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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 the solitary sound of the incomparable Nebraska.

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 the solitary sound of the incomparable Nebraska.

Bruce Springsteen: Nebraska

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-nebraska/

Nebraska

Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 solo album Nebraska has been called a folk album, and that’s true to an extent in both its acoustic setting and, on some of the material, in the construction of the songs. But folk songs in the traditional sense are in part defined by how they travel through culture, typically by being played in person for other people. Nebraska invites no such feeling of communion. These songs aren’t part of a shared language that people in a room might speak to each other, they are one-way transmissions from a distant, lonely place. But the signals that come through on Nebraska crackle with electricity—sometimes it’s just a hum, and sometimes it seems like a circuit is going to explode. In early 1982, Bruce Springsteen was living in a rented house in Colts Neck, New Jersey, recuperating from a year-long tour following his 1980 double album The River. His band played 140 marathon shows and were on their way to becoming one of the biggest rock acts in the world. During this period, Springsteen tasked his guitar tech, Mike Batlan, with buying a simple tape recorder so that he could tinker with some new songs and arrangements without having to bother with renting studio time. Batlan picked up a Teac Tascam 144 Portastudio, a then-new device that was the first piece of equipment to use a standard cassette tape for multi-track recording. The new machine arrived in Springsteen’s life at the perfect moment, during what was arguably the most fruitful songwriting period in Springsteen’s long career, one that would produce enough material for two albums (1982’s Nebraska and 1984’s Born in the U.S.A.) with dozens of additional songs to spare. On it, he would craft what is still the most singular album in his catalog. Nebraska remains an outlier for Springsteen, a record that sits uneasily in his discography. Instead of making an impact upon release, Nebraska has been accruing weight gradually over the last four decades, becoming a marker of its socioeconomic era as well as an early document of the later home-recording revolution. It stands alone partly because Springsteen didn’t tour behind it—his work is ultimately about his connection to his audience, and that connection is felt most intensely when he’s performing onstage—and partly because the record itself is kind of an accident, something that fell into place before Springsteen knew what to do with it. “I had no conscious political agenda or social theme,” he later wrote of this time in his autobiography, Born to Run. “I was after a feeling, a tone that felt like the world I’d known and still carried inside me.” Springsteen’s initial burst of material in Colts Neck clustered around isolation and disillusionment. There were connections to his earlier work in these new songs—two tracks on The River, “Stolen Car” and “Wreck on the Highway,” conveyed a similar feeling of despair—but the new work was different. Springsteen seemed both emotionally closer to his characters but also less interested in judging them. These songs had no heroes and no villains, everyone in them was making their way with what they were given, every grim or brutal scene had its own context and its own internal logic. Early in his career, Springsteen’s work thrived on personal instinct, but in isolation, it became more reliant on specific inputs. He’d transform ideas he discovered in books and films and the news into frameworks for songs: the short stories of Flannery O’Connor, which detailed the harsh lives of people living on the margins; Ron Kovick’s Born on the Fourth of July, in which a gung-ho soldier becomes deeply scarred by the actions of his government. At some point, he saw Terrence Malick’s Badlands on television, a film based on the 1957–58 killing spree of Charlie Starkweather. The Starkweather murders were meaningless, and the randomness of that violence and inability to explain it fit with the mood of Springsteen’s songwriting. Once the new songs recorded on the Portastudio began to gel, Springsteen selected some of his favorites, ran his simple arrangements through a Gibson Echoplex unit to add some reverb and echo, and mixed them down to a boombox he had laying around the house. He sent the tape to his manager, Jon Landau, with handwritten notes on the songs and ideas for how they might find their way on to a new record. Springsteen’s letter to Landau, reproduced in his book of lyrics, Songs, suggests that the album that was emerging was mysterious even to its creator. “I got a lot of ideas but I'm not exactly sure of where I'm going,” he wrote. He didn’t quite understand what he had, but he did feel he was entering new territory with his work. Springsteen carried around the cassette in his pocket as he tried to figure out what to do with his new collection of songs. The initial assumption was that his E Street compatriots would flesh them out. There were recording dates with the full band who tried to give the pieces life like they had so many other songs Springsteen had written on his own. And when that didn’t work, there were sessions of Springsteen alone, trying to capture the stark feel of the original tape in a professional studio with proper fidelity. Springsteen never could recapture the atmosphere that imbued the demos; eventually, the choice was made to put it out as-is. The power of Nebraska’s whole comes from Springsteen’s blend of fiction and memoir—some songs are personal and intimate with details drawn from Springsteen’s own life, others are the stuff of novels and cinema. “Nebraska” was Springsteen's re-telling of the Starkweather saga, and it begins, as the film does, with a shot of a young girl twirling her baton outside her house. From the innocence of this image—boy meets girl in the heartland—the song moves quickly and seamlessly to the narrator’s description of the killing spree. The fact that we’re living in a world where these things can coexist in such proximity is terrifying, and it suggests that the symbols and structures that we think exist to protect us may, in the end, offer us nothing. The album’s violence continues. “Johnny 99” describes an act of murder that is the product of blinding desperation; in “Highway Patrolman,” a cop protects his violent brother even though doing so goes against everything he believes. “Atlantic City,” the only song released as a single, is a masterpiece of withheld information, a story of an out-of-luck character who is about to perform an unnamed act that he hopes will rescue his life from oblivion. Springsteen never personally experienced these scenes, but he renders them with such care and detail, he puts the listener squarely in the center of them. In contrast, “Used Cars,” “My Father’s House,” and “Mansion on the Hill” draw from Springsteen’s past, particularly his complicated relationship with his father. “Used Cars” and “Mansion on the Hill” are written as memories and “My Father’s House” is told as a dream. But all are permeated by a deep yearning for connection, a wish that the unexpressed could be finally be spoken, and that barriers erected over a lifetime could dissolve. In the world of this record, these are the small and quiet tragedies that can nudge you down a path leading to larger and more explosive ones. On paper, this is Springsteen at his most novelistic, trying to get into the heads of murderers and corrupt cops, or diaristic, revisiting detailed scenes from his childhood. One writer even turned the songs’ narratives into a book of short stories. But the record’s most lasting power comes not from its words or melodies but from its sound. The atmosphere in the room and the grain of Springsteen’s processed voice scramble notions of a fixed time and place. To put on Nebraska and hear its world of echo is to enter a dream. As Bruce Springsteen songs go, these are very good ones, but their true meaning came out in the presentation. Nebraska is above all a sonic experience, which explains why he could never get the songs right in a proper studio. “A lot of its content was in its style, in the treatment of it,” he said in an interview in 1984. “It needed that really kinda austere, echoey sound, just one guitar—one guy telling his story.” The atmospheric processing on Nebraska, the vast majority of which was imparted by the Echoplex during the mixdown stage, is crucial to the album’s meaning. The slapback echo present on some of the songs conjure early rockabilly (the technique, which thickens sound by folding a slight delay onto the signal, was pioneered by Sam Phillips at Sun Studio and can be heard in all its glory on the sides Elvis Presley recorded there), and the heavy dose of reverb has been present in all kinds of music, from Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” to any number of country hits. But rather than invoking a certain era, genre, or style, the sound of Nebraska brings to mind the radio, the medium through which these techniques were first widely distributed. The right amount of reverb and echo can make a cheap speaker in a car’s dashboard sound lush and dreamy. Nebraska’s homespun production reinforces the notion that recorded music happens across vast amounts of time and space. The guy playing and singing alone in this rented room in 1982 is connected to the person hearing it by invisible forces moving through the air. That separation, underscored by the arrangements, give the album its force. A few songs on the record contain references to transmissions, and these people often find themselves connected to each other in the most distant ways, often by wireless. Roads are littered with radio relay towers, radios in dark cars are choked with talk shows, a cop is called to action by the crackle of the radio. “State Trooper,” a song directly influenced by “Frankie Teardrop” by the synth-punk band Suicide, is Nebraska’s atmosphere reduced to its essence, just an ominous repeating guitar and a voice that sounds like a howling ghost. A Springsteen song like “Darkness on the Edge of Town” shares thematic elements with the songs on Nebraska, but the quiet/loud motif is designed for the stage, where Springsteen and his listeners could share in the energy. “State Trooper” might as well be beamed in from an orbiting satellite—there’s the song and then there is silence. “State Trooper” also illustrates how the automobile, central to Springsteen’s work throughout his career, functions a bit differently on Nebraska. On Born to Run, the car represented escape, while on Darkness on the Edge of Town and parts of The River it was used to define boundaries, to mark the places where the dramas of life unfold. On Nebraska, the automobile is a kind of isolation chamber, a steel husk that keeps its passengers apart from the world. “Used Cars,” a comparatively gentle song inspired by Springsteen’s own life, finds a child experiencing the shame of class difference. The family is each inhabiting their own world, the father and son unable to connect and share with each other what they might be feeling in the moment. The boy knows only by what he sees, not what his father tells him; the father, consumed with his own shame, has no sense of the boy’s experiences. Springsteen wrote that he wanted Nebraska to consist of “black bedtime stories,” and the album almost seems to take place during one long night. Those who have jobs are working the night shift. Coming as it does at the end of the album, “Reason to Believe” feels a bit like a sunrise. Suddenly there’s a crack of light, a bit of humor; we can take a breath. The levity comes not from the details of the song, which include two shattered relationships and the death of a dog and a relative, but from the perspective of the person telling the story. Perhaps life, rather than being grim and hopeless, is merely absurd. In the arc of Springsteen’s career, Nebraska is still a blip. It’s an essential record in the history of home recording, but it was sort of a cul-de-sac for Springsteen himself. He has returned twice to the general format of the record, releasing the mostly solo and mostly acoustic albums The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) and Devils & Dust (2005), but neither comes close to the alchemy of Nebraska. This one just happened. Springsteen covers the entire episode of the record in just a few pages in Born to Run, and there isn’t a lot to say. He wrote the songs, he put them down on a demo, and that demo became the record. It didn’t sell particularly well and got no airplay. “Life went on,” is how he ends the section of his book on the record. And so it does.

2018-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Columbia

March 18, 2018

00012c3a-6a7c-4cdc-922f-69a1ee4f918e

Mark Richardson

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

The debut album from the meteoric pop star lives in a world of its own: gothic, bass-heavy, at turns daring and quite beautiful.

The debut album from the meteoric pop star lives in a world of its own: gothic, bass-heavy, at turns daring and quite beautiful.

Billie Eilish: When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/billie-eilish-when-we-all-fall-asleep-where-do-we-go/

When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?

Billie Eilish has suddenly become an obscenely famous pop star—the kind with 15 million Instagram followers, sold-out shows around the world, a haute modeling contract, and couch time with Ellen DeGeneres. Her brilliance is an obvious truth; just ask any teenager in America as they wait patiently for the rest of the world to catch up to their consummate taste in pop music. Of course, the 17-year-old Eilish is still waiting for her teeth to straighten out. This fact trumpets the arrival of her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?: For its intro, Eilish removes her much-loathed transparent braces in a series of lightly gross, ASMR-worthy slurps, and proclaims, “I have taken out my Invisalign, and this is the album.” She then dissolves into heaving cackles, the kind that alienates any onlookers too prissy to partake. There are several more oddball moments like this—absent-minded humming to a track, giggling asides—that remind us she’s still a precocious, creative teen girl on this rocket, and all her gothic proclivities don’t cancel out how much she’s enjoying the ride. Her rise has been striking: At 14, she put the song “Ocean Eyes” on SoundCloud, a glassy, straightforward ballad with tearful synths and woozy, Lana Del Rey–indebted crooning. She snared a young fanbase with her hooks and raised her middle finger to pop’s status quo; here was this music that shifted between genres—from pop to trap and EDM—made by a lawless young female singer sporting baggy, androgynous clothes. She cast her bored, listless eyes upward instead of batting them at the camera. She filled her videos with flowing black tears, plunging needles, and arachnid hors d’oeuvres instead of twirling around sleek cityscapes. Eilish’s creepy eccentricity feels so removed from the pop formula; it helps distance her from the music industry’s historically lewd maceration of teen idols. Eilish just seems sharper, meaner, more self-sufficient—a young star from Los Angeles, in the grand tradition, but one that could only have come along while its hills are burning. The best moments of When We All Fall Asleep play firmly into this formula. Inspired by Eilish’s frequent night terrors and lucid dreams, the album juggles dark compulsions with grim eulogies, balancing her feathery vocals with deep, grisly bass. Like her spirit animal, the spider, Eilish can weave something that is at once delicate and grotesque: In “You Should See Me in a Crown,” she lulls the listener into a false idyll with her murmured lilt, then leaps off the cliff of a tectonic dubstep bass drop, her sneer fully audible. (That the title is cribbed from Moriarty, the beguiling psychopath of television’s Sherlock, also speaks to her pull toward the sinister.) “Xanny” plumbs sincere anxiety over more marrow-shaking bass, the kind that could blast apart a few pairs of headphones. Eilish’s voice crossfades over the narcoleptic beat, and slips into full despair, whimpering her most self-aware lines on the record: “Please don’t try to kiss me on the sidewalk/On your cigarette break/I can’t afford to love someone/Who isn’t dying by mistake in Silver Lake.” Eilish’s lyrics wonderfully underscore how all teen angst is both fiercely sincere and an affect of being only partially informed. A similar spirit drives “Bury a Friend,” another early single. Despite the vocoder-style distortion, Eilish’s voice feels even more intimate as she hisses, “Step on the glass, staple your tongue” in a farcical singsong. Eilish has namechecked Tyler, the Creator as one of her greatest influences; in her slightly jazzy trill, too, she also nods to her clearest pop progenitor, Lorde, who cleared much of Eilish’s path with her autonomous creative control, heavy-lidded social observations, and blithely goth aura. Still, all Eilish’s weaponry can’t stop her most overtly pop track, “Bad Guy,” from going stale. A snappy pulse launches Eilish into a litany of taunts against her partner. Over the rubbery electro beat, she says she’s the “make-your-girlfriend-mad type/Might-seduce-your-dad type.” It gave me pause because it suggests that perhaps Eilish isn’t so far removed from the teen pop continuum as we’ve come to believe: How different is her bragging about statutory rape, culturally, from trussing up 16-year-old Britney Spears in pigtails and plaid? Even if it’s a teen girl’s decision, entirely, to flaunt her sexuality (or engage in provocative role-play), the line crosses a boundary plenty of adults were happy to cosign. The quieter moments of When We Fall Asleep nod more to Eilish’s past, and to mixed results. Much like her first EP, 2017’s Don’t Smile at Me, they skew glum instead of macabre, even briefly twee. “Wish You Were Gay” spotlights Eilish’s vocals, which deserved better than being spackled with canned studio laughter and self-involved lyrics in the lamentable lineage of Katy Perry’s “Ur So Gay.” Minimalist, mournful piano ballads like “Listen Before I Go” and “When the Party’s Over” further prove her vocal talents amid larger inertia. Throw in a cheeky, extended riff on an episode of The Office on “My Strange Addiction”—which smatters in clips of the Dunder Mifflin crew reacting to Michael Scott’s own contentious creative efforts—and you have an album as widely collagist as a teen’s bedroom wall.

