alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The latest from Tame Impala and Pond’s Jay Watson smooths out the pastiche psych-rock and dials down the eccentricity to create a more seamless song cycle. | The latest from Tame Impala and Pond’s Jay Watson smooths out the pastiche psych-rock and dials down the eccentricity to create a more seamless song cycle. | GUM: The Underdog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gum-the-underdog/ | The Underdog | Jay Watson isn’t shy about self-deprecation. His recent string of albums as GUM have functioned as billboards for his own diffidence: Glamorous Damage, Flash in the Pan, and now, The Underdog. Perhaps such humility is a natural byproduct when you’re a silent partner in both Australia’s most famous psychedelic rock band and its most rambunctious, while trying to carve out space as a solo artist beyond their long shadows. By Watson’s own admission, GUM’s past records effectively served as storing houses for whatever ideas are bouncing around his head when he’s not playing with his other bands. But the encouraging evolution of the project suggests that Watson may not be able to keep up the false-modesty act for much longer.
The Underdog is built from the same toolkit as GUM’s previous releases—psychedelia, prog, ‘70s soft rock, disco, electro—but smooths out their pastiche quality and dials down the eccentricity to create a more seamless song cycle. According to Watson, The Underdog is a quasi-concept album that presents a dusk-to-dawn snapshot of his life. The passage of time isn’t so much marked by specific events as impressionistic shifts in mood, where the promise of the night gives way to intense wee-hours introspection.
As per GUM tradition, the album opens with a brief instrumental teaser—in this case, a sun-beamed synth aria—however, the fact Watson actually titled this one “Introduction” reinforces the greater attention to structure and sequencing in effect here. It leads us right into the album’s title track/theme song, a shot of swaggering cosmic funk where Watson throws down his mission statement: “Always go for the underdog!” His declaration is instantly undercut by a rejoinder that’s perfectly Lennon-esque in both sound and cynical spirit: “Someone’s always in the way/And that’s not gonna change.”
It’s tempting to read that exchange as a comment on Watson’s relatively humble standing next to Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker and the challenges of establishing GUM’s own identity. At times, it’s impossible to ignore the, ahem, under-Currents flowing through The Underdog: the lo-fi ballad “After All (From the Sun)” blossoms into a bass-synth bounce that will have you mentally transposing the woozy chorus refrain to “’Cause I’m a Man,” while the soft-focus intro of “The Blue Marble” is upended by a booming break that could pass for a pitch-shifted remix of “New Person, Same Old Mistakes.” But the big difference this time is that GUM no longer sounds like the idiosyncratic, lo-tech offshoot of Tame Impala: In both its more luxuriant production and more emotionally resonant songwriting, The Underdog finds Watson pursuing his own widescreen vision of lonerism.
Following a playful opening stretch, The Underdog reveals its wounded core during its more absorbing second act, where Watson slips into an insomniac’s fever dream wracked with anxiety and self-doubt. “Rehearsed in a Dream” is a dark-night-of-the-soul reckoning embedded in a hazy fog of Floydian psych and quiet-storm R&B, and that encroaching sense of existential dread peaks on the gripping “Trying My Best,” a self-help mantra amplified by the sort of dramatic, throbbing synths you hear on a ’70s European sci-fi-flick soundtrack. But with the neon-tinted disco of “The Fear,” Watson opts for the most effective therapy: losing your mind at the club. “I’ve got the fear!” he repeats, and the directive is clear: sing along if you know the words—or, better yet, tremble uncontrollably if you’re all too familiar with the feeling. | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Spinning Top | April 17, 2018 | 7.2 | 042313f4-bbbb-4dcb-bed1-d8bf48a6e78c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The fourth album from the country outlaw is another left-turn with synth-rock at its scuzziest, boogie-rock at its cheesiest, all held together by Simpson’s fearless songwriting. | The fourth album from the country outlaw is another left-turn with synth-rock at its scuzziest, boogie-rock at its cheesiest, all held together by Simpson’s fearless songwriting. | Sturgill Simpson: SOUND & FURY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sturgill-simpson-sound-and-fury/ | SOUND & FURY | In 2017, Sturgill Simpson publicly declared that Nashville—every country musician’s master—does not dictate who he is or what his music sounds like. After his third studio album, A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Simpson busked outside the 2017 Country Music Awards in protest of a statement CMA sent to journalists demanding they refrain from asking artists about the Las Vegas massacre, gun rights, or politics in general. One of the signs in his open guitar case read, mockingly, “Struggling country singer.” If the country music establishment didn’t feel he was fit for them, he’d show them that they were correct. He expands on this idea on SOUND & FURY, his fourth full-length, an extension of that protest in album—and anime—form. The album is the soundtrack to an accompanying Netflix film, which is essentially a 41-minute music video.
Fitting, then, that the album opener is titled “Ronin,” meaning a wandering samurai with no master. The song kicks off with some grade-A foley work—boots crunching rocks on a dirt road, an old gas-guzzler wheezing to life, Alex Jones on the radio—and evolves into a swampy extended guitar solo that lays bare Simpson’s intentions for the rest of the album. Across 10 tracks, Simpson trades subtlety and plaintive guitar work for full-bore skronk and sleaze. It’s a hard but fearless turn away from what Simpson’s calling card of blurring the lines between country and psychedelia. On SOUND & FURY, Simpson throws both genres into the trunk of his car and does 85 down the backroads.
Musically, SOUND & FURY has more in common with ZZ Top’s 1983 album Eliminator than Merle Haggard’s Hag—or any country album, really. The tracks are woven together by the car radio first heard on “Ronin,” as if Simpson is changing the station for us, showing that he can glide between synth-rock, glam, dancefloor-fillers; songwriting is king in his world. It doesn’t matter if he’s playing a dreamy campfire song—there are none here, by the way—or a two-minute instrumental stomper. Simpson is the one dictating his sound, take it or leave it.
What works for Simpson is when he lets his soulful voice shine through, like on “All Said and Done,” the closest fans will get to a Simpson song of yore on the album, or “Mercury in Retrograde,” a bouncy pop tune with electric strings and a fluttering synth about fake friends who barge on to his tour bus to ask him if his songs are about them. This one is.
What doesn’t quite land are tracks like “A Good Look,” co-written with John Prine, if you can believe it. It’s a frenetic disco-funk song, with a police-siren lead guitar and an overworked bassist. Its genuinely interesting and introspective lines about creating art, like, “I write my poems in the dirt with an oily rag/I have to wear a gas mask just so I don’t gag” become frustrating afterthoughts when followed by an incessant cowbell. There are a few more moments like this, where Simpson’s reliance on ’80s disco and funk often feels more like artifice than art, a reactionary and deliberate hard-right away from what has served him so well in the past: lush, beautiful soundscapes and sweeping choruses.
The lyrics from “Make Art Not Friends,” anticipate such criticism. The song begins with an extended arpeggiated synth part that wouldn’t sound out of place on Tangerine Dream’s Tangram, before eventually evolving into a cohesive thesis for the album. “This town’s getting crowded, the truth’s been shrouded. I think it’s time to change up the sound,” Simpson croons. “The wheels keep turning, the flames get higher, another cycle rolls around.”
Simpson has always looked for an escape. His first album, High Top Mountain, was his traditional country debut, a hail-mary attempt to make it; Metamodern Sounds in Country Music was his refutation of that style, with stoned panache; and he said he wrote A Sailor’s Guide to Earth because “people think I wake up in the morning and pour LSD on my Cheerios.” SOUND & FURY is miles down the road from any of his previous albums. As the album’s closer, “Fastest Horse in Town,” reaches the seven-minute mark and the radio sounds return, we hear that same car from “Ronin” revving up and speeding away. He’s likely already done with this sound, and on to the next one. Hell, he told his wife a few years ago that he’d make a bluegrass record someday composed of ’80s covers of her choosing. Only the real ones will be along for this ride, but, as he sings on “Mercury in Retrograde,” the album’s penultimate track, “the road to hell is paved with cruel intentions.” He’ll travel it solo if need be.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Elektra | October 1, 2019 | 7.2 | 0423e011-ecd3-423d-8573-c248fc3ddca2 | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
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 Aaliyah’s final album, her masterpiece. | 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 Aaliyah’s final album, her masterpiece. | Aaliyah: Aaliyah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aaliyah-aaliyah/ | Aaliyah: Aaliyah | Whether you believe in the afterlife or not, it’s easy enough to picture Aaliyah in heaven. The video for “Rock The Boat,” the 2001 single that would be her last, looks as if it were beamed down from one of the mythical seven heavens: gently lapping water, the flare of a bright sun, women dressed in all white. She seems peaceful, softer than in previous clips. In August, after wrapping her scenes in the Bahamas, Aaliyah boarded a flight home. The Cessna twin-engine crashed moments after takeoff, killing the singer and eight others. She was 22. In life, Aaliyah was often described by friends and collaborators as angelic; in her death, that image persists.
Just weeks earlier, she had released her third album, Aaliyah, a well-received collection of songs that mapped her personal growth during the five years since her second full-length, 1996’s One In A Million. During that hiatus, she’d taken an interest in acting, starring in a couple of films and lining up others, including two upcoming Matrix movies. But in between being on set during the day and in the studio at night, Aaliyah also had a lot to reckon with. In 1995, she’d ended a professional and allegedly predatory sexual relationship with R. Kelly, who’d produced her 1994 platinum-selling debut Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number. Today, especially following testimony aired in Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly,” Aaliyah is understood to have been a survivor of his predation, but at the time, many people blamed her for the secret relationship and the falsification of her age on a clandestine marriage certificate.
Internally, there was a concern that her career would flounder, that she would not be able to match Kelly’s production and songwriting elsewhere. But with members of the Supafriends—Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and, eventually, the late Static Major—by her side, Aaliyah easily eclipsed her work with Kelly. “Tim and I were new producers," Missy told Rolling Stone in 2001. "From day one, she had that much faith in our music that she treated us like we already sold a million records, when we hadn't sold anything yet. She really helped make us what we are today.” The gamble paid off. Where Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number was defined by Kelly’s rote new jack swing and carried by her vocal depth, One In A Million was clever, fun, and forward-thinking. A couple of years later, “Are You That Somebody,” a single made for the Dr. Dolittle soundtrack, changed everything: Aaliyah wasn’t just sweet and sly; she revealed herself as endearingly weird and aspirationally cool—over a bizarre drum pattern and the sample of a baby’s coo, at that.
Aaliyah took that many steps further. By the time she began working on the album in 1998, she had developed an interest in both the experimental and traditional, and her collaborators on the album—the Supafriends as well as producers signed to her family’s Blackground record label—were up to the task. She veers wildly, but cohesively, between the futuristic, triple-time experimentation of singles like “We Need A Resolution” and “More Than A Woman” and the throwback soul of “Never No More” and “I Care 4 U.” It was Aaliyah’s voice that strung it all together. Her falsetto had earned an edge, and her multi-part harmonies, arranged ingeniously, added grace and texture. Even Timbaland’s grating, awkward raps and ad-libs are softened.
This time, Aaliyah had added Static, who’d cut his teeth working with Ginuwine and in the R&B group Playa, as a writer. The result was something that diverged from the pop language du jour, yet somehow remained in conversation with it. Though Aaliyah hadn’t yet become a writer, she was inordinately good at picking songs, absorbing them, and interpreting through her bright, wispy soprano. The album’s singles—“We Need A Resolution,” “More Than A Woman,” “Rock The Boat,”—are among her best, boldly off-kilter, imaginative, and alternately mellow and razor-edged. But the deep cuts are just as solid. “Never No More” is an emotional song about enduring and then rejecting abuse at the hands of a partner, “U Got Nerve” and “I Refuse” are formed around a similar suspicion and self-assurance. Her primary currency was an effortless cool matched only then by Janet Jackson and, all these years later, by Rihanna.
In reviews and profiles from the time, Aaliyah is praised, at the expense of some of her peers, for eschewing the “candy-coated” sound and style of the charts; actually, she was simply pre-empting the trends many of her peers would eventually try on. The glossy girl- and boy-band era was at its peak at the turn of the century, and before pop acts would attempt to replace that sheen with cool, calling on “urban” producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes, Aaliyah modeled the perfect balance of pop, R&B, and hip-hop. Months before Britney Spears made headlines for performing with a snake at the MTV VMA awards in 2001, Aaliyah had done it in the video for “We Need A Resolution.” Her personal style, creative direction, and choreography were legendarily inventive. She made comfort look luxe as the original little shirt, big pants girl, and tore through dark-and-mysterious years before Keanu Reeves made leather trench coats trendy (in the early years, her omnipresent sunglasses and then side-swooped hair prompted widespread rumors of a lazy eye). By the time of Aaliyah, she’d reinvented herself yet again, this time brighter and more streamlined. Her dancing, unlike that of many of her peers, was fluid and interpretative, designed to communicate more than to be imitated by fans in bedrooms and basements around the world. Her image was like her music: risky and adventurous, with a fondness for just the right amount of cheek.
Nearly 20 years after her death, she persists as a moodboardable influence, finding lasting presence not purely of nostalgia but as aesthetic inspiration for a generation that came to age in her absence. Searching Aaliyah’s name on Tumblr brings up thousands and thousands of images—watermarked red carpet photos, GIFs and photo sets ripped from music videos, and the occasional ode of fandom. One photo, of what appears to be a performance look, appears to be a direct inspiration for Solange’s current tour wardrobe: a triangle bikini top with straps crisscrossed across the torso and a pair of flowing, loose-fitting pants.
But Aaliyah has been a reference for Solange, and others, elsewhere, too: The multiple-part harmonies that have become the younger Knowles’s signature were in fact once the signature of Aaliyah, most in focus on, Aaliyah. On what would have been Aaliyah’s 36th birthday, Frank Ocean shared his own take of the Isley Brothers’ “At Your Best,” which she’d first covered more than 20 years earlier, in 1994. She’d updated it with a spare, solemn almost-whisper, and Ocean’s version, which was eventually given a proper release on Endless, draws equally from Aaliyah’s falsetto as from the Isley Brothers’ original. There are traces of her influence elsewhere, too; the layered harmonies and gentle melodies of Beyoncé’s “I Miss You,” co-written by Ocean, could easily have been recorded first, albeit with more restraint and whimsy, by Aaliyah. Understandably, among the most common refrains about the singer was that she was ahead of her time.
And yet, paradoxically to its significance, the legacy of Aaliyah is now diminished by its absence from streaming services. After her death, Blackground Records, run by her uncle and cousin, faced some operational and legal issues. The label’s domain name has lapsed, and a final release promised by an associated publishing company has not materialized. There have been a couple of false starts—a posthumous album helmed, and then abandoned, by Drake and 40; an unsanctioned greatest hits release; the sale of her catalog to a publishing company—but most of Aaliyah’s catalog has remained unavailable to stream or download. Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, the album written and produced by her abuser, is the only accessible release. For many artists, this could mean being written out of history, forgotten to more convenient nostalgia. For Aaliyah, it means something rarer—a legacy defined not by industry profiteers and hologram start-ups but by friends, fans, and kindred artists. | 2019-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Blackground / Virgin | July 14, 2019 | 9.3 | 042837ed-a82a-4c59-a8f4-2922e7bcd85c | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Big K.R.I.T. is at the top of his game on his new double album. It’s an even split between booming subwoofers and tough-guy talk on one side and a considerable vulnerability on the other. | Big K.R.I.T. is at the top of his game on his new double album. It’s an even split between booming subwoofers and tough-guy talk on one side and a considerable vulnerability on the other. | Big K.R.I.T.: 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-krit-4eva-is-a-mighty-long-time/ | 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time | In July of 2010, Big K.R.I.T. made an unannounced appearance at the Highline Ballroom in Manhattan, opening for rapper du jour Jay Electronica, fresh off the heels of “Exhibit C.” The crowd—anxious to see the reclusive Jay Electronica in a rare performance—was clearly not there for K.R.I.T., and when he broke into his hit “Country Shit,” he was roundly booed.
The scene was reminiscent of the 1995 Source Awards, when a provincial New York crowd met the announcement of OutKast’s victory for Best New Rap Group with jeers. With Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, OutKast had made a record that was unapologetically of, by, and for the South. And it was always dope—it just took the rest of the world a few years to catch up. From the podium at Madison Square Garden, amid a chorus of boos, Dre declared “The South got somethin’ to say,” and over the next 10 years, people started listening.
More than two decades later, it’s clear that Big K.R.I.T. was taking notes. From the jump—his 2010 breakout K.R.I.T. Wuz Here—K.R.I.T. cemented his reputation as a Southern rap traditionalist. His unapologetic reverence for UGK and Organized Noize is well-documented; his work as a producer feels like a synthesis of the various branches of Southern rap history. In that way, he shares a similarity with the early work of New York formalists like Joey Bada$$ and Roc Marciano, who made their names capturing an aesthetic pulled from their city’s most classic records. But unlike his New York contemporaries, K.R.I.T. has never been overly concerned with lyrical dominance, brushing off Kendrick Lamar’s name-check on “Control” like he was annoyed to even have to respond. “More spiritual than lyrical,” K.R.I.T. doesn’t really seem to care if anyone thinks he’s the greatest rapper alive, as long as you know he holds it down.
K.R.I.T.’s latest LP, 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time, finds him defiantly redrawing blurred lines between his work and home life—the first disc is dedicated to his Big K.R.I.T. persona, he of the booming subwoofers, candy-painted Cadillacs, and tough-guy talk. The second, marked by his government name, Justin Scott, is considerably more vulnerable, with earnest tales of love, his relationship with God, and the “Price of Fame.” And in this way, at least, he’s well-served by the double album construction. By saving much of the O.G. uncle wisdom for the Justin Scott half of the record, he avoids any awkward juxtaposition of his flexing and his meditations. Reflection rap from grizzled veterans is often poignant, and K.R.I.T. is at his strongest lyrically when he drops the macho facade (“Played it too cool, almost like I froze, had to turn my flame on,” he raps on “Drinking Sessions”), hindsight’s clarity granting him a more evolved perspective. He’s got some high-profile guest appearances from Southern rap titans (Cee-Lo, T.I., UGK), but spread out over 22 tracks, he manages to avoid being overshadowed.
As a producer, he’s mostly lived up to the promise he flashed on K.R.I.T. Wuz Here, evolving to encompass the sounds of various parts of the South—Houston, New Orleans, Atlanta, and his home of Mississippi—into an aesthetic that is instantly familiar to its fans, if not specifically attributable to any one city. And while K.R.I.T.’s spirituality feels more personal than communal, the church’s influence is still prominent on organ & gospel chorus jams like “Keep The devil Off.” The spaced out synths on “Aux Cord” (co-produced by DJ Khalil and Rogét Chahayed) feel like they could have been pulled from a Curren$y record at his peak in 2010, and the controlled chaos of the T.I. collab “Big Bank” sounds like the sequel to Killer Mike’s “Big Beast.” But mostly, it’s on the low end of the frequency spectrum where K.R.I.T. really shines. To put it mildly, K.R.I.T. likes bass, and while the rumbling low-end might not translate well to laptop speakers and cheap earbuds, it’s right at home on a booming system.
K.R.I.T. is operating at the top of his game here, and the South has finally been recognized for its considerable hip-hop bonafides. But 4eva Is a Mighty Long Time still feels decidedly average. For some time now, K.R.I.T. has been suffering from an originality crisis—it’s the only real knock against him. He’s happy to keep making music that sounds great on the 15s in the trunk of his car, scoring a familiar sound of the South that doesn’t necessarily need updating—even if it doesn’t sound as fresh as it once did. Subwoofers are admittedly very cool, but by volume 4 (“Subenstein (My Sub IV)”) of K.R.I.T.’s magnum opus of adulation for the bass speakers, the conceit has worn a little thin. Still bumps, though.
Where does that leave the King Remembered in Time? Five years after getting booed at the Highline, he returned to a friendlier climate, this time as a headliner, the world appearing to have caught up with K.R.I.T., too. But unlike Dre, he never really got bored with slammin’ Cadillac doors, and his latest work feels stuck in a time capsule that pop has left behind. Still, in a hip-hop landscape largely defined by artists from the South, he’s managed to carve out his own lane. And he seems content to ride it out, on cruise control, 4eva. | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Multi Alumni / BMG | October 30, 2017 | 7.3 | 042a15ba-9371-44f0-bebf-fea9722e078a | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
When they first stepped out in the mid-90s, The Roots were regarded by many as an interesting but quaint novelty ... | When they first stepped out in the mid-90s, The Roots were regarded by many as an interesting but quaint novelty ... | The Roots: Phrenology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6832-phrenology/ | Phrenology | When they first stepped out in the mid-90s, The Roots were regarded by many as an interesting but quaint novelty act. Although other hip-hop groups had used live instrumentation, The Roots were the first well-publicized, full-fledged hip-hop band, thus providing fans with a comeback when our culturally obtuse friends or relatives would say "rap isn't music." The Roots were also one of the first acts to speak out against the hip-hop tendency toward hyper-capitalism, a criticism which reached its zenith in the hilarious video for "What They Do". But, to paraphrase Biggie, things done changed in the hip-hop game. Now live musical accompaniment is becoming increasingly prevalent-- The Neptunes donned a backing band for NER*D-- and while political consciousness is still an important component of hip-hop, it's hardly unique, and no longer en vogue in an increasingly conservative cultural climate.
So what are the pioneers to do when they find that their style has been played to the extreme by half-assed imitators? What any true artists would: Submerge themselves in the lab for three years and come out with a new, airtight sound, awash with challenging-- but not too challenging-- deviations from their formula. For Phrenology, The Roots supplement their trademark loose and light jazz palate with harder, more aggressive tones, eschewing their "organic" sound and using the studio as an instrument. On "Rock You", The Roots open with a snarl, as a jagged and spare arrangement backs Black Thought's aggressive flow. As with many songs on Phrenology, "Rock You" is accented by decidedly inorganic electro flourishes, with a noticeable absence of the smooth jazz keys that made hippie hip-hop headz cream their collective jeans back in the mid-to-late-90s. Unfortunately, the track contains album's weakest hook, with Black Thought screaming, "We will rock you/ Rock You!/ ROCK YOU!" Which is exactly what they do on the acerbic, 24-second Bad Brains knock-off "!!!!!!", a straight-up, raw-as-fuck punk track which I respect for its sheer boldness, even if that it had me covering my ears.
In sharp contrast, "Water" clocks in at well over ten minutes, and is perhaps the first clear cut example of mainstream prog-hop. For hip-hop purists, it's easy to dismiss this song-- which deals with former band member Malik B's struggle with addiction-- as needlessly bloated, but given its personal subject matter, it's understandable why ?uest and crew indulged themselves in a dark, expressionistic foray into the mindset of a drug addict. We can only hope that Malik gets the message.
But despite these two extremes, Phrenology can't be boiled down simply to superfluous experimentalism or a complete abjuration of their previous work. It manages to incorporate all the elements that have characterized The Roots' sound; they revisit the old-skool hip-hop template on the "apache"-laced "Thought @ Work", where Black Thought approximates the rapid-fire cadence of Kool G. Rap (one of many examples on Phrenology that have Thought switching up his flow to compensate for the loss of Malik B). For "WAOK (Ay) Rollcall", The Roots once again enlist Ursula Rucker to give a brief spoken word piece, in which she namechecks the architects of hip-hop culture. However, there's also the overtly political number, "Pussy Galore", which may be one of the most vapid, boring examples of political consciousness ever recorded by a major hip-hop group, and the weakest spot on the album by a long shot. Hopefully, it won't become another source of ammunition in Coca-Cola's campaign to represent/co-opt "real" hip-hop.
Structurally, there's the now-expected spoken word bit at the end (this time performed by the esteemed and controversial poet Amiri Baraka), and a hidden track featuring Talib Kweli. It's preceded by two red herrings, twenty-second-long tracks of silence, and followed by a brief techno burn that's sure to have fans scratching their heads. Like "What They Do" from Illadelph Halflife and "You Got Me" from Things Fall Apart, the current single, "Break You Off", is an obligatory three-word R&B; crossover number, replete with guest vocalist Musiq's nu-soul crooning, four cellists, a noir concept video, and a $300,000 budget. Despite the obvious radio pandering, it's a beautifully smooth and melodic song, featuring some of their warmest production ever.
To The Roots' credit, they utilize their guest appearances better than on any of their other previous efforts. "Seed (2.0)", a cover of a track from L.A. crooner Cody Chesnutt's recent Headphone Masterpiece, is the most immediately satisfying track on the album-- which is surprising, since it's an orgiastic garage funk number with a blazing guitar riff that feels lifted from Sticky Fingers-era Stones.
Regardless of how you feel about The Roots' aesthetic-- I tend to gravitate toward the traditional two turntables and a microphone hip-hop paradigm-- you have to give these guys credit for making an album that so successfully combines ambition and experimentation with accessibility. Phrenology completely realizes The Roots' talents and potential, maintaining its cohesiveness despite its many disparate elements. It's a stark rebuke to those who say hip-hop artists can't turn out solid full-lengths: For its few negligible missteps, Phrenology has more than enough momentum to sustain an uninterrupted listen. | 2003-01-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-01-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | MCA / Okayplayer | January 28, 2003 | 8.1 | 0432198c-5e81-4569-a287-7e7674781e11 | Pitchfork | null |
|
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Raekwon’s game-changing 1995 debut, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore Raekwon’s game-changing 1995 debut, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…. | Raekwon: Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raekwon-only-built-4-cuban-linx/ | Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... | In 1995, critics saw in Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... the same things that fans of the record celebrated. It invented “mafioso rap” and glorified mass criminality; its songs were paeans to those hardworking souls ducking RICO charges. The album was a blueprint for narrative in gangsta rap albums. It profoundly influenced Jay-Z, Nas, and the very sound of New York rap, thanks in part to RZA’s extraordinary beats and the introduction of Raekwon and Ghostface as a legendary rap duo. But the record could be all those things, could be influential, without being widely listened to today. It could simply be an artifact of its time. Cuban Linx remains relevant not because of its violence or the way it changed rap history, but for what it really is: an anthology of brotherly love stories, framed by the deep connection between its two stars.
You don’t need to have taken a course in masculinity studies to acknowledge that American men have been socialized to avoid overt displays of emotionality. So to tell stories like the ones that Raekwon and Ghostface Killah tell on Only Built 4 Cuban Linx..., you needed to disguise the narrative. The plot needed to be cryptic and bloody. All the gangsterisms, everything that made the album so palatable to many fans, those violent elements color the story. But they are all deeply intertwined with the tenderness at the record’s core, which stands in contrast to the gritty image associated with the Wu-Tang Clan.
That said, in 1995, Raekwon had no problem talking about what Ghost meant to him. “That’s my heart right there,” he told Jeff “Chairman” Mao that year, shortly before the record was released, the third Wu solo album to follow 1993’s group debut, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). “We think so much alike. Like I’ll say something and he’ll be like, ‘Yo, I was just gettin’ ready to say that, son.’” RZA brought the pair together. The sage of the Wu-Tang clan had known Raekwon since second grade and was living with Ghost in the early ’90s. He saw the couple as a natural fit, notorious stick-up kids, former rivals raised in different parts of Staten Island, Ghost from the Stapleton projects, Rae from Park Hill. “They kinda hooked up and seen that similarity in them, and that’s how it went down,” he told XXL. “They didn’t know each other as well as they knew me—it was my concept.”
For RZA, the concept of Cuban Linx was business-oriented as was so much else with the Wu-Tang: the order that solo records would be released, who would appear on each song, and countless other decisions were made with the bottom line in mind. (In 1996, a Harvard Business School professor, James Cash, said the Wu were at “the head of the class in terms of strategy development.”) The album was to be designed for a specific demographic, the street guys, who the Clan had never addressed quite so directly. And for Raekwon, a full-time rap career was simply the sensible option. He had been a hood, and he was tired of that life. “I had a name for myself on that street, so my time, my sand was running out,” he told Mao. There was ample opportunity for a lateral move. He had honed his skills through battle rapping and was already recognized as one of the strongest MCs in the crew. He and Ghost took the first pair of verses on Enter the Wu-Tang, and his leadoff verse on “C.R.E.A.M.”—“I grew up on the crime side/The New York Times side”—was a minted classic.
Raekwon established a unique rhyming style on Cuban Linx. He uses short staccato bars laced with internal rhymes to deliver fragmented stories, ones for which there is a range of interpretations. His lyrics are precise and diffuse, digressive and focused, thematically consistent but constantly roving. It’s not that the narrative doesn’t add up, it’s that two dedicated listeners can disagree on exactly what happened in a verse, bar or song, without one of them being proven wrong. (It was 2016 when the rapper finally cleared up whether he had said “who sons who” or “who Sun Tzu” on “Incarcerated Scarfaces”.) On “Knowledge God,” in one of the greatest rap verses that exists, he describes a rich man named Mike Lavonia in intimate detail. It only takes Raekwon 150 words to give him a soul.
The lyrics don’t always look like much laid out: “Mafia flicks, tying up tricks/Was his main hobby/Teaching his seed, Wu-Tang karate/Mixing drinks in clubs, hairy chest with many minks.” But they are alive on record, and you come away from the verse aware of Raekwon’s affection for and knowledge of this petty emperor, Lavonia. He names his pipe Sandra (which is kind of adorable!) and claims that New York is ancient Babylon. What you may not realize is that Raekwon’s character has killed Lavonia by the time the verse begins. This man—portrayed lovingly, wistfully, and in full—is already dead.
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... is stacked with little stories like this, more an anthology than a record with a master narrative, though RZA would tell you otherwise. His inspiration for the album came from The Killer, the John Woo film in which an assassin and a police detective team up (dialogue from that film and Scarface (which was partly where that began) is sampled throughout the album). RZA has said that the narrative of Cuban Linx follows a similar path, as two characters from rival neighborhoods team up to pull off one last job before leaving the criminal life forever. But Rae and Ghost only halfway engaged in that narrative, which makes RZA’s enduring contribution not his concepts (which could be dicey!), but his ability to bring like-minds together over the most finely tuned collection of beats he ever provided for a single album, recorded in the basement of his Staten Island home. As a producer, he refused to let a simple loop carry any given song, and so classic tracks like “Criminology” and “Wu-Gambinos” are laced with additional instrumental flourishes, separate melodies that guide the tracks to a higher plane. The loop on “Ice Water” is already perfectly proportioned and RZA still can’t help but to drop scratches, switch up the rhythm of the vocal sample, and play with a half-dozen other ideas, granting the listener the simultaneous pleasures of minimalism (in repetition) and maximalism (in the number of elements at play).
Raekwon was capable of living within those intricacies, angling his words to fit pockets created by the instrumental churn. And while Ghost was his equal in terms of pure ability, he was more liable to just bulldoze through everything, letting his intuition, aggression and unmatchable sense of humor guide his bars. While many of Rae’s verses are relatively stoic (see “Incarcerated Scarfaces”), Starks brings an unparalleled energy: On “Criminology,” he talks about being “trapped by sounds/Locked behind loops,” and his verses often feel like he’s giving his all to just get the hell out of the booth, out of the basement. Even on the relatively peaceful “Wisdom Body,” ostensibly a love song, Ghost’s vibe is all wrong for the lyrics, his need to be over and done with everything just bleeding through the track, poisoning what should be a smooth, relaxed, loverman take. He was drunk when he recorded the verses to the song—as he was while recording much of the album—and you can hear him slurring. Several times, the track seems to flinch, as RZA substitutes one take for another. Even fucked up, you can hear why Ghost is a match for his partner; lines like, “Your eyes sparkle/Just like glass in the sun,” are beautiful, piercing, and sad. “I was going through a lot of real internal shit during Cuban Linx” Ghost told XXL. “I was drinking my pain away every day.”
Cuban Linx makes explicit use of that pain on songs like “Rainy Dayz,” on which an agitated Ghost spells out his troubles, fuming after he’s just been robbed. On tracks like these, his chemistry with Rae is most obvious. After he calls himself ungodly at the end of his verse, Rae extends a helping hand, kicking his verse off with wisdom from the Nation of Islam and eventually guides Ghost away from the edge of total derangement. “Half of us’ll try to make it, the other half will try to take it,” he reasons, and his rational acceptance of the random gyres of misfortune that life throws at us is the yin to Ghost’s agitated yang.
You might think, given their chemistry, that other features might slow the momentum of Cuban Linx. But fraternal affection isn’t a zero-sum game and the posse tracks on the record are as strong as the solo performances. There are sterling features from the Wu-Tang underclass, Cappadonna on “Ice Water”; U-God on “Knuckleheadz.” And Cuban Linx features the first cameo from a rapper outside of Wu Corp. on “Verbal Intercourse.” Nas shows up, in his prime, holding forth with the roving camera eye that was already familiar from his 1994 debut, Illmatic, the one New York album that consistently outranks Cuban Linx on the list of all-time great rap records. You can see why. Illmatic’s verses are far more straightforward, which makes them more accessible. Take “One Love,” where everything Nas writes to his friend in prison is intelligible to the casual listener. Compare it to the opening verse of “Knowledge God,” where the idea of writing to a friend in prison comes in halfway through, Rae reflecting on club nights when he remembers that Cousin Reek is upstate, and pivots to address Reek directly.
This is Cuban Linx: so much is jumbled, digressive, filled with ambiguous meaning, down to the title itself, which was shorn of an extra word. It’s a code, a puzzle, and a bible. Much like the slow pace of baseball was perfectly suited to the era of radio, the album owes much of its reputation to its release in the mid-1990s. This, of course, was before the iPod, when listeners who had purchased individual records wanted to sit with them, get their money’s worth, and would spend weeks if not months listening to an album, deciphering every last word. It was also before Twitter, where Rae could just solve the record’s decade-long riddles. Because the prophets weren’t available to interpret their scriptures, the members of early online forums devoted hours to hashing out the record’s Talmudic qualities, and in doing so, spread the Wu gospel.
There was a religious aspect to Rae’s raps. His slang was borrowed equally from Staten Island and the Five Percenter movement, which branched off from the Nation of Islam in the 1960s and which Raekwon associated with when he was still a kid. But he certainly wasn’t looking to alienate listeners; he was simply trying to make enough money to eat. Rapping for him was about escaping the life he had lived, exchanging criminality for criminology, and poverty for a full belly and a flute of Cristal. He was happy to move away from authenticity, and he says as much several times on Cuban Linx. “I’m out,” he says on “Knuckleheadz.” “My raps play the part like a ‘Get Smart’ secret agent,” meaning, essentially, that he was happy to be a fake James Bond, if it alleviated the risk and he could make some ends.
And then there was the added joy of having partners, people who could help you up and hold you down. Listen to the beginning of “Wu-Gambinos,” where Rae is jubilant to have an extended crew around him. Method Man’s chorus reflects that delight in the posse’s presence: “Wu roll together as one/I call my brother Son cause he shine like one.” The song is famous for the crew names, the AKA invention that would soon sweep rap. (A year later, Nas was already calling himself Nas Escobar on It Was Written.) As Rae put it to Mao: “People seen that we came in with nothin’ and left with something…. If you one of them niggas that’s just all about money, there gotta be love first. Love your niggas that you rollin’ with. Love them.”
The record ends as the crew disappears and Rae and Ghost are together, the partners rhyming in tandem, reminiscing about old robberies. Raekwon addresses the overlap directly, acknowledging their closeness: “We connect thoughts.” As the outro rolls, they lament the fragility of life, mourn dead friends, and shout out their collaborators. The guns, the bullets, the semi-fictionalized dispatched enemies: They fall away, leaving only the real world, and the realest fact of their world is love for their brothers. | 2018-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loud / RCA | May 27, 2018 | 9.5 | 0433a19d-2500-4b14-9120-7d1deb5a015e | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Released just 10 days after Steve Albini’s death, the trio’s sixth record closes the book on the band and serves as a reliably excellent epitaph. | Released just 10 days after Steve Albini’s death, the trio’s sixth record closes the book on the band and serves as a reliably excellent epitaph. | Shellac: To All Trains | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shellac-to-all-trains/ | To All Trains | To All Trains is a Shellac record. Expectedly, thankfully, obviously, unapologetically, unremarkably a Shellac record. A 180-gram Touch and Go Records—“made with 100% Recyclable Material which is PVC & Phthalates Free and uses 79% less CO₂ to produce”—Shellac record.
Of course, the crucial difference with this particular Shellac record, their sixth, is that frontman Steve Albini passed away from a heart attack at age 61, just 10 days before its release. It’s hard to wave away the tragic circumstances clouding it, especially when it concludes with a track called “I Don’t Fear Hell” where Albini delivers the smiling-through-clenched-teeth lines, “Something something something when this is over/Leap in my grave like the arms of a lover/And if there’s a heaven, I hope they’re havin’ fun, ’cause if there’s a hell I’m gonna know everyone.” Yet To All Trains is not an album overcast by death: It’s just one more example of how someone chose to live their life.
Leading Big Black, Rapeman and, finally, math-rock trio Shellac, Albini spent 40 years dedicated to a singular vision of underground rock music that was no frills, free of overdubs, constructed with analog tools and constantly nattering with guitar tone that started shrill and slowly evolved into Morricone metal. Eminently dependable, Shellac were the Honda Civic of alternative rock—modest, reliable, generally affordable. You knew the drill. There was a new album every so often, but never too often, whenever the mood struck prolific studio engineer Albini, prolific mastering engineer Bob Weston, and working drum instructor Todd Trainer.
Most of the things that made Shellac a great band in 2000 and 2007 and 2014 were already firmly bolted into place on their 1994 debut, At Action Park: the growl ’n’ skwonk, the bludgeoning repetition, the best-sounding drums around. They’re still here, too. Unlike similarly minimalism-minded rock bands like the Ramones, Motörhead, or AC/DC, you never had to worry that Shellac were going to fall prey to the creeping influence of modern production techniques or genre trends. Shellac songs would vacillate between rancorous and caustic (2000’s “Prayer to God"), hypnotic and caustic (2007’s “The End of Radio") or funny and caustic (2014’s “All the Surveyors”), but no one was ever going to file a complaint to the Better Business Bureau about the ingredients on the label.
To All Trains naturally walks the same path and, had circumstances permitted, would likely have been appreciated simply as little more than Shellac’s sixth excellent record. At a lean 28 minutes, it’s their shortest and most instantly rewardable—no instrumentals and none of the longform post-rock indulgences of 1998’s Terraform or 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound. Elements of the Minutemen were always lurking in Shellac’s music, but they seem especially pronounced in the groove-spiel of “Chick New Wave,” the sharp pauses of “Days Are Dogs” and the pro-labor screed “Scabby the Rat,” which plays like a funnier, less anxious version of Double Nickels on the Dime’s “West Germany.”
Like all good minimalism, the changes are small, so the highlights are subtle. The blown-out noise-rock coda of “WSOD” is outrageous, like a half-minute Brainbombs blast. “Days Are Dogs” is a cowbell-slamming Nazareth song for about five seconds. Albini’s guitar slowly distends like gelatin at the end of “I Don’t Fear Hell.” “Scrappers” stomps along as if Pussy Galore had bothered to learn how to play their instruments. Shellac’s lyrics are as cryptic as ever, so it’s fun to imagine the Weston-sung “How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man (Cock & Bull)” as a belated clapback to the Fall’s Mark E. Smith, who playfully dissed Albini on “50 Year Old Man” in 2008. Shellac’s photorealist recording strategy and silence-heavy compositions mean there are lots of places to admire things like cymbal decay and snare drum ring. In fact, Trainer is probably the album’s MVP, thanks to his artful, muscular, musical little drum solos across many of the open chasms.
To All Trains closes the book on the band and serves as a perfectly respectable epitaph; it’s exemplary, just like the five Shellac records that preceded it. The band’s legacy will blare on in noise-rock bands like Couch Slut, Chat Pile, Metz, KEN mode, Whores, and the Austerity Program. Weston will likely be mastering more of your favorite records, and it’s possible that some of your favorite new drummers will be trained by Trainer. Most importantly, Albini’s dogged, outspoken adherence to high-quality audio fidelity, equitable working conditions, and DIY grind will probably be an inspiration for some time, even as the very economics of “indie rock” are increasingly unsustainable for bands both new and veteran. This is a sad fuckin’ song, but it’s by no means finished. | 2024-05-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-22T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Touch and Go | May 22, 2024 | 8.1 | 0434749f-b6e3-4bd8-acfa-483a88c7c36a | Christopher R. Weingarten | https://pitchfork.com/staff/christopher-r. weingarten/ | |
null | Brian Eno, Roxy Music's art-schooled keyboard and tech wizard, and Robert Fripp, King Crimson's mostly self-taught guitarist, convened in Eno's home studio in 1972. Both were conceptually inclined: Eno called himself a "non-musician," while Fripp claimed to be tone deaf and rhythmically impaired when he began playing. Both of them would go on to reinvent their chosen tools-- Eno the studio, Fripp the guitar (he would eventually devise his own standard tuning and picking techniques)-- to suit their unique talents and visions. The two LP-length collaborations they recorded in the 70s, now remastered and reissued by DGM, laid the groundwork | Fripp & Eno: No Pussyfooting / Evening Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12546-no-pussyfooting-evening-star/ | No Pussyfooting / Evening Star | Brian Eno, Roxy Music's art-schooled keyboard and tech wizard, and Robert Fripp, King Crimson's mostly self-taught guitarist, convened in Eno's home studio in 1972. Both were conceptually inclined: Eno called himself a "non-musician," while Fripp claimed to be tone deaf and rhythmically impaired when he began playing. Both of them would go on to reinvent their chosen tools-- Eno the studio, Fripp the guitar (he would eventually devise his own standard tuning and picking techniques)-- to suit their unique talents and visions. The two LP-length collaborations they recorded in the 70s, now remastered and reissued by DGM, laid the groundwork for each musician's most iconic works.
One technique is central to both records: the use of two Revox reel-to-reel tape recorders as a primitive looping system, wherein sounds recorded to the first deck resurfaced unpredictably when the tape passed through the second deck. Eno and Fripp didn't pioneer this technique; Terry Riley, among others, had used it before. But Eno would master it in his Ambient albums, where it became an end unto itself, not a background. As Eno refined the technique for the studio, Fripp refined it for the stage in his "Frippertronic" performances, which prefigured the use of looping pedals among arty rock bands today. Even in these two early works-- 1973's No Pussyfooting and 1975's Evening Star-- we can begin to track the process's rapid evolution.
On No Pussyfooting (the parentheses that originally enclosed the title are dropped on the reissue), we hear Eno and Fripp discovering the process-- it was the very first thing they recorded together in this vein. The album bursts with a sense of spontaneity. "The Heavenly Music Corporation" sequence is raw and rambunctious, resolving in long deep waves of aggression, with Fripp's molten, fluent guitar leads putting his rock prowess on display. The effervescent "Swastika Girls" strikes a contrast. In fact, "The Heavenly Music Corporation" and "Swastika Girls" seem designed as opposites-- the former gooey, deep, and broadly rolling, the latter effervescent, high, and cramped with wiry spirals. Of course, these tracks lack the sophistication of Eno's later ambient work, where pristine clarity became his focus. Clutter and impulsiveness haunt the margins, especially on "Swastika Girls", and Fripp's leads seem to stand somewhat apart from Eno's manipulations on "Heavenly". But whatever Pussyfooting lacks in subtlety, it compensates for with sheer mojo.*
Evening Star* demonstrates how quickly Eno and Fripp evolved-- it's confidently serene where No Pussyfooting was brashly assertive, and bears a closer resemblance to the 2004 Eno/Fripp collaboration The Equatorial Stars. Fripp's guitar is less often recognizable as such; we frequently hear what resembles clouds of bowed strings drifting through each other. When it is recognizable, as on the title track, the guitar phrases seem deeply interwoven with the surrounding sounds rather than roaring over them. The album opens with a quartet of naturalistically themed pieces, evoking water, wind, and sky, before delving down with a six-track sequence called "An Index of Metals". Not only did Eno and Fripp hone their technique on Evening Star, they erected a thematic architecture, which was absent from No Pussyfooting and would be crucial to Eno's subsequent work.
The only disappointing thing about these reissues is the bonus content. There's none on Evening Star, and No Pussyfooting comes with a second disc of reversed and half-speed mixes. There's an historical precedent for this: Miscuing a tape, John Peel played tracks from No Pussyfooting backwards on his radio show (and it says a lot about this kind of music that only Eno noticed the error), while the slowed-down versions recreate the experience of playing the album, which was originally released on vinyl, at the wrong speed. That's cool, but would have made more sense on a commercial release in 1975. Now that listeners who want to hear music at different speeds can create the effect themselves in a matter of seconds, the bonus disc seems anachronistic.
In his review of The Equatorial Stars, Dominique Leone correctly downplayed the idea that anything was invented on these albums. As previously mentioned, the technique that informed them predated Eno and Fripp. And while Eno made great strides in building a theory of ambient music, the basic challenge-- to make music that took an evasive stance toward form and content-- wasn't new; many modernist composers had already been approaching it in a variety of ways. But art always evolves that way, with old ideas recombining into new forms, embodied in but not created by specific individuals. Eno and Fripp invented something more tangible than an abstract cultural movement here: They invented themselves, and a way of thinking about music that was not so much novel as perfectly of the moment, alive to its unique technological and conceptual possibilities. They irrevocably altered the course of art music in the process. | 2009-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-01-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | null | January 9, 2009 | 7.9 | 0439b99b-905e-480d-810b-570aab9aa73a | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
After a self-imposed exile from the music industry, the Ottawa singer-songwriter is clear-eyed and serene, writing just for the thrill of discovery. | After a self-imposed exile from the music industry, the Ottawa singer-songwriter is clear-eyed and serene, writing just for the thrill of discovery. | Kathleen Edwards: Total Freedom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kathleen-edwards-total-freedom/ | Total Freedom | Near the end of Total Freedom, Kathleen Edwards sings a song for her dog. Narrating in the second-person to Redd, her golden retriever, the 42-year-old songwriter reflects on the day they first met: “You were so sweet, immediately.” She goes on to describe their walks together, the compliments they received from neighbors, and the place she eventually buried his ashes. It is a quietly emotional and personal narrative, weaving in a thread about her own habit of self-medicating with alcohol. But more than any of these novelistic details, what’s most striking is her serenity, the focus in her delivery and peace in her voice as she quietly breaks your heart. It is a love song for a lost friend: the kind of thing you might sing alone, at home, when no one is listening.
This is the tone of Total Freedom, the Ottawa songwriter’s first album in eight years. And if it sounds like the work of someone who had a lot of time to focus on the things that matter, that’s because it is. Beginning with 2003’s Failer, Edwards released a string of expertly written records on the edges of heartland rock and alt-country, building a tight knit fanbase (which includes Maren Morris, who asked her to co-write a song on her most recent album). But after 2012’s atmospheric Voyageur, produced by Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Edwards found herself disillusioned with the industry. Playing its songs every night was destroying her voice, and the shows themselves had become draining and financially unsustainable at a point when she hoped to be crossing over. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, no one cares. I’m just not good enough,” she reflected. “The only reason I sold two hundred tickets is because Bon Iver fans are coming to see if Justin might show up.’”
All of this was on her mind when she drove past a storefront for lease near her hometown. An inside joke with a friend became a life preserver, and she decided to retire from the music business and open a coffee shop. She called it Quitters. Located in the small town of Stittsvile, Ontario, it evolved into a local fixture with a loyal clientele—multiple Yelp reviews note the stellar music in the shop—and Edwards found a hard-won, person-to-person sense of gratification. She felt fulfilled. She spent more time with her dogs.
Slowly, the songs came back. There was “Who Rescued Who,” the one about Redd, and “Ashes to Ashes,” a plainspoken eulogy for one of her Quitters customers. But the one that got the ball rolling was “Glenfern,” a breezy rock song that filtered her past life as a touring musician through frank new perspective: “Now when I find myself looking back,” she sings calmly, “I think of all the cool shit that happened.” (Of course, she wasn’t totally ready to chase away those demons: “We bought a rock and roll dream,” she confesses, “and it was total crap.”) If Edwards’ work once recalled the dark, pastoral story-songs of Lucinda Williams, her writing here feels more akin to recent work from Mount Eerie or Sufjan Stevens—memoristic folk songs that scour hard memories for new lessons.
The production matches her clear-eyed realizations, and the resulting album feels like a creative breakthrough, written solely for the thrill of discovery. (Or as she put it to the New York Times, “I mean, what’s going to happen? I go back to working at the cafe? OK, sounds good!”). “Bird on a Feeder” is a gorgeous song about solitude, played on acoustic guitar with subtle flourishes of piano. In each verse, she follows the same pattern of thought, counting each passing season and reflecting on the ways her internal atmosphere has changed. She concludes each chorus with a brief observation—“no one to need”—and her delivery could be affirming, inquisitive, or hopeless with each repetition.
Other songs refuse to be misinterpreted. In “Hard on Everyone,” Edwards sings about the dynamics of an emotionally abusive relationship, revisiting the gravelly texture of her early work to summon the strength to fight back. “Fools Ride” travels similarly rough terrain, as she reflects on a long series of warning signs ignored with the hopes of finding contentment: “Here comes the red flag flying in the shit parade,” she recounts as a dizzy-sounding rhythm section tumbles behind her.
These are unsparing accounts of tough subjects, but Edwards navigates each song with tenderness and humor, allowing her to tear apart old idioms (“Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker”) or invent new ones (“Love is simple math/I can be a total pain in the ass”). Listening to her reckon with these complicated emotions, it occurs to me how many people dream of finding this kind of wisdom: stepping away from the daily rituals, imagining themselves happier and lighter in the aftermath.
Through these songs, you hear that freedom, but Edwards also reminds you how the past lingers, how actual escape is more elusive than it seems. In a virtual live set earlier this month, she covered the Neil Young classic “Comes a Time,” a decades-old song about how the world moves on despite the small catastrophes that happen every day. She heard it on the radio a few nights earlier and found herself humming it while walking the dog. It seemed to suit the times, so she learned to play it when she got home. As tree branches blow outside her window, for a minute, the future seems simple enough.
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. | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dualtone | August 17, 2020 | 7.8 | 0439d8b3-35e4-46be-91ca-ef237c504878 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
On Cam’ron’s first full-length album in four years, he sounds disengaged. The beats don’t pop and the fun has drained from his lyrics. | On Cam’ron’s first full-length album in four years, he sounds disengaged. The beats don’t pop and the fun has drained from his lyrics. | Cam’ron: The Program | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camron-the-program/ | The Program | Cam’ron is supposed to be retired by now. In 2014, he announced that he was calling it quits and that the sequel to his 2004 epic Purple Haze, then scheduled for a 2015 release, would be his last album. He told Miss Info it was “time to move on” and later told The FADER he was “winding down,” segueing into a career in film and television. His heart isn’t in rapping anymore. Maybe it never really was. He always seemed almost hilariously bored by it, no more wowed by the perks of rap pageantry than he was impressed by his own showmanship. But he’s still here, seemingly begrudgingly so: Reuniting with long lost Dipset compatriots for the tryhard throwback “Once Upon a Time,” prepping a sequel no one asked for of 2006’s Killa Season, and sharing his first full-length in four years, a mixtape called The Program. These are the raps of a man with nothing left to prove and nothing left to earn. “Let me tell you rappers something/Look man I don’t need you/I never was a rapper, mane/I’m a get money nigga, I do this for leisure,” he raps on “Hallalujah” [sic]. Uncoincidentally, he’s never seemed less engaged than this.
Cam’ron is a man who once rapped “My earring is nice, the price: Three townhomes in Delaware” and bragged about drinking sake on a Suzuki in Osaka Bay after shooting at his rivals. His verses were so blasé, hyper-specific, and subtly comical, with details odd enough to make the bizarre seem believable: random asides like holding a Spanish timeshare for nine years for time away from Times Square while your girl forged checks for him by the Port Authority. In fact, a debate over a colorful Cam’ron bar is what led Ilan Zechory, Tom Lehman, and Mahbod Moghadam to start Rap Genius. But these days Cam’s raps are less wordy, less mind-expanding, and frankly, less fun.
In the years since 2009’s Crime Pays, Cam’s last solo studio album, he has slowly become a much less interesting writer, one that’s far less self-aggrandizing. Perhaps adulthood has finally overtaken his surrealist world, and reality has set in, but there isn’t the same artful absurdity to his rapping. Before, he merely seemed apathetic toward the lifestyle he led; now his indifference is aimed squarely at the audience. On “Coleslaw,” he gives Kanye bad PR advice, one ex-Roc rapper to another, before veering into aimless and sometimes senseless machismo. On “Hello,” his cornier punches are a letdown following Don Q, who rips off the tape’s densest schemes: “Had to get my respect, it was past due/Through with my past, I just reminisce when I pass through/Moving them bags, tryin’ to get ‘em flipped ‘til my stash grew/Shooters that blast over the nonsense when the cash blue.” The pen that once drew up the most fantastically farcical story designs in rap has all but dried up.
That isn’t to say there isn’t some of that old Cam charm under all the bluster. “Uwasntthere,” originally planned for his proposed retirement album, is an autobiographical and vivid rags-to-riches story, comprised of neatly-stacked raps that fool around with phonetic sounds (“Some was unfortunate, pine box or orphanage/Watching your siblings turning into foster kids”). “Lean,” where a child choir hums Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” behind him as he raps loyalty and camaraderie, is full of signature Cam quirks. This is the closest he gets to digging deep, enjoying himself, and satiating listeners. But far too many moments on The Program make you wonder why this mixtape was made in the first place: If not for him, then certainly not for us.
For fans of Cam’s delightfully goofy interpolation of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” there’s “Dime After Dime,” a rework of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time,” turning the soft rock staple into a drug anthem. The rest of the production is stymied by a lack of imagination. The beats that aren’t flashbacks to older variations of Cam songs are derivative or straight up copies. The AraabMuzik beat for “The Other Side” is a simple rip of a Lex Luger beat, “Kiss Myself” jacks Rick Ross’ “I Love My Bitches,” and “Chop It Up” is a by-the-numbers recreation of Scarface’s “On My Block.” Beat jacking is a cornerstone of mixtape culture, but none of these songs live up to their samples and Cam delivers forgettable performances on all of them. And that’s The Program’s biggest issue in a nutshell: Cam has been many things in the past (daffy, lazy, sometimes even cringe-worthy), but never forgettable. These songs are just hallmarks of a rapper all out of ideas, seeking a reason to stay. | 2017-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Killa Entertainment | November 22, 2017 | 5.5 | 0440cbec-0b4d-425b-9a42-6238a075f5a6 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Lou Barlow and John H. Davis’ first body of new work in 25 years applies a fresh coat of paint to the droning indie rock sound of the duo’s formative years. | Lou Barlow and John H. Davis’ first body of new work in 25 years applies a fresh coat of paint to the droning indie rock sound of the duo’s formative years. | The Folk Implosion: Walk Thru Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-folk-implosion-walk-thru-me/ | Walk Thru Me | The Folk Implosion certainly wasn’t the first 1990s indie rock act to tinker with the sample-based structures of hip-hop, but their approach to genre fusion may have been the most prescient. “Natural One,” the duo’s unlikely Billboard-charting hit and best-known contribution to Larry Clark’s Kids soundtrack, was a reaction to recently released major label debuts by Portishead and Beck, translating the group’s usual plunking bedroom recordings into a beat-driven context while consciously avoiding the sardonic tone of a track like “Loser.” As Lou Barlow and John H. Davis grew into their new sound, their experimentation became increasingly distinct, particularly on their last album, 1999’s One Part Lullaby, which fully realized their blend of glitched-out electronic composition, gritty drum breaks, and whispery emo pop. From a contemporary perspective, the album’s title cut and the vocoder-infused “E.Z. L.A.” feel like an embryonic version of recent work by brakence or Jane Remover: intimate, yet futuristic in equal measure.
Following the release of 2023’s Music for KIDS compilation—a retrospective look behind the scenes of the soundtrack sessions that inspired the Folk Implosion’s embrace of electronica—Barlow and Davis have returned with their first body of new work in 25 years. Walk Thru Me, written remotely before the pair hit the studio with producer Scott Solter, is a return to the group’s roots as penpals. They’ve also largely abandoned their hip-hop influences, dusting off the droning indie rock sound of the band’s formative years and giving it a fresh coat of paint. While early Folk Implosion outings like Take a Look Inside and Palm of My Hand were patchwork affairs comprised of crunchy thrash, stoned jam sessions and bite-sized lo-fi pop gems, Walk Thru Me lacks their mercurial mystique. Davis, who is currently studying Persian music, incorporates stringed Middle Eastern instruments like setar, oud, and saz into his songwriting, though he and Barlow stick to a familiar formula throughout, noodling and down-stroking over leisurely, mid-tempo drum patterns. Without the Folk Implosion’s typically unpredictable energy, the duo’s knack for conjuring surreal harmonic atmospheres is dampened by boilerplate beats and song structure.
The shift toward more polished, fleshed-out songcraft finds greater success on the lyrical front. On “My Little Lamb,” Barlow grapples with his approach to parenting, weighing his protective instincts against the wisdom that “they’ve gotta wonder on their own.” With a conversational cadence that recalls Jad Fair, Davis’ turns at the mic are painstaking snapshots of adult ennui, describing the numbing effects of robocalls and televised sports on “Bobblehead Dolls,” and trying to put himself in the neurological headspace of his late father on “The Day You Died.” Earlier Folk Implosion material reveled in abstract expression, balling up scribbled pages of adolescent catharsis on songs like “Daddy Never Understood” or “Mood Swing” and chucking them into oblivion. The fragmented lyricism suited the dashed-off, DIY quality of Barlow and Davis’ mid-’90s output, but here their angst translates to full storytelling quite naturally.
Many of the cuts on Walk Thru Me, like “Moonlit Kind” and “Crepuscular,” swirl formlessly, riding spin cycles of fingerpicked acoustic guitar, twangy slides, and reverb-laden riffs. But when the duo ratchets up the BPM, their ideas coalesce into a tight, krautrock-inspired groove that recalls the first two DIIV albums. “O.K. to Disconnect” wields tension and dissonance masterfully, coiling nimble guitar leads around a motorik rhythm section and letting them venture into cryptic atonality during instrumental breaks. “The Fable and the Fact” also makes ample room for Barlow and Davis to jam between verses, bouncing wriggling peals of distorted guitar off of springy low end. The contrast between the duo’s understated vocal presence and their turbulent improvisational chemistry is most potent when they’re moving fast, letting rushed melodic phrases spill over the song’s margins. Chaos is still encoded into the Folk Implosion’s DNA, but Walk Thru Me’s idiomatic alt-rock composition feels too stable to properly channel it. At their best, Barlow and Davis wrestled with seemingly opposing interests in the primal and futuristic: After a long period of inactivity, they’re still finding their footing in the present. | 2024-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Joyful Noise | July 9, 2024 | 6.4 | 0441a823-52d3-40fd-9626-967c8b5c7881 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
Amid the rich textures and hushed production of this playful, soulful six-song EP, the San Bernardino native radiates sensuality—and fun. | Amid the rich textures and hushed production of this playful, soulful six-song EP, the San Bernardino native radiates sensuality—and fun. | Moses Sumney: Sophcore EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moses-sumney-sophcore-ep/ | Sophcore EP | When Moses Sumney sings, “I am not a woman, I am not a man” in something close to his speaking voice on “Hey Girl,” I thought, Right on. He is himself and his artistic forebears too—namely, the Prince who offered a similar affirmation in “I Would Die 4 U” Then the kicker: “I am an amoeba.” The San Bernardino native of Ghanaian parents sings over squishy, squirrelly tracks whose post-Maxwell R&B foundations accommodate damaged rock rifflets and modest gospel overtones; you might imagine him practicing vocal runs in the bedroom before church. The six-song EP Sophcore—a curriculum vitae outlining his robust laryngeal resources—recaps Sumney’s achievements and sets up what audiences might expect from a new full-length statement. It’s a tease in the best sense.
Four years ago, on his breakthrough album, grae, Sumney expressed the yearnings of a soul sonic force who loved being, as he sang on one of its most powerful tracks, “neither/nor.” That album’s “Virile,” a collaboration with industrial rock act Yvette, regarded masculinity as a land worth invading with a conquering army. To master such whisper-to-a-scream dynamics requires a sense of self that eschews bluster but is plenty assured.
A collaboration with Portland producer Graham Jonson, who goes by quickly, quickly, yields Sophcore’s prettiest and liveliest moments. “Gold Coast” begins as a sensual, puttering thing indebted to Bjork’s Vespertine. Sumney’s chalky falsetto complements and works against the plucked guitars, distorted multi-tracked vocals, and synths; his impressionistic lyrics (“Talk in tongues, testify/Sunrise skin, color of clay”) say no thanks to coherence, bless them. A symphony of gurgles and music-box melodies cushions “I’m Better (I’m Bad),” in which Sumney recreates with louche delight a dialogue between himself and a feminized object of desire.
Over Sophcore’s recombinant grooves, Sumney radiates a sense of fun. Confidence in his vocal talents doesn’t congeal into self-regard. Turns out he’s right: Trills and melisma suit arrangements that swell and contract like protoplasmic organisms. The finger-snapping rhythm track on the closing “Love’s Refrain” is almost an afterthought, a metronome to remind Sumney that his fascinations remain earthbound despite the stratospheric vantage point of his vowel experiments. “I was in my world, you were in yours too,” he coos, “so let’s refrain.” From what—independence or romance? Duetting with himself into infinity, he deepens the enigmas. | 2024-08-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-06T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tuntum | August 6, 2024 | 8 | 0441b77f-baa6-45b8-a17c-eddf098f088f | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Breezy, uplifting, and never forced, the Jamaican reggae star’s debut imbues the ennui and uncertainty of this epoch with much-needed positivity. | Breezy, uplifting, and never forced, the Jamaican reggae star’s debut imbues the ennui and uncertainty of this epoch with much-needed positivity. | Koffee: Gifted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koffee-gifted/ | Gifted | Midway through summer 2020, the young Jamaican reggae artist Koffee released her single “Lockdown” and dreamed of life after the pandemic. “Where will we go/When di quarantine ting done and everybody touch road?” she sang over an Afrobeats-tinged riddim, imagining a relationship’s future once she and her boo could finally progress past FaceTime. Its video was similarly optimistic: Koffee at home, relatably, in sweatpants; then Koffee hitting the beach with a crew of friends, blessedly communing out in the world. “Me ah go put you pon lockdown/Put yuh body pon lockdown,” she crooned—pandemic stasis begging to become summer spontaneity. As the Delta variant spread, though, the anticipated end of isolation deflated like a party balloon. Rather than languish in her jammies, Koffee got to work: Gifted, her first album and the follow-up to her Grammy-winning Rapture EP, is by definition a pandemic album, imbuing the ennui and uncertainty of this epoch with a positivity it could surely use.
The relatively short career of Mikayla “Koffee” Simpson is a feel-good story about a rising star: A YouTuber from Spanish Town, Jamaica, discovered at 17 after Usain Bolt posted her tribute to him, “Legend”; collaborating with millennial reggae heroes like Chronixx and Protoje and signing to a major label at 18; winning the Grammy for Best Reggae Album at 19, for a five-song dancehall EP, her first, making her the youngest person and only woman to earn such a distinction. Her accomplishments and accolades are well deserved, but it’s also the kind of uplifting trajectory the music industry loves, and the narrative tends to flatten Koffee’s message. Her joy is rightly celebrated, but she also tells real stories about her life, including critiques of the Jamaican government’s complicity in structural poverty and gun violence (most explicitly on 2019’s crunchy dub “Raggamuffin”). And so Koffee’s COVID-era album, upbeat as it sounds on its face, is not a spiritual turnaround—in March she told Zane Lowe that her writing process was in part a way of encouraging herself out of her low points—and belies that she’s had any cheerier of a pandemic than many of us. She ultimately lands on a gratefulness that reads as hope, simply because to do otherwise doesn’t seem much in her nature.
Gifted veers from the contemporary dancehall of her prior acclaim and into the breezier realm of roots reggae: Low-end edges are burnished in favor of a trebly midtempo that centers guitars and the surety of her voice, a clarion tone about which she once sang, “Inna mi zone/Alto to baritone.” The last two years focused her thoughts inward—as they have for many of us—and Koffee, now a sage 22, is surer in both her talent and what matters most to her. As the title track, “Gifted,” suggests, she’s contemplative about her upbringing in Spanish Town, and the album is full of paeans to her single mother, a Seventh Day Adventist who raised her daughter in the church choir. (“I just try to make [my mom] feel the impact of what she’s done for me,” Koffee told The Gleaner in March.)
In combining traditional influences like acoustic guitars in major keys with the contemporary diaspora—the Afroswing experimentation of the British musician J-Hus, with whom Koffee has collaborated, comes to mind, and they share a producer in Jae5—Koffee bridges history with her Zoomer present. She references Jah and her mom, ’Raris and Rovers, Babylon and Benzes, sometimes in the same stanza. (If there is a person who can describe wearing Prada and Balenciaga without sounding ostentatious, Koffee is it.) The juxtaposition, meted out easily in Koffee’s genial alto, is a meditation on where her life has taken her so far. Several tracks take on the intimate patina of prayer. On “Gifted,” for instance, she invokes an oft-decontextualized Black American spiritual: “Pray to di Father, seh, ‘Kumbaye’/Full up mi plate and bruk my tray, yeah.”
Koffee’s humble wisdom underpins her songwriting, with songs like “Defend” and “Shine” contemplating gun violence and poverty with that same peaceful aspiration, her voice strong and true as she recounts sociopolitical realities and offers herself as a bulwark against them. “Koffee defend them case,” she sings on “Defend,” and on “Shine,” she beseeches the youth to “just stay alive… I’ve got to shine, you’ve got to shine.” The relaxed pace of “West Indies,” with its screwed-down outro, feels like the joyous memory of a party replayed in slow motion, a romantic counterpoint to the slow-grind lovers rock of “Lonely.” There’s a proud and pure undertone to her music, not least because of her inviting vocal timbre, which gives the impression that she’s open-hearted and open-minded too. For the churlish among us, uplifting music can tend to grate rather than inspire, but Koffee hits a satisfying midpoint, free of didacticism and never forced; she’s simply inviting us into her world. It’s sunny there, and I, for one, could use it. | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony UK / RCA | March 29, 2022 | 8 | 0441fe10-440e-4ee4-b435-c7cc4de75423 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a declaration of independence. With it, Ms. Hill put the entire genre of hip-hop on blast and elevated heartbreak to spiritual proportions. | The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a declaration of independence. With it, Ms. Hill put the entire genre of hip-hop on blast and elevated heartbreak to spiritual proportions. | Lauryn Hill: The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22035-the-miseducation-of-lauryn-hill/ | The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill | The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a declaration of independence. It is a breakup letter to the bullshit routine of dealing with men who can’t stop hurting the women who love them. And it is a love letter to the liberated self, the maternal self and to God. It is an album of junctures: between adolescence and adulthood, between Lauryn as ⅓ of the Fugees and Lauryn as a woman on her own, between being a child and being a parent. (She conceived of the album at 22 years old, single and pregnant with her firstborn.) Musically it arrived as the conceptual confluence of three of the most powerful musical ideas in all of Blackness: hip hop, Motown-era soul and reggae. Doo-wop harmonies and the flushed distortion of voices singing their pain were cast over taut snares and hard boom-baps. The lo-fi production and warm, thickly muzzled bass tones purposefully recalled vintage vinyl on a rainy Sunday afternoon. After having written for Whitney Houston, having traveled to Detroit to sit with Aretha, it makes sense that Lauryn Hill returned to look upon the Fugees and their hard, brick-city, midnight-winter rap with a newfound skepticism.
Ms. Hill’s background (and perhaps her most developed skill set) lay in hip-hop, and Miseducation had the effect of putting the entire genre on blast. The mid-’90s had seen the ascendency of the genre to corporate-level sales numbers, aided in large part Bad Boy Entertainment, their bromidic disco samples and unrepentant tales of jewelry and gunplay, their rallying cry of “tits and bras, ménage à trois, sex in expensive cars.” Meanwhile, regional acts like N.W.A. and Geto Boys had introduced an incidental violence so extreme that it mutated into horrorcore, and even reigning king Nas, once known as the sharpest and most conscious of project prophets, had ridiculously rebranded himself “Esco” and was spinning elaborate drug tales in juvenile heist raps. The Fugees entered into this mayhem first to settle the score. But it was Lauryn Hill who came to re-educate the whole people.
Soul and hip-hop aside, Miseducation is most deeply fueled, spiritually and musically, by reggae. Six years before, the release of the immensely popular Songs of Freedom boxed set pushed the Marley legacy once again forefront of urban youth culture. By 1998, every halfway-conscious hip-hop head knew at least the basics of Marley’s primary theology: That Black people had been subject to centuries oppression at the hands of the un-righteous, but that God was on the side of the oppressed. This meant that you were to live in peace and love with all things, for this is part of your covenant with God, but you were also not to take no bullshit from no oppressor lying down.
Ms. Hill didn’t just gain inspiration from this philosophy; she quite literally inherited it. Half of Miseducation was recorded in Jamaica at Marley’s own Tuff Gong Studios. The baby she carried was conceived with Rohan Marley, son of Bob. From this regal lineage, Miseducation strikes out with the lionhearted courage of a crusader. But it can’t stay there. Metaphors of God soldiers and Lions of Judah are good as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough. The problem is that such a worldview is fundamentally male, which is to say more ubiquitous than correct. Lauryn Hill was tasked with something more difficult than that: to walk a series of intertwined tightropes specific to young Black women. To be vulnerable, but fearless. To tell the truth, but look beautiful in doing so. To be driven by love, but ready to fight. To be soft enough to mother a newborn, but hard enough to protect her family. At 23 and pregnant, she was too young to be responsible for this much. It’s just that most people didn’t notice it, because on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, she handled these competing drives so beautifully.
The first track is the hard “Lost Ones,” a resentful fuck-you over tight snares with a hook loosely based on Sister Nancy’s heavily sampled 1982 dancehall classic “Bam Bam.” The song does everything short of calling Wyclef out by name, but Ms. Hill is in full battle-rap mode, putting her former partner on every type of blast: “L been this way since creation/A groupie call, you fall from temptation/Now you wanna bawl over separation/Tarnish my image in the conversation.” While “Lost Ones” is about the dissolution of a business and artist relationship with Wyclef, “Ex-Factor” is about the loss of a personal one. Here, the approach highlights Ms. Hill’s soul mode, the instrumentation and background harmonies drawing heavily from Aretha’s Capitol sessions. It’s maybe the album’s most successful evocation of this concept, milking the two-chord chart for all its attendant melodic variants while a stellar guitar solo (still a valid trope in 1998) calls to mind Muscle Shoals session man Wayne Perkins’ rousing turn in the overdub of the Wailers’ “Concrete Jungle.”
Hearts, and the men who break them, are a primary theme of Miseducation, but Ms. Hill’s implicit liberation theology elevates this commonly-visited issue to spiritual proportions. When she partners with Mary J. Blige on the affecting “I Used to Love Him,” she spells out the universal interconnectedness of heartbreaker and victim in plain terms. “I see him sometimes and the look in his eye/Is one of a man who’s lost treasures untold.” These songs are the spiritual forebears of Beyoncé’s Lemonade. The sentiment is echoed when Bey sings “When you play me, you play yourself”—why, these women ask, would you hurt a woman who is fighting for the liberation of your people?
Ms. Hill’s other mode is the raw, smoky rhyme delivery on tracks like “Doo Wop (That Thing),” “Superstar,” and “Final Hour.” Somewhere around 92 bpm had become the standard tempo of golden-era East Coast hip-hop, and Ms. Hill’s flow—confident, determined, and creeping deliberately just a hair behind the beat—is absolutely resplendent at this pace. It breathes a stunning, martial life into razor-sharp bars like “And when I let go, my voice echoes through the ghetto/Sick of men trying to pull strings like Geppetto/Why Black people always be the ones to settle/March through these streets like Soweto.” At her best Lauryn Hill flirts with legitimate prophet status, digging to her deepest to harness the power greater than herself; a power we all need to survive and overcome. She offers it to us. I’m out here, she seems to say; you can be out here, too.
Even though this is when Ms. Hill is technically at her best, these songs don’t comprise the highlights of the album. The heart of Miseducation is too vast, too imperative to find its complete representation in a series of slick punchlines. This is what separates Lauryn Hill from her male contemporaries, and why it feels that the album almost demands to be more rooted in song than verse. Rather than an iteration of Nas, she is Stevie Wonder merged with Joni Mitchell over classic East Coast beats. It is true that her vocal skills are stretched to their limits on numbers like “Everything Is Everything” and “To Zion,” but what does it matter? Like the winsome classroom interludes woven throughout it, this is an album about learning to love. On “To Zion” she is breathless, learning love of God through love of her child; on “When It Hurts So Bad,” she learns (painfully) about the love others, and on the title track, she reaches the apogee of this cycle by learning love of self. “Deep in my heart,” she sings over a swell of Hathaway-esque strings, “I made up my mind to find my own destiny.”
The thing about destiny, though, is that we never know what it is until it happens. Ms. Hill could not have predicted that this wildly successful album would plunge her into an ugly legal battle about credit and compensation with New Ark, the amateur production team she partnered with to make it. Her immense personal drive made it too easy to cast her in the public eye as a megalomaniac intent on hoarding all the accolades for herself. When two people who are used to being fucked over (Black men and Black women) get together, the collective trauma makes it highly likely that each will feel the other is taking unfair advantage. The ensuing court case, with all its finger-pointing, shady interviews, and painful depositions, took a tremendous psychic toll on Ms. Hill, whose subsequent retreat from the public eye effectively continues to this day. Bad business practices (the parties signed no agreement before work began) no doubt contributed to the squabble, but a bigger factor may have been that the 23-year-old Hill, girded up for a liberation battle, and fleeing from what she felt was an oppressive partnership with Clef and Pras, perhaps believed that everything she made from that moment forward, for justice’s sake, belonged entirely and exclusively to her.
On Miseducation, Lauryn Hill demonstrates that she was one of the coldest MCs of her era. It has always been the case, however, that a woman could rhyme ridiculous and still never be considered the best of them all. In a way, it didn’t matter. Even if she wanted to, Ms. Hill could not have spent a career talking about crooked cops, gold chains and project come-ups. Being a woman meant that she had to, for a time at least, talk about the truth of her self. When your body is the very weapon of your oppression, it sometimes must be through the art of self, soul, and spirit that you create your freedom. | 2016-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ruffhouse / Columbia | July 10, 2016 | 9.5 | 04449d93-033c-4ed9-be6a-86eddab3ce9a | Carvell Wallace | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carvell-wallace/ | |
The rapper's next comeback LP, this is meant to trace Em's journey out of depression and drug addiction and back into the peak of his powers. | The rapper's next comeback LP, this is meant to trace Em's journey out of depression and drug addiction and back into the peak of his powers. | Eminem: Recovery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14380-recovery/ | Recovery | Watching Eminem attempt to re-situate himself in the pop landscape the past year or so has been a bizarre spectacle. He roared out of his post-Encore slumber in early 2009 seeming almost puppyishly eager to rap again, spitting verses for anyone who put him in front of a mic with a desperation that suggested he was making up for lost time. Relapse, his 2009 comeback album, found him trying to scratch and claw his way back into the body of 1999-era Slim Shady, but the effect was similar to Metallica trying to revisit their thrash years with 2008's Death Magnetic: The sound was there; the fury, long gone. No matter how many starlets he tortured and killed in his lyrics, Em couldn't rewrite the intervening years and the enervating effect they've had on his spirit.
So now he's back again, with the follow-up to Relapse, and as its title suggests, Recovery is meant to be triumphant, tracing Em's journey out of depression and drug addiction and back into the peak of his powers. Out of all the depressing aspects of Recovery, the worst is the realization that for listeners the album takes the opposite arc-- the more he motors on about having reclaimed his passion for hip-hop and finally figured out who he is, the more draining the album becomes. Eminem has never really known who he is, which has resulted in one of the most wildly erratic discographies of any major rap artist; at this point, the number of times he's sounded rudderless on record are catching up to the times he's sounded alive. At his best, he has always made a fascinating scramble of his internal turmoil, but the guy rapping on Recovery just sounds devoid of any noticeable joy, personality, or wit.
Not that he's not trying. As on Relapse, Em almost passes out showing us he's still got it, rapping in double and triple time, piling tricky syncopations on top of each other, constructing whole verses with end rhymes buried in the middle of phrases-- basically any kind of pyrotechnical trick he can think of to wow the kind of rap listeners who venerate technical skill above all else. And yet for all the rattling-around-inside-the-beat syllable pileups here, there is almost nothing worth quoting. He reels off an astonishing amount of cringe-worthy lines, on the order of, "Girl, shake that ass like a donkey with Parkinson's." On the menopausal, Diane Warren-esque uplift anthem "Not Afraid", he actually strings together the excruciating lines, "Okay, stop playin' with the scissors and shit, and cut the crap/ I shouldn't have to rhyme these words in a rhythm for you to know it's a wrap." Eminem spends nearly half of Recovery insisting he's the best rapper alive, but for the first time in his career, he actually sounds clumsy.
He can't even coexist meaningfully with a beat-- every producer he works with seems to give him the most attenuated version of their signature sound possible and back away carefully. The liner notes will tell you that Recovery features production by Boi-1DA, Jim Jonsin, DJ Khalil, and Just Blaze along with the usual suspects Mr. Porter and Dre. But your ears will tell you it's the same click track Em's been rapping over since time immemorial-- the only times the beats elbow to the fore are with DJ Khalil's characteristically chunky and unwieldy rap-rock hybrids. Em just sort of drifts through these productions, as haunted and disembodied a presence as 2Pac on a posthumous release.
The only winning moment on the record comes early, with "Talkin' 2 Myself", where Em admits he contemplated dissing Kanye and Lil Wayne out of jealousy. "Thank god that I didn't do it-- I'd have had my ass handed to me," he raps, in a rare moment of wry honesty. The climax of the song sees him shouting out Wayne, Kanye, and T.I. in a show of solidarity, but the truth is Em doesn't even inhabit the same universe as these guys. He lives in a world all his own, and for the most part, that world doesn't allow for visitors. When Wayne shows up on "No Love", a po-faced duet built on a sample of Haddaway's "What Is Love", the point is hammered home-- the two rappers' verses don't even seem to belong to the same song. Marshall has never played all that comfortably or well with others, but here his solipsism is so overwhelming it negates whoever or whatever else is going on around him. He sucks the air out of the room just by stepping into it. | 2010-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / Shady / Aftermath | June 18, 2010 | 2.8 | 0444bbc0-8303-4aa5-865e-8e3e9e440492 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Prodigious talent Pat Grossi displays an aptitude for the grandeur and grace of M83, OMD, and Animal Collective on this new EP. | Prodigious talent Pat Grossi displays an aptitude for the grandeur and grace of M83, OMD, and Animal Collective on this new EP. | Active Child: Curtis Lane EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14301-curtis-lane-ep/ | Curtis Lane EP | Pat Grossi's a harpist, an ex-choirboy, an Active Child; precious, no? Nah, not really. Grossi's gauzy, twinkly Active Child songs feel at once rather humble and astronomically huge. Bits of Animal Collective's stacked harmonies, Dazzle Ships' askew shimmer, and M83's post-New Order epic pulse coalesce in Grossi's tidy yet titanic sound, stretched out over six songs and 30 minutes on the Curtis Lane EP. Precious? More like prodigious.
Tracks here comes in a couple of varieties: there's the hazier, sultrier, slower numbers, and the ones you can dance to. Grossi's smart to keep the two sides in balance, but while the thumpier numbers have their charms, they seem a bit timid next to the others' sky-streaking grandeur. "I'm in Your Church at Night" seems to stretch on forever, matching Grossi's heaven-sent falsetto to a lush rumble not unlike a screwed'n'chopped "In the Air Tonight". His compositional skill is really something, moving beats and harp plinks and negative space in and out without disrupting the majestic scope of the tunes. His falsetto, a touch meek on its own, has a dreamy incandescence when piled on top of itself. The harp's far from the focus here, but coupled with his voice, it provides a organic counterpoint to the synthetic sounds constantly shuffling underneath him.
Grossi's hand as a dance producer isn't quite as steady; deft as he is at matching sounds, there's a reason you don't hear much harp in house music, and the throb he throws under half the tunes here never quite seems to knock hard enough to actually enter the realm of the danceable. Perhaps that's not the point, but the reedy "Take Shelter" doesn't have quite as much vitality as the stretchier stuff, sounding at times like any number of bedroom Bernard Sumner. A stuttery sample of Grossi's voice makes head-nodder "When Your Love Is Safe" the best of the dancier bunch, but "Weight of the World" is bogged down by too much thump and a sharp vocal downshift; his falsetto's lovely, his tenor not so much. It's not that Grossi oughta give up trying to get people to move, but his dance music's just a smudge too cerebral, and besides, the more extravagant numbers are moving enough as is.
Grossi's limited means seem to have pushed the cosmic, stately side of these tracks to the forefront; these tunes might be huge in effect, but they're fairly modest in execution, and one hopes Grossi can maintain that homespun feel should bigger and better things befall him. And they oughta; lord knows if I were charged to soundtrack the big smooch in a teen movie I'd snatch up the rights to "Wilderness" or "I'm in Your Church at Night" post-haste. These songs just feel climactic, durable, far greater than the sum of their parts. If this guy can almost get you to dance to harp songs, just imagine what he might be capable of creating. | 2010-06-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-06-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Filter / Merok | June 1, 2010 | 7.7 | 04459281-6937-4d65-ac0a-2a2491ac1d40 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Chicago drill rapper Lil Durk follows up his muddled 2014 Def Jam debut Remember My Name with some of his strongest work. Focused, direct, and poised, he sounds like the rapper Def Jam thought they were getting. | The Chicago drill rapper Lil Durk follows up his muddled 2014 Def Jam debut Remember My Name with some of his strongest work. Focused, direct, and poised, he sounds like the rapper Def Jam thought they were getting. | Lil Durk: 300 Days 300 Nights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21386-300-days-300-nights/ | 300 Days 300 Nights | When the major labels descended upon Chicago in hope of landing the Next Big Thing during 2012’s great drill uprising, Lil Durk was among the most promising prospects: a melody-driven, phrase-warping dynamo who turned a trio of mixtapes into a deal with Def Jam and a sizeable national buzz. His breakthrough project, 2013’s Signed to the Streets, produced a catchy street hit ("Dis Ain’t What U Want") and spotlighted his particular brand of Auto-Tuned warbling, equal parts soothing and seething.
After a rough 2014 marked by spotty appearances on the Coke Boys 4 mixtape, a lukewarm Signed to the Streets sequel, and the murder of his cousin, OTF Nunu, things continued to nosedive for Durk in the months leading up to and immediately following his Def Jam debut, Remember My Name. His manager, OTF Chino, was killed last March and his debut, which arrived shortly thereafter, grappled with the same gun violence that took his friend and colleague, only with minimal affect and an uneven, often shoddy, delivery.
Lil Durk, however, soldiered on and earned back some musical capital with the rap ballad "My Beyoncé" featuring Detroit rapper and long-rumored girlfriend Dej Loaf, which perfectly married their similarly cleansing uses of Auto-Tune—for Durk, it purges impurities; for Dej, it makes her vocals smooth and measured like pressing wrinkles from a garment. The duet was the first taste of Durk’s latest mixtape, 300 Days 300 Nights, a 19-track offering that manages to sustain interest for its duration, presenting a reinvigorated Durk, who’s the sharpest he has been in years. "Ever since I built my buzz, I don’t get the same love," he raps on "Mud." He raps like he’s trying to earn that favor back.
The main knock on Durk is that his use of Auto-Tune renders him a prisoner to melody, which, in turn, renders him one-dimensional, but he proves himself capable on bustling rap-first songs like "On Em" and "Make It Back," where he packs some of his most ferocious bars together ("Can't stand the smell of that work, that's why my brothers cook it for me/ 30k a show don't call my phone, just book it for me.") He sounds good in both traditional drill productions (courtesy of staples Chopsquad DJ and DJ L) and spacious songs with distorted vocal samples (like Christian Rock band BarlowGirl’s "Never Alone").
The unsung hero behind many of the best cuts on 300 Days 300 Nights is producer C-Sick. The Chicago beatmaker has done most of his notable work for King Louie, but he and Durk have a palpable chemistry. On "Gunz N’ Money," Durk bops through a punching track as the bottom drops out, exposing chillingly direct warnings: "Word to Nuski killer/ Word to Chino killer/ Word to Moski killer/ We know we gon’ kill ya." Durk raps about leaving the safety of his own home and venturing out into the streets on "Jump Off," which winds layers of chords into a cocoon. The tone-setting intro, led by a monologue from his father, who has been locked up since Durk was an infant, is built around a pitched-up sample of Lori Perri’s "Up Against the Wind," which seems like a fitting representation for the tumultuous environment that Durk comes from. 300 Days 300 Nights could’ve benefitted from some sort of executive producer cutting it down to its 13 strongest songs, but songs like "Believe It or Not" and "Street Nigga" are solid as far as filler goes. Few moments lack Durk’s captivating and crushing bellows or his blunt writing. This is the rapper Def Jam thought they were getting. | 2016-01-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 8, 2016 | 7 | 0448a9df-e4a6-4396-85c1-27260a2e02a1 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Yoko Ono’s radical influence on pop history has inspired generations of visionary musicians. Deeply rooted in Fluxus, Ono’s newly-reissued early albums help to detail her broader artistic intentions. | Yoko Ono’s radical influence on pop history has inspired generations of visionary musicians. Deeply rooted in Fluxus, Ono’s newly-reissued early albums help to detail her broader artistic intentions. | Yoko Ono / John Lennon: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins / Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions / Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22393-unfinished-music-no-1-two-virgins-unfinished-music-no-2-life-with-the-lions-yoko-ono-plastic-ono-band/ | Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins / Unfinished Music No. 2: Life With the Lions / Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band | Courting confusion is part of the job description for anyone working in the avant-garde. Some experimenters meet this requirement with the equivalent of a shrug, while others take to the task with more evident relish. For over half a century, the singer and visual artist Yoko Ono has found herself in the latter camp, gleefully scrawling her new approaches into the official ledgers of cultural production.
The editors of the recent volume Fluxbooks credit Ono’s 1964 Grapefruit as being “one of the first works of art in book form.” Ono’s early short films likewise helped expand cinematic practices. In the years before she started dating a Beatle, Ono sang with one of John Cage’s most trusted musical interpreters, and turned a New York loft space into a contemporary-art destination that drew the likes of Marcel Duchamp to her door.
Yet this multimedia artist’s most notorious act of provocation was her approach to becoming tabloid fodder. She took one of the world’s most popular musicians and hurried along his engagement with the experimental fringe (an attraction already evident in John Lennon’s work, as early as 1966’s Revolver). In some quarters, she’s never been forgiven for this. But Ono’s radical influence on pop history has also inspired generations of visionary artists.
The Lennon/Ono collaborative albums were a critical part of their take on celebrity coupledom. Their first two LPs carried the series title “Unfinished Music,” a conceptual gambit with deeper roots in the aesthetic of the Fluxus art movement than in that of the British Invasion. The first set to be issued, subtitled Two Virgins, was a sound-collage set reportedly produced during their first night together. The album’s name, and the full-frontal nudity of its cover, referenced the couple’s sense of innocence in approaching a new beginning—as well as the fact that the recording took place just prior to the consummation of their relationship.
As the product of a first date, Two Virgins is fascinating. As a sound artifact from the initial decade of Fluxus-inspired activity, it has plenty of competition. Casual clips of the couple’s conversations—mixed in alongside Lennon’s tape loops—blur the distinction between the private and the public-facing. This approach recalls efforts by some of Ono’s contemporaries, like Charlotte Moorman and Benjamin Patterson. But what makes Two Virgins distinct is the range of Ono’s voice. In the opening moments, she contributes some pure-tone humming, which sounds downright companionable amid Lennon’s meandering keyboard motifs and reverb tape-effects. Four-and-a-half-minutes in, Ono unleashes the first of her extended yelps, from the top of her range. Even if you know it’s coming, this sound always registers as shocking.
This aspect of Ono’s musicianship confused (and enraged) large portions of Lennon’s audience. Despite her purposeful variations of timbre and her ability to hit notes cleanly, Ono’s recourse to this proto-punk wail was often decried as unmusical. And after the White Album’s “Revolution 9”—a much tighter collage created by Lennon, Ono and George Harrison, now sometimes interpreted by classical musicians—she was often accused of being the driving agent behind the Beatles’ breakup.
Tensions from Beatlemania carry over into the couple’s second, less idyllic “Unfinished Music” release, subtitled Life With the Lions. Corporate tussles between the Beatles and their record label provide some of the inspiration for “No Bed for Beatle John,” a piece recorded in Ono’s hospital room, following a miscarriage. The album’s dominant track, though, is the side-length workout “Cambridge 1969,” a live recording driven by Lennon’s guitar feedback and Ono’s harshest vocalizations.
In failing to create much interest over its 26 minutes, “Cambridge 1969” reveals something important about Ono’s art. The performances of hers that work don’t do so merely because she can kick up a unique noise. Instead, the takes that have true liftoff usually find her switching up those extreme textures with greater frequency. Unlike some of the composers she hung out with, circa 1961, Ono is not a drone artist. She’s an expert in subtle variations, carved from blocks of seeming chaos.
Her 1970 album Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band is a triumph, in part, because it sounds fully aware of this reality. It’s also iconic because it contains some of Lennon’s most aggressive guitar work. Opener “Why” hurtles from its needle-drop opening, with slide guitar swoops and febrile picking that anticipate the variety of Ono’s vocal lines. When the singer enters, she wastes no time in applying a range of approaches to her one-word lyric sheet. Long expressions full of vibrato give way to shorter exhalations, rooted in the back of the throat. Spates of shredded laughter communicate the absurdist good humor that’s often present in Ono’s work. The minimalist pounding of drummer Ringo Starr and bassist Klaus Voormann is there as a foil, propped against all the invention on offer from Ono and Lennon.
“Why Not” inverts this script by arranging similar licks inside a slower tempo. Ono’s voice becomes more pinched and childlike, while Lennon’s guitar lines have a bluesier profile. Elsewhere, Ono puts a new spin on an “instruction” piece from her Grapefruit book, with the echo-laden “Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City.” Here, in another surprise, Ono’s voice sounds stolid and more traditionally “correct.” That feel is subsequently obliterated by the noisy middle section of “AOS,” a track Ono recorded in ’68 with saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s band. The Lennon-led backing group returns for the final two pieces of the original LP configuration, which have a comparatively calmer air.
Like Lennon’s ’70 solo album of the same name (and near-identical cover), Ono’s Plastic Ono Band initially scans as acerbic, yet manages to create a supple variety of song-forms from that opening template. Ono’s absorption of her new husband’s sonic language was only beginning to pay dividends, too. As Sean Lennon’s Chimera imprint and the Secretly Canadian label continue to reissue her catalog, Ono’s subsequent experiments with rock and pop formats will come into clearer view for audiences that have only heard rumors about her craft. Still, these opening reissues—which come complete with era-appropriate B-sides and outtakes—all manage to reflect a key aspect of Ono’s broader artistic intentions, as defined in a 1971 artist’s statement: “I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back.” | 2016-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | null | December 5, 2016 | 6.8 | 0448e4a7-9fe7-44bc-8de4-6fed4d7fe2ff | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The dub techno duo’s first new record since 1999 is a submerged wonder. Its stirring, bold elements steer the tracks into murky, unexpected places. | The dub techno duo’s first new record since 1999 is a submerged wonder. Its stirring, bold elements steer the tracks into murky, unexpected places. | Porter Ricks: Anguilla Electrica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porter-ricks-anguilla-electrica/ | Anguilla Electrica | There’s a certain level of artistic passivity associated with dub techno. This is in large part because stoned minimalism is the style’s modus operandi, but also because so many of the synthesizers and software programs people have used to make techno throughout the years seem tailor-made to spit out ghostly snare hits and sub-aquatic bass. Your Roland Space Echo is not going to have an off day.
Porter Ricks, the German duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner, has always made music tangential to basic dub techno—they were there in the beginning, on the seminal Chain Reaction label, as Basic Channel laid the ground rules that still govern the style. But Porter Ricks have always seemed more dynamic and wily than their stylistic peers, and if so much dub techno is sending depth charges to the ocean's bottom, then Anguilla Electrica, the duo’s first new record since 1999, is the moment when whatever’s lurking down there comes up to play.
What this means, functionally, Mellwig and Köner have taken a pretty typical techno framework—kick drums on every beat, snares and claps in familiar places, and with plenty of echo—and focused the energy anywhere but that scaffolding. This is not an album about perfectly tuned kick drums or the transients of snares bathing in reverb; it’s about the mechanistic bass-worm that burrows through “Shoal Beat” or the shark-y way that white noise seems to circle “Scuba Rondo.” Each of Anguilla Electrica’s six tracks contains stirring, bold elements that steer the tracks into murky, unexpected places. (And if you think “has memorable moments” is a low bar for any piece of music to clear, you may be underestimating how long certain people will listen to a minor chord drift into the ether.)
Dub techno invites a lot of philosophizing because it naturally deals with time and decay and repetition (and because it pairs well with drugs). Mellwig and Köner, despite some digressions into the duality of the mind and body, seem chiefly concerned with “nuanced sonic experiences,” something that is borne out during Anguilla Electrica.
Porter Ricks share an indelible quality with tricksters like Aphex Twin: artists who, despite building tracks with the same elements as everyone else, consistently manage to sound more slippery and idiosyncratic. You hear this in the static that cloaks “Sandy Ground,” which seems to take on a technicolor aspect as a melody emerges. Even, “Prismatic Error,” the most traditionally dubby track here, idles in a kind of harmonic glow. There’s very little techno music—very little electronic music in general—that sounds like Anguilla Electrica, and that includes previous Porter Ricks albums.
The six tracks here feel labored over—for four years, according to the duo—which, again, is no minor distinction amid techno’s chillest and jammiest substrata. In turn, they ask for your attention, for you to puzzle over the massing overtones and darting basslines with the same intelligence and care their creators did. The distinctions between Anguilla Electrica and workaday techno can sometimes feel subtle, but that’s kind of the point: Mellwig and Köner love techno too much change it, just as they love techno too much to not to. | 2017-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tresor | July 8, 2017 | 8 | 044aabf6-0901-4b4e-b9b8-d9ace7332161 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
On a five-song EP accompanying the British National Maritime Museum’s “Polar Worlds” exhibit, the Inuk experimental musician joins landscape, culture, and resistance. | On a five-song EP accompanying the British National Maritime Museum’s “Polar Worlds” exhibit, the Inuk experimental musician joins landscape, culture, and resistance. | Tanya Tagaq: Toothsayer EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tanya-tagaq-toothsayer-ep/ | Toothsayer EP | There’s an Inuktitut word, “ajunamat,” that translates to “it cannot be helped”—a concept that embodies many Inuit people’s adaptive way of living, given the unpredictable weather conditions of their homeland and hunting grounds. The researcher Tom Artiss has written that Inuit music in the 21st century lives at the intersection of ajunamat and sappulik, a word that means to “never give up.” To pair the two ideas is to join acceptance with resilience. This is certainly true of the Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq’s work. When Moravian missionaries traveled to Canada in the late 18th century, they prohibited Inuit drumming, dancing, and throat singing. Tagaq, on the other hand, fuses them with an array of contemporary styles of music, from downtempo rap to industrial rock to contemporary classical.
The adaptability and indomitable spirit of her people are present in Tagaq’s politics, which encompass firm, assured stances on environmentalism, women’s rights, and indigenous rights. Those themes permeate Toothsayer, a companion to the “Polar Worlds” exhibit at London’s National Maritime Museum. Bearing a title that suggests both prescience and defiance—“We are going to have to get our fists up and our teeth out to carve our way to survival in this world,” Tagaq explained—Toothsayer is both a love letter to the Inuit and a call to arms for the preservation of their culture.
“Icebreaker” kicks off the EP in devastating fashion. An ominous drone is soon joined by slow, insistent drumming, suggesting something steadily chipping away at indispensable ice. Above the mechanistic beat, Tagaq’s voice oscillates between gasps and growls. It doesn't just sound like a portrait of the merciless Arctic winter, but a meditation on the ecological crisis at hand. Like “Icebreaker,” the rest of the EP’s songs communicate without lyrics. And while much of the instrumentation is thoughtful (the Iranian-British electronic musician Ash Koosha contributed to the delicate “Snowblind” and the raging “Submerged”), nothing is as potent as Tagaq’s voice.
Her virtuosity is impressive—she’s able to move between high-pitched squeaks and guttural bellows, gnarly cackling and fierce howls. What’s most affecting, though, is when we hear katajjaq—the vocal game traditionally played among Inuit women while men are away hunting. It involves two women standing face to face, exchanging repetitive vocal motifs until one fails to keep the pattern going. In older recordings of katajjaq, it’s easy to sense just how entertaining they were: Many games end with laughter.
The katajjaq we hear across Tagaq’s discography is different—it’s performed solo, and she’s not laughing. On “Icebreaker,” the technique runs through the song only to be suddenly silenced—a suggestion, perhaps, of the impending extinction of many traditional practices—and the way she executes her vocalizing on her own feels like a somber foreshadowing of a time when others won’t be present to join her. On “Submerged,” her katajjaq is delivered over simple, repetitive percussion that’s reminiscent of Inuit drumming. When the song reaches its climax, Tagaq swerves into piercing shrieks that are bolstered by electrifying guitar-like sounds. The message: Calamity is near, and the Inuit are its victims.
“Polar Worlds” is about the history of British exploration and scientific enquiry, but it is also about the effects of climate change on the region—a topic central to Tagaq’s work. The issue is serious: Winters are becoming shorter, the weather is getting harsher, the Arctic ice pack grows ever smaller. The livelihood of Inuit people is at stake, and the sustainability of their culture is in danger—the effects of climate change have meant fewer opportunities for younger generations to learn skills their forebears used. If the fury of songs like “Icebreaker” and “Submerged” is keyed directly to the impending crisis, the same is also true of the melancholy cast of the EP’s quietest songs. In “Hypothermia,” her katajjaq takes on the desperate cadence of someone panting, while the crystalline harmonies of “Snowblind” are both a vivid evocation of landscape and a bittersweet expression of pain—the pain of knowing that this could all be gone. | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Six Shooter | March 12, 2019 | 7.6 | 044b7535-4ed8-4265-a01f-8dc0110cf074 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Portland band Blowout's exuberant debut conveys the sense of being so overwhelmed by frustration, excitement, or any feeling really, that it must be acted on, coordination be damned. | Portland band Blowout's exuberant debut conveys the sense of being so overwhelmed by frustration, excitement, or any feeling really, that it must be acted on, coordination be damned. | Blowout: No Beer, No Dad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22179-no-beer-no-dad/ | No Beer, No Dad | Anyone who’s heard a second of Rainer Maria, the Promise Ring or the Anniversary is likely to hear their influence in the Portland band Blowout’s exuberant debut LP. Consider the most identifiable similarities: The coed vocals that can’t be bothered with the order of “call and response” and just pile on top of each other instead; a spring-loaded rhythmic section; group chants that feel like more of a product of musical theater than punk. These are the qualities of a certain itchy, impatient brand of ‘90s indie rock, one that was so exasperated by its more staid and slack peers that a song like “Do the Standing Still” felt necessary call them out. This was music that conveyed the sense of being so overwhelmed by frustration, excitement or any feeling really, that they simply had to act on it, coordination be damned. So from a certain angle, *No Beer, No Dad *is an indie rock band making one of the most irresistible dance albums of 2016.
I mean, it’s emo as hell too: “Indiana” double-dips in the genre’s favorite tropes by using a geographic signifier for a hook on a song about having a pet for a best friend. When Laken Wright breaks into a barrage of “ba ba bas” on “Cents Cents Money Money,” it could be heard as direct homage to the Promise Ring’s “Why Did We Ever Meet?” even if the inspiration is entirely different: rather than being incapacitated by infatuation, she’s at a loss for words to describe how bored she is with your bullshit. There’s a wild streak of pop-punk pissiness as well in the tart edge of Wright’s vocals, the between-song banter about beer and cheap guitars and the general attitude: “Indiana” is a love song about a pet, but Wright only gets to this point after admitting, “People just bore me.”
Even if inspires some odd contortions at basement shows, *No Beer, No Dad *appears to have the same goal of *traditional *dance albums: release from the problems of the straight world. And while they’re young, Blowout are going to make the most of out of having the energy to take on the universe while absorbing the resistance of the universe pushing back with its incessant demands; jobs, money, relationships, parental guidance, all of that annoying shit. Fittingly, the hookiest songs are the ones that speak to Blowout’s ambitions to get up, get out and find success or failure on their own terms. During the riotous “Guts Grown Up,” the entire bands yells “I left it all!” and they could not sound more excited to get drunk, sleep on ratty couches, engage in doomed sexual encounters, and in general do all the things that will probably inspire their more considerate, *mature *second LP. If they get there, they'll hopefully discard the bafflingly unflattering production that serves as their strongest current similarity to Promise Ring circa -30 Degrees Everywhere.
It’s not like anyone should expect a band this young and energetic to sound like they walked out of Daniel Lanois’ studio; but No Beer, *No Dad *doesn’t sound raw or lo-fi like it’s trying to accurately capture a young band’s live energy. The problem is more concrete: often times, you can barely hear the vocals at all. Wright too often struggles just to be heard, and these aren’t songs where the vocals are meant to function as texture. This becomes even more pronounced during *No Beer, No Dad’*s second half, where Blowout veers towards looser song structures that can sound like instrumentals with incidental studio chatter. It isn’t enough to negate the exceeding promise Blowout has right now, but maybe it's just a part of their “dance like no one’s watching” attitude: they’re going to express themselves right now, polish and nuance be damned. | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lauren | August 4, 2016 | 6.8 | 044fa412-a196-4fa8-8cd6-a09538f3f4ce | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Atlanta label home to Migos, Lil Yachty, and a squad of up-and-coming rappers showcases their year on top with a 30-song victory lap of minor-key flexers and foamy delights. | The Atlanta label home to Migos, Lil Yachty, and a squad of up-and-coming rappers showcases their year on top with a 30-song victory lap of minor-key flexers and foamy delights. | Various Artists: Quality Control: Control the Streets, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-quality-control-control-the-streets-vol-1/ | Quality Control: Control the Streets, Vol. 1 | Patience has finally paid off for Quality Control, the Atlanta label founded by Coach K, a long time rap mentor and manager to trap mavens Gucci Mane and Jeezy, and local hustler Pierre “Pee” Thomas, now the company’s chief executive. Led by Migos and Lil Yachty, the brand is stronger now than ever. There was a No. 1 single, a slew of brand partnerships, and a high-profile proposal consolidating rap power. After a year of hits and wins, the label was recently featured in The New York Times, and K was profiled in The New Yorker. The name Quality Control implies a focus on nurturing talent, and that developmental style has reaped dividends in 2017, with fans and analysts taking notice. “There’s some artists we could’ve signed if we were trying to get some right-now money, but we’re trying to build something for the long run,” Pee told The New York Times. The QC executives have chalked the burgeoning label’s success to a local-first, street-focused approach to roster-building and music making, even though they’re home to some of the most internet-friendly acts out. “If I’m being honest—and it might sound ignorant—I don’t own a computer. I’m really out here in it,” Pee said. K echoed the sentiment in his profile: “We did it in the hood, man.”
But the truth lies somewhere in-between: there is an organic, streets-first mentality to the infrastructure, but there’s also a memeability and virality to the label’s biggest stars, like Yachty breaking out on syncs from a viral comedy sketch or Migos getting an impromptu, word of mouth shout from Donald Glover live during a Golden Globes telecast, boosting their Spotify stats by 243%. (They must understand this, for the upcoming Migos video will parody a viral feud with the cast of the web series “Everyday Struggle.”) Quality Control scored huge in 2017, bridging the gap between trap ideology and traditional business mechanics, hood recruiting and economics, and viral marketing. Control the Streets, Vol. 1 takes stock of the Quality Control empire, particularly the Migos explosion, recapping the year that was and looking to establish future stars.
The message here is unmistakable: “The street that you walking on, we control it/Quality Control this shit,” Quavo raps on the intro before adding, “YRN, throwin’ up QC/We got trap stars and we on TV.” The evidence supports his claims. On “South Africa,” he raps, “Ice chain, QC keep on spinning,” presenting the project’s more general idea: Quality Control has arrived, they can’t stop and they won’t stop. If there was any questioning Migos’ value to QC, they establish themselves as the label’s flagship act on its compilation: a member of the trio appears on 22 of a possible 30 tracks and they mix them in with guests, individually and together, to create all kinds of unique pairings and match-ups. They each have have their strong individual showings—Offset on “Violation Freestyle,” Takeoff on “We the Ones,” and Quavo on “She For Keeps” with Nicki Minaj—but they got here as a unit, and that’s still how they best operate.
They luxuriate in their raps, enjoying their toys and taunting their skeptics, and when their verses stack neatly into each other, they’re particularly effective. “Bosses Don’t Speak” addresses lesser stunters while “Thick & Pretty” takes measurements of the models and strippers they surround themselves with. Both songs are filled with acrobatics and simple but effective one-liners like “My bitch so bad she walk around being mean.” Then there’s “Too Hotty,” which warps Eurielle’s “Carry Me” into a spooker. “Pull up in the Poltergeist/Hundred thousand on me, yikes!” Offset raps. Takeoff takes things big picture: “Migos but move like the mafia/Can’t see it, you need some binoculars.” The jump cutting and flipping would be dizzying if the ideas weren’t so easy to latch onto; nearly every phrase gets its own life, performed with such gusto that everything is constantly magnified. They ad-lib each other’s bars and cut in unexpectedly. Each sentence ends emphatically with an exclamation point. Even as they settle into a routine, honing their execution in the process, there is still a spontaneity to their songcraft. At every turn, one of the three is popping up and making their presence felt.
Migos owned 2017, but the most improved artist on QC has been Lil Yachty. Control the Streets, Vol. 1 is a much his showcase as anyone else’s. On the keyboard-flickering “Holiday” he likens randomly paying someone’s rent to gifting them an extra vacation, each full-throated exclamation inducing further celebration. “Movin’ Up,” a team-up with Ty Dolla $ign, adds an sweet, airy falsetto to Yachty’s bubblegum range. He’s right in his wheelhouse for the Young Thug duet “On Me,” which returns to playhouse synths and melodies; he’s clumsy where Thug is graceful, but that juxtaposition is the whole point. His writing still has room to improve, but it’s becoming far less grating as he continues to practice, and there are more memorable zingers like “If my diamonds had a voice it would sound like Fantasia” or “Flex so hard had to invest in fitness.”
Other Quality Control signees get their spotlight moments: Lil Baby gives a taste of his Too Hard mixtape on “Sides,” City Girls make a snappy first impression with the MajorNine-produced “Fuck Dat Nigga,” and Kollission’s “Space Cadet” lives up to its title. These exhibitions are scattered throughout the tracklist on Vol. 1, but never seem out of place among songs from the stars, in part because of consistently compelling beats. The production features many of the usual suspects working in trap circles—808 Mafia co-founder Southside, Murda Beatz, Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E., and Ricky Racks, especially—but it’s more of a showcase for in-house beatmaker Quay Global, frequent Yachty producers Digital Nas and EarlthePearll, Migos’ DJ Durel, and even Quavo. Some are wonky and others are straight boomers. Minor key flexers are offset by foamy delights, thanks in large part to Yachty and his crew. Highly technical arrays give way to rich, Auto-Tuned melodies. Everyone does their part. This is the compilation of a label with a clear vision and the personnel to execute. The Quality Control annual report is in, and the forecast looks bright. | 2017-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Quality Control | December 12, 2017 | 7.9 | 045af11e-176b-4229-a3b4-1b0374000e3f | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The singular experimentalist’s first official solo compilation traverses the universes that make up his discography, rejecting genre and attribution in an album-length argument for mongrel pop. | The singular experimentalist’s first official solo compilation traverses the universes that make up his discography, rejecting genre and attribution in an album-length argument for mongrel pop. | Dean Blunt: Roaches 2012-2019 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dean-blunt-roaches-2012-2019/ | Roaches 2012-2019 | Dean Blunt started the decade challenging small audiences and ended it collaborating with A$AP Rocky and Panda Bear. At the same time, he created a body of work as distinct as it is varied, inventing a niche somewhere between post-punk provocation and dub experiment. As a semi-public figure, Blunt is restless and acerbic, willing to change allegiances at the drop of a hat and pull stunts that are simultaneously thrilling and idiotic. He sent an impostor to collect his NME Award, sold a weed-filled toy car on eBay, and released unlistenable noise as Babyfather. His propensity for gags can make it easy to dismiss the rigorous craftsmanship of his work. Yet Blunt sculpts infinite soundscapes littered with indecipherable messages; his songs are simultaneously archives of past genres and transmissions from the future. This ecumenical approach and DIY prankster spirit animates his latest release, Roaches 2012-2019, a collection of solo and collaborative pieces from the past decade. Blunt’s first official solo compilation rejects genre and attribution in favor of nuance and theme in an album-length argument for mongrel pop.
The YouTube one-offs and previously unreleased tracks collected here traverse the universes that make up Dean Blunt’s discography. Unlike fan-made compilations or those Blunt has leaked via WeTransfer, this compilation, released through his World Music label, serves as an official archive and survey of the work he’s made in the past seven years. Album opener “Felony” and the bristling “Acts of Faith” take their cues from the cinematic string and beat structure of solo releases like 2014’s Black Metal and 2013’s The Redeemer. The smoldering duet “Neva,” which pairs Blunt with singer Poison Anna, recalls Blunt and Inga Copeland’s broken ballad “The Narcissist.” The tragic street narrative and thudding goth-rock sample in “Trident 2” wouldn’t sound out of place on Babyfather’s 2016 album BBF Hosted by DJ Escrow. The numbered “Benidorm” tracks are short, experimental sound samples that bring to mind the interstitials on 2012’s Black Is Beautiful, while the “Nitro Girls” songs with Joanne Robertson mimic the stripped-back acoustics of the pair’s recent collaborations. Taken together, they form a miniature history of Blunt’s development, a survey of the many ad-hoc genres he’s created over time.
Steeped in post-punk and reggae, Blunt uses both genres to convey his particular desperation. “Prayer 2015” is post-punk taken back to its reggae roots; Blunt creates a dub version of Shellac’s “Prayer to God” by muting Steve Albini’s vocals and keeping the propulsive rhythm section of the original song. Adapting the technique of a Jamaican dub producer like Big Joe, he strips the song to its essentials, using the remaining foundation as a backdrop against which to modulate and delay his voice. Limited by his vocal range and distorted by reverb, lines like, “Here is my prayer to the one true God” gain added urgency as they fall in time with the militaristic march of the drums. In his monotone ad-libs, Blunt acknowledges the song’s debts to previous genres: “Here is my prayer… Jah!”
When a speaker on “Sicko freestyle” says, “We made a culture, niggas,” it could be the manifesto for Blunt’s approach: If black music underlies all pop music, then is any part of pop off-limits to the black artist? If all cultural gradations are artificial, then why maintain any separation? It’s this sense of possibility that frees Blunt to fragment Prefab Sprout’s “Cue Fanfare” into the mumbled “Lit freestyle,” which sounds as though it were taken from the same Babyfather recording session that produced “Skywalker Freestyle” out of Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights.”
Blunt’s fascination with reimagining the past has been present since the start. You can hear it on “The Throning,” a 2010 single by Hype Williams (a group then composed of Blunt and Copeland). It starts out as a vaporwave cover of Sade’s “The Sweetest Taboo,” then morphs into hazy techno reminiscent of Carl Craig’s More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art in its final 30 seconds; it’s both pop parody and pop devotional. Depending on your viewpoint, Blunt is a charlatan or a perpetually dissatisfied perfectionist. Roaches offers a map of the roads he’s taken and a peek at those he didn’t: On “N Then She Said I Need to Tell U Somethin N Dont Hate Me for It...,” a seven-minute dirge filled with MIDI harmonica, we get a glimpse of Dean Blunt the prog-rock frontman. Steeped in personal and musical history, the collection is as conflicted as its creator. It’s simultaneously political and apolitical, conscious yet contemptuous of race, focused and impatient. Roaches 2012-2019’s series of artifacts contains Blunt’s vision for the future. | 2020-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | World Music | May 2, 2020 | 7.8 | 045c5f02-a8a5-4981-ac07-2697e26cb69a | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
Nicolas Jaar's tight, three-song EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, is at once sexy and frigid, cavernous and cramped. | Nicolas Jaar's tight, three-song EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, is at once sexy and frigid, cavernous and cramped. | Darkside: Darkside EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16116-darkside-ep/ | Darkside EP | Nicolas Jaar creates slow, strange, cloistered songs with keyboards and field recordings, breath, and drums. He makes synthesizers feel like natural elements, mingled with running waters, murmuring voices, and sighing winds. Jaar called his breakthrough record Space Is Only Noise, expanded on a key track to "Space Is Only Noise if You Can See". Titles are often red herrings, but this is the rare case where we might pause and come to understand something essential about Jaar's perspective. No one has found a good box for him yet, likely because he doesn't make a kind of music, but a way of music. (In purely diagnostic terms, our own Mike Powell's "downtempo minimalism" is the best shorthand I've read, though it wisely doesn't even venture to address the music's sense.) Jaar's new EP as Darkside, a collaboration with guitarist and bassist Dave Harrington, clarifies things further, but we've got to unpack a little before we come to it.
Listen again: Space is only noise if you can see. The nouns and verbs are flashier, but the devil's in the adverbs and conjunctions. I kind of hate that rogue "only," that innocent-faced little "if." Does it mean that if you can see, you discover space is merely noise? Or that space becomes noise only upon being seen? And what the hell would either of those things mean? Jaar doesn't make it that easy for us. His assertive yet ambiguous phrasing has no solvable outcome, so it sticks in your mind-- or rather, your mind sticks up against it. And this may be the key to how Jaar's music works too. He applies a chilly, commanding logic to disassociated quantities until they fall into a restive equilibrium. He creates biospheres and then adds one extra, destabilizing element, or leaves out something crucial. His songs pose enigmatic questions disguised as bold assertions. Meaning leaks out of the substance to pool in the cracks, and things that shouldn't relate, do.
That Jaar is more about means than ends explains why he's able to transition so seamlessly from dreamy electronic music inflected with impressionist piano, gently digitized French singing, lobby-jazz, and cave sounds to the terse, rugged dub-funk of Darkside, all while still sounding totally Jaar: nocturnal, cerebral, sensuous, paradoxical, and intuitive. (And sounding totally Jaar is a remarkable thing for a young producer with one major album under his belt to be able to do in any case.) The tight, three-song EP, released on Jaar's own Clown and Sunset label, is at once sexy and frigid, cavernous and cramped. Much closer to idiomatic pop than Space, with Harrington's falsetto clenching Jaar's own loose, Matthew Dear-like croak, the EP brings Jaar's highly personalized values to the quality of time, rather than space: because what is funk, if not the creative, slantwise division of metrical time? As Harrington holds down long, deep, calmly needling grooves, Jaar colors the atmosphere around them to give them different senses of brave momentum or back-winding reticence, earthbound heft or atmospheric suspension. On "A1", he sets glimmering whorls below the loping guitar and a cushion of static above, holding them in check until the very end, when they burst forth in a high-desert mirage that carries over into the Morricone-tipping "A2". It's icy-hot stuff. The importance of Harrington's ace fretwork can't be overstated, but the frosty austerity could only be a product of the curious mind of Jaar. | 2011-12-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-12-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Clown & Sunset | December 9, 2011 | 8 | 045cb2ad-1b30-4174-bb39-90f90dd82d13 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Danish band takes fairly normal indie reference points-- Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine-- and turns them into lavish, stratospheric, fairy-tale prog. | Danish band takes fairly normal indie reference points-- Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine-- and turns them into lavish, stratospheric, fairy-tale prog. | Mew: And the Glass-Handed Kites | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9285-and-the-glass-handed-kites/ | And the Glass-Handed Kites | This rock band, Mew: They might not be “cool.” I mean, they’re Danish, and they’re pretty, and they wear natty blazers and scarves, and they play great music, all of which is pretty cool. But if you see them perform, there will come a point when Bo Madsen is playing metal-style power chords, while the long-haired 1970s-prog keyboard player unleashes his “epic” wash settings, and singer Jonas Bjerre soars up into his sappiest, most atmospheric register, and you’ll notice that they’re good with hair gel and look like soap stars, and it’ll all come clear. These guys are not “cool”-- these guys are like Queensryche. Queensryche meets Sigur Rós, but still.
And maybe that’s the pinnacle of style in Denmark (what do I know), but over here it’s uncool, and that uncoolness is part of what makes And the Glass-Handed Kites, now released in the U.S., one of the better rock records of the year. The band’s reference points are normal enough in the indie world-- Radiohead, My Bloody Valentine-- but the ambitions they draw out of them are not: These are some of the only guys around who still believe in hard-rock Valhalla, the kind of lavish, stratospheric, fairy-tale prog that’s less about making aging boys geek out and more about making young girls swoon. Who else does this-- would Stars ever rock out like this? Even a grandiose pop band like Coldplay wants to act down-to-earth, and here are these guys with their dreamy thunderstorm pop.
The payoff, of course, is that they really are nearly as magnificent as they’re hoping to be. For one thing, they’re not actually throwbacks, and their rock is cutting-edge elegant: Madsen’s rhythm guitar scratches through odd chord voicings like Radiohead, his lead lines match the dreamy buzz of any shoegazer act, and the keyboard and piano lead both through epic builds and breakdowns with only the slightest winks at “cheesy”; on first listen, they sound more like a better-funded Swirlies than a laser-light show. These grand songs-- the whole record is technically one continuous piece, but whatever-- are complicated in a way that’s theirs: Bjerre’s doe-eyed vocal melodies come in strange, lilting figures, and the band switches through tricky half-measures, endless changeups, and sly, slick rhythms to wrap around them.
This stuff might even be considered “difficult,” if it didn’t always come back to the starry-eyed soaring. Like “The Zookeeper’s Boy”, which acts like it might be a great knotty rock song for approximately 30 muscular seconds. Then the keyboards start sparkling, and then Bjerre teases you with the most unapologetically glorious chorus here-- a heart-clutching, soaring-through-clouds, upper-register plaint: “Are you/ My lady, are you.” All 53 minutes are packed full of ideas like that, often to the point of over-egging things: oceanic dream-pop on “Chinaberry Tree”, interstellar hard rock on “Apocalypso” (seriously: how prog is that?), or geologically huge melodies on “Saviours of Jazz Ballet” (which sounds like Yes album covers look). They have song titles like “The Seething Rain Weeps for You” and lyrics about girls with “meringue-colored hair.”
It’s a terrific accomplishment, and it’s tempting to imagine one reason why-- that these guys are playing not out of fashion, but out of pure belief. What’s stranger is to imagine how this fashion-bucking record could pull fans from so many different classes of listener: arty cloud-buster for Coldplay fans, sensitive hard-rock opus for Guitar Center techies and Dream Theater devotees, a masterpiece for people who haven’t smoked weed yet but are thinking about it, Bambi-faced European dreamers to match the unicorn poster on the wall. For our readers-- at a time when indie rock is enamored of scratchy post-punk minimalism, and even a grand-ambition pop act like Bloc Party pretends to be bristly-- this could be the escape of the year, a curve off into the lush, ambitious stargazing that used to happen all the time. No matter which direction listeners come from on this one, they’ll find the same thing: If you’re up for that fairy-tale rock glory, these guys have it down. | 2006-08-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-08-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony | August 8, 2006 | 8.4 | 04636f6b-03c5-4315-98f6-be07e4c23f3e | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Being a teenager is all about testing out different personalities to figure out who you really are. This kind of personality development, for better or worse, defines Sunflower Bean’s full-length debut, Human Ceremony. | Being a teenager is all about testing out different personalities to figure out who you really are. This kind of personality development, for better or worse, defines Sunflower Bean’s full-length debut, Human Ceremony. | Sunflower Bean: Human Ceremony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21471-human-ceremony/ | Human Ceremony | Being a teenager is all about testing out different personalities to figure out who you really are. This kind of development is all over Sunflower Bean’s full-length debut, Human Ceremony. It's most evident in the frenetic variety of the album, as the Brooklyn trio—singer/bassist Julia Cumming, singer/guitarist Nick Kivlen, and drummer Jacob Faber, all in their teens when they recorded it—try on genres throughout 11 tracks.
There are bits of psych, moments of metal, and lots of guitar sounds from an era when major labels threw lots of money at alternative rock. The Cure, Lush, Sonic Youth, and even the Sundays are somewhere in their record collection. And you can practically hear the practice space discussion of the band composing the songs: "Okay, we'll do the Pumpkins part eight times and then go into the Sabbath part."
But even if they're doing things that have been done before, it sounds like they're discovering these things for the first time, and that excitement is palpable on Human Ceremony. Sure, the excitement occasionally results in childlike naiveté, but that's also part of the fun. A seasoned songwriter would probably be too self-conscious to title a song "Space Exploration Disaster," and if Sunflower Bean had somebody with a heavier hand advising them, we might not be treated to such a decodable album cover. (Is that a Frida Kahlo button near the Dalí melting clock? What do the 12 clocks even mean? Kivlen's look is totally Bringing It All Back Home Dylan!)
The band’s diverse influences sound best when Kivlen's voice serves as a darker echo of Cumming’s angelic optimism, especially in a call and response. But the band's hodgepodge approach doesn't always work. Kivlen occasionally feels out of place adding a second vocal to some of the songs, especially when he's delivering clunky quasi-mystical lyrics like "in your right hand is the magic potion/ You can drink the elixir now/ Don't forget the notion" on the title track. The band especially fall flat when they try to do both dreamy and nightmarish within the same song. It just sounds silly when after a few minutes of prettiness during "Creation Myth" they delve into one of those aforementioned Sabbath bits. Sunflower Bean rock out and they can also be trusted to handle more fragile material, but it's best to keep these traits separate from song to song. The band may find their identity by mixing these contrasting elements, which, it must be said, is the reason that being a teenager is so interesting. It's the time in your life when mixing it up like this can actually work. | 2016-01-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-29T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | January 29, 2016 | 6.9 | 0463fead-cdaa-49d5-839e-36ab4a26cd22 | Pat Healy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pat-healy/ | null |
The former Fifth Harmony member’s debut solo album is largely successful at capturing her charismatic flair. Anchored by the wonderful “Havana,” it shines especially when it's light and breezy. | The former Fifth Harmony member’s debut solo album is largely successful at capturing her charismatic flair. Anchored by the wonderful “Havana,” it shines especially when it's light and breezy. | Camila Cabello: Camila | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camila-cabello-camila/ | Camila | When an enterprising member of a pop group dares to dream about solo success, they have to reintroduce themselves to the world. If they have the vision, chops, and nerve to survive beyond their hit-making machine, they can blaze a new trail for themselves on their own terms; if they come up short, they’re relegated to history’s dustbin. Camila Cabello’s sultry, salsa-inflected “Havana” is a keystone for a superstar origin story: Striking out on her own after a bitter split with her bandmates in Fifth Harmony, Cabello realized her creative ambitions with a smash that celebrated her Cuban heritage and helped define a year in which Latin music was ascendant.
Of course, pop careers rarely come into being with that kind of elegance, and Cabello’s own rise to the top of the charts was a little more complicated. “Havana” began its run as a humble summer promotional single, one lacking the support of label execs and radio personnel alike. It was tossed onto streaming services a few months after her first attempt at a grand debut, “Crying in the Club,” fizzled out just inside the Top 50. And “Crying in the Club” failed to meet expectations because it sounded like Cabello was tracking, note-for-note, a demo pulled from between Sia’s couch cushions. It lacked the qualities that gush out of “Havana” like steam: history, personality, charisma. The tension between Cabello’s two potential futures—a spot in pop’s upper echelon or a decade spent churning out anonymous EDM collaborations and thankless soundtrack work—is what animates Camila, her debut solo album.
Cabello’s flair for the dramatic has always been her greatest strength. It was never difficult to pick her out within Fifth Harmony and when given the chance, she chewed scenery like an overeager character actor. (Listen to her rip through the bridge of weightless trop-house ditty “Write on Me.”) Her performances on the duets that first flagged her as a breakout candidate—the Shawn Mendes sleeper “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and Machine Gun Kelly’s soggy “Bad Things”—verge on histrionic, and that isn’t a bad thing; the emotional intensity of her singing makes up for the volume and density her voice lacks.
Camila shines when it’s light and breezy, giving Cabello the space she needs to cook. “All These Years” and “Real Friends” are gentle and largely acoustic with a hint of Jai Paul’s liquid zip, and Cabello sings with real delicacy about lost love and loneliness. (The fluttering vocal runs she unspools midway through “All These Years” are stunning.) “She Loves Control” is an apt mission statement for a star who soured on girl group life because she couldn’t “explore [her] individuality,” and it shows Cabello can navigate a reggaeton rhythm with the same ease that characterized “Havana.” She effortlessly toggles between English and Spanish on the sun-kissed, steel drum-flecked “Inside Out.” It’s on these songs that Camila makes its strongest argument for Cabello as a unique force, one who can churn out pop hybrids that perfectly suit a shifting pop climate and a changing country.
When the album falters, it’s because it loses sight of this compelling identity. She growls and hiccups her way through new single “Never Be the Same,” but its reliance on a love-drug conceit suggests a novice writer who has room to expand her range. (Cabello worked with a production team led by veteran Frank Dukes, but her writing credit on every song suggests a fertile Notes app.) The overwrought one-two punch of “Consequences”—which sounds a little like her attempt at something like Rihanna’s “Stay”—and “Something’s Gotta Give” slow the album to a crawl. And when Camila interfaces with trends in the larger world of pop, the results are varied. The frothy, flirty “Into It” finds a delightful sweet spot within a Lorde-Carly Rae Jepsen-Ariana Grande Venn diagram, but “In the Dark” is the kind of generic trap-pop you’d expect from any number of B- and C-grade stars. It’s a Bebe Rexha deep cut.
None of these songs are abject failures; a half-decade in a group like Fifth Harmony is an extended pop boot camp, one that can’t help but equip you with basic proficiency. If they’re frustrating, it’s because they’re juxtaposed with tantalizing glimpses of a next-generation star, the kind of artist with the presence and charm to carry pop forward into a new decade. Perhaps that’s the greatest compliment you can pay Camila: It throws off enough sparks to justify expecting more. | 2018-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic / Syco | January 17, 2018 | 6.8 | 0464adc1-4ce2-4c10-a18b-c48a727fe7e7 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Young UK band influenced by modern R&B lands on the scene with a terrific debut, filled with seductive songs set to spare but effective arrangements. | Young UK band influenced by modern R&B lands on the scene with a terrific debut, filled with seductive songs set to spare but effective arrangements. | The xx: xx | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13400-xx/ | xx | The xx are four 20-year-olds from South London who make predominantly slow, furtive pop music, mostly about sex. They are also one of the stranger recipients of UK hype in recent memory. They have no calling-card song; members of the Pitchfork staff have ID'd no fewer than four songs ("Basic Space", "Crystalised", "Islands", "Infinity") as "the one." They are not fashion plates, nor likely to be. Their list of influences is potent but imperfect: Young Marble Giants (too shaggy and heavy-lidded); Japan (too robust and theatric); Glass Candy (too quick and glammy). Without one gimmick song they'll never be able to reproduce, without an alternate agenda, without a set-in-stone hip influence, the xx start to sound like a real actual band, even if, after dozens of listens, it's nearly incomprehensible to think that a group so fresh-faced produced xx.
Strongly influenced by modern R&B-- the group made hay with an early cover of Womack & Womack's "Teardrops", while UK copies of xx come packed with their version of Aaliyah's "Hot Like Fire"-- the xx use a drum machine to complement their copiously tidy compositions. Unlike contemporary R&B fetishists Hot Chip or Discovery, who have clearly spent long hours internalizing Timbaland, the Neptunes, and other radio cognoscenti, the xx incorporate more abstract elements of the genre: a liberal use of bass tones and an unwavering focus on sex and interpersonal relationships.
Singer-guitarist Romy Madley Croft in particular seems all but incapable of uttering a line that isn't a come-on, a post-coital musing, or a longing apology for a lack of one of the former. During "Islands" or "Basic Space", her voice takes on a pleasant soft-pop vibe, like Stevie Nicks'. When Madley Croft sings, during "Shelter", "Maybe I had said/ Something that was wrong/ Can I make it better/ With the lights turned on," it's unclear whether lights-turned-on activity is sex or... something besides sex. She's not some purring kitten, though, merely reflective about a subject we don't often associate with teenagers and self-awareness.
Croft's sparring partner, bassist Oliver Sim, usually fills in the other spaces via either his responsive vocals or ever-present bass. (His best trick: momentarily interrupting the divine verses of "Islands" with four short thumbings). Sim's voice, papery and affectless, is a sticking point for some, but pop music has plenty of room for ugly male voices, especially those with such pleasant friends. Importantly, both Croft and Sim seem like they're singing not because they have the best voices but because they have the most to say (and, purely speculatively, possibly to one another), something that would align them with an indie rock tradition as long as the genre is old, (and folk and blues long before that).
Their voices provide plenty of friction, however, in the context of the xx's slight, expert compositions. Working without a live drummer, the xx manipulate airy, lingering negative space as well as any band going. Initially hospital-tile sterile, xx rewards volume and repetition like few other albums this year. Nudge the knob clockwise to hear sparse guitars decay, bass notes wobble. Amid these delicate environs, Croft and Sim can seem like they're working on different agendas, but the cagey back-and-forth on "Basic Space" is exquisitely timed, and the lovers' mumbles of "Heart Skipped a Beat", over a clacking drum machine, acquire their own weird logic. Jamie Smith (he of the "Basic Space" remix) and Baria Qureshi are responsible for most of the drums/loops/keyboards (and some of the guitars), and they're adept at knowing when to jump in, picking up "Stars" just as Sim seems to get bored with it, spicing "VCR", the band's quaintest, simplest pop song ("You/ You just know/ You just do"), with small xylophone melodies.
That all said, the record is not a complete break with recent sounds: tune in during certain moments of "Crystalised", and you'll hear the flecked, staccato guitars of Interpol. "Infinity"'s slow-strummed electric chords feel like late-period Radiohead. But xx is nervy and self-contained, the product of a new band thinking a lot harder about topics-- sex, composition, volume-- than we are accustomed to new bands thinking. It is so fully formed and thoughtful that it feels like three or four lesser, noisier records should have preceded it. The xx didn't need a gestation period, though xx is nuanced, quiet, and surprising enough that you might. | 2009-08-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Young Turks | August 28, 2009 | 8.7 | 04658331-92dd-4ff0-9421-a890efd95b31 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Considering Sunn O))) and dark Norwegian post-metal experimentalists Ulver's résumés, the relatively bright sounds, open-ended structures, and medium volume of Terrestrials might come as a surprise. | Considering Sunn O))) and dark Norwegian post-metal experimentalists Ulver's résumés, the relatively bright sounds, open-ended structures, and medium volume of Terrestrials might come as a surprise. | Sunn O))) / Ulver: Terrestrials | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18861-sunn-o-ulver-terrestrials/ | Terrestrials | Despite the heavy-metal solemnity that the names and the pasts of Sunn O))) and Ulver might suggest, their three-track collaboration Terrestrials actually started as a celebration. In 2008, Sunn O))) played its 200th set in a park in Oslo, Norway, to a few thousand ear-burned listeners at the Øya festival. For the auspicious occasion, the band expanded into a transcontinental quintet, with the core of bassist Greg Anderson, guitarist Stephen O’Malley, ritualistic showman Attila Csihar, and an accompanying militia of amplifiers abutted by two guests, Norwegian electronics aggressor Lasse Marhaug and British multi-instrumentalist Daniel O’ Sullivan. “This is Sunn O)))’s 200th concert!” exclaimed their stage plot for the big night in one of metal’s motherlands. “We are very, very happy to be playing it in Norway! Thank you! Hail to Norway!”
To consecrate the event, two days later Ulver invited Anderson and O’Malley to Crystal Canyon, their longtime Oslo studio, to stay up late and improvise until the sun rose—two supposed pillars of darkness, creating a collective morning love song. The pairing made sense: Sunn O))) and Ulver have emerged sporadically but surely as “searching musicians,” the phrase that Robert Levin coined to describe John Coltrane’s essential artistic unrest in 1957. (O'Sullivan, Rygg, and O'Malley also play in the highly collaborative art-metal ensemble Aethenor.) Sure, Sunn O))) earned their initial cachet by dressing in robes and playing long, loud riffs through a macabre veil of fog. But their records are deeply experimental odysseys where choirs, orchestras, and harsh-noise masters enrich their typical amplifier worship. And during the last two decades, Ulver have moved from a black metal powerhouse into an outfit that have used electronica and theatrics to forge their own cutting edge. To wit, O’Sullivan, who joined these sessions after supporting Sunn O))) at Øya, has since become Ulver’s fourth member. His other projects include Grumbling Fur and Guapo, associations that reinforce Ulver’s beyond-metal charge.