2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Darkroom / Interscope

March 29, 2019

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Stacey Anderson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/

The double-disc second album from all nine rappers can feel bloated and disjointed, but it is also the greatest distillation of the Wu at their most chaotic and functional.

The double-disc second album from all nine rappers can feel bloated and disjointed, but it is also the greatest distillation of the Wu at their most chaotic and functional.

Wu-Tang Clan: Wu-Tang Forever

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wu-tang-clan-wu-tang-forever/

Wu-Tang Forever

In the summer of 1997, the Wu-Tang Clan were in the midst of their mafia movie montage—you know, when life is sweet and it seems like it’s always going to be that way. That summer, the nine Staten Island goons went on tour with one of the premier rock bands on Earth, Rage Against the Machine, blowing cash and sipping champagne on airplanes. They got a $960,000 budget for the special effects-ladened music video for “Triumph,” the famous, reckless, hookless posse cut. And at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, the Wu headlined Hot 97’s Summer Jam, when the station was still a king-maker. Yet instead of kissing the ring, the Wu flipped them off. “Fuck Hot 97, we listen to Kiss FM!” is what Ghostface Killah yelled out to the crowd that night, annoyed at sound issues. He followed that uppercut with a haymaker, a flip on the station’s slogan—“Hot 97, where hip-hop dies!”— and eventually got the audience to chant along. Meanwhile, Method Man flung a battery at DJ Big Dennis Rivera and Funkmaster Flex backstage. For years after, the station shut the Wu out, refusing to spin their records as a group or solo. That would eventually hurt them, but at that moment, the Wu didn’t need the rap world—they had created their own. The party records, big-money samples, and sleek R&B hooks of the Bad Boy shiny suit era were on the horizon, but in the years before the summer of ’97, the Wu went on a storybook run unlike any other group in rap history. From their instant classic 1993 debut Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) to a string of five solo albums between 1994 and 1996, a raucous crew of forgotten borough rap purists had become mega-stars. By 1997, the world of the Wu was as deep and insular as professional wrestling. They fully established their own mythology and language: lingo remixed from Park Hill and Stapleton projects in Staten Island, an endless pool of aliases, nearly indecipherable inside references, and lyrics lined with allusions to kung fu flicks, Five-Percenter ideology, and ultra-specific New York City geography. That June, the group reunited for the 36 Chambers follow-up Wu-Tang Forever, with “Triumph” as the lead single. The sprawling, gloriously messy, double-disc album makes no concessions. It’s almost two hours of bars dunked in the Fresh Kills Landfill, dense wordplay, twisted humor that blurs the line between reality and fantasies told on the corner, and RZA’s unrelentingly dark production with a polished spin. Naturally they dethroned the Spice Girls for the No. 1 album in America, reaching the peak of their popularity as a collective. On Forever, nobody can tell the Wu-Tang Clan shit. Part of the appeal is that they’re completely high on their own success. While 36 Chambers is a masterpiece—the raw energy of the raps is kinetic and RZA’s soul samples crackle like burning wood—it’s so air-tight that it doesn’t feel like the truest Wu-Tang experience. The Wu-Tang Clan are messy; if there’s a rule they’re going to break it, just because. Yes, Wu-Tang Forever is bloated and disjointed, but also the greatest distillation of the Wu at their most chaotic and functional. That it was made in such a contentious and uninspired environment is not completely unsurprising, given how goosed-up their egos were. When Raekwon reflects on the writing of his 1995 mafioso rap epic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx he tells it like it was an Eat, Pray, Love-style excursion of self-discovery. Holed up for weeks in Barbados and then Miami with his spiritual confidant Ghostface, the pair wrote relentlessly, motivated by the warmth, ocean breeze, and a bond built over John Woo heroic bloodshed pictures and Wallabees. The making of Wu-Tang Forever was far more clinical, as if they were clocking in after putting in their two weeks’ notice. A divide had grown between the members of the group who got the opportunity to release solo albums (Rae, Ghost, Dirty, Meth, and GZA) and those who didn’t (Deck, Masta Killa, and U-God). In an effort to reawaken their former camaraderie, RZA, the architect of their vision, brought everyone to L.A. to stay in separate rooms at one big apartment complex. That was no Barbados. A flame was not ignited; hardly anyone hung out with each other, most guys showed up hours late to sessions, and usually Ol’ Dirty Bastard disappeared altogether. In the meantime, tensions flared over who was in control of the Wu brand, mostly directed at their manager and RZA’s older brother Divine. The more popular members felt the money was being divided up unfairly, and not everyone was psyched about the affiliate crews like Killarmy that RZA was stamping with the Wu logo. These frustrations boiled over in frequent arguments and a diminishing trust in RZA’s iron-clad grip on the sound. Given the unrest, it’s a miracle that the rapping on Forever is so exciting. When they rap the brotherhood is alive, even if the friendships aren’t. It might be because of RZA’s magic on the backend, stitching together loose threads as only he can. It might be because pretty much everyone was a more skilled rapper than they were four years earlier. But I like to believe that it’s in tune with the Hong Kong action movies they worshiped. In those films sometimes blood and non-blood brothers engage in a sword duel or point handguns at each other’s faces, but when they finally team up, the connection is almost mystical. Though the album has the runtime of a movie, it’s the brief moments that reestablish their one-of-a-kind chemistry. On “Deadly Melody,” when GZA so smoothly interrupts Masta Killa and U-God for two lines of his evocative imagery: “Fifty caliber street sweeper/Shots from Shaolin that go to Massapequa.” How Method Man floats in the background of Raekwon’s intensely delivered street politics on “Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours,” before brightening the mood with his smooth singsongy gibberish. How tonally connected Dirty and honorary tenth member Cappadonna are on “Maria”: Dirty howls wistfully about this fine woman who gave him gonorrhea and Capp reveals he has the pick-up game of Michael Cera in Superbad. It’s ridiculous as hell. “Maria” goes off the rails because of a RZA verse tacked on at the end, where he sounds bitter about being dumped or something. RZA does that a lot. There is probably too much of him on Forever, a sign of how much control he had, but the way he raps every line as if it could change your life is magnetic, even when it’s not as deep as he thinks. He’s so engaging that even when he parts the seas so he can monologue for a couple of minutes, it’s mesmerizing. “Yo this is true hip-hop you listenin’ to right here/In the pure form, this ain’t no R&B with a wack nigga takin the loop,” he says on the intro to disc 2, so convincing that he probably could have made C. Delores Tucker believe in the magic of hip-hop for a split second. On the production tip, RZA’s beats still have this grimy soul to them, but lag behind much of his other work during this peak period. Slowly he was moving away from samples and stripping back his sound, going for a more cinematic style; unsurprisingly, two years later he composed his first film score. He splits the difference comfortably on the first disc, his stronger side: the funk of “As High as Wu-Tang Get,” the slight distortion on the sample of “For Heavens Sake,” the forceful piano on “Severe Punishment” feels like it could soundtrack a chase scene in a Blaxploitation thriller. As for the second disc, the bloat of the more than a hour runtime is only an issue because the production isn’t urgent enough. There are lulls that ruin the groove, like the plodding sound of “Little Ghetto Boys” and 4th Disciple’s drab backdrop of “The City,” which is nowhere nearly as colorful as Inspectah Deck’s rhymes. In the mid-1990s, there were two floods in RZA’s basement where it was said he lost more than 500 beats. But the most substantial loss was Inspectah Deck’s debut album. He would start again from scratch, and after some label nonsense, his redone debut eventually hit stands in 1999. It’s aight. But that lost album made during RZA’s creative apex has become mythical. Its status is only boosted by how his dazzling wordplay and buttery delivery stands out among larger personalities throughout Forever. “Yo, in the housing, thousands seen early graves/Victims of worldly ways, memories stays engraved,” Deck opens on “A Better Tomorrow.” His words are slick, but without sacrificing the scene setting that captures it all like a drone shot. Then there’s his star turn on “Triumph”: The song is kinetic throughout its nearly six-minute runtime despite contributions from the whole crew, and Deck’s thickly layered yet clear-eyed opening verses rises above the rest. It’s like watching Kyrie Irving dribble in slow motion. “Triumph” closes with the one-two punch of Ghostface and Raekwon, who are on some shit on Forever. Coming off the combination of 1995’s Cuban Linx and 1996’s Ironman—Ghost was a couple years away from reaching rarified air with Supreme Clientele—it’s like they believe all of their words should be enshrined. I wouldn’t say that’s always true—Ghost’s sex chronicles on “The Projects” could have stayed in his journal and Rae nosedives his “Duck Seazon” verse with homophobia. But for the most part, their writing is full of so much imagination and detail that on posse cuts it’s hard to pay attention to the verses that come before or after them. Sorry to Masta Killa, but his solid mathematics-driven words are overshadowed by the mystifying Rae verse on “Visionz.” And Method Man’s voice owns “Cash Still Rules/Scary Hours,” but only until Ghostface struts in reminiscing about robberies with a glimmer in his eye like he’s talking about his Little League memories. When Ghost and Rae have the Wu around the firepit telling stories that may or not be truth, Forever doesn’t get much better than that. There is “Impossible,” which is a heavy-hearted Ghost chronicle so vivid that it feels like the framework for a memoir. The mood is a lot lighter on Ghost and Rae’s concept track “The M.G.M.” about attending a boxing match between Julio César Chávez and Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker. They finish each other’s lines, have a conversation about The Supreme Wisdom, and spot celebrities, all while moving the story along with lines that never stop the groove. It’s like they’re Statler and Waldorf, high on dust. The big disappointment of Forever is Dirty. He’s funny on “Maria” and his intro to “Triumph” is iconic, but he’s largely an afterthought. This was around the time when his reliance on drugs and alcohol was getting worse, and his communication with the Wu suffered. He feels detached from the group, and his half-assed solo track, “Dog Shit,” has none of the natural charisma of his 1995 debut. “Dog Shit” is the nadir of the second disc, which is overstuffed with solo tracks nobody ever asked for (Tekitha?!), sketches, and B-tier posse cuts, but it’s that excess that gives the album so much of its personality. On a more concise album, Ghost and Rae wouldn’t have gotten a chance to clear out for a couple of minutes of paranoid crime fiction. An editor may have told Deck to save his solo spotlight for his debut. A rational group would have told U-God to keep “Black Shampoo,” his borderline soft porno ode to massages with peppermint oil and fragrances in the drafts. But they probably didn’t even think twice about it. They were the Wu-Tang Clan and if they said it it was hot. That’s amazing; you couldn’t tell them shit. Soon after, their invincibility wore off, and their slow plateauing was mostly self-inflicted. By the time they reunited for 2000’s The W, which still features lots of great rapping, the group was even more fractured as faith diminished in RZA’s ability as a producer. Meanwhile, the lack of financial transparency created a rift that would never be properly mended. When the 2010s came around, Raekwon was communicating with the group through representatives and RZA was bleeding the Wu brand dry with gimmicks like 2015’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin: A stitched together full-length with pre-recorded Wu verses that were pressed onto one copy, put into a custom silver box, and auctioned for $2 million to infamous pharma dude Martin Shkreli. But if it had all gone smoothly, that wouldn’t have been the Wu-Tang Clan. Humility be damned; keep that shit elsewhere! Forever is the Wu-Tang Clan spitting their asses off. They wholeheartedly believed they were the most important artists in the world; for a moment it was nearly true, and they did it without giving an inch to the music industry, no matter how powerful. RZA wasn’t lying. Wu-Tang Forever is hip-hop in its purest form, for real.