Despite those résumés, the relatively bright sounds, open-ended structures and medium volume of the pleasant Terrestrials might still come as a surprise. After that initial session, O’Malley and Ulver frontman Kristoffer Rygg finessed the recordings, editing and assembling the jams into three sympathetic pieces, aided by strings and trumpet. The results step far afield of Sunn O)))’s generally infinite desolation and pull Ulver’s own stylistic wandering toward a center of static gravity.
The opener takes the name “Let There Be Light”, a de facto mantra for the tune and overall effort. These first 11 minutes, for instance, cycle through a dense bed of guitar sustains, trumpet curlicues, and violin trills until a drum roll introduces a marching-band-sized fanfare. With its plunging bass and vaulting melodies, the moment suggests the sun pictured on the album’s cover, at last climbing from the blanketing dark. On “Western Horn”, the shortest and most essential piece here, the ensemble builds patiently, with sinister guitars and torpid tones accreting during the first several minutes. But there’s a luminous undercurrent to this unlikely rendezvous of Miles Davis’ electric jazz surrealism and Sunn O)))’s fathom-deep drones. O’Sullivan’s coruscant keyboards and a trumpet extend vivid lines from beneath the din. It’s like staring into darkness so long that you imagine new flickers of light, a mirage of impending triumph. The 14-minute closer “Eternal Return” fully indulges this radiance, with soporific vibraphone loosely marking the meters through distended lines of guitar and violin. Think Earth 2.0, allowing Dylan Carlson’s guitar leads to bleed outside the pocket. At the midpoint, an organ introduces a repetitive piano-and-synthesizer figure. It’s practically danceable. Kristoffer Rygg falls into this rhythm, delivering a poem of mixed mythologies (Hades collides with the Wilderness of Sin, and so on) in his melodramatic croon. It’s offered as a culmination.
Sunn O))) and Ulver have collaborated before for “CUTWOODeD”, an obscure, abstruse track appended to a version of White1 issued through a very limited box set several years after the original’s release. That sidelong span was darker and more menacing than anything on Terrestrials, with death-of-machines wheezes and layered, low-lying drones tracing a bleak landscape. But in retrospect, that decade-old collaboration shares the same aversion to momentum—rising, falling, climaxing, moving toward much of anything—that handicaps Terrestrials. On “CUTWOODed”, only a distant electronic thud urged the listener onward, a beacon providing a semblance of forward motion.
These three tracks are much more sculpted and finessed than that very deep cut, but the same feeling of lingering and waiting presides. These are introductions to something that never really arrives. When Rygg’s stentorian voices vanishes during “Eternal Return”, the music limps into the void for another four minutes, an anti-climax that gives even the biggest moment here the elliptical feeling of a preamble. Despite some rather majestic sheets of sound and many moments of instrumental interplay that suggest giants from Ennio Morricone to Philip Glass and from Jon Hassell to the Necks, Terrestrials is a slight musical drift, a soundtrack unattached to a significant story.
Ultimately, Terrestrials works as a likable listen, a liminal play concerning the push and pull between dusk and dawn. But it serves as a mere footnote or, at beast, an appealing redundancy for Sunn O))) and Ulver, two acts whose power has long stemmed from their willingness and ability to push past the parameters of genre. Together, they redouble one another’s outsider inclinations, but they push until they become all but unmoored to the thrall endemic to their best work. After the sun rises on these meditations, then, you can simply go about your daily routine, somewhat elevated but mostly unaltered. | 2014-02-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-02-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental / Metal | Southern Lord | February 5, 2014 | 6.9 | 0466b0e9-1d20-4dca-b678-b8ee35061e62 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
With whispery beats and spectral vocals, erstwhile dubstep DJ Jon Gooch seeks a quieter, more intimate sound. | With whispery beats and spectral vocals, erstwhile dubstep DJ Jon Gooch seeks a quieter, more intimate sound. | seventh stitch: murmuring chasms of nostalgia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seventh-stitch-murmuring-chasms-of-nostalgia/ | murmuring chasms of nostalgia | Listening to the shadowy, crepuscular compositions on Jon Gooch’s murmuring chasms of nostalgia, it’s hard to fathom this is the same guy behind a screeching dance hit called “I Do Coke.” After developing a reputation for brain-splattering drum’n’bass under the moniker Spor, the British producer migrated to the realm of commercial EDM in the late 2000s as Feed Me, releasing big, garish dubstep through deadmau5’s mau5trap label and remixing AWOLNATION and Gorillaz. But nonstop raging takes an emotional toll, so Gooch came up with a project that’d serve as a personal diary: “Music is always a release for me but with seventh stitch it’s a world I can breathe in,” he said in January.
Teased for years, the resulting EP by seventh stitch attempts to reveal a sensitive, ruminative side of Gooch. More consciously tasteful than his bass-wobbling bangers, it’s a collection of eerie downtempo songs with wispy titles that gesture to what’s hidden in the recesses of memory: “the last day you stayed” and “the sound of tennis shoes on concrete.” One reference is the phantom rave-pop of Everything But the Girl, with their yearning, world-wearied vocals and sputtering beats; another is the crackly, greyscale ruminations of Burial. Opener “who are you waiting for” is like a tormented, after-hours sprint through barren streets, cold wind blowing you into a dark unknown.
Though ostensibly a more intimate project, murmuring chasms of nostalgia can still feel impersonal; the billowing light-up synths at the end of “tin pear” conjure a generic sense of alienation, the reeling thoughts of a drunk person in a festival crowd who still feels alone. Sometimes Gooch tries to shortcut to depth, like on the closer, where a muffled voicemail from an unknown woman plays over muted piano and whispery beats for a full minute. This scrapbook approach has been deployed to the point of cliché in popular music; here, as in many instances, the sampled material lacks the specificity or context to seem significant.
But midpoint highlight “idle thumbs” disrupts the EP’s moody haze, snapping you awake with bright, chiming tones and a syncopated rhythm. The most interesting parts of murmuring chasms of nostalgia are its spooky and tactile details, as in the case of “the red book,” where hospital monitor beeps, mechanized whirring, and serpentine wails evoke a subterranean lab experiment gone awry; on “hearts beat for,” insect flutters meet trickling liquid that sounds disturbingly like snot. While the EP is not without moments of triteness, it still occasionally manages to be spectral and enveloping. | 2023-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Nofanfare | August 10, 2023 | 6.4 | 0466cfe3-ee5c-4eae-8b47-97f894d7a188 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
The Italian synthesizer composer explores new dimensions of her algorithmic, arpeggiated sound, playing with tempo, duration, and pacing to toy with listeners’ sense of perception. | The Italian synthesizer composer explores new dimensions of her algorithmic, arpeggiated sound, playing with tempo, duration, and pacing to toy with listeners’ sense of perception. | Caterina Barbieri: Ecstatic Computation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caterina-barbieri-ecstatic-computation/ | Ecstatic Computation | Caterina Barbieri uses music to bend time and space around her. The Italian-born, Berlin-based electronic composer’s 2017 breakthrough, Patterns of Consciousness, utilized whirling synth oscillations over marathon run times to create something akin to a dreamachine for the ears. Like the device conceived by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs to create hallucinatory visuals with alpha-wave-inducing flickers of light, Barbieri’s cumulatively building patterns made each track a mind-altering journey. She didn’t so much reach mesmerizing climaxes as induce them right in the listener’s brain. Last year’s Born Again in the Voltage scrambled her musical timeline even further: Functioning as a single, fluid piece, the album sounded like an evolution, but it had actually been recorded in 2014. With Ecstatic Computation, Barbieri’s proper follow-up and debut for Editions Mego, she has folded her sonic universe in on itself once again, delivering a series of tracks that break new ground individually while flowing seamlessly as a whole.
Barbieri opens Ecstatic Computation with its longest and most definitive statement, the 10-minute “Fantas.” Though that might be shorter than her earliest tracks, it condenses an arc worthy of an entire album. She’s grown so skilled at programming hypnotic webs of sound that listeners are already put under by the halfway point, but Barbieri doesn’t stop there. After building the tense melodic progression to its logical peak, the track softens and stretches but never stops gaining momentum. It’s a warp-speed jump where everything seems to move slower and faster all at once. The brilliance of “Fantas” is hearing her use that sensory state not as an end, but a foundation to build even further. After Barbieri weaves the central theme back in near the end, it feels as if she could take us anywhere. Instead she shatters everything, distorting the sequence into a crashing electrical storm that’s all the more bracing for how methodically she’s set it up. It’s a breathtaking moment, one that cements her mastery of entrancing listeners by virtue of how dramatically she takes it away.
From there, the previously rigid structures of Barbieri’s music melt away like never before. “Fantas” is followed by “Spine of Desire”, an effervescent 94-second rush of endlessly climbing Shepard tones. The shortest piece of music she’s ever released, “Spine” builds a bridge towards club music, bringing to mind the pointillistic trance of fellow Milanese producer Lorenzo Senni. On “Arrow of Time” Barbieri moves into a more classical mode, methodically spacing an 18th-century harpsichord around operatic vocals from singers Annie Gårlid and Evelyn Saylor. The two recently appeared among many voices on Holly Herndon’s album PROTO, where they play a crucial role during one of the “live training” pieces, teaching an A.I. collaborator how to sing. Though Barbieri has used vocals in her music before, Gårlid and Saylor’s gorgeous passages provide an exciting counterpoint to the algorithmic structure of her music: a newly introduced element of the divine in her expanding universe.
For every track where Barbieri pushes her sound in new directions, there are others where she simply refines it. Tracks like “Closest Approach to Your Orbit” and “Pinnacles of You” deliver waves of euphoria-inducing synths similar to Patterns of Consciousness highlights like “Scratches in the Readable Surface.” But while Patterns’ sprawling journey was anchored by an emotional return-to-Earth moment in its profound final track, “Gravity That Binds,” the closing “Bow of Perception” avoids catharsis by design. Barbieri builds a spacious atmosphere before delivering a final fakeout: The track unexpectedly speeds into a dizzying new form and abruptly cuts out. If the thrill of her work has always been in its meticulously charted journeys and perfect landings, Ecstatic Computation ends with Barbieri shooting off the map completely, the transmission breaking apart like an out-of-range radio signal. The destination feels completely unknown from here, but rest assured, she knows where she’s going. | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Editions Mego | May 23, 2019 | 7.8 | 046c7c0d-408d-450b-8cfd-cb82d14537ad | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Daedalus, the most famous inventor in ancient Greece, is probably best known for fathering a dipshit. Daedalus' son Icarus reckoned ... | Daedalus, the most famous inventor in ancient Greece, is probably best known for fathering a dipshit. Daedalus' son Icarus reckoned ... | Daedelus: Invention | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2129-invention/ | Invention | Daedalus, the most famous inventor in ancient Greece, is probably best known for fathering a dipshit. Daedalus' son Icarus reckoned himself such a player when he decided that flying higher than anywhere else on flimsy wings held together with wax (the Scotch tape of ancient Greece) was a good thing. Icarus was killed when he plummeted into the sea after the heat of the Aegean sun melted away the wax on his wings. It wasn't for another two thousand years or so that Leonardo Da Vinci thought about winged flight-- Icarus' stupidity put everyone but the Renaissance genius off the idea of becoming birdy.
Daedalus, though, was a shrewd man. He constructed one or two questionable things, and chief amongst them was a cow. Yes, Daedalus fulfilled a request from King Minos' wife Pasiphae to make her a cow costume so that she could fuck a bull that the sea god Poseidon had sent for Minos to sacrifice in order to confirm his right to rule over Crete. I suppose he looked at the project as more of an engineering challenge than as some kinky request from a sovereign's wife who could have him decapitated if he didn't comply. Despite his successful completion of the task and Pasiphae's successful impregnation by Poseidon's bull, Daedalus still ended up in the chokey. I guess Minos wasn't too pleased when his wife gave birth to the half-human, half-bull chimera, the Minotaur. But before throwing him in the clink, Minos did order Daedalus to construct the labyrinth in which Minos imprisoned the Minotaur. All in all, a pretty remarkable figure, this Daedalus bloke.
As you'd expect, anyone adopting Daedalus' name (albeit with a tiny alteration in spelling) takes on a slew of pre-conceived notions. Fortunately, the gorgeous and nigh-on-unique Invention is more than worthy of assuming the name of its ancient Greek forbearer. Daedelus takes downtempo IDM and adds the naivety of childhood and the poignancy of Tin Pan Alley ballad arrangements. Just as Dntel's Life Is Full of Possibilities charmed me out of my IDM ennui last year, so too has Invention.
Daedelus' combination of Mush-style beats with the dew-eyed nostalgia of 1940s and 1950s string arrangements may seem awkward on paper, but nowhere does the combination of avant electronics and strings jar or sound forced. Daedelus has realized what the downtempo elite Broadway Project and Bonobo have known for a while now: contrast need not disturb. Throughout Invention, I'm amazed at how complementary the opposites sound. During "Playing Parties," a low frequency sawtooth sound emerges from the skirts of a stately, stomping concert grand piano into a glitched-up clockwork world of nursery toys. Daedelus presents a sound picture of gentle chimes and bells and whirs, then ushers in the star attraction-- a synthetic melody line every bit as romantic as the one Jega used on his stand-out "Geometry."
The opening string ensemble sample that begins "Pursed Lips Reply" recalls the wistful poignancy of the Hollywood String Quartet's accompaniment to Frank Sinatra's 1957 album Close to You, a sentiment builds throughout the track. Daedelus recasts that 50s nostalgia with "Astroboy," a complexly arranged tune with segmented spoken word narration. It's like Brian Aldiss' short story "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (the foundation for Kubrick/Spielberg's A.I.) retold for first-graders. Remarkably, the chopped story of a robot wondering about its identity is never cloying or even, in fact, resolved.
For "Adventress," Daedelus pulls a woodwind ensemble out of retirement and gives them wistful melodies of their forgotten youth to dwell upon. "Quiet Now" is as close to conventional downtempo as Invention gets. Over a lolloping EQ'd rhythm track a processed guitar works counter-rhythms. By contrast, "Perchance a Bit" is John Surman's bass clarinet soundclashing with Jega's electronics. "Soulful of Child" recalls some of Squarepusher's least spastic jazz-n-bass, a style that Daedelus taps more frenetically for "Thus the Whirligig."
Two bonus cuts chart Invention's progression from childhood naivety to savvy maturity. Daedelus invites guest MCs Busdriver and Sach to rhyme over "Quiet Now" and "Pursed Lips Reply." Busdriver's and Sach's stagy delivery and avant-poetry message locate them squarely in Mush/cLOUDDED territory. However, while I appreciate these rhymes on their own, they do squelch the overall mood of the record in this context.
Still, Daedelus' debut album manages to find common ground between 21st century electronics and the string arrangements of yesteryear. He never obscures one with the other, nor allows one to shine through at the other's expense. The disparate elements are in harmony and at the command of Daedelus' personality. It could have gone so horribly wrong. Daedelus could have ventured too far into the mawkish, or equally astray in search of David Lynchian oddity. Invention has very few peers, in my opinion. Though Schlammpeitzinger's Collected Simple Songs of My Temporary Past and Andrew Coleman's Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt come close, I'm firmly resigned that I'll not hear a more effortlessly charming album this year. | 2002-06-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2002-06-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Plug Research | June 2, 2002 | 8.8 | 046cd0ea-ee79-4466-889d-c50e6a3e3af0 | Paul Cooper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-cooper/ | null |
On this elaborate concept album, initially released in monthly installments, the hardcore collective reclaims its status as the most fearless prog-punk band of them all. | On this elaborate concept album, initially released in monthly installments, the hardcore collective reclaims its status as the most fearless prog-punk band of them all. | Fucked Up: Year of the Horse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fucked-up-year-of-the-horse/ | Year of the Horse | This month, Fucked Up celebrated the 10th anniversary of David Comes to Life, an 18-song rock opera that arrived with a promotional blitz featuring a movie-style poster campaign and a companion compilation of fictional bands who inhabited the album’s narrative universe. At the time, David seemed to signify the apotheosis of the band’s transformation from hardcore scrappers to art-punk dignitaries. But for all its extravagant packaging, David was also a triumph of economy, harnessing Fucked Up’s power in service of melodic, anthemic tunes that continue to goose their streaming stats to this day. In hindsight, the album was a warm-up exercise for a group that has continued to pursue their ambitions in thrillingly unpredictable ways. And their latest song cycle, Year of the Horse, counts as their most audacious move yet in a career full of them.
Compared to David Comes to Life, Year of the Horse arrived with almost zero fanfare. The music was quietly unveiled in four instalments on Bandcamp, while the lyrics and liner notes were provided via a WeTransfer link. Technically, the release is part of Fucked Up’s long-running Zodiac series, the limited-edition, parallel-universe discography where they’ve entertained their most experimental impulses. But this 94-minute concept album is no mere sideshow curio. In a climate where the Armed have obliterated hardcore’s horizons, Iceage are making gospel records, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have revived the batshit-bonkers medieval concept album, this is the sound of Fucked Up forcefully reclaiming their status as the most fearless prog-punk band of them all.
Unlike David Comes to Life and 2018’s Dose Your Dreams, Year of the Horse isn’t merely a collection of narratively linked songs. Each of its four epic movements is an intricate and overwhelming assemblage of recurring motifs, lyrical callbacks, and spoken-word scene-setting. The band’s chief architect, Mike Haliechuk, collaborated with Toronto playwright David James Brock to craft a dramatic tale involving a mythical horse named Perceval on the run from an evil wizard king named Sour, en route to her rightful home among the moon and stars. We see much of the action through the eyes of a young girl named Blanche, whose abusive, alcoholic mother belongs to a posse of hunters sent to track down the wayward mare. For all its Games of Thrones cosplay, the album’s underlying themes—animal protection, environmental devastation, dysfunctional families, and the craven, destructive desires of powerful men—root us in a world that feels all too familiar. (And if lines like “vipers waiting in the sand/under the spell of Zazamanc” are liable to fly over your head, you can always follow along with this handy Tweet-by-Tweet plot synopsis.)
There’s another story playing out on Year of the Horse, however, and its main characters are Fucked Up themselves. The saga of the band can seem like one of perpetual conflict, namely between the unrelenting, punx-not-dead growl of frontman Damian Abraham and the high-art aspirations of Haliechuk and drummer/fellow musical director Jonah Falco, while bassist Sandy Miranda and guitarists Josh Zucker and Ben Cook (who sat this one out) dutifully play both sides like kids caught in a custody battle. That tension seemed to reach its breaking point on Dose Your Dreams, where an eclectic musical palette and myriad guest-vocalist cameos threatened to crowd out Abraham, who admitted to questioning his future in the band at the time.
Year of the Horse showcases Fucked Up’s dynamic writ large, with Abraham’s attack routinely disrupted by Haliechuk and Falco’s flights of fancy, which take the form of Godspeed-level overtures, Renaissance Faire folk, spaghetti-western cavalry charges, Tubular Bells-style soundscapes, Bad Seeds-indebted goth pageantry, and wah-wah-drenched psychedelic funk. But the remarkable thing about Year of the Horse is that it continues to push Fucked Up into uncharted territory while deploying Abraham’s blood-curdling roar to its strategic advantage. Like most stories about flying horses, Year of the Horse’s narrative is particularly well-suited to metal, and when Abraham seizes the reins, Fucked Up don’t so much resemble a conflicted punk band as an omnipotent thrash act. (The album is dedicated to two metal gurus lost in the past year—Iron Age guitarist Wade Allison and Power Trip singer Riley Gale—and their influence feels both musical and spiritual.) But Abraham’s eternally ravaged voice bleeds pathos and poignancy as he delivers the recurring motivational mantra that guides Perceval throughout her journey: “Look up at the moon!/Child, you will be home soon!”
Fucked Up were wise to release Year of the Horse in monthly intervals. There is a lot to digest here, and listening in one sitting practically demands an app to track your endurance. But in a sense, the complicated structure actually makes the action easier to follow. Its many shifts propel the narrative, introducing new characters, announcing changes in scenery, or advancing the plot. In between, Haliechuk and Falco give themselves space to refine the sharp songcraft they brought to their electro-mod side project Jade Hairpins, especially on Act One’s dreamy disco-folk odyssey in the “River Suite,” the woozy psych-soul workout in the middle portion of Act Three, and the gorgeous, ‘70s-soft-rock tune that emerges eight minutes into Act Four.
After 90-plus minutes of head-spinning theatrics, Year of the Horse concludes with a celestial ambient symphony guided by Falco’s sunrise-summoning trumpet and the wordless vocals of Julien Baker. The National’s Matt Berninger also checks in toward the end of Act Three with his signature, cigarette-stained monotone. But these indie A-listers ultimately take a backseat to lesser known guest vocalists like Chubby and the Gang bassist Maegan Brooks Mills and the soulful, London-based singer Tuka Mohammed. Their presence is a reminder that Fucked Up isn’t only a means for Haliechuk and Falco to pursue their ever-expanding vision but also a long-standing platform for raising unsung voices. Just as this band once broke the rules of hardcore, they have also reinvented the concept album, transforming the most indulgent exercise in the classic-rock playbook into an egalitarian, community endeavor.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Metal | self-released | June 24, 2021 | 7.8 | 046e0d66-7b99-449c-aed4-c365834b2d06 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Guitarist Matt Kivel's debut Double Exposure was a deeply solitary record. On his follow-up, Days of Being Wild, he's still troubled by mortality, but on Days he is pushing away from it, towards life and contact. | Guitarist Matt Kivel's debut Double Exposure was a deeply solitary record. On his follow-up, Days of Being Wild, he's still troubled by mortality, but on Days he is pushing away from it, towards life and contact. | Matt Kivel: Days of Being Wild | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19501-matt-kivel-days-of-being-wild/ | Days of Being Wild | Matt Kivel's Double Exposure was a deeply solitary record. The lyrics brimmed with death, stillness, pale horses, and Kivel recorded it largely alone, away from his other projects, Gap Dream and Princeton. It was initially difficult to tell if anyone else even noticed this stark, beautiful little gem--it came out in late 2013, a tough time for indie records, especially ones by new, unproven names. I often wondered, living with it, if I was the only one listening.
Someone else must have been, because Kivel was picked up from Olde English Spelling Bee by Woodsist, and his follow-up, Days of Being Wild, arrives less than one year later. Kivel is touring with Steve Gunn and the Clientele now, and his new record reflects a modest new warmth. If the mood of Double Exposure was frozen and desolate, Days is rainy and melancholy. "Little Girls" even feels like a Clientele song, with its drizzly mix of acoustic and clean reverb'ed guitars. Kivel's lyrics are still whispered , but this time they are addressed to an intimate crowd rather than the corner wall.
The switch from acoustic to electric has a lovely lamplit effect on the songs. The chords and riffs make pleasant, friendly college-rock shapes, like the riff on "Insignificance", which feels like a watercolor made out of a Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain song, or the overdrive on "Open Road," which fizzes like a classic Yo La Tengo drone rocker. The power chords of "Blonde Boy", which Kivel barely articulates with the edge of his pick, feels like a Bachman-Turner Overdrive or Cars song creeping through a library on tiptoes.
Kivel seems to be making his muted version of a radio rock record, which is something you can hear in the lyrics as well. On "Insignificance," he whispers fragmented FM rock signifiers—"Black is night/ The highway/ Her nails so red and wild/ Green and slip/ The oceanside"—like Bob Seger via William Carlos Williams. On "Little Girls," he sings "Honey I ain't got forever/ You take me now or never/ Just step into the night/ There I'll be gone." On the title track, Kivel quotes the melody of Fine Young Cannibals' "She Drives Me Crazy", of all things. As with everything else, it's handled gently, cradled like a robin's egg. No one is actually being wild here per the album title, but the album is full of feeling for the memory of such days, the imprint they leave in the mind.
Kivel's voice is as much a warm shape and the guitars: As on Double Exposure, he's barely intelligible save for isolated phrases. Pieced together, these little snatches of clear communication convey almost as much, in their evocative settings, as the full lyric sheet does. One of them, from "Only With the Wine," is "She fucks with other guys/ But why?", and another, from "End of Adventure," is "Slapped on your ass." One of the welcome surprises of spending prolonged time with Kivel's music is discovering how quietly libidinous it is. Of course, another clear, ringing lyric piercing the haze is "I don't wanna die/ But I will." But compared with *Double Exposure'*s central confession "I want to kill myself" (from "Whip"), the line feels positively life-affirming. Kivel is still troubled by mortality, but on Days he is pushing away from it, towards life and contact. | 2014-07-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Woodsist | July 11, 2014 | 7.6 | 046f113e-9baa-4125-a637-c9c3798dbc94 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Lady Gaga's second record, containing "Bad Romance" and "Speechless", finds her coming into her own as both a songwriter and a pop star. | Lady Gaga's second record, containing "Bad Romance" and "Speechless", finds her coming into her own as both a songwriter and a pop star. | Lady Gaga: The Fame Monster | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13823-the-fame-monster/ | The Fame Monster | Remember that "Simpsons" Treehouse of Horror where the Krusty the Clown doll was trying to murder Homer? Turned out the problem was the doll had a switch on its back set to "evil" and with a flick of the wrist, it could be reset to "good." It feels like sometime late last summer, someone flicked a similar switch on Lady Gaga. For about a year, she was nothing but a lot of talk and a badge-- only without the badge. She filled her résumé and interviews with style icon namedrops-- Andy Warhol and his notions on celebrity, the denizens of New York's downtown arts scene, and avant couture designers like Thierry Mugler-- but her singles betrayed none of the artistry that she insisted was part of her package. "Poker Face" had about three big hooks, but next to her other singles-- which ran the gamut from forgettable fluff ("Just Dance") to "Muffin Top" ("LoveGame")-- it seemed like a fluke. Then, between the VMAs and "Paparazzi", she came into her own. And on "Bad Romance", the lead single from The Fame Monster, she became kind of awesome.
The rest of The Fame Monster-- out late last year, while we at Pitchfork were wrapping up our 2009 content-- isn't as strong as its lead single (although the Queen-like "Speechless" comes close), but it at least stakes a claim that Gaga is a potential new Madonna rather than simply a new Katy Perry. If I had to guess, I'd say once she became hideously popular Gaga was able to take more control of her career, the early result being "Bad Romance", arguably the best pop single and best pop video of 2009. And the video is part of the package: Like Madonna or Prince, it's impossible to separate the song from the performer. But unlike those artists, Lady Gaga isn't particularly attractive, and she uses this to her advantage by suppressing her vanity and making herself a slippery figure. She's still largely unknowable and also almost unrecognizable from moment to moment, as she contorts, disguises, masks and maims her face and body like a Matthew Barney or David Cronenberg creation.
Gaga comments on fame as she becomes more famous: It's in her record titles-- The Fame, The Fame Monster, "Paparazzi", "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich", "Starstruck". It's also in her wearable art, and the way she deconstructs her own look-- rigid, robotic dance moves as if she's a puppet on a string, moving in crutches after being damaged by her outsized fictional celebrity in the "Paparazzi" clip. In "Bad Romance" she alters whoever Lady Gaga the Pop Star might be into any number of female types-- at times recalling Britney Spears, Madonna, an Anime character, Angelique, Christina Aguilera, and Amy Winehouse. In that sense, she's a perfect 21st century pop icon-- a regular person willing to manipulate herself into whatever it takes at any given moment to be a star.
And yet, unlike the empty famewhores climbing atop the shoulders of reality TV and tabloid journalism to notoriety, we know next to nothing about her personal life. In that sense, she's the anti-Kanye, the anti-Eminem, and the anti-Winehouse-- the twists and turns of her private life don't inform her art. Rather, she is whoever she wants to be at any time, and her art is as much the manipulation of that image and notions of modern celebrity as it is music or fashion. And it's refreshing to have a big pop star communicating to us from afar, like pop stars used to.
Everything about "Bad Romance" is big but oddly clean and direct-- whooshing synths, jarring rhythms, and stratospheric choruses. It's not an earworm so much as something designed to just take over a listener, to force them to pay attention the way Gaga's image seems to have done to people in recent months. Sure, the choruses were also skybound on "Poker Face" and "Paparazzi", but they seemed bigger by working as a counterpoint to other elements of the song-- the odd way Gaga makes her voice go deep and guttural, the terrible sing-speaking she has ideally abandoned. "Bad Romance", on the other hand, has two volumes: 10 and 11. In that sense, it's almost template breaking-- reminiscent of stadium house with Gaga as a new KLF, fucking with us from the inside. (No surprise that it sounds so European either-- it comes across like futurist pop music without any hints of hip-hop's influence.)
Elsewhere on The Fame Monster, she morphs into other stars-- Freddie Mercury on "Speechless", ABBA on "Alejandro", Madonna on "Dance in the Dark", Britney Spears on "Telephone", Kylie Minogue on "Monster", and Christina Aguilera on "Teeth". Yet instead of hopelessly retro, it comes off very modern, in part because U.S. pop and hip-hop is currently drawing heavily from Europop, hi-NRG, and dance music. It's almost as if we're experiencing a sonic present that's whitewashed most of the influence of backbeat sample-based hip-hop-- from Kanye and Cudi to Jason Derülo and the Black Eyed Peas, it's all presets and synths and dance. All of a sudden, Eminem's claim that "nobody listens to techno" seems like a hell of a long time ago.
Where a lot of The Fame felt like rote pop with overt "comments" on fame, Gaga's recently acquired actual fame allows her interactions with an audience to become a theatrical experience. Her music, meanwhile, has become subtler, more playful, and more well-rounded, extending the electro-pop bubble she lived in on her debut. And instead of shoehorning references to celebrity into some tracks, she's borrowing elements and templates and simply focusing on quality control. The weird result is that, despite her flitting between personalities and personas, her music feels more like her own here than it did on her debut LP. The songs feel like they were written for Lady Gaga rather than simply for any modern pop star.
Whether Gaga can keep up the streak is another matter. Maybe she'll get chewed up and spat out in the end, or maybe her chameleonic image changes are just Madonna's career at the speed of the Internet era and we're seeing all of her ideas at once. But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around. | 2010-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | January 13, 2010 | 7.8 | 046f724b-254f-4824-be9a-aa6fbbfde81b | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Annie Clark brings the glammy sounds of the ’70s to an album about mothers and daughters, fathers and prison. It’s an audacious and deeply personal record occasionally beset by clunky choices. | Annie Clark brings the glammy sounds of the ’70s to an album about mothers and daughters, fathers and prison. It’s an audacious and deeply personal record occasionally beset by clunky choices. | St. Vincent: Daddy’s Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/st-vincent-daddys-home/ | Daddy’s Home | When St. Vincent announced Daddy’s Home by wheat-pasting Who’s Your Daddy? onto a concrete wall, she wasn’t just launching an ad campaign. She was revealing a brand new self. She’s done this before, as the delicate butterfly of Sufjan’s touring band, a self-styled “near-future cult leader,” and the leather-and-latex domme of 2017’s Masseduction. Annie Clark is no stranger to being a stranger. An immense talent with an impeccable track record, her meticulous craft is matched by a Bowian gift for shapeshifting. Every world-building detail on Daddy’s Home, her album-length tribute to ’70s rock’n’roll, is executed with chameleonic precision; not a note or a hair on her Candy Darling wig is out of place. It is her most personal record to date, telling the story of her father’s incarceration and her own fear of parenthood. It is delivered entirely in costume.
The best and truest moments on Daddy’s Home are when Clark refuses to play wife or mother. “I went to the park just to watch the little children,” she sings, on “Pay Your Way in Pain.” “The mothers saw my heels and they said I wasn’t welcome.” Her character exists as a hairline fracture apart from the women who watch over their children like helicopters. On “Somebody Like Me,” she bristles at strolling “straight down the aisle”—and pointedly makes a meal out of “straight,” turning the word into a slippery vocal run.
These are time-honored themes for St. Vincent. Her 2007 debut was titled Marry Me; back then, she invited her lover to “do what Mary and Joseph did/Without the kid.” On Daddy’s Home, she’s even more adamant. Stand-out “My Baby Wants a Baby” is laden with worry that having offspring—or failing to do so—will obliterate her own identity. “No one will scream that song I made,” she sings, “won’t throw no roses on my grave,” as her voice, and her back-up singers’ voices, rush frantically toward the climax: “They’ll just look at me and say: Where’s your baby?”
In the work of writers like Elena Ferrante, Joanne Ramos, and Sheila Heti, alternatives to motherhood are presented as aspirational: an education, a fulfilling career, a loving (and childless) partnership. Daddy’s Home bucks this trend. The album’s protagonist is no budding girlboss; she wants a kind of dangerous freedom. The breathtaking ballad “Live in the Dream” narrates someone reviving after an overdose only to succumb in a milky fog of sitar. The singer of “Down and Out Downtown” chases highs and crashes, again and again, between kisses. She’s found love, but it, too, is the dangerous kind. (“911? I’m in love.”) Her partner changes the locks, “drops the scene,” drives her to “suicidal ideation”—unrequited love on the level of the queen of Carthage.
But Clark remains steadfast: “I wanna play guitar all day,” she sings, “make all my meals in microwaves.” She’d rather be a child than bear one. Men embrace this wish without apology; she’s forced to justify it at length. She worries that her yearning for absolute freedom makes her wicked, irredeemable, that she’s got something of her wayward father in her. If she had a baby, she tells her lover, “I couldn’t leave like my daddy.” She resents him for his departure; she yearns for the same careless abandon that he had.
This brings us, finally, to the album’s title track, “Daddy’s Home.” Clark says the song refers to her father’s 12-year incarceration for his role in a $43 million stock manipulation scheme. The indignity of her father’s imprisonment was, no doubt, doubled by the whole world learning about it. She’s been candid about the experience while doing press for Daddy’s Home and to her credit, Clark has clearly done her research on mass incarceration. She’s cited statistics about the effects of the prison-industrial complex on Black Americans. During visitation in her father’s prison, she says, families were invited to pose against a backdrop of a plantation veranda. It seems clear that she wishes to empathize with the Black community and critique the prison system.
But dissonance appears on Daddy’s Home whenever Clark’s louche time-traveling character collides with the political tensions of the present day. It’s odd, for example, that two songs on the album refer to calling “the cops,” or 911, in light of the past year’s uprisings against police brutality. A reference to Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” in “The Melting of the Sun” is similarly ill-considered. Like Hozier before her, Clark dilutes Simone’s fierce and intentional anti-racist activism by listing her alongside white celebrities. The album’s title track deploys a sticky bassline, a syncopated funk groove, and the voices of seasoned Black back-up singers Kenya Hathaway and Lynne Fiddmont to tell the story of Clark and her father, a white man who committed a white-collar crime. Why deploy the conventions of Black music to reckon with his sins? Why wear a mask at all?
In 2011, long before it broke in tabloids and became public knowledge, St. Vincent wrote “Strange Mercy,” a plaintive song about her father’s incarceration. The imagery of the song is simple, evocative. “Our father in exile,” she sings. “When you see him, wave through double pane.” It’s hard to forget, once you’ve heard it, her delivery of the song’s bridge, through gritted teeth: “If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up, no, I… I don’t know what.” She is alone at the microphone. She sounds like nobody but herself.
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. | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | May 19, 2021 | 6.7 | 0470df5b-c292-46f9-af2c-de21976bb7b5 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
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 an essential greatest hits album, one that brought ABBA indefinite fame. | 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 an essential greatest hits album, one that brought ABBA indefinite fame. | ABBA: Gold: Greatest Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/abba-gold-greatest-hits/ | Gold: Greatest Hits | What, exactly, is the use of a “greatest hits” album in 2019? The full catalogs of almost every artist popular enough to merit such a collection are available through any streaming service, organized by algorithms, and easily sorted by play count, which means labels have little reason to waste time and energy on a task the machines have already mastered. Even when the indie rock band Spoon released a greatest hits record earlier this year, the band acknowledged that its fondness for the form outweighed what was a near-certain losing proposition businesswise.
That fondness exists because of the real power greatest hits albums once had: They threw open doors for curious new listeners, solidified artists’ place in the canon, and transformed reputations that had fallen into disrepair. In his 2016 eulogy for greatest hits, anthologies, and other, similar reissues, Stephen Thomas Erlewine noted that Bob Marley could have languished in relative obscurity were it not for the release of Legend in 1984. “By focusing on the hits, they crystallize the essence of each star,” wrote Erlewine, touching on compilations of work by Elton John, Billy Joel, and Tom Petty. “Over time, those greatest hits albums—purchased as a package, repeated incessantly on the radio—formalized each act’s conventionally-accepted canon and, in turn, cemented their enduring public personas.”
If the ideal greatest hits collection captures the fundamental truth about an artist, stitches them into an enduring place in our cultural fabric, and sells enough copies to fund the purchase of a minor island, then ABBA Gold—a 79-minute buffet of schlocky ballads, elegant pop delicacies, and disco heat rocks—is the definitive example of the format. The 1992 compilation rounded up all of the Swedish pop band’s international smashes into a refined package with surprising emotional range. It capitalized on a simmering, subcultural interest in ABBA’s work and sparked a full-blown revival, one that culminated in Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan belting and grunting their way through “S.O.S.” in the movie version of Mamma Mia! And it became one of the best-selling albums of all time, with copies continuing to trickle out of stores in shocking numbers to this day. Because of Gold, ABBA has become an integral part of the world around us, their music floating through common spaces around the world like a music fan’s lingua franca; without it, the band might have remained a curio, the kind of half-forgotten treasure you have to seek out rather than stumble upon.
Little more than a decade separated Gold’s release from the unceremonious end of the band’s recording career. After a delirious rise to global superstardom in the second half of the ’70s, ABBA was finally starting to lose steam. Its two constituent couples—Björn Ulvaeus and Agnetha Faltskog, and Benny Andersson and Frida Lyngstad—were either separated or divorced by the release of their final album, The Visitors, in 1981. And while all four members continued working together with an impressive level of professionalism, the fact remained that Ulvaeus and Andersson were writing music and lyrics, including post-breakup ballads and wounded domestic dramas, for their ex-wives to sing.
The band had soured on touring and promoting themselves after enduring some of the most frenzied appearances this side of Beatlemania, and the fatigue was showing up in their music: “I was sick and tired of everything/When I called you last night from Glasgow,” sighed Lyngstad on the title track of 1980’s Super Trouper. “All I do is eat and sleep and sing/Wishing every show was the last show.” And after conquering the pop charts in dozens of countries around the world, everyone was ready for a new challenge: Andersson and Ulvaeus were dreaming of a detour into musical theater, and Faltskog and Lyngstad were curious about reviving their dormant solo careers.
Boredom aside, ABBA’s commercial peak was clearly in the rear-view mirror by the early ’80s. The Visitors was their least successful album since the beginning of their career, and the band’s generation-spanning core audience was starting to wander into new spaces. The children who grew up with ABBA omnipresent on the radio were maturing into punk, rap, and new wave; the adults who enjoyed their lighthearted, melodic hits were less interested in minimally arranged character studies. Studio sessions in the spring of 1982 yielded little more than a few singles, and by the end of that year, it was clear ABBA’s time had come. Andersson and Ulvaeus collaborated with Tim Rice on Chess, a musical about a chess tournament (and love triangle) set against the backdrop of the Cold War; Lyngstad made an album with Phil Collins; Faltskog scored a few solo hits and duets before largely retreating from public life.
From a distance, it must have seemed unlikely that ABBA would explode back into the popular consciousness and stay there indefinitely. Yet Gold was perfectly positioned to take advantage of shifts in technology, music business, and the culture at large, all of which crested alongside the compilation’s release in 1992. In the decade since ABBA’s collapse, CDs had become the dominant form of physical media and were accelerating toward their turn-of-the-century peak. While the CD market had been steadily growing since the end of the ’80s, reissues covering the ABBA catalogue had become conspicuously absent from record store shelves around the world, a consequence of business decisions made near the beginning of the band’s career—all handled by the group’s famously unscrupulous manager, Stig Anderson—and an ensuing string of contracts, renegotiations, and acquisitions.
“Many in the music business raised their eyebrows when Stig signed with different record companies all over the world, instead of letting one major label handle the group globally,” wrote Carl Magnus Palm in his essential ABBA biography Bright Lights, Dark Shadows: The Real Story of ABBA. “That, however, was the whole point. Stig’s theory was that no company could be strong in every territory around the world and ABBA’s interests would be better served by working with the label that had the most impressive sales presence in each market.” Anderson’s decision to establish a network of international distributors meant that by the band’s demise, ABBA’s catalog could be handled differently according to each country’s needs; the compilation slapped onto shelves in Madrid wouldn’t necessarily be the same as the one stocked in Melbourne.
When Anderson’s Polar Music Group (and, consequently, ABBA’s songs and masters) were acquired by Polygram (now part of Universal Music Group) in 1989, the label had to wait for Polar’s patchwork of licensing deals to expire before devising a coherent strategy with which to approach ABBA’s library of hits. Plans for a box set were pared back to a single disc, a conservative play intended to gauge the market for the band’s catalog before investing any more resources. The label polled its offices around the world regarding song selection, market tested the album’s cover art—its classy, minimal black-on-gold a far from the kitsch of ABBA’s studio album artwork—with potential British buyers, and made sequencing decisions based on fan feedback rather than chronology.
Even though Polygram was dedicating reasonable amounts of time and money to ABBA’s revitalization, they still underestimated the amount of latent interest in the band’s music by the early ’90s, in part because that enthusiasm was rooted in marginalized communities. For gay men around the world, ABBA’s blend of naïve camp—consider the outfits they wore on stage, which ran the gamut from High Elven couture to sets of matching white silk kimonos—indelible melodies, and genuinely wrenching melodrama proved captivating. They wrote anthems for dancing queens and men after midnight, inadvertently adopting language that would become essential to gay life. And as much as the gay community loved ABBA, the band returned the favor: “In the ’80s, especially the first half, [it] was like ABBA was forgotten,” said Ulvaeus in a 2019 interview with Gay Times. “We thought that was it, we go on and do other stuff and ABBA will be forgotten. Then it was the gay community who underpinned the comeback… we felt that we had the full support, and it made a lot of difference.”
Goofy cover bands like Australian outfit Björn Again built on this enthusiasm for ABBA’s music and became genuine sensations at clubs around the world, dialing up the kitsch with even more outlandish attire and between-song banter delivered in Swedish accents. And if the commercial potential of ABBA’s music wasn’t already evident, it became impossible to ignore in mid-1992 when Erasure’s cover EP Abba-esque topped the charts across the UK and continental Europe.
So came the perfect storm surrounding Gold’s release: assembled at an ascendant moment in the music business by a label that approached the ABBA catalog with an unprecedented level of coordination and thoughtfulness, delivered to a public desperate for a convenient way to hear the band’s hits. It’s a fascinating story, yet it still doesn’t explain why millions of people around the world were ready to embrace ABBA once more with feeling. What is it about this band’s music that spoke, and continues to speak, to listeners across languages, cultures, and borders?
Unlike the great majority of contemporary hits, ABBA’s version of pop music is completely divorced from the influence of R&B, hip-hop, soul, funk, and Latin music—in short, from non-white musical traditions. Ulvaeus summed up their approach rather neatly in a 1981 interview: “Our musical roots are European—we like French and Italian songs,” said Ulvaeus. “This is probably why our songs work well in the countries of Latin America… in the United States, pop music is heavily influenced by the blues, soul, and gospel—which isn’t in ABBA’s heritage.”
Ulvaeus and Andersson grew up on traditional Swedish folk music and schlager music, a sappy, simple strain of pop with a distinctly continental European flair. And when their tastes began to develop as teenagers, they developed a network of influences that remained almost exclusively white: the Beach Boys’ golden teenage hymns, Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, Lennon and McCartney circa Rubber Soul, classical music, and musical theater. It’s no surprise that as mature composers and lyricists, they came to favor crystalline melodies, dizzying arrangements and counterpoints, and over-the-top emotional gestures.
This mix of influences helped create the band’s reputation as purveyors of unrefined schmaltz. The songs on Gold that have aged most poorly are the cuts that bear the greatest schlager influences, songs like “Chiquitita” and “Fernando” and “I Have a Dream.” Even gorgeous hooks wilt up against inelegant English lyrics, martial Germanic pomp, and faux-Italian balladry.
Rare misses aside, hearing Faltskog and Lyngstad’s impeccable voices weave through a battalion’s worth of riffs, bells, and whistles is an indefatigable source of ecstasy. Listening to “S.O.S.” or “Dancing Queen” or “Super Trouper” for the first time can feel like hearing “Good Vibrations” or “Born to Run” in the same fashion: Your pleasure centers are overwhelmed until they blow up like the Grinch’s tiny heart, expanding beyond their old size and becoming something new.
Listening to Gold with fresh, focused ears, I was struck by the sheer variety of sounds beneath its blinding polish. The ABBA ground-zero that’s anchored in my head lies somewhere between “Lay All Your Love on Me” and “The Winner Takes It All”: cavernous, sprightly, desperate dance-pop confections built for crying in the club. (Robyn became one of this decade’s great pop heroes by pinning down this same sad-ecstatic balance and welding it to modern, muscular production.) And while this might have become their most distinctive mode, it was far from their only one.
“Take a Chance on Me” is best remembered for its a cappella opening buoyant chorus, but its verses are pure Swedish honky-tonk; I hear them and think of Daft Punk’s “Fragments of Time,” a hidden jam on Random Access Memories that’s built on a warm country boogie. (Speaking of Random Access Memories: while that album’s connection to Giorgio Moroder may have been more explicit, its primary sound—expensive, theatrical, continental European pop—is pure ABBA.) “Money, Money, Money” is the most successful of Ulvaeus and Andersson’s early forays into musical theater, a gold-digging fantasy that’s given real edge through Lyngstad’s dramatic interpretation. Late-period hit “One of Us” is heartbroken, lilting reggae, and it boasts one of Faltskog’s most delicate vocal takes for good measure; glammy stomper “Does Your Mother Know” is dumb, clean fun, even if hearing Ulvaeus take the lead makes you wish they’d called in Elton John for the supremely bitchy guest spot the song deserves. The magnificent “Knowing Me, Knowing You” finds the band at its best and its silliest in the span of 60 seconds: An elegant chorus with a male countermelody leads into a second verse spoiled by vaguely, unintentionally pornographic backing whispers.
Skeptics pointed to the watch-like precision of every new ABBA hit as evidence of the band’s soullessness. In a 1993 essay in TIME after Gold’s American release, critic Richard Lacayo wrote that the band “was always easy to enjoy, if you could just put aside the unnerving sense that they were hastening the decline of pop music into commercial calculation and mindless buoyancy.” But the level of quality represented on Gold sprung from more than just studio scheming or bald ambition. By the time ABBA won the 1974 Eurovision contest with “Waterloo,” Andersson and Ulvaeus had each enjoyed a decade of domestic success as musicians, and Faltskog and Lyngstad were working solo artists in their own right. They had collectively played thousands of tour dates across Sweden, produced music for dozens of other artists, and spent untold hours working as a songwriting and performing team. Their mastery and enthusiasm for their craft was indisputable.
Calling ABBA icy or passionless also conveniently elides the intricate balance between their craftsmanship and mournful writing. Take it from no less an authority than Max Martin: “I’m a sucker for the melancholy,” admitted the legendary pop producer in a 2001 interview with TIME Europe. “I guess that’s one of the things, coming from [Sweden]. If you listen to ABBA… it’s always sort of melancholy.” Ulvaeus and Andersson had figured out the balance as early as “S.O.S.,” ABBA’s first major international hit after “Waterloo.” It sounds like Faltskog is singing the first verse from the bottom of a well; her loneliness and desperation are so thick, you can almost reach out and touch them. When the chorus finally arrives, its warmth is palpable until, all of a sudden, it’s not: “When you’re gone,” Faltskog chirps, “How can I even try to go on?” The contrast is stark, and it’s irresistible.
As the division of labor between Andersson and Ulvaeus became clearer later in the band’s discography—the former handled most of the music, the latter wrote the bulk of the lyrics—the divide between subject matter and sound became even more pronounced. The tumult of the band’s personal lives began to subtly leak into their art: “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and “The Winner Takes It All” are crushing glimpses at marriages in disrepair, sung by adults who know they can’t help but carry on with their lives. Relatively silly cuts like future booty-call anthem “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” are marked by quiet urgency: “Half-past 12/And I’m watchin’ the late show in my flat all alone/How I hate to spend the evening on my own,” Faltskog moans. Even “Dancing Queen,” the band’s most purely joyous moment, can’t fully give itself over to pleasure. It’s a celebration of impermanence. You may be young and sweet now, but you won’t be 17 forever.
Erlewine wrote that greatest hits have a way of “sand[ing] away the artists’ quirks,” and the same is true for Gold. Polygram’s decision to detach the album’s sequencing from the arc of ABBA’s career makes it harder to appreciate the band’s gradual transformation. The silly, glammy Swedes who galloped onto the stage at Eurovision took over the world, stormed the disco, and finished their career making their saddest, strangest music yet. (The new ABBA music reportedly recorded as part of a 2018 reunion has yet to materialize). And yet Gold still conveys the one thing you absolutely need to know about the band: For about a decade, these four Swedes cracked the code on pop music.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polygram | September 29, 2019 | 8.3 | 04742d22-659b-4772-8cdf-d50d912b0015 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
Pink's second album furthers his cult-baiting mystique. | Pink's second album furthers his cult-baiting mystique. | Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Worn Copy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6554-worn-copy/ | Worn Copy | Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti's official debut, The Doldrums, won praise for having the Animal Collective's graces and for being an uncanny perversion of the Me Decade pop-radio that worshipped the golden calves of Dylan, McCartney, Carpenter, and Orlando. Pink's second album, Worn Copy, furthers his cult-baiting mystique as a bedroom hermit from suburban L.A. who conjures up ghosts by burning a roll of avocado-green shag carpet un-vacuumed for 30 years.
To his credit, Pink has sharpened his songwriting and studio touches-- he has several 1970s AOR-pop Muzak formulas nailed, making his freakitude compelling and digestible. That's a quality Ween and Redd Kross sometimes failed to capture-- quotation marks were clearly and fashionably marked on their odes to that decade's trash culture. But the problem remains that if the fashionably shoddy production values are removed from the sound, Pink's music would melt into the air.
Still, Worn Copy's first half is a gas. Opener "Trepanated Earth" begins with a hazy, synth and flanged guitar. Pink then mumbles something romantic before one of his split personalities interrupts, "The human race is a pile of dogshit!" and "Mankind is a Nazi!" After a few false starts and jumbled rickets, he then becomes a charming easy-listening opening act for the Wings 75 tour. "Immune to Emotion" is nasally congested "I'm OK, You're OK" pop that could serve as country club luncheon entertainment. "Jules Lost His Jewels" is a 33rpm power-pop raveup cranked or "Alvin-ized" (as composer John Oswald might put it) to 45 with bloodlines that can be traced to the Mothers of Invention's "Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance".
Pink's most poignant moments come when his low-fi smoke screen dissipates. "Credit" is a clever, disco-spiced lament that smokes its second pack of cigarettes over credit card policies and bills-- the mundane subject matter made so bizarre yet sensible for the inflation-addled 70s. "Life in L.A." is a fine downer-rock number with a languid mood that mimics the exhaustion of watching the sunset over a beach while you're trapped in a traffic jam on a freeway bridge.
The rest of Worn Copy indulges in too many half-realized noise experiments and ideas. "Bloody! (Bagonia's)" is Pink amusing himself with Tourette's syndrome, while the quasi-rap number "Cable Access Follies" earns a silver star for imitating Beck at his most confusing.
By the way, did you know that this year marks the 10th anniversary of Mike Watt's sleeper-hit "Against the 70s"? It's the tune where the legendary postpunk bassist has Eddie "Crazy Horse disciple" Vedder sing, "The kids of today must defend themselves against the 70's!" The key lyric goes: "It's not reality/ It's someone else's sentimentality." | 2005-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Paw Tracks | May 2, 2005 | 5.9 | 04757c5d-e4c1-4f88-a0af-49ca41f0e7e2 | Cameron Macdonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-macdonald/ | null |
Cass McCombs’ sprawling seventh full-length takes root in the history and mythos of the American West. Across its 85 minutes, he crafts a cosmology out of Western characters from the past two centuries and covers most of the musical themes and narrative fixations he's drawn upon since his 2003 debut. | Cass McCombs’ sprawling seventh full-length takes root in the history and mythos of the American West. Across its 85 minutes, he crafts a cosmology out of Western characters from the past two centuries and covers most of the musical themes and narrative fixations he's drawn upon since his 2003 debut. | Cass McCombs: Big Wheel and Others | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18612-cass-mccombs-big-wheel-and-others/ | Big Wheel and Others | Few things are as quintessentially American as the mythos surrounding the West. Manifest destiny, the romance of wide open plains and broken landscapes, get rich quick schemes, and old-fashioned wandering. Cass McCombs’ seventh full-length album, Big Wheel and Others, takes root in this fertile soil of Americana, crafting a sprawling cosmology out of its characters from the past two centuries. When I interviewed McCombs in 2011 around the time of Wit’s End, he confessed a fixation on northern California’s history of “drugs, gunslingers, and gold.” Where he took this fixation two years later reveals all one needs to know about the wry, reclusive singer-songwriter.
Wheel opens with a child’s voice, blithely talking about his drug use. This turns out to be an audio clip from Sean, a 1969 documentary about a 4-year-old raised by Haight-Ashbury hippies. In McCombs’ mind Sean isn’t a tragic figure, however, but a stand-in for the unregulated San Francisco of the acid-testing 1960s. For McCombs, Sean’s creepily unregulated upbringing aligns with a broader history of the Wild West, like the Gold Rush’s ruthless Barbary Coast district from a century earlier, and the shiftless drifters populating highway on-ramps and truck stops to this day.
An eight-minute run on Side 2 encapsulates much of Wheel’s own mythology. In another edited movie clip, after solidly affirming that “there’s no God around,” because “the whole world is the Indians’ world,” Sean is prompted for his thoughts on America. “You know America,” he replies. “Half of the world.” For McCombs, such a naïve assertion isn’t cause to rail against patriotic chauvinism, but a perfect segue into the languid Roger McGuinn-style folk-rock of “Home on the Range”. An original composition, “Range” references the 19th century ode to life in Kansas, rumbling with cattle and surrounded by the infinite horizons of what at the time was the American West—and for residents, the entire world. The idea that Sean in 1969 shares a shrunken worldview with a Romantic 1870s rancher is not lost on McCombs. Much of Wheel emanates from this notion: the size of one’s world, and the shape of one’s belief system, equates to imagination plus experience.
Appropriately for an album with such broad aims, Wheel itself is sprawling. With an 85-minute runtime, it covers most most of the musical themes and narrative fixations McCombs has drawn upon since his 2003 debut*.* Since that time, he’s quietly become one of America’s finest chroniclers of fringe characters, a writer of heart-rending love songs and psychedelic odes to the natural world, a teller of tall-tales with a sense of humor dry as desert wood, and that rare folksinger who actually sings about the folk. Over the last decade, McCombs has been a remarkably consistent, if not publicity-averse, singer-songwriter, comparable to Bill Callahan and Will Oldham as our foremost translators of Old, Weird America into modern terms (and vice-versa). Appropriately, then, the lead character of “Range” is not taken with the beauty of his surroundings, but in a milder form of lawnessness. “I believe in littering,” he croons to open the song. “Waste should not be hidden, but seen.”
Musically, McCombs mixes light and dark in a similar way. His songs are often cast with an eerie serenity, emanating both from his soft vocals and fondness for guitar-led arrangements that glide between sections. His songs are often very pretty, though always invested with a palpable, if not quite visible, sense of foreboding. This befits the characters of Wheel, most of whom are alone—some desperately so—and seeking redemption, if not simply trying to prove something to themselves. A sweet, loping love song is set between a couple “broken down for days at a free motel/ under the Oregon ridge.” On the brooding lament “My Name Written in Water”, McCombs trails a character escaping the suburbs for time spent amongst the ancient majesty of Utah mesas. Quoting Hamlet’s time-worn soliloquy on mortality, he’s concerned not with where to get gas, but with how the words he’s writing will represent him after he’s gone.
Elsewhere, McCombs packs the album full of outsize, masculine characters in the mold of “Lionkiller”. Early along the tracklist is the swaggering trucker of “Big Wheel” who bags lot lizards and spouts idioms like bumper stickers (“A man is bolts, a man is rust/ For a little while, then the man is dust”). There’s “Joe Murder”, a Coen Brothers-style telling of “Cortez the Killer”, on which McCombs uncoils a sinister guitar lead grumbling with intensity, while shaping the titular drug-runner through his personality quirks. Joe Murder “cut with milk sugar, to eliminate cost,” to which McCombs adds: “such a frugal drifter.” Then there’s the shit-talking narrator of “Satan is My Toy”, letting loose a series of randy, schoolyard-quality couplets, eliding curse word punchlines and relying on the listener to fill in the blanks. It’s McCombs in Nick Cave drag, and the kind of song you’d expect to hear pour out of a biker bar when a fight erupts into the alley through the front doors.
These songs have more muscle than the typical McCombs song, with “Wheel” chugging like V-12 pistons, and “Satan” smoldering with sticky saxophone smears. This befits their subject matter as well as the vibe of the album, on which McCombs plays with genre more explicitly than usual. This wide-ranging approach seems to be one of Wheel’s guiding principles, only once resulting in an eyebrow-raising inclusion, when halfway through the album he drops a fairly inexplicable three-and-a-half minute jazz-rock instrumental. Coming from McCombs, who ended PREfection with six-plus minutes of ambient car-alarm and then opened Dropping the Writ two years later with the same sound fading out, such a move should be expected, if not honored. Likely he’s giving us an intermission.
As taken as he is with the American West as a stark, limitless canvas for his characters to make their own, it’s likely McCombs has an affinity for Bobby Dupea, the volatile, shiftless oil-well rigger from 1970’s Five Easy Pieces. Dupea has everything he could want, but discards it all in fits of selfishness and unacknowledged confusion as he drives from California to Washington. Foremost among those left behind is Dupea’s girlfriend Rayette Dipesto, a Tammy Wynette-worshipping waitress and the film’s saddest character. Karen Black was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Rayette, though it’s likely that a generation discovered her 40 years later, through her haunting vocals on Catacombs’ “Dreams-Come-True-Girl”.
Black died this past August, and McCombs not only dedicated Wheel to her memory, but gave her the lead on the second of the album’s two versions of “Brighter!” Musically, the song bears mid-tempo similarities to the Orbisonian theater of “Dreams-Come-True-Girl”, though it differs thematically. At once, “Brighter!” is a spiritual invocation and a melancholy tale of a directionless life. “I stopped in for a little while, and learned a host of sins,” Black sings in her highest register. “I wandered off a little while, because you can never win.” Somewhere within the 74-year-old Black’s delivery on this couplet lies a strong hint as to McCombs’ complex moral universe: if you stop moving too long, you won’t like what you learn. | 2013-10-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Domino | October 18, 2013 | 7.9 | 0476beba-b13a-4a36-9b4a-01c82d6ef492 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
The more relaxed, country-adjacent follow-up to 2017’s Enjoy the Great Outdoors pairs pastoral modes with surreal meditations on a warming world. | The more relaxed, country-adjacent follow-up to 2017’s Enjoy the Great Outdoors pairs pastoral modes with surreal meditations on a warming world. | Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else: Hot Spring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spencer-radcliffe-and-everyone-else-hot-spring/ | Hot Spring | Observational humor is a nice way to come to terms with anxiety, a good means by which to develop a gentler relationship with your environs. Spencer Radcliffe’s last full-band album, 2017’s Enjoy the Great Outdoors, was a treat for apocalyptically minded worrywarts, using dusty indie rock to frame an ill-fated attempt to escape a burning city that ended with the getaway car hitting a deer. The world evoked in that album’s sequel, Hot Spring, is just as fraught, but the songs are notably more relaxed. And it might be that by relaxing—by looking out and taking in instead projecting landscapes of nervous ideation from within—Radcliffe the songwriter can access and conjure a fraught world in richer detail. Great songs can come from both places, but Hot Spring taps something special with its wry experiential poetics.
Among what Radcliffe sees around him: birds, bugs, dirt, neighbors, love. Ever attentive to the relentless passage of time, his lyrics place the listener in seasons, even if, per the album’s title, spring’s gotten so hot it might as well be summer. The scenery activated in his songs edges into the territory of some new American pastoral, and so it fits that the music itself takes on a rootsy sound. In the early moments of album opener “The Birds,” cello and pedal steel (a new addition to the Everyone Else band, by Pat Lyons) hum beneath bright acoustic-guitar chords, soon joined by padding drums and a sweet whisper of piano. Simple structures are thickened into full-scale landscapes. If the country-music thing does occasionally slide into the realm of winking pastiche, in general the instrumentation builds a stable ground that wasn’t there in the looser, more guitar-driven sound of Radcliffe’s earlier work.
That sonic fullness translates into a kind of humidity, a persistent and sometimes dread-tinged sense of the buzz of living things. A handful of Radcliffe’s lyrical narratives hinge on journeys interrupted, which in turn become transformations of consciousness or self. On the slow-burning, sing-song “Clocktower,” he’s looking for a solitary walk when the person next door stops to chat. Their conversation shifts to an interior monologue about labor, time, and presence, and the song ends in two and a half minutes of the phrase “tick-tock” sung as a cheerful dirge over noodling guitar. In “Walking Back,” the album’s airiest and most wistful folk micro-anthem, Radcliffe realizes, mid-nostalgic stroll, the accidental violence of his movement:
Ah, you could feel the heat
Of a thousand breaths
A thousand tiny cries rising up begging for mercy sweet
Though I’d been gentle in my step
To the bugs below, I was a giant
I meant certain death
The unplanned violence of a quest laid bare
Bugs are everywhere in this album, an oddity that drifts Radcliffe’s plainspoken observations into something charmingly weird, even posthuman. “True Love’s Territory” trades environmental specificity for folk-song classicism; a chance meeting with a beau upends the narrator, who goes from a happily directionless flea to an explorer carving a path into the unknown.
I could dig into Hot Spring’s latent themes—so delicately yet ironically tucked into all-American musical stylings—of climate change, of the (multispecies!) relationships that might guide our survival. It is, however incidentally, one of the better nature-in-a-post-natural-world albums I can think of. Still, there’s nothing lofty or terribly conceptual in the way these things emerge in Radcliffe’s breezy and mature songs, nor does the album push for anything more specific than looking closely and curiously at what’s around you.
Hot Spring is of the everyday, and so even when it opens itself to deeper, darker places, it does so in a way that’s admirably comfortable and composed. I think of the lyrical ambivalence of the single “Here Comes the Snow,” one of my favorite songs from the album, which I listened to compulsively riding my bike around my North Carolina town during the tail end of our own literal hot spring. In one verse, darkness “dull[s] out the brightest things and cut[s] right to the core” so that “they don’t shine no more”; in another, a “new kind of light” is seen “lighting up the darkest parts/Melting the snow beneath your feet.” In lightness or in dark, the weather comes to pass, but I’m glad to have my senses widened by the detail with which Radcliffe renders the changing modes of its arrival. | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | June 4, 2019 | 7.8 | 047752e3-c09d-4d60-9721-6d624d9ebc69 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
This reissue collects the crude and exceedingly noisy early recordings of the Silver Jews, back when the band included Pavement's Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. | This reissue collects the crude and exceedingly noisy early recordings of the Silver Jews, back when the band included Pavement's Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. | Silver Jews: Early Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16743-early-times/ | Early Times | In the early 1990s, "lo-fi" actually meant something interesting. For all the received ideas about songwriting and performance that had been booted aside in the previous 15 years, almost nobody had seriously interrogated the way rock recordings sounded. The understanding was that you were supposed to reproduce, as closely as possible, what a performance in the same room would have sounded like. Then a string of bands started deliberately doing recording "wrong," or at least asking to what, exactly, "fidelity" in music was supposed to be. Nobody did it wronger-on-purpose than Silver Jews, whose first two EPs-- 1992's Dime Map of the Reef and 1993's The Arizona Record--were pile-ups of cheap cassette wobble and flaws, song fragments, sloppy jams, and flubbed notes, with something cracked but wonderfully original radiating from within them.
The rumor, in 1992, was that this ridiculously named band was actually Pavement under a pseudonym. Dime Map of the Reef came out about a month after Slanted and Enchanted, on the label that had put out some of Pavement's earlier records, and one of the voices on it clearly belonged to one of the Pavement guys; it was obvious! (Fine, laugh. We didn't have Google back then.) Silver Jews weren't Pavement, but for a while the two bands shared singer/guitarist Stephen Malkmus and drummer Bob Nastanovich, and Pavement's early repertoire included "Secret Knowledge of Backroads" and "West S", both of which appear here. (Malkmus has even played the latter solo.)
It became evident with time that Silver Jews were very much singer/guitarist David Berman's band. They had the same progenitor as Pavement (University of Virginia band Ectoslavia), and a pretty similar knack for knotty riffs; both bands had obviously listened to the Fall a lot at an impressionable age. But Berman maybe cared a little less about tunes than Malkmus, and a little more about language. He, in fact, was the one who had come up with the phrase "slanted and enchanted."
Dime Map is more a thrown-down gauntlet than a collection of songs, opening with a fake tourist jingle for Canada and continuing for a packed 7" single's worth of recordings that refuse to behave. "The Unchained Melody"-- no relation to that other "Unchained Melody"-- rambles through an extended introduction, and cheekily fades out in the middle of its first verse. Berman begins "The Walnut Falcon" with a dramatic image of two rams clashing on a mountain, then immediately undercuts its seriousness: "The horns go thwop/ The horns go thwop/ And I'm looking for my snowy bed."
The nine tracks that made up The Arizona Record are more satisfying on their own: The sides of its original vinyl incarnation opened with the two skewed, compelling songs that the Jews shared with Pavement. It's also got a couple of fragmentary songlets-- "Jackson Nightz" cuts from a crappy recording of a promising riff to an even crappier cassette recording of the same, then back to the original version, mid-lyric, and fades out on a snatch of Malkmusian falsetto. But it ends with a piece that actually seems finished, the meditative instrumental guitar trio "Bar Scene from Star Wars".