2022-10-09T00:03:00.000-04:00

2022-10-09T00:03:00.000-04:00

Rap

Loud

October 9, 2022

0003d139-5a41-434e-9f15-ea59e315ba6c

Alphonse Pierre

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

Tied to a film-related renewed interest in the band, Joy Division's three formative, formidable works get cleaned up and reissued in deluxe form.

Tied to a film-related renewed interest in the band, Joy Division's three formative, formidable works get cleaned up and reissued in deluxe form.

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures / Closer / Still

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11624-unknown-pleasurescloserstill/

Unknown Pleasures / Closer / Still

Rock history is jammed with messy, stupid, and tragic ends to promising starts-- plane crashes, overdoses, gunshots-- but Ian Curtis' death is still striking. Sometime early on the morning of May 18, 1980, Ian Curtis, at the age of 23, watched Werner Herzog's Stroszek, played Iggy Pop's The Idiot, and hung himself in the kitchen. It's easy to say, in retrospect, that people should have seen it coming. His marriage was falling apart, his epilesy was worsening, and at their most uplifting, his band's lyrics set new benchmarks for melodrama, paranoia, and depression. "This is the way, step inside," intones Curtis at the start of the group's posthumous sophomore release Closer, an album title whose double meaning imparts almost as much menace as the fact that Curtis already sounds like he's singing from beyond the grave on the sepulchral lead track "Atrocity Exhibition". On the other hand, Joy Division's popularity was on the rise. The group was about to embark on a U.S. tour with the Buzzcocks. A month after Curtis' death, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" would become the group's first hit. And unlike such dead-before-their-time predecessors as Nick Drake and Chris Bell, Ian Curtis was a bona fide star in the making whose impact was already being felt throughout the underground, and whose presence was being picked up on by such prescient mimics as Bono. ( "A Day Without Me", a single from U2's 1980 LP Boy, was allegedly inspired by Curtis' suicide.) And then there's the music, a conflation of tribal primitivism and sophisticated art-rock that set the template for those twin poles of post-punk. A lot of credit goes to eccentric producer Martin Hannett, and it's the production-- not Curtis's well-parsed words or the band's suddenly ubiquitous biopic cachet-- that benefits most extensively from cleaned-up deluxe reissues of the band's two utterly essential albums, Unknown Pleasures and Closer. Simply put, the group's debut full-length Unknown Pleasures, released in 1979, sounds like little that came before it. At its most familiar, it vaguely approximates the cold claustrophobia of Iggy's The Idiot or David Bowie's Low, but from the first notes of "Disorder" on, the music is almost as alien as its iconic cover art. It's one of the most perfect pairings of artist and producer in rock history, but that shouldn't undersell the band's input. Joy Division, like many of their Manchester peers, were inspired by the DIY anti-ethos of the Sex Pistols; they just didn't know what to do with it at first. So, shaped and prodded by notorious provocateur Hannett (who would turn the heat in the studio down low enough for everyone to see their breath), the group embraced space, ambience, and an imposing austerity. It's noteworthy how many songs on Unknown Pleasures fade in like something emerging from the shadows. It's also worth noting how heavy songs such as "Day of the Lords", "New Dawn Fades", "Shadowplay", and "Interzone" are, while sinewy anthem "Disorder" and the discordant anti-funk of "She's Lost Control" are glorious anomalies in both their precision and concision. Closer is even more austere, more claustrophobic, more inventive, more beautiful, and more haunting than its predecessor. It's also Joy Division's start-to-finish masterpiece, a flawless encapsulation of everything the group sought to achieve. The hypnotically abrasive "Atrocity Exhibition" leads to the relentless yet somehow still economical "Isolation", the group more capable in its playing and confident in the arrangements. The dirge "Passover" implies that the band is every bit aware of its morbid power, while "Colony" marks a return to the heavy riffage of Unknown Pleasures. Then, after such an auspicious start, Closer really clicks into gear. "Means to an End" is death disco before the fact, buoyed by a surprisingly rousing (and wordless) chorus. "Heart and Soul" is a remarkable collision of atmosphere and minimalism, the stuttering drum beat, synth and Peter Hook's melodic bass lead linked to one of Curtis' most subdued performances. "Heart and soul," he sings, as the stark instruments intertwine and twist together. "One will burn." "Twenty Four Hours" briefly tries to pry free from the album's looming inevitability before "The Eternal" and "Decades" draw the music back down and the listener back in to Curtis' world. "The Eternal" is the bleakest thing the band ever recorded, and if "Decades" comes off a relative respite in comparison, the lyrics quickly quash that idea. "We knocked on the doors of Hell's darker chamber," moans Curtis. "Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in." The re-release of the collection Still is a little more frustrating, especially considering the singles collection Substance-- the only single disc on which you can find "Love Will Tear Us Apart", "Atmosphere", "Transmission", as well as several early tracks, some of Joy Division's most beautiful and brutal work-- is not included in this slate of reissues. (Perhaps the assumption is that older fans already have the awesomely comprehensive Heart and Soul box.) Still, originally released in 1981, a month before the surviving Joy Division members issued their first New Order album, Movement, is a ragged, enigmatic coda, an uneven odds-and-ends collection of lost tracks that fills in some gaps in Joy Division's history and legacy. Yet for a band that recorded so little, it's hard to quibble with the availability of more, especially when that means such songs as the actually uptempo "Ice Age", "The Kill", "Glass" (B-side to "Digital"), the metallic "The Sound of Music", and the immortal "Dead Souls". The rest of Still is Joy Division live, for better and for worse-- captured mostly at the group's final appearance in Birmingham High Hall. Most notable is the presence of "Ceremony", eventually issued as New Order's first single. As tempting as it may be to project parallels with Joy Division's near-future incarnation as New Order, they're really not there, at least not beyond the most vague and nascent of stylistic precursors. As the band progresses, more synths make their way into the soundscape, and Peter Hook's bass creeps higher and higher, but there's otherwise little from Joy Division that ports over to New Order (though in a pinch, "Decades", which concludes Closer, could be the missing link between Power, Corruption and Lies and a track like "Elegia" from Low-Life). In true "deluxe" fashion, each of these reissues is packaged with live disc that, while hardly pristine recordings, serve an important purpose. In fact, the furious sets documented-- 7/13/79, 2/8/80, 2/20/80-- prove that, free from the constraints but also the polish of the studio, Joy Division could be a decidedly aggressive beast. In these recordings, their chilly veneer melted away with visceral guitar slashing, Hook's no-nonsense bass, and Stephen Morris' spastic drums. The group also proves itself ruthlessly effective despite the conspicuous lack of proficiency. In the studio, Joy Division and Hannett could meticulously craft the album, note by note. Live and unleashed, they were undeniably powerful-- especially Curtis, whose Mancunian Jim Morrison croon fills each respective hall with foreboding-- but also pretty sloppy (it's no wonder the surviving members of the band later hitched themselves to drum machines and sequencers). Yet the live sets are vital reminders that these purveyors of almost indomitable gloom were also human. Lest one forget, these were just young men caught up in the excitement of punk. They covered "Sister Ray" and "Louie Louie". They tried out then-new songs and trotted out staples for their growing legion of fans. They were making it up as they went along, and to an extent, still are. Only Curtis knows how the story really ends, and he's not talking.

2007-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

2007-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

October 29, 2007

0006c04d-e64a-431a-bdbb-eb1304e6cd42

Joshua Klein

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

The Texas singer uses experimental vocal collages set against actual Lynchian backdrops to create a uniquely off-kilter kind of evanescence.

The Texas singer uses experimental vocal collages set against actual Lynchian backdrops to create a uniquely off-kilter kind of evanescence.

Chrystabell / David Lynch: Cellophane Memories

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chrystabell-david-lynch-cellophane-memories/

Cellophane Memories

The presence of director David Lynch’s name atop the new Chrystabell album, Cellophane Memories, will attract curious ears it might not have otherwise. After a few listens, however, you may wonder less about what Lynch brought to the table, and more about why Chrystabell, a Texas-based singer, is credited just once. Cellophane Memories should be attributed not to Chrystabell but to Chrystabells, plural. The greatest virtue of this beautiful album is how it layers her voice over and over—and over—again. The opening of“With Small Animals” is a prime example of this collage effect—her vocal lines spin free from their ambiguous origin point like threads of an ever-fraying fabric. On “The Sky Falls,” the effect is more strategic, vaguely resembling a classical canon; the pacing of overlaps is ambiguous but still calculable. A synthesizer backdrop lends it an almost irritating texture, giving this seeming evanescence a uniquely off-kilter quality. Cellophane Memories may be pretty, but it’s not easy. On “Reflections in a Blade,” the vocal bits are harshly clipped, providing a fractured view of an uncertain whole. They flicker by, the patterning delicious, forming a jumbled mess of voices. Behind the chorus a lone synth hums, interspersed with what sounds like someone breathing through a saxophone. The majority of the songs have just an instrument or two in the background, but each selection reflects exquisite decision-making. And each production element firmly reflects Lynch’s presence. As a filmmaker, Lynch suffuses his work with sound, from the lush scores that Angelo Badalamenti provided for Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, to the essential presence of pop songs, like those of Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet and Chris Isaak in Wild at Heart, all the way back to the radiator drones of his debut, Eraserhead. Lynch’s sonic hallmarks are everywhere on Cellophane Memories, from the earnest treacle of Badalamenti’s backing pads (the composer died in 2022, but is spiritually present here), to the tremolo-thick guitars of Orbison and Isaak, to the haunting rumble favored in his film sound designs. There are also mechanized rhythms—bone machine beats, à la Tom Waits—that bring to mind other Lynch pop forays, most notably his work with the late Julee Cruise, who died the same year as Badalamenti. Chrystabell doesn’t merely sing back-up for herself: The dovetailing of her vocals means you don’t always know what’s the main line, what’s an echo, and what’s an eerie backmasked premonition. Vocally, it’s clear that Cellophane Memories owes a debt to numerous gloomy and dreamy pop concoctions of the past, like Mazzy Star, Cowboy Junkies, Kate Bush, and Nico. There’s also a strong influence of art-pop forebear David Sylvian—whose dramatic, self-correcting melodic arcs she follows as if she wrote a dissertation on the subject. It’s difficult to listen to the layered vocals on Cellophane Memories and not think of the roles that mirrors and fractured identities play in Lynch films. The layering is so persistent that it’s unclear if that consistency signals conceptual coherence or extended sameness. As a listener, I came down a little more on the latter end of that continuum—over-consistency is the album’s main, perhaps sole, demerit—but it makes up for that sameness in countless other subtle, subconscious ways.

2024-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Experimental / Rock

Sacred Bones

August 6, 2024

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Marc Weidenbaum

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

The Virginia duo’s sparse, meditative indie folk songs grapple with the impermanence of life and the disorientation of grief, evoking an aching stillness.

The Virginia duo’s sparse, meditative indie folk songs grapple with the impermanence of life and the disorientation of grief, evoking an aching stillness.

Lean Year: Sides

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lean-year-sides/

Sides

Lean Year’s songs move at a glacial pace, their melodies diffuse and hollow, their arrangements sparse. The Virginia-based duo of Emilie Rex and Rick Alverson sometimes sounds like an ambient, slowcore version of the xx, while at other times their piano plucks and saxophone whiffs recall the quietude of a documentary score. Their defining mood is melancholy, their color palette monochrome. On their eponymous 2017 debut, Rex sang of loneliness and isolation over minimalist folk-rock, her voice barely elevated above the guitars and jazz percussion and slow-burning Wurlitzer. The pair made their latest album, Sides, amid personal tragedy: Alverson’s parents passed away, Rex’s mother was diagnosed with cancer, and the couple’s dog died. Add the pandemic to the mix and you get a bleak, meditative collection of songs that grapple with the impermanence of life and the disorientation of grief. With the kalimba-led opener “Legs,” Lean Year set the template for Sides: a looped pump organ or synth or piano riff offset with improvisational horn and piano flourishes, anchored by Rex’s steady, sorrowful voice. “Friends, they just don’t know/About the big thing up ahead,” she and Alverson mutter together before the song breaks open in a storm of saxophone and piano. Between the droopy kalimba and Rex’s careful cadence, the first half of “Legs” sags, but it’s cathartic when the composition erupts into a contained sort of chaos. Similarly, on “The Trouble With Being Warm,” a dreary synth underpins Rex’s plodding vocals until, near the end, she unleashes a run of gorgeous, feral coos. Sit with Sides long enough and you’ll learn to live in its aching stillness, its pleas for annihilation, its horror in a future so barren and broken. It may sound like an unbearably intense listen, but Lean Year err toward aloofness. Even when saxophone and piano wiggle in and out of the frame, the album’s instrumentation is decidedly flat. These songs communicate dense, thorny emotions without always eliciting them directly. “Nitetime” is rife with stale clarinet, keys, and bass melodies; the saving grace is Rex’s silky falsetto. The predictable structures and moody vocals owe something to alt-R&B, but the pallid, monotonous production whirrs in ambient minimalism, even when, like on “Bad Woman,” the bones of less opaque melodies beg for release. Before making Sides, Lean Year were devising a concept record about conflict. After experiencing so much trauma, they began writing around themes of loss and grief instead. Yet a lingering tension remains on Sides: adhere to conceptual consistency or explore the unknown parameters of pain? A song like “Panes” seems designed to fit within the album’s architecture without standing apart from it, while “End” dares to venture beyond familiarity. A dainty piano and lumbering saxophone are all Rex needs to capture the depth of her mourning: “Left me with my troubled mouth/Watched the sense run out/Don’t know where I am/Don’t know where I’ve been.” Sides shines when it’s both melodically limber and emotionally poignant, when the numbness bordering the edges of these songs finally burns away.

2022-09-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-09-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

Western Vinyl

September 2, 2022

00085250-1963-4427-9617-774f569fa1f7

Brady Brickner-Wood

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

Beyoncé's little sister issues her second album, most of which rides the classicist Motown framework repopularized by Amerie and producer Rich Harrison.

Beyoncé's little sister issues her second album, most of which rides the classicist Motown framework repopularized by Amerie and producer Rich Harrison.

Solange: Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12203-sol-angel-and-the-hadley-st-dreams/

Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams

The landscape of contemporary R&B is littered with the bones of self-styled mavericks-- Imani Coppola, Lina, even Kelis of late. So it's with trepidation that I endorse Solange Knowles' second album; its cryptic, wordy title already promising a fatally over-ambitious statement at odds with the more mercantile concerns of mainstream pop. In reality, Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams is more familiar than its title and cover-art might suggest, most of it riding the classicist Motown framework repopularized by Amerie and producer Rich Harrison. Instead, Solange's vision and, depending on how you look at it, pretension manifests in an aesthetic of excess: On "Would've Been the One", the sudden rhythmic contortions, the dizzying chord progressions, the too-bright dazzle of Solange's vocal and the excesses of her harmonies combine to form something gloriously surplus-to-requirements. Likewise, the conflicted "T.O.N.Y.", with its circular lyrical fixations (the one-night-stand that got away) and lurching groove, at first feels somehow top-heavy before snapping into place with a charming short-circuit of restless confusion and explosive conviction. At her least, Solange can be too mannered, knocking out flawless period pieces that float past without leaving a trace, her wispy voice, plush arrangements, and oblique, counter-intuitive hooks offering too much of a good thing-- no one except nu-soul enthusiasts wants that much studious classiness. And there are times when everything gets surprisingly arch: the toe-tapping jazz-ballet patter of "I Decided, Pt. 1" sounds a bit like an off-Broadway paean to Motown, its deliberate facsimile of a facsimile of soul signifiers relying on Solange's declamatory performance to carry it to victory. But it's when she abandons the rigorous structures of soul revivalism that this too-clever vibe can get a bit too much-- see "Cosmic Journey", a soft-centred glitch-pop ballad whose swooning loveliness is tarnished slightly by its heavy-handed title and unnecessary "psychedelic" techno-trance coda. Many will applaud the daring of the handful of electronic tracks here-- album closer "This Bird" is even built around a Boards of Canada sample-- but I'm afraid we'd consider this same thing juvenile from, say, Imogen Heap. In fairness, Solange isn't lapsing into cliché here: The arrangements are unpredictable, and the lyrics even more so; on "This Bird" she sighs over how "your dad drives a foreign car and your momma looks like a beauty queen," in an inscrutable tribute to Gershwin, before delicately advising the listener to "just shut the fuck up." But there's a tinge of diaristic adolescence in the way she inevitably fuses these sonic journeys with a thematic obsession with boundlessness, her incomparable surpassing of all expectations and limitations. Predictably, then, it's when Solange slows down and lets the world catch up that she's most arresting. On "I Decided, Pt. 2", a straight-to-the-point remix of its predecessor by erstwhile commercial house merchants the Freemasons, she unabashedly embraces streamlined pop form, her sassy performance somehow finding a new urgency amidst the very anonymity of the song's sugary, Phil Spector-meets-glam arrangement. Call it "generic," but here the term is a compliment: Any hint of eccentricity would be a blemish marring the song's perfectly proportioned, irresistibly svelte figure. It's not a case of Solange performing best when she jettisons her ambition, but rather her need to find a way to let her avant inclinations work with rather than against her pop instincts, and maybe the best way for that to happen is to let the former emerge organically through the latter. Only marginally behind "I Decided, Pt. 2" in terms of impact (and, perhaps, marginally more loveable) is "Sandcastle Disco" its light-as-a-feather summertime funk strut leavened by an utterly magical chorus. A bid for chart success? Undoubtedly, but Solange makes it her own with a crescendo performance like a bubble of terrified elation swelling up in your chest. When she can do scrunch-faced joy so purely, so superlatively, why bother with window-dressing?

2008-09-18T01:00:03.000-04:00

2008-09-18T01:00:03.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Music World

September 18, 2008

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Tim Finney

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

Long considered an outlier in her catalog, Nina Simone’s newly reissued 1982 album is an intimate and immense portrait, a culmination of Nina Simone’s frustrations molded into a jarring personal statement.

Long considered an outlier in her catalog, Nina Simone’s newly reissued 1982 album is an intimate and immense portrait, a culmination of Nina Simone’s frustrations molded into a jarring personal statement.

Nina Simone: Fodder on My Wings

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nina-simone-fodder-on-my-wings/

Fodder on My Wings

“I’ll tell you what freedom is to me,” Nina Simone once said: “No fear.” If many of the most important records of the soul icon’s career were about political freedom, her 1982 album Fodder on My Wings, newly reissued, was about personal freedom—about liberating herself from her past and finding the liberty to create as she pleased. It was Simone’s means of working through fear—of death, manipulation, discrimination—in search of joy and self-discovery. A marvel of self-expression, Fodder on My Wings is a culmination of Simone’s frustrations molded into a jarring personal statement. At times manic, at times depressive, she shares many different sides of herself in vignettes that make up a portrait both intimate and immense. Although it does not achieve the unrivaled brilliance of the performances on her albums for Philips, it marks her creative apex as an artist, somehow both her most worldly and her most introspective work. Even in Simone biographies, Fodder on My Wings is usually represented as an outlier in her career. But it is a strange, captivating document that helped capture what a complicated person she was, the tumultuous life she’d led, and the nature of her travels. Some songs she sang in English, some in French, and on others she alternated between the two languages. The album contains some of the most poignant ballads of her entire catalog, some songs that could double as rallying cries, and others that feel like fun sketches made for her own amusement. It is a record as unsteady, daring, damaged, and sensational as she was. For a while, it didn’t seem like Simone would be back in a studio again. Her 1978 album Baltimore had soured her on the recording process. She butted heads with CTI producer Creed Taylor, recording all that record’s vocals in a single hour-long session on the final day of taping. “The material was not my personal choice, and I had no say whatsoever in the selection of songs. It was all done before I could make any decisions,” she later claimed. Simone was not fond of the album’s reggae-tinged sounds and rhythms (“What is this corny stuff,” she asked CTI arranger Dave Matthews). The album recreated songs by Randy Newman, Judy Collins, and Hall & Oates, and while it is often hailed as a late-career highlight, Simone said that she felt forced into making it. After the experience with CTI, Simone sought greater authority in recording Fodder on My Wings. She always exercised some measure of control over what she recorded, but this was different. She was adamant about composing and arranging nearly every song, and she wanted it known that she had done just that. She played all of the piano parts. She enlisted African percussionists Paco Sery and Sydney Thaim—who played congas, bells, timpani, and woodblock—and bassist Sylvin Marc. All three men sang backup. This band produced what Simone liked to call black classical music, parlor music which drew on soul sounds and calypso rhythms. It was the sound of her recent travels. The album’s title track puts this odyssey into perspective. Simone portrays herself as a bird that fell to Earth, landed in human debris, and was irrevocably changed. “Although it was able to survive, it couldn’t fly. So it walks from country to country to see if people had forgotten how to live, how to give,” she explained. “Most of the people had forgotten.” The metaphor was reflective of how Simone saw herself (a damaged songbird), the world (ungiving), and the world’s impact on her (harmful to her fragile psyche). Many of the album’s songs carry stories or lessons from this journey, things she’d picked up living in Switzerland, Liberia, and France. Simone had enormous respect for France and French people. In her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, she described them as a people with “a lot of respect for serious artists” and Paris as a safe haven for African exiles. “I would be able to create my own Africa in the heart of Europe, Africa in my mind,” she imagined. After a rejuvenating trip in the 1970s to Liberia, Simone’s ancestral home, which was settled and made independent by free blacks from the American South, the singer had reconnected with her romanticized idea of Africa. But that Liberian pilgrimage produced a difficult loss, too: After Simone left, there was a coup in 1980, and her former lover, the local community leader C.C. Dennis, died of a heart attack two weeks after his son Cecil was executed by the military. The album is deeply touched by the experiences of these trips, full of African spirituals sung in French, musings on black spirituality and the hereafter, and attempts to recalibrate and recapture a glow lost in the wake of personal losses. “Fodder in Her Wings” is a song about this meandering journey to Africa with “dust inside her brain.” Simone takes a second crack at the hymn “There Is a Balm in Gilead”; the version on Baltimore, performed leisurely in English and like reggae, sucked the character out of her voice. As if to spite Taylor, “Il y a un baume à Gilead” maintains the island sway of the original but lines its edges with a more nuanced vocal take. She reintroduces the spiritual “Thandewye,” first recorded for the 1974 live album It is Finished, pushing even deeper into divinity. Simone’s voice could open the sky or scorch the earth. Despite reports that her vocal cords were decaying, her contralto described as having “deepened into a mannish baritone,” she had lost little of her power. Her own characterization, as recorded in the 2015 Netflix documentary, What Happened, Miss Simone?, was still more accurate: “Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.” In the lighter moments, the feathery French of “Gilead” or the crescendos of “I Sing Just to Know That I’m Alive,” she exudes grace and poise. In the dark ones, like “Thandewye,” she plays into the harshness of her tone. She is a master of dynamics, knowing when to hurt and when to heal. “What I did on this album was try to get myself deep into joy,” she wrote in the liner notes. On the triumphant opener “I Sing Just to Know That I’m Alive,” she reaffirms her belief in the sacred power of performing. The repeated refrain of “Color Is a Beautiful Thing” feels like something she’s trying to internalize, a coda to 1969’s “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black.” “Liberian Calypso” channels the night she felt most free, naked and drunkenly blissful, table-dancing her way through an African discotheque. All of these effervescent songs feel like they’re swirling around the tragedy at the heart of the record. At the center of the reissued Fodder on My Wings is “Alone Again Naturally,” Simone’s stripped-down response to Gilbert O’Sullivan’s 1972 hit of the same name, in which she recounts the events surrounding her father’s death a decade earlier. (Its place on the tracklist has shifted over the years.) She was glad to learn he was dying: he had betrayed her when she needed him most, and in dying he’d taken her mother with him. Suddenly, the song grows somber, and in the closing minute, she reveals that losing this man was, in fact, a devastating blow. No one was closer to her. No one else understood her. She points to his loss as the impetus for all subsequent struggles. The specter of his death casts a pall over the album’s pursuit of joy. One moment, her father’s death makes her question God’s existence; the next, when singing a reassuring song her father introduced her to (“Heaven Belongs to You”), she embraces heavenly salvation. This is the push and pull throughout the album: the weight of pain and the beauty of faith. Together, all these songs become a memoir. She wasn’t just singing to know that she was alive; she sang also to reflect on how she’d lived and what she might learn from it. The haunting piano solo “Le peuple en Suisse” revisits her time in Switzerland, among a people she believed to be cold, but not before waxing poetic about moving forward. “Let no one deceive you/You have so little time/So let the corpses molder/To live your life is bolder/To waste it is a crime,” she sings, as though trying to convince herself. She didn’t want to be trapped, least of all in her role as performer. Nina Simone spent much of her life on stage, and it was in those moments that she really seemed to become the High Priestess of Soul, but by the 1980s, her shows had developed a reputation for devolving into chaos as much as for achieving excellence. “Her performances have the aura of sacramental rites, in which a priestess and her flock work to establish a mystical communion,” wrote the critic Stephen Holden in 1983, during her first show back in the States to perform songs from the album. As if cognizant of such a spiritual relationship with her audience, there’s “Vous êtes seuls, mais je désire être avec vous” (You are alone, but I want to be with you), a song that seemed to be an olive branch to crowds around the world. She chants the phrase over and over until the words completely disarm and overwhelm, until she felt exonerated. (Nicole Cerf-Hofstein wrote that, for many in attendance when Simone first performed the song at the New Morning, it was “a missed rendezvous.”) The song seems indicative of her ongoing battle to overcome both internal and external demons. Even her deepest explorations of self were made in conversation with her public. Simone was privy to the way the world at large saw her and sought to sideline her, as evidenced in songs like “I Was Just a Stupid Dog to Them” and “They Took My Hand,” but she was optimistic she could make a better future by learning from the past. “Now, everything will change!” she exclaims on the former; “You took my teeth/You took my brains/You try to drive me so insane/And now you’re trying to take my eyes/But it is finished/Because I’m too wise,” she sings on the latter. With Fodder on My Wings, she found new freedom in song, seeking out new heights as she left her fears far below. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

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

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

Jazz / Pop/R&B

Verve

April 9, 2020

000a32c8-f375-4fb4-8e17-085212be93f9

Sheldon Pearce

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

The long-awaited Cruel Summer is a crew album, a chance for all of the rappers Kanye West has signed over the past few years (former greats like Pusha T, half-decent punchline rappers like Big Sean, and entourage bottom-feeders like CyHi the Prynce) to momentarily feel like they own the place.