The Arizona Record and Dime Map are all we get here, although it'd have been nice if this set included the band's other early recordings, including a side of a split single credited to "Silver Jews & Nico." Still, the early Silver Jews' whole aesthetic was built on enforced incompleteness-- suggesting that something amazing had happened on the nights they recorded in Bob Nastanovich's living room, and that they'd just barely managed to catch enough of it on the fly to imply its glory, like a fragment of a Sappho poem. As the Fall put it: "What really went on there? We only have this excerpt." | 2012-06-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | June 21, 2012 | 7.1 | 047960bf-ed2c-4fb6-a117-6ba985a7e626 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Unmoored by the Wind is Los Angeles songwriter Kayla Cohen’s second album under the Itasca name. On this album her work can be classified as a straightforward form of homespun folk. | Unmoored by the Wind is Los Angeles songwriter Kayla Cohen’s second album under the Itasca name. On this album her work can be classified as a straightforward form of homespun folk. | Itasca: Unmoored by the Wind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20115-unmoored-by-the-wind/ | Unmoored by the Wind | "Aloneness is a state of being," Townes Van Zandt once observed, "Whereas loneliness is a state of feeling." On Unmoored by the Wind, Kayla Cohen, a.k.a. Itasca, spends much of her time navigating between those two states. Her folk-derived style is one that seems necessarily borne from many hours spent in solitude and quiet contemplation. And though this solitude has clearly given Cohen the space to perfect her instrumental craft and to revel in the rhythms of the natural world, there is also a subtle tug of melancholy coursing through many of these songs that speaks to a sense of displacement and a yearning for community or connection.
Unmoored by the Wind is Cohen’s second album proper under the Itasca name, following a string of CD-R and cassette releases, including several mystic drone and experimental works that she recorded under the name Sultan. On this album her work can be classified as a much more straightforward form of homespun folk. Cohen’s delicate and expert fingerpicking places her work somewhere in the area of American Primitive, a genre that can always stand to benefit from additional female performers. But on Unmoored by the Wind, her vocals are an even bigger draw. She has a voice that is at once striking and vaguely familiar, the type of voice that will send folk-nerds to rack their memories to decide which other obscure or semi-obscure singer she most resembles. (I’m going with Bridget St. John and/or Sibylle Baier for now.)
Recorded at her home in Los Angeles, the album features the occasional flutter of flute or overdubbed vocal, but is otherwise built almost exclusively on Cohen’s voice and acoustic guitar. She does a fine job of balancing the album’s lyric and instrumental passages, and constructs her songs with enough textural variety and narrative energy that the album’s momentum never flags despite the simplicity of its production. Aside from such baroque interludes as "Colt in Hiding", which features multi-tracked layers of angelic vocals, the album’s overall tone is one of conversational intimacy, and it is not difficult for listeners to feel as if we’ve been invited to pull up a chair right there in the room with her, with the shades partially drawn.
This never feels more literally true than on the prayer-like "After Dawn", which finds the singer sitting quietly by her window watching as the sunlight changes and people flow past. It’s as though she is viewing the world and its human activities from a distant remove, a meditative sort of self-imposed seclusion that is further echoed on such tracks as the pastoral "The Hermit’s View" or the dreamy instrumental idyll of "Walking in Hahamongna".
Elsewhere, however, this sense of isolation from the world grows a bit more pronounced. On the narcotic "Dream of the Water Bearer", the song’s narrator, beset by mysterious dream figures, helplessly waves her hands in the air "just to see if I could change the picture." Similar dream figures appear in "Nature’s Gift", images that "seem as if I’ve called them here" although she is unable to determine how "these angels can help me out."
When the dreamy cobwebs clear away, as on the wake-up call "Alleyway" ("I walk out my door to find the world same as it was before") and especially on the radiant "Congregation", Cohen writes personal pep-talks with the lucidity and clarity of a self-help manual, variously singing "I’ve got to change my ways" or "I’ve got to find my hopeful place to rest" like she is writing lines in a private journal. This feeling that we, as listeners, have been granted access into Itasca’s private inner sanctum is what helps give Unmoored by the Wind its quiet gravity, and her ample instrumental skills and deft songcraft make this invitation well worth your while. | 2015-01-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-01-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | New Images | January 15, 2015 | 7.4 | 047a129f-fdbd-480c-b1ff-3905b7c28736 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
Read Stephen M. Deusner’s review of the album. | Read Stephen M. Deusner’s review of the album. | Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10709-for-emma-forever-ago/ | For Emma, Forever Ago | The biographical details behind the creation of an album shouldn’t matter when it comes to a listener’s enjoyment, but For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon’s debut as Bon Iver, exudes such a strong sense of loneliness and remoteness that you might infer some tragedy behind it. So, to skirt the rumor mill, here are the particulars, as much or as little as they might apply: In 2005, Vernon’s former band DeYarmond Edison moved from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, to North Carolina. As the band developed and matured in its new home, the members’ artistic interests diverged and eventually the group disbanded. While his bandmates formed Megafaun, Vernon—who had worked with the Rosebuds and Ticonderoga—returned to Wisconsin, where he sequestered himself in a remote cabin for four snowy months. During that time, he wrote and recorded most of the songs that would eventually become For Emma, Forever Ago.
As the second half of its title implies, the album is a ruminative collection of songs full of natural imagery and acoustic strums—the sound of a man left alone with his memories and a guitar. Bon Iver will likely bear comparisons to Iron & Wine for its quiet folk and hushed intimacy, but in fact, Vernon, adopting a falsetto that is worlds away from his work with DeYarmond Edison, sounds more like TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe, not just in his vocal timbre, but in the way his voice grows grainier as it gets louder.
Vernon gives a soulful performance full of intuitive swells and fades, his phrasing and pronunciation making his voice as much a purely sonic instrument as his guitar. In the discursive coda of “Creature Fear” he whittles the song down to a single repeated syllable—“fa.” Rarely does folk—indie or otherwise—give so much over to ambience: Quivering guitar strings, mic’ed closely, lend opener “Flume” its eerily interiorized sound, which matches his unsettling similes. “Lump Sum” begins with a choir of Vernons echoing cavernously, which, along with that rhythmically rushing guitar, initiates the listener into the song’s strange space.
For Emma isn’t a wholly ascetic project, though. A few songs benefit from additional recording and input after Vernon’s initial sessions: Christy Smith of Raleigh’s Nola adds flute and drums to “Flume,” and Boston-based musicians John DeHaven and Randy Pingrey add horns to “For Emma”; surprisingly, their company doesn’t break the album’s spell of isolation, but rather strengthens it, as if they’re only his imaginary friends. Vernon turns the cabin's limitations into assets on “The Wolves,” layering his falsetto, tweaking his vocal tones to simple yet devastating effect, and piling on clattering percussion to create a calamitous finale.
That passage contrasts nicely with the simple intro to the next track, “Blindsided,” which builds from a single repeating note into a halting chorus melody that sells his skewed Walden imagery: “I crouch like a crow/Contrasting the snow/For the agony, I’d rather know.” Vernon’s lyrics are puzzle pieces that combine uneasily; his nouns tend to be concrete, yet the meanings slippery. On “Flume,” the lines “I am my mother’s only one/It’s enough” form a strong opener, but the song grows less and less lucid: “Only love is all maroon/Lapping lakes like leery loons/Leaving rope burns—reddish ruse.” It’s as if he’s trying to inhabit the in-between spaces separating musical expression and private rumination, exposing his regrets without relinquishing them. His emotional exorcism proves even more intense for being so tentative. | 2007-10-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-10-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | October 4, 2007 | 8.1 | 047a22ca-aa27-497e-b659-7701995837a2 | 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 Massive Attack associate’s 1995 debut, a gloomy unicorn of contemporary UK pop. | 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 Massive Attack associate’s 1995 debut, a gloomy unicorn of contemporary UK pop. | Tricky: Maxinquaye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tricky-maxinquaye/ | Maxinquaye | Tricky’s Maxinquaye brought grinding doubt and psychedelic waves of paranoia to the radio at a time when Oasis were telling us we would live forever and Blur were living that Parklife. Tricky would go on to release masterful music after: Nearly God and Pre-Millenium Tension, both from 1996, push at the boundary between enjoyment and unease, aching and itching in their weed-infused paranoia. But neither is as elegantly chaotic as Maxinquaye, an unrepeatable record so unbelievably wrong it could only be right. Maxinquaye is a work of beautiful disorder and lucky mistakes. Its success was like the extraordinary run of an underdog sports team to the final: wildly unlikely yet oddly fated.
The crux of Tricky’s early music is the combination of his own deep-smoked vocals and the wispy, melancholy delivery of Martina Topley-Bird, a teenager who Tricky met when she was sitting on a local wall, drunk on cider, after finishing her exams. That chance meeting alone was essential to the genesis of Maxinquaye. Without other moments of serendipity, Tricky might never have become a solo artist. He was born Adrian Thaws in Bristol, England, and his early life was impossibly hard: His mother, Maxine Quaye, died when he was four and his father was rarely around. Tricky met Milo, who would later become a DJ for legendary local soundsystem the Wild Bunch, when he was just a boy; this connection led to him coming on board as a rapper for the group, which in turn gave birth to Massive Attack. While never quite at the center of the Massive Attack world, Tricky featured on the band’s 1991 debut Blue Lines and was sufficiently in their orbit to ask their management for cash when cash was needed.
It was Mark Stewart, the Bristol musician who founded the Pop Group and lived with Tricky in the 1990s, who suggested that Tricky should try to “blag” money from Massive Attack’s managers to make a solo record. It worked, with half of the money going to booze and the remaining £300 to record “Aftermath,” a devastating work of hip-hop blues that Massive Attack apparently passed on. (As ever with Tricky—not the most reliable narrator—it is worth hearing these claims with a skeptical ear.)
“Aftermath” was a statement of intent: a mixture of midnight keyboard trills, rockabilly guitar riffs, haunting flute, and dub basslines that lopes to a dusted boom-bap beat with the menace of a stoned tiger. It could have been one of the classic debut singles of the early ’90s. Yet “Aftermath” languished, unheard beyond its initial white-label release in early 1993, until Tricky’s cousin suggested he try to secure a record deal a couple of years later. Julian Palmer, who ran the Fourth & Broadway imprint within Island UK, was a fan of “Aftermath” and convinced Island to fund recording sessions with Howie B, a Scottish producer who had worked with Siouxsie and the Banshees and Soul II Soul. The sessions produced “Ponderosa,” a bhangra-influenced evil lullaby whose percussive gamelan lurch threatened to drag the song upbeat, even as the lyrics painted a picture of troubled minds and temporary oblivion. “Ponderosa” persuaded Island to sign Tricky, although legal and managerial wrangles detached Howie B from the project and shelved an early batch of songs.
Tricky and Topley-Bird, by now a romantic as well as a musical couple, were on their own to record an album, a process Tricky proclaimed he knew nothing about. In another moment of fortune, he asked Mark Saunders, a producer on Massive Attack associate Neneh Cherry’s debut album, to collaborate on the record, attracted by his handiwork on the Cure’s Wish and Mixed Up. It was—as Island understood it—a fairly straightforward engineering gig. “I don’t think the record company really knew what Tricky did,” Saunders told Sound on Sound in 2007. Island, he says, thought they had signed a DJ/producer who would be perfectly capable of making his own album and had furnished him with a small studio’s worth of equipment in a house in London’s Kilburn to do so. “However, the first day I went to his place to work, it was just littered with vinyl all over the floor,” Saunders explained. “He said, ‘OK, let’s sample this record,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, sure, go ahead.’ He said, ‘No, no, I don’t do any of that stuff.’”
In his book Hell Is Round the Corner, Tricky paints a rather different picture of the album sessions. According to him, Saunders came in at the end of the recording process, after Tricky had produced most of the tracks himself, to mix the album. He also claims that Saunders—“a corny old dude”—didn’t understand the music on Maxinquaye and frequently added unwanted guitar parts to the songs, which Tricky later wiped.
Whatever the case, recording Maxinquaye was a deeply peculiar experience for all involved. Saunders called the album “a complete un-learning experience,” while Tricky was surfing on the power of musical naivety. “Being naive I think is how you construct new music,” he told The Guardian. “When you start thinking too much what is it you’re doing? You’re just making an album. You’re not doing brain surgery.” His aim was simple: “To do an album that’s going to fuck everybody up. No compromise whatsoever.”
When I say that Maxinquaye is unique and unrepeatable, this is what I mean. Tricky’s naivety meant that he approached making music as no one else would, rejecting any kind of musical orthodoxy. “If someone can tell you how they did a song, I don’t trust them,” he once told Rolling Stone. “It should be a magical process.” Saunders relates tales of Tricky asking him to sample two songs that ran at different tempos and in different keys; of Tricky picking from records scattered around his flat seemingly at random; of rough mixes and rotten sounds left in to fester; of borrowing a Portishead sample, stoned, and forgetting about it. Sometimes—as on “Strugglin’,” a remarkably bleak work of slo-mo hip-hop that feels like Houston chopped-and-screwed oozing up through a Bristol gutter—Tricky’s singular choices could be made to work by bending and de-tuning the samples at hand. At other times, this would prove impossible, and Tricky would move swiftly onto the next idea bubbling inside his head.
“Tricky’s genius is just being Tricky,” Saunders explained in 2007. “He had no idea of pitch whatsoever and also not much regard for any kind of timing. He really couldn’t get the concept of four-bar, eight-bar, 12-bar sections; that stuff meant nothing to him.” On this point, Tricky largely agrees: In Hell Is Round the Corner, he proudly explains that he “didn’t know how to make music.” “I had no rules,” he wrote. “I’ve always had weird time signatures, not because I’m trying to do it—some artists use them to try and make their music weird. My music is weird because I don’t know what I’m doing.”
You might expect that Maxinquaye would be the fearsomely unapproachable work of a hip-hop malcontent, a Trout Mask Replica for the Blue Lines set. But somehow these fiercely amusical ideas cohered into exquisitely lush almost-pop songs that chill in their intent while seducing with their delivery, a little like the RZA’s perfectly realized avant-hip-hop beats on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Even at its most experimental—on “Strugglin’” or “Overcome”—Maxinquaye is never less than listenable, while the Michael Jackson-referencing, Britpop-baiting “Brand New You’re Retro” is a poisonous pop dart to the neck.
It would be easy to assume that Saunders deserves credit for the album’s cohesion. “Just for the Hate of It (Rough Monitor Mix),” a precursor to “Abbaon Fat Tracks” included on the 2009 deluxe edition of Maxinquaye, stumbles and lurches, a mess of badly interconnecting elements, while the finished “Abbaon Fat Tracks” glides, weaving together disparate elements—telephone tones, lurching piano, and what sounds like a heavily phased guitar—in a silken mesh. But listen back to an alternate mix of “Aftermath,” taken from the song’s 1993 white-label release, and it is obvious that the irresistible hooks and pop smarts were there from the beginning, rendering the layers of tape hiss and recorded gloop irrelevant.
More than anything, Maxinquaye came from hip-hop. While recording the album, Tricky was invested heavily in the Geto Boys’ horror-scarred Southern rap, and hip-hop runs in deep currents underneath Maxinquaye, from the scuffed breakbeats to Tricky’s mumbled raps. But Tricky has broad musical tastes—he once named Frank Sinatra’s “That’s Life” and “Lalla Laroussa” by Algerian rai singer Cheb Anouar among his 10 favorite songs—and these pushed Maxinquaye into unlikely new spaces.
Tricky considered Maxinquaye to be “new music,” and you can see what he means. He’s not recreating anything, though you can hear a debt to everything from the Specials’ pointed ska fusions to labelmate PJ Harvey’s heart-on-sleeve bluesy intensity. At the same time, Maxinquaye wears the sharp thrill of perfect pop music. Tricky would claim to be annoyed by the success of Maxinquaye—which reached No. 3 in the UK charts, turning it into what he called ”a coffee-table album”—but he was always a fan of more adventurous pop artists, notably Kate Bush, who he called “in the same league as John Lennon.”
In assimilating these expansive tastes, Tricky was surely influenced by his upbringing in Bristol, the culturally adventurous Western English city that helped birth Massive Attack, Portishead, Flying Saucer Attack, Rip Rig + Panic, Smith & Mighty, John Parish, Roni Size, and Krust. Tricky may claim to have little time for talk of a Bristol scene (and very little time for Portishead) but it seems noteworthy that this musical free spirit grew up in a city where the Wild Bunch mixed punk with R&B and Massive Attack added reggae, soul, and downtempo hip-hop to their soundsystem stew.
Topley-Bird’s vocals also played an important, if perhaps unconscious, role in sweetening the Maxinquaye pill. Tricky wanted to foreground a female voice in the role of “my mum speaking through me,” and many of the lyrics were written from a woman’s perspective, adding a prescient sense of gender fluidity to the record. Where Tricky’s voice is rough and phlegmy, with all the silent menace of the powerful, Topley-Bird’s is a cobwebbed whisper, somehow both lush and fragile, like the thinnest silk thread.
Don’t mistake this delicacy for weakness, though. On songs like “Brand New You’re Retro” or “Black Steel,” Topley-Bird has an incredible swagger, while on “Abbaon Fat Tracks,” she is alarmingly blank and predatory. Tricky used different vocalists on two Maxinquaye songs—Alison Goldfrapp on “Pumpkin” and Ragga on “You Don’t”—and, to my mind, they feel slightly off, like representatives of a parallel universe where Tricky and Topley-Bird never met.
Topley-Bird also brought the lion’s share of vocal melody to Maxinquaye, spinning off improvised tunes like velveteen rabbits from a hat. Rather than suggesting that Topley-Bird listen to his tracks in advance and reflect on what she would sing, Tricky would apparently hand his teenage foil a set of lyrics and send her off to the kitchen to improvise a take. It was, Topley-Bird said, “totally instinctive.” “There was no time to drum up an alter ego,” she told The Guardian. Yet the melodies she came up with are otherworldly and sublime, from the hairs-on-the-back-of-the-neck revolt of “Strugglin’” to the disinterested disgust she lays on “Abbaon Fat Tracks.”
These various themes—happy accidents and wide tastes, casual melodic power and genre ambivalence—collided on “Black Steel,” a strutting, guitared-up half-cover of Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” that dented the UK charts. The track started with a scratchily recorded drum loop from “Rukkumani Rukkumani,” taken from Indian film composer A. R. Rahman’s Roja soundtrack, which Tricky had received from the mother of his former girlfriend and to which someone—possibly Saunders—added a backward guitar riff. When it came time for Topley-Bird to record her vocals, Tricky couldn’t be bothered to write them out in full, so Topley-Bird ended up using just the song’s first verse, to which she improvised one of her most powerful melodies, twisting and swooping like a bird escaping from its cage. Techno-rock act FTV, who Tricky had met at a gig, added snarling guitar and Sex Pistols-style drums to create a supremely unlikely—and yet entirely fitting—Bollywood/rock/techno/hip-hop take on the Public Enemy classic.
Maxinquaye was an immediate sensation in the UK, selling 100,000 copies in its first months of release. It even made an impact in the U.S.—something almost unknown for a hip-hop-leaning act from the UK at the time—and Tricky teamed up with Gravediggaz for The Hell EP, cementing a stylistic union with RZA. For an album so rooted in Bristol, Maxinquaye’s reach remains surprisingly universal: Tricky might have claimed that Beyoncé had never heard of him when she invited him to guest at her 2011 Glastonbury headline slot, but without the critical and commercial success of his debut, that bizarre cameo surely would never have happened. Such public recognition came at a price. Alongside the output of Portishead and Massive Attack, Maxinquaye would come to be seen as a leading work of the trip-hop movement, a stylistic tag that Tricky hated. “I don’t really know what trip-hop is, I think it’s bollocks to be honest,” Tricky told Dummy in 2013. “People call Morcheeba trip-hop don’t they? Well I’ve never listened to them.”
You can understand his distrust of the label. Tricky’s music is far darker and more abstruse than the soft-soap hip-hop beats of Morcheeba or Sneaker Pimps; it is far more claustrophobic than Massive Attack’s celebrated trio of ’90s albums; and there is little to no connection between the scorched velvet of Tricky and Topley-Bird’s vocal pairing and the operatic intensity of Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. Tricky had poured his whole life into Maxinquaye and had no desire to see his music watered down by weakling imitators armed with a sampler and a couple of library-music albums.
Even if his debut were trip-hop, Tricky would spend the next few years recording an increasingly bleak collection of records intended to “kill all that Maxinquaye bullshit,” resulting in the noxious paranoia of Nearly God and the vibe-suffocating desolation of Pre-Millenium Tension. With the ratcheting nerves of Tricky’s subsequent albums—2020’s Fall to Pieces was his 14th—Tricky’s star has faded somewhat, and he has bounced label to label and collaborator to collaborator. For almost 30 years, listeners have been waiting for Tricky to return to the monumentally anomalous charms of Maxinquaye, a record regularly cited among the best albums of the ’90s.
They will wait in vain. To revisit such singular territory is unthinkable, like wishing lightning would strike twice with a slightly updated color scheme. Even if Tricky wanted to return to the sound of Maxinquaye, he almost certainly couldn’t. Maxinquaye was based on musical instinct—on not knowing what was right, and caring even less. But chance encounters happen only once, and innocence lasts only so long. In recording Maxinquaye, Tricky inevitably started to absorb the conventions of musical production, slowly strangling the goose even as it laid the golden egg. Fall to Pieces is a great album, agonizing in its wounded depths; but, the odd anarchistic touch aside, it is a fairly orthodox record, one that appears to know all about eight-bar sections, consonant harmonies, and the other musical conventions to which Tricky was once so gloriously indifferent.
Like fashioning a house of cards in a strong wind, Maxinquaye held its destruction in its own creation and its failure in its success: a borderline unclassifiable work that was Tricky in both name and nature. If we can no more remake Maxinquaye than land another first man on the Moon, it remains a magnificent singularity, a full-on solar eclipse of an album that blotted out all precedent to seek refuge in the shadows. | 2022-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Island | March 27, 2022 | 9.3 | 047cf3a9-8b24-468c-9c2b-7fd9a9825e67 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
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 Australian superstar’s 1997 departure to clubland, a misunderstood journey of self-discovery that became the black sheep of her catalog. | 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 Australian superstar’s 1997 departure to clubland, a misunderstood journey of self-discovery that became the black sheep of her catalog. | Kylie Minogue: Impossible Princess | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kylie-minogue-impossible-princess/ | Impossible Princess | Kylie Minogue asks what if. In her radiant pop world, every feeling tingles with possibility: the longed-for romance that you barely dare whisper, the intoxication after just one drop, the liberation under the strobe light. She is love’s defiant crusader who, in her 1987 single “I Should Be So Lucky,” made being ignored by a crush sound flat-out delightful. She has an answer to everything; rejection is her gasoline. You don’t want my love? Put your hand on your heart and tell me. Most famously, she is consumed with an infatuation so dizzying it defies words, bubbling to the surface only as la la la.
The Australian artist’s music is an invitation to share what she feels, an ethos that has enthroned Minogue as an icon of positivity and a poet laureate of dancefloor communion. “It’s hard work being a Kylie,” said Björk, a friend of Minogue in the ’90s. “It’s a service to the nation. You have to smile and do handshakes—it’s like being a diplomat, or the Queen.”
On her 1997 album Impossible Princess, pop royalty went rogue. Minogue simmers with rage, thrashing at the limits of torture and tenderness in a dark tango with the frenetic club music of the day. With help from a slate of buzzy producers, her unvarnished songwriting tangles with underground styles including pulverizing breakbeat and drum’n’bass, throbbing techno and ambient rave, as well as joyous jangle pop. If Minogue’s earlier music had been seen as a universal opiate, this was a mischievous abdication of civic duty.
Minogue considered the record a personal triumph. “I had people controlling me for years,” she told New Idea at the time. “Now I am reveling in the fact that I have control, I take responsibility for my decisions and I live and die by them.” But Impossible Princess was troubled by a messy rollout, label mismanagement, and some stale collaborations, making it more complicated than a straightforward artistic win. She would never make a record like it again.
Born in Melbourne, Kylie Minogue started acting professionally at age 8 in a period drama called The Sullivans. After a series of roles in her teens, she became a star in the UK and Australia thanks to a role on the sunny soap opera Neighbours, in which she played a tough-talking mechanic named Charlene. Within a year, Minogue became known simply as “Kylie” to an entire continent and was whooshing down the soap actress to pop star pipeline. She signed to PWL, the London-based label that was home to Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW), a British production trio that had helped to define ’80s Hi-NRG disco, crafting landmark singles for Dead or Alive, Divine, and Hazell Dean. SAW were the architects of Minogue’s sparkling early sound, powered by her winsome, youthful image and dance-pop that snapped like a rubber band. “They told me what to sing, what clothes to wear, and how to look in my photographs,” Minogue later said of PWL. She likened the experience to being “knee-deep in concrete.”
After four albums with PWL, Minogue signed to the independent dance label Deconstruction in 1993, favoring the small London imprint over offers from EMI and A&M for the creative freedom it offered. The promise turned out to be bluster. Her first release for the label, 1994’s Kylie Minogue, was meticulously A&R’d. That album boasts one of her best songs in the iridescent “Confide in Me” and some nice post-Erotica pop-house, but had plenty of missed opportunities too. A exhilarating Pet Shop Boys demo, “Falling,” was remixed into an elegant wisp (Minogue liked that decision; it sounded like Mr. Fingers, whom she adored). The label also nixed a Prince duet Minogue had been planning (Minogue did not like that decision). Deconstruction “had no idea what they wanted, apart from being different from the SAW stuff,” said Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne, who worked on two unreleased tracks for the record. Minogue later called it “a musical bridge over troubled waters”—one she had to “endure” to get to Impossible Princess.
Outside of music, Minogue’s three-year relationship with INXS’ Michael Hutchence had, she said, taken her “blinkers off” to a wider cultural world. She was a fan of dance labels like Mo’Wax and Source Lab, went clubbing at Aphex Twin’s legendary party Rephresh, and was listening to Tricky, Daft Punk, Massive Attack, and Beck. After what she described as a “Hollywood faux pas” in the 1994 turkey Street Fighter, she starred in a Sam Taylor-Wood art film, Misfit, lip-syncing to the last known recording of a castrato from 1904. In 1995, she duetted with Nick Cave on the murder ballad “Where the Wild Roses Grow,” singing from the perspective of a slain virgin. Performing the song on Top of the Pops with Cave, Minogue wore a dress from Alexander McQueen’s incendiary 1995 collection Highland Rape. She looked like a Pre-Raphaelite heroine ready to be reborn.
Minogue’s boyfriend at the time was Stéphane Sednaoui, a French-born artist and director who helped to define the scrappy, surreal aesthetic of post-grunge MTV with music videos like Smashing Pumpkins’ “Today,” Fiona Apple’s “Sleep to Dream,” and Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” To Minogue, Sednaoui represented freedom—and the kaleidoscopic escapes depicted in his music videos seemed like welcome relief from the paparazzi hounding her in London, where she had lived since 1990. The pair embarked on a series of trips to Australia, Japan, South Korea, and piled into a muscle car for a month-long road trip across the U.S. Minogue snapped photos on her Contax camera. She began writing in her notebook, and found that she had much to say.
Cave had passed Minogue a book by the British punk poet Billy Childish titled Poems to Break the Harts of Impossible Princesses, a collection which grapples with generational trauma and finding one’s place in a broken world. She brought the book along to an early meeting with Brothers in Rhythm, a British production outfit who had collaborated with Janet Jackson and Pet Shop Boys. Inspired by Childish’s writing, they began working on a song called “Dreams.” Here, too, Minogue asked what if? But for the first time, the target was her own desires, rather than canny twists on the pop playbook. “To taste every moment and try everything/To be hailed as a hero, branded a fool/Believe in the sacred and break every rule,” she sang, over lushly orchestrated trip-hop. “These are the dreams of an impossible princess.” Delivered with the sincerity of a fairy tale, Minogue’s earnest message of spiritual clarity is unexpectedly moving. On a 2022 episode of the This Is Disco podcast, Brothers in Rhythm’s Steve Anderson recalled his mindset after the session: “We have to scrap everything we’ve been doing [...] We have to create this blanket of safety to let her experiment, and we have to help her make the record that she wants to make.”
To record Impossible Princess, Minogue traveled with Brothers in Rhythm to Real World, a bucolic residential studio owned by Peter Gabriel. Over a weeks-long stay, the boundary between her life and creative process began to dissolve. She lived in a small house opposite the studio, working on demos in a glorified closet behind a maintenance room. “I was quite obsessed by my album,” she told Australia’s Feast Magazine. “It [was] like [an] ache that every now and then is really obvious. Which makes it sound like a bad thing, but it wasn’t.”
The resulting album is Minogue’s umwelt—her individual sensory world—made real, propelled by vibrant perceptions and impressions that are, at times, delivered with ferocity. “Too Far” is a phantasmagoria of frenetic drum ’n’ bass, breakbeat, sawing violins, buzzing bees, and layered pleas and screams. In the verses, Minogue can barely keep up with her thoughts, as if she’s frantically trying to capture the realization that every painful ending can be a wonderful new beginning. “‘Too Far’... is as psychotic as I’ve been,” she said in a 1997 interview with The Big Issue. It was the end of a relationship, and she was angry and hurt. “I went for a walk to the end of the street and into a cafe, and wrote it all down to get it off my chest. I got the moment by the throat by putting it all on paper.” Ten minutes later, the song was done. “Some of my favorite songs weren’t changed [after writing],” she said of the album. “No going back and rearranging. Just subconscious scrawl that formed itself, and I found those ones really pleasing.”
Minogue paired her raw automatic writing with vocals that shapeshifted to its moods. On the 140-BPM techno heater “Drunk,” she dances with oblivion, sounding wrecked over menacing strings. “Time and space and hurt and tears are not enough,” she slurs, bleeding into the next bar, before an accelerating beat brings an epiphany. On the industrial-dance whiplash of “Limbo,” co-produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball, she tries out jazzy impressionism over synths that rev and swerve. She shifts into unexpected registers—stretching some syllables, and cramming others into spaces where there’s only room for one: I’m HUUUUUURTing!/Helpmeout.
The album Minogue delivered to Deconstruction was quite different from the one we hear today. The label informed her there was no lead single, and cut fascinating experiments including the psychedelic trip-hop of “You’re the One,” the smoky jazz of “Stay This Way,” and a nine-minute interplanetary rave ballad titled “Take Me With You.” Minogue was paired with Manic Street Preachers, scuzzy glam rockers turned UK rock radio mainstays, in an attempt to get a hit. The trio rounded out the tracklist with “I Don’t Need Anyone” and “Some Kind of Bliss,” brightly gleaming Britpop moments that already felt dated by 1997, a year when even the subgenre’s architects like Blur were turning to alt-rock. The songs were an ill fit for the album, but, in a textbook bait and switch, “Some Kind of Bliss” was chosen as Impossible Princess’ lead single against the wishes of Minogue, who wanted “Limbo.” “Some Kind of Bliss” reached No. 22 on the UK charts, her lowest-charting single to date.
The British press called Minogue’s new musical direction “Indie Kylie,” a term which probably had more to do with the singer working with the Manics and her new cropped hairdo. But it cast a broader sense of suspicion over Minogue, as if she was masquerading for Cool Britannia points. In fact, Minogue’s music had never hewed so closely to the sounds dominating mainstream pop, particularly in the UK, where the charts are historically quicker to embrace the club. Nevertheless, the album was Minogue’s biggest commercial failure. Originally scheduled for September, it was hastily repackaged with the title Kylie Minogue following the death of Princess Diana in August—which made it, oddly, Minogue’s second consecutive self-titled album—and trickled into stores around the world that fall, before finally making its way to Australia in January 1998 and the UK in March. It stalled at No. 4 in Minogue’s home country and at No. 10 in the UK, but has since become a fan favorite: A 2022 vinyl reissue restored the album’s original title and charted higher in both countries.
Minogue’s effervescent voice was a perfect vehicle for PWL-era pop, but audiences and critics were unused to hearing darker themes delivered in a light lyric soprano—her register read as bubblegum. A Sydney Morning Herald review of Impossible Princess noted the lack of “guts in her voice,” and The Guardian said, of one track, that “it could be any breathy vamp singing it.” NME’s pan of Impossible Princess envisioned Minogue “singing into her hairbrush in front of her bedroom mirror, hamming up proceedings without anything approaching conviction.”
The world didn’t seem to know what to do with a cirrous voice singing about serious things. Minogue’s high-femme take on ennui had little similarity to Madonna’s late-’90s Earth Mother reincarnation, and even less in common with the grit and gristle of Grammy favorites like Alanis Morissette or Sheryl Crow. Minogue emphasized her comfort with higher registers on Impossible Princess’ most intimate songs like “Breathe,” an isolation chamber of airy subtlety, and “Say Hey,” a minimal techno trip cocooned in the purrs and sighs of self-pleasure. But the double standard ate at her. In 2020, she spoke of feeling like an imposter, asking rhetorically, “How are you being successful if they’re telling you that you can’t sing and your voice is not a valid voice?”
The notion of a pop star snatching the reins from label bigwigs to make a personal album is cliché. But Minogue’s late ’90s weren’t so much a matter of wresting control away from her bosses as working through their neglect. Deconstruction label head Pete Hadfield was unwell, and as a result the record company’s A&R department “hadn’t really been present for much of the album’s development,” wrote Minogue’s creative director William Baker in the 2002 book Kylie: La La La. “Creative control of the project was left with Kylie and Stéphane.” Minogue and Sednaoui were well-connected in the music world, but famous friends are no substitute for a seasoned A&R. A wider network of co-writers could have helped shape Minogue’s clunkier lyrics on songs like “Through the Years” and “Dreams”; additional producers might have opened the throttle on slight almost-anthems like “Cowboy Style” and the Japanese-edition bonus track “Tears.” The lack of support got to Minogue, who said in a 2000 interview with Rolling Stone Australia: “On some songs, lyrically it’s obvious to me now that I am saying, ‘I’m not waving. I am, in fact, drowning. Hello? Is there anybody there?’ At the time I felt like there was no one to help me.” A few months after the release of Impossible Princess, Deconstruction dropped her.
While Impossible Princess is Kylie Minogue at her most impish and spectacularly strange, it also offers insight into her private growing pains at a time when she felt abandoned by the music industry. Isolated and in a state of psychic turmoil, she threw off the burden of speaking for everyone and spoke only for herself. She is the girl who knows too much, who needs saving from herself. In its bracing honesty and crafty embrace of unexpected sounds, Impossible Princess shares a sibling bond with contemporaneous albums like Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope and Madonna’s Ray of Light, forming a trilogy of A-list experimental pop records in 1997-8 that addressed their artists’ fears, anxieties, and dreams. Minogue’s album is rather more scattered—fascinatingly so—but you can’t blame mainstream audiences for being reluctant to unpick a Gordian knot. Crucially, it has no euphoric floor-filler like “Together Again” or “Ray of Light,” moments of transcendence that drew pop fans to albums of wisdom and weight.
In her later music, Minogue avoided anything like Impossible Princess. She followed the record by signing to Parlophone and releasing 2000’s Light Years and 2001’s Fever, critical and commercial juggernauts that showcased Minogue at her dance-pop zenith. Understandably, she is no longer interested in creating music about her struggles. Not when civic duty beckons. In 2007, following a battle with cancer, Minogue released her tenth album, X, a collection of glossy electro-pop performed in structural outfits that resembled armor. Some wondered if she had considered bringing her private trauma into her music once again. “If I’d done an album of personal songs it’d be seen as Impossible Princess 2 and be equally critiqued,” she said. “I didn’t want every song to be about being ill. I wanted to do what I do.” | 2023-01-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | BMG / Deconstruction / Mushroom | January 22, 2023 | 7.6 | 047d5fe2-0ea8-4c29-b3a0-4f1d196317ab | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
The urbano star’s third album pushes him beyond his comfort zone as a romantic reggaetonero—and abandons some of the qualities that once made him unique. | The urbano star’s third album pushes him beyond his comfort zone as a romantic reggaetonero—and abandons some of the qualities that once made him unique. | Ozuna: Nibiru | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ozuna-nibiru/ | Nibiru | When you’re the biggest star on the internet, is there anywhere to go but down? Such was Ozuna’s dilemma as he headed into 2019. His first two LPs (2017’s Odisea and 2018’s Aura) sold more than half a million units each, and he had just been crowned YouTube’s most-viewed artist of 2018, featuring in four of the platform’s top 10 most-streamed videos of the year. He teased his third LP, Nibiru, three months after Aura’s release, and the excitement was palpable. But things didn’t exactly play out as planned.
Behind the scenes, the 27-year-old Dominican-Puerto Rican was being extorted over an “intimate” video from his teen years, which ended with his extortionist’s murder (Ozuna was never a suspect). He was nominated for a Latin Grammy for Best Urban Song, but lost out to an artist who isn’t even Latin. And after two years of releasing an album each August, he was still working on Aura’s followup through the fall. By the time Nibiru was released at the end of November, expectations had reached a fever pitch that would prove almost impossible to meet.
Nibiru is a self-described urbano record—that umbrella term that encompasses the reggaetón, trap, and R&B currently dominating the Spanish-language pop charts. Reggaetón is made for the dancefloor, fueled by a classic, irresistible riddim. And Latin trap can trace its roots back to Atlanta’s strip clubs, with basslines that ooze sex and sleaze. Ozuna typically occupies the space in between, a romantic reggaetonero who softens the edges of the traperos he often collaborates with. Tracks like “Se Preparó” and “Síguelo Bailando,” from his debut LP, crystallize this notion, conjuring a suave and sophisticated aesthetic imbued with both confidence and vulnerability. Nibiru extends him beyond this comfort zone, and in the process, loses some of what made him unique.
Named for a fictional planet where Ozuna makes his music before bringing it back down to earth, the LP hints at the scope of his ambition: He’s been beyond the clouds, searching for new territory after so thoroughly and quickly conquering YouTube. There are glimpses of that otherworldly talent on Nibiru. His agile flow en español shines on “Yo Tengo una Gata,” a kush-cloud duet with Panamanian reggaetonero Sech, with a simple synth melody that yowls with heartache. And “Baila Baila Baila” may be almost a year old, but it has endured as one of the biggest dance tracks of the year and reveals Ozuna’s mastery at writing hooks.
Much of the rest of Nibiru suffers from an identity crisis, and most of its hip-hop collaborations feel like regressions. “Eres Top,” which revisits Diddy’s early-aughts hit “I Need a Girl Part 2,” feels hollow, like DJ Snake slapped the reggaetón riddim on top of the original and called it a day. And “Patek” wastes some of the album’s strongest production on a tired post-Future trope of soothing heartache with expensive cars and watches, and features one of Snoop Dogg’s wackest verses of the decade, a category with intense competition. The Swae Lee-featuring “Sin Pensar” is a notable exception; Ozuna naturally assimilates into the Rae Sremmurd hook wizard’s MIDI-toned future pop&B, and their Auto-Tuned harmonies sound as natural as anything robotic ever could.
Ozuna’s growing pains were likely inevitable. It is entirely possible that the pressure to constantly churn out music led to some of Nibiru’s missteps. That this record could be considered “late,” coming just 15 months after 2018’s Aura, is evidence of the outsized expectations for a contemporary urbano star. Not exactly a triumphant return, the inconsistent Nibiru contains some of his best and worst work. It’s a record made by a massive talent who’s not quite sure what to do next. That it disappoints has as much to do with the promise of its creator as it does the quality of its contents. | 2019-12-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Sony Music Latin | December 31, 2019 | 6.8 | 04803aa5-771d-4297-b8e2-8ab1a98b7753 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Malmo-based group's second album is full of syrupy pop songs-- effortless vocals riding the crest of soft-focus synths and programmed drums. | Malmo-based group's second album is full of syrupy pop songs-- effortless vocals riding the crest of soft-focus synths and programmed drums. | The Radio Dept.: Pet Grief | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9003-pet-grief/ | Pet Grief | There's something about Swedish pop music that strikes me as clinical. Chalk it up to a relentless sense of perfectionism-- this is a country that not only produced "Dancing Queen" but also the exquisite engineering of Saab and the precision of Björn Borg's backhand. The dream pop of Malmo's Radio Dept. is cut from the same cloth. Their second album, Pet Grief, is stacked with syrupy pop songs, as Johan Duncanson's effortless vocals ride the crest of soft-focus synths and programmed drums. But too often, the songs come off like the sonic equivalent of IKEA furniture: highly functional, sleekly designed, and sterile.
That might sound harsh, but it doesn't mean that Pet Grief is lacking. Part of these songs' charm is their love affair with sounds from the 1980s and early 90s-- like a more ethereal, Quaalude-doped version of the Pet Shop Boys or New Order's energetic electro-pop. But the ingredients are there, from dancefloor beats and big piano chords to layers of majestic, string-aping synths. "Every Time", the album's catchiest song, even cops the flat, treble-drenched distortion of My Bloody Valentine's guitars, and Duncanson's half-whispered delivery decorates with a fragile and compulsive melody. Between the band's production choices and lovely (if understated) vocals, Pet Grief is built to be instantly pleasing and, as a result, sometimes smacks of déjá vu.
This lack of originality is echoed in Duncanson's musings on relationships, which are often trite to the point of unfeeling. On "Tell", for instance, he simply announces, "Betrayal is always sad". It would be an insufferable moment if his no-brainer observation wasn't packaged with easily loveable music. Elsewhere, his naïveté is more amusing. Concerning a girlfriend that has moved on, he takes comfort in knowing that her new boyfriend has "the worst taste in music," explaining, "If I didn't know this, I'd lose it." It's a line at once juvenile and touching, illustrating the little ways we negotiate pain.
The songs on Pet Grief are easy to fall in love with; the facile melodies and slick production eliminate any barriers to enjoyment. But the lack of challenge-- few surprises, scant diversity-- means you won't want to put the album on for repeat listens, even if you're never compelled to turn it off while it's playing. Radio Dept. could sacrifice a little polish for a few more rough edges. | 2006-06-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2006-06-16T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Labrador | June 16, 2006 | 7.4 | 0481a3a3-dca7-427a-8938-84a176523534 | John Motley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-motley/ | null |
Three years after they reached superstardom with The Heist, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis return with This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, a blend of juvenile joke raps, inquisitive woke raps, and diaristic contemplations of Macklemore’s life that attempts to prove they belong—that they’re not just white saviors trying to project their face onto the culture. | Three years after they reached superstardom with The Heist, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis return with This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, a blend of juvenile joke raps, inquisitive woke raps, and diaristic contemplations of Macklemore’s life that attempts to prove they belong—that they’re not just white saviors trying to project their face onto the culture. | Macklemore / Ryan Lewis: This Unruly Mess I've Made | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21504-this-unruly-mess-ive-made/ | This Unruly Mess I've Made | "You got robbed," begins the most guilt-ridden apology of the 21st century. "I wanted you to win. You should have. It's weird and it sucks that I robbed you." The screencap seen 'round the world explains the duality of Ben Haggerty, aka Macklemore, whose unexpected mainstream appeal has enabled him and his music partner, Ryan Lewis, to rise to the top of the industry. At the 2014 Grammys, the duo’s The Heist had defeated Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city for the Best Rap Album Grammy, an upset that weighed on Macklemore’s conscience. He reached out to Lamar, screencapping the mea culpa for Instagram so everyone could see how just how hard he’d fallen on his sword.
Macklemore understood that the only people who thought The Heist was better or more important than good kid were Grammy voters and misguided white teenagers. But he also needed deeply for the world to know he understood. This same tension between humility and ego fueled his crossover smash hit "Same Love," which advocated for the very non-controversial idea that "being gay is okay" and made them unlikely spokesmen for easily digestible social justice. It also prompted criticisms that they weren’t ready to preach from the mount, and after a few years spent internalizing those criticisms, they’ve returned with This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, a blend of juvenile joke raps, inquisitive woke raps, and diaristic contemplations of Macklemore’s life that attempts to prove they belong—that they’re not just white saviors trying to project their face onto the culture.
"Music was intended to be that one thing that we could rely on to disrupt the norm," Macklemore said in a video announcing the album. "Start conversations and change the way that we think and we feel." When he released "White Privilege II," a sprawling monologue in which wonders if he’s an interloper and lectures about the literal definition of white supremacy, he didn’t just drop the mic and try to let the song speak for itself. Instead, he gave interviews about the song with non-white publications, and launched a website in which he and his collaborators—including Chicago singer Jamila Woods (who sung the hook on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s "Sunday Candy"), community organizer Dustin Washington, activist Nikkita Oliver, and more—detailed its conception. There was a lot of effort to convince you he was taking the issue of white privilege very, very seriously. Call him the rap game Matt McGorry—the rare white pop star making political music with explicitly middlebrow outreach.
And make no mistake, Macklemore is taking a lot of issues very seriously. "Same Love" wasn’t complicated, but it put a human face on gay marriage that was able to connect with millions of Americans. Here, the clattering funk of "Kevin" reaches for a similar understanding about the prescription drug crisis, as the accessibility of opioids like Oxycontin has devastated low-income (and white) communities across the country. Macklemore is a former addict, and his invective about the parasitic sway of drug abuse ("We play Russian Roulette/ And try to find a life where we could be content/ ‘Cause for us, we're just trying to minimize the fear of being alive") carries the moral authority of lived experience. (In interviews, he’s said he also lapsed back into his addiction within the past few years, giving his words a different urgency.)
But Leon Bridges’ hook is too moralizing, and it has the maudlin feel of a song written to solve a problem. Macklemore has more appeal as the everyman—a normal guy who who just stumbled into all this pageantry. On the opener "Light Tunnels," he narrates a trip to an awards show: He feels desperately out of place in his town car and his tux, the industry’s eyes on him without his friends for support. ("I wish I had the homies with me here but nope/ Most of the artists I know don’t get invited to this show.") He waxes about how "they" want gossip, drama, for Kanye's rant "to go on longer." As he accepts an award (which may be the Grammy he robbed Kendrick of), he ponders how he’ll explain "this unruly mess I’ve made"—a slightly disingenuous "aw shucks" characterization of his career that nevertheless communicates some truth about the weight of his expectations.
"Buckshot," meanwhile, reflects on his days as a rebellious graffiti artist, featuring KRS-One and DJ Premier, and "St. Ides" is a tender travelogue of his days as a teenage alcoholic. On "Growing Up," Macklemore dictates a comprehensive list of cool-dad lessons for his newborn child ("Listen to your teachers, but cheat in calculus"; "Take your girl to the prom, but don’t get too drunk hanging out the limo.") His knowledge is slightly undermined when he recommends reading Langston Hughes’ A Raisin in the Sun (Langston Hughes did not write A Raisin in the Sun), but hey, nobody’s perfect.
He developed the big-tent struggle gospel sound of The Heist with Ryan Lewis after a decade spent as an underground rapper, and the formula hasn’t changed much here: There are still lots of choirs, dramatic string cues, and dewy pianos set to tug heart strings. Even a goofy song like "Dance Off" gets a swelling horror-movie organ intro before a big dancehall rhythm kicks in. It’s atypical backing music for a rap album, but Macklemore is kind of an atypical rapper. His cadence tends to fall between "impassioned slam poet" and "guy talking in your ear," and when he’s doing the latter, the lights dim on the production. "The Train" is set solely to piano and the sound of a train whizzing over the tracks, as he softly raps about how his growing responsibilities have pulled him away from his family. "St. Ides" is almost completely muted but for a pealing guitar riff. It sounds like the reference track was Buffalo Springfield’s "For What It’s Worth," or like, the Mountain Goats.
The hit here is "Downtown," which features three legitimate rap pioneers—Melle Mel, Kool Moe Dee, and Grandmaster Caz—and passionate vocal theatrics from Foxy Shazam’s Eric Nally. Macklemore’s verses are trivial—the opening verse details his attempt to purchase a Moped—but there’s an appealing breeziness to his low-stakes ribbing. The rap O.G.s aren’t given much to do, acting as a chanting Greek chorus and flexing in the video, but their presence gives the song the feeling of an event and allows Macklemore to show he knows and respects his history. (According to Kool Moe Dee, it was Big Daddy Kane who brokered the collaboration.) "Downtown" is a Broadway song, basically—rap for people who loved Hamilton. I hear it and imagine parades, streamers, the Super Bowl half-time show they will probably someday play.
Macklemore is also a skilled mimic. He presses hat to heart when Chance the Rapper is around, spits with cocksure nostalgia around KRS-One and DJ Premier, does budget OG Maco-flow trading lines with YG on "Bolo Tie." On album highlight "Need to Know," Chance delivers a thoughtful verse about the pitfalls of fame—being alienated from the white girls who "call me nigga at my show," feeling the pressure to strip the spirituality out of his music and "just leave the cool parts." (Meanwhile, Macklemore offers hashtag rap in the guise of self-awareness: "I only think about my worth, I only think about my come up/ Capitalism.") It’s the opposite of Chance’s stint on Kanye’s "Ultralight Beam," where he exclaimed "I’m just having fun with it!" But Chance isn’t here to have fun, because Macklemore is so granite-faced on the serious songs that his guest stars have no choice but to match his mood.
"Fun" is reserved for songs like "Dance Off" (in which Idris Elba challenges you to a dance off) or "Brad Pitt’s Cousin" (in which Macklemore boasts that "every white dude in America went to the barbershop: 'Give me the Macklemore haircut'"). That said, it isn’t always easy to tell when Macklemore is trying to be fun, or when we are having fun at his expense. "Let’s Eat" is presumably about our collective body image issues, but the jokiness prevents it from getting a foothold. Macklemore would not be the first rapper to alternate between goofiness and gravitas, but the gulf between sober analysis of Oxycontin abuse and white privilege, and the "DEEZ NUTS" jokes is just too wide. If he’s serious about wanting to "start conversations and change the way that we think and we feel," he needs to sound as comfortable serving wisdom as he does shooting Sandler-esque wisecracks.
The trumped-up portentousness of "White Privilege II" is still difficult to digest. It’s a messy explainer of his still-forming politics, a Facebook status come to life. His heart is in the right place, but it’s hard to justify on musical terms. He doesn’t deserve a free pass for being well-intentioned, of course. But "White Privilege II" is different from, say, Brad Paisley and LL Cool J’s "Accidental Racist," another race-focused song with its heart in the right place that nevertheless missed the mark because it made no attempt to examine its founding premises. ("If you don’t judge my gold chains, I’ll forget the iron chains" is not a fair trade.) Instead, Macklemore is laboring to show us, brick by awkwardly-rapped brick, how he laid the foundation of his new ideology. It isn’t a link to a Wikipedia page—it’s the whole article. As a song, it’s not great. As an endeavor, it’s hard to be snide about. His credibility regarding his intellectual growing pains is the most essential part of his music, even as it’s also the part that makes him seem doe-eyed and naive.
In other words: Do you want to argue that more public discussion of systemic power imbalances is a bad thing? More than one person I follow on Twitter expressed surprise that anyone needs white privilege explained to them, but Donald Trump has won three presidential primaries and counting, so maybe Macklemore has a better bead on the country than some are willing to admit. We can also dispense with the take that his motivation in writing songs like "White Privilege II" is cynical, because solemnly intoning about white supremacy is insistently anti-commercial, and not likely to endear him to radio markets that think Beyoncé hates the cops. It would have been much, much easier to record an album of "Thrift Shop" sequels; I’m sure at least one record executive suggested it.
Like Macklemore, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made is nowhere near as bad as its detractors would like it to be. It’s an occasionally inspiring, often corny rap album made for winning Grammy nominations and waking the hearts of the unwoken. The sum of this is sometimes appealing, though frustrating, if only because you’d like to imagine a world where Macklemore was not counted on to inject a dose of political consciousness into our daily proceedings. I’m thinking about Kendrick Lamar, and what he said months after Macklemore’s public apology. "Yeah, I think it was uncalled for," he opined. "But I think, for confirmation from the world, he probably felt like he had to put it out there, which he didn’t need to do... I don’t take nothin’ away from him anyway 'cause I know where his heart is at. He cool." | 2016-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 26, 2016 | 5.1 | 04847b49-c04b-475f-8be5-d002ae42d664 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
After releasing a haunting EP on Tri Angle as Ayshay, the busy multimedia artist returns with another EP featuring a very different, more beat-driven sound with tropical inflections. | After releasing a haunting EP on Tri Angle as Ayshay, the busy multimedia artist returns with another EP featuring a very different, more beat-driven sound with tropical inflections. | Fatima Al Qadiri: Genre-Specific Xperience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16021-genre-specific-xperience/ | Genre-Specific Xperience | About a month ago, Fatima Al Qadiri released an EP on Tri Angle called WARN-U under the name Ayshay, adding another line to her already crowded résumé. The moody tracks centered around the spectral chanting of traditional Islamic songs in Arabic (Al Qadiri was born in Senegal, raised in Kuwait during the Gulf War, and lives in Brooklyn now). Given the content of that EP, it makes sense that she chose to release Genre-Specific Xperience using a different name, and on a different label. GSX harnesses the eerie mysticism of WARN-U that sat nicely under Tri Angle's shrouded, echoey umbrella but channels it into a percussive, neo-global club sound driven by an unexpectedly sinister synthetic steel drum-- and with a more compelling result. It picks up nicely where L.A. mixmasters Nguzunguzu left off when they made a 12-minute "megamix" of WARN-U, pumping the EP's original three cuts full of skittery beats and bass.
This EP could stand on its own as a piece of music suited for dancing under the right combination of fog and lasers, but it remains connected to her aesthetic as a whole. GSX showcases Al Qadiri's ability to evoke, using sound only, the uncanny and seductive themes she dreams up and explores visually. So it makes sense that the release party for the EP took place at New York's New Museum, complete with a screening of corresponding videos created by a horde of collaborators. But you don't need videos to get a grip on Al Qadiri's haunting, pan-cultural visions. Looking at the tracklist before listening to the EP, you might figure the title "Hip Hop Spa" to be just a nifty and offhanded combination of words; listening to the bassy, new age-bending song, though, it's clear that Al Qadiri has thought about exactly what music might be played at a hip-hop spa, if such a thing existed (in fact, she should probably open one). "Vatican Vibes", the EP's centerpiece, is a degree more suggestive still, folding Gregorian chants into a thumping, futuristic synth-and-steel-drum backdrop. All five songs deliver on the slickly gaudy, pillar-laden poolside setup gracing the cover.
GSX can lean toward gimmickry, but Al Qadiri stays on the right side of that line throughout most of the EP's 23 minutes. The only place she misfires is on "Corpcore", a shrill, forgettable closer that was first released over a year ago. Perhaps it was tacked on as an afterthought because its visual counterpart was put together by newly high-profile video-installation artist Ryan Trecartin. Regardless, its predecessors are substantive and strong enough that it doesn't much detract from the project's overarching vision: otherworldly, synthetic amalgams of dance sub-genres that sound like they've been sent from the future. Al Qadiri is a jack-of-all-trades-- she writes a well-informed column on global music, DJs, and exhibits her visual art in galleries around the world-- but GSX gives her original solo music a solid push to the forefront of her broad output. | 2011-11-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2011-11-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | UNO | November 9, 2011 | 7.5 | 04851f66-3f56-41ec-92b6-a71cb19f021a | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
The singer-producer explodes her sound with a feverish blend of shoegaze and bedroom pop. | The singer-producer explodes her sound with a feverish blend of shoegaze and bedroom pop. | Jane Remover: Census Designated | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jane-remover-census-designated/ | Census Designated | On Frailty, Jane Remover was a voyager sculpting her own cosmos from her childhood bedroom. A frenetic combo of emo, EDM, and idyllic video game tones, the singer-producer’s 2021 debut rendered a cyber otherworld with ultra-blue fjords and bleach-white skies. Within her insular online music scene, it soon became a touchstone. Instead of capitalizing right away, she took some time to hibernate and touch grass, embarking on a cross-country road trip. She said goodbye to the freaky mashup microgenre she dreamt up under an alter ego. She also came out as a trans woman, announcing the name Jane Remover with the release of two songs: the smoky, whimpering ballad “Cage Girl” and “Royal Blue Walls,” which starts wispy and escalates into a delicate squall that felt less digitized than her past work. On her new album, Census Designated, Jane ushers in another evolution of this shoegaze blueprint.
Census Designated hits like a flash flood, following moments of dreamy calm with clattering downpours. It’s a feverish mutation of shoegaze and bedroom pop, anchored by her skills as a producer for sculpting layers that sparkle and mutate. Jane hangs in the storm like an eager specter. Instead of bitcrushing her voice or sampling stock howls like she did on Teen Week, she squeezes more from her own resources to unlock a newly expressive style. The way she weaves lattices of vocal clips and skitters between inflections—breathy sighs, elegant swoons, and desperate, ravenous screams that make her sound possessed—is intoxicating. Her curlicued melodies mirror the lyrical unease and lend baroque detail to songs like “Idling Somewhere” and “Lips.”
The weather patterns on Census Designated move in distinct acts and peak with glorious deus ex sonica noise-drops. Where Frailty’s dense, shiny synths could feel like drowning in pixels, these songs are scratchier and serrated: They crush you slowly and gently. Fuse yeule’s electro-acoustic ballads, Slowdive’s bright crescendos, and the febrile anticipation of Ethel Cain’s “Ptolemaea,” and you get a song like “Video,” which strums for six minutes and then erupts with a lung-tearing scream. “Lips” begins as a willowy whisper of indie balladry. As Jane sings about being someone’s nervous wreck, a semi-acoustic loop tuned like echoing chimes shimmers against a rhythm guitar that churns below the surface. Sure enough, everything warps into an infrared, rock nightmare. Jane’s voice claws through the smoke like a ghostly dagger—imagine My Bloody Valentine commissioned to soundtrack Fatal Attraction. “Take a step back boy/I’m so afraid,” she warns. “You want crazy/I’ll give you insane.”
Census Designated’s long, mountainous unfurling means that sometimes the songs stretch out for too long, and they aren’t stuffed with as much delicious ear candy as on Frailty. But the effect is immersive. As with her vocals, Jane takes a beatmaker’s approach to rock arrangements, sending filtered guitars, computerized burbles, and processed vocal shards flying in and out of focus. When dissonant drones shroud the sparse winter horizon of “Contingency Song,” you can almost feel the chill of its malign fog. The theatrics hit the ceiling on the title track. Engulfed in inferno-rock, Jane sketches a map of mindstates and geographic coordinates (a Marriott, NYC, the top of a mezzanine). She’s worried she’s being lied to and exploited for her age, yet she also delights in the idea of being “young blood, fresh meat.” At the end, a Puce Mary-esque blitz of static and spliced screams sounds like Jane’s being sucked into a sinkhole.
Having experimented with drum n’ bass, ambient, glitch rap, and Jersey club euphoria, why would she choose fiery avant-rock as a primary vehicle? More than any other style, these slow-then-sudden buildups convey the vertiginous emotions she sings about. For every deafening blast, there’s a quiet moment to sober up. When the hurricane clears, Jane turns soft and apologetic, compressing herself to fit in someone’s pocket on highlight “Always Have Always Will.” The intro weaves a single long ahhh that extends like an infinity mirror. Like all the other songs, its five-minute ascent peaks with a crash of fuzz, but this one feels more blissed-out than baleful. As the noise shreds Jane’s voice into glinting husks, she keeps repeating one request: “Just promise you’ll wait for me?” This music represents a decisive step away from the internet-addled hyperactivity of her early work, and Census Designated could be deployed as a dopamine detox regimen, its patiently unraveling compositions an offramp for kids hopelessly addicted to two-minute TikTok hits. It’s also the most poignant and piercing music Jane has made yet: the sound of an artist finally given the tools to realize her ever-expanding vision. | 2023-10-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | DeadAir | October 20, 2023 | 7.8 | 048541ac-78ac-41f1-bb7c-802e1831f696 | Kieran Press-Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kieran-press-reynolds/ | |
Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s faithful and loving ode to ’70s R&B has a distinctly light touch, which works both for and against the project. | Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak’s faithful and loving ode to ’70s R&B has a distinctly light touch, which works both for and against the project. | Bruno Mars / Anderson .Paak / Silk Sonic: An Evening With Silk Sonic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silk-sonic-an-evening-with-silk-sonic/ | An Evening With Silk Sonic | After fiddling with the R&B of the 1980s and ’90s to great commercial success on 2016’s 24K Magic, Bruno Mars has assigned himself a more challenging project: Silk Sonic, a fidelity-obsessed act in which he and onetime tourmate Anderson .Paak recreate the rhythm and blues of the ’70s. The duo sought out particular drum skins to better replicate the sounds of the studio during the heyday of Gamble and Huff, when those songwriter-producers polished soul music to an extravagant sheen. With period-specific instrumentation in place, the exuberant pop hitmaker and the acclaimed rapper-singer-drummer with underground cachet recorded as their ancestors did, with just one or two mics for the entire room of musicians. As a gesture of commitment, Paak got his chest tattooed with portraits of Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. They even enlisted Bootsy Collins to host their lean game of musical I Spy: “Fellas, I hope you got something in your cup,” the beloved bassist from Parliament-Funkadelic announces on the intro. Trap drums freshened up 24K Magic but there’s nothing comparable on An Evening With Silk Sonic, a loving yet slight act of nerd-dom.
After one listen, my scorecard noted the crystalline guitar glissando best associated with Motown session musician Melvin “Wah Wah Watson” Ragin (see: Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” or Ragin’s own “Goo Goo Wah Wah”), the siren-like ARP synth from Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness,” a whiff of the chorus from the Ohio Players’ “Fire,” and the title of Rick James and Teena Marie’s magisterial “Fire and Desire” (released in 1981, but close enough). Other critics will surely pin down allusions of their own. For a certain listener, this is half the fun: An Evening With Silk Sonic is an opportunity to prove your adoration and knowledge. For some younger listeners, this may be their first full-length engagement with one of the richest chapters in music history. Others will process this as simply a good time. But any significant level of investment poses the question: When artists invoke music as beloved as Motown and Philly soul, how can anything they create measure up?
One way to dodge the smack of the yardstick is with a joke, and An Evening With Silk Sonic does not want for winking silliness. If anything, Mars and Paak are hamming it up harder on this collaboration than on past records. The internet received the clip of Mars belting out “this bitch,” from the heartbroken lament “Smokin Out the Window,” and did the work of a crackjack marketing team by turning it into a meme. (For my money, that song’s funniest line reading is Paak’s despondent yet fluttering “I wanna die.”) The videos are pure burlesque. This is a cartoon revival of a well-worn aesthetic, and when so many of the creative decisions resist being taken seriously, any criticism makes you sound like a killjoy.
As many have pointed out, the classic means of Motown production as laid out by founder Berry Gordy were as regimented as the assembly lines in nearby Detroit auto plants. In his classic genre study The Death of Rhythm and Blues, Nelson George wrote that “Motown promoted Gordy as an affirmative, unthreatening symbol of black capitalism…Gordy clearly stated that his goal was to buy into mainstream standards.” To ensure the label’s artists passed inspection, Motown instructed its stars to cut a smooth figure. As quoted in Kelefa Sanneh’s recent book Major Labels, Maxine Powell, the head instructor at the label’s charm school, told her pupils to “be natural, be poised, and be positive.” There’s no chance Ms. Powell would have condoned Silk Sonic dropping the b-word, but it’s still possible to draw a line from Motown’s artifice to the contrived jokes and slickness of An Evening With Silk Sonic. These songs are more “explicit,” but they’re fundamentally safe. Motown’s artists worked hard to cross over; for years now Mars has operated from the epicenter of pop music, not the margins.
Still, some of the slicker numbers on the project work well: “Leave the Door Open,” “After Last Night,” and “Smokin Out the Window” are among the highlights, slathering elevated technique—all those key changes—with satisfying molten cheese. In the first verse of “After Last Night,” after Thundercat’s tender ooos place the sonic equivalent of a rose-colored scarf over a bedside lamp, Paak explains that one especially zesty sexual encounter has him throwing out his phone and deading his player tendencies. He opens the second verse singing, “If I still had my phone I’d call every girl I know/And tell them goodbye.” It’s an amusing detail made sweeter by Mars’ harmonies on the last syllable. This splashy interplay between male vocalists is perhaps the record’s strongest selling point: There are virtually no male R&B vocal groups of note these days, though the power of layered harmonies is the catalyst for much of the genre’s finest records, most notably the entire body of work of Marvin Gaye.
The best song, “Put on a Smile,” is also the cause of the most frustration. Co-written by the singularly talented Babyface, the album’s big ballad digs as deep emotionally as Mars and Paak are willing to go on a project that keeps the stakes low by choosing humor over sincerity at just about every turn. Collins’ rhyming intro mentions “begging in the rain,” and the subject matter doesn’t stray far from the Temptations’ “I Wish It Would Rain” or the Miracles’ “The Tracks of My Tears,” perfect songs about trying to mask your busted heart. Structurally, “Put on a Smile” teases massive catharsis with its first chorus that it smartly holds back until the second refrain, when the drums finally crescendo and Mars leaps to the top of his falsetto. The song is played entirely straight, as the level of emotion calls for. And it is immediately followed by an empty ode to partying in Vegas called “777.” Blow the dice, papa needs a new foreign, etc. It’s soulless.
Both artists are capable of more. Listen to Mars’ version of Adele’s “All I Ask”—don’t watch it, because he and his band are dressed like Halloween versions of hypebeasts and I don’t want you distracted—he has grit in his voice, total sincerity that doesn’t let up. It’s his most emotional, unvarnished recording. And “Wngs,” from Anderson .Paak’s collab album with Knxwledge, not only anticipates but nails the Silk Sonic concept, despite Paak singing over a simple beat. “Baby, get your shit together, we hittin’ the town/It’s been a long time since we drank all night and I wanna see that ass move around,” Paak sings, as rude and romantic and funny a lyric as he’s ever written. The sense of familiarity baked into the invitation is exactly the mood of Silk Sonic; what is this supposed to be if not the album of lovable carousing uncles? Depth doesn’t have to mean sad—on “Wngs,” it means lived-in, novelistic detail.
But An Evening With Silk Sonic was only meant to be a hyper-detailed costume party. As Paak explained to Rolling Stone, Mars told him, “We’re making music to make women feel good and make people dance, and that’s it.” He didn’t lie. At eight songs plus an intro, it’s the shortest full-length project either artist has released. Teased since March of this year, leading to a promotional cycle that’s lasted nearly nine months, it arrives burdened with more hype and attention than its songs should have been asked to bear. Could they have made a weirder, more surprising version of this record? Absolutely. But as they’ve insisted from the start, it’s not that deep.