The long-awaited Cruel Summer is a crew album, a chance for all of the rappers Kanye West has signed over the past few years (former greats like Pusha T, half-decent punchline rappers like Big Sean, and entourage bottom-feeders like CyHi the Prynce) to momentarily feel like they own the place.

Various Artists: Kanye West Presents: GOOD Music - Cruel Summer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16994-cruel-summer/

Kanye West Presents: GOOD Music - Cruel Summer

Cruel Summer is not Kanye West’s record; listening to it, I found a certain peace in reminding myself of this. Cruel Summer is a crew album, a chance for all of the rappers he's signed to his G.O.O.D. imprint during the past few years to momentarily feel like they own the place. They range from former greats like Pusha T to half-decent punchline rappers like Big Sean to entourage bottom-feeders like CyHi the Prynce, and spending a long time in their presence can feel like being trapped in a reality-TV house. Kanye drops by occasionally, but he mostly feels a million miles away. Kanye’s career has been built on maniacal quality control, but Cruel Summer feels uncharacteristically disposable. Even the title is botched. The album arrives on September 18, with school in session and the season’s cruelest days far behind us. This day late/dollar short feeling persists throughout. The production is often cluttered with unnecessary effects, like the vocal “whoa-oh-oh” synth pads West threw on his remix of Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like” when he couldn’t figure out how to improve it. Songs take ill-advised turns. After verses from Raekwon, Common, Pusha T, 2 Chainz, and CyHi the Prynce are hurled at you like a handful of action figures on "The Morning", the song inexplicably changes key so that Nigerian singer D’Banj can warble in Auto-Tune. “Sin City” starts out with a generic dubstep low-end before transitioning into a mortifying slam-poetry performance by Malik Yusef. And then when that’s over, who should come along next but... CyHi the Prynce. Again. If Kanye had resisted the temptation to stuff Cruel Summer with his LucasArts production magic, it might have worked as a pure bid for rap radio’s dead center. With “Niggas in Paris,” West got closer to that center than he’d been in a while; My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, for all its accolades, struggled to find its foothold on the pop charts. There are a handful of hits here, and they range from the pretty good to the fantastic. You’ve probably heard them all by now, and they will outlive this comp; they are are the reason the record deserves to exist. Cruel Summer’s secret MVP is Hit-Boy, the producer who brought Kanye the “Paris” beat; he shows up on with “Cold” (formerly known as “Theraflu”), a sleekly coursing West solo track in which he hashes out the increasingly silly details of his life—his jealousy towards Kim Kardashian’s 72-day husband Kris Humphries; his adventures go-karting with Polish models—with his trademark aggrieved sense of urgency. Hit-Boy also offers up “Clique,” a transfixing, Timbaland-like collection of hiccups and synth strobes. “Clique” is haughty, spotless, and coldly perfect; it sounds like bottle service. West takes the opportunity to sneer at former CIA director George Tenet’s car. Apart from Hit-Boy’s contributions, there are three tracks from Hudson Mohawke, the rising Glasgow producer whose compellingly fractured beats have caught the ear of hip-hop figures like Just Blaze. His contributions—“To the World,” “The One,” and “Bliss,” which makes use of 2009’s “Ice Viper”—don’t sound like anything off of his riotous Satin Panthers EP, but they are welcome signs that Mohawke is moving into high-profile hip-hop territory. “To the World,” a track featuring R. Kelly that’s built off a slightly stiff drumline beat and swarms of string plucks, benefits from an animated turn from Kanye, who mangles Francis Ford Coppola’s name hilariously and taunts Mitt Romney in a nagging singsong for failing to disclose his taxes. But once the early run of singles are out of the way, things start to go south. By the time you get to Kid Cudi’s dribbly alt-rock solo turn “Creepers” (actual lyric: “If I had one wish, it’d be to have more wishes/Duh... Fuck trying to make it rhyme”) it seems like even the artists involved have left the room. Pusha T huffs and snorts a lot, but drops lines like “wherever we go, we do it pronto.” You’d never guess from his performance here that he was once a member of Clipse. Big Sean, who's shown flickering signs of wanting to actually rap lately, sits back and offers terrible puns on the word “ass.” R&B singer Teyana Taylor comes nowhere near her work on Twisted Fantasy. It’s the sense of Event, which has become as much of an art for Kanye as his music over the years, that is most blatantly missing here. The only people who seem to recognize what’s at stake are the old-timers. Ma$e, of all people, shows up out of nowhere on “Higher” to lick shots at his former Bad Boy rival Loon: No one cares, but he still sounds slick. And then there’s Ghostface, who roars to life at the end of “New God Flow,” a track based off his own “Mighty Healthy” from 2000’s classic Supreme Clientele. Ghost’s appearance is an obvious prestige-casting move, but still a perfect one, and he makes the most of it, reliving his Pretty Toney days one more time. A handful of guests aside, though, none of G.O.O.D. Music’s personalities do much to justify their newfound prominence. If Cruel Summer is meant to be an argument for the label’s other talent, it makes a weak case.

2012-09-18T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-09-18T02:00:00.000-04:00

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

September 18, 2012

000c50d7-fcc8-4c64-9ffe-12c3cf92f589

Jayson Greene

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

Emerging from hip-hop's brief and fruitful collision with jazz at the turn of the 1990s, Digable Planets' second album is a love letter to Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. On Blowout Comb, they made a proto-crate-digging approach feel completely organic, and integrated with their broader goal of deepening rap's connection to music history.

Emerging from hip-hop's brief and fruitful collision with jazz at the turn of the 1990s, Digable Planets' second album is a love letter to Brooklyn's Fort Greene neighborhood. On Blowout Comb, they made a proto-crate-digging approach feel completely organic, and integrated with their broader goal of deepening rap's connection to music history.

Digable Planets: Blowout Comb

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18154-digable-planets-blowout-comb/

Blowout Comb

Around the turn of the 1990s, hip-hop had a brief and fruitful collision with jazz. “You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop/ My pops used to say, it reminded him of bebop,” said Q-Tip on 1991‘s The Low End Theory, an album that included contributions from legendary second-Miles Davis Quintet bassist Ron Carter and featured a song called “Jazz (We’ve Got)”. A year earlier, Spike Lee had followed his landmark Do the Right Thing, a film closely connected in spirit to the hip-hop street, with Mo Better Blues, a film whose main characters were sharply dressed jazz musicians trying to figure out how their work fit into the modern world. Guru of Gang Starr started a side project called Jazzmatazz, which found jazz legends playing alongside MCs; Us3 looped Herbie Hancock to create a global smash. Hip-hop jazz was now a thing, and one of the small, brilliantly burning sparks to emerge from this tiny explosion was the Brooklyn-based trio Digable Planets. To understand the music of Digable Planets, it helps to remember the cultural landscape of the early 1990s. The crack epidemic was in full swing and violence was at an all-time high. (We’re rightly horrified at the 506 murders in Chicago last year, but in 1992, there were 943.) Coming off of 12 years of Republicans in the White House, Ronald Reagan and his successor, George H.W. Bush, had turned the country rightward, and each had scored political points by exploiting racial prejudice. The youthful energy of the civil rights generation was fading; young people who might have seen Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X speak in person were well into middle age. Hip-hop was well established and rapidly growing in popularity, but it wasn’t yet a global cultural force. So what did “jazz” mean in this hip-hop moment? It went beyond just sampling grooves and instrumental accents from the Roy Ayers catalog or the groove-based hard bop of the 50s/60s Blue Note catalog (though there was a lot of that too). Part of it can be found in that Q-Tip lyric: This is my music, and my father hears his music in it. It was a way to connect a thread of African-American culture to the earlier generations, to affirm a sense of shared experience and tradition. “My father always told me jazz is the black person’s classical music,” Digable Planets MC Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler told writer Ann Powers in the May 1993 issue of SPIN. So jazz as an idea in hip-hop was a story of tradition and shared knowledge, of connecting a younger cohort to the radical art of their parents’ generation. And in the tense era of the 80s and 90s, there was comfort to be found in that continuum, of positioning this new music in the context of an earlier sound that had changed the world. If Digable Planets were the product of a specific time, they also came together in a specific place. Blowout Comb, their second and final album, which was first released in 1994 and now returns in the form of this gorgeous and beautiful-sounding vinyl reissue from Light in the Attic, is practically a love letter to the Brooklyn neighborhood of Fort Greene. It’s a part of the borough with a long history (Walt Whitman lived here), and not all of it was rosy (in the 1970s and 80s, crime in the area was endemic). It’s also a neighborhood of African-American families, and it has been known as an incubator of creativity. Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule office is based here; jazz musicians young (Branford Marsalis) and old (Cecil Taylor) called the area home. As described in Brooklyn Boheme, a film by Fort Greene resident and writer Nelson George, during the late 1980s and 90s Fort Greene was a nexus of African-American cultural activity, to the extent that George calls it the late-century Brooklyn version of the Harlem Renaissance. It was a good place for Digable Planets, none of whom were native Brooklynites, to set up shop. The group’s debut album, 1993’s Reachin' (A New Refutation of Time and Space), is very good, but all the promise of the project was realized with its follow-up. Blowout Comb is an album of forces pulling in different directions, exerting tension and stretching into new forms. On a purely sonic level, the music, produced by the group, is beautiful and goes down so easily it’s almost disconcerting. The mixture of soul and jazz samples and live instrumentation paints an eminently listenable late-night atmosphere: there are clouds of vibraphone, drum loops firmly in the pocket, creaky Fender Rhodes lines, tasteful horn accents, all of it anchored by warm, snug, and instantly memorable basslines. The general sonic approach became more prominent as the 90s wore on, as these kinds of crate-digging, rare-groove types continued to mine old soul and jazz records for samples, eventually transforming into a kind of supper-club trip-hop (Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation). But Digable made the approach feel completely organic and integrated with their broader musical goal of expanding rap’s reach and deepening its connection to music history. Digable also found an approach to rapping that fit perfectly with their musical ideas. The three MCs-- Butterfly, Craig “Doodlebug” Irving, and Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira-- rap with confidence, skill, and force but they also sound relaxed, unhurried, close to the microphone, and intimate. “No stars, just bars,” Doodlebug raps on “The May 4th Movement”, and his words serve as a good explanation for what’s going on here. Because the vocalists take a similar angle on rapping, they feel like a true unit, individuals who are comfortable giving over a certain amount of their personality to the project as a whole. Ladybug often takes the first verse on a given track, and since the three MCs truly feel like equals and there’s not much in the way of macho posturing, lines between masculine and feminine also seem porous. But if the sound and vocals are decidedly chill, the lyrics are alternately celebratory, searching, and anxious. There is a strong thread of black nationalist consciousness (Butler's father is a professor of African-American history) but it’s often presented impressionistically. “Black Ego” opens with a spoken exchange that finds Butterfly being arrested and shaking off a racial slur with a “here we go again,” and later finds him transcending the situation with a mix of affirmations and escapist Afro-futurist imagery (“My shit's, a natural high, the man can’t put no thing on me/ Now catch me when my mind stretch out, it's astro black/ Time reaching into end, nappy Afro-blue”). “Dog It” has references to out-jazz genius Eric Dolphy, Marvin Gaye, bell hooks, and raised fists; elsewhere we find Five-Percent National imagery and mythology (see Ladybug’s “68 inches above sea level/ 93 million miles above these devils” on “9th Wonder (Blackitolism)”. Mixed in with the political observations and mysticism are joyful observations of everyday life, of soaking in the texture of the streets and feeling happy to be young and motivated and creative. Anyone who has felt even the slightest romantic pull of bohemian living can recognize the youthful assuredness mixed with wide-eyed wonder that pervades the record. So Blowout Comb is a modest hip-hop classic that thrives on contrast. It’s both dated and timeless, angry and laid-back, smooth and prickly. It’s one of the easier albums in pop history to put on and enjoy and vibe out to, but it has a rich undercurrent of history and thought. It’s also something of a cul de sac. Though Butler did pick up some of these threads and combine them with more abrasive and abstract music as Shabazz Palaces, Digable Planets as a project did not endure. Culture moved on and rap moved on with it. But Blowout Comb, a richly rendered world with so much to explore, is still there and is accepting visitors, and it has a lot to teach us on whatever level we choose to listen.

2013-06-25T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-06-25T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Light in the Attic

June 25, 2013

000c8a4e-51bc-40de-ac2b-1fb4cedc7ec9

Mark Richardson

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

On his second collection of melancholic 80s-inspired pop odes, the 27-year-old singer/songwriter/producer Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, channels vagabond emotions into something universal and inviting. His Cupid Deluxe is an album that tenderly details heartbreak through the language of longing.

On his second collection of melancholic 80s-inspired pop odes, the 27-year-old singer/songwriter/producer Devonté Hynes, aka Blood Orange, channels vagabond emotions into something universal and inviting. His Cupid Deluxe is an album that tenderly details heartbreak through the language of longing.

Blood Orange: Cupid Deluxe

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18736-blood-orange-cupid-deluxe/

Cupid Deluxe

Every night in New York City, around 4,000 young people face the darkness without a home. Many are teens. A disproportionate amount are gay, lesbian, or transgender, shunned by their families or the world at large. Some close their eyes under trees in Central Park. Some sell sex downtown. Others go underground and lean their heads on the dulled metal of subway trains traveling along the ACE line, from the top of Manhattan to the bottom of Queens. According to "Netherland", a harrowing New Yorker story from last year that chronicled the city's young, homeless, LGBT underground, the ACE is known to some lodgers as "Uncle Ace's house." This comforting nickname provides the title and inspiration for "Uncle Ace", a key track from singer/songwriter/producer Devonté Hynes' second album as Blood Orange. Starring the kind of battered-but-resilient souls who stroll through the city in the dead of night, the impressionistic song has Hynes switching between a low and high singing voice, subtly accentuating the androgynous characters within. It's mysterious, desperate, empathetic. "Not like the other girls," he offers, possibly taking the purview of a woman who feels like a man, or vice versa. Hynes shines a careful light onto his vulnerable subjects, inhabiting their travails with grace, all while a disco pulse and smoky saxophones harken back to his beloved 80s, when Times Square was a misfit's home away from home. The outcasts that live inside of "Uncle Ace" are Hynes' people. As the London-raised, New York-based 27-year-old has hopped from project to project and style to style over the last 10 years, he's maintained the air of an outsider. With Cupid Deluxe, he channels those vagabond emotions into something universal and inviting—an album that tenderly details various heartaches through the language of longing. Growing up, Hynes was bullied and beaten up enough to end up in the hospital on more than one occasion. He first directed his angst into Test Icicles' spazzed punk as a teen before moving onto Morrissey-style tragic confessionals with Lightspeed Champion. His first album as Blood Orange, 2011's Coastal Grooves, traded in Lightspeed's orchestral folk-pop for slick new wave and funk, streamlining his once-unwieldy songwriting in the process. But it wasn't until he co-wrote and produced two songs from last year—Solange's "Losing You" and Sky Ferreira's "Everything Is Embarrassing"—that he found the most suitable vessel for his melancholic odes to expired love. Both tracks are propelled by springing 80s beats that are tugged down by minor chords and wounded lyrics; the upbeat drums suggest good times past, making the reality-check vocals hit that much harder. Given the blaring nature of modern pop, the subtlety of these hollowed-out songs was genuinely refreshing; not just "indie" for the sake of it, but affectingly human. Cupid Deluxe largely (and winningly) follows the formula set forth by those modest hits, while bringing them forth on a full-length scale. Across the album, Hynes sings, writes, produces, and plays guitar, bass, keyboards, drums, synths. But this is hardly a solo act. In fact, one of the record's greatest strengths lies in its pitch-perfect deployment of guests. Not only does each member of the Cupid Deluxe team seem to fully understand the overarching wistfulness of the whole, but many of them show off heretofore unheard facets of their talent. While Hynes' girlfriend and Friends frontwoman Samantha Urbani and Kindness leader Adam Bainbridge exhibited tentative skills with their respective groups' debut albums last year, they make the most of their spotlights here; Urbani often sounds like she's mimicking the sultry chirpiness of an absent Solange, but her clear chemistry with Hynes makes the substitution more than adequate. Meanwhile, Dirty Projectors' David Longstreth and Chairlift's Caroline Polachek have never sounded more soulful. Typically ominous rap producer Clams Casino contributes light, skittering drums to the Longstreth showcase "No Right Thing", which could fit snugly into any Vampire Weekend setlist. Even the set's two rap cameos, from Queens' Despot and London's Skepta, are anything but your usual in-and-out 16-bar guest shots—both MCs are given plenty of space to weave tales that are tactile and intimate, while Hynes' vocals take on a more ghostly role on the tracks' edges. And while the inclusion of a bubble-funk remake of Britpop curio Mansun's pompously overwrought 2000 single "I Can Only Disappoint U" sounds almost comically random on paper, Hynes' Fat Boys scratches and Urbani's featherlight vocals make it fit into the album's loose after-hours milieu. Such awareness and selflessness consistently pays off, making all involved sound that much better. Especially Hynes, who's in complete control. Each drum machine snap, snippet of errant barroom chatter, Malcolm McLaren sample, and moist-eyed, questioning chorus snaps together to form a midtempo mixtape for the high-school dance you never had. The first-blush glances. The slowed mirrorball twinkle. The push and pull. "Baby are we on the line/ Tell me baby are you mine?" he sings, knowing full well that if you have to ask the question, you probably know the answer. Like many Manhattan iconoclasts before him, Hynes holds director Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary of NYC gay and transgender ball culture, Paris Is Burning, very dear. While everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga has taken inspiration from these events—one of the few safe havens for participants to revel in their true selves without having to worry about the judging eyes of society—they often focus on their more outrageous or empowering aspects (see: "Vogue"). But Dev Hynes' music is more suited to the film's beautiful and wrenching quiet moments, like when transgender model Octavia Saint Laurent confesses her desire to "be somebody" or is seen worshipping cut-outs of supermodels taped to the walls of her bedroom. The message comes full-circle on the Michael Jackson demo of a closing ballad, "Time Will Tell", which repurposes some of Hynes' own lines while a refrain of "and it keeps on running back" underlines the repetition. Gay, straight, man, woman, black, white, or anywhere in between: Heartbreak is real. It won't stop.

2013-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2013-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Domino

November 13, 2013

000c8e65-d6dc-4a4d-b97a-e4db5a36f706

Ryan Dombal

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

Thirty five years ago, while Mick and Keef injected the final doses of Jack and junk into Beggars Banquet\n ...

Thirty five years ago, while Mick and Keef injected the final doses of Jack and junk into Beggars Banquet\n ...

Blur: Think Tank

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/828-think-tank/

Think Tank

Thirty five years ago, while Mick and Keef injected the final doses of Jack and junk into Beggars Banquet out in Los Angeles, Brian Jones sucked a deep hit of kif and hopped a cab down the coast from Tangier to Larache with engineer George Chkiantz and girlfriend Suki in tow. From Larache the group hiked halfway up a mountain to the village of Jajouka, where for ages masses of drummers pounded under a chorus of reed ripping rhaita players as part of the Bou Jeloud ritual dance. Jones dreamed of expanding the Stones' sound beyond their American roots influence. Easily bored, he'd already exhausted sitar, vibraphone, dulcimer, and "the bloody marimbas" (as Keith called them) two years earlier on Aftermath. As Jones' health famously sagged along with the bags under his eyes, The Rolling Stones found less and less use for his experiments. "Moroccan drums" pop up on "Midnight Rambler", but the band would never hike that mountain for the elusive Jajouka fusion. That is, not until they mattered little, in the late 80s, for "Continental Drift", a cut hidden deep in the career nadir of Steel Wheels. By then, looking to Africa for a muse had become AOR cliche, thanks to Paul Simon and Sting. Even the derided Paul McCartney overcame bubblegum balladry for Band on the Run, recorded in Lagos amidst studio shortcomings and legendary knife-point muggings. Which brings us to Blur and their long-developed Think Tank, recorded in Morocco without founding guitar icon Graham Coxon. Rock 'n' roll precedent begs certain questions. Will the loss of Coxon equate to the loss of Brian Jones (or Mick Taylor) or a hypothetical loss of Keith Richards? Will Think Tank be another Cut the Crap, The Final Cut, Dr. Byrds and Mr. Hyde, Carl and the Passions (So Tough), Good Stuff, And Then There Were Three, Wake of the Flood, Mag Earwig, Stranded, One Hot Minute, Face Dances, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, Other Voices, Squeeze, Muse Sick-N-Hour Mess Age, Ultra, Drama, Slow Buildings, Road Hawks, Now and Them, or Chinese Democracy? Or more along the lines of Sticky Fingers, Back in Black, XTRMNTR, Adore, Up, In the Studio, Movement, Everything Must Go, Soft Bulletin, Power, Corruption & Lies, First Step, Damaged, Green Mind, This Is Hardcore, Coming Up, Full House, and ...And Justice for All? With the exception of a year back in 1995, Blur have never rested on their laurels. Unlike their peers, they've delivered each album dipped in a drastic new element while keeping a consistent melodic heart. Albarn has always taken his shots, and thirteen years on seems to savor the challenge. Take, for instance, 2002's Mali Music, his rich, ethereal solo equivalent to Brian Jones' The Pipes of Pan at Joujouka: not content to simply document the musical heritage of the locals, Albarn stepped in alongside Afel Bocoum, protegé to Ali Farka Toure, humming his melodica during Niger-side jams and later reassembling the results in London as a montage of British-pop sensibilities with post-production special effects and punches of guitar, bass, and keyboard. The ambience and dust of the Malian excursion settles heavily over Think Tank, and notably, Albarn seems to have picked up more guitar skills from Bocoum than Coxon. The majestic, snaking "Out of Time" relies less on the lugubrious, Gibraltar-docked solo than the vast, four-dimensional environment surrounding it. One gets the sense that even if Graham Coxon had caught the flight to Marrakesh, Think Tank wouldn't have turned out much different. Of course, all this focus on Damon and Graham discredits Alex James and Dave Rowntree, who really push Think Tank through the sand. The two both preempted the critics by perfectly describing the new music in interviews. James claimed Think Tank "has hips," while Rowntree simply said it's most similar to Parklife. James goes the furthest in giving Blur hips, beyond often posing with his protruding-- with the focus off Coxon, his brilliant bass playing will finally be seen as the vital element in Blur. It gave "Girls and Boys", "Parklife", "Coffee and TV", and "Song 2" their major hooks, while Graham hammered away on minimal riffs. If you're air-playing anything along to those tracks, it's the air-bass you're wriggling your index and middle fingers to. Likewise, Think Tank is laden with creative bass leads. "Brothers and Sisters" pounds along like contemporary Primal Scream revisiting Screamadelica. While Damon twists away like the Konda Bongo Man on guitar and hammers "Rockit" Hancock keyboard blurts, James freaks out like a Funkadelic foray into post-punk on "Moroccan Peoples Revolutionary Bowls Club". Rowntree, meanwhile, switches between locking the beats into motorik molds or loosens them up into Bou Jeloud punk. But Think Tank is by no means "Blur gone dance" (ironically, the two Fatboy Slim songs, "Crazy Beat" and "Gene by Gene", are, if anything, Clash-inspired)-- what was "Girls and Boys" but a disco rock track seven years before it was fashionable? Even "Battle", "People in Europe", "Death of a Party", "I'm Just a Killer for Your Love", "Entertain Me", "On Your Own", and "London Loves" used loops or drum machines. Incidentally, despite my earlier, tenuous attempts to link Blur to the Stones in some sort of sacred, afro-spiritual rock history, Blur worship more at the altar of Bowie. The Bowie element has, of course, always been there, from "Bugman" to "M.O.R."-- the latter emulated Lodger's "Boys Keep Swinging" to such an extent that Bowie was given songwriting credit. Here it seems that Albarn must idolize Lodger, in particular, as Think Tank follows the overlooked album closely in spirit. In "Fantastic Voyage", "African Night Flight", and "Yassassin", Bowie found a fractured, minimal sound affected by Middle Eastern and African music without blindly throwing a robe and bongo on while inviting Ladysmith Black Mambazo to sing. In contrast "DJ" and "Boys Keep Swinging" offered jittery, pre-new wave dance-rock. Combat Rock, too, stands as an obvious parallel. "Car Jamming", "Straight to Hell", and "Overpowered by Funk" inspire the most daring Think Tank tracks-- "Me, White Noise" (with Phil Daniels standing in for Ginsberg), "Jets", and "Ambulance". But, ah, remember Dave Rowntree saying this was like Parklife. In basic sound, as you may have gathered, no. Parklife was the defining BRITISH album of the 90s, ushering in an unintentional wave of newly patriotic blokes who failed to see it as satire, like "Born in the U.S.A." blaring at Reagan rallies. Likewise, Think Tank sounds like Britain today-- a Britain where Panjabi MC's "Mundian to Bach Ke" and Audio Bully's "We Don't Care" outchart Athlete's modernized Britpop. It sounds like Notting Hill, where American media-skewed preconceptions are both confirmed by the enormous white townhomes and shattered by the multi-ethnic markets. Damon Albarn is more likely to find bootleg dancehall CDs spread across a Pakistani carpet outside his Honest Jon's Records shop than Heathen Chemistry. Then again, Think Tank does sound like Parklife, as it contains Albarn's best ballads since. "Sweet Song" plucks an echoing piano and rusty guitar under a lake of pure, clear melody, and "Caravan" cracks like a last lament transmitted from an imploding submarine on crunchy sonar pulses and disintegrating guitar from a deep P.A. as Albarn announces, "You'll feel the weight of it," before breaking the surface in dulcimer-drenched sunshine. Oh, and Graham does pop up once, on "Battery in Your Leg", which opens sounding eerily similar to Eno and Bowie's Berlin output before Coxon makes his guitar twang like high tension wires snapping and erupts in Saturn-rocket blasts. Like being plopped down in Morocco for the first time, or Covent Garden for that matter, Think Tank takes some reorienting. To answer the questions posed earlier, the album is laughably miles better than every album on the first list, and surprisingly better than, or just as good as, every single one on the other. But don't just judge it as an album by a band coming off a major line-up change. You won't need to.