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. | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Aftermath | November 16, 2021 | 6.4 | 04871466-e669-4e09-93ce-246f89ec657c | Ross Scarano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ross-scarano/ | |
Three years after the genre-shattering, scene-defining debut Glass Swords, the inimitable Glaswegian producer Rustie returns with his second, diverse full-length. Danny Brown, Redinho, and others guest. | Three years after the genre-shattering, scene-defining debut Glass Swords, the inimitable Glaswegian producer Rustie returns with his second, diverse full-length. Danny Brown, Redinho, and others guest. | Rustie: Green Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19610-rustie-green-language/ | Green Language | Just four minutes into Rustie's Green Language, some 20 seconds before the close of the second song, there's a brief fade-out that's more like a fake-out. By this point, the album has blown through more than ten percent of its running time with what is essentially a pair of introductions. The opening "Workship" offers two minutes of gleaming synthesizers streaming chemtrails of white noise; vast and cinematic, it suggests a three-way fusion of John Williams, M83, and Oneohtrix Point Never. Then, "A Glimpse" materializes out of a mist of birdsong and running water, as carousel-like arpeggios accelerate and a sawtooth synth lead goes supernova. It's even more widescreen than the opener, but it still feels like a scene-setter rather than the main attraction.
That what makes what happens next feel so sneaky. The song fades out, and after near silence and another smattering of birdsong, there's a rumble like a gathering storm played back on fast-forward. And then, BOOM: an actual electric guitar! Shredding! It couldn't sound further from the Glasgow producer's wheelhouse, which is to say that it would be hard to think of a move more in line with his trickster's M.O. But before you can say, "I hear you're throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real; you want to make a Van Halen record," the joke, if that's what it is, is over. "A Glimpse" is presumably just that—a fleeting peek at a much stranger and more audacious record than Green Language ultimately turns out to be.
It's not entirely unsuccessful, not by any means; with some tweaks it could've been a great album. The Glasgow producer's chops have never sounded punchier, his synths never shinier or more serrated. Following his cock-rock feint, "Raptor" soars like a Kevlar-plated phoenix, synthesizer glissandi strafing all over the damn place, rat-a-tat 808 snares firing like a rivet gun. The light it throws off is dazzling; listen back to Glass Swords and it suddenly sounds practically lo-fi in comparison. The sheer amount of sonic information he packs in is almost overwhelming: is that the sound of an alarm clock in the background, or just some kind of residual tinnitus ring from all those harmonics being piled on top of one another? And what's up with the angel cooing above it all?
When Glass Swords came out, Rustie's approach was so unfamiliar that the music was discussed primarily in terms of its impact—"maximalism," a term also applied to his peer Hudson Mohawke—and its texture. He helped us out with titles like "Ice Tunnels" and "Crystal Echo", not to mention those dazzling quartz obelisks on the cover—imagery that felt like a DMT-inspired mission to unlock the secrets of synaesthesia once and for all. But things are different now. The kinds of sounds he privileged on his debut album—'80s-inspired slap bass, hyperkinetic electro-funk, the lysergic riffs on Southern hip-hop that he termed "aquacrunk"—have become popularized and re-naturalized. That last bit has become particularly true as the dubstep scene, the primary context in which Rustie was once considered, has cratered, its former practitioners gone looking for other styles to adapt or colonize.
Foremost among those is "trap"; Rustie's dalliances with the form make him look more like a follower than a leader. Case in point: "Attak", a blistering number featuring the Detroit rapper Danny Brown. The tune's not without its charms, especially a synth lead that interpolates an echo of Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" between Brown's marble-mouthed spray—and those machine-gun snares are a nice touch. But it feels like he's reaching for a hit, or at least a festival anthem, and the same could be said of "Up Down", featuring the grime rapper D Double E from Newham Generals, although at least the latter's wormhole bass and gamma-ray high-end are more in keeping with Rustie's usual methods.
The main issue with Green Language is that it feels scattered. "He Hate Me", featuring Gorgeous Children, is a fuzzy cloud-rap track with a beat that sounds like Rustie's mashing his fist on a home organ; after D Double E and Danny Brown's double-barreled bellows, the rappers' whispery voices fall flat, and the wind goes out of the album's sails. With "Velcro" we're suddenly plunged into a bewildering collision of Nintendo, Daft Punk, and trap; "Lost", featuring Numbers signee Redinho, is a talkbox-revival jam that aims for Zapp but hits closer to Chromeo.
Just as the album begins with a succession of intros, as though opening up a set of Russian nesting dolls, it goes out with a series of alternate endings. The ecstatic R&B of "Dream On" would have been an excellent place to finish, but "Lets Spiral", with its helicopter-rotor hi-hats and helium arpeggios, is essentially a companion piece to "A Glimpse", and the final song, "Green Language", is just 1:54 of underwater Windham Hill riffing laced, once again, with running water and birdsong. There's nothing wrong with Rustie's ambient abstractions; they may be structurally slight, but they pack a surprisingly powerful emotional wallop. Ultimately, though, you get the sense that he can't decide between two competing visions: that of the festival-anthem trap lord, and the new age cosmonaut. The battle that ensues is exhilarating and frustrating in equal measure: as a producer, Rustie's skills are in top form. But instead of the epic hero he wants to be, he's tilting at glass windmills. | 2014-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | August 27, 2014 | 7.2 | 0487bbb6-a114-4159-98bc-15e06f65e071 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Alongside producer Gil Norton, whose work defined commercial alt-rock, the Leeds hardcore band reanimates the sound of 1995 with eerie accuracy. | Alongside producer Gil Norton, whose work defined commercial alt-rock, the Leeds hardcore band reanimates the sound of 1995 with eerie accuracy. | Higher Power: 27 Miles Underwater | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/higher-power-27-miles-underwater/ | 27 Miles Underwater | 27 Miles Underwater is the most 1995 rock album of 2020, sounding and feeling like a DGC million-dollar advance. The Leeds band’s influences are almost exclusively drawn from the credibility void between Nevermind and Is This It, and they treat ’90s alt-rock with the reverence usually afforded to classic rock. It makes sense: The last time I listened to my local alternative station, they were playing “Get Lucky,” and any song that sounded remotely like Higher Power was about as old as frontman Jimmy Wizard—his age is one year for every mile underwater in the album title. Even the cover’s grungy, grey-green-orange color scheme is a period piece, recalling countless Buzz Bin casualties clogging Sam Goody racks.
2017’s Soul Structure was tuneful enough to suggest Wizard’s yelp could travel from dingy bars to Midwest fairgrounds with the right guidance, and Higher Power is the latest post-hardcore act to get called up to Roadrunner, which boasts an unparalleled track record helping heavy guitar bands achieve the more modern, modest definition of success—Turnstile, Creeper and Code Orange all worked their way up from raw, uncommercial beginnings to the bigger fonts on festival posters topped by their labelmates Korn and Slipknot. Higher Power is by far the most accessible of the bunch, which likely explains why they called on UK vet Gil Norton for production rather than Roadrunner Loudness War-mongers Will Yip or Ross Robinson; Norton practically invented the sound of commercial alt-rock on the Pixies’ post-Albini albums, perfected it on Foo Fighters’ The Colour and the Shape and was behind the boards when Jimmy Eat World, Counting Crows, Dashboard Confessional, and Catherine Wheel wanted to make their slickest, sharpest albums.
27 Miles Underwater’s resulting games of “spot the riff” are fun for all ages—depending on whether you got your Carhartt hoodie from Goodwill or the WIP holiday sale, “Seamless” might variously recall Jane’s Addiction, Glassjaw or a more radio-friendly Turnstile. As with Deftones when they first started to experiment with these funny little things called “melodies,” Higher Power link atonal riffs to polished choruses with transitions so jarring they become hooks on their own. As with many of their peers, Higher Power’s idea of psychedelia is sourced from the woozier moments of Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, and Hum, and they’re maybe the only one that remembers those bands could groove, too. While nearly every single part of a Higher Power song has an identifiable source, they cycle through ideas quick enough to avoid any charges of grand larceny even when they get caught stealing.
But ultimately, Higher Power’s Case Logic binders give more insight into their lives than their lyrics book. Wizard’s purview extends to what he calls “relationships and issues,” gut-level concerns that keep Higher Power grounded in hardcore but denies 27 Miles Underwater a perspective to match its grand sonic ambitions, something as distinctive as Matt Talbot’s sci-fi affinities, Page Hamilton’s stoicism or Chino Moreno’s bloodthirst. This isn’t helped by the tracklist, which shares titles with actual Pantera, Helmet and Deftones songs. The Headbanger’s Ball cosplay is less of a concern if Higher Power is your idea of fun, but there's not much to linger on here, and no matter how you look at it, once you break the surface of 27 Miles Underwater, it ain’t that deep. | 2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Roadrunner | February 7, 2020 | 7 | 0489cd32-8280-4a27-9c93-1894065a8070 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
This project has ridden a wave of online buzz thanks in part to a deliberately murky backstory, but the music, a kind of spectral R&B, transcends hype. | This project has ridden a wave of online buzz thanks in part to a deliberately murky backstory, but the music, a kind of spectral R&B, transcends hype. | The Weeknd: House of Balloons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15264-house-of-balloons/ | House of Balloons | Less than two months ago, few of us had ever heard of the Weeknd. Then, as soon as the creepy R&B tracks from this free mixtape began to circulate, the hype engine revved up. There was the Drake cosign, the album art that looked like Spiritualized crossed with Tumblr art-porn, the missing vowel, the stylish samples, and the project's creators hiding in the shadows. You can't buy buzz like this, and the Weeknd's quick rise to Internet fame, both in indie circles and in parts of the mainstream, raised fascinating questions about the blurrier-than-ever lines between those two audiences and the underground's newfound embrace of R&B. (see also: Frank Ocean, Tri Angle Records, How to Dress Well.)
These are very interesting topics that have already spawned some good thinkpieces around the web, but set all that aside for a moment and you're still left with an album, same as always. And this album happens to be very good. The work of Toronto singer Abel Tesfaye and producers Doc McKinney and Illangelo (Drake producer Noah "40" Shebib, is not, as has been reported, involved in the project), House of Balloons is a remarkably confident, often troubling debut that excels at both forward-thinking genre-smearing and good old-fashioned songcraft. Take for starters the track "What You Need": with Burial-style vocal samples, techno scrape, and a sticky pop chorus, it's far from your average R&B number.
Of course, the Weeknd are not without forebears-- producers from Rodney Jerkins to Static Major and recently The-Dream have been pushing the sonic boundaries of R&B for some time now. Where the Weeknd differ, though, is that their source material pulls from the leftfield (the title track re-purposes Siouxsie and the Banshee's "Happy House", two songs here ride mutated Beach House samples), and their approach is more about building vibe and atmosphere. They're great at rich, woozy compositions that send Tesfaye's aching falsetto through the mix. An example is "The Morning", which feels at first like a spacey synth instrumental before a stuttering digital drumbeat announces this massive, swaying chorus that enters your brain and refuses to leave.
The group's penchant for druggy atmospherics is mirrored in their lyrical content, which is overtly sexual, narcotics-focused, and occasionally downright frightening. Debauchery is obviously nothing new in R&B, but this takes it a step further-- the drugs are harder, the come-ons feel predatory and lecherous, and the general feeling is self-hating rather than celebratory. On opener "High for This", Tesfaye handholds a partner through some strange sex act, singing, "Trust me, girl, you wanna be high for this." "Glass Table Girls" is pretty clearly about doing coke. Because we don't know these guys, it's hard to say whether these are real-life tales or imaginative storytelling-- you want to think the latter, but ultimately the anonymity makes it seem more disturbing.
What makes this whole thing work in an album context is that all the thematic and sonic pieces fit together-- these weird, morning-after tales of lust, hurt, and over-indulgence ("Bring the drugs, baby, I can bring my pain," goes one refrain) are matched by this incredibly lush, downcast music. It's hard to think of a record since probably the xx's debut (definitely a touchstone here) that so fully embodies such a specific nocturnal quality. And even though the image of nightlife painted by the Weeknd isn't a place you'd ever want to live, it's one that's frankly very hard to stop listening to. | 2011-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | March 29, 2011 | 8.5 | 048f1300-639c-406b-842d-6d49131acb67 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | null |
The latest album from the Big Thief singer evokes a singular, solitary chill. With a great imagination for melody, Lenker conjures a world of mingled trauma and love. | The latest album from the Big Thief singer evokes a singular, solitary chill. With a great imagination for melody, Lenker conjures a world of mingled trauma and love. | Adrianne Lenker: abysskiss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adrianne-lenker-abysskiss/ | abysskiss | Adrianne Lenker dies within two minutes of her solo record abysskiss. It is not a dramatic passing. Over feather-light fingerpicking, she simply sings, “See my death become a trail/And the trail leads to a flower.” Her voice is sweet, the tone muted, nothing but her breath and guitar strings. The transformation sounds peaceful, maybe even a relief, a dispersing of stored energies.
Lenker recorded abysskiss quickly, in about a week, and the entire album has this exhaled quality. It doesn’t feel worked over, or rushed—it feels focused and unconcerned with your comprehension. The palette is muted and spare, exactly one electric guitar chugging away quietly on one song (“out of your mind.”) The rest of the album seems to be rustling toward some private horizon, a gleam in its eye. You don’t listen to it so much as follow it, the way you might track a wild animal that showed up in your yard. It is pastoral music, but not a barefoot-in-a-field way; more of a don’t-eat-these-berries sort of way, a world of mystery and menace whose secrets will always be held from us.
As the leader of Big Thief and on her own, Lenker writes powerfully about secrets of all kinds. The shared secrets of intimacy, the buried secrets of family, the impenetrable secrets of nature—they all swirl like sediment in a wine glass. abysskiss thrums quietly with the unease of these secrets, of mingled trauma and love. “Hold me in your heat” she whispers on “terminal paradise”—an animal plea, a child’s plea. On “out of your mind,” she sings, “My love pulls the trigger on you,” and on “10 miles” she kisses a lover “very hard and wild.” Her path is a prickly one, somewhere between savage and tender.
You don’t hear the savagery at first. It takes several listens before the delicate fingerpicking and the whisper of her voice turns dark. Her lyrics accrete alarming imagery in quick clumps, in the “little red flower on your wrist” on “blue and red horses,” or the “sharp glass loosing of your best friend” on “what can you say.” The characters in her songs always seem one wrong step away from leaking blood or spilling someone else’s. The more time you spend cocking an ear to her music, the more foreboding her world seems, the more likely it will end in pain.
This world is not that far removed from her work in Big Thief, but there is a solitary chill here that isn’t only or entirely because this is her solo work. Her songs for Big Thief bustle with characters, people with places and names and specific histories. She was a person rooted in and tethered to society, tweaking and exploring its bonds with her writing but still embedded within it. abysskiss is a taste of what Lenker’s imagination can do when it is set free down its own dreamy paths, away from these shared histories. There are almost no names here, just a world of beauty and terror, of worms dropped into beaks, horse tails flicking away flies. She is like Annie Dillard in her 1974 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a dreamy soul wandering alone in nature and marveling at the brutality and the grace she finds there.
The album is also a quiet showcase for her melodic imagination. Fingerpicked acoustic guitar is the sort of medium that reveals the kind of musician you are at your core—like playing solo Bach, it leaves you with nothing to hide behind. You can learn the basics of the technique in two hours and then spend a lifetime getting lost inside the possibilities. The best and most inventive players treat the acoustic guitar more like a harp—Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile, Jessica Pratt—and Lenker has this same flickering touch. In her hands, guitar notes fan outward into little constellations. The chord voicings never settle entirely, just like her voice, which can sound soothing or alien, depending on her inflection. The mix of feelings—seething disquiet, lurking menace, breath-to-ear intimacy, lurching uncertainty—brings to mind the Elliott Smith. As with his music, you can read detect almost any intense emotion in its quiet thrum if you need to find it there.
She closes the album, as she opens it, with her own death. She is in someone’s arms this time, and there is a brief hint of the older, more sexualized meaning of “to die.” The song is called “10 miles,” and it is the closest we get to the warmth of Big Thief. She and her lover wake early on a farm. They feed horses. They read together. But it turns out that “nothing is real,” and this too has been a figment of Lenker’s imagination—the woman of the song is 10 miles away. Lenker is still alone, dreaming aloud, and as the album ends, she is once dying once more, gazing up into the sky. | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | October 12, 2018 | 8 | 048f2ebe-6bb0-4698-907c-892311b816f1 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman returns with two markedly different albums, one recorded with help from Philly pals and one recorded in New Orleans. | The Clap Your Hands Say Yeah frontman returns with two markedly different albums, one recorded with help from Philly pals and one recorded in New Orleans. | Flashy Python / Alec Ounsworth: Skin and Bones / Mo Beauty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13582-skin-and-bones-mo-beauty/ | Skin and Bones / Mo Beauty | Refracted through rock mythology, the first chapter of Alec Ounsworth's story plays out in one of two stock ways. The first: Wanting nothing to do with the online hype typhoon attending Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's first album, he kills the band with a Difficult Second Album, 2007's Some Loud Thunder. The second, equally familiar way to frame the narrative comes from Ounsworth himself: "If I want to do something with a particular group of people, I will. And if I don't, I won't. If people are willing to work on those terms, that's good. If not, I'll just have to figure out a different way." Though I suspect his full story includes elements of both tropes, I'll give Ounsworth the benefit of the doubt-- at the least, it makes chapter two easier to understand.
This latest stage sees Ounsworth as an itinerant songwriter, recruiting collaborators to flesh out a heap of previously written material. On Skin and Bones, credited to Flashy Python and available only from his website, he hires all manner of Philly indie luminaries/friends (members of Dr. Dog, Mazarin, the Walkmen, and Man Man appear) to collaborate on a wheezy, dark song cycle-cum-inebriated stumble down South Street. Mo Beauty, released on Anti-, is more a proper solo album as we know these things, yet also recorded with significant help: at New Orleans' Piety St. studio, with a dozen or so local pros. Thus, two fresh plot-twists: Bones is druggy rock'n'roll so uniform in sound and sentiment it feels like a one-off concept album; Beauty is more variegated and takes more chances: Ounsworth showing his chops.
Lyrically, Skin and Bones is a sort of treatise on growing up and settling down while staying weird, cut with lamentations on the false consciousness of those who've chosen to follow the herd. The vibe is overwhelmingly woozy, with Wurlitzer and Hammond-laden arrangements spiked with jagged guitars and Ounsworth's instantly recognizable squawk, which more than ever evokes some anachronistic eccentric, twirling around a bar and liberally quoting Ezra Pound. On the title track, he bleats out a skewed requiem for life passing him by ("Nothing's wrong, the spaceship comes from inside!") before crying out to his wife Emily to take him home. "Cattle's New Clothes" is spiked with pedal steel, as Ounsworth lays into an ex-undergrounder-turned-square ("Look at him go down with the businessmen cattle").
Though it's possible to enjoy the atmosphere of Bones without worrying about lyrics, one does need a taste for murky and tipsy ambience. Ounsworth gets fucked up straightaway on the opening track, a giddy, staggering thing held up by Toby Leaman and Matt Barrick's muscular rhythm section. He free-associates for a few minutes before the piece trails off with Billy Dufala's skronking saxophone coda, the musical equivalent of belching loudly while getting pushed out of the bar. "Ichiban Blues", a sour take on exotic travel, is the most straightforward song on the album, and cinema ode "In the Darkness" will satiate those looking for a return to the gangly new wave of the CYHSY stuff. Like those lost evenings we've all had, Bones is a good time while it lasts, but not necessarily something to return to all that often.
Ounsworth's likeness to David Byrne began with CYHSY's still lovely "Over and Over Again", and the comparisons won't stop with Mo Beauty-- though for slightly different reasons. Where Byrne himself once decamped in the Big Easy to work with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band for the spare, stately score of Knee Plays, Ounsworth went to New Orleans to hook up with former Meters bassist George Porter, Jr., keyboardist Robert Walter of the Greyboy Allstars, and a dozen or so others. "I've romanticized that city's aesthetic since I visited there when I was 12," he told our news section last August. "The music seems to just flow out of people naturally."
The result of Ounsworth bottling this "flow" and working it into a set of songs is an album that showcases the breadth of his talents much more than the limited palettes of Flashy Python or CYHSY. Steve Berlin's crisp production highlights the collaborators' vibrant contributions while keeping Ounsworth front and center, resulting in a balanced, evocative work with a focus, appropriately enough, on place. Between the solemn, achingly pretty ballad "Holy, Holy, Holy Moses (Song for New Orleans)" and the jaunty, acoustic "South Philadelphia (Drug Days)", Ounsworth is able, like Byrne, to balance tics with songcraft, and play in opposite ends of the emotional spectrum (post-Katrina anomie, getting fucked up as a kid) with an aura of effortlessness. Elsewhere, "Idiots in the Rain" brings the brass to bear on a tune about the exuberance of a French Quarter band revving up, and "Bones in the Grave" is a creaky, spooky bit that by itself explains the LPs release on Anti-.
Yet speaking about both records, Ounsworth told us that Skin and Bones was "more about me trying to erect some grand statement," while Mo Beauty is "going down to New Orleans for a short period of time and trying to piece something together based on a collection of mostly old songs." Hmmm, okay. But one of these "pieced-together old songs" happens to be "That Is Not My Home (After Bruegel)", a set of vignettes each beginning with "me and the wife," set to a wonderful blend of swoony new wave, punchy brass, and torrid string swells, which just might be the best song he's ever done. That's one of the ironies of authorship, though: Too often, the author himself can be his own worst enemy when it comes to his own real-life narrative, dismissing his most inspired work in lieu of something which, for whatever reason, he finds himself closer to. For our sake (and his), let's hope he relegates future Flashy Python work to footnote status, and continues staking his persona on more adventurous projects. | 2009-10-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-10-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | null | October 21, 2009 | 6.5 | 048f6670-1d25-4f28-835e-fe01982e5345 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Self-funded, self-released, self-produced, and self-referential, the Welsh rock band’s seventh album has a big-tent sound with all the requisite wit and panache. It is unquestionably the ultimate Los Campesinos! album. | Self-funded, self-released, self-produced, and self-referential, the Welsh rock band’s seventh album has a big-tent sound with all the requisite wit and panache. It is unquestionably the ultimate Los Campesinos! album. | Los Campesinos!: All Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/los-campesinos-all-hell/ | All Hell | How does one best measure the Los Campesinos! experience—in years or albums? Sexual humiliations or World Cup disappointments? Pints of lager or mouthfuls of vomit? Whichever you prefer, they’ve come a long way to reach a recognizable form of “maturity.” All Hell, the Welsh band’s seventh album, ends with a solo acoustic guitar, musings on the afterlife, and hushed backup vocals that make it kinda sound like a late-period Blur song. True to form, it’s also called “Adult Acne Stigmata.”
If the embarrassments of adolescence have become badges of honor in adulthood, well…there’s probably a Los Campesinos! album to which you have an unhealthy attachment, so I won’t dishonor that by calling All Hell their best. But it is unquestionably the ultimate Los Campesinos! album. Self-referential, self-funded, self-managed, self-released, and self-produced, All Hell is a triumphant validation for the coalition Los Campesinos! have amassed in two decades of wandering the margins: emo-curious indie adults, indie-curious emo kids, DIY scenesters and Genius annotators, avid consumers of hard cider and hard-left politics, obsessives of European football and American Football alike.
To call All Hell a form of fan service is hardly a slight, since that’s been the entire point of Los Campesinos! from their very beginning—from their early zines to the “Blood Pact” badge to the “Doomed” football jerseys to their listening party bingo cards or even just the socialist leanings inherent in their name. Throughout their new record, Gareth David pledges allegiance to Hunt sabs and ACABs, secular girls with Catholic guilt, backbreakers of the spineless, cheapskates with costly words. Conversely, the ever-present “them” in positions of authority are anonymous and off-screen, interested solely in protecting their power. “Tell me how many hours in any single dull day/Can I pray to a league table but still it don’t change?” he sneers on “Long Throes,” a perfect expression of the existential dread that comes after years believing that outcomes in politics, sports, or the supernatural could actually be changed by the average person.
Maybe there’s a German word that captures this feeling, but until then, Gareth does his best with a series of truly one-of-one metaphors. As ever, the dizzying array of football, video game, and wrestling references illuminate rather than obscure the syllabus of “adult friendship…drinking for fun and drinking for misery…the heart as an organ and as a burden…climate apocalypse.” The grim jest of life is a “cavalcade through antemortem, terminal suburban boredom,” ground-level organizing is “pooling pennies for the coin-op guillotine”; lust is rendered as familiar greed (“You’re a million bucks and I am avarice”), whereas the climate apocalypse might come before finding true love (“You and me, antipodes/The Earth’s collapse, we finally meet”).
At this point, Los Campesinos! aren’t trying to sway critics who found them too wordy, too effusive, or just plain too much. The band wasn’t writing songs as streamlined and propulsive as “Moonstruck” in their early, bad-diary days, even if the chorus still rests on the word “selenograph.” “Feast of Tongues” builds towards the first true Los Campesinos! lighter-waver, the only lovers left alive survive on “the tongues of the last bootlickers.” But All Hell expands their sound and vision, welcoming diehards who’ll recognize the callbacks to “I Broke Up in Amarante” or any of the “Heart Swells” medleys, casual listeners who crammed “You! Me! Dancing!” into all of their 2007 mix CDs, and the newly converted teens whose parents need explainers of how to act at a Los Campesinos! show.
“Holy Smoke (2005)” finds LC! back in their spite-spitting, scenery-chewing MySpace voice, when Gareth’s top priorities were getting drunk and getting laid. Now with “no children and no profession, walking dead at 37,” Gareth takes a more considered approach, trying to suss out the generation gap between himself and the future of the left (“They don’t buy the beers I drink/And they don’t drink the beers I buy”). “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” is a welcome return to the scabrous post/pop-punk of We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, with its production enlarged for texture—the better to pick up on the nods to Black Desert Online, Leisure Leagues, and Bundesliga.
Every proper song on All Hell honors some past iteration of Los Campesinos! from a more refined perspective, none more so than the one featuring the first Kim Paisey lead vocal in nearly a decade. It’s 18 years of evolution crammed into 156 seconds: the verse is also basically the chorus, Tom Bromley rips off a hotshot solo that would’ve required a session hand on 2008’s Hold On Now, Youngster, the gang vocals sound piped in from a church rather than a pub, and having refrained from barging in over his bandmates for nearly two minutes, Gareth comes in to steal the bridge. But again, if this all sounds like a “mature” version of Los Campesinos!, the song is called “kms” and played for laughs.
“kms” sets the tone for All Hell’s remarkable final stretch, one that amplifies the tender mood that Los Campesinos! have taken since they reclassified themselves “the UK’s first and only emo band” upon seeing their influence spread amongst Tumblr power users and maximalist revival bands. “Grind my bones into the finest snow,” Gareth shouts on “0898 HEARTACHE,” a callback to his early tendencies to envision no better outcome for his life than the most gruesome, awesome death. The message soon changes, as he hopes to be “restored to Earth, afforded a second birth,” providing a feast of rotten fruit for years to come. By the end, Los Campesinos! view mortality with more acceptance than resignation. Maybe this is just the inevitable subtext for a band that once put out a new album every year and now does so once every half decade; especially one surely aware of the precarious longevity of any peoples’ movement.
So yes, Los Campesinos! are thinking about their legacy at a time when formerly beloved athletes, television shows, and politicians have disappeared up their own ass doing the same. The difference here is that, for all of the “self” that went into making All Hell, it’s all in service of endless generosity and respect for the people who made it possible. After 18 years, the members have finally dropped the Campesinos! surnames, the last thing that distinguished them from their own fans. The astonishing amount of care and detail that went into All Hell might just be the result of seven and a half years of creation, or maybe it’s Los Campesinos! giving us an album big enough to live in case it needs to last a lifetime. | 2024-07-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Heart Swells | July 19, 2024 | 8.5 | 048ffdc1-2609-47ba-b112-a103a7095ae7 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Just a few months after the reunion of her "Making the Band" group Danity Kane landed with a flop, singer Dawn Richard returns with Blackheart, a fierce and sometimes harrowing album. | Just a few months after the reunion of her "Making the Band" group Danity Kane landed with a flop, singer Dawn Richard returns with Blackheart, a fierce and sometimes harrowing album. | Dawn Richard: Blackheart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20104-blackheart/ | Blackheart | Dawn Richard has spent her solo career blowing up emotions to near-mythical levels. Her last solo album, 2013's self-released Goldenheart, portrayed a love affair in the language of battle and war, while 2012's Armor On channeled it through religious devotion. It's potentially hammy territory, but it works because Richard sells it so well—she's a tremendously evocative singer who can turn a song as fluffy as Katy Perry's "Dark Horse" into something truly exotic and alluring. And with help from her close partner Druski, she dressed it all up in sleek, futuristic production. All of that made last year's reunion of Danity Kane, the "Making the Band" group with which she got her start, almost shocking, at least on Richard's part. Jettisoning her independent freedom in favor of cookie-cutter girl-group pop she already managed to escape once, it turned out the group couldn't contain her anyway. The reunion only lasted a few months, resulting in a nearly-unlistenable album and an alleged physical altercation involving Richard. Now, just a few months after DK3 landed with a flop, we get Blackheart, a fierce and sometimes harrowing album that feels all the more potent given the shaky year that preceded it.
Blackheart is the second installment in Richard's planned Heart trilogy, and it also launches a new phase in her career which she calls "The Black Era." Appropriately, the music is darker, more paranoid, and more personal. Where Goldenheart's themes of romance were intentionally universal, Blackheart deals with Richard's own experiences in the music industry, her frustrations and her frayed nerves. She also plays a much larger role in the production, co-producing most of the tracks herself with Noisecastle III. Don't be fooled by the bump and grind R&B of first single "Blow"; Blackheart offers a sprawling and sometimes knotty take on songwriting, sometimes doing away with verse and chorus structure altogether and settling on a stream-of-consciousness barrage instead.
The album's opening run seems purposefully designed to scare away less adventurous listeners with rushing synth runs, jungle breaks, and sharply-cut vocal samples. Dawn doesn't even come in for three minutes on "Calypso", and once she does, she's nearly taken in by the tide anyways. The idea might be a cliché at this point, but on Blackheart Richard truly uses the studio as an instrument. Organic sounds are few and far between, and just when you think you've got a hold on a song, it could all melt away and morph into something else entirely. "Billie Jean" turns from side-eye rant into an orchestral ballad, and the cautionary tale "Adderall/Sold" swells into a passionate vocoder hymnal where Richard bellows "She was living/ Like she's dying soon" with such conviction that it's hard to believe she's not talking about herself. The vocoder aappears over and over on Blackheart, embellishing her cries with a gravity that meshes with the already otherworldly texture of her natural voice.
There are a few more traditional moments on Blackhear**t, beginning with the power ballad "Warriors", which sounds like a holdover from Goldenhear**t. "Projection" is a stunning rumination on memory that sounds illusory, transient, and in danger of simply flickering out at any moment, while "Castles" focuses on themes of fragility and solidarity amidst a torrent of vocal ad-libs both sampled and Richard's own. This section of the album forms a redemptive arc that peaks with "Phoenix", a feel-good duet with ex-Danity Kane partner Aundrea Fimbres that would be overbearing if it didn't feel so triumphant. Look at it one way and it's a typical radio song about coming back from heartbreak, but put it in the context of Richard's career outside her solo work—a series of false starts unbefitting of such a uniquely talented artist—and it feels transcendent. Even its relatively simple structure and Top 40 sonics register as a renewed sense of clarity rather than a compromise.
The excess of "Phoenix" is tempered by "Choices", a short interlude where Richard croons "I love you/ But I love me more" over gilded threads of synthesizer. It's one of the many little moments on Blackheart that feels like an emotional punch in the stomach, especially once she starts cooing "I choose me" in gorgeous falsetto melisma that sounds as effortless as her talk-singing on "Billie Jean". "Choices" and penultimate track "Deep"—a bare, conciliatory climax—are a reminder that beneath all the production flourishes and high-art concepts, Richard is also a deft and powerful vocalist.
"Deep" is a heartbreaking conclusion where Richard acknowledges her mistakes. "Trying to save the little soul I have left/ I lost it in a poker game to the highest bet/ And if you ask me I'm not the kind to play and quit/ And even though I lost the best of me/ It was worth it," goes the opening verse, a confession from someone who was, at one point in her career, part of a major pop group. As she stands now, Richard is a lone wolf, and Blackheart reaffirms it. The album pulls her back onto the path she she started with Armor On and into unknown territory.
"I took it to the deep," she sings on the song's chorus, "because my heart doesn't swim in shallow creeks." She's not exaggerating: if there's anything that defines Richard's music, it's her grand, sweeping feelings that she lays bare for all to see and hear. Blackheart takes it down a peg from the mythology of Goldenhear**t into a more introspective, earthy realm—that it's wrapped up in inventive production that feels about five years ahead of mainstream radio is just icing on the cake. She begins the album howling "I thought I lost it all" into the void, but by the end, it feels like she found herself, and her voice, again—Blackheart is the singular, visionary work that she's been hinting at since she struck out on her own post-Diddy in 2011. | 2015-01-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-01-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Our Dawn Entertainment | January 16, 2015 | 8 | 04919480-cee8-4a7d-a5a0-c20e06b8e001 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
The bright lights flashed in unison like cheap aluminum UFOs in a starless sky. My eyes convulsed in time with ... | The bright lights flashed in unison like cheap aluminum UFOs in a starless sky. My eyes convulsed in time with ... | Radiohead: I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6657-i-might-be-wrong-live-recordings-ep/ | I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings EP | The bright lights flashed in unison like cheap aluminum UFOs in a starless sky. My eyes convulsed in time with the massive flashes of white, but I didn't really mind. Somehow, Franky and I had made it to that sacred place where the lights are far too bright and the sound is far too loud. The excitement was palpable. Though the vast majority of the 10,000 or so people present was directly behind me, and well outside of my field of view, I could sense the size and excitement of the crowd around me. I turned to Franky, who stared in rapt attention at the stage, absolutely silent.
Finally, the moment arrived. These five beings graced the stage like the gods of old descending from Olympus, illuminated by the fiery rays of Helios' chariot. The scene was as heavenly and beautiful as Jesus and Buddha playing handball on Jerry Garcia's assflab. The crowd's response was as loud and forceful as a tidal wave of live kittens. Yet, Franky remained silent. Finally, as the band prepared for their first song, he turned his head to me, his brown eyes shiny and round like a sheep turd soaked in glitter. Surely, he was aware that this was the single most magical moment of his life ever. Staring awestruck at the massive crowd behind my head, Franky opened his mouth slightly, prepared to speak. And the words he spoke, which seemed to flow straight from his soul like a leaky thermos of godly ambrosia, have remained with me to this day:
"Thom Yorke just got 10,000 people to pay $60 to stare at his ugly ass."
Sure enough, the audience seemed to be positively transfixed by the image of Yorke, his lazy eye dragging two or three centimeters behind him, twitching and wailing. It wouldn't be much of a stretch to equate the show to Radiohead's music itself-- big rock laced with intrigue, fragility, and ugliness. On I Might Be Wrong, a good deal of the essence of Radiohead's live show is distilled onto an eight-track EP. And while some moments are absolutely stellar, I Might Be Wrong is only a shadow of what a Radiohead live album could have been.
Like most Radiohead shows, I Might Be Wrong opens with "The National Anthem." The song's introduction, with Thom Yorke breathing in staccato over Colin Greenwood's thunderous bassline and Jonny Greenwood's skillful manipulation of the primitive Ondes-Martenot, is absolutely wonderful. Without a horn section, though, the song never really develops as it does on Kid A, trailing off without a satisfying conclusion.
"The National Anthem" is followed by "I Might Be Wrong," a song that wouldn't be even remotely interesting in its live incarnation if not for the subtle shifts in dynamics that grace the middle and end of the song. "Morning Bell," like "The National Anthem," builds to a meandering ending. But it meanders with enough grace to keep it interesting, with Ed O'Brien and Jonny Greenwood working their trademark magic with effects-laden guitars and synthesizers.
With "Like Spinning Plates," I Might Be Wrong hits its stride. Recasting the song as a piano ballad with eerie synthesized strings, Radiohead turned one of Amnesiac's most cryptically brilliant tracks into something much more emotional and accessible without being at all sappy or manipulative. With this new version, the song's melody-- complete with the eerily, vaudevillian quality that inhabits it during the chorus-- takes center stage, showcasing Radiohead's songwriting virtuosity rather than their sonic adventurousness.
"Like Spinning Plates" is followed by "Idioteque" and "Everything in its Right Place," possibly the two finest tracks from Kid A, and certainly one of the better sections of this EP. The former succeeds in capturing the energy Yorke channels during live interpretations of the song, whereas the latter takes the aural experimentation of the album version one step further, with sublime digital manipulations building electronic tapestries of sound.
After the schizophrenic meltdown of "Idioteque" and the catharsis of "Everything in Its Right Place," an entirely unexceptional version of "Dollars and Cents" is more than a little bit of a letdown, as it lacks both momentum and innovation. But "Dollars and Cents" is followed by I Might Be Wrong's main attraction, the previously unreleased "True Love Waits." An acoustic outtake from the OK Computer era, "True Love Waits" is absolutely gorgeous. With signature unexpected chord changes and a melody that both aches and soothes, "True Love Waits" can hold its own against any song on OK Computer, and makes a very welcome ending to I Might Be Wrong.
But while tracks like "Like Spinning Plates" and "True Love Waits" certainly justify the existence of I Might Be Wrong, the EP seems purposely limited in a way that's immensely frustrating. At only eight songs, the disc is being sold and marketed (and priced) as a full-length album. Given the fact that so many shows were recorded in preparation for this EP, there's absolutely no reason that I Might Be Wrong should have been limited to eight tracks. Similarly frustrating is the fact that every single track here, aside from "True Love Waits," is taken from either Kid A or Amnesiac. The inclusion of a live version of "Fake Plastic Trees," "Karma Police," or "Just" would have rounded off the record nicely. Sadly, one can't shake the feeling that this disc exists largely as a promotional item for Radiohead's last two albums.
The quality of the recordings and performances on I Might Be Wrong is certainly top-notch. But Internet bootlegs-- most notably a soundboard recording from Nijmegen, a small city in Holland-- present a better, more complete picture of the Radiohead live experience. Still, even with better live documents available for free, it's hard to resist an officially sanctioned live EP with a few absolutely stellar tracks. And although I Might Be Wrong is obnoxiously incomplete, the fact remains that Thom Yorke just got 100,000 people to spend $17.99 for eight songs. Good for him. | 2001-12-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-12-17T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | December 17, 2001 | 8 | 0492096d-5845-44f1-b82c-8351f204431d | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
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 Katy Perry’s second album, a sugary pop juggernaut with big misses and even bigger hits. | 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 Katy Perry’s second album, a sugary pop juggernaut with big misses and even bigger hits. | Katy Perry: Teenage Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katy-perry-teenage-dream/ | Teenage Dream | When it’s on it’s on: Teenage Dream has the endless promise of summer vacation. It lives in suspended animation, always excited for the weekend, never clocking into work. Katy Perry’s second album is ostentatious, off-color, fearlessly optimistic even when the music isn’t great. It is forever young, but—as teenagers often do—still loudly announces its age. And it was a smash: Its five No. 1 hits tied a record set by Michael Jackson’s 1987 album Bad. Half of the tracklist went Top 10. Teenage Dream was the last gasp for guitar-powered bubblegum; the following year, Adele’s 21 would shatter sales records and kick off a moody new era in pop. To look back on it now is to realize just how fast it all changed.
Teenage Dream’s subject, like the subject of young life broadly speaking, is love. Some of the album was supposedly written about men from Perry’s own life, including then-fiancé Russell Brand (“Hummingbird Heartbeat,” “Not Like the Movies”), Gym Class Heroes’ Travie McCoy (“Circle the Drain”), and nice boy Josh Groban (“The One That Got Away”). But the appellations might as well have been added after the fact; these songs aren’t confessionals, they’re two-ingredient cocktails, party-starters just waiting for you to arrive. Teenage Dream boasts some of the stronger writing in Perry’s catalog, maybe because she hadn’t yet had time to repeat herself. And even then: There are two hurricanes, one representing the passion of youth and another followed by a rainbow, and then there’s another rainbow, except this one ends in a giant penis.
If Perry seems like she’s really trying, it’s because she was an unlikely success. She grew up in Santa Barbara, California, the middle child of Pentecostal preachers who sent her to private religious schools. She dropped out after freshman year and released her first music, as Katy Hudson, on a small Nashville Christian label. Her eventual pivot to Katy Perry, flirtatious and foul-mouthed pop star, made for a contrast as bold as her outfits, and she had to try the whole time: years in major-label purgatory, entering and exiting contracts with Def Jam and then Columbia with no album, no single, nothing except a soundtrack cut for The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. She worked for a time critiquing other singers’ demo submissions at a small label outside Los Angeles. It was, she remembered later, “the worst music you’ve ever heard in your entire life. … I wanted to jump out of the building or cut my ears off and say, ‘I can’t help you! I can’t catch a break. What am I gonna say to you? And you sing off tune.’”
Perry finally caught her break with Capitol A&R executive Chris Anokute, the twenty-something son of Nigerian immigrants from New Jersey who’d caught his break by approaching Whitney Houston’s father in public. At a Grammy party in 2007, Anokute heard a tip from Angelica Cob-Baehler, a Columbia publicist: Perry had potential, but the label was going to drop her anyway. Cob-Baehler was plotting her own career move from Columbia to the Capitol umbrella, and she was determined to take Perry with her. “I stole all the Katy files,” she recalled in Perry’s 2012 documentary Part of Me. “I just grabbed them and I put them under my arm and I just snuck out.” Anokute and Cob-Baehler persuaded Capitol to take another chance, though expectations weren’t high. “It was a really bad deal because she’d been dropped, so it’s not like we were going to give her a huge advance,” Anokute later told Billboard.
At Columbia, Perry had been recording a pop-rock album with production trio the Matrix, who’d worked on 2002’s Let Go and 2003’s Liz Phair. She liked rock music; she wasn’t allowed to watch MTV growing up, but she admired Shirley Manson and Gwen Stefani. After landing at Capitol, she revamped some leftover tracks, wrote new material, and assembled her official debut, 2008’s pop-punk-inflected One of the Boys. To re-introduce herself, she released an mp3 download: “Ur So Gay,” a casually homophobic takedown of “metrosexuals,” that elusive, well-groomed, adamantly straight figure of ’00s cultural anthropology. Madonna called it her new favorite song. If this was gasoline, “I Kissed a Girl” was a blowtorch. Perry’s bicuriosity anthem felt a little retrograde, but it was still risqué enough to annoy prudes, and there was no other song quite like it. Wide-eyed and media-trained, she rode to her first-ever No. 1 hit on an updraft of semi-manufactured notoriety.
One of the Boys made Perry a star, but it came with qualifications: The relative novelty and runaway success of “I Kissed a Girl” put her close to one-hit wonder territory, and the perky pop-rock sound was on its way out. “The second record I’m more buckled in because, God, how many times do you see people slump on their sophomore record? Nine out of 10,” Perry told the Guardian. “I want to sell out, but just not in the ‘I’ve sold out’ kind of way. I want to sell out arenas and sell millions of records.” She’d spent years on projects that amounted to nothing, and now that she was finally inside the gates, anything less than improvement would look like a failure. She had to prove she could do it again—become impossible to ignore.
Perry co-wrote every song on Teenage Dream, but she got help from the biggest names in ’00s pop production: Max Martin, Stargate, and Christopher “Tricky” Stewart. She also reunited with Dr. Luke and Benny Blanco, the producers responsible for One of the Boys’ two most popular songs, “I Kissed a Girl” and “Hot N Cold.” In 2010, before he would be accused in a lawsuit of sexual abuse and battery, Luke’s career was on the upswing, powered by megahits like Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA.” At the time, Blanco was Luke’s protégé, working on music for Britney Spears and, of course, Kesha, whose debut single “TiK ToK” became the first No. 1 song of the new decade.
The final key to Teenage Dream was Bonnie McKee, a friend from Perry’s first years in L.A. Once an aspiring pop star herself, McKee switched to songwriting but, much like Perry, spent years languishing in the industry. “After we got dropped from our labels, we used to play shows together,” she said later. Teenage Dream changed her life. It was McKee who came up with “Teenage Dream”—not the entire song, but the phrase, the first of Teenage Dream’s many flytrap hooks. Like sex scenes in high-school movies and “...Baby One More Time,” “Teenage Dream” brushes uncomfortably against pop culture’s obsession with the barely legal, but Perry and McKee pull it off. “Teenage Dream” is sexy, but it’s written from an adult perspective: Perry’s narrator is a (slightly) more mature woman getting back in touch with the kind of young dumb love that feels like a distant memory until it happens again. Hear the nods to nostalgia in the elastic guitar chords of the intro, as if “Good Vibrations” started with the chorus, and in the climactic line, “Don’t ever look back, don’t ever look back,” like an echo from “The Boys of Summer.” If Perry wasn’t listening to Don Henley, she probably heard the Ataris’ Top 40 pop-punk cover.
Perry and McKee collaborated again on “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” a song inspired by their own youthful party days, and on “California Gurls.” Bouncier than a beach ball, “California Gurls” is Teenage Dream’s towering lead single, with a scene-stealing cameo from Snoop Dogg, identified in the Candy Land-themed video as the “Sugar Daddy,” winking and nodding as he takes in the scenery. It’s the biggest song on the album, not by sales, but because it sets the backdrop: Teenage Dream is a California record, and from the cover art to the concert tour, it all happens in Candy Land. The “California Gurls” video is the single most memorable part of the album, and the single most memorable part of the “California Gurls” video—well, you already know. Mashing up Madonna’s Jean Paul Gaultier cones with a little Varsity Blues-style Americana, Perry’s whipped-cream-can bra was so critical to the Teenage Dream aesthetic that she closed concerts by spraying foam from a red-and-white bazooka.
To the media, Perry pitched “California Gurls” as the West Coast answer to JAY-Z and Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind,” which conveniently had spent five weeks at No. 1 earlier in the year. But “Empire State of Mind” is about ambition; “California Gurls” is about having it all. It’s the sped-up, tarted-up update of the Beach Boys (whose label was apparently successful in removing Snoop’s ad-libbed “I really wish you all could be California girls” from the album version) and the carefree party girl’s reply to 2Pac’s streetwise anthem “California Love” (whose talkbox vocal hook sneaks into the outro). Perry’s first real flirtation with hip-hop was anything but hard, which is why it’s so much fun—Snoop Dogg sounds as game and as goofy as she does.
But more often, Teenage Dream feels dated, and not just because of the white girl with a feather headdress in the “Teenage Dream” video or 2010-vintage lyrical clunkers like, “That was such an epic fail.” Ironically, it’s the fresh-faced power-pop of One of the Boys that aged better; the attempt to outdo it sounds loud, insistent, compressed. The tracklist takes a nosedive with “Peacock,” a song-length dick joke that aims for high camp and misses. Even that isn’t as grim as “Who Am I Living For?” a dreary power ballad for the Serious Person that previews Perry’s future lyrical woes. Her 2008 Warped Tour jaunt resurfaces on the powderpuff hard rock of “Circle the Drain,” a chronicle of a crumbling relationship that can’t stand up to its inspiration, Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” But Teenage Dream refuses to take itself seriously for long: “E.T.,” a bizarre, shouty sci-fi romance, magnifies a confused lyric with a stadium-sized beat originally created for Three 6 Mafia. The No. 1 hit single version, which picked up an absurd, Avatar-looking video and a shitpost-tier Kanye West verse—“Tell me what’s next? Alien sex”—is the type of weird-monoculture monument that feels almost impossible to explain in retrospect.
Teenage Dream’s emotional peak, though, is “Firework,” yet another No. 1 hit, a brassy positivity banger with a soaring chorus note doomed to embarrass you at karaoke. It is very, very easy to be cynical about “Firework”: “More than her Christian background or the chick-lit limits to her take on sexual liberation, what makes Perry a controversial artist is her essential hollowness,” wrote Ann Powers for the Los Angeles Times in 2010, citing its stupidest, funniest lyric, a line straight out of American Beauty, the question that has endured as a kind of ironic synecdoche for pop culture’s vast, vapid ocean of motivational bullshit. And yet—there’s Perry singing it for the president, replacing Stargate’s pneumatically powered strings with a tasteful cinematic arrangement: “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag?”
Do I ever. Stare too deeply into Teenage Dream and strain your vision—it’s plastic bags all the way down. One more outrageous detail: The inspiration for “Firework” is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that formative text of artists and teenagers, specifically the passage where Kerouac’s narrator claims “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,” who “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.” “Firework” is Teenage Dream’s American dream, and it’s not about freedom but desire, desire for redemption, for recognition, for the kind of infinite, desperate consumption that necessarily burns itself out in the end. Perry changes her look, but she has only one true aesthetic: It’s gaudy, explosive maximalism, and Teenage Dream is the most maximalist of all.
So forget about nuance and forget about Kerouac; put both hands in the air and submit to plasticity. Teenage Dream came to have a good time and to hit it really, really big. “Teenage Dream,” “Last Friday Night,” “California Gurls,” and “Firework”—four No. 1 songs in a row. Some pop stars spend their whole lives trying to put together a string of hits that amount to a lasting legacy; Katy Perry did it in the first 15 minutes. This album is a crowning achievement, not just of her career but of its style: EDM and disco and pop, bold and belting, entirely processed yet instantly recognizable, robust yet chintzy. In 2010, having it all was still enough.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | February 21, 2021 | 6.8 | 0493fa2c-0892-46b3-9837-dabb2d70fdc6 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
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 timeless 1992 debut from Dr. Dre, a historic moment in hip-hop that redefined West Coast rap. | 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 timeless 1992 debut from Dr. Dre, a historic moment in hip-hop that redefined West Coast rap. | Dr. Dre: The Chronic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dr-dre-the-chronic/ | The Chronic | Dr. Dre’s solo rap career began like a yarn out of a mob epic: coercion, conspiracy, guns strategically placed near jacuzzis. As a member of N.W.A in the mid-1980s, the producer was a star, but he was convinced that Eazy-E—the head of his record label, Ruthless, and fellow N.W.A. member—was fleecing him. Dre was seeking freedom from the World’s Most Dangerous Group, but he ended up dealing with someone far more treacherous.
Pro football prospect turned hulking enforcer, Marion Knight, Jr., nicknamed Suge for the sweet sugar bear he was as a child, had a reputation for intimidation that was the stuff of industry myth: punching a guy through a closed door and dangling Vanilla Ice off a balcony. He’d been hanging around Ruthless as the D.O.C.’s bodyguard and had grown close to Dre during his conflict with the label. With an eye on becoming a music mogul, Suge saw Dre as his meal ticket. Dre was already done mastering the final N.W.A. album, 1991’s Niggaz4Life, and he wanted out so he could finish work on his solo material. All that was standing in his and Suge’s way was Eazy.
On April 23, 1991, Eazy-E went up to the studios at Solar Records where he was greeted by Suge and a small entourage of men with pipes and Louisville sluggers. Suge delivered contract releases for several Ruthless artists and planned to squeeze Eazy into signing them so he could poach the artists for the fledgling label he was starting. He told Eazy he had N.W.A.’s manager Jerry Heller tied up in a van before offering a final warning: “We know where your mother lives.” With that, Eazy signed. The documents weren’t deemed legally binding, but the wheels were in motion. Eventually, Suge got his way: Dre was no longer a Ruthless artist, and Death Row Records was born.
In 1992, Dr. Dre was the biggest producer in hip-hop music, a pioneer drawing comparisons to Quincy Jones and Phil Spector; he was also its most unemployable one. Plagued by legal battles and beset with a number of open court cases, nobody would touch him. Five of the eight albums Dre produced for Ruthless from 1987 to 1991 went platinum, but he was a volatile figure prone to violence. He was accused of a savage, public assault by journalist Dee Barnes and another assault on a police officer during a 50-person brawl he allegedly started. On top of that, neither he nor Suge had much of a business acumen, and they were hemorrhaging cash.
Death Row was ostensibly up and running with a master architect at the helm, but the young label needed a big victory upon which to build its empire. The Chronic became that cornerstone achievement, kicking off a historic four-year run that ended with the death of the label’s other major star, Tupac Shakur. In that time, Dre established himself as not just a peerless producer but a visionary. His debut album, 1992’s The Chronic is an imaginative crusade with half-truths so vibrant they blurred the lines of what was real. He collapsed the distance between the lawless Los Angeles of the persona he created for himself and the real one right outside Solar studios, giving his songs texture wherever possible: prank calls; Rudy Ray Moore skits; clips from blaxploitation flick The Mack; an earlier Chronic song playing as background music for a sketch in a later one; live commentary from protestors; exasperated TV news anchors announcing a city on fire. It is so meticulously crafted, so magnificently designed.
Thanks to some last-minute minute legal negotiations that set the price for Dre’s freedom from Ruthless at royalty payments for all of Dre’s Death Row projects including The Chronic, the same album Dre used as a megaphone to badmouth Eazy-E and Jerry Heller was also paying them handsomely. They are the album’s primary antagonists, and Dre’s ire for them powers his performance. The triumphant lead-off “Fuck wit Dre Day” couches celebration of his success in the broader context of the streets losing respect for Eazy. The taunts on the intro are aimed squarely at Ruthless, as if their demise was the postscript on Death Row’s ascendence, and Eazy was the bitch that ain’t shit. Despite all the direct provocation, Dre’s greatest insult was the album itself: He’d pried The Chronic right out of Eazy’s hands. In Ronin Ro’s Have Gun Will Travel, Heller lamented its loss: “That album would’ve been ours if it hadn’t been stolen.”
Death Row was a seedy operation with drug lord investors, secret incorporations, and nefarious loans, according to Ben Westhoff’s Original Gangstas, but the men at the top both knew how to spot talent. The album sometimes plays as promotional material for the label, partially because everyone there was trying to will future success into existence, but also because the label was the center of Dre’s entire world at the time. “I needed a record to come out,” Dre admitted to Rolling Stone in ’93. “I was broke. I didn’t receive one fucking quarter in the year of ’92.” Dre desperately needed to find a new voice. In N.W.A, he had the luxury of working with one of rap’s best-ever writers, Ice Cube. Those were big shoes to fill. He found his new scribe in Snoop Dogg, a slinky teenager from Long Beach who quickly became one of the greatest rappers ever.
Dre wasn’t a songwriter, he’d only ever performed in a posse, and the hearty voice of the rapper he banked on, the D.O.C., had been irreparably damaged in a car accident. He was a great director without a star. It was Snoop, with his sneering yet relaxed flow, that so casually stole the role. He seized every opportunity. “When I listen back to The Chronic album, I’m like, how the fuck was I on damn near every song?” Snoop remembered. “I was whoopin’ niggas! They would be going home to go get chicken, I’d be in that motherfucker all night. If Dre even had half of a beat or had the drums, I’d write some shit to the drums and come up with a melody. Before you know it, I’m on a song.”
As both a purveyor and connoisseur, Snoop also brought to the table one of the album’s most critical ingredients: weed. His incessant use introduced his producer to the chronic, slang used in reference to sticky hydroponic bud that was of the highest quality; the term, which became a metaphor for the quality of the music, stuck as a title. Dre, who’d rapped on 1988’s “Express Yourself” that he didn’t smoke marijuana because it caused brain damage, was now naming his entire album after a potent cross-strain. The aromatic puffs of smoke that filled the studio inspired slower, smoother music.
Snoop was at the center of a writer’s room that Dre had taken to calling the Death Row Inmates: The D.O.C., rapper-producer Daz Dillinger and RBX (two of Snoop’s cousins), Kurupt, Lady of Rage (who Dre flew in from Manhattan), Snoop’s group 213 with Dre’s stepbrother Warren G and a little-known singer named Nate Dogg, and the First Lady of Death Row, the R&B vocalist Jewell. This oddball crew convened at Dre’s Calabasas mansion and the Solar studios with musicians Colin Wolfe and Chris “The Glove” Taylor, smoking, bonding, writing, and recording, punching in and exchanging ideas.
Suge Knight wanted Death Row feared and revered around the land like a lauded crew of bandits in a spaghetti western. According to Original Gangstas, the label head would send his rappers to little amphitheaters and housing projects to battle anyone. Those battles spilled over to The Chronic, fostering both a familial closeness (beyond the obvious blood ties) and a competitiveness that fueled many sessions. The Inmates were all broke and eager to rhyme back then. Every member wanted to cut the best verse and meet Dre’s impossibly high standards. Songs like “Lyrical Gangbang” and posse cut “Stranded on Death Row” in particular had this battler’s edge, pure showcases of raw rap talent from Lady of Rage, Kurupt, and RBX. The artists on The Chronic team were written off, as many West Coast rappers were, as lesser rappers (the headline on Jonathan Gold’s review in the Los Angeles Times read, “The Rap’s Flat, But Ya Can’t Beat the Beat”). They weren’t working as hard to be clever as most of the rappers back East, and while they weren’t quite the writers Ice Cube and MC Ren were, their verses were still striking, charismatic, imposing, and idiosyncratic.
Criticism of the rapping on The Chronic also took aim at Dre, who was never quite a natural rapper, even in N.W.A’s heyday. Gold called his verses “forced,” and deemed him a lesser rapper than producer. If the former is an overstatement, the latter is true. But both were pervasive judgments of Dre. One of the album’s greatest feats is how it mitigates his limitations with a chorus of other voices. Dre goes to painstaking lengths not to appear too frequently, and when he does, he comes off as part of a dynamic one-two punch.
The force of the combination is felt most heavily on the attack, and much of The Chronic offensive continued N.W.A’s longstanding war with cops and L.A.’s violent policing initiative. The spark was an acquittal of the four officers caught on videotape beating motorist Rodney King with batons. For six days after, in Spring 1992, L.A. was ablaze.
The LAPD was the first militarized police force in America, a hostile occupying mob that went to war with the Black Panthers and invaded Southern Los Angeles. Chief of Police Daryl Gates, who, in 1990, infamously said casual drug users “ought to be taken out and shot” because “we’re in a war,” had encouraged the kind of treatment seen in the Rodney King video across the city, and now that black citizens were rising up in response he was sitting on his hands. While the violence of the riots spread from the corner of Florence and Normandie like a wave overtaking the city, Gates was at a fundraising dinner in affluent Brentwood. (As the city outside was catching fire, one woman at the dinner said of Gates, “We’re behind you all the way and I want to see you as President of the United States,” to laughter and cheers from the crowd.)
The original version of Chronic track, “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” called “Mr. Officer,” imagined a vengeful Dre switching places with King and rising up in a way he couldn’t. “Fuck Daryl Gates and the whole police staff,” he raps venomously. “Mr. Officer” spoke more directly to hatred for police, but the song is better for the change: foregrounding not the crooked cops killing with impunity but the people standing up to them. “You see when niggas get together,” Dre rapped, “they get mad ’cause they can’t fade us.”
Cops were often the villains in N.W.A songs (see: “Fuck the Police,” “Real Niggaz Don’t Die”), but their influence throughout The Chronic is more insidious. Dre’s Los Angeles was a direct product of the LAPD’s anti-black and commando agenda. They raided the Panthers’ L.A. headquarters in 1969 on a bad warrant, which in turn created a vacuum filled by gangs like the Bloods and Crips, they cultivated one of the most trigger-happy departments in the country by the early ’90s, and they tagged crimes between black victims and perpetrators as NHI, for “No Human Involved.”
Twenty-seven years later, when I hear “The Day the Niggaz Took Over,” I still see Los Angeles burning. It’s doomsday rap seeking a reckoning, the sound of a city swallowed whole by a sweeping black rage and defiance: As RBX puts it, “Hell no, the poor blacks refuse to go.” But I also see Ferguson, its streets covered in tear gas, its police occupation; a protester in an American flag T-shirt throwing a fuming canister back at tactical officers; paramilitary units convening under a Seasons Greetings banner. I see Baltimore during the Uprising. Protesters standing on ravaged cop cars; bikers in gas masks, fists raised before a wall of officers in riot gear; a convoy of black civilians rolling through the city, arms interlocked. I see fed-up communities crying out—for Freddie Gray, for Mike Brown, for Rodney King, for every act of racist violence unanswered for—taking to the streets, refusing to be ignored. It’s about victory over corrupt law enforcement, however briefly.
It’s no wonder that, under the constant antagonism of an aggressive and bigoted police state, the man with a master plan on The Chronic was a nigga with a muthafucking gun: “Cause it’s the city,” Dre explained, “and for you to survive a nigga gotta be a gangsta.” Dre wasn’t a gangsta, per se, but he had gangstas of many different varieties all around him, so his definition of what constituted being one was fluid. Sometimes he was a larger than life mob don, as on “Let Me Ride,” leaving headless bodies on Greenleaf. On the plaintive, Donny Hathaway-inspired “Lil Ghetto Boy,” he plays a street-weary veteran of only 27, a link in a chain of generational violence. His theory of gangsta is clearest and coolest on “Nuthin’ But A G Thang,” a perfect rap song if ever there was one. Together as a united front, Snoop and Dre are swaggering, unfadable. But more than anything, across The Chronic being gangsta is a state of mind; its core tenets: better to strike preemptively than to be caught slippin’ and never let anyone take what’s yours.
The Dre verse on “The Day the Niggaz Took Over” prioritizes looting as a weapon against the status quo. His gotta-get-mine perspective is a direct response to the King verdict, and he sounds like an avenging angel. In the essay “Black Riot,” writer Raven Rakia explores looting as a means of indemnification and protest. “Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property. In America, property is racial. It always has been,” she explains. “Looting is the opposite of apolitical; it is a direct redistribution of wealth.” The Chronic may be most unmistakably political on this song, but the rest of it understands the spirit (and principles) of black revolt well. How fitting that the album is all about not just getting back what is owed but taking it by force.
The confrontational machine gun funk of “Rat-Tat-Tat-Tat” and the sinister squeal of the creeping “High Powered” were emblematic of a territorial mentality. Both Dre and Snoop rapped as if on standby, calm yet poised to strike at a moment’s notice. Many of the album’s best sequences are just them standing their ground. In Daryl Gates’ Los Angeles, this was radical. “Old buster ass nigga talking bullshit/Don’t know that I’m the wrong nigga to fuck with,” Dre barks on “A Nigga Witta Gun.”
At Solar, Dre produced on a cutting edge SSL mixing console that producer Rhythm D likened to the Starship Enterprise, which felt particularly fitting since they were making beats by reworking about a dozen Parliament-Funkadelic songs in their sessions. A connection with the Mothership had yielded a magnificent and funky new subgenre. They were building songs from the ground up, according to Wolfe, “drums, bass, keys, guitar, in that order,” with drums and bass being fundamental to their hydraulic, shock-absorbent bounce. Instead of sampling records, as he had for N.W.A, Dre had his live musicians channeling the deep alien grooves of Bernie Worrell and George Clinton.
Dre helped to reshape the sound of the West using whining Moog synthesizers. The initial wave of West Coast gangsta rap was (naturally) still indebted sonically to hip-hop’s birthplace, New York City. N.W.A songs sampled Big Apple rappers Whodini and Beastie Boys. AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted was produced by Public Enemy’s team the Bomb Squad, and Cube was “obsessed with” Run-DMC. Many of the West Coast rappers that had come before Dre brought an undeniable California flavor to rap, but there wasn’t yet a distinctive sound separating them from their East Coast predecessors. The Chronic was instrumental in changing all that. The album’s reinterpretation of ’70s P-Funk, dubbed G-Funk, was altogether different. Dr. Dre’s songs moved more leisurely, a tonic for the hustle and bustle of East Coast rap.
It’s an oversimplification to say Dre beats sound good, but the man did sell a line of high-performance headphones to Apple for $3 billion on the strength of his music’s supreme fullness and fidelity. He is a production genius. “I used to spend all my time trying to make my beats be mixed as good as Dr. Dre,” Kanye West recently admitted. Q-Tip called Dre the bar for producing A Tribe Called Quest’s The Low End Theory. Dre, in turn, was pushed to match that classic’s resonant bass, and The Chronic set a new mark.
In addition to launching Dr. Dre into rarified air, the album launched about a half dozen successful solo careers. It is the nexus of an entire chunk of rap history. Death Row peaked with the February ’96 Vibe cover, more an endnote on an era than anything else; Dre left the company a month later, and by that fall Tupac was dead. In the end, the label Dre built with Suge was just as combustible as the one he left to start it. But The Chronic lives on as a timeless show of strength when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, and as the herald of a tectonic shift in rap. Without it, or Dre, there is no Game, no YG, no Kendrick Lamar or To Pimp a Butterfly, no Nipsey Hussle. Dre gave shape to L.A.’s present and future. His dispatch from inside a city in transition not only furthered its sense of place in the world beyond but helped affect the place it was becoming. | 2019-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Death Row / Interscope | December 15, 2019 | 10 | 049430b8-65c9-46eb-a389-8805430b1df9 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Taylor Swift’s project to re-record her albums to reclaim legal ownership of the music begins here with 2008’s Fearless, an almost identical, polished, and somewhat melancholy version of it. | Taylor Swift’s project to re-record her albums to reclaim legal ownership of the music begins here with 2008’s Fearless, an almost identical, polished, and somewhat melancholy version of it. | Taylor Swift: Fearless (Taylor’s Version) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/taylor-swift-fearless-taylors-version/ | Fearless (Taylor’s Version) | When Taylor Swift announced that she planned to re-record each of her albums to effectively take control of her masters and stick it to famed music manager Scooter Braun, the move was quintessential Taylor: strategic, savvy, and easily mapped onto an empowerment narrative. This wasn’t simply a cynical IP grab with purely financial implications; this was also a woman quite literally reclaiming her past selves. For listeners, however, the value proposition seemed less clear. So much of the relationship between pop star and fan revolves around the idea of “blessings,” with the generous artist bestowing gifts to her listeners. With “new” versions of old albums, Swift seemed to ask her fans to accept the re-done albums as a new canon to replace the beloved decade-old records.
Fearless (Taylor’s Version) is the first of six of these planned “new” versions. Starting with her second album is a deft choice; her writing is stronger than on her 2006 self-titled debut, and Fearless contains some of her more iconic and commercially successful tracks. Instead of cosplaying a caricature of her 18-year-old self, we get present-day Taylor in conversation with the Taylor of the past with a wrenching intimacy.
What is to be gained from parsing the gap between remix, recitation, and reincarnation? Dissecting the Easter eggs tucked into Swift’s songs has always been part of the Taylor listening experience—decoding which lyric corresponds to which break-up, tracing the lineage of each biting remark. Fearless (Taylor’s Version) presents a different puzzle: spotting the difference between the original and this almost-identical copy. These versions are slightly more polished, like photos touched up on Instagram with a press of a button: The sound is brighter, the mix is clearer, each peal of guitar is sharper. Most of the alterations to original songs are barely noticeable, besides an invigorating blast of fiddle on “Love Story”; each song’s runtime remains either exactly the same or off by a single second.
Most obviously changed is her voice, which has strengthened and deepened over the years. Her choruses are a bit less breathy, and she glides into belting without sounding strained. There are micro-changes in inflection: “You ask me for my love and then you push me around,” she cries on “Tell Me Why,” the note a bit more strangled and snarling. The seconds-long “Hallelujah” in the bridge of “Change” sounded exalted on the earlier version; here it sounds more like a sigh, somewhere between relief and remorse.
The songs on Fearless surge between hope and pain, bitterness and awe. The tension in Taylor’s early albums drew from that dichotomy: to reach for fairytales while listing their fallacies, to decry white horses and still believe there’s redemption in the perfect dress. “Today Was a Fairytale,” a song she wrote to accompany her cameo in the 2010 rom-com Valentine’s Day, slots right into this context with buoyant guitar and Swift’s ode to “magic in the air.” The other “new” songs on Taylor’s Version, released from her famed vault, blend into that bland, twangy sweetness—with the exception of “Mr. Perfectly Fine,” a delightful, strumming takedown. “I don’t know how it gets better than this,” she sings on the title track, and that glow remains even as she describes a breakup that leaves her breathless.
“Forever and Always” is Fearless’ best song, but the shock from the original album gives way to something cooler—more disgusted than aghast. In the 2009 version, Swift sounded wounded as she sings: “You looked me in the eye and told me you loved me/Were you just kidding?” In the newer versions (she also includes a slowed piano iteration among the bonus material), her voice is subdued but more full as she sings those lines, no longer litigating the cruelty of an ex, but allowing the sorrow that comes with accepting your own anger.
That mournfulness hangs over this new recording session. It’s hard to distinguish whether there are actual sonic differences in how she re-performs a song or if the knowledge that a 31-year-old is embodying songs she wrote as a teenager permeates each track. On the new recording of “Fifteen,” she clings to the last note of “Count to 10” for an instant longer than the original before she cries: “This is life before you know who you’re going to be.” Part of listening to Fearless (Taylor’s Version) involves tracing its link back to our own past selves, when we could pretend that wanting was worth more than knowing, that wanting could be everything. The meta-layers of control and contrition tangle in these recordings; Swift was 15 herself when she signed her deal with Big Machine’s Scott Borchetta, who eventually sold her catalog to Braun. She is making some of the best music of her career now, and presumably putting that on hold to wrangle control over her old records. The past always becomes a difficult place to revisit. | 2021-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | April 20, 2021 | 7.5 | 0497db19-404c-4f00-963d-017770e066cb | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
null | Their persona is so well defined: The Replacements were the working-class kids bursting with talent but always ready to squander it; the bratty wise guys with a sensitive streak who refused to play by the rules. But the group's persona has a distancing effect for those who are new to the band. There's never been a shortage of thirty and fortysomethings reminiscing about the 'Mats. You read about the sloppily brilliant live performances, the massive quantities of beer consumed, the backstage hijinks; questionable theories are proffered, something about how this band should, if there were any justice in the world, | The Replacements: Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash / Stink / Hootenanny / Let It Be | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11676-sorry-ma-forgot-to-take-out-the-trash-stink-hootenanny-let-it-be/ | Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash / Stink / Hootenanny / Let It Be | Their persona is so well defined: The Replacements were the working-class kids bursting with talent but always ready to squander it; the bratty wise guys with a sensitive streak who refused to play by the rules. But the group's persona has a distancing effect for those who are new to the band. There's never been a shortage of thirty and fortysomethings reminiscing about the 'Mats. You read about the sloppily brilliant live performances, the massive quantities of beer consumed, the backstage hijinks; questionable theories are proffered, something about how this band should, if there were any justice in the world, have had pop hits and been on the radio. You hear such things from the people who were there, man, and it's tempting to dismiss the Replacements as a Gen X nostalgia trip and turn your attention to some unexplored corner of post-punk, maybe a boundary-pushing band with an experimental bent. The idea of the Replacements has a lot to do with why they've endured, and as archetypes go, it's a compelling one. But sometimes it gets in the way.
It'd be nice if these reissues from Rhino, which remaster and generously expand upon the band's four early records for their hometown imprint Twin/Tone, can bring us back to what the Replacements were: a creative, smart, silly, exuberant, and often hilarious rock'n'roll band. Rhino has done everything right with these records, giving them the sort of treatment they deserve. The liner notes and documentation are detailed; the bonus cuts generous and well chosen. This crucial part of the Replacements story is finally available in all its detail, and hopefully, it'll help us hear the music again in a fresh way. There's a lot worth exploring.
Hearing these records again, after having the originals in mothballs for quite a while, has been a revelation. It's not that they're top-to-bottom great (well, except for one of them, but more on that in a sec), because the Replacements weren't really that kind of act. But boy, they had songs and they could play, right from the start. Before these reissues, when someone would say that the band peaked with their first album, 1981's Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash, I'd assume they were either: 1) a serial contrarian, 2) someone who finds punk rock to be music's greatest expression, or 3) crazy. Surely, the Replacements improved as they went. But now, returning to these records after so long, the "debut is best" take finally makes some sense. I don't agree with this assessment, not by a long shot, but I can understand why someone might. For a supposedly sloppy and tossed-off record, Sorry Ma comes across as weirdly majestic and strikingly consistent. Also, amusing: singer Paul Westerberg's self-deprecating liner notes, which helped launch the Replacements myth, suggest that he might have had second career writing comedy: "This song is proof that Chris Mars is one of the best drummers we could find at the time," he says of "Otto".
As the short, sharp tracks tick off, each is immediately arresting. If Mothers Against Drunk Driving hadn't formed the year before, the invigorating and dangerous jolt of "Takin a Ride" might have served as the organization's catalyst; "Customer" is comical fast-talking portrait of an instant crush; "Shiftless When Idle" is an early statement of purpose. Bob Stinson can't wait to bust out his searing solos. Everything sounds loose, live, and brimming with energy. Over 18 songs, only a couple are less than great. Among the 13 bonus tracks, the highlight is the four-song demo from 1980 the band originally gave to Twin/Tone's Peter Jesperson, hoping to get some club gigs. I'm trying to imagine the excitement when he popped it in his tape deck and heard "Raised in the City", with its relentless drive and chugga-chugga riff and a 20-year-old Westerberg sounding like he already knew a hell of a lot about it melody. No wonder Jesperson became their manager.
Then came Stink, the quickie EP follow-up from 1982. The cover's subtitle used to say "'Kids Don't Follow' Plus Seven" and its expanded version now reads "'Kids Don't Follow' Plus 11". Well, it's true: "Kids Don't Follow" is much better than these other songs. This is their true-blue punk record, and, while they pull it off, they sound too one-dimensional. The songs are entertaining, with titles alone that are good for a chuckle: "Fuck School"; "White and Lazy"; "Dope Smokin' Moron"; "God Damn Job". You can guess how they go without even hearing them; it's a record for a single mood. Some the outtakes are actually better: There's a great cover of Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin" that was a live staple of the time, and their disemboweling of "(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock" is worth a few laughs. Stink is an important piece of the puzzle, but less interesting on its own.
Hootenanny is occasionally mentioned as the Replacements finest moment, the precursor to Let It Be that is funnier, more tossed-off, (i.e., more "Replacements") and also the most diverse offering in the band's catalogue. No argument on the latter; this thing is all over the place, and it has one example of just about everything they ever did. But too much of it sounds purposeless, the band amusing themselves rather than the listener. Some tracks have the whiff of something that would have been OK as B-sides, but sound underwhelming on an album proper. The title track isn't nearly as funny as it thinks it is; "Mr. Whirly", which mixes snippets of "Strawberry Fields Forever", "Oh! Darlin'", and "The Twist", is clever but skippable; "Lovelines", in which Westerburg half-sings personals ads while the band plays a peppy tune behind him, is infectious in the way that hearing someone else laugh makes you laugh, but it's also easy to forget. All that said: "Color Me Impressed" is possibly the best of the 10 or so proper Replacements Anthems, the moody "Willpower" improves on Stink's "Go", and "Run It" is as intense and joyous as any of the rave-ups on the debut. Bonus tracks here are also strong, mostly loud, fast, and snotty, with the exception of the bluesy acoustic demo "Bad Worker", about giving minimum effort for minimum wage. Essential for fans, but not the place to start.
Hootenanny's "Within Your Reach" found Westerberg stretching out and trying a love song of sorts, but it would take one more record before he really hit his stride with this sort of material. The leap in songwriting on Let It Be, the final Twin/Tone album, is dazzling. As a record, it's both simpler and more complicated than anything that came before. You want hardcore? "We're Comin' Out" is the most intense punk song they ever made. A no-frills declaration of love? You can't get much more concise than "Favorite Thing". There's the perceptive "I Will Dare", which seems like it's about a relationship but is also about the band ready to take on the world; the wailing "Unsatisfied", with its disarmingly direct expression of frustration. All of the contradictions and wild mood swings of youth can be found here somewhere.
Let It Be is widely praised as an independent rock classic and one of the finest albums of the 1980s, but before I started listening to this set, I didn't expect to rate it so highly. I kept thinking of songs that even fans of the record consider insignificant, namely "Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out", the cover of Kiss' "Black Diamond", the near-instrumental "Seen Your Video" and the silly "Gary's Got a Boner". Surely, this was filler.
But the more I listened, the more I realized that all these songs have their place, and each does work on the album that needs doing. Film critics like to speak of emotionally charged moments being "earned" by carefully laid groundwork in character development. The farther Westerberg went out on a limb with songs like "Androgynous" (all of a sudden he's the indie rock Cole Porter, looking out for the shy, arty types that didn't fit in) and "Sixteen Blue" (the ultimate articulation of teenage angst), the more empathy he showed and the more he needed ballast. The dumb songs offer relief and make the ballads hit that much harder. They also rip. It helps that this is the best-sounding record they ever made, and the rockers pummel like never before. The mix is clear; the guitars tear the space in half when they need to and ring clearly when they don't, when they throw in unusual instruments, they work. The six outtakes-- a couple of covers (of T. Rex and, uh, the DeFranco Family featuring Tony DeFranco), and two choice originals-- are strong, but they wouldn't have fit on a record that doesn't waste a note. Let It Be is, in its own way, perfect.
Being a fuck-up with a good heart is endearing when you're young; if you've not changed by the time you hit your late twenties, well, you're probably just pretty much a fuck-up, and eventually, you become annoying. All the contradictions in the Replacements' music, and in Westerberg's songwriting, are not something you can easily carry into adulthood, which is partly why the band would run into some trouble later on. But none of that matters here, when they were young and understood so much about youth. People change, but records don't, and that's part of what makes them great. They're frozen in place, ready to be found by people who need them. And if you haven't found these yet-- well, I'm jealous. | 2008-04-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-04-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 21, 2008 | 9.4 | 049aac9b-02f5-4873-8b2a-8a54de9c5324 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Compiled from the band’s 2012 world tours, Not Here/Not Now is the fourth release and second double-live album Michael Gira has issued since reviving the Swans name in 2010. Of the songs featured, only three have appeared on previous recordings, and the lone 80s-era track that figures offers an idea of where Swans are heading on their upcoming album. | Compiled from the band’s 2012 world tours, Not Here/Not Now is the fourth release and second double-live album Michael Gira has issued since reviving the Swans name in 2010. Of the songs featured, only three have appeared on previous recordings, and the lone 80s-era track that figures offers an idea of where Swans are heading on their upcoming album. | Swans: Not Here/Not Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18712-swans-not-herenot-now/ | Not Here/Not Now | Contrary to popular belief, Swans are not a noisy band. Noise is a dissonant irritant, something that makes you wince momentarily and prompts you to plug your fingers in your ears as a defence mechanism. However, a Swans concert presents a symphony of cacophony from which even deafness provides no relief. Because Swans deal not in noise, but loudness—a gusty, wall-crumbling, tectonic-plate-shifting loudness that doesn’t so much give you a headache as an ulcer. As I discovered during a show last fall, even when you’re taking a mid-show piss in a bathroom that’s two storeys and several walls removed from the venue stage, Swans are still the most punishing band you’ve ever experienced.
But for all the abuse and misanthropy they project in concert, Swans consistently reward their fans’ tolerance with great acts of generosity. Compiled from the band’s 2012 world tours, Not Here/Not Now is the fourth release and second double-live album that Michael Gira has issued since reviving the Swans name in 2010, and like the previous concert document—2012’s We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head—it’s a limited-edition, hand-crafted package that will help fund the next Swans studio opus. (And given that we got The Seer out of the last deal, it’s no surprise that Not Here/Not Now’s first run sold out almost immediately. Though you can still donate to the cause by ponying up $500 for something even better than a mere record: a new Gira song written in your honour.) But Swans live albums have come to represent more than just fancy souvenirs for charitable fans. They’re opportunities for Swans enthusiasts to observe the band’s ever-evolving aesthetic in action: Of the songs featured on Not Here/Not Now, only three have appeared on previous recordings. And any worries that Swans are showing too much of their hand are defused by the fact that new Swans songs rarely make it from the stage to record in the same form, and, once officially released, mutate even further in subsequent performances.
So if you’re wondering if you need another version of “The Seer”, the answer is: hell yes. After debuting as a brawny, pulsating rocker on We Rose and then transforming into the exotic, cinematically rendered 32-minute centerpiece of its 2012 namesake album, “The Seer” reappears on Not Here/Not Now as an oozing piece of toxic sludge that just gets thicker and nastier over its marathon 44-minute runtime, with two new songs bubbling up from its miasma: the scorched-earth psychedelia of “Bring the Sun” and “Toussaint L’ouverture”, a maniacal Francophone rant couched in an opium-den ambiance reminiscent of the comedown on Sonic Youth’s “Expressway to Yr. Skull”. But even those developments feel natural compared to what’s happened to “Oxygen”, a song that first surfaced as an acoustic meditation on Gira’s 2010 solo album I Am Not Insane, but has been unrecognizably reworked into a gut-punching, Jesus Lizardian rumble. (The original describes Gira’s experience with asthma; the new version feels like it.)
You can get a pretty good idea of where Swans are heading on their upcoming album from the lone 80s-era track that figures here: the Holy Money-era sludgefeast “Coward” is the perfect complement to the bone-crushing heft of new 10-minute dirge “Just a Little Boy”, which sounds even more like how you’d imagine a Melvins cover of David Bowie’s “Station to Station” would sound than the Melvins’ actual cover of “Station to Station”. And that’s just the third-longest new song unveiled here: the stormy 16-minute opener “To Be Kind” sees Gira gravely repeating the title with the solemn cadence of a cantor, as if the sentiment expressed within was an impossible ideal; “She Loves Us!” deviously appropriates the title of a bygone Beatles hit in service of a 15-minute maelstrom that builds up a drum-battered drone into a mutant stoner-metal groove.
By comparison, the sand-swept drift of “Nathalie Neal” can’t help but feel like the least momentous of the new-album previews on offer here, but it serves as a logical bridge out of these caustic concert recordings into Not Here/Not Now’s pair of lo-fi acoustic-demo denouements. More than just expose the psych-folk underpinning of Swans’ seismic sound, the rough sketches for “Kirsten Supine” and “Screen Shot” offer a disarmingly intimate glimpse into Gira’s songwriting process, complete with his play-by-play, strum-by-strum commentary. After nearly two hours of being subjected to Swans’ highly orchestrated onstage onslaught, these human, off-the-cuff moments come as a great relief; in sharp contrast to the authoritative, stentorian presence Gira casts in concert, the demos present him in charmingly self-deprecating mode, questioning himself about what direction he should steer the song into, or even if it’s any good to begin with. Just as the double-tracked vocal incantations and needling acoustic jabs of “Screen Shot” approach peak hypnotic intensity, Gira stops the song cold and admits, “I have no idea where it’s going to go from there… but we’re going into the studio in a couple of weeks and we’ll figure it out.” Given Swans’ recent track record, those words feel less like glib reassurance than a distant early warning of what’s to come. | 2013-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Young God | November 8, 2013 | 8.2 | 049b6046-978a-4494-b9f4-783dae90d2a9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
One way to look at the Boredoms is as the Andy Kaufman of rock. Through meticulous study, they have completely ... | One way to look at the Boredoms is as the Andy Kaufman of rock. Through meticulous study, they have completely ... | Boredoms: Vision Creation Newsun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/863-vision-creation-newsun/ | Vision Creation Newsun | One way to look at the Boredoms is as the Andy Kaufman of rock. Through meticulous study, they have completely mastered the architecture of the transcendent rock jam. But instead of celebrating their achievements, they choose to undercut their monuments to riffology in service of the first commandment of Dadaism: Thou Shalt Fuck With People's Heads.
Just as Kaufman's killer Elvis impression turned his hapless, unfunny "foreign man" character into a surreal comic enterprise, so does the Boredoms' overreaching rock power achieve extra poignancy through their unwillingness to leave well enough alone. The classic Boredoms song inches us ever closer to the brink of orgiastic musical communion, until Yamatsuka Eye and Co. derail the groove train at the last minute, sending us spinning off into a ditch in a messy tangle of open reel tape. We are frustrated, but as Frank Sinatra once said, "That's life."
The best example of this sort of monkeywrenching on Vision Creation Newsun (the follow-up to 1998's Super Are, which is currently only available as a pricy Japanese import) comes with the second track. The song (there are no titles here, only unpronounceable symbols) begins in a swell of chiming guitars and shimmering percussion, opening slowly like a lotus flower, and eventually takes root as a driving, circular psychedelic guitar workout reminiscent of Spacemen 3's "Suicide."
As the band moves through variation after variation on the simple theme and the track gains in volume and power, Eye suddenly seizes the tape machine and begins cutting the song to ribbons, splicing in air raid sirens, EQing, and phasing like a tone-deaf janitor trapped in the Radio One control booth. In this instant, Eye makes an unholy pile of shit from a perfect specimen of guitar rock ecstasy. How could he do such a thing when we were feeling so good? But then, just as we're about to hit the Stop button in disgust, he gets the song back on the rails and shoves it forward with even more thrust. And as we appreciate the authority of the song that much more, we thank him for the moment of discord.
No music writer can resist the occasional "x meets y" sort of comparison, and the one that describes latter-day Boredoms is too unusual to pass up: The Ramones meets the Grateful Dead. Strange as it may sound, it could be the only way to describe a band that once cut a 34-minute cover of a single Mekons riff-- it appeared on Super Roots 7, a tremendous achievement that remains the band's trance rock pinnacle. But if anything, this odd amalgamation only points out what's so great about Japan: musicians there don't waste time trying to figure out why the Sex Pistols are cooler than King Crimson, they merely combine the best elements of both.
Vision Creation Newsun takes the Boredoms even further into neo-hippie psychedelic territory, though a few songs (like the aforementioned Track Two) rock more thoroughly and convincingly than any pre-punk band apart from the Stooges. Though there are a handful of lengthy, evolving crunchers, the majority of the album consists of exercises in atmosphere. This largely instrumental LP leans mostly on plucked guitars, gurgling synths, and tribal drumming, sometimes reminiscent of folky psyche travelers Ghost. It's a beautiful sound-- one that gains in complexity with repeated listens-- but it never quite reaches the heights of Super Are. I guess you have to take what you can get with the Boredoms. | 2000-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2000-02-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Warner Bros. | February 29, 2000 | 7.9 | 04a07539-ff80-4b89-afd5-8ed9b6d2544d | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
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 Shania Twain’s 1997 blockbuster, one that showed the world the power of a true pop-country crossover. | 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 Shania Twain’s 1997 blockbuster, one that showed the world the power of a true pop-country crossover. | Shania Twain: Come On Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shania-twain-come-on-over/ | Come On Over | Seven notes of hot, crackling guitar. Let’s go, girls. Three words, beamed forth like a cosmic directive, spoken with the Mona Lisa’s suggestive sense of mischief. Mother isn’t calling, but her fun younger sister sure is.
Though it was the eighth single from Shania Twain’s Come On Over, “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” is the first volley and thesis statement of the singer-songwriter’s third album. Celebrating girls’ nights out and their grooming rituals, the song embodied the liberated lady’s lifestyle with “the prerogative to have a little fun.” In the video, an inversion of Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” Twain gradually ditches layers of her outfit amid a troop of synchrony-challenged beefcakes. The song revamped the spirit of Cyndi Lauper’s 1983 hit for the blossoming bosslady feminism of the late 1990s—girls just want to have fun, but women go out and get it for themselves.
Released in November of 1997, Come On Over arrived on the high tide of the pre-Napster Clinton economy, before the music industry could sense that the bottom was about to fall out. Everything about Come On Over radiated enthusiasm, from the invitation of its title to the six exclamation points sprinkled across its tracklist. With its hard-charging hooks, sassy kiss-offs, and radiant sparkle, it became one of the defining titles for the “I don’t like country, but…” crowd. With Robert “Mutt” Lange in her corner as producer, co-writer, and husband, Twain set a new standard for pop-country crossovers. She started a new chapter of the decades-old grousing over who gets to be country and make country music, kicking open opportunities for a new generation.
For a record that had dramatic consequences for Nashville, Come On Over had very little to do with the city itself. Twain was an early-thirties singer-songwriter who’d grown up poor in Canada; Lange was a hermetic South African-born producer whose pre-Shania credits were mostly big-ticket rock records: the Cars’ Heartbeat City, Def Leppard’s Hysteria and Adrenalize, plus the AC/DC hat trick of Highway to Hell, Back in Black, and For Those About to Rock We Salute You.
By some measures, Twain developed her success from the hardscrabble hunger of her working-class upbringing, but by others, she was a genre-wrecking false prophet who could nonetheless pull off a great smoky eye. She had grown up in rural Ontario, developing her musical interest as a child and playing gigs around town—including last-call appearances at bars—at her parents’ behest. As a 21-year-old, she began to look after her four siblings following their parents’ death in a car crash, supporting the family by singing in a variety revue at a resort. Her aspirations were never limited to country music, as she told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1997: “I wrote every kind of music...I wanted to sing rock’n’roll at 12 years old.” Still, she settled on a relative country comfort zone for her first album, 1993’s Shania Twain.
Lange brought his arena-tuned ear to 1995’s The Woman in Me, which eventually sold 20 million copies after a disappointing showing from Twain’s debut. The album’s boisterous singles toyed with new country combinations, establishing Twain as a pop-forward up-and-comer: the slick barroom swing of “Whose Bed Have Your Boots Been Under,” the accelerating stomp of “Any Man of Mine,” the rock edge of “(If You’re Not in It for Love) I’m Outta Here!” She built steam in resisting touring for the record, and by 1997, she had Springsteen star-maker Jon Landau as another asset in her corner.
While drenched in crimson-velvet glamor, Come On Over feels like a complete manifestation of a small-town girl’s ambitions, where you’ve got a hold on yourself and a hot man available for treats and foot rubs, and you’re also somehow able to be incredibly sexy in bold red lipstick. It’s no small wonder that Come On Over sold 36 million copies by the end of the millennium, still holding the distinction of being the 12th best-selling record ever in the United States.
At 16 tracks, Come On Over is hardly lean. But the hits are so potent that the duds mostly fail to register. Lange’s fastidious attention to production makes Come On Over a power-couple masterwork: Beneath its high-gloss finish sits an engine of uncompromising bridges and choruses. It’s difficult to hit pause at any point in the album’s first four songs, and after a few minutes of breathing room, Twain lunges into the unstoppable three-song run of “You’re Still the One,” “Honey, I’m Home,” and “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” That Twain is but a so-so singer becomes immaterial as she coasts through her agreeable numbers—which are, as it turns out, very easy for a regular person to sing along to.
Come On Over is also assertive. It channels all the gusto of someone living their dreams in real time, matching a blockbuster sense of confidence with arena-size sounds and attendant energy. When Twain says “Let’s go girls,” the answer is unquestionably, “Yes ma’am.” Her band of bruisers hurtle along, with “I’m Holdin’ on to Love (To Save My Life)” picking up at a gallop from “Man!”’s opening salvo. Its underlying early-rock rhythm jumpstarts a sense of anticipation as Twain sings about the trials and triumph of true love.
From there, Twain and Lange make good on their then-indelible bond by transforming the phrase “gol’ darn gone and done it” into an implausibly great earworm on “Love Gets Me Every Time.” The record’s title track is loaded with pomp and hospitality, slowing to a parade’s pace as Twain encourages relaxation and cutting loose. Aligning Twain’s French-Canadian heritage with the day’s brief zydeco fascination, an accordion gives the Acadian-flavored track a curious edge. Declining an invitation so obviously ready to please, so unburdened of pretense—well, it would just be rude.
Twain put her foot all the way down with “That Don’t Impress Me Much,” a killer cruiser that gleamed like a chrome bumper as it rode the Top 40 for 22 weeks. It arrives later in the record as a sharp dismissal of gasbags who can’t keep up with her needs. Cars, looks, attitude: None of it compares to a man who shows up where it counts. The song’s quicksilver guitar lead catches with the same immediacy as “Man!”’s primary declaration, the spicy edge of Twain’s rebukes cooled by the gliding guitar and smooth backing harmonies of the chorus.
Twain applies her all-in approach to every second of Come On Over. At their most capital-B Basic, the songs at least respect the tradition by going full-tilt gushing romantic. “From This Moment On” arrives as the first of Come On Over’s most saccharine ballads, which feel like appeals to recently surrendered bachelorettes seeking a perfect first-dance number for the reception. A duet with young Oklahoma crooner Bryan White, it is a breathy vow with a Disney-level cinematic sweep. “You’re Still the One” follows with a gauzy reaffirmation of the sentiment a few minutes later. Though they offer calm between gales, they keep the record’s passionate throughline running without sacrificing too much ground to the treacle.
Fiddles are the key element in transmitting Come On Over’s country core, one of the most hotly contested qualifiers of the record’s gatekeeping detractors. The players are all bona fide country pros: Larry Franklin (Asleep at the Wheel, Randy Travis), Rob Hajacos (George Strait, Brooks & Dunn, Garth Brooks), Aubrey Haynie (Trisha Yearwood, Clint Black), and the bluegrass-inclined titan Stuart Duncan. But in the “Don’t Be Stupid” video, lines of hard-heeled steppers join Twain and a cadre of plainly dressed fiddlers on screen, shoving the song into Celtic associations (and hooking it to another intense late-’90s cultural obsession: Riverdance). Whether swinging forward in a surge or skirting around a jock-rock stomp, the fiddles are Come On Over’s Rosetta Stone, playing all sides into an appealing middle.
With the smeared edges of their production, Twain and Lange master the illusion of genre, as if they fashioned Come On Over into a plastic lenticular print. Tipped toward the honky-tonk hop of “Honey, I’m Home” or the unabashed twang of “Love Gets Me Every Time,” Come On Over can boot-scootin’ boogie with the best; the glimmering facets of “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “You’re Still the One” bear the blinding shimmer of full-strength pop. Twain could be anything to anybody, a principle that bolted past genre as “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” spawned thousands of drag homages.
Twain drew criticism in the press for perceived shallowness. Garth Brooks’ shadow loomed in almost every critique, having filled arenas by making a big deal about his status as an affable everyman who also appreciated the occasional spectacle of pyrotechnics. But where Brooks made an almost frightening display of his affection for over-the-top production, Twain was more relaxed, leveraging Lange’s super-producer abilities into melodies and hooks that just won’t quit.
Her lyrics, while upbeat and assured, largely stayed away from any controversy. It’s clear from Twain’s interviews around her work that she never claimed to be a brilliant genius or the poet of a generation. She’s the first to insist that her songs are meant to be fun, and it is OK to enjoy them on those terms alone. Twain and Lange were funneling all of their energy into making a towering monument to their ability to produce a direct and powerful kind of neurological pleasure. The inexplicable appeal is by painstaking design.
Despite dazzlers like Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, and anybody else who’s ever worn a Nudie Cohn suit, the country music industry has long sagged under a masculinity-fueled obsession with a particular sense of authenticity. In Christopher Cain’s 1992 drama Pure Country, celebrated Texas gentleman George Strait stars as an ascendant (and distressingly ponytailed) country singer named Dusty Chandler. Corrupted by the demands and excesses of his rising fame, Dusty skips his big gigs in favor of a temporary break on a stranger’s ranch. One overall message of Pure Country, favored by a subset of fans and artists across decades, is that real country music exists apart from pageantry. But the country music industry that allowed these artists to achieve icon status, regardless of their angle, was established as a way to market “hillbilly” music to a growing white middle class.
It’s disingenuous to insist on some sort of undefined ideological genre purity from Twain (or Brooks, for that matter), who was pursuing one of the values foundational to country music from its first shellacked 78s: selling stuff to white people. George Strait may not have allowed himself to be hoisted by his britches over arenas full of his adoring fans, as Garth Brooks did, but he still has his own line of Wrangler apparel. Hank probably hadn’t done it that way, either. Twain sang about how women’s perceived trifles are in fact serious business. That she draped them in contemporary charisma and adapted them to the media of the day makes them no less meaningful.
Come On Over’s many visual counterparts—arriving in Pop-Up Video’s peak era—shaped the public perception of country music while leaving an imprint on future stars still in their tender years. Twelve songs from the record were made singles, and while not all of them got videos, the campaign’s high femme aesthetics underscored Twain’s sizzle. The airplay across VH1, MTV, and CMT cemented her in hearts and minds with soft-focus semi-psychedelia, a tilted tophat, a pseudo-casual behind-the-scenes shoot, blue beachy dreams, and even a questionably en vogue bindi. Her head-to-toe cheetah look in “That Don’t Impress Me Much” sealed her as an icon of the decade (not to mention the lipstick, the matching luggage, the bangs). As she waits out a ride in the desert, she’s a damsel less in distress than disgust at her lack of acceptable suitors.
Still, ascribing Come On Over as some sort of major feminist manifesto is an overstatement—for all of its finessed charms, it is the result of major-label music-industry machinery humming along at full operating capacity. Indeed, Come On Over curdles as it drops into its sloughable back quarter. It begins with “Black Eyes, Blue Tears,” which presents escaping domestic violence as a matter of self-worth and features Twain delivering a wispy, “Find your self-esteem and be forever free to dream.” The track worsens with the footnote that it was inspired by the O.J. Simpson trial.
As the Chicks were revving toward righteous murder plots and mattress dancin’, Shania’s politics were more muted and, at times, contradictory. “I think we’re kind of spoiled in a lot of ways, with the advantages we have. Feminists may not feel that way, but I do. It’s pretty darn fun to be a woman,” she once said. And, true, “If You Want to Touch Her, Ask!” is too clumsy to earn much credit as a victory for bodily autonomy, but Twain wrote it as a sincere response to her own experience with handsy men. Within the major keys and kicky romps, she still conveyed direct realities about life as a woman in the middle of the road.
“Honey, I’m Home” is a particularly forceful number, cribbing the booming authority and jagged guitar of “Any Man of Mine” for one of Come On Over’s more rollicking country-rock entries. While Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” addressed workplace woes with chipper sweetness, Twain was content to declare that work sucks, actually, and so does all of the other bullshit that comes with it. “Honey, I’m home and I’ve had a hard day,” she crows, detailing her grievances and escalating into a loud haze of heys. It’s one for when “Take This Job and Shove It” and “Oney” are a little too heavy-handed, scorching with the sincere frustration of everyday existence.
Between the lines of its super-charged numbers, Come On Over inadvertently outlines the ways that heterosexuality, like capitalism, is a scam. Get past the various creeps, no-counts, and ain’t-shits that Twain warns you about, and you still might end up with a guy who’s suspicious of your phone calls or gets weird about your mail (“Don’t Be Stupid”). And then, some years later, he still might cheat and leave you for your best friend anyway, which is what precipitated Twain’s divorce from Lange that was finalized in 2010.
But all that is what turns “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” into an antidote against everything. Like the saucier niece of Helen Reddy’s unwitting second-wave anthem “I Am Woman,” Twain’s stunner strikes at a universal ache for self-determination and emancipation from a society that still says you can’t. “I want to be free to feel the way I feel,” she sings. Twain had taken her potshots at feminist politics, but that single line is the gist of a lot of it.
She drops three sharp, yelped exhalations before belting the titular battle cry. It’s impossible to recreate quietly. One thing about feeling like a woman is that, in addition to all of the nail polish and good gossip and such, it involves a lot of feeling like the whole world is screaming at you all of the time. The constant message is one of being too much and not enough, a criticism repeatedly lobbed at Twain and Come On Over. There’s no right formula, and the goalposts never stay put, if they’re even acknowledged at all. It’s exhausting. I want to be free to feel the way I feel. Screaming right back—it feels pretty good, when you can swing it.
Though Twain maintained her status as a country favorite, she continued to push further into pop aspirations. Come On Over got a remixed “International” edition with pulsing club beats and other flourishes, further juicing her popularity in Europe. Perhaps overestimating his capacity for mystique, Brooks expanded his efforts to keep up with pop-music maneuvers through his Chris Gaines alter ego in 1999. Though Brooks had his only Top 40 hit with Gaines’ “Lost in You,” Twain played better to her charming strengths with more evenly applied Lange-loaded hits. Her next record, 2002’s Up!, arrived in three different color-coded editions: one pop-inclined (red), one country (green), and an “international” reprisal, a blue iteration remixed by the English-Indian duo Simon and Diamond Duggal.
Sometime in the early or mid-2000s, Twain contracted Lyme disease, which sidelined her singing career. She retreated without explanation after wrapping the Up! tour in the summer of 2004, and eight years passed before her grand return, a two-year residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas beginning in late 2012. As Shania excused herself from public life, a teenage Taylor Swift began her ascent as a wholesome young successor, releasing her self-titled debut thirteen years after Twain’s.
Though Swift pursued Twain’s pop-forward model most aggressively, the pervasive influence of Come On Over stretched well into the 2000s and far beyond any fussed-over boundaries of pop and country music. Harry Styles, Haim, Miley Cyrus, and Sheer Mag have all kissed the ring with covers. Twain’s celebrity—and the girl-power awe it inspired—was a series-long joke on Broad City that culminated in her appearing in a 2017 episode. Halsey borrowed the cheetah look for “You should be sad,” and Post Malone was belting along with her 2019 American Music Awards performance.
Despite Twain’s accomplishments, the country music industry still struggles to recognize women’s talent in the moment on their terms, or cede any power to those who might. Women have continued to face what seems like endless sandbagging and howling egotistical storms, to say nothing of how Black women like Mickey Guyton have effectively been shut out of the industry. Some radio programmers have insisted that women artists just don’t have the same appeal to audiences as men do; Twain’s enduring adoration has long been authoritative evidence to the contrary. It was an excuse handed ad nauseum to Kacey Musgraves, a direct heir of Twain’s sparkling empire who nonetheless followed her arrow toward the commercial and critical success of 2018’s Golden Hour.
Shania Twain reached the rare stratosphere of country-music fame by trusting the unifying appeal of pop music, by pointing at underseen, under-engaged women and saying “Yes, you, too.” “Be a winner, be a star,” she declares on the title track. It’s a vague, ridiculous proposal, but she makes it sound fun and feasible enough to try.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mercury | October 31, 2021 | 7.5 | 04a51c71-0244-416e-bd53-409d3613512b | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The Japanese quartet devote their second album to enthusiastic, maximalist pop with a bluntly feminist message. | The Japanese quartet devote their second album to enthusiastic, maximalist pop with a bluntly feminist message. | CHAI: PUNK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chai-punk/ | PUNK | Consider the following lyrics, as translated from Japanese: “Pink butt cheeks are my charm/Twinkle, jewels, pearls, princess, twilight!” Now throw some glitter into the mix: Distort those vocals ever so slightly, jam in multiple competing synth lines, and add a jolt of four-on-the-floor drums just for the hell of it. You now have “I’m Me,” a sugar-rush of bubblegum pop from Chai, the four-piece disco-punk band who aspire to destabilize the way beauty and cuteness function in Japan even as they embrace stylized camp and matching outfits.
The Nagoya-based band’s second album, PUNK, is terrifically over the top. The current landscape of indie rock produces songs with heavy notes of loss and longing. But Chai is a band who screams yes to joy, and PUNK is a record written in earnest about being yourself, loving your friends, and not caring about what anyone else thinks about the way you live your life. “I don’t know about the world but I know me/I don’t hide my weight,” vocalist Mana sings elsewhere in “I’m Me.” PUNK is full of that kind of bluntly feminist songwriting. If empowerment is uncool, the women of Chai would choose to be uncool every single time.
Chai call equally upon blog house’s halcyon days as they do the ecstatic joy of Downtown new wavers like Lizzy Mercier Descloux and Tom Tom Club. The album’s gleefully overstuffed 30 minutes leave little room to come up for air. Take “GREAT JOB,” which resembles a “Dance Dance Revolution” song as heard from the most brightly lit of suburban arcades. Winning combinations on casino slot machines light up, synths mimic the sound of honking car horns, and vocals buzz around the innards of the track like a swarm of bees pollinating a greenhouse. “Fashionista” jackhammers its way through neon-lit guitar overdubs while getting serious about the capitalistic impulses of industrial cuteness. “Too much makeup/Just lips and eyebrows all set/Glossy yellow skin/Have nothing more than this,” goes one particularly emblematic line. On “THIS IS CHAI,” a post-punk track built around a 15-second loop of what sounds like marching band brass, the quartet explores the effects of decay and distortion on the human voice. Listening to the all of the song’s noisy layers come together evokes the sight of a highly pressurized can of whipped cream exploding.
The closest Chai come to slowing down is “Wintime,” a starry pop song about ringing in the New Year with the people you love, set to synthesizers coated in disco goopiness. As the band shift gears into their most subdued setting, their lyrics travel to deep space: “In a cold sky the eclipse will laugh/To the point that it’s so bright,” the quartet sings. More than just a song about friendship, “Wintime” paints a future where happiness is powerful enough to pull the planets in the night sky out of retrograde. | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Burger | March 15, 2019 | 8.3 | 04a58a76-bc91-458d-b13e-d35c1be69509 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Decked out in wind synths and fretless bass, the L.A. trio’s debut album lovingly invokes new age and ambient jazz at their most opulent. It’s a heartfelt argument that smoothness is not a crime. | Decked out in wind synths and fretless bass, the L.A. trio’s debut album lovingly invokes new age and ambient jazz at their most opulent. It’s a heartfelt argument that smoothness is not a crime. | Total Blue: Total Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/total-blue-total-blue/ | Total Blue | Los Angeles’ Nicky Benedek and Alex Talan may not live in the past, but you can bet they have summer houses there. Benedek—who in 2011 cited Zapp and Roger Troutman as influences, making him one of the most clued-in college juniors in the history of higher education—got his start making sleek, ’80s-inspired boogie that sounded like it had been swiped from the cassette deck of a vintage lowrider (another major influence: West Coast G-funk). When he graduated to a broader amalgam of R&B, new age, freestyle, and deep house, Benedek’s music remained steeped in analog warmth and tape hiss. Talan, aka Coolwater, has shown similar crate-digging instincts on his NTS show Cool World West, favoring artists like Joe Zawinul, Bill Laswell, Haruomi Hosono, and also Talan’s late father, a filmmaker and bedroom synth player. Coolwater’s eponymous 2020 debut EP sounds like a distillation of all those influences, a kind of L.A. jazz noir with a Blade Runner soul. In the new trio Total Blue, which includes their friend Anthony Calonico, they dim the lights and deliver an even more enchanting simulacrum of outernational jazz and big-budget new age.
The three musicians previously worked together on Coolwater’s EP, which in retrospect looks like a trial run for Total Blue. Their debut album takes similar sounds and influences—fretless bass, muted trumpet, racks of outboard effects—and distills them into a dreamier, more ethereal fusion. “The Path” opens the record on an aquatic scene: A liquid electric bass melody glistens like oily water beneath the docks; a gentle marimba rhythm clinks like rigging against sailboat masts. It’s chromatically lush, a feast of augmented chords and burnished accidentals; halfway through, a keening wind-synthesizer melody carries the song to its logical smooth-jazz conclusion. “Corsair” picks up both the maritime metaphor and the retro sensibility: Everything, from the flanged guitar to the LinnDrum thwacks, seems designed to evoke a specific era and spirit of digitally abetted jazz production. Back in its heyday, this was an expensive sound to create; Total Blue pay tribute to those studio bills of yore with sumptuous chords and arrangements that sound like a million bucks.
If you didn’t know the backstory, it would be easy to assume from the album’s glistening sheen that it was a reissue of an ’80s new-age relic. Even the evocative, globe-trotting titles sound like something from a Windham Hill or Private Music laserdisc: “Heart of the World,” “Chaparral,” “Jaguarundi.” It’s not just the sound design that feels opulent; so do the songs themselves, which stretch out with an almost extravagant sense of leisure, bass glissando and ersatz reeds mirroring each other in slow, sensuous motions. No matter how many times I’ve listened, every time the trio pivots to a particularly juicy chord, it feels like triple cherries coming up on the slot machine.
Their references are easy to identify. The taut, dubbed-out guitar plucks at the center of “Heart of the World” flash back to the cosmic expanses of Manuel Göttsching; “Jaguarundi” is rooted in the rainforest rhythms of Jon Hassell records like Vernal Equinox; the electroacoustic shimmer that ripples across the album recalls new-age jazz composers like Mark Isham and Patrick O’Hearn. Unlike some record collectors, these three never sound like they’re trying to score cool points; to the contrary, many of their inspirations are artists and sounds that have long been written off by gatekeepers. “Bone Chalk,” one of the album’s highlights, is a dead ringer for the billowing filter sweeps and misty-eyed chord changes of Seal’s “Violet,” the meditative closing song on the adult-contemporary singer’s Trevor Horn-produced debut. Intentional homage or accidental kin? Whatever the case, Total Blue’s bewitching take on ambient jazz is a compelling argument that there’s no such thing as too smooth. | 2024-07-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-25T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Music From Memory | July 25, 2024 | 8 | 04a5bb0e-e1be-4d0c-8f17-9c2296992a17 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Atrocity Exhibition can be seen as the third work in a trilogy that began with XXX. Here, Danny Brown's songs of pain and release are accompanied by dense sonics from all over the musical map. | Atrocity Exhibition can be seen as the third work in a trilogy that began with XXX. Here, Danny Brown's songs of pain and release are accompanied by dense sonics from all over the musical map. | Danny Brown: Atrocity Exhibition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22468-atrocity-exhibition/ | Atrocity Exhibition | Danny Brown is an auteur. Hip-hop has a tradition of collaboration, but the Detroit rapper is a one-man show who, while he reps his own Bruiser Brigade and works frequently with a handful of producers, has a voice and vision completely his own. You can think of his progression over the last five years in filmic terms. If 2011’s XXX was the brilliant independent foreign film that was critically acclaimed and wildly successful and put him on the map, Old was the solid but safer domestic version, with higher production costs, a prettier cast, and many of the edges sanded off. Atrocity Exhibition, then, is the movie someone makes after they come back down to earth from making that tentpole project, a work predicated on the “one for me, one for them” mentality.
Brown’s individual releases need to be understood as part of a whole, and in each of them, he has an obsession with form. On Old, he took a throwaway line about getting jumped on the way to the grocery store to buy Wonder Bread from XXX and built a whole song around the incident, and he snakes references to his older work throughout Atrocity Exhibition. Take the title of the first song, “Downward Spiral.” It’s a direct nod to XXX’s opening track, where Brown prominently (and memorably) rapped: “it’s the downward spiral, got me suicidal/But too scared to do it.” By reaching back five years, Brown makes Atrocity Exhibition a brick in a larger edifice, perhaps a bookend to an implied trilogy that starts with XXX and ends here.
Structurally, Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown doubling down on familiar tropes from his last two records: once again he starts with a gripping opener, the mise-en-scène; following that are some shorter songs in rapid succession that do the dirty work of exposition; a back-half run that reckons with the hedonism that comes before it (that section here starts with the Kelela-anointed “From the Ground”); and then, finally, a stomach-churning closing track that is never triumphantly resolute but feels like an ending just the same.
But the references extend well beyond Brown’s own work, and well beyond hip-hop. “Downward Spiral” is of course an oblique Nine Inch Nails nod, and Brown, who sampled This Heat and Hawkwind on the same song on XXX, drags Atrocity Exhibition through an industrial, electronic, post-punk sludge, borrowing a title from Joy Division while releasing the album on Warp. The bass on “Rolling Stone,” a duet with South African singer Petite Noir, is pure New Order. “Ain’t It Funny,” with its bold horns, recalls the Stooges’ flirtations with free jazz and Bauhaus at their most bombastic.
The thirty-five-year-old Brown has an old-head mentality as a rapper: play a song and he’ll rap on it. Make any beat and he’ll rap on it. It’s about rhymes, wordplay, and (for lack of a better term), bars. This approach isn’t currently fashionable, but there’s a pleasure in hearing someone else’s joy at putting words together—Brown’s old-school bent intermittently hits some delirious highs, from “Slice your tomato if you owe us for the lettuce/Running through the sack of D sorta like Jerome Bettis,” to “Rocks about the size as the teeth in Chris Rock’s mouth.”
The potential pitfall to this word-drunk approach is sometimes his songs just aren’t easy on the ears. The production here sounds wonderful—frequent collaborator Paul White is credited with 10 songs, and the two have an easy chemistry, because both indulge in coloring outside traditional genre lines (White’s collaborative album with Open Mike Eagle from earlier this year, Hella Personal Film Festival, is kind of like the quieter, gentler, non-evil version of this album, pulling from a different set of rock influences). But Brown sometimes lapses into his Old flows, that idiosyncratic style where he falls off beat, gets in front of it, or simply yells above it. He avoids the frat-baiting EDM songs like “Dip” and “Smokin & Drinkin” that pocked Old here, even though singles like “When It Rain” (more vintage Brown than anything from the past five years) and “Pneumonia” flirt with that sound. But fortunately they’re too rough around the edges, too jumpy, too dark to soundtrack a scene like this. To its credit, Atrocity Exhibition balances its sonic elements and never slips into the mush of guitars and bad ideas that threatened to infiltrate rap at the dawn of this century. White, Brown’s most gifted and consistent collaborator, keeps things at an even keel.
No matter what's going on with the music, Brown’s acute emotional writing is once again on full display. Where XXX seemed to promise a way out, Old reflected (and sometimes reveled in) the lifestyle afforded him through his breakout success. This record, as dark, dingy, and uncomfortable as it is, continues to suggest something deeper is haunting Brown. “Everybody say, you got a lot to be proud of/Been high this whole time, don’t realize what I done/‘Cause when I’m all alone, feels like no one care/Isolate myself and don’t go nowhere,” he offers. He so internalizes all of his demons that, for the third record in this implied trilogy, you start to worry—is he irredeemably lost? Is his pain a response to his upbringing in Detroit, ground zero for armchair sociologists looking for a symbol of American decay? How long before the dam finally breaks? The great “Lost” here brings all these concerns to a head.
And then there’s “Really Doe,” produced by Detroit compatriot Black Milk, which juts out on the geography of the album because it features guest rappers (B-Real merely shows up for the hook on “Get Hi”) and also because it’s the only song not directly about Brown’s demons. It’s a fun track, and Earl Sweatshirt does that thing where he acts like he’s not rapping but ends up murdering everyone anyway while expending as little energy as possible. “I was a liar as a kid, so now I’m honest as fuck,” Earl offers, his unwavering delivery always imbuing what he raps with a startling amount of intimacy. You sometimes wish Brown could hit these more casually real notes more frequently, like he did on the origin story “EWNESW” from XXX or the blackout bars of “Greatest Rapper Ever” and “White Stripes” from 2010’s The Hybrid. But Brown is too good a writer and too focused on the whole not to carry heavy feelings into all his songs, like “some people say I think too much/I don’t think they think enough,” from “Rolling Stone,” and “your work killing fiends/‘cause you cut it with Fentanyl,” from “Ain’t It Funny.” These reflective lines are the work of a smart writer with an eye for hard-earned detail, and Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm. | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warp | October 3, 2016 | 8.5 | 04a7b835-4319-4621-a1cb-6cac75a1cae6 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
This riveting DVD/CD set captures the energy and sensory overload of a Chemical Brothers show. It also showcases many of the finest moments from their catalogue. | This riveting DVD/CD set captures the energy and sensory overload of a Chemical Brothers show. It also showcases many of the finest moments from their catalogue. | The Chemical Brothers: Don't Think | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16424-the-chemical-brothers-dont-think/ | Don't Think | Something happened during the initial theatrical screenings of the Chemical Brothers' concert documentary Don't Think that, while spontaneous, also felt like a foregone conclusion: audiences got up and danced. Sharing a darkened room with a flashy, quick-cutting, psychedelic sensory overload blasted out in Dolby Surround can do that to people. Especially when it's based around a set from arguably the most enduringly successful rave-gone-pop act of all time. Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons have built a 20-year canon that can effortlessly fill 90 minutes with wave after wave of euphoric, body-shaking classics. And at a time when their occasionally-bumpy transition from next-big-thing 1990s icons to Hanna-scoring cool older brothers has positioned them as elder statesmen of a resurgent moment for electronic dance music, the role of a generation-bridging legacy act has fit them well. So while Gondry and Jonze did them plenty of justice in the MTV era, an actual audiovisual document of their mind-bending live show feels a bit overdue.
If you're wondering how Don't Think overcomes the skepticism people might still harbor towards live EDM shows, it's actually a bit misleading to focus on the music itself as a performative act. It's more of a catalyst for something bigger, an approximation of the kind of mixed-media freakout that provokes synesthesia. Not that Tom and Ed aren't up there working the dials and controlling the levels and amping up the crowd-- every time they're shown on film, they're twiddling switches to some end or another, messing with levels and dropping in cues and, crucially, being just as propelled by the music as the people in the crowd. (One key shot -- a single finger hitting a key on a synthesizer that lets loose with that sharp opening hornet-buzz of "Hey Boy Hey Girl"-- almost feels like a jolt on the order of a Pete Townshend windmill.) The Chems have earned a rep for avoiding canned setlists and predictable sequencing, and even if some moments lean on long-used ideas-- Bernard Sumner's voice on "Out of Control" is chopped up and folded in on itself in much the same way as it was on the live Glastonbury 2000 version that appeared on the Music: Response EP-- there's no contempt in their familiarity.
Expecting the gold standard that Daft Punk's Alive 2007 set for re-defining career-spanning overviews shouldn't be necessary; there aren't as many transformative mash-up tricks or back-and-forth intra-song dialogues on that level. But there's still no shortage of the kinds of fan-geekout juxtapositions that give new meaning to tracks new and old. The bombastic Boss 302-gone-Roland 303 of "Horse Power" sounds a bit more at home cut out of the more subtly refined surroundings of Further and dropped in the midst of an early peak, but it also makes for a perfect stage-setter for the vintage acid of "Chemical Beats". And the b-boy lineage of a set-closing run that conflates "Leave Home", Q-Tip's vocals from "Galvanize" and the deathless "Block Rockin' Beats" is a fine way to go out, especially when that latter track's familiar bass gets pushed into super-fast-forward until it's just a blurred, stammering climax.
And the newer stuff stands just as well on its own. The crowd goes nuts at the woozy, vertiginous opening of "Swoon" for a good reason, and the title cut's hyperventilating bridge between Surrender favorites "Hey Boy Hey Girl" and "Out of Control"-- think Dig Your Own Hole deep cut "It Doesn't Matter," but simultaneously more melodic and more suspenseful-- is perfectly placed to make it sound like the they-still-got-it highlight it is. It all flows so smoothly so immediately that tracks which felt like late-career missteps on album-- like overstuffed pigeon-toed funk oddities like "Do It Again" and "Get Yourself High", which show up in succession in the set's first 10 minutes-- come across as all-hook monsters, fused in a way that splits the difference and shaves off all the fat.
It's a good CD, but a staggering film. Shot at the 2011 Fuji Rock Festival by longtime visual partner Adam Smith, it's a rhythmically edited spectacle that builds off the strobing pulse of basslines and lights alike. But even under the engaging light-show antics and all the allusions to 60s acidsploitation LSD-freakout sequences (faces covered in swirling colors, dancing silhouettes, scary clowns), the real engrossing thing is the focus on the crowd as the performative focal point. And not just the massive faceless festival-size throng, either, though there isn't a lack of wide shots and pans showing just how many people are going berserk at pivotal moments.
The field of vision is often geared to make a theatergoer feel like they're on the same scale as the people on the screen, a microcosm of thousands-strong energy strewn across a dozen faces. And there's an emphasis on capturing individual people as certain moments break-- abrupt drops startling an unsuspecting fan out of his reverie, buildups sending people into head-back ecstasy, people losing it as they shout along to lyrics. Sometimes it pulls back to the outer edges of the crowd by the concession stands, occasionally following one woman in particular and capturing moments where she's frightened or amused or disorientated by all the things going on around her; other moments we see vendors nodding along to the music or bewildered concertgoers suddenly finding out that the same projections that flood the main stage's screen also sneak in little cameos amongst the trees and the mud.
It's an angle that might seem derived from performative social-media awareness; when everyone has a video camera, crowds are so easily distilled into individuals. But its real effect is an on-the-field, you-are-there immediacy that pulls you in more than any concert documentary recorded in recent memory, capturing not just what you see when you're riveted to the stage, but what you see when you turn to your friend, when you glance over your shoulder, when you wander the grounds, when you completely lose control. The crowd at Naeba Ski Resort could say they were there, sure, but you could probably count anyone who saw it in a London theater or a Montreal living room or a Chicago train ride as claiming an honest attendance, too. | 2012-03-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-03-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | March 27, 2012 | 8.2 | 04a9990a-9109-4469-b442-fb1d1ca62962 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Big Thief’s sophomore album beautifully excavates family history and trauma into a delicate, intricately built folk rock record, showcasing the gorgeous style of singer Adrianne Lenker. | Big Thief’s sophomore album beautifully excavates family history and trauma into a delicate, intricately built folk rock record, showcasing the gorgeous style of singer Adrianne Lenker. | Big Thief: Capacity | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23280-capacity/ | Capacity | The Brooklyn quartet Big Thief did not name their debut Masterpiece because they felt it was flawless. Rather, Masterpiece painted the complex experience of being young and uncertain with a rare sense of humility: the highway becomes home, a romance between two reckless moonshiners ends for the fear of pain, a slap in the face is real love. But when a band enters the world with such a bold declaration of accomplishment, what do they title the work that surpasses their opus? Big Thief call it Capacity.
Though Big Thief—singer-guitarist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek, drummer James Krivchenia, and bassist Max Oleartchik—began recording Capacity just seven months after they finished work on Masterpiece, the unflinching accounts of death, domestic abuse, and primal romances that filled their debut have settled on their sophomore record. Stories pour out of Lenker’s mouth like an endless ribbon, bold and without friction. While the process of excavating such intense memories was challenging and painful, Capacity finds Big Thief firmly nestled in the catharsis. As Lenker sings, “For in the dark there is release.”
This idea that we contain opposing yet complementary forces is central to Capacity: We are mother and daughter, rearing and growing at once. Look to the record’s cover, which shows Lenker’s uncle holding her as an infant, dark hair slick on her soft skull. The adult Lenker so closely resembles her relative that at first glance she appears to be cradling a baby version of herself. “There is a child inside you who is trying/To raise the child in me,” she sings on “Mythological Beauty,” the record’s emotional centerpiece. The track adapts a horrific and bloody accident that befell her as a child as a means of empathizing with her young mother’s vast responsibility. “You held me in the backseat with a dishrag/Soaking up blood with your eye/I was just 5 and you were 27 praying don't let my baby die,” she screams, her voice and the guitars both tightening to their breaking points.
On the sweeping title track which thumps with crashing drums and wiry guitars, Big Thief intertwine the ideas of consonance, captivity, and capacity. “I am a beautiful bird/Fluttered and floating/Swollen and hollowed/For heaven,” Lenker declares in a manner that is both life-affirming and crushing. Earlier on the finger-picked acoustic opener “Pretty Things,” the narrator whispers to a lover, “There’s a woman inside of me/There’s one inside of you too,” an idea that is meant to suggest that the maternal urge inside each of us grants our survival.
There are times on Capacity where the intimacy becomes almost unbearable. When these moments occur, the band’s melodies serve as buoys to cling to for comfort. “Watering” and “Coma” tell of a traumatic assault and the character’s eventual awakening from the ensuing haze. There’s so much darkness contained in the former’s illustration of a poisonous, carnal relation, but Krivchenia’s drumbeat is there to offer the reminder of a heartbeat and sharp guitars jolt the subject out of dissociation. Though Lenker, Meek, and Oleartchik each attended a lauded Berklee College of Music program at some point in their life, Big Thief’s blend of intricate folk rock pulls more from ecstatic expression than academic practice. They are each technical musicians, but their songs are foregrounded with melody and emotion rather than fussy prowess. The first half of “Coma” is as isolated as the title suggests, just Lenker’s murmur and a guitar. As soon as the narrator builds the strength to wade into her new, changed world, the band arrives as her docent.
Of note is Big Thief’s use of names. Matthew, Evelyn, and Haley become a community of people through which Lenker invites us into the past and present of her life. Most movingly, there’s “Mary” dedicated to Lenker’s best friend, a love song straight out of the detailed schools of Joni Mitchell and Joanna Newsom. Over a gentle piano, Lenker pays tribute with a vivid catalogue of images. It’s so easy to find the wrong words for life, we do it every day, but here, Lenker’s verbal waterfall is a perfect abstraction:
Monastery monochrome boom balloon machine and oh
Diamond rings and gutter bones marching up the mountain with our
Aching planning high and smiling cheap drink dark and violent full of butterflies the violent
Tenderness the sweet asylum the clay you find is fortified we felt unfocused fade the line
The ease with which Lenker’s honeysuckle voice tumbles out, I could keep typing the lyrics forever.
Capacity is a remarkable record, one that proves that Big Thief are not a one-trick pony, they are the full circus. It is a complete journey, from the early collective cacophony of “Shark Smile” to the hypnotizing conclusion of “Black Diamonds.” There are bands with stories to share, wounds to rub salt into, loves to relive, but few address every moment with such adroit care as Big Thief. You can hear it as they revel in the darkest moments, rejoices in the later lightness, and fumble around for a sense of closure. Capacity is human, which seems to be all Big Thief desire. | 2017-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | June 9, 2017 | 8.3 | 04ab67b2-3357-478c-aeef-ea40995cdf68 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
On their eighth album, the married duo spout off defiant one-liners over prickly basslines and noise spirals, sounding as dry and self-aware as ever. | On their eighth album, the married duo spout off defiant one-liners over prickly basslines and noise spirals, sounding as dry and self-aware as ever. | ADULT.: Perception is/as/of Deception | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/adult-perception-isasof-deception/ | Perception is/as/of Deception | For over two decades, the married duo of multi-disciplinary artists Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller have used the guise of electro as an outlet for asking the big questions: Why do I feel so bad? What the hell is your problem? What’s wrong with our society? Now on their eighth studio album as ADULT., Perception is/as/of Deception, Kuperus and Miller turn that focus inward. Over prickly basslines and harsh noise spirals, they shoot off defiant one-liners that sound deep, but their assertions often boil down to that oft-memed adage, “Real eyes realize real lies.”
Kuperus and Miller made a name for themselves during New York’s electroclash heyday, but the Detroit band have always sought to distance themselves from the term. (Miller said he felt “hate” for the signifier as early as 2002.) Still, one of the genre’s defining characteristics was a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor, and the duo have retained some of that. On its face, lead single “Why Always Why” is a coarse interrogation of thoughtless participation in late-stage capitalism (“Don’t you know consuming doesn’t make you exist?”). But then you watch the music video, where the pair don ostentatious sunglasses and leather jackets in a shopping mall and Kuperus pushes a shopping cart through the toilet aisle at Home Depot, and you notice the smirk.
As a whole, Perception is more brash than 2018’s This Behavior. Save for the odd drone blast (“Controlled By”) or gliding lead synth (“Reconstruct the Construct”), drum machines and uneasily arpeggiating bass make up the bulk of each song, hearkening back to the early industrial minimalism of DAF or Front 242. The tools haven’t changed, but what they achieve with them has, if ever so slightly. “Second Nature” evokes the neon-drenched synthwave of Kavinsky and Carpenter Brut; the bruising saw wave undulations on “Untroubled Mind (Bring Me Back)” allow Kuperus the room to tap into her inner Ian Curtis.
Kuperus is the human anchor that grounds the machine-driven madness, her melodramatic sneers and off-kilter affectations piercing through layers of oppressive atmosphere. “Truth in speech, in gesture, delivery, they persuade you,” she chants on “Total Total Damage,” delivering a miniature summary of Manufacturing Consent. Distrust of authority and the reality-warping tendencies of those who hold it make up some of the central themes of the album; you can just picture Kuperus baring her teeth to spit on the powerful, flanked by grinding textures and shuddering hi-hats.
ADULT. have said they set out to create more of a philosophical record than an explicitly political declaration. In the artist statement for an accompanying exhibition, Kuperus and Miller namedrop Goethe, French existentialist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-fueled journal The Doors of Perception among the album’s esoteric influences. The result can be lyrics that rarely delve deeper than espousals of generalized wariness, like on “Have I Started At the End” where Kuperus intones, “We… we only see… we only see what we know.” She has a knack for telling stories just by looping memorable phrases. If you stop to notice, she’s just spouting slogans. But as long as the synths are clanging and the lighting is just right, ADULT. sound as dry and self-aware as ever.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dais | April 15, 2020 | 7.2 | 04ac45ab-06bf-420e-a9a9-68512e00c3c5 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
At its peaks, the album delivers on the promise of its star-wattage with some of the most affecting and emotionally overwhelming pop songs of the year. | At its peaks, the album delivers on the promise of its star-wattage with some of the most affecting and emotionally overwhelming pop songs of the year. | Lady Gaga / Bradley Cooper: A Star Is Born Soundtrack | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lady-gaga-bradley-cooper-a-star-is-born-soundtrack/ | A Star Is Born Soundtrack | A Star Is Born has no right to be as good as it is. Directed by Bradley Cooper, the third remake of David O. Selznick’s 1937 film has been in development for most of the decade and at one point counted Clint Eastwood as its director with, impossibly, Beyoncé in the lead role that Lady Gaga now occupies. The immersive and romantic narrative of singer-songwriter Ally (Gaga) and her relationship with veteran rocker Jackson Maine (Cooper) as the latter watches the former rocket to pop stardom is imbued with the sort of rockism that typically triggers derision in the current cultural climate. But alongside powerful turns from Cooper and Sam Elliott, Gaga shines brightest with an empathetic performance that presents a summation-in-reverse of the last several years of her career.
Since the aggressive blare of 2013’s Artpop, Gaga has moved further away with every career turn from the brand of pop that put her on the map circa her 2008 debut, The Fame; she took up crooning alongside Tony Bennett for 2014’s Cheek to Cheek and hopped in the studio with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker and Father John Misty for 2016’s Joanne. When the curtain rises on A Star Is Born, she’s covering Edith Piaf with fake eyebrows taped on her face; two hours later, she’s a full-blown pop star, complete with backup dancers and split-second costume changes. With a wholly organic and real-feeling performance, Gaga again engages in the blur between person and persona that she’s toyed with for much of her iconographic career thus far.
Even though Gaga’s performance caps a decade-long run of shapeshifting pop stardom, there’s nothing in the apparently modern-day A Star Is Born that really reflects the actual 2010s pop landscape. For starters, it’s a bit difficult to imagine Maine’s dyed-in-the-wool country-rock playing to such a huge audience at Coachella, as it does in the film’s opening scene; elsewhere, some modern relevance is achieved through a Halsey cameo and a pivotal scene centered around the type of all-star Grammys tribute that typically turns social media into a unanimous airing of grievances. This disconnect from our reality is totally fine: A Star Is Born reaches for and ultimately achieves a timeless vibe that doesn’t require current pop-cultural relevance.
The film’s official soundtrack is similarly old-fashioned in its approach, even as its credits include a host of modern songwriters from the pop, country, and rock spheres. Along with Gaga and Cooper, there’s contributions from Jason Isbell, Willie Nelson’s son Lukas, Mark Ronson, Miike Snow frontman Andrew Wyatt, behind-the-scenes pop wizards Julia Michaels and Justin Tranter, the list goes on. The songs fall into a few distinct silos—blaring blues-rockers, tender acoustic ballads, anthemic torch songs, and robotic electro-pop—and save for a digital flourish or two on the pop songs that make up much of the film’s back half, there’s very little here that would’ve sounded out of place on blockbuster film soundtracks of decades past.
At its peaks, the album delivers on the promise of its star-wattage with some of the most affecting and emotionally overwhelming pop songs of the year. If you’ve spent half a day on the internet over the past several weeks, you’ve likely encountered the explosive Gaga-Cooper duet “Shallow,” and deservedly so; it’s a stormy ballad so instantly iconic that its place in Oscar montages for decades to come is practically guaranteed. At the risk of heresy, though, it might not even count as the strongest song on the album—at the least, it reaches a three-way tie with the swaying, unabashedly sentimental “Always Remember Us This Way” and the film’s stunning, heart-wrenching closer, “I’ll Never Love Again.”
Those three standouts heavily feature Gaga—the latter two as solo performances—which speaks to the somewhat uneven nature of the Cooper-led cuts. The simple, sincere, Isbell-penned “Maybe It’s Time” possesses a quiet radiance, but otherwise Cooper’s songs as Maine take on a somewhat anonymous blues-rock shape alongside the soundtrack’s more dynamic moments. Despite the strength of Gaga’s performances captured on this soundtrack—all live takes recorded during filming, an approach that she insisted on—she isn’t totally off the hook when it comes to the lowlights either; the more explicitly pop songs that make up Ally’s ascent as a solo artist range from forgettable (“Heal Me”) to ridiculous (“Why Did You Do That?”).
The mere act of engaging with A Star Is Born’s songs in a home-listening setting presents a very modern issue: dialogue or no dialogue? Streaming services currently offer both dialogue-free and dialogue-heavy versions of the soundtrack, the latter functioning as a somewhat spoiler-y but surprisingly immersive experience of the film itself. Choosing which version to stream is a peculiar conundrum to face (imagine, for instance, buying two separate copies of the Bodyguard soundtrack), but even though “I’ll Never Love Again” is plenty effective on its own, the dialogue-included version of the song dramatically cuts out in its final seconds the same way the film does: jumping back in time from Gaga’s time-stopping performance to a pivotal and heartbreaking scene that only enhances the song's emotional quotient.