2003-05-05T01:00:01.000-04:00

2003-05-05T01:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Virgin

May 5, 2003

000dccd4-3ae4-4ff3-8655-2b6e35437c6a

Brent DiCrescenzo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/

Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst team up for a tight-knit folk-rock album about alienation, solitude, and our potential to better ourselves against bad odds.

Phoebe Bridgers and Conor Oberst team up for a tight-knit folk-rock album about alienation, solitude, and our potential to better ourselves against bad odds.

Better Oblivion Community Center: Better Oblivion Community Center

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/better-oblivion-community-center-better-oblivion-community-center/

Better Oblivion Community Center

When Conor Oberst first heard the sad, conversational songwriting of Phoebe Bridgers, he felt compelled to get in touch. “It’s nice to know you are out there singing this stuff,” he told the 24-year-old Los Angelean after she sent an early version of her breakthrough debut, 2017’s Stranger in the Alps. “I think lots of people will find good comfort in your songs. They are soothing and empathetic, which I know I need more of in my life.” He wasn’t kidding. After some trying years, Oberst’s recent work has been a vessel for stark, existential unburdening. On 2016’s Ruminations and its 2017 companion Salutations, he funneled first-person accounts of grief, depression, insomnia, paranoia, court appearances, and hospital visits into his most vivid and unsettled music in years. Drawing a direct line to the shaky downer anthems that made Bright Eyes an influence for so many young artists—Bridgers included—these newer songs sounded exhaustive and raw, like there was a punchline at the very bottom of all his anxieties and he’d dig through them like a pile of dirty laundry to uncover it. For Bridgers, this was essentially square one. Her songs, hushed and patient, often seek in-the-moment honesty over retrospective wisdom. She’s equally adept at capturing an omnipresent fog of melancholy and the cosmic joke looming just outside our periphery. Her debut was filled with odes to friends who died too young and woeful retellings of her stoned, late-night regrets, all sung with a lightness that made her worldview seem both chaotic and consoling. Late in the album, she invited Oberst to sing on a ballad called “Would You Rather.” Voicing the troubled family member who helped make Bridgers’ childhood survivable, he echoed her fluttering whisper in a low, empathetic wheeze: “I’m a can on a string/You’re on the end.” The duo’s first full-length collaboration, Better Oblivion Community Center, continues their conversation. It’s a tight-knit folk-rock album about alienation, solitude, and our potential to better ourselves against bad odds. Despite its loose concept about a dystopian wellness facility and its elaborate rollout—complete with cryptic brochures and a telephone hotline—it’s not a bracing political statement like 2015’s Payola, Oberst’s pre-Trump rallying cry with his old punk band Desaparecidos. And unlike Bridgers’ recent EP as one-third of the supergroup boygenius, these songs don’t seek collaboration as a means for full-throated emotional escapism. Instead, Better Oblivion is a collection of quiet, wandering thoughts: the sound of twin souls burrowing deeper into their common ground. Despite the laid-back atmosphere, the songwriting focuses on characters pushed to breaking points. Many of the songs revolve around destinations of wellness and escape: vacations, silent retreats, “little moments of purpose.” Such ideas have fascinated Oberst since his 2007 pivot-point Cassadaga, and they’ve never really left his work since. As an artist who depicted himself on his last album cover drowning face-down in a swimming pool on a beautiful summer day, he remains skeptical of taking it easy. “All this freedom just freaks me out,” he sings, sounding genuinely freaked out, in “My City.” The track ends with the album’s most primal vocal performance: a long note that the duo holds in unison before getting snuffed by a steady, clipped drumbeat. It’s a centering moment, like removing your earbuds and realizing how serene the world around you is compared to what’s in your head. Because of their uniquely emo vocal styles and their tender subject matter, both Oberst and Bridgers are typically characterized as confessional songwriters, which can belie the complexity (and humor) of their work. In these songs, they push each other to write more in character. The opening “Didn’t Know What I Was in For” is an imagistic story-song that spirals out from dreary contentedness. Observing a friend who “says she cries at the news but doesn’t really” and eavesdropping on poolside conversations that start polite but “always sounds so cruel,” Bridgers implicates herself in a generational sense of helplessness: “I’ve never really done anything for anyone,” she sings over a mournfully strummed acoustic guitar. Better Oblivion is dotted with refrains that sound breezy but read like last-ditch confrontations long after the spark has died (“Is this having fun?/It’s not like the way it was,” “I loved you/I wore you down,” “Why don’t you want it anymore?”). The radiant “Dylan Thomas” gallops forward with its impressive rhyme scheme, but the words mostly highlight a shared tendency toward fatalism: the couple at the party who get along best when they’re pointing out how pathetic the whole endeavor is. Along the way, Bridgers sneaks in what sounds like a jab at her critics (“They say you’ve got to fake it/At least until you make it/That ghost is just a kid in a sheet”) and Yeah Yeah Yeahs guitarist Nick Zinner shows up for some woozy solos, like a hungover take on Springsteen’s “No Surrender.” Suddenly, their pact to “go it alone” seems somewhat triumphant. For each declaration of acceptance, there’s a bleaker attempt at finding closure: doomed visions of digging people up from the ground or driving until you feel different. In “Chesapeake,” the album’s slow-burning centerpiece, Bridgers and Oberst share a formative memory, sitting on someone’s shoulders during a concert: “We were the tallest person watching in Chesapeake,” they sing in harmony. Bridgers has written before about finding meaning with the music blasting—crying in the crowd with the teenagers, drowning out the sadness with a car radio. Here, she sings it like a lullaby, as Oberst’s familiar quiver helps guide toward a lonely conclusion. Sparsely attended and tepidly received, the concert they’re singing about seems kind of like a drag, and any revelation it inspires is short-lived. Soon they know that the music will be over, the crowd will disperse, and the world will be louder and more confusing than ever.

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

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

Rock

Dead Oceans

January 25, 2019

000f04a1-57c3-4264-bf9c-402bb2e62982

Sam Sodomsky

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

Founded in 1975 to release "Little Johnny Jewel", the debut single by Television, Ork Records had a brief but influential five-year run. This lavishly packaged and thoroughly researched boxed set captures the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined.

Founded in 1975 to release "Little Johnny Jewel", the debut single by Television, Ork Records had a brief but influential five-year run. This lavishly packaged and thoroughly researched boxed set captures the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined.

Various Artists: Ork Records: New York, New York

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21203-ork-records-new-york-new-york/

Ork Records: New York, New York

Founded in 1975 to release "Little Johnny Jewel", the debut single by Television, Ork Records had a brief but influential five-year run. The brainchild of West Coast weirdo Terry Ork and art school dropout Charles Ball, the label was blessed with a number of big firsts. Ork released not just the first Television single, but also the first music from poet and punk rock originator Richard Hell and the first singles by Memphis-based musician Alex Chilton following the dissolution of Big Star. This in addition to great power pop by Chris Stamey as well as new wave groups like Marbles, Student Teachers, and the Revelons. Compiled by Numero Group, the lavishly packaged and thoroughly researched Ork Records: New York, New York collects the label's complete 13-single catalog along with a number of related releases that never made it to shelves during the label's existence. Among these are a scrapped single by New Jersey's the Feelies and a sidelined 7" by the rock critic Lester Bangs that ultimately saw daylight via Spy Records, an imprint run by John Cale. In 2015, nostalgia for late '70s New York City can feel oppressive, given its documentation in an endless stream of record reissues, memoirs, films, and biographies. If you grew up during the '90s, your entire cultural coming-of-age might have been spent surfing successive waves of the city's punk-era remembrance—from "Saturday Night Live" reruns to Julian Schnabel's Basquiat biopic, the Strokes to LCD Soundsystem. But New York, New York is a significant artifact. The music and photographs capture the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined. It's a glimpse at iconic personalities in a moment of vulnerability, before they were fully hatched and before anybody cared. By contemporary standards, these songs might not register as wild or controversial. In the context of the '70s—a time of slick pop and bluesy choogle—Ork's artists were from another planet. The first sound on Television's "Little Johnny Jewel" is not a squeal of feedback or an expertly rehearsed riff, but the thin and elastic tone of Tom Verlaine's guitar plugged directly into the mixing board. Hell's "(I Belong to The) Blank Generation" is a bizarre throwback of a different kind—a skewed and slanted remake of the Rod McKuen's jazzy 1959 novelty song "The Beat Generation" that was a far cry from the buzz saw tones and pop minimalism of the Ramones. Listening back now, the music is familiar because these sounds have become so deeply embedded in the DNA of today's indie rock. Chris Stamey's "The Summer Sun" is nostalgia-tinged bubblegum pop, buoyed by jangling acoustic guitars and backing "oohs/ahhs." Chilton's singles are charmingly stoned and discombobulated proto-slacker rock. A one-off studio project, Prix delivers the pained power pop that Ork probably wanted from Chilton, but the singer was then unwilling to deliver. Others offer slightly fudged takes on the more established downtown bands. The Erasers' clean guitar tones and slanted melodies recall Television. The Student Teachers' stripped down and hookly "Channel 13" is not too far afield from Blondie, whose keyboardist, Jimmy Destri, produced the band's single. These bands weren't necessarily biting a successful style, just taking cues from their peers. Bangs' "Let It Blurt" is an outlier, in that it is terrible. The music—a Beefheart-inspired and Quine-penned backing track—isn't the problem. It's the singing. Bangs slurs and blubbers about the details of a break-up. The details are ugly and unflattering. If Television's music attempted ecstatic transcendence, "Let It Blurt" represents the opposite end of the spectrum—earthly woe, gracelessness, the sadness and confusion of lonely dudes. Perhaps this was the intent, though. For what it's worth, the critic seems aware that both the song and his lyrics are absurd. A California counterculture type lured east by Andy Warhol's Factory scene, Ork met Verlaine and Hell when the latter was a clerk at Cinemabilia, a Greenwich Village film memorabilia shop that he managed. He took an active interest in their musical pursuits, set them up with guitarist Richard Lloyd, and when they formed Television, Ork became the band's first manager. In 1975, when the group—by that point in its official, Hell-less lineup—recorded a few 4-track demos, Ork agreed to press a single. The record did well enough to warrant a second release, Richard Hell's first two songs with the Voidoids. Because Ork was a good scenester but a poor businessman, Ball came on to help professionalize the operation. Initially, Ork's mission was to capture a local scene that had grown up around CBGBs but over time there wasn't much incentive to keep going. The bands were not popular and there was little hope of financial reward. It was hard for bands to get booked outside of New York, even regionally. In the liner notes, the Feelies' Dave Weckerman explains that there was only one new wave-tolerant venue west of the Hudson. Many of Ork's artists were not particularly fond of their singles on the imprint. At the time, Television's Richard Lloyd told interviewers that he hated "Little Johnny Jewel"—"It worked primarily as a demo," Hell said of his single, "I can't stand to hear it." But the lack of polish is what makes many of these recordings compelling. On Marquee Moon, Television sounded immaculate and artful. Here, the band is sloppy and primitive, but also unconventional and free. On their debut album, Crazy Rhythms, the Feelies sounded tense and jittery, but Ork's version of "Fa Cé La" is fast and blisteringly loud. Eventually, the money ran out and Ork folded in 1979. Ball would go on to found the influential no wave label, Lust/Unlust and Ork left both New York and the music business, returning to the West Coast. Both have since passed on (Ork in 2004, Ball in 2012). When the label fizzled, punk and new wave were still very much underground. Of the bands that populated the CBGBs scene, only Blondie and Talking Heads had found anything resembling national success. For all the talk of doom and gloom in today's post-Internet music world, some comfort can be taken in the fact that, even when people were still buying records, Ork's prospects seemed equally grim. The label's biggest hit sold 6,000 units, but, according to the set's liner notes, most releases were lucky to sell a third of that. If you're running an independent record label today, those numbers might not be that far out of reach. In Ork's case, the label wasn't ultimately a lark or a waste of money—the music was heard. These singles diffused out into the world and found their way into the hands of weirdos in far-flung locales. When promoting Hell's single in 1976, Ork ran advertisements with the singer's phone number and suggested that people, "Call Hell." "I called him," Minutemen bassist Mike Watt told author Michael Azzerad in the book, Our Band Could Be Your Life. "I said, 'Is this Hell?' And he said, 'Yeah.' And I got scared and I hung up." That accessibility stuck with Watt, though. "That, to me, was punk."