The switch-up is a nice trick as a listening experience, but it also unintentionally highlights the incidental flaw of A Star Is Born’s soundtrack: It just can’t pack the emotional punch of watching the songs performed within the film. The live recording of “Always Remember Us This Way” doesn’t capture Gaga’s impassioned physical delivery behind the piano, her face emblazoned on a jumbotron behind her as Cooper goes moony-eyed at her blown-up visage. And as powerful as “Shallow” is, nothing matches the look of genuine surprise on Gaga’s face as Ally, when she hits her higher register for the first time and effectively launches the song into the emotional cosmos and beyond. These moments speak to her obvious strengths as a performer, as well as how impressively the music works in congress with the film’s imagery; you can recreate them in your head while listening, or go for your best Gaga while belting these songs out in the shower, but it’s just not as effective as the real thing. | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Folk/Country | Interscope | October 9, 2018 | 7.4 | 04ad7448-23b9-4b66-9ca1-a38aa490744c | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
After 10 years and an aborted Dr. Dre collaboration, the legendary MC releases his comeback album. | After 10 years and an aborted Dr. Dre collaboration, the legendary MC releases his comeback album. | Rakim: The Seventh Seal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13738-the-seventh-seal/ | The Seventh Seal | A new Rakim album should be a big deal-- or at least a bigger deal than this. Talking about the man's career, it's hard not to lapse into hyperbole, to talk like he invented rap, because in some ways he kind of did. The things that make rap what it is in 2009 existed in various forms back in 1986, when Rakim's career launched, but Rakim isolated, elevated, streamlined, and developed them. The seen-it-all thousand-yard stare, the twisty internal rhyme schemes, the innate sense of the meter of speech and its possibilities, the mystic codes that intrigued just as they alienated, the emphasis on sheer weight of presence-- these are all Rakim's legacies, and without them, rap would look very, very different.
Rappers and old-head fans talk about Rakim the way they talk about retired legends; but Rakim's out there, hungry, ready to work, making occasional guest appearances. He hasn't recorded an album in 10 years, but he's only one year older than Jay-Z or Diddy. For a while, he was signed to Dr. Dre's Aftermath imprint, at work on a record that seemed so titanic (arguably the greatest rapper ever united with arguably the greatest rap producer) that it almost had to disappoint. But that didn't happen, and here he is, on an album full of budget beats and nobody guest singers, radiating rinky-dink half-hearted comeback attempt. He deserves much, much better.
On "Won't Be Long", Rakim states his current aim: "Complete my legacy/ Without compromising my artistic integrity." In interviews, he's implied that he and Dre parted ways because Dre wanted him to record the sort of accessible gangsta music that's always been Dre's stock-in-trade, something Rakim wasn't interested in doing. And lyrically at least, The Seventh Seal sounds very much like the album Rakim wanted to make. There are a lot of love songs on the album, a lot of educating-the-youth songs, a lot of Obama namechecks. There's one song about God, another about the redemptive power of music. I'm pretty sure he doesn't curse once on the whole LP, and there's not a single crass commercial cash-grab here.
That's great, admirable even, but you also hear what Rakim's missing without a Dre-level executive producer on board. The beats are generally flat, lifeless thumpers from unknown producers. And even the few decent beats from decent producers like Jake One or Nottz have to contend with the guest singers, who show up over and over and who feel like total dead-weight voids. No rapper would be able to maintain a consistent level of force or intensity in settings like these. Understandably, Rakim sounds exhausted more often than not, his laconic basso growl never quite as effortless as it once was. A Dre-type figure could also tell Rakim that it might not be such a good idea to rhyme "euthanasia" with "youth in Asia" or to point out that "love backwards is evil," simply because it's near-impossible to make moves like these without coming off corny.
But this is still a Rakim album, and that goes a long way. Some of the man's greatest strengths, like his technical rigor and fluidity, are the sorts of things that naturally wear away with age. But others-- principally the rush that comes just from hearing the unrushed weight in his voice-- have stuck around. Some of the songs here also make great use of the boundless goodwill that Rakim's built up over the years. Rakim's always taken his love songs seriously, committing to them as intensely as he does to his dropping-knowledge tracks; 1990's "Mahogany" is my favorite example. He pulls that off a few times here, talking about everyday struggles between couples without sounding like he's pandering or doing token for-the-ladies songs. And on "Dedicated", he brings enormous pathos to a song about his recently dead mother, making even the terrible-idea No Doubt sample on the chorus sound acceptable.
But this album still falls way short of what it could be, and I have to wonder how this even happened. Rappers should be lining up to work with this guy, but the only guest rapper on the whole album is perennial C-lister Maino. A second-generation Rakim disciple like Cormega can score DJ Premier and Large Professor beats for his new album, but Rakim himself gets stuck with pale imitations of those guys' best work. I can't say enough bad things about these hook singers. It's not a new thing for rap veterans to make limp, uninspired new albums that only barely hint at past glories. But it is a new thing for this rap veteran. | 2009-12-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-12-02T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | SMC | December 2, 2009 | 5.6 | 04adc0d1-c848-4253-923b-f05dfbccc0d1 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Charli XCX’s latest mixtape is a vision of what pop music could be, the sound of an eclectic, hyperreal future where romantic love is fun but fucked and partying is an emotional refuge. | Charli XCX’s latest mixtape is a vision of what pop music could be, the sound of an eclectic, hyperreal future where romantic love is fun but fucked and partying is an emotional refuge. | Charli XCX: Pop 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charli-xcx-pop-2/ | Pop 2 | Maybe some people look at Sophia, the world’s first robotic citizen, and feel optimistic about the endless horizon of potential, both technological and human; I look at Sophia and feel an unsettling sadness. There is something profoundly tragic in her existence, a sense of uncanny anti-natalism that triggers a strange empathy for those who also did not ask to be born. Sophia has sharp cheekbones and golden eyes, molded in the likeness of Audrey Hepburn. Her bald head opens at the back to unveil a disturbing metal cap that hides the whirring mechanics within her skull. Through knee-jerk millennial instinct, that vulnerable bald skull always flashes me back to those unforgettable photos of Britney Spears at the gas station in 2007—head freshly shaved, eyes blank and wild, umbrella wielded as a machete. It is the image of a woman who has decided to finish the job the world started: complete disassembly.
Charli XCX knows this trope—the glitched-out femmebot, programmed for love—all too well. She grew up on Britney and the Spice Girls, then joined Myspace and catapulted into the brash, neon-tinted world of bloghouse and Hype Machine electro. After spending her early teens performing in big sunglasses and blonde wigs at DIY London raves, she signed to Asylum Records at 18 to live her pop star dreams. With the massive success of Icona Pop’s “I Love It” and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (both co-written by Charli) alongside her first solo hit, “Boom Clap,” her mainstream crossover seemed like a given, ready whenever she was. Instead, she doubled down on the weirdo Tumblr-core mixtapes she used to release for free, linking with post-post-modern bubblegum bass crew PC Music to try and figure out exactly what kind of artist she wanted to be. “Go fuck your prototype/I’m an upgrade of your stereotype,” Charli purrs on “Femmebot,” a cut off her latest tape, Pop 2, before her humanoid vocals stutter and short-circuit. Or as Robyn put it seven years prior: “Fembots have feelings, too.”
Pop 2—the best full-length work of both Charli and PC Music’s respective careers—is the antidote to the overwhelming monotony of the 2017 pop charts. It’s Charli’s second mixtape of 2017, which, calling your project a “mixtape” is a pretty negligible move these days, especially if you’re putting it up for sale. But for Charli, who’s been expressing herself in the format since before it was cool, there’s a meaningful distinction: albums mean compromise; mixtapes mean total creative freedom. As streaming services render organic music discovery obsolete, and as major label A&R decisions feel increasingly like a demented cross-promotional Mad-Lib of someone who has heard approximately four rap songs, Pop 2’s sprawling, thoughtful mass of guests—from Brazilian drag queen/vocalist Pabllo Vittar, to Estonian emcee Tommy Cash, to Hollyweird-via-Cologne pop conceptualist Kim Petras—put me on to no less than five artists I’d never heard of before. Because Pop 2’s not really about Charli XCX, Pop Star Extraordinaire; it’s an uninhibited, anti-algorithm vision of what pop music could be.
It’s not just the guest roster that sets Pop 2 so apart from the mainstream pop landscape, it’s the way these voices are integrated, making its 10 tracks feel less like a cool-kid curation project and more like a popping afterparty you’ve stumbled into. On “Out of My Head”—the kind of song that makes you want to slam a Strawberita and dance all night—Charli doesn’t show up in the mix until the second verse, giving the spotlight to Swedish bloghouse revivalist Tove Lo and Finnish trop-goth ALMA. By the bridge, the three voices have braided together almost imperceptibly. And on “Backseat,” an instant night-drive classic (and a fever-dream collab for anyone who replies to celebrity tweets with “mom”), Charli and synth-pop sweetheart Carly Rae Jepsen exchange verse and hook duty before coming together as one voice, howling “All alone, all alone, all alone” in unison. These are huge, emotionally climactic songs, with soaring melodies and bass that sounds like the shifting of skyscraper scaffolding. But there’s something doomed and loveless in the air, too; on Pop 2, romantic love is fun but fucked and partying is an emotional refuge.
It’s Pop 2’s production, more than anything, that places it on the vanguard of a complete stylistic breakthrough, thanks largely to PC Music’s A.G. Cook, whose credit appears on every song. I was skeptical of the label’s high-concept art school antics when they first emerged; but the further they’ve gotten from the Web 1.0 shtick, the more vital the collective’s impeccable, poignant pop futurism has become. And though Pop 2 sounds like the future, even more delightful is the way it hybridizes sounds from the past two decades of weirdo electronics: the synthetic maximalism of Rustie and HudMo, heartfelt late ’90s Eurodance a la Aqua or DJ Sammy, Crystal Castles’ goth electro-scuzz, J-pop super-producer Yasutaka Nakata’s wistful Shibuya-kei, Cher’s “Believe,” and of course, Britney, from Blackout to Britney Jean. And though it’s by now common practice for pop stars to flirt with hip-hop production, the results often reveal a cynically low level of engagement with the genre—tacking on “Metro Boomin-Type Beat,” some 808s, and calling it a day. Here, Charli and A.G. Cook know exactly what they’re going for: the “Versace”-style repetition on alien posse cut “I Got It”; the pristine, sultry chords, reminiscent of Late Nights With Jeremih on “Out of My Head”; the slurry, decayed cadences on “Delicious,” calling to mind Travis Scott or Swae Lee.
The strangest and most uncannily similar stylistic comparison to Pop 2, though, is former “Teen Mom” Farrah Abraham’s outsider opus, My Teenage Dream Ended. Sweepingly ridiculed as one of 2012’s worst albums, that judgment, five years later, feels wildly narrow-minded. It is a baffling work, to be sure: frantic layers of dubstep, EDM, witch-house, and breakbeats seem to run in the opposite direction as Abraham’s absurdly AutoTuned narratives about surviving the death of her husband. (In a recent interview, the album’s producer, Frederick M. Cuevas, admits that Abraham recorded her diaristic lyrics before ever hearing the music.) After my first full spin of Pop 2, I couldn’t shake the thought: “This sounds like Farrah, but good.” The album’s vocal processing is unlike anything I’ve heard in pop; Cook’s aggressive, evocative filtering has the paradoxical effect of heightening the humanity of it all. On “Lucky,” the tape’s saddest, wildest song (whose title cannot be understood without an implicit nod to Britney, whose own “Lucky” was her first of many explorations of the soul-sucking side-effects of stardom), Charli’s voice warps from anthropomorphic pan flute to rogue AOL dial-up tone to primal scream from the soul. When she sings, “You got no reception, you’re breaking up,” her voice gently stutters like it’s just out of service range, a subtle but brilliant touch.
But the tape’s best moment is saved for last. Unceremoniously titled “Track 10,” the song glitches into focus as if beamed in from interstellar broadband. Charli’s hyper-filtered melodies float over a celestial synth choir, building into a densely-layered collage of her own voice, howling at the moon until their vocal chords go ragged. Halfway through, the track explodes into ecstatic drums and vocal effects from Lil Data, a PC Music artist who uses a program called TidalCycles to compose via code. Far from the pristine perfection of PC Music’s early releases, there’s something a bit messy about the whole thing—a sense of humanity, beaming plainly from its hyper-synthetic surroundings, that feels like a revelation. | 2017-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Asylum / Atlantic | December 20, 2017 | 8.4 | 04b09f9b-3007-45c7-a1c9-a1d6b0624f86 | Meaghan Garvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/meaghan-garvey/ | |
A few years ago, estimable hip-hop producer Peanut Butter Wolf did his part in \n\ heralding the new breed of ... | A few years ago, estimable hip-hop producer Peanut Butter Wolf did his part in \n\ heralding the new breed of ... | Quasimoto: The Unseen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6610-the-unseen/ | The Unseen | A few years ago, estimable hip-hop producer Peanut Butter Wolf did his part in heralding the new breed of old-school with My Vinyl Weighs a Ton. The album, his solo debut, featured an impressive number of MCs from the thriving San Francisco hip-hop scene. One of its first tracks, "Styles Crew Flows Beats," features the Lootpack crew. The group passes the mic dexterously, each doing his part to heighten the flava until the groove suddenly shifts and an eerily high- pitched voice strolls into the proceedings. Quasimoto, he calls himself, and the remainder of the track is little over a minute of the finest underground hip-hop on record. He seems hyperactive and ready to burst, yet his rhymes are laid-back and his tone remains almost resolutely monotone with limited inflections.
Let it be known, then, that Quasimoto is no mere mortal. He is the brainchild/ alter ego of Lootpack member and producer Madlib, a sped-up manipulation of his own twisted rhymes. But injecting a little self-reflexive post-modernism into music never hurt anybody. Just ask David Bowie what it can do for a career.
Instead of recording a proper solo album for Peanut Butter Wolf's Stones Throw imprint, Madlib decided to give his other persona top billing, and he pulls it off to a degree. His production generally mixes sparse loops of spoken samples with obscure funk and R&B; overtones, grounded by tight, snappy beats. "Return of the Loop Digga" is an engagingly funny paean to his mad production skills. Here, Madlib steps up to document his rise from stealing records from his auntie to laying down tracks for his man Quas.
The 'Moto, for his part, starts strong as the "bad character" of the project: \x93I smoke a nigga with a brick/ Talking out of place/ Like I was sniffing paint/ Laced/ Lining up outta space." Damn! The delivery of lines like "dropping shit like some horses/ Irritate your mindstate/ Have you split like divorces/ Of course this is the new breed/ Fuckin' up the mainstream" are pure gold, but by the middle of the album, it becomes clear that Madlib decided to cheat his alter-ego out of ontological priority rather than simply let him be. As the man behind the boards and the squeaky little man up front, Madlib accords himself too many shout-outs, too many poorly disguised pats on the back, and makes too many appearances as himself for a character album. And while by no means fatal, this is the primary fault of the project.
The Unseen is an above-average contribution to the resurgence of the old- school aesthetic, but it could have been better. The record is littered with great moments-- such as the sci-fi manifesto of "Astro Black" and the moving musical backing of "Come on Feet"-- that make me hope this isn't the last we'll hear from Quasimoto. But for Quasimoto to convince, Madlib has to chill. Let him record his own album. | 2000-06-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2000-06-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | June 27, 2000 | 7.3 | 04b1d5fa-ab87-4308-b097-fd4fb0f359c9 | Sean Murray | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-murray/ | null |
When music from the twisted pop project SOPHIE first emerged in 2013, it sounded state-of-the-art. Those early singles, gathered here with some newer material, still sparkle, but the problem with PRODUCT, ironically enough, is one of format. | When music from the twisted pop project SOPHIE first emerged in 2013, it sounded state-of-the-art. Those early singles, gathered here with some newer material, still sparkle, but the problem with PRODUCT, ironically enough, is one of format. | SOPHIE: PRODUCT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21212-product/ | PRODUCT | When music from the project SOPHIE first emerged in 2013, it sounded state-of-the-art. It was the work of a producer who had rarely been photographed and who never gave interviews, which seemed appropriate if also tiresome. Such mystery had long become a cliché by this point, but uncertain authorship suited these bulbous, sparkly audio objects, which seemed to float down out of the sky like a cluster of neon-colored balloons ready to pop. "Bipp" and "Elle"—the former impossibly buoyant with an earworm vocal line, the latter featuring deep bass and chasms of space, a bright and twinkly counterpoint to the grim tone common to dubstep—promised that future music was going to be weirder and more disorienting than we imagined but that it would also function as a bent version of popular song.
Two years and several singles later, SOPHIE is now understood mostly in the context of PC Music, a loose UK collective centered on producer A. G. Cook that recasts brazen commercialism as a kind of winking postmodern art project. PRODUCT, which collects the SOPHIE singles to date and adds some new songs, was released in limited-edition versions that packaged it with a jacket, sunglasses, and platform shoes, as well as a version sold with an object that looked like a sex toy. When you take into account that bounty of merch, and add the fact that SOPHIE’s "Lemonade" has in the last year been used to soundtrack a McDonald’s commercial, of all things, it’s clear that the act of buying and selling is deeply embedded within this project.
You might look at all this as a Warholian transformation of commerce into art or you might just see a run-of-the-mill cash-in, but neither of these perspectives adds much to the enduring brilliance of SOPHIE’s first pair of singles. Following on "Bipp" and "Elle", "Lemonade" intensifies the sound, like switching from a freshly squeezed glass of the titular drink to drinking Minute Maid concentrate right out of the cardboard can. Befitting music constructed at least in part as a critique of consumerism, SOPHIE’s tracks are gleaming and immaculate on the surface and hollow to the core beneath it. "Hard"’s chiming synths and rippling bass are again set against wide spaces of unnerving silence, a void where a deeper sense of meaning might be.
These tracks argue, often convincingly, that the surface is everything. It’s Turing Test pop: if its exterior catches your ear and makes you feel things, that communication is proof enough that some kind of soul resides inside the machine. The closing track here, "Just Like We Never Said Goodbye", shows this contrast in widescreen. It’s a melodic construction worthy of Max Martin, but the pitched-up voice, drum-free production, and generally half-finished feel highlight all the immediate pleasures of pop music while completely erasing the idea of a point of view. It’s so "almost there" you can’t help but play it over and over.
But SOPHIE is not, alas, an album-length proposition. Even at 26 minutes, the record drags, and the three song stretch of "MSMSMSM", "Vyzee", and "L.O.V.E."—that’s 38 cents of your album dollar—is depressingly skippable. These tracks either recycle bits from the earlier singles (chirpy vocals, squeaky percussion) or fold in new elements that sound mundane (trap percussion, doomy synths), leading to tracks that sound like they could have come from anybody. That these are the newer songs doesn’t help matters or bode particularly well for what might come next. And then there’s the fact that music this compressed and this syrupy is best heard in small doses, before your ear gets tired listening to it.
So the main problem with PRODUCT, ironically enough, is one of format. Every industrialist wanting to get his or her goods to the world knows that you have to package them properly. Heard individually and spaced many months apart, the best tracks here were diamond-hard realizations of very specific sonic ideas; placed on an album alongside songs that use similar ingredients but are markedly inferior, they rattle around in the can, perfect objects in search of the right container. | 2015-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Numbers | December 2, 2015 | 6.6 | 04b2fc83-280a-438d-81fd-3b3cebed8ef5 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Open Mike Eagle's solo career pushed him from Project Blowed cog to a spotlight that gave him space to ruminate over his fights against orthodoxy. His latest album overlaps between amusing insights and uncomfortable truths, making for one of the most compelling indie-rap listens of the year so far. | Open Mike Eagle's solo career pushed him from Project Blowed cog to a spotlight that gave him space to ruminate over his fights against orthodoxy. His latest album overlaps between amusing insights and uncomfortable truths, making for one of the most compelling indie-rap listens of the year so far. | Open Mike Eagle: Dark Comedy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19477-open-mike-eagle-dark-comedy/ | Dark Comedy | Somewhere between Richard Pryor going platinum and the latest episode of Louie, the establishment of comedy as a filter between the outside world and an individual's churning-brain anxiety took a deep hold in the mainstream pop-culture consciousness. The more that once-uncommon voices are allowed to speak as themselves, the likelier it is that they'll slip their grievances and worries in under the cover of slyly built jokes.
Open Mike Eagle's solo career pushed him from Project Blowed cog to a spotlight that gave him space to ruminate over his fights against orthodoxy, starting with hip-hop's (his first two album titles: Unapologetic Art Rap and Rappers Will Die of Natural Causes) and working his way outwards from there. In the process, he's found a strong lane as an MC who cracks wise in both senses of the term. For each handful of fans that came to him through a connection with the Los Angeles underground hip-hop community, there's at least one who heard about him through stand-up stars like Hannibal Buress or Paul F. Tompkins.
So his latest album, Dark Comedy, pipes in a laugh track on its semi-titular opening track, "Dark Comedy Morning Show," and Mike Eagle makes sure it comes in clear after the more raw-nerved lines—"I flew off the handle, and boy are my arms tired"; "If another dude calls me a racist, I'm'a snap"; "There's mad shootings on the news/ Unless it's in the Chi, cause blacks and Mexicans can die". The song sums up the whole album's "on that laugh to keep from crying tip" operating mode in just three verses, but there are new angles and transformative concepts that keep the balance unpredictably gallows-humored throughout.
"Informations" sets up some *Tetsuo the Iron Man-*meets-Videodrome body horror that plays to smartphone-addiction fears, then leavens it with scatological humor ("When I pass gas it sounds like a fax machine") and a sense that he's actually thrilled with the man-machine fusion. The line in "Doug Stamper (Advice Raps)" where he admonishes white rappers to "Quit rappin' in your hood voice/ Sound like a clown 100-pounder that took 'roids" both cuts closer and leans goofier when he actually imitates it as a dopey "HARR RAAR RAAR RAAR RAAAGH". Even when he threatens to lean towards unadulterated stress-rap, he undercuts it by titling his most severe bout of venting "Sadface Penance Raps" and cutting it off after less than a minute and a half under the pretext that the beat malfunctioned. The sung hook, lifted from They Might Be Giants' "Don't Let's Start", that falls victim to this truncated ending: "No one in the world ever gets what they want, and that is beautiful."
Mike is an artist who thrives on working through some potentially inaccessible or confrontational thoughts and feelings using a very upfront and deceptively easygoing way with jokes and wordplay. That's not just in the references he throws around ("Thirsty Ego Raps" gives not-entirely-non sequitur nods to Dave Gahan and Michel'le in consecutive lines), or his knack for internal rhymes and verse construction that actually scan like well-timed improv asides; it's also in how he builds up a self-portrait that establishes his own agency while still opening himself up to the possibilities of camaraderie and community.
"Qualifiers," which he recorded a live version of in a laundromat, should stand as his newest signature song for that reason. He pits party-rocking impulses alongside unglamorous but important fatherhood work by rhyming "get up and dance" with "I wipe my son's ass and get shit on my hands," jabs at hood-pass-hungry vultures questioning his cred ("Fuck you if you're a white man that assumes I speak for black folks/ Fuck you if you're a white man who thinks I can't speak for black folks"), and builds a hook that upends ego-tripping with weasel words: "we the best, mostly/ Sometimes the freshest rhymers/ We the tightest kinda/ Respect my qualifiers". It's frank modesty in terms that any independent artist ever prone to self-second-guessing should recognize.
That nervous energy radiates through everyone in Mike's orbit, whether it's a characteristically mellow/jittery Kool A.D. feigning ignorance and riffing absurdist logic on "Informations" or Buress turning basic common courtesy into snarky older-brother wisdom on "Doug Stamper (Advice Raps)" with a Biz-caliber rap verse. (Sample line: "Wash your hands when you touch your l'il dirty dick/ And dry 'em off before you come tryin' to shake my shit".) Even the beats—Ultra Combo's Cloud Rap for Airports-esque "Very Much Money (Ice King Dream)", Dibia$e's chunky synths bouncily ambling in low-g on the dream gig with a catch story "Jon Lovitz (Fantasy Booking Yarn)", Jeremiah Jae laying down treated strings that sound like aluminum being table sawed on "A History of Modern Dance"—hang on a precipice between whimsical irreverence and real to-the-gut emotional immediacy.
It all builds off a feeling that this anxiety touches everyone, that even if Mike's a singular kind of weirdo, his worries are our worries. So he's feeling out the process of coming to happy terms with the weirdness he and his friends inhabit, while still wishing it came with easy communication or self-sufficient success. Whether it's through casual observation or the to-the-bone identity struggles, Open Mike Eagle's overlap between amusing insights and uncomfortable truths makes for one of the most compelling indie-rap listens of the year so far. | 2014-06-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-06-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello | June 20, 2014 | 8 | 04b50a4a-ed6c-4e3b-ab2b-736ae5704272 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Toronto duo follows up an eight-year-old debut EP with an album that gestures toward various eras of dancehall and traverses a range of emotion. | The Toronto duo follows up an eight-year-old debut EP with an album that gestures toward various eras of dancehall and traverses a range of emotion. | Bonjay: Lush Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonjay-lush-life/ | Lush Life | It has taken nearly eight years for Bonjay to release the follow-up to their 2010 debut EP, Broughtupsy. The Toronto duo apparently mastered their first proper album, Lush Life, years ago, but kept revisiting and revising it, absorbed by the process. You can sense that from the album, which is both more tightly arranged and more expansive than anything else they’ve made. Elaborating on the sparse, looped riddims of their early music, they traverse a skidding range of emotion, gesturing toward various eras of dancehall while keeping their genre allegiances loose.
Bonjay frontwoman Alanna Stuart began singing in the Pentecostal church, and her voice never flinches beneath the weight of heavy drama. Lush Life’s first track, “Ingenue,” segues from chanted toasting to high notes worthy of Kate Bush. “My love,” Stuart cries, as she draws out that last syllable for ten anguished seconds, then collapses: “It’s you.” Instrumentals co-written by Stuart’s bandmate, Ian Swain, play over her vocals like stage lights. “How Come” pairs its drum machine, all throb and ache, with a delicate synth melody; everywhere the beat pulses in counterpoint to her. “Brick & High Beam” begins with a whispery refrain that lands someplace between mantra and lullaby, then, before the final chorus, gets shrouded by echoing effects. It’s the air twitching at a séance, an aria wrapped in gauze.
Lush Life was engineered by several of Canada’s best electronic musicians, including Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys and Arthur Russell superfan Sandro Perri—people who know enough about weird old disco records to bring their magic to new releases. “Devil’s Night,” a duet between Stuart and longtime Owen Pallett collaborator Thom Gill, further expands the ensemble. Gill’s low, sultry vocal inspires her most theatrical performance, her high notes tapping against the percussion, hushed yet poised. The rhythm slows to a hypnotic flicker. Lyrics yearn abstractly. At one sublime moment, a saxophone drops into the mix, its notes distending through space as Stuart sings phrases without words. You may distantly remember the Grenadian slang translation of Bonjay’s name: Good God.
“Night Bus Blue,” the closing track on Lush Life, takes its name and mood from the buses that knit Toronto together after 2 a.m., carrying shift workers, travelers, immigrants, and drunks—vehicles that represent both relief and regret. It’s by far the longest song on the album, yet it’s also the most intense, driven by clattering drums and ethereal overdubs that merge in a climax of feedback. Stuart sings like she’s narrating a dream, her soothing languor growing insistent with the music: “Nighttime fades to morning, all the while they sleep/Skyline is adorning the glow of city streets.” This is just what it’s like to watch streets race by from one of those buses, bewitched by their sapphire headlights, fingers making the frosted windows sweat. | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Mysteries of Trade | June 2, 2018 | 7.4 | 04b66813-bb4d-4ca0-8e16-4adf574eab28 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | |
Deafheaven’s second album is an epic mix of intense black metal and chiming post-rock, the sort of sound that inspires the wide-screen feelings people look for in Sigur Rós, Mogwai, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. | Deafheaven’s second album is an epic mix of intense black metal and chiming post-rock, the sort of sound that inspires the wide-screen feelings people look for in Sigur Rós, Mogwai, or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. | Deafheaven: Sunbather | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18060-deafheaven-sunbather/ | Sunbather | Deafheaven weren’t always this good. The San Francisco band’s early shows found a scrappy, ambitious bunch of punk kids trying to warp black metal with shoegaze in a way that, for all its advances, felt familiar. In late 2010, they signed to Deathwish, the label run by Converge’s Jacob Bannon, and there were expectations in the underground. (Though, at that time, people seemed to focus more on the fact that they didn’t look like a metal band than what they were creating.) When vocalist George Clarke and songwriter/guitarist Kerry McCoy released their debut LP, Roads to Judah, in 2011, they added wrinkles to that live sound, especially on the opening track, “Violet.” The collection didn’t always match those standards. It sometimes felt muddled, like they were trying to squeeze too much into the frame.
But that gorgeous 12-minute set-piece established the template and scope for the band’s excellent sophomore album, Sunbather, a record that finds Deafheaven living up to and then surpassing expectations. Basically, they’ve learned how to take the sounds they’ve dreamed up out of their heads so we can hear them, too. If you go back and listen to Roads, you’ll find the elements that appear on Sunbather with 10 times the intensity. So while the approach here isn’t a surprise, the force with which Deafheaven pulls it off is a revelation.
Sunbather’s a seven-song collection that fuses into a massive 60-minute piece. The sequencing, moving from brightness to darkness and back, is brilliant. Throughout, McCoy gives in to his inner Johnny Marr, offering deeper, prettier, more eclectic guitar tones. His lines are smeary with tremolo and delay, and the band seamlessly incorporates melancholic piano, harsh Godflesh-style noise bursts, spoken word, lush acoustic strums, and eerie samples. That, and new drummer Daniel Tracy plays big, adding a wallop they’ve missed in the past. (Deafheaven have always been Clarke and McCoy with a shifting lineup around them; let’s hope this one lasts.)
This is music that inspires the kind of wide-screen feelings people look for in Sigur Rós, Mogwai (who Deafheaven have covered), or Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Words of anger and frustration collide with the sheer beauty of the music. The power of that blend—raw black metal and hardcore basking in pastel-colored post-rock guitars—is something you don’t experience in those other groups. There are plaintive moments here, but this is largely music about romantic lust, anger, and disappointment delivered by a band who know their punk and hardcore as well as their metal. They know their Cure and the Smiths, too. Remember the ecstatic closing moments of Fuck Buttons’ “Sweet Love for Planet Earth”? Loop that and ask Explosions in the Sky to play the accompanying music and you're tapping into this sound.
While Deafheaven push this epic music as far as it can go, they retain a central emotional core, and are always in control compositionally. The opening song, “Dream House,” is over nine minutes long; the closer, “The Pecan Tree,” which moves from dire black metal to triumphant post-rock without any stitches showing, is closer to 12. The four longer songs don’t repeat themselves; each is stunning in its constant motion and variation. “Sunbather” is bleaker than “Dream House,” for instance, and on “Vertigo,” they downshift from gossamer prettiness to full-on heavy with a warped My Bloody Valentine transition followed by their most power metal guitar soloing to date. At the five-minute mark of that song, blast beats enter and it goes black metal. Two minutes later, though, it’s soaring again with hook-laden guitars and floor-punching dynamics.
Even the interstitial parts inspire. “Dream House”’s delicate closing arpeggios blend with “Irresistible,” a three-minute swatch of melancholic guitar and piano that works as a gentle pause before the massive “Sunbather,” but is in of itself a gorgeous composition. The grinding industrial noise at the end of “Sunbather” dissolves into “Please Remember,” a relatively brief piece that features Alcest’s Neige speaking lines from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being. (Clarke explained its inclusion in a recent Show No Mercy: “That passage is really important to me. It just screams insecurity, which I have huge faults with.”)
Clarke’s voice mixed with the mountains of cascading guitars and drum crescendos is so strong that you don’t need to know what he’s saying to feel the effect of the music. But if you do decide to read the lyrics, you won’t be disappointed: Sunbather was in part inspired by the singer growing up with his mother and brother without any money and wondering what it’d be like to have it. There’s also his realization that, like his largely absent father, he’s able to be cold emotionally, and not necessary able to love. The album’s central image is of a girl sunbathing outside of her upscale house. Clarke spotted her after moving back home for a bit and while stuck in an existential crisis. He wondered what he’d end up doing himself and, more so, what it would be like to have that girl’s existence. And, of course, what it would be like to have that girl. “Dream House” ends with a dialogue Clarke says he pieced together from drunken texts between him and a woman he was crazy about: “‘I’m dying.’/‘Is it blissful?’/‘It’s like a dream.’/‘I want to dream.’”
With Sunbather, Deafheaven have made one of the biggest albums of the year, one that impresses you with its scale, the way Swans’ The Seer did last year. Like M. Gira’s masterpiece, it has the ability to capture the attention of people who don’t normally listen to heavy music. It’s also one of the most successful examples of a band using black metal as a starting point and ending up somewhere else entirely. People cite the short-lived San Francisco band Weakling’s seminal 2000 album Dead as Dreams as the pinnacle of American black metal; Sunbather is another. Like Weakling, Deafheaven have changed things with this record—black metal won’t be the same now that it’s been released. Of course, folks will argue over just how black metal—or even metal—Sunbather is, and will discuss the “un-metal” pink cover art and the fact that Clarke could probably be a J. Crew model. These kinds of arguments are irrelevant. Instead, try focusing on how much better Sunbather is than any other black metal album released this year, and how it’s, by far, one of the best in any genre. Or, maybe, just talk to your friends about what it feels like to listen to a modern classic. | 2013-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Deathwish | June 11, 2013 | 8.9 | 04b718a9-1b4d-483d-ab3c-6caeeb9e38ff | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | |
Wild Nothing's third full-length is their cheeriest and most fleshed out recording to date. Jack Tatum let his love of soul music and even some disco seep into his dream-pop project, and the best moments are the most PG-13 Wild Nothing has been on record yet. | Wild Nothing's third full-length is their cheeriest and most fleshed out recording to date. Jack Tatum let his love of soul music and even some disco seep into his dream-pop project, and the best moments are the most PG-13 Wild Nothing has been on record yet. | Wild Nothing: Life of Pause | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21599-life-of-pause/ | Life of Pause | On the occasion of Wild Nothing's third full-length, Life of Pause, it feels appropriate to circle back to the record that thrust Jack Tatum's college project into the spotlight. 2010 saw hugely successful shoegaze/dream pop revival records like Beach House's Teen Dream, Beach Fossils' self-titled debut, No Joy's Ghost Blonde, and the Radio Dept.'s Clinging to a Scheme. The year before, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart loudly tore into the C86 revival, declaring "This Love Is Fucking Right!" Emotions were strong, guitars were soft and fuzzy, and synths were sugary. But no record embraced romantic grandeur like Wild Nothing's Gemini. The then-21-year-old's debut communicated through instrumental atmosphere and texture, jumping between dreamy pessimism and sleepy introspection, eliciting comparisons to the big influential UK bands of the late '80s and early '90s: Cocteau Twins, the Cure, the Smiths, the Jesus and Mary Chain, etc.
Perhaps most appealingly, Gemini's innocence and purity are heavily rooted in nostalgia. "Do you remember the lightning storm?/ It was the first time that I really felt you," Tatum sang on "Live in Dreams," with the detached desire of a crush who is too afraid to say "I love you" but will write and perform a song for you. However, the thing about nostalgia is that it maintains the ability to quietly exist in the back of your brain, which is exactly why Gemini always threatens to become background music. Listening to Gemini today, six years after its release, it is easy to get swept away by the softness and sentiment, only to use the record as a soundtrack for one's own memories; perhaps this is why it was so loved in the first place.
Tatum capped off 2010 with the Golden Haze EP and eventually released his second full-length, Nocturne, in 2012. Unlike Gemini, which was recorded in Tatum's Blacksburg dorm room, Nocturne received the full studio treatment. Given the appropriate tools for growth, Wild Nothing's sophomore effort is cleaner, with a more diverse array of sounds and a considerably brighter tone. Nocturne made clear that Tatum intended to develop his sound from his bedroom pop debut. A year later, Wild Nothing released the Empty Estate EP, which attempted to zero in on the scattered electro-pop shimmer of Nocturne but ultimately came across as distant due to a deficit of textural variations and engaging lyrics. Wild Nothing's third full-length offered a chance for reinvention, and while Tatum has clearly evolved as a musician, the limitations of his past releases are still with him.
From the opening, carbonated, notes of marimba on "Reichpop," Life of Pause presents itself as Wild Nothing's cheeriest record. Tatum has said that he wanted his third full-length to sound more "organic" or "gelled," and to give his audience a sense of physical space. To strengthen this idea, Tatum created an actual room to represent the album's world for the cover shoot. Tatum's fabricated atmosphere is a warm and groovy 1970s pad, with dashes of curiosities like a checkered teapot and a mysterious bouquet of flowers. But unlike this room, which existed only temporarily in a warehouse in Long Island City, Tatum recorded Life of Pause in Los Angeles and Stockholm, at a studio once owned by ABBA.
Tatum admitted that he was listening to "a lot of Philly soul, sweet soul music" while working on the record. When these moments, particularly the notes of funk and disco, are pushed, it feels like a move in the right direction. This is the most PG-13 Wild Nothing has been on record yet: The steamy sax on "Whenever I" paired with Tatum's silky drawl could be a track in a David Lynch nightclub; his voice on "A Woman's Wisdom" is a husky plea for intimate insight. "Reichpop" is stunning, with the aforementioned marimba played by Peter Bjorn and John drummer John Eriksson.
It's a high-bar statement of an opener, but the album rarely reaches that energy level again. "Japanese Alice" brings new life to the middle of the record with psych-pop guitars reminiscent of Deerhunter, and the title track's synth throbs have a hint of Neon Indian to them. Following these two, the stoned "Alien" feels like a setback, but the brief, noisy breakdowns save it from being a completely absurd outlier.
So why does Life of Pause not completely succeed? To begin with, the record is not emotionally accessible or relatable, which isn't a huge surprise considering Tatum favors sound over lyrics. The trouble is that it's unclear exactly what Life of Pause's mood is intended to be. Tonally and instrumentally, the album is a change in style, but there is no moment of surprise; it still feels very predictable. There is nothing wrong with being formulaic; it worked for…well, pretty much everyone. But there is no moment that truly grabs you, no emotional climax, no reason to truly care. Life of Pause is a straight, albeit funky, line.
Life of Pause's monotony is only heightened by its monochromatic songwriting. In a majority of the songs, Tatum asks some sort of question ("Can I learn to wait for my life?," "Will I find a way to make sense of/ The way that you love me?," "How can we want love?," etc etc) only to conclude during "To Know You" that "There is no answer to the question." All this amorous, existential pondering seems to prevent him from doing anything, from taking a risk, from making a statement that sticks. It doesn't help that these questions are delivered in such an aloof manner that even if they pique interest for a second, they will melt away quickly. It seems like Tatum is living a lyric from "Reichpop:" "The less you say the less that you get wrong." | 2016-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | February 18, 2016 | 6.5 | 04b7b2c0-8731-4859-bf3f-ee8e6e185fa0 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
"One more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we ... | "One more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we ... | Daft Punk: Discovery | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2134-discovery/ | Discovery | "One more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, we're gonna celebrate, oh yeah, all right, don't stop the dancing, one more time, you know I'm just feelin' celebration, tonight, celebrate, don't wait, too late, we don't stop, you can't stop, we're gonna celebrate, one more time, one more time, one more time, a celebration, you know we're gonna do it right, tonight, just feeling, music's got me feeling the need, we're gonna celebrate, one more time, celebrate and dance so free, music's got me feeling so free, celebrate and dance so free, one more time, music's got me feeling so free, we're gonna celebrate, celebrate and dance so free, one more time."
It's practically brainwashing, isn't it? Daft Punk seem to be operating under the premise that if you hear something enough times, you'll start to believe it. But after more than 15 listens to Discovery's first single and opening track, "One More Time," vocodered vocalist Romanthony doesn't have me "feeling the need," much less not waiting, celebrating, and dancing so free. This could just be me, of course. Maybe I just haven't taken enough ecstasy and horse tranquilizers to appreciate the tinny, sampled brass ensemble, the too-sincere "chill out" midsection, or the fat drum machine beats that throb in time with my headache.
Few things are more incriminating than Daft Punk's own lyrics, which, while generally deeper than "don't stop the dancing," rarely go beyond sensitive junior high poetry and "could this be love" Whitesnake-isms. But music like this wasn't meant to be judged on its lyrics. And since Discovery relies heavily on the French neo-disco stylings established by 1997's Homework, the duo would probably suggest we shut up and dance.
In truth, Discovery rarely invokes its predecessor's slap-bass funk, and few other tracks resemble the obviously single-designed "One More Time." Instead, Daft Punk focus on fusing mid-80's Kool and the Gang R&B; beats with post-millennial prog flourishes and more vocoders than you can shake at Herbie Hancock. Of the six tracks that feature vocals, four are smothered with the synthesized pitch corrector. On tracks like "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger," the duo make it work by pushing the instrument to its breaking point, squeezing out subhuman glips and merging the vocals into a Vai-style synth-guitar solo. But when the band relies on the tool merely as a gimmick, as on "Digital Love" and "Something about Us," the sentimental love songs come off with all the heart-melting earnestness of Kid Rock's "Only God Knows Why."
Daft Punk typically succeed in an instrumental environment, though. Discovery's first big score comes with the rousing "Crescendolls." The obscure Imperials sample makes the song with spirited "hey's" and "everybody y'all's" yelled out from a crowd. "Superheroes," which draws its repeated refrain from a late 70's Barry Manilow track called "Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed," sates with a massive, fist-pumping kickdrum, complex chord changes, and light-speed keyboard bleeps. The snapping percussion and Phantasy Star II phaser synths of "Verdis Quo" recall a somber Flashdance-era Giorgio Moroder. And the 16-bit pitch-bent tones and Klymaxx electro-bass of "Short Circuit" would have felt at home on Trans Am's Surrender to the Night.
Prog and disco have never openly begged for their own hybrid, but the genres' newborn Frankenbaby is alive, whether we like it or not. Still, this beast, however grotesque, is relatively harmless-- rather than running amok in the village and snapping the necks of civilians, it only wants to "celebrate and dance so free, one more time." Just don't let it sing. | 2001-03-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2001-03-13T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Virgin | March 13, 2001 | 6.4 | 04b99153-18ab-4377-85b8-160287e18fc9 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Twenty-six years after its release, the R&B stalwart’s occasionally tedious sophomore effort remains a lovable album whose flaws only deepen its charms. | Twenty-six years after its release, the R&B stalwart’s occasionally tedious sophomore effort remains a lovable album whose flaws only deepen its charms. | Mary J. Blige: My Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-j-blige-my-life/ | My Life | In 1994, the self-styled Queen of Hip-Hop Soul understood she had competition. TLC melded their bubblegum instincts to post-New Jack Swing beats. En Vogue flirted with rock guitar workouts. Whitney Houston was already a statue in the park admired for her architecture but taken for granted. Yet thanks to persistence and flexibility, Blige remains influential because she never assumed the masochism that became her lodestar requires sad, airless albums. Her work is morose, not numb. No matter how intensely she abases herself before lovers who don’t tire of leaving or underestimating her, Blige’s flinty egoism triumphs. No multi-platinum R&B singer has used the language of self-help as sword and shield better.
Sandwiched between the buoyant debut What’s the 411? (1992) and the austere, inevitable divadom of Share My World (1997), My Life positions Blige as heiress to an R&B fortune, thanks in large part to the sampling acumen of Bad Boy’s Hitmen team members Chucky Thompson and Sean “Puffy” Combs. There's Isaac Hayes and Barry White, Roy Ayres and Slick Rick—history as group therapy. These ancestral voices reassure but offer subtle contrasts, too. The title track interpolates the hook and ascending three-note keyboard from Ayers’ 1976 “Everybody Loves the Sunshine,” creating a healthy tension between Blige’s blue mood and the sample’s shafts of light. On the other hand, “Mary Jane (All Night Long)” finds her and the source material in harmony: by brightening Rick James’ original synth-flute line, Thompson and Combs give Blige the chance for some old school scatting over the outro. A ’90s fly girl hearkening back to Ella Fitzgerald over a Reagan-era jam, Blige had learned how to contextualize her melancholy.
The anniversary edition confirms the novelty if not radicalism of the Hitmen’s approach: R&B as tradition and living history. Hayes and White, after all, had long stopped scoring pop crossovers; here was a Black woman artist modernizing them as part of glistening triple-platinum product. The presence of Smif-N-Wessun and LL Cool J on the second disc’s remixes attest to her dialogue with hip-hop; Blige had no interest in settling for Anita Baker’s market share. And who knows how many young listeners gave rap a try after Combs and Thompson wove Notorious B.I.G. and Method Man’s “The What” into a transformed “I’m Goin’ Down”?
While pairing artists for the sake of consolidating streams is the way the business works in the 21st century, the guest spots expose My Life’s often ho-hum songwriting. Belters like Blige rely on audience submission: Admire the voice, ignore the material. Tensile, brassy, and confident, her mezzo-soprano has little warmth. She’s stingy with shows of compassion. Less gifted predecessors compressed Blige’s whole career into five minutes, as Karyn White did with “Superwoman.” When Blige out-sings on tracks like “Don’t Go,” her technique strands her. Indeed, she has less in common with her soul forebears than with Annie Lennox, also blessed with pipes so formidable that she sings like a lead guitar, bending and stretching notes on material that, fortunately, didn’t stint on tackiness and depended on shows of vocal derring-do. Blige isn’t tacky; she’s incapable of bad taste, which sometimes cuts into her sense of fun. To listen to “I’m Goin’ Down” in sequence after the torpid “I Never Wanna Live Without You” is to wonder how a covers album of classic-R&B deep cuts recast as manifestos of self-reliance might’ve played. On the plus side, Combs hadn’t yet turned sampling into the mechanical Puff-ery of the late-’90 No Way Out era; he lets Blige tiptoe over the vocal melody of “You Bring Me Joy” without the rhythm track from White’s “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me” overcoming her.
After My Life strengthened her commercial appeal, Blige embraced traditional feminine roles on duets. Male artists acted as foils. On the remix of “You’re All I Need to Get By,” she plays Tammi Terrell to Method Man’s Marvin Gaye. She then scored her biggest solo pop hit to date, the Babyface-composed “Not Gon’ Cry” from the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack; while no different from other performances of survivor-hood, the specificity of the songwriting suggested Blige’s capabilities when paired with the right collaborator. Ghostface Killah called her up for “All That I Got Is You,” a grim remembrance of things past. Energized, Blige recorded two of her best albums back-to-back. Mary (1999) perfects My Life’s old-is-new ethos, with Lauryn Hill, Aretha Franklin, and Elton John as collaborators and inspiration. She may have lied when titling its follow-up No More Drama (2001), but, oh, what drama—after 9-11, Blige’s dismissing hateration and holleration on “Family Affair” worked like aspirin. If she could survive, hey, there was hope for the rest of us.
My Life, though occasionally tedious, remains a lovable album; its flaws deepen its charms. The album points toward the late 2000s when Blige found simpatico partners in Bryan-Michael Cox for 2005’s The Breakthrough (its megahit “Be Without You” is a sleeker, shattering variant on “I Never Wanna...” ) and Stargate for 2007’s Growing Pains. For her last trick on My Life, she anchors “Be Happy” to Curtis Mayfield’s “You’re So Good to Me,” its slap-bass front and center. “All I really want is to be happy,” she repeats over its seven-minute groove—a prayer, promise, and earned affirmation.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen / UMe | November 24, 2020 | 7 | 04be392f-a6c8-4ad2-81db-4e0b3bb4ac2b | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
Following the lead of Royce da 5'9" and Elzhi, this rising Detroit rapper proves he's also one of underground rap's brightest young talents on his new LP. | Following the lead of Royce da 5'9" and Elzhi, this rising Detroit rapper proves he's also one of underground rap's brightest young talents on his new LP. | Danny Brown: The Hybrid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14760-the-hybrid/ | The Hybrid | Dilapidated and chronically underemployed, Detroit operates as the archetype for urban decay. The automotive industry and population have withered while the murder rate remains among the highest nationally. Musically, Jack White-- once one of Detroit's most famous musicians-- moved to Nashville, and three of the biggest pillars of Detroit's hip-hop scene, J Dilla, Proof, and Baatin of Slum Village, all passed away within the last four years. Yet the talent pool of Detroit's rap scene remains deep, with the survivors flourishing amidst the rust and discontent.
The new big three include Royce da 5'9"-- an elder statesman once plagued by label woes now enjoying a late-career renaissance as one of the best underground rappers in America-- and Elzhi, whose precision with words is so advanced that he could have his own rhyming dictionary. And now on The Hybrid, Danny Brown drops his name in the hat as one of Detroit's elite.
Brown comes swinging out the gate, copy of Dilla's Donuts clutched in his hands. On opening salvo "Greatest Rapper Ever", he unleashes a torrent of savage punchlines, highlighting both his vivid imagination and the most peculiarly infectious voice since Dizzee Rascal. In less than three minutes, he compares himself to video game dinosaur Yoshi when talking about oral sex, turns a Phil Collins single into a death threat, and reminisces about skipping school while taking "the same pills that had Carlton dancing fast." Brown maintains that wide reference base throughout the record, as George Costanza, Elvis Presley, and Alanis Morrissette are all used as tools to help the rapper bolster rhymes about "bitches," blunts, bricks of cocaine, and being broke. At times, he relies too heavily on garden-variety street talk, which doesn't help the limp beats and grating choruses of songs like "New Era", "Exotic", and "Need Another Drink".
Thankfully, Brown's restless creative spirit heavily outweighs his tendency to lean on gangsta-rap tropes. The Hybrid seems an appropriate album title due to his ability to toe the line between excitable ignorance and shrewd high concept. His Linwood upbringing inspires him to cast his eye on the desolate streets of one of the most downtrodden cities in America: While most rappers brag about their newly acquired wealth, Brown goes on a shopping spree with his food-stamp card on "Thank God". Over the woozy, hallucinogenic synth line on "Generation Rx", he runs down the list of over-the-counter drugs and the prescription drug culture that keeps America's health care system going. Best of all is "Juno", which flips the script on the Ellen Page movie and the romanticism of teen pregnancy.
Back on "Greatest Rapper Ever", Brown raps, "I rap like I bet my life/ 'Cause in all actuality, nigga? I DID." While the conviction in his voice is startling, Danny Brown is still a ways away from seeing the fruition of the title of his debut album's opening track. The Hybrid, however, is a peek inside the mind of one of Detroit's brightest young talents, and shows that he is definitely on the right track. | 2010-10-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-10-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Rappers I Know | October 20, 2010 | 7.6 | 04c877f0-09de-42de-ae24-053524426194 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Debut album from the Chicago MC and Kanye West protégé is proudly out of step with contemporary hip-hop-- despite contributions from his mentor, Jay-Z, and the Neptunes. | Debut album from the Chicago MC and Kanye West protégé is proudly out of step with contemporary hip-hop-- despite contributions from his mentor, Jay-Z, and the Neptunes. | Lupe Fiasco: Food & Liquor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9437-food-liquor/ | Food & Liquor | Lupe Fiasco is not the artist you think he is: Though he's been touted as everything from deck-wielding hip-hop savior to carpetbagging poseur, Fiasco is actually more of a dilettante. Which is not to say he's untalented-- he is, extraordinarily so. The Chicago MC sports one of the slipperiest flows I've heard in a long time-- he's dexterous but never technical, sly but not arrogant. He rarely hangs on syllables too long and never wastes a word. And words are plentiful on his debut album, the long-delayed Food & Liquor. Fiasco's a self-proclaimed entrepreneur wading against a current he can't seem to condone: Hip-hop circa 2006. His first album's the work of an MC in love with rap's freedom of expression but at odds with its current landscape.
Where Fiasco misses classic status is his sonic approach. The album's sound-- produced in large part by the 1st and 15th Productions duo Soundtrakk and Prolyfic-- is clearly influenced by the bombastic derring-do of Kanye West's Late Registration, the record on which Fiasco was famously introduced. Much of Food & Liquor is draped in stuttering, chopped strings and blaring guitar. Tracks like "He Say She Say" and "Sunshine", with their sweeping violas, sound like manipulative film music, undermining an MC bursting with enthusiasm by portraying him as some sort of epic figure, here to erase and rewrite rap lore. Call it Score-Hop-- only the sentiment doesn't match the performer, particularly for a rapper blowing up because he wrote a deft song about skateboarding. He also blogs, loves anime, and collects toys. Not exactly the stuff of Tolstoy.
Where West mined humor and pathos out of his delusional grandiosity, Lupe too often falls back on smug in-fighting. On the closing verse of the mostly sublime Jill Scott-assisted jazz joint "Daydreamin'", Fiasco-- with the wily tone of a nasally Chi-Ali-- mocks his peers. "Now come on everybody, let's make cocaine cool/ We need a few more half-naked women up in the pool," he raps. Only seconds later he swallows the shit and stops grinning, opting for introspection: "I'd like to thank the streets that drove me crazy/ And all the televisions out there that raised me." Why the ridicule before the contemplation? Maybe it lies in Fiasco's faith, which dictates some of his preachier verses. The influence is clear on "Intro", which echoes the opening track of Mos Def's debut, and the brilliant screed "American Terrorist".
More troubling is Fiasco's apparent inability to write fly hooks. While his verses are packed with wit and double meaning, his hooks are mostly blandly-sung, unmemorable couplets. This highlights what may be Food & Liquor's biggest flaw: It's just not that fun. This is not to say there isn't a place for grand, thoughtful hip-hop-- there isn't nearly enough. But on the strength of his 1st and 15th mixtapes, the joyful "Kick, Push", and effervescent "I Gotcha"-- one the best Neptunes tracks in years-- Fiasco's at his best when he's a bit livelier. This is to say nothing of "Outro", another grandiloquent production, minus the intelligence. It's 12 minutes (!) of Lupe shouting out people like MTV, his nieces, nephews, and his "big homie Shondell." It's barely listenable once, let alone repeatable. There is also a track on here produced by Linkin Park's Mike Shinoda featuring onelinedrawing's Jonah Matranga of which we will say no more.
Of course, this sounds negative, but it's more the notes of a slightly disappointed fan. I never fell in love with the highly regarded leak of this album months ago, but this is an improvement, with futuro-funk tracks like "The Cool" (from Kanye West) and "I Gotcha" added to the mix. The album's best song, "Hurt Me Soul", is as ostentatiously conceived as much of the album, brimming with lush strings and a single plinking piano courtesy of Needlz-- his only solo production.
Lyrically, Fiasco is vivid and nimble and appealingly contradictory. He opens with the accusatory, "I used to hate hip-hop, yup, because of the women degraded" and then explains he was swayed by Too $hort's humor. He later questions Jay-Z (a noted supporter of Fiasco's) and his "never prayed to God, I pray to Gotti" credo from "D'Evils", only to become a convert after his 30th viewing of "Streets Is Watching" which has him "back to givin' props again." All essential battles for any serious hip-hop fan. But this is a tough tightrope for any MC to walk and Lupe is let down by what is supposed to be this album's selling point: the music.
Reportedly Fiasco modeled Food & Liquor after Nas' adventurous if overblown follow-up to Illmatic, It Was Written. This illuminates everything. Fiasco's putting the Phantom before the horse, so to speak. He hasn't released a classic, gritty album yet. Instead he's attempted to ascend to a status he hasn't earned, and frankly, shouldn't want. This is no call for Lupe to tone down his aggressively thoughtful themes, merely to reframe them. He doesn't have to be a savior. There's no one to save. | 2006-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / 1st & 15th | September 21, 2006 | 7.9 | 04d47da1-a5f6-47e3-b949-24080b1be475 | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a confluence of jazz’s past and present, an unsung modernist classic from 1974. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a confluence of jazz’s past and present, an unsung modernist classic from 1974. | Bennie Maupin: The Jewel in the Lotus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bennie-maupin-the-jewel-in-the-lotus/ | The Jewel in the Lotus | One summer night in 1972, Herbie Hancock’s group Mwandishi was booked to play a show in Seattle, Washington. The group, named for a Swahili title Hancock had adopted meaning “composer” or “writer,” also included bassist Buster Williams, drummer Billy Hart, and multireedist Bennie Maupin. Capable at not just saxophone, but also bass clarinet and flute, Maupin was the most recent addition to the group. The Detroit native was 32 years old at the time, slowly establishing himself as sideman so he could no longer work days at the Jewish Memorial Hospital in New York. By the time he joined Mwandishi, Maupin and the band picked up on a thread started at the sessions for Miles Davis’ 1970 album Bitches Brew—where Maupin and Hancock first played together—incorporating rock and R&B rhythms while still retaining the free improvisation and harmonic complexity of the era’s most forward-looking jazz.
As Hancock remembers it in his memoir, the Seattle show did not take place under ideal circumstances. The band had arrived the night before, and, after playing their first gig, commenced an all-nighter of partying across town. “By the time we straggled back to our hotel, the sun had not only risen—it was already beginning to set again,” Hancock wrote. After only two hours of sleep, Hancock did not feel up to opening with solo piano, as he did most nights. He passed the buck, calling the song “Toys,” which begins with a bass solo.
What happened next was transformative. Buster Williams began to play so brilliantly, Hancock let him continue alone for ten minutes, instead of the two or three he’d intended to give him. “His hand looked like some kind of crazy spider, crawling up and down the length of the bass,” Hancock remembered. When the band finally came in together, they were invigorated, going on to play a set that reduced some of the audience to tears.
Afterwards, Hancock cornered Williams, awestruck, and asked him where he’d found the vitality to play the way he did. Williams was more than willing to explain. While everyone else had been trying to sleep off the previous night, Williams had been in his room chanting. He repeated the syllables “Nam Ryoho Renge Kyo,” the core mantra of Nichiren Buddhism, based on the ancient text of the Lotus Sutra. Williams had been introduced to the practice by his sister, and had already inspired Bennie Maupin to explore it. The three of them, Williams, Maupin, and Hancock, became lifelong adherents, spending the rest of the tour visiting Buddhist community centers instead of parties.
The chant translates to “the mystic law of cause and effect through sound,” and for the Mwandishi group, it became embedded in their approach to music. Bennie Maupin described the chant in musical terms to jazz magazine Down Beat in 1975, saying “the rhythm itself is such a basic rhythm that I feel I’m getting more in tune not only with myself but with other people too.”
The following year, Hancock went in a different direction, disbanding Mwandishi, but retaining Maupin, whom he saw as “most open to change” among his collaborators. A new group, including the percussionist Bill Summers, recorded 1973’s Head Hunters, one of the most successful attempts of the era to unify jazz and funk. Its most famous song, “Chameleon,” includes a melody written by Maupin, a dramatic fanfare over a hypnotic bassline played by Hancock on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer. Maupin later told musicologist Steven Pond that the theme came to him at the Wattstax concert in Los Angeles earlier that year. While watching concertgoers doing a dance called the funky robot, he heard the notes come together in his head. The result is unquestionably both funky and robotic.
It was in 1974 that Bennie Maupin released his first solo album, The Jewel in the Lotus, on the relatively new ECM label, joined by Williams, Hart, Hancock, Summers, and additional percussionist Fred Waits. The title is a translation of another Buddhist chant, “Om Mani Padme Hum,” which evokes an ancient story. The Buddha once stood in front of an assembly of monks to deliver a sermon, and instead of speaking, silently held up a lotus flower. The lotus became a powerful symbol in the religion, a flower that can grow without roots, from muddy water.
The chant evoked by the album’s title is immediately apparent on the opening track, “Ensenada.” It begins with Buster Williams playing a droning, two-note bassline, over which Fred Waits adds accents on marimba. The melody begins, with Maupin at the forefront on flute, and Hancock adding shimmering harmony underneath. The flute is so unadorned as to hardly add up to a melody; Maupin plays only a single note per measure of music for most of the composition’s duration. This was a principle, he told Down Beat, that he had explored with Hancock, Williams, and Hart in Mwandishi: “We did, in many instances, eliminate the idea of notes. A lot of things that we did might imply chords, but in a lot of instances it wasn’t. It was just that we discovered so many different areas of sound that we could use to create certain illusions.”
This approach seems almost incomplete when interpreted by way of conventional wisdom about jazz. In the mainstream reading of the jazz tradition, the music is an expression of heroic individualism, as embodied by a soloist who leads the ensemble with a complex improvised melody. That assumption has long made the drawing of political conclusions irresistible. “We believe jazz is a metaphor for Democracy,” says the mission statement of Jazz at Lincoln Center, founded and directed by traditionalist Wynton Marsalis. At an event in tribute to jazz at the White House, Barack Obama asked, “Has there ever been any greater improvisation than America itself?”
In its most oversimplified version, this is principle is reduced to a sequence of solos—everyone gets their turn to speak. But in “Ensenada,” there is no lone hero. The players almost seem to be accompanying a missing melody, or accompanying each others’ accompaniment. This kind of musical structure is more familiar to modern listeners; the measure-by-measure textural approach has since become characteristic of ambient and electronic music, from Brian Eno to Basic Channel. “Ensenada” is prescient enough that minimal techno producers Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer used it as the basis for a track on their remix album Re:ECM.
“Mappo” takes on a more recognizable jazz structure, including the addition of trumpeter Charles Sullivan. With the exception of an opening and closing statement by Sullivan and Maupin (on flute), the majority of the track is given over to the rhythm section alone. Hancock plays the closest thing to a familiar jazz solo on the album, still allowing bass and percussion to share equal space. The composition’s title also comes from Nichiren Buddhism, referring to the present historical moment as charted by Buddhist philosophy. This preoccupation with temporality comes up again on two short interludes, “Past + Present = Future” and “Winds of Change.”
Allusions to Asian musical forms had been present in jazz for some time, including album-length explorations by fellow Detroiters Yusef Lateef, on 1961’s Eastern Sounds, and Alice Coltrane, on 1970’s Journey in Satchidananda. Williams’ bass often sounds like it is the setting for a raga, and on “Excursions,” Maupin can be heard literally chanting. It’s not a stretch to see the music as an extension of a chant—the joining of multiple voices in the same syllables and notes. The title track, with its chant-derived name, shows how far this can be taken. It brings us closest to the sound of Mwandishi, with Hancock on pulsating electric piano and Maupin on saxophone. Here the leader takes his only long solo on the album, but he maintains the method established on “Ensenada,” rarely playing more than one note per measure.
This emphasis on texture over narrative, even if it is accessed through an international lens, is not a full departure from the jazz tradition. Histories of jazz that emphasize the development of the melodic line—as epitomized by the emergence of bebop in the mid-’40s—tend to overshadow the changes in the underlying musical environment. Bebop is often dated to 1939, when Charlie Parker discovered, while soloing over the pop song “Cherokee,” that he could draw from the entire musical scale rather than just the chords. But the modernization of jazz could just as well be traced to Walter Page’s basslines in the mid-’30s, with various iterations of the Count Basie Orchestra. His “walking” style made for a less divided rhythmic pulse, matched by drummers like Kenny Clarke and Max Roach, and more seamless transitions across harmonies, which pianists could carry further with chord substitutions. The players on The Jewel in the Lotus all came from this tradition, finding common ground between modern jazz, contemporary R&B, and ancient music from the African and Asian continents.
Though Bennie Maupin is listed as the leader, The Jewel in the Lotus defies assumptions about the hierarchy of musical composition and performance. “A more selfless album is hard to imagine,” said the review in Down Beat. Maupin may have taken his cues from Buddhism, but the resulting music implies a more expansive principle, about jazz in particular and self-expression in general. The most heroic soloists in the jazz canon—Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and others—accomplished their inventions with the assistance of an attentive ensemble, to whom they paid equal attention. Even when an individual speaks alone, it suggests, the collective listens together, and there is no higher calling than accompanying others. | 2019-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Universal | April 28, 2019 | 9.1 | 04d72dca-2c69-425e-9d85-047b3e8bf4cf | Shuja Haider | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shuja-haider/ | |
Standing on the Corner is the collaboration of two jazz-inclined oddballs from New York City. Their dazzling, invigorating Red Burns project is a freeform response to recent world events. | Standing on the Corner is the collaboration of two jazz-inclined oddballs from New York City. Their dazzling, invigorating Red Burns project is a freeform response to recent world events. | Standing on the Corner: Red Burns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/standing-on-the-corner-red-burns/ | Red Burns | Standing on the Corner is a sonic workshop for 21-year-old artists Gio Escobar and Jasper Marsalis: two jazz-inclined oddballs and tinkerers fascinated by rap drums, warped vocals, and improvisation. After releasing their debut last year, the duo shared a stranger and more personal chronicle called Red Burns on September 11. The project is a scrapbook made with assistance from artists in their New York community, which includes rising rapper MIKE. Its title became a reference to the generational scars left by imperialism, how deeply the tendrils of oppression burrow into the shared histories of black and brown people. “It’s a curse that I think people of the diaspora have,” Escobar told The Fader. “I guess the root is, ultimately, manifest destiny—this willingness of colonial white settlers from Europe who chose to violently alter the history of another people for the rest of time. We can never undo these things.”
Red Burns isn’t actually about any of that conceptually; there isn’t a “concept,” per se. Instead, Red Burns is a collective response to recent world events (like Trump) from a team of black and brown musicians manifesting as a “weird ass album.” The project is a freeform, hour-long, continuous track, which feels like an act of purposeful subversion in the playlist era. Red Burns is a dazzling sensory experience, a city tour in which each track is like a street sign. Escobar has expressed his frustrations with the confines of musicianship—“Not everything you feel can come out in a song”—and Red Burns seems designed as a sort of multidimensional diagram of New York City, the diverse perspectives it shapes, and the varying journeys inside its city blocks. The album’s website, a collage of memes, serves as a visual and emotional moodboard for the project. This is a tricky, experimental manifesto of sorts for young brown New Yorkers, a burst of raptness and poise amid the busyness and noise.
In the first minute, Red Burns establishes its stakes: “The inability to breathe is what this record is all about.” In the background, you can hear Eric Garner’s final pleas for air. The project forces the listener to parse the data and find meaning. Each segment captures a complicated space from a new angle. The piecemeal delivery of info and scenery only heightens the sensations, and odd details will catch the ear each uninterrupted playthrough: conversation fragments, lyric fragments, background noise, glitchy vocals, distortion effects, five-percenter rhetoric. Some moments are serene. Others are jagged. Some seem to happen just out of the frame—the feelings associated with the minutiae of Medina life. Some are panoramic. There’s spoken word à la the Last Poets, and hypemanisms, and soul singing, and Puerto Rican music. But everything feels connected, even despite the constant tensions.
The main thing tying the Red Burns snippets together is a free-flowing narrative that primarily pivots on the five recitations scattered across the hour, titled “nate sees the storm,” “red burns comin!,” “cleb sees the storm !,” “what about the planet?,” and “the devil Meets Red Burns.” Each soliloquy seems to dictate which corner the project turns down next. The first is a series of seemingly unrelated snapshots from a city in constant motion: “You know these young niggas run up old school, with a gun and a mask, and the cops don’t stop cuz they scared. And the kids skin their knees. And somebody daddy barbecuing on the sidewalk in the summer. Somebody gonna miss they daddy. Somebody always gonna miss they daddy...And somebody’s mother’s crying for her baby. Somebody got a new baby, sadly, or happily, you can never really tell.” The findings here seem to suggest a truth of Red Burns in general: Make observations fast or you might miss something; glean what you can from everything you hear and see.
The sounds of Red Burns are just as eclectic and thrilling as the city they hope to contextualize: sketches of sensual Marvin Gaye soul and Tribe alt rap, tributes to free jazz maestro Albert Ayler and milly rocking (with a subtle cameo from Playboi Carti’s “Magnolia”). There is a bona fide MIKE deep cut and an offering from an Afro-Cuban tradition honoring both the Catholic St. Lazarus and the African-inspired Oricha Babalú-Ayé. “Sellin Soap” starts as a drum-happy, fidgety coke saga and then suddenly, refreshingly melts into mellow, glowing keyboard fills. DJ airhorns intro “Wont U,” a psychedelic slow-roller that builds to whirrs and whooshes, sounds usually associated with space travel. Across Red Burns, you can hear Standing on the Corner and friends navigating the city they love with both despair and optimism (“Survived 9/11, I’ll be damned if we don't make it to heaven”). Their interpretations of the city’s echos are helping to reinvigorate its stagnated hip-hop scene. | 2017-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Grand Closing | October 7, 2017 | 8 | 04da0b5c-cc35-49f5-bb81-32a51544a8ab | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Jay-Z’s first solo album since 2009’s The Blueprint 3, released initially on Samsung mobile devices, finds him working with marquee names including Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, and Nas. | Jay-Z’s first solo album since 2009’s The Blueprint 3, released initially on Samsung mobile devices, finds him working with marquee names including Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, Pharrell Williams, Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, and Nas. | Jay-Z: Magna Carta... Holy Grail | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18247-jay-z-magna-carta-holy-grail/ | Magna Carta... Holy Grail | Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch the Throne was introduced by Frank Ocean parsing the respective qualities of gods and kings. Two years later, both rappers have new solo albums that expound on the distinction. Kanye infamously proclaimed “I Am a God” on Yeezus; you could either gape in awe or call it heresy, but you couldn’t doubt his conviction. And just as the brutal and blasphemous Yeezus is true to its title, Magna Carta… Holy Grail offers a jumbled juxtaposition of the regal and divine—hear Jay-Z gasp, “You in the presence of a king/Scratch that, you in the presence of a god,” on “Crown.” It’s one of the few lines here that scans as wishful thinking. The album is a celebration of unlimited financial privilege and power that even used its literally game-changing release as a Samsung Galaxy app to separate Jay-Z’s fans into haves and have-nots. Only a small subset could acquire Magna Carta… Holy Grail on its release date, and it seems safe to say that fewer still will relate to it in a meaningful way.
Which is problematic, since here the “voice of the young people” seems bent on addressing the public. “I ball so hard on ESPN/See my name come across CNN/About six minutes you gonna see it again,” he later claims on “Crown.” Between his newborn daughter, budding sports agency, political controversies, and his equally famous wife, Magna Carta has the most personal material to work with since The Black Album. But the songs rarely go deep. On “Picasso Baby,” Jay boasts “House like the Louvre or the Tate Modern/Because I be goin’ ape at the auction.” I doubt he meant it to be “Poppin’ Tags” for the Sotheby’s set—a vulgar display of net worth that puts him in the tax bracket of shipping magnates and NBA owners—but it comes across as a context and appraisal-free recitation of famous names, a Winner’s History of Modern Art.
The same can be said of the collaborators. Like The 20/20 Experience, the latest album from his Legends of the Summer tourmate, Justin Timberlake, Magna is a hedge-betting, black-tie/Black Card affair that’s not just an account of luxury, but an accessory to it. Marquee names Timbaland, Swizz Beatz, Pharrell, Timberlake, Beyoncé, and Nas all lend their talents—and all appear on “BBC.” The money isn’t totally wasted, as these are some of the stranger beats Jay’s rapped over in some time. Witness the contorted, metallic pings of “Tom Ford,” “Somewhereinamerica”’s drunken ragtime horns, or the codeine-laced, dubby “Crown.” Jay is at least trying to interact with a hip-hop mainstream that has evolved a great deal since his last true solo album, though relegating the production of reigning MVP Mike Will Made-It to a one-minute interlude ("Beach Is Better") smacks of unintended elitism.
At its best, Magna is a record that only a 43-year-old Jay-Z could make. “Heaven” is the most thought-provoking spiritual meditation he’s written, and the willful misreading of “Losing My Religion” is used to powerful effect. “Jay Z Blue” ruminates on the responsibilities and cyclical pathologies of fatherhood with warmth and self-doubt rather than the bitterness that marked what had previously been his most family-minded LP, The Dynasty: Roc La Familia. But Jay also manifests a worst case scenario for “dad-rap.” Twelve albums in, he’s still Muhammad Ali, he’s Michael Jackson, he’s Michael Jordan, he’s Frank Sinatra—the latter is the most deflating comparison, if only because Jay-Z is using him as a prop for yet another lyric about how he did it “my way.” As tedious as these hoary references can be, it’s worse when Magna Carta dabbles in contemporary name-drops and Jay-Z becomes Jay Leno—mentions of Homeland, Instagram, Scott Boras, and Miley Cyrus’ twerkin’ incident bomb like failed monologue jokes between idle chatter.
Unlike Watch the Throne, Jay-Z lacks a foil to bring out an emotional or sociological underpinning, someone to help Magna Carta resonate beyond “look at my shit.” Timberlake is in “my name is Bob and I work at my job” mode during the laughably overblown “Holy Grail,” cycling through every tortured artist cliché short of a crucifixion metaphor. And as bad as the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” interpolation reads on paper, once you hear JT and Jay-Z duet on “And we all just entertainers/And we’re stupid and contagious,” the Nirvana song becomes just another forgettable status symbol. And where Kurt Cobain felt compromised by his fame, Jay and Timberlake are doing everything in their power not to offend the money people—whether it’s Samsung, Target, or someone dropping $250 to see them at the Rose Bowl.
Jay-Z rapping about the incomprehensible awesomeness of his life is nothing new, and the corporate synergy is hardly a novelty: The Black Album doubled as a retirement party, Kingdom Come was launched by a Budweiser commercial, American Gangster coincided with a Hollywood blockbuster of the same name, and, in hindsight, The Blueprint 3 was made with full knowledge that Jay-Z would be Coachella’s first hip-hop headliner. He’s a businessman and a business, man. After all, while Samsung shelled out seven figures for exclusive access to the Jay-Z brand, Shawn Carter was the guy signing the contract and cashing the check. But the best of those joint ventures seemed determined to reach a new audience and create a connection. The weirdly distant and safe Magna Carta… Holy Grail abides by the tried and true business principle that the customer is always right: You just have to remember who the customer is here. | 2013-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Roc-A-Fella / Roc Nation | July 8, 2013 | 5.8 | 04dc2143-dde8-4b76-9a73-c306d7a274d3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Cheena is composed of members from noise and hardcore outfits like Pharmakon and Anasazi, but on their debut, they are a rock band, pure and simple, channeling the New York Dolls. | Cheena is composed of members from noise and hardcore outfits like Pharmakon and Anasazi, but on their debut, they are a rock band, pure and simple, channeling the New York Dolls. | Cheena: Spend the Night With... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22165-spend-the-night-with/ | Spend the Night With... | It’s been a long time since New York City sounded like Cheena. In a year that’s seen some of the city’s greatest venues and record stores shutting their doors, Cheena’s New York is undoubtedly a figment of the past. On their debut album, Spend the Night With..., the band longs for an instantly recognizable but long-gone locale: home of CBGB’s, leather jackets, cheap rent, the New York fuckin’ Dolls. Like the band’s Instagram-ready pose on the album cover, these aren't just sounds you stumble upon in the wild. You have to summon them specifically. It makes sense, then, that Cheena is a band composed not only of lifelong New Yorkers, but also of long-time New York musicians from the city’s noise and hardcore scenes, notably including Pharmakon’s Margaret Chardiet on lead guitar and Keegan Dakkar of the gothic punk outfit Anasazi.
While the members of Cheena share a history of using their music to provoke and push boundaries, Spend the Night finds them settling into more comfortable territory. The reference points are clear and shameless, channeling the rockabilly swagger of the Gun Club, the coked-out blues rock of *Goats Head Soup-*era Stones, and, of course, plenty of the Dolls. With such a specific set of influences, Cheena emerges both too confident to be deemed just a side project yet too understated to feel like a supergroup. Instead, Cheena is just an old-fashioned rock band.
In accordance with their old school philosophy, *Spend the Night With... *is an old-school kind of album. It’s a fast-paced, ten-song ordeal, over in just thirty minutes. The hit-after-hit structure lends the album a breezy, amiable flow, but one that occasionally threatens to steer them into monochromatic territory. Vocalist Walker Behl, who cut his teeth in the hardcore band Crazy Spirit, has a snarly growl that aims for attitude over melody, a quality that fails to make most of the songs any greater than just the sum of their riffs. Overall, the album has the feel of a solid, well-paced live set. You might not leave humming the songs, but you’ll still have fun.
Aside from “Liberated Animal,” whose gnarly, dissonant riff reminds you that Chardiet is a musician with a history of “effectively convey[ing] the disturbing nature of corporeality,” Spend the Night With... is mostly content to just be a good time. The moments that stick with you then are the ones where the band amps up the melody and energy, like on infectious single “Stupor,” or when they just switch things up entirely, as they do on mid-album country weeper “Electric Snoopy Gang.” Aside from that song’s deeply literal balladeering (“Knick knack paddy whack, my doggy’s gone”), Cheena specializes in late-night party anthems. When you can make out what he’s saying, Behl is usually just flirting with you, looking for something to do, or sayin’ it like he sees it, as in the album’s quintessential line: “I think New York’s okay.”
Between Biehl’s blase lyrics and Logan Montana’s drunken, yawning slide guitar—the unabashed MVP of the album, oozing through the mix like a snake on the subway tracks– there’s an attractive sense of ease to Cheena. Cheena is not trying to blow your mind. In fact, they’re not trying to do much of anything. But that spirit rings true, and it feels less like a pose the longer the album goes on. Cheena knows that the least New York way to live is to be constantly perplexed and amazed by where you live. As Joan Didion wrote, to merely live in New York is to “reduce the miraculous to the mundane.” After all, she writes, “one does not ‘live’ at Xanadu.” For the span of ten songs, Cheena spends the night at Xanadu, absolutely trashes the place, and, in the end, decides it’s just okay. | 2016-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sacred Bones | August 3, 2016 | 6.9 | 04de8634-4a50-44b6-b228-e46257a1b200 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The debut from the London musician is a culmination of her eclectic journey to the vanguard of electronic music. It is a marvelous paradox: Despite the music’s rigidity, it breathes like a living thing. | The debut from the London musician is a culmination of her eclectic journey to the vanguard of electronic music. It is a marvelous paradox: Despite the music’s rigidity, it breathes like a living thing. | Beatrice Dillon: Workaround | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beatrice-dillon-workaround/ | Workaround | Most producers in electronic music tend to work in a linear fashion: They start with a chosen style or set of ideas and move gradually forward with them, making incremental progress toward their larger vision. Not Beatrice Dillon. An unsuspecting listener presented with a half dozen of the London musician’s releases might easily assume they were the work of six different people. A 20-minute cassette with Germany’s Gunnar Wendel collected fragments of a noise performance; a pair of albums with composer Rupert Clervaux alternated percussive concision with freeform drift. Themed mixtapes—like a journey through Smithsonian Folkways’ archives or a guided tour of RVNG Intl.’s idiosyncratic catalog—comprise a surprising proportion of her discography. In the absence of anything like an identifiable sound, she has developed a singular sensibility: inquisitive, inventive, attuned to textural nuance and the power of a well-timed surprise. She may be everywhere and nowhere at once, but her catalog suggests its own hidden logic when taken together.
Workaround, her debut album, doesn’t sound much like anything she has done before—which is to be expected—but it’s readily apparent that this is her most ambitious record yet. Putting her rhythmic instincts front and center without bowing to convention, she reconciles her fondness for dance music with the more esoteric tastes she developed working at London’s Sounds of the Universe, a record store with deep holdings in global rarities. Though the 14 tracks range in style and duration, from hypnotic club cuts to brief, abstracted etudes, they all share a palette of scratchy drum machine and glistening FM synths; virtually all are paced at roughly 150 beats per minute, so that they feel less like standalone compositions than variations upon a single, overarching theme.
That uncommon tempo, pitched somewhere between techno and drum’n’bass, is an inspired choice. For one, it removes Dillon’s music from the workaday context of most contemporary dance music; the body registers the beats’ power, but the brain struggles to find a precedent. It’s also an unusually flexible tempo, conducive to both quick syncopations and laid-back, half-time grooves. Informed by dancehall reggae’s lurching cadence, her rhythms lunge and snap, complementing the synthesizers’ staccato attack. And even at such comparatively high speeds, the machine-tooled drums and electronics leave plenty of negative space. This all results in a marvelous paradox: Despite the music’s rigidity, it breathes like a living thing.
Over this skeletal rhythmic framework, Dillon drapes a surprising array of sounds sourced from friends and collaborators: the liquid bounce of UK bhangra musician Kuljit Bhamra’s tabla; scraped strings from cellist Lucy Railton, who played on Mica Levi’s Jackie score; rainbow-streaked pedal steel from Jonny Lam, whose CV includes credits with Norah Jones and Pharaoh Sanders. On “Workaround Two,” Laurel Halo’s vocoder and synths intertwine with Verity Susman’s airy saxophone contrails; UK bass musicians Batu and Untold also turn up in the credits, along with Senegalese griot Kadialy Kouyaté. But the form these pieces take is more like collage than real-time collaboration: With the exception of “Workaround Two,” in which Dillon dictated exactly what she wanted from her players, most of her guests’ contributions were created around a pair of demo tracks that Dillon eventually scrapped, freeing her to edit, manipulate, and recontextualize their parts as she would any other sample.
Those dueling processes—improvisation vs. cut-and-paste, real-time exchange vs. the infinite possibilities of digital editing—are the unspoken theme at the heart of Workaround: It’s a record about control. “The computer always wins, that was my phrase,” Dillon told The Guardian of her philosophy going into the record. The album’s noticeable lack of reverb, she pointed out, banishes any illusion of musicians jamming together in real time, in a single room. Instead, the album’s airless, clinical atmospheres intentionally suggest the pristine, brushed-metal gleam of a brand-new laptop, fresh from the box. At a time when so many dance musicians strive to emulate vintage sounds (whether by means of battered analog equipment or digital plugins that emulate effects like tube distortion and tape warble), the album’s unsentimental polish is all the more exciting. It’s that rarest of creatures in electronic music: something we haven’t actually heard before.
Dillon cites the influence of visual artists Tomma Abts and Jorinde Voigt on the album’s interplay of shape and hue, an inspiration that can be detected in the music’s flattened, two-dimensional quality. Individual sounds like kora and standup bass become severed from their origins and reduced to abstractions—blocks of color, shapes on a page, forms being dragged about within the empty white rectangle of a computer screen. There, detached from the messiness of meatspace, Dillon can make the most of their contrasting textures: the graceful curl of the pedal steel set against the unerring linearity of digital drums; crisp, “Diwali”-like claps cushioned by dub-techno memory foam.
Despite the nimble rhythms, there’s a prevailing sense of patience, even stasis. It’s a factor of the music’s repetitive nature, both within individual tracks and across the album as a whole. But that lulling serves a secret purpose, setting you up for a surprise when a particularly captivating sonic object comes rolling across the stereo field. There’s a four-note riff in “Workaround Two” that sounds like a cross between Japanese city pop and a smartphone ringtone, and the fact that it happens just once and disappears in the blink of an eye only makes it that much more riveting.
Though Workaround’s second half is anchored by one of the album’s highlights—“Square Fifths,” a fractal waterfall of icy rave stabs over tabla and a groove that hints at dembow—that song is followed by a sequence of short, largely interchangeable percussion sketches that all sound like minor variations on the same basic idea. In another context, those might be taken for DJ tools—rhythmic loops for DJs to juggle to their hearts’ content. But even that nod to club functionalism seems appropriate for this curious and captivating record. In an album as intentional as this one is, the choice to include these passages is surely significant: they feel like pages torn from Dillon’s notebook, equations worked out in pursuit of electronic music’s version of a theory of everything.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Pan | February 12, 2020 | 8.3 | 04def07e-8a21-4387-96c2-acbb2717e781 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Paradise Gallows finds the Richmond, Virginia five-piece alternatively aiming to be both the world’s heaviest act and also the prettiest. | Paradise Gallows finds the Richmond, Virginia five-piece alternatively aiming to be both the world’s heaviest act and also the prettiest. | Inter Arma: Paradise Gallows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22074-paradise-gallows/ | Paradise Gallows | Few metal bands in recent years have emerged with all their parts so immediately perfected as Inter Arma: every pummeling, slow-as-molasses drum fill; every seasick, punishing guitar solo; every ounce of reverb on Mike Paparo’s pained, death metal howl; every blast of feedback swelling in the mix like a bolt of thunder forecasting a biblical storm. For a band so wild and untamable, every aspect of Inter Arma’s records sounds as if it was deliberated upon and perfected for hours in a studio before reaching our ears. This was true on their 2013 Relapse debut Sky Burial, and it was even truer on their 2014 follow-up EP The Cavern. A single 45-minute track, *The Cavern *showcased a band uninterested in resting on their laurels. They had established a signature sound, with their moody amalgam of death metal, black metal, doom metal, and Southern rock, and were now focused on crafting compositions as interesting and distinctive as their sonics.
Such is the mission statement for Paradise Gallows, an album that finds the Richmond, Virginia five-piece alternatively aiming to be both the world’s heaviest act and also the prettiest— and they don’t waste any time. Brief opening number “Nomini” pairs acoustic fingerpicking with soaring David Gilmour-indebted solos and leads right into “An Archer in the Emptiness,” their most guttural, atonal slab of sludge to date. The juxtaposition of the two songs is an almost too-perfect summation of what Inter Arma is capable of (see also track titles like “Violent Constellations” and “The Summer Drones”), but Inter Arma is too smart to become formulaic. On Paradise Gallows, their songwriting is consistently sharp and challenging, making the album’s 71 minutes of shapeshifting feel not only coherent but also wholly natural and downright triumphant.
Like The Cavern, Paradise Gallows is most impressive when taken as a whole, but it is not without its individual highlights. “Violent Constellations” finds Paparo quoting both Rainer Maria Rilke and Waylon Jennings over some of drummer T.J. Childers’ most powerful rhythms. The proggy “Summer Drones,” meanwhile, is one of the shortest tracks here at just under seven minutes, but is also one of its most stunning: a psychedelic burst of swirling mayhem, with chanted vocals that illustrate the common ground between early Swans and the Doors. The clean vocals return on “Where the Earth Meets the Sky,” the quiet, gothy closing number that proves that Inter Arma—a band with the ability to sound like a windstorm sweeping through deserted swamplands set on fire—can also sound like Death in June (and sound pretty good doing it).
“As a young man, I’ve ventured far from youthful realm,” sings Paparo in “An Archer in the Emptiness,” and it rings true throughout. Paradise Gallows, despite being only the band’s third full-length LP, occasionally feels like a release from metal elder statesmen, summarizing a long discography spent dabbling in various genres and experimenting with different sounds. Inter Arma might have been expected to use this album as an opportunity to present a more distilled version of themselves, after affirming a multitude of sonic possibilities on their last two breakthrough releases. It’s worth noting that Neurosis—the seminal and similarly unclassifiable band to whom they are most often compared—released the restrained, folksy Souls at Zero at a similar point in their career: an album that identified and exercised a specific mood in their arsenal, while alienating some of their core metal fanbase in the process. But on *Paradise Gallows, *Inter Arma seems uninterested in refining anything, choosing instead to indulge all of their strengths at once. The result is a captivating, dizzying record by a band aware that they can do anything—so they’re doing it all. | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | July 7, 2016 | 8 | 04df1863-b26a-4ede-a082-1c3e69082799 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The Los Angeles band struggle to find an identity on their third album of dramatic rap-tinged alternative rock. | The Los Angeles band struggle to find an identity on their third album of dramatic rap-tinged alternative rock. | The Neighbourhood: The Neighbourhood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-neighbourhood-the-neighbourhood/ | The Neighbourhood | “Cry Baby” is only the Neighbourhood’s fifth-most popular song on Spotify and it has 45.3 million streams—are you responsible for any of them? Did you know that they took Travis Scott, BROCKHAMPTON’s Kevin Abstract, and the 1975 on their first American tours? Did you know that their fans identify as “Hoodlums” and that you missed your chance to buy a Hoodlum beanie at Urban Outfitters? Do you know that they’re not even British?
There’s a decent chance the answer for all of the above is “no,” and that’s why the L.A. band’s self-titled third LP is singularly focused on a market share that’s been dwindling ever since they emerged out of their KROQ petri dish sporting a black-and-white visual motif, a severe and vowel-less 2013 typeface (“THE NBHD”), and their colossal No. 1 hit, “Sweater Weather.” It was a bummer summer jam that balanced the attraction of beautifully doomed California stereotypes with an anti-California message that the rest of the country could get behind. Lead singer Jesse Rutherford might’ve pictured himself as a damaged rock star trying to write a Lana Del Rey song, but he just had the fortune of being a few years ahead of G-Eazy. And so the more pressing question five years later on The Neighbourhood: Who do these guys think they are?
Imagine if the Chainsmokers didn’t at least have the decency to be as crass and shameless as their music in real life. Or, imagine if Halsey and Khalid didn’t hard-sell their voice-of-a-generation pitch to clueless cultural gatekeepers with titles like “New Americana” and “American Teen.” Or, imagine Twenty One Pilots chose a Benz instead of a backpack. Or, just imagine a combination of all of the above that somehow feels less organic.
The band’s 2013 debut I Love You took itself way too seriously, but it was hard to hate as the Neighbourhood tried their luck with chillwaved R&B, cloud rap, and major-label indie rock like a desperately horny frat boy at last call. By 2015’s Wiped Out!, the Neighbourhood had their eureka moment: They are, in sound and spirit, the guys who wanted to recreate the Weeknd songs that sampled Beach House without the attorney’s fees. At the very least, the Neighbourhood are proof that alt-rock still exists, and that new bands have about as much use for the sounds of the past as 03 Greedo and Lil Xan do for Tupac. The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon. Rutherford strains on every single line under the weight of substance abuse, his traumatic upbringing (“Always feel inadequate/The same way my daddy did”), and the obligations of being a beautifully damned sex symbol. But instead of the herniated howls of Eddie Vedder or Kurt Cobain, Rutherford models the gaslight anthems of Drake and Abel Tesfaye, guys who will say or do anything to get you into bed and turn it swiftly into a therapist’s couch.
If you take the Hoodlum annotators at their word, much of Rutherford’s self-pity stems from his band’s inability to create anything that has stuck like “Sweater Weather” and it’s not for lack of trying. The Neighbourhood has at least six producers and 18 writing credits making them, at any given time, one degree of separation from Scarlett Johansson, White Lung, G-Dragon, and Maroon 5. Even with all of the topshelf talent on hand, The Neighbourhood bizarrely opens with the sputtering, AutoTuned blog-pop throwback of “Flowers.” The Neighbourhood are almost deserving of empathy here—this is the best Columbia’s money can buy and Rutherford can do little but watch his band’s moment pass them by.
A third of The Neighbourhood already appeared on the band’s two recent EPs and its every thwack of a processed, priapic snare is a reminder of just about every pop-rap trend you’re trying to forget. “Sadderdaze” and “Too Serious” litter profoundly dopey wordplay over acoustic guitars and can’t even beat Post Malone at this game. Their actual attempt at trap-pop is so offbeat it actually makes this kind of production sound novel again (“Revenge”). With the occasional triplet flows and sotto voce ad-libs, Rutherford often sounds like the Hoodlum type personified, that guy from the suburbs rapping along to Migos in his car, hoping not to be caught in the act. Otherwise, the bulk of The Neighbourhood is every bit as inane and interchangeable as the last Tory Lanez or Travis Scott song you heard, but the Neighbourhood are the only ones who still get to play KROQ’s annual Weenie Roast festival.
That’s not the Neighbourhood’s fault. These guys have done nearly everything in their power to opt out of rock music, including commissioning a mixtape called #000000 & #ffffff featuring Casey Veggies, Dej Loaf, Danny Brown, and YG. And while there is no amount of public shaming that will stop white rock bands from doing hip-hop covers, you’d think someone who has personally collaborated with rappers would have the good sense to choose something other than “Me and My Bitch” for a Red Bull session. Or at the very least, to not sing, “pussy stay wet like she was mixed with Mexican” with an utterly straight face. Not that anyone should take this as a mandate for more of the same, but “Me and My Bitch” and the rest of #000000 & #ffffff feels way more honest than The Neighbourhood trying to convey gravity by swapping out a This Guy Fucks pose for Sad as Fuck t-shirt—it looks like the last time they had any fun. | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | March 16, 2018 | 4.7 | 04e22a3a-0b85-4d7e-9dad-bc0214176a89 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The collaborative album by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Palehound’s Ellen Kempner tells compelling and rarely heard stories, but doesn’t reach the same highs as their respective solo work. | The collaborative album by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Palehound’s Ellen Kempner tells compelling and rarely heard stories, but doesn’t reach the same highs as their respective solo work. | Bachelor: Doomin’ Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bachelor-doomin-sun/ | Doomin’ Sun | Last year, on a lark, I picked up Amy Kaufman’s book Bachelor Nation: Inside the World of America’s Favorite Guilty Pleasure. I came away convinced that everyone involved in the long-running reality television franchise ought to be tried for crimes against humanity. Jay Som’s Melina Duterte loves the show; Palehound’s Ellen Kempner is baffled by it. “I couldn’t get over the fact that one of the gayest people I know,” says Kempner—meaning, fondly, Duterte, “is obsessed with the straightest piece of media.”
Tongue planted firmly in cheek, the two women appropriated the show’s title to christen their new supergroup. A square-jawed Chad, a bouquet of roses—that, says Kempner, “is the complete opposite of what we are.” And yet, their debut album, Doomin’ Sun, is the furthest thing from a fistful of Pride confetti. In several songs, Duterte and Kempner tell compelling stories about the tension and joy found in relationships between women, refuting the notion of queerness as an idyll.
The narrators of Doomin’ Sun’s 10 tracks have one thing in common: They yearn for someone who simply cannot love them in return. In the opening track, “Back of My Hand,” Duterte and Kempner pose as Beliebers, whispering their love in low voices: “Got a seat for your show/Couldn’t swing the front row/Could you hear me from the nosebleeds/Screaming every word?” Beneath their lust lies a more complex question: “Do I wanna be you?” It’s a sentiment familiar, no doubt, to every kid for whom Jungkook is #transitiongoals. In other songs, reciprocity is even less plausible: an apparition in a sex dream, a one-sided conversation with the moon. The narrator of these songs loses sleep in her loneliness, deprives herself: “I skip a meal, I drink some tea.”
And yet, there is a certain safety in these fantasies. When real people enter the equation, a more sinister shade of songwriting does, too. In “Stay in the Car,” our narrator watches a “fuming” woman with “eyes like two shrieks of fire,” and burns with lust: “I want us to get along/Be the ice cream left out in her sun.” On “Anything at All,” she gets her wish and regrets it. The woman who seemed alluring in the light of day is predatory by night; our narrator shakes in her bed, watching her approach, waiting for her to “wrap me in silk and bite off my head.”
Most tragic of all, the narrator of Doomin’ Sun doesn’t seem to believe she deserves better. She’s too anxious to find a new lover, too scared to defend herself against the one she’s got. For every portion of hope, there’s always a dash of resignation. In “Sick of Spiraling,” her partner flips RuPaul’s maxim on its head, spitting at her: “If you can’t have your own back/How the fuck can you have mine?” She struggles to name what’s happening to her, even as she vents her anger at “a grown man” who hurt her “best friend,” on “Spin Out.”
It’s easy, throughout Doomin’ Sun, to pinpoint moments that come distinctively from Duterte or Kempner: a quiver of Jay Som synth here, a vividly carnal Palehound lyric there. Kempner grounds Duterte’s dreamy abstraction in gritty reality, creating a dissonance that works best when it mirrors the album’s treatment of the darker edges of relationships. At times, though, the collaboration limits these artists’ strengths. Duterte’s synthesizers never seem to fully bloom, and Kempner’s earthy, plainspoken guitar is relegated to just a couple of fingerpicked tracks. The best showcase of what each has to offer is still their respective solo albums.
Doomin’ Sun is still a worthwhile listen for anyone who loved Everybody Works or A Place I’ll Always Go. It’ll be especially indispensable for young queer women working through their own experiences. If television’s Bachelor crafts a manipulative and artificial version of romantic love, this Bachelor provides its opposite: a wrenching depiction of walking on eggshells, giving vulnerable people the vocabulary to get free.
Editor’s Note: The original version of this review inferred the album was about abuse. It has been updated to clarify that the album does not strictly concern abuse, and some language has been changed to reflect this.
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. | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 3, 2021 | 7.1 | 04e2c74b-0f7a-49a2-bff8-5295d3687827 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
"Damn right I love this life I live/ 'Cause I went from negative to positive/ And it's all... good ... | "Damn right I love this life I live/ 'Cause I went from negative to positive/ And it's all... good ... | Jay-Z: The Blueprint | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4216-the-blueprint/ | The Blueprint | "Damn right I love this life I live/ 'Cause I went from negative to positive/ And it's all... good." --Biggie Smalls, "Juicy"
"H to the Izzo" wasn't a summer jam for me. No TV, sadly, means no BET. I'm too far from ATL to get good radio, and the only thing bumping out the trunk at stoplights was that fucking White Stripes album. I was so deprived that when Nas pondered if Jay-Z might be "H to the izzo/ M to the izzo," I didn't even get the damned reference. Approaching a Jay-Z album in a cultural vacuum is a dangerous venture-- something I haven't done since his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt-- and my hopes were a lot lower for this new one, which was rumored to be short on bigger-than-Jesus superproducers and entirely free of perpetual Roc-a-Fella sidemen Beans and Bleek (both of whom I've come to like far better than Jay himself). Honestly, I was expecting mediocre shit-- the worst kind of boredom that comes with return-to-my-roots formalism, or maybe a chorus or two from a children's musical. What I got was the plush defining statement from hip-hop's last great personality.
The Blueprint is possibly the least sonically inventive hip-hop chart topper in years-- stunning and captivating for sure, but still loungily comfortable enough to sleep to. The songs are spare, but the care of assembly holds any leftover interest that Jay isn't already commanding. The unexpected flourishes are subtly beneficial, like the fanfare that sneaks in at the end of "All I Need," or the incredible clap-clap break of "Heart of the City." Retro soul samples are dull white, picked clean of lint and sanitized. They're wielded like pieces of a glitch track around Jay's words, coming in at all the right moments and corporealizing into a clipped skeleton to drape his ego on. Disregarding "Takeover" (which is a separate world, anyway), he's left behind all the dirty funk of so many jams past; too powerful, too rich, too fucking refined to even be touched by such filthiness. It's easy-listening because his life is almost entirely easy living, and his only nuisances (bitch-ass rappers and the media, naturally) are shortly addressed in two quick jabs: laid-back dis track and Eminem guest shot.
"Takeover" is the dis track. Casually flowing over a marching bassline and carbonated harpsichord flourishes, Jay slowly and confidently explains to you that Nas and Mobb Deep's Prodigy are the most wack, fake-ass thugs in the universe, and how he must destroy them. After it ends, you realize he was simply performing an obligation-- responding to a glove slap that's far beneath him, but entirely within his capacity to address. The abrupt final verse is the topper as Jay laughingly exhorts that, "All you other cats throwin' shots at Jigga/ You only get half a bar, fuck y'all, niggaz." How does Jadakiss even begin to respond at that?
As for the rest, well, there's nothing really awful (the cringeworthy track or two that seems to lurk at the end of every Jay-Z album is notably absent), but there's nothing really shocking, either. But the other tracks are so forward-moving and hallucinatory that even Timbaland can't stab his way out of the haze. What holds it together is Jigga's overwhelming self-assuredness-- the kind of justified confidence you can imagine witnessing from a world conqueror or cult leader. When the pitchshifted chorus of "U Don't Know" exclaims, "You don't know... what you're doing," Jay is quick to respond: "Sure, I do." He then goes on to casually add up his yearly earnings and ponder the total like Mos circa Mathematics if possessed by Gordon Gekko, and you realize that this is for real: Shawn Carter finally entirely synchronized with the Jigga-man rapping persona for an entire album.
Gradually, the other tracks start to make sense; "Hola Hovito" is a Swizz Beatz eulogy with Roger Troutman shouting nonsense from the bathroom. "Jigga That Nigga" is all the lovely French females from "Girls, Girls, Girls" asking him to kick it 1998-style once again. "Heart of the City," possibly the best song that actually works in the style of the album, deftly grinds with tiptoeing smoothness like a bugged-out Cluster track while Jay makes a convincing case for holding it down six summers straight. "Niggaz pray and pray on my downfall/ But every time I hit the ground I bounce up like round ball."
Bouncing up means coming down, and he does for "Renegade," teaming with the world's other greatest MC to whine about the perils of being the world's greatest MCs and all. I shouldn't have to mention the brilliant rhymes, but (surprisingly, after a few bombs on the d12 album) it's almost ridiculous how good Eminem's beat is-- strings, synth and "Good Vibrations"-style theremin tones roll easy like 1987. After that, Jay puts focus in full on his rep, bigging up Reasonable Doubt more times than every other cut of his career combined. Jay's always been moving towards abolishing the hardcore production style that originally went with being gangsta, but the funny thing about this is how overwhelmingly post-gangsta he is-- the fruits of a thug life that was too long ago to dwell on.
"If I ain't better than B.I.G./ I'm the closest one," he says on "Hola Hovito," and that's an important clarification; when Puffy and Easy Mo Bee were laying pop beats under Biggie's real-life crime stories, the old school heads complained about how the rugged and rough aesthetic was on the way out. But "Juicy" shut the haters up by simply explaining that Biggie was pop only because he didn't need that dirty funk-rock life anymore. And so, while frat boys went buckwild for screeching thugs like Cypress Hill and Onyx who boasted of a running crime rate, Biggie had already gotten over it and just wanted to live his life in peace. But everyone knows what actually happened, and after his crime style finally caught up with him, the new generation of pop thug was ushered in. After Biggie's death, no one comes closer than Jay-Z. | 2001-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2001-11-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella | November 6, 2001 | 8.7 | 04e9975f-3969-4145-afa1-26e2f570d998 | Ethan P. | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ethan-p./ | null |
While Classixx have made a name for themselves as internet remixers du jour, that by no means guaranteed a strong original debut album. But Hanging Gardens shows the duo to be great producers and songwriters. It's bright, warm, and breezy, making its early summer release perfectly timed. | While Classixx have made a name for themselves as internet remixers du jour, that by no means guaranteed a strong original debut album. But Hanging Gardens shows the duo to be great producers and songwriters. It's bright, warm, and breezy, making its early summer release perfectly timed. | Classixx: Hanging Gardens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18004-classixx-hanging-gardens/ | Hanging Gardens | Los Angeles production duo Tyler Blake and Michael David achieved prominence through a constant presence on the internet remix circuit, but their tendency to reference and recontextualize runs deeper. Before the pair adopted the nostalgic-by-design Classixx moniker, they cranked out a few electro-chintz remixes as Young Americans, an assumed allusion to the classic David Bowie LP of the same name. The debut single from Blake's solo project Fingerpaint, last year's "Lunar", leaned heavily on a sample of Arthur Russell's "This Is How We Walk on the Moon". The cover of Classixx's debut LP, Hanging Gardens, is a double-vision homage to the sleeve for Tangerine Dream's 1988 album Optical Race, while its title track pilfers the melody of Fleetwood Mac's glistening Tango in the Night cut "Seven Wonders".
Internet-age producers who frequently create with others' raw materials aren't necessarily guaranteed a similar level of success when left to create worthwhile music on their own-- take last year's debut album from mashup outfit the Hood Internet, the astoundingly tepid FEAT. With Hanging Gardens, Blake and David soar above any low expectations; they've put together a cohesive, impossibly lush record that pays adequate lip service to a variety of pop sounds while loading the decks with glossy, head-cleaning dance. Classixx remixes frequently possess the slick expansiveness of disco, with a touch of nocturnal mood-shading to boot. By contrast, Hanging Gardens is bright, warm, and breezy, and as the summertime approaches, its release couldn't have come at a better time.
Classixx excel at creating a textured push-and-pull within the framework of their own productions, and Hanging Gardens provides several wordless moments to get lost in. Take the contemplative 4/4 of "A Fax From the Beach", which plays like a post-post-comedown sequel to Fred Falke's indelible, wistful 2008 single "808 PM at the Beach"-- as well as a killer transition or two, like when the rollin'-and-scratchin' bump of "Rhythm Santa Clara" gently bleeds into the declarative synth stabs that open up "Dominoes"' positive, propulsive Balearic structure. Album highlight "Holding On", meanwhile, elicits comparisons to Discovery-era Daft Punk, uncannily combining "One More Time"'s repetitive pulse with the bright-eyed, bushy-tailed purity of "Digital Love".
Classixx are very good producers-- their sonic excursions are placid and stylistically considered, with plenty of surface beauty, if not a ton of depth-- but the biggest surprise of Hanging Gardens is that they're great songwriters, too. It's astonishing how many of the guest appearances simply work, and in such a satisfying way, too: Take the all-caps kiss-off anthem "All You're Waiting For", featuring a typically tart vocal from ex-LCD Soundsystem member and DFA fixture Nancy Whang, and Sarah Chernoff's dizzying "A Stranger Love", reminiscent of Saint Etienne's glassy-eyed club gestures.
Jesse Kivel of L.A. electro-pop duo Kisses does effective mush-mouthed romanticism all over the palm-muted synths of "Borderline", while chillwave castrato Pat Grossi (whose monastic Active Child project has benefitted from Classixx's touch before) does his weightless choirboy thing over the airy bells of "Long Lost", an ethereal R&B-leaning tune that's a silkier, less pathos-heavy version of what AC did on 2011's just-okay You Are All I See. The record's most potent punch, ironically, is more than three years old: "I'll Get You", which saw release as a single in 2009 on the waning tastemaker imprint Kitsuné, wields Jeppe's brash vocal beams as an effective weapon, as the former Junior Senior vocalist asks repeatedly and somewhat ridiculously, "Do you like bass?" It shouldn't work, but it does, and pretty well.
More than anything else, the pure pop cuts on Hanging Gardens leave the listener wanting more, which is exactly the record's paradoxical flaw: although it runs to nearly an hour long, a good deal of space is relegated to the more instrumental cuts, which aren't quite distinctive enough to push the five-and-six-minute mark as they frequently do. The less impressive material loses its effectiveness when isolated from the sequencing of the album, which flows impressively as a front-to-back listen. Hanging Gardens is a decadent trifle to lose yourself in, a deceptively simple record that has the potential for great longevity. | 2013-05-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-05-31T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Innovative Leisure | May 31, 2013 | 7.8 | 04ea366b-50c3-46e1-9057-d26608f442a8 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Free jazz drummer Milford Graves has a nice trick that he performs at his shows: He brings someone in the ... | Free jazz drummer Milford Graves has a nice trick that he performs at his shows: He brings someone in the ... | Four Tet: Rounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3166-rounds/ | Rounds | Free jazz drummer Milford Graves has a nice trick that he performs at his shows: He brings someone in the audience up on stage and asks them to feel for his heart rate. It starts out steady, but as the person holds both wrists, it slows, and Graves begins to diverge his bloodstream on either side of his body, finally achieving an internal polyrhythmic pulse between the two points. Then he jumps behind his kit and clatters away in ecstasy.
Four Tet's lone member, Kieran Hebden, is fascinated with the impossible rhythms that the free-form jazz greats could bang out as they pleased. Whether or not he's taking a page out of Milford Graves' book is debatable, but he opens "Hands" with a cardiac sample fibrillating into a multi-limbed percussive rattle of densely edited and seemingly random drum hit samples that just starts to stroke Barry Altschul's beard before locking down into a hip-hop groove. He fades the cymbals' sizzles into the pseudo-Clyde Stubblefield sticks of "She Moves She", a cycling song evenly spaced with wheeling rimshots, scattered gongs, and funky string plucks that veer around the car horns that bleat past.
"My Angel Rocks Back and Forth" gently blows iron-lung sighs through ride cymbals and dirty, run-out grooves while an austere piano twinkles, hinting at the sort of gentle sounds Hebden will soon weave around English folk legend Vashti Bunyan. Verging on the lugubrious is the nine-minute "Unspoken" (whose piano riff is lifted from, of all sources, Tori Amos' "Winter"), but Hebden's touch keeps it from morass. Here, he controls his ingredients-- fictitious soundbytes of early Gato Barbieri sax, a plaintive finger or two from McCoy Tyner, broken chimes, backwards feedback, and a DJ Shadow kickdrum-- keeping them at a contemplative simmer, rather than allowing them to come to a full boil.
"Chia" is a tabla-bubbling conduit to the mod bass and shimmying sitar of "As Serious as Your Life", namechecking the crucial free-jazz text by Val Wilmer, yet standing much closer to Miles Davis' On the Corner, with those odd-metered handclaps and that stuttering punch of a Jack DeJohnette hi-hat. With metallophone ripples at a wake, "And They All Look Broken Hearted" is an abstract and solemn affair, recalling the oddly melodic cadence of a player like Bobby Hutcherson, and with spliced drum solos swirling around some affected harpsichord and vibraphones like club smoke, Hebden captures the cool sadness of old Blue Note posters. It sounds like a shoo-in for the album's closing track, but it instead leads up to "Slow Jam", which has that long goodbye of the best melancholy closers, a circle game of echoing footsteps, fitful static, gleeful kazoos, lulling guitar repetitions, and shadows surely sinking in, revolving all disparate sounds to resolution.
Freely moving in and out of cycles, able to coalesce or evanesce in a heartbeat, straight up and down, or else banging about like a toddler on the pot shelf, Rounds funnels every element through the drum, which always remains at the forefront of the mix. But what gives this record its internal order, and allows it to stand out against previous laptop explorations of immense record collections, is the other genres Hebden dabbles in and draws upon to flesh out the beat. Though hardly obvious the first time through, there's the supple, propulsive fun of funk, as well as the pastoral placidity of folk, both moving over the cut-up rhythms like cumulous clouds, allowing hot light through at some junctures, but cooling things out with a darker umbrage in others. Rounds may not be "as serious as your life," as one track proclaims, but it does feel that pulse. | 2003-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | May 4, 2003 | 8.2 | 04ea4eee-3894-4464-933d-bf7d32b7a0b0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Now that her peers have caught up to her visual provocations, Lady Gaga seems less like an audacious pioneer than one among many, and Joanne feels tentative, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear. | Now that her peers have caught up to her visual provocations, Lady Gaga seems less like an audacious pioneer than one among many, and Joanne feels tentative, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear. | Lady Gaga: Joanne | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22524-joanne/ | Joanne | At the start of the decade, Lady Gaga worked hard to reposition pop as a high art or vice-versa—both absorbing and extending a lineage that included oddball visionaries like Andy Warhol, Klaus Nomi, Prince, David Bowie, Grace Jones, Elton John, Madonna, and Missy Elliott. Most of her avant-garde gestures were extra-musical, a string of cheeky, absurdist visions realized entirely outside of the studio and only tangentially in conversation with her bloodless dance jams (Gaga herself has referred to that early work as “soulless electronic pop”). It’s not hard, now, to recall these stunts from memory: she was sewn into a dress fashioned from slabs of flank steak for the VMAs. She hatched herself from a semi-translucent egg at the Grammys. She hired a self-described “vomit artist” to puke a steady stream of syrupy green liquid onto her bosom during a SXSW performance. Her repeated and earnest disavowal of anything remotely normative was (and remains) plainly empowering for anyone sitting at home alone in her room, feeling like a true weirdo. The idea was always to fracture and reestablish a hierarchy. Only Gaga could turn “monster” into a term of endearment.
And regardless of whether you find those moves electrifying or tedious, it's hard to overstate the value of that work as a public service—every generation’s freaks elect a champion, and Gaga was tireless, proud, and wholly devoted to the job. Her commercial success also meant that her chart peers were, for better or worse, free to get stranger, artier, and less predictable; Gaga helped usher in an era of pop in which hardly anything is too far-out (or pretentious) to play. Visual provocations of one sort or another are expected now: Sia performed “Chandelier” at the Grammys with her back to the audience, wearing a bobbed, platinum wig, while Kristen Wiig and the then-twelve-year old dancer Maddie Ziegler frolicked around her in nude bodysuits. Miley Cyrus gyrates among furries as a matter of routine.
But now that her peers have caught up, Gaga is starting to feel less like an audacious pioneer and more like one among many. Joanne, which is named after her late aunt—a sexual assault survivor who died of lupus at nineteen—experiments with rootsier idioms like country and folk, maybe as a kind of goofy gesture toward authenticity, or maybe just to distance herself further from 2013’s overblown and gloppy ARTPOP. Gaga has always sounded most comfortable belting out rich, brawny pop songs while wiggling around a piano bench, and her best tracks, like the deeply irresistible “Yoü and I,” from 2011’s Born This Way, are reminiscent of the more virtuosic fringes of glam-rock (“You and I” features inimitable Queen guitarist Brian May, a drumbeat that nods directly to “We Will Rock You,” and harmonies that very nearly recall “Bohemian Rhapsody”).
Glam—its blatant preoccupation with fame and stardom, its mischievous and inelegant tendencies, its emphasis on the theatrical, the visual, the decadent, the garish—made sense for Gaga, both for her voice (while robust and often lovely, it is not exactly nuanced; the little fissures and breaks that typically animate folk songs aren’t instinctive to her) and for her fantastical, psychedelic-leaning visual taste. A move toward singer-songwriter earnestness now—especially following Cheek to Cheek, the collection of jazz standards she recorded with Tony Bennett, itself a purposeful expression of seriousness, maturity—feels unnecessary.
Gaga has repeated Warhol’s claim that “art should be meaningful in the most shallow way,” but Warhol also insisted on a kind of surreal detachment from flesh—“Sex is so abstract,” he once said. Gaga’s disembodiment feels less deliberate. Joanne never reveals much of a narrative or stylistic through-line, and even her brief dips into indie-rock—her collaborations with Father John Misty on “Sinner’s Prayer” and “Come to Mama” (Misty is also credited as a writer on Beyoncé’s Lemonade), and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Perfect Illusion” (Rihanna covered Parker’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on Anti)—feel familiar.
Joanne is rife with visitors, though none make themselves especially known: Mark Ronson (who co-produces), Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. “Dancin’ in Circles,” a song she co-wrote with Beck, is a clubby paean to self-love with a grody pre-chorus: “Up all night, tryna’ rub the pain out,” she chants. In 2016, masturbation-as-engine-of-escape isn’t a particularly titillating topic (in the decades since “She Bop,” Hailee Steinfeld, Nicki Minaj, Pink, the Pussycat Dolls, Britney Spears, and plenty of others have recorded tracks about getting themselves off), nor the instance of Beck-Gaga collusion anyone was hoping for (imagine, for a moment, if he had brought her “Debra”).
Though Gaga addresses a handful of serious concerns here, some topical, some personal—the murder of Trayvon Martin; what happens to a person after she dies—her treatment of them often feels clumsy if not performative (in “Angel Down,” an ode to the Black Lives Matter movement, she sings, “Angel down / Why do people just stand around?” while Ronson sadly plays a Mellotron).
Elsewhere, there are hints of a smaller, more personal arc: Gaga’s got it for someone she knows is bad news, but she’s not sure if she can walk away just yet. “Perfect Illusion,” the record’s first single, struggled to chart (it debuted at number fifteen on the Hot 100), but has a propulsive, dizzying quality that feels like a pretty good analogue for the process of completely losing your mind over someone, only to realize later you’ve been hoodwinked: “Mistaken for love, it wasn’t love, it was a perfect illusion,” Gaga bellows, her fire-hose voice big, unchecked, wild. She sounds indignant but also vaguely unhinged—like she’s figured out she’s playing a rigged game, but still refuses to fold her hand. Opener “Diamond Heart” has Homme on guitar, but the best moments are Gaga’s: “Young wild American / C’mon, baby, do you have a girlfriend?” she wonders in the chorus.
It’s the same story on “Million Reasons,” co-written with Hillary Lindsey (who collaborated with Carrie Underwood on “Jesus, Take the Wheel”), an undeniable power ballad Poison would’ve murdered in 1988: “I bow down to pray,” Gaga sings at her piano. “I try to make the worse seem better.” This kind of semi-desperate negotiating will be uncomfortably familiar to anyone who has tried to will a doomed situation into something viable. Her man’s already given her a million reasons to split. “But baby, I just need one good one to stay.”
Sartorially, Gaga has recently come to favor civilian get-ups; just last week, she returned to the Bitter End, the tiny, Greenwich Village venue where she got her start, wearing short-shorts and a sheer, Bud Light-branded tank top (Bud Light sponsored her Dive Bar tour). In the video for "Perfect Illusion," she wears denim cutoffs, black combat boots, a black t-shirt, and a blonde ponytail. I sported a similar look—though with far less success—nearly every school day between 1995 and 1997. But nobody wants to immediately recognize herself in Gaga’s aesthetic; we want her to suggest a path we hadn’t thought of before, to nurture and clarify a beauty we didn’t even realize was there. Joanne feels too self-conscious, an affront to the Gaga of yesteryear—the truest self, after all, isn’t always the quietest. | 2016-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Streamline / Interscope | October 25, 2016 | 6.9 | 04ea8b38-00c6-446a-8b24-a6347e64765d | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Mute remasters and reissues the first four albums from Pitchfork faves Can, whose music anticipated both the musical trend toward decontextualization via electronics, post-production, and editing, and the cultural trend toward collective experience and shared information. | Mute remasters and reissues the first four albums from Pitchfork faves Can, whose music anticipated both the musical trend toward decontextualization via electronics, post-production, and editing, and the cultural trend toward collective experience and shared information. | Can: Monster Movie / Soundtracks / Tago Mago / Ege Bamyasi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11698-monster-moviesoundtrackstago-magoege-bamyasi/ | Monster Movie / Soundtracks / Tago Mago / Ege Bamyasi | Are we there yet? After 25 years of critical reappraisal and at least 15 years of indie and post-rock bands flaunting their influence, has Can finally gotten their just desserts? I don't think so. Not just yet. Can still seem just a little bit ahead of the curve. They really were "post-rock," as opposed to just futuristic. Can's music anticipated both the musical trend toward decontextualization via electronics, post-production, and editing, and the cultural trend toward collective experience and shared information. Other bands shone as brightly in this regard (The Beatles, for one), but Can arrived as a more finished product and more capable of translating their ideas onto record than any other. And they jammed: Any randomly picked moment from "Yoo Doo Right" or "Halleluwah" is as powerful now as when it was released. You can use them as make-out music, a drug soundtrack, or just stuff to listen to while driving. You can use them to blast off or come down.
Can formed in 1968, featuring two former students of avant-garde classical composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, a former free-jazz drummer interested in math, a rock'n'roll guitarist 10 years younger than the others, and an American sculptor living in Europe in order to evade the draft. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt had visited America in 1966, hooking up with the Fluxus musicians (Terry Riley, La Monte Young, et al.) and becoming inspired to form a rock band. He and bassist Holger Czukay (who would issue 1969's Canaxis, which used primitive sampling technology) were keen to incorporate experimental composition and compositional theories into a rock setting, and when Czukay's student Michael Karoli turned them onto Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles, the band's fate was sealed.
However, Can would not become just another band. For one, they eschewed the idea of a frontman or long solos. Each member of the group served a specific function, but the band operated as a collective; no individual part was more important than the whole. They recorded music in a manner befitting a modern electronic artist, editing together tracks using source material culled from marathon improv sessions. This is also similar to what Miles Davis was doing at the time on In A Silent Way and Bitches Brew, though while the trumpeter was jumping into uncharted territory for a jazz musician, Can had already memorized their instruction manuals and covered more artistic and technical ground faster than any band had ever done.
But then, Can's music transcends those kinds of props: They made music that felt at turns desolate, euphoric, tense, and blissful. They were the best possible result of intellect and inspiration in rock, and these four remastered CDs argue they are as "important" as any band you could name. Their sound is very much improved. For one, there is no hiss (!) and the EQ is much better than the previously available CD versions (Can liked bass). They also come with liner notes by The Wire's David Stubbs; although his essays don't contain a lot new info, they'll be of interest to anyone who hasn't read much about Can.
Monster Movie was released in 1969, and is Can's most rock-oriented album by a considerable margin. Its songs are raw and aggressive-- very much informed by The Velvet Underground's larval trance-rock-- and they mark Malcolm Mooney as nothing if not an inspired amateur. "Father Cannot Yell" leaps out of the gate with a hi-speed keyboard flutter and the snap of Jaki Liebezeit's snare. Although the band would later perfect a kind of ambient funk, here they were brawny (though precise), determined rockers to the hilt; five minutes into "Father Cannot Yell", the song climaxes with a blaze of bass, drums, and fuzzed-out guitar, and an entire legacy of minimalist rock (from Neu! to Comets On Fire) is predicted. Of course, the 20-minute "Yoo Doo Right" is the centerpiece, and gives the best indication of what Can would do afterward. The murky, primal atmosphere of drums that dominates the track never allows the listener to escape the band's propulsion; like much of Can's best music, "Yoo Doo Right" seduces me into hypnosis, and winds through a seemingly endless array of textures and variations. Monster Movie is an amazing debut, but would be Mooney's last. He suffered a nervous breakdown onstage and returned to America.
Before beginning work on their second album, Can released the compilation Soundtracks, containing music they'd done for films. Soundtracks was released mainly to capitalize on the success of the band's debut in their native Germany, and is often overlooked by listeners expecting only throwaways and outtakes. In truth, most (but not all) of the songs don't extend the same artistic reach as those on either Monster Movie or the subsequent records, but they're hardly throwaways. In particular, "Mother Sky" has an intensity matching anything on the debut, and new vocalist Damo Suzuki's presence lends the tight-lipped drone a sedated, half-gone feel that only advances its tranced-out cause. "Tango Whiskeyman" and "Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone" are short, beat-dominated variations on Can's version of pop, while "She Brings the Rain" (featuring Mooney) cuts out the drums entirely in favor of jazzy torch balladry. Can would later compile a more satisfying collection of non-LP material (1974's Limited Edition, expanded to Unlimited Edition two years later), but Soundtracks is a good sampling of their more straightforward experiments.
1971's Tago Mago saw Can stretching out into the beyond, and it was their first full-length studio record to feature Suzuki. Originally released as a double-LP, Tago Mago confirmed what "Yoo Doo Right" had only suggested: Can knew trance-rock as if they'd invented it. However, unlike it did on Monster Movie, the band didn't necessarily lull you into hypnosis via bass and beats. "Aumgn" and "Peking O" are the most experimental tracks in the Can catalog, sharing more in common with the irreverent electronic music of Stockhausen or Pierre Henry than most anything related to rock-- Ummagumma was a possible exception. Their often-bizarre arrays of sound effects and reverb-drenched, murky guitar sprawl have driven more than one listener to put down the pipe. Of course, when the epic "Halleluwah" starts with Liebezeit's industrial strength funk pattern before winding through dark, echo-chamber ambience and minimalist drone (while never letting you forget those drums), the detours seem a lot less harrowing. The shorter songs, like the gray, faintly ominous "Paperhouse" or the flawless funk and dark impressionism on "Mushroom", are merely smaller pieces of the band's most exotic pie.
The following year's Ege Bamyasi drops the haze and hits with a sharp pang from the get-go. Often described as the "tense" Can album, Ege Bamyasi is actually the band at its most focused, bolstered in part by the surprisingly good performance of the single "Spoon". The proto synth-pop (or synth-rock) song was used as the theme to a popular German television show, and made enough money for the band that they could afford a better recording environment and a chance to do justice to their ideas. "Pinch" is reminiscent of concurrent Miles Davis; a tough, dissonant take on rock, always kept sparse enough as to be unsettling. Likewise, "One More Night" was dry and efficient in the extreme, though, musically having more in common with Steve Reich than Davis. "Sing Swan Song" was Can's best ballad, while "Vitamin C" is still the best funk ever to come out of Europe. The band would refine their sound even more in coming years, but they wouldn't really ever get better than this. | 2004-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | null | November 10, 2004 | 8.7 | 04ed5633-3b05-4cbc-996c-8d625d3362c7 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
On his latest solo album, the breathless saxophone playing of Colin Stetson locks into familiar, albeit vastly impressive and evocative forms. | On his latest solo album, the breathless saxophone playing of Colin Stetson locks into familiar, albeit vastly impressive and evocative forms. | Colin Stetson: All This I Do for Glory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23151-all-this-i-do-for-glory/ | All This I Do for Glory | The music of experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson gives you an unusually heightened awareness that you are hearing a human body laboring to produce sound. That is human breath passing its way through a metal tube, yup; those are fingers clacking on different keys to manipulate tone and pitch. This hyper-awareness can feel like a distraction: If you’ve ever been deeply stoned in mixed company, focusing more on the moving mouth of your interlocutor than the emerging words, Stetson’s music might summon an uncomfortable déjà vu. But that palpable strain is in some ways the implicit subject of his art: Any interview or feature on Stetson eventually mentions his circular breathing technique, the Herculean way he keeps forcing air into the body of his saxophone to keep his music going. His album and song titles, too, often evoke struggle on an epic scale—New History Warfare, “Hunted” and “Brute” and “This Bed of Shattered Bone.”
His latest album is called All This I Do for Glory, and the six compositions on it survey the same blasted, rocky terrain. Stetson has his approach: You either know everything about him and the demanding way he makes his music going in, or you have your mind blown by it on first contact. His saxophone playing has reshaped people’s ideas of what the instrument can sound like, how it can be played, and how it can be used, and his trio of records,* New History Warfare,* is thus far his defining statement.
All This I Do for Glory, by contrast, doesn’t offer a single new idea during its runtime—it’s easy to get greedy with a fearless and inventive artist and hope they stay fearless and inventive forever. Glory instead settles into grooves and revisit territories. Stetson plies us with all his best techniques—his irradiated drones emerging from his bass saxophone are like Hans Zimmer film cues all by themselves, capable of shattering bedrock. He sings through the mouthpiece of his saxophone while blowing, producing a disembodied ghost vocalist crying an eerie melodic counterpoint to his own melody. The “thump” and “click” of percussion coming from the keypads slapping the body of his horn are so tactile it feels like he is drumming his fingers directly on the grooves of your brain.
He does all of this, in fact, in the first few minutes of the opening title track, which gives the album a strange “Stetson’s Greatest Hits” feeling. Even the dirge-like processional feels like a slight echo of something he’s played before. The differences here are in degrees—the whiplash percussive crack of “Like Wolves on the Fold” is one of the most violent sounds he’s ever made, and the track itself feels inexorable, even nightmarish, in its cacophony, like a village raid witnessed through a hole in the wall. “Between Water and Wind” is almost pure percussion, and the thumpa-thumpa-thumpa pulse of “In the Clinches” feels physically violent. These moments, when his music toes the line separating music from pure texture, are some of the most vivid.
But he's dug into all of these trenches before, and at times the forward march feels like a slog. There is a whiff of old-school machismo to what Stetson does—detectable in the steel-grey imagery of his titles, the muscular drive of his pieces, and, not least, the sight of his ropey arms wrangling sound from the hulking tank of an instrument he keeps strapped to his body. So when his sax flutters skyward on “Spindrift,” it is a relief. It is one of the only pieces that feels touched by warmth and sunlight, and its redemptive spirit breaks from the more serious stuff, a flower picked and studied before the slaughter resumes.
If you come away from Glory nursing suspicions that Stetson’s thrilling work might have grown a little one-note, try his reverent remake of Gorecki’s 3rd Symphony from last year, in which he enlisted a small ensemble including the violinist Sarah Neufeld and the virtuosic drummer Greg Fox to tackle the most fearsome territory of all: unabashed sentiment; or his muted full-length collaboration with Neufeld, Never Were the Way She Was, from 2015. Both of those albums bring Stetson’s well-developed ideas into thrilling contact with newer, unfamiliar ones. The repetitive throb of minimalist music is exceptionally good at taking the shape of whatever it comes into contact with. Maybe this is why he’s more inspired when he strays away from his intensely individualist solo albums—each an imposing continent of hands and breath—and instead soaks up energies with others. | 2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 52Hz | May 2, 2017 | 7.1 | 04ed935b-7e63-4ec7-9489-7ee9bf57973b | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
But You Caint Use My Phone is a mixtape in the true hip-hop sense, as it largely finds Erykah Badu putting her spin on other artists' songs. Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, and featuring a guest spot from André 3000, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom. | But You Caint Use My Phone is a mixtape in the true hip-hop sense, as it largely finds Erykah Badu putting her spin on other artists' songs. Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, and featuring a guest spot from André 3000, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom. | Erykah Badu: But You Caint Use My Phone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21319-but-you-caint-use-my-phone/ | But You Caint Use My Phone | When Erykah Badu found out that her friend and collaborator J Dilla passed away in February 2006, her mind reeled. The producer was just 32, felled by a rare blood disease that clogged his body with clots and a case of lupus that caused his immune system to go haywire. Badu thought of a story Dilla's mother told her about her son's dying days, when she would find him having conversations with an unseen companion. One time, when she asked him who he was talking to, he said it was Ol' Dirty Bastard, who had died in 2004. As Badu recounted years later, Dilla explained to his mom: “He was telling me what bus to get on when I cross over. He said, ‘Don’t get on the red bus, get on the white bus. The red bus looks fun, but that’s not the one.’” That memory inspired Badu to write a song called "Telephone", which starts: "Telephone, it's Ol' Dirty/ He wants to give you directions home/ Said it won't be too long."
"Telephone" originally appeared on Badu's 2008 album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War) and it's reprised in chopped-and-screwed form as a tribute to another late rap producer, DJ Screw, on the singer's new mixtape, But You Caint Use My Phone. For the 44-year-old ankh-worshipping R&B iconoclast, phones aren't just emoji factories or Candy Crush receptacles—they're mystic devices that can span time and space, heaven and Earth. According to Badu, phones can enhance our ability to communicate deep desires across oceans, but they can also jumble our meaning with static or frustrate with busy signals and voicemail. As an extension of ourselves, phones can be heartbreaking, lustful, smart, dumb, noisy, distracting, powerful.
But You Caint Use My Phone is a mixtape in the true hip-hop sense, as it largely finds Badu putting her spin on other artists' songs. Created alongside a young producer and fellow Dallas denizen named Zach Witness in just 12 days, the tape feels off-the-cuff, yet also steeped in history and wisdom. This paradoxical quality can be found in much of Badu's work over the last two decades as well as on her initial inspiration for this tape, Drake's "Hotline Bling", the SoundCloud loosie-turned-smash about late-night buzzes with a beat taken from Timmy Thomas' 1972 anti-war plea "Why Can't We Live Together". "Hotline Bling" is old and new, R&B and hip-hop, serious and fun—it's a song that might not exist without the pioneering work of Erykah Badu, so it only makes sense for her to reclaim it.
But rather than putting her stamp on a slew of 2015 hits, Badu reaches back across the last 40 years of phone-related pop, patching the Isley Brothers, Usher, Egyptian Lover, and New Edition through her own frequency. As a kid who grew up listening to her family's Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Chaka Khan records before falling in love with hip-hop in the '80s—her first concert was Run-D.M.C. and she began her musical career as a rapper known as MC Apples—Badu has always been ideally positioned between the reverence of classic soul and the irreverence of hip-hop. And on But You Caint Use My Phone she taps into her own language and influence along with everyone else's.
The title of the tape and its blaring opening suite reference her 1997 kiss-off "Tyrone", and the playful "Dial’Afreaq", a remake of the early electro-rap hit "Dial-A-Freak" by Uncle Jamm's Army and the Egyptian Lover, offers a brief history of Baduizm: "'On & On' and Mama's Gun/ Underwater ill motherfucker from the other sun." Further referential depth comes courtesy of producer Witness, a one-time child turntable prodigy who was a toddler when Badu started her career. He first came to the singer's attention through his remix of "On & On", and he melds his star's offbeat spontaneity and cosmic funk with a sleek SoundCloud-ready sheen. Another relatively unknown new artist Badu brought on for the project, rapper ItsRoutine, doesn't come off as well. His two Drake-impersonating verses ("Erykah on my hotline," he misdirects) are bizarrely, well, phoney—annoying prank calls on what should be a highly protected line.
Badu, a self-described "analog girl in a digital world," has a clear fondness for old-school, pre-cell models with buttons that pushed and dials that turned. It's a nostalgic stance from someone who became famous a decade before the introduction of the iPhone, but it can also be convincing. "Phone Down" has Badu pleading for someone to disconnect from the grid and plug into real life, but the track's sinister synths and her melancholy delivery suggest that she knows it's probably too late.
And yet. The mixtape's final track, a revamp of the Todd Rundgren/Isley Brothers '70s hit "Hello It's Me", features André 3000—aka the father of Badu's only son, Seven—leaving his phone on the table in an effort to find some clarity, and it works. In the late '90s, Badu and Dre were a much-celebrated hip-hop couple, a model of black enlightenment and creativity. They broke up after a few years but remained close, and André famously apologized to Badu's mother on OutKast's "Ms. Jackson", promising his commitment to fatherhood: "Know that everything's cool/ And yes, I will be present on the first day of school, and graduation." And as Seven turned 18 last month, his parents are still talking, still figuring things out, still collaborating on art. As their duet fades out here, both voices come together, and the conversation keeps going. | 2015-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | December 1, 2015 | 8.1 | 04ee5836-5636-4758-baaa-4351b9878670 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Subsets and Splits