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

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

Numero Group

November 11, 2015

000f76d3-1b3d-49a2-96f9-11e2d95b8ac8

Aaron Leitko

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

On her second album, Taylor Swift straddles the line between country and pop. Still new to Nashville, she took her teen self seriously and demanded others do the same.

On her second album, Taylor Swift straddles the line between country and pop. Still new to Nashville, she took her teen self seriously and demanded others do the same.

Taylor Swift: Fearless

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

Fearless

When Taylor Swift moved to Nashville as a teenager with hopes of becoming a country star, she faced an uphill battle. “Basically, all the record companies went, ‘Ah, how cute. She’s just a little kid,’” Swift said in 2008. “They also said, ‘Give up your dreams. Go home and come back when you’re 18.’” “I would feel like they were deleting me from their BlackBerrys as I was telling them,” Scott Borchetta, president of her label Big Machine, told The New York Times of the Nashville industry’s reaction to signing Swift. She never wanted her age to be “the headline,” or a number that screamed to writers and producers that she was just a starry-eyed hobbyist making music in her bedroom. On her self-titled debut, Swift established herself as a precocious storyteller who could write love songs vague and ageless enough that anyone might find herself in them, perhaps to prove to Nashville that a teen could do it. Her second album, Fearless, is a rebuke to that approach, with Swift bringing listeners straight to the dreaded football-game bleachers and mean-girl maze of high school. She took her teen self seriously and demanded others do the same, navigating the cloying innocence of a girl who simultaneously experiences relationships like a dog-eared Nicholas Sparks novel and also has the wisdom to know that not all kisses end in a rainstorm. Fearless straddles the line between country and pop, clinging really only to Swift’s faint, faux-country accent which magically materialized at some point between her hometown of Wyomissing, Pennsylvania and Nashville, and a few bits of fiddle and banjo that flicker in and out of the record. “I write as life happens to me,” Swift told Rolling Stone in 2010, and, on Fearless, it’s clear she’s dead serious; a day before she had to turn the album in, she begged Borchetta to add the track “Forever & Always,” a breakup song inspired by the pop singer Joe Jonas. The songs are diaristic not just in their images of fairytale romance and frustrated heartbreak, but in how Swift writes her lyrics like mini-stories with wordy, narrative structures. On “Love Story,” she rips from the play I’d assume is burned into every average American high-schooler’s brain, Romeo and Juliet, for a tongue-twister of a chorus (“And I said, Romeo, take me somewhere we can be alone…”). She sounds almost breathless by its end. She likes to give a play-by-play, stacking minute summaries of a moment on top of each other like she’s story-boarding the perfect montage out of an indelible memory. “And I stare at the phone, he still hasn’t called/And then you feel so low/You can’t feel nothing at all,” she rattles off on “Forever & Always.” Prior to and after Fearless, there was a conversation in the press about whether Swift could actually sing, especially as she was still considered an underdog in a genre where her peers were vocal powerhouses like Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert. On “Change,” the album’s blow-out finale, her voice loud and guttural in the mix, she proves the skeptics (or, as she would say, haters) wrong. But Swift’s talky-delivery and conversational songwriting style—a mixture of personal intimacy and outright fantasy—sounds original and deliberate. With their dramatic arcs and plot twists, these songs often sound like Swift is quite literally speaking as she would to her subject, high off the adrenaline rush of a blindsiding breakup or meeting her new Prince Charming. “When I sit down and write a song, the only person that I’m thinking about in that room is the person that I’m writing the song about,” Swift told Marie Claire in 2009. “And what I want them to know and what I wish I could tell them to their face, but I’m going to say it in a song instead.” She serves straight Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul with “Fifteen,” half guardian angel and half alarming guidance counselor to high school freshmen everywhere, reminding them there’s so much they don’t know yet, and name-checking her real-life best friend Abigail. At times, the extreme specificity can feel like a misstep, with the album suddenly taking on the dated air of a copy of Swift’s yearbook we’re somehow privy to. Such is the case with “Hey Stephen,” a twee, passed-in-class love note of a song that could be a brother to Plain White T’s’ “Hey There Delilah.” What’s remarkable here is Swift’s earnest sweetness. In the years following, she would become a master at biting songs about exes, from “Dear John” to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.” There’s little to none of that vengefully confessional sentiment on Fearless. The closest she gets is when she calls Jonas a “scared little boy,” on “Forever & Always,” but even that insult, so wholesome, is still understandably tepid for a young woman wading through the minefield that is her first series of serious relationships. The best songs come when her writing is wielded with knife-like precision, revealing feelings with each cut rather than glamorizing the teen tropes of hanging by the telephone or yearning for crushes. It’s the fantasies that truly define Fearless; dancing in a storm in your “best dress,” a love that feels like a roller-coaster. While the teen pop stars of the early-aughts like Christina Aguilera or Britney Spears had their highly erotic, sensational hits written by Swedish pop masterminds, there was something novel about Swift being a teenager and writing about her reality in her own terms coming into that same mainstream space, redefining what “teen pop” could sound like in the process. But despite the fact that Swift was drawing from her real life on Fearless, the album speaks less to the actual reality of a teen girl than to a teen girl’s imaginative desires, desires which, for Swift, are remarkably pure. In 2008, teen pop culture was bending to influences of chastity. Swift’s Disney peers like Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers helped popularize purity rings and one of the biggest YA series and its movie adaptation, Twilight, implicitly preached the virginal values of its Mormon creator. “Love Story,” which culminates in being told to pick out a “white dress” for a wedding, or “Fifteen,” which mourns the fact that her friend Abigail gave “everything she had to a boy,” hit hard with this same audience. Their clean, plucky country-lite production cut through the colorful pop of artists like Lady Gaga and Beyoncé on the radio. As much as Swift was hailed for her ownership over her own image and voice, what she was serving to teen girls was still squeaky clean and parent-approved. On Fearless, Swift also cultivated an underdog, misunderstood voice with songs like “You Belong With Me” and “The Best Day” that would, surprisingly, continue to haunt her music well into adulthood. “They don't like what I stand for,” Swift said of her classmates in 2008. “They don’t like somebody who stands for being sober, who stands for anything happy.” Even the clunky refrain of “You Belong With Me” (“She wears short skirts, I wear T-shirts/She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers”) became ripe for parody in later years, a testament to how meaningless any of those signifiers are now. Yet the simplicity of that refrain was the clearest window into Swift’s potential as a mainstream pop songwriter. The explicit modesty of these songs may be fixed in 2008, but the songs nonetheless stick with you; Swift’s great remake of “Love Story” in slick 1989-era production is proof of its timelessness. Fearless remains not only Swift’s best-selling album, but also her breakthrough into the pop charts, a world which would soon become her permanent home (or a permanent cage, depending on how you respond to her recent material). It was also the last time Swift was simply seen as an artist restless with promise and lived-in inspiration who was deemed a “savant” and a “prodigy” by critics before being saddled with the mark of a tabloid celebrity as well. No moment solidified this more than when Swift was called to the 2009 VMAs stage to accept the Best Female Video award for “You Belong With Me,” beating Beyoncé and prompting Kanye West to storm the stage and proclaim Beyoncé’s video better. “I like the lyrics about being a cheerleader and she’s in the bleachers!” West wrote later in an apology. In Fearless, Swift captures and bottles a girlish sense of romantic excitement and suburban anguish that is all too fleeting, before real adulthood and the depths of the world’s cruelty actually hit her. For the rest of her career, she would uncork this nostalgia like champagne and pour it over her pop mega-hits. “This ain’t Hollywood, this is a small town,” she sings, as if to remind herself that she’s still just the teen girl next door, a country singer with dreams of a bigger stage. In that all-too-brief moment, she was right.

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

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

Pop/R&B

Big Machine

August 19, 2019

00102087-ece4-4361-a1c0-a4c19414152a

Hazel Cills

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

16 years after their original underground classic, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham reunite for an album that plays like the continuation of a decades-long conversation.

16 years after their original underground classic, Matt Sweeney and Will Oldham reunite for an album that plays like the continuation of a decades-long conversation.

Matt Sweeney / Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Superwolves

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matt-sweeney-bonnie-prince-billy-superwolves/

Superwolves

A few years after he’d decided to start calling himself Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Will Oldham released a song called “A Wolf Among Wolves.” It’s about a person who doesn’t feel properly seen, and it’s exceptionally sad, even for the guy who wrote “I See a Darkness.” “Why can’t I be loved as what I am?” he sighs. “A wolf among wolves, and not as a man.” Wildness, ferocity, heart, all the things wolves tend to signify—the way he sings, it’s as if they’ve all been drained away by loneliness. In the years since, Oldham has made collaboration central to his work, partly, as he recently told GQ, in the hopes of “turning aspects of an innate introversion into something that resembles extroversion.” And while he’s had innumerable artistic successes, both on his own and with others, he never sounds more at home, more fully himself, than he does when writing and recording with guitarist Matt Sweeney. Not for nothing did they name their first album together Superwolf. Now, 16 years after Oldham’s tender singing and Sweeney’s cable-knit guitars made the original an underground classic, they return with Superwolves, an album that is, just as its title suggests, both a continuation of Superwolf and something more. On the album, the duo let us in on a decades-long conversation, their respective instruments virtually finishing one another’s thoughts. Their bond is so deep, and their knowledge of one another is so profound, it’s essentially impossible to hear the boundary between them. Oldham and Sweeney began work on the material that would eventually become Superwolves five years ago, using the same process they had before: Oldham wrote his lyrics as pure text, then sent them to Sweeney, who set the words to melody and wrote the music. Sweeney has a lover’s sense of Oldham’s tendencies as a singer, and he arguably knows how to write for Oldham’s strengths better than Oldham does. They move in tandem, Sweeney coaxing Oldham into following his line in the chorus of “Make Worry for Me,” the singer thinning out his voice and letting it break over the word “me” in a way that makes it sounds like a soft howl. On the page, “Make Worry for Me” is a chest-thumping song about power and horror, the kind of thing you’d expect from a main character of a Nick Cave song. But Sweeney’s slinking guitar and sinuous verse melody complicate the mood. “You’ll be shaking, you’ll be trembling, and you’ll moan,” Oldham sings, and as with many Bonnie “Prince” Billy songs, it’s hard to say whether we’re supposed to be terrified or turned on. Oldham has always had a light touch as a lyricist, but on Superwolves, figuring out the perspective can be like watching shadows thrown by a candle in a drafty room; you have a pretty good idea where this is coming from, but what you’re seeing keeps shifting. “Good to My Girls” is sung from the point of view of a madam reflecting on how an indifferent cosmos compels her to treat the women in her charge with care. But squint a bit and it could easily be about a new dad taking up his responsibilities, confronting his mortality, and shutting out the outside world. Oldham sympathetically depicts a woman whose life has crawled to a halt as she anticipates a deity who never arrives in “God is Waiting,” then sharply makes his own declaration of faith: “God can fuck herself, and it does—hardcore,” he assures us. The tone shift is jarringly sudden, undermining the woman’s dignity. In “My Blue Suit,” Oldham observes that his partner looks better in his clothes than he does, and how he’d like to be rolled up in her pocket for a while. It’s a nice little subversion, the man being possessed by the woman for a change. Or it may just be that Oldham thinks his wife looks hot in menswear. As lyrics, these songs resist simple interpretation, something Sweeney must have been keenly aware of; his settings, and Oldham’s performances, give Superwolves an all-too-human ambiguity. In the course of making the album, Oldham became a husband and father, and in 2020 he lost his mother to Alzheimer’s. Throughout Superwolves, he sings with a mix of sadness and self-assurance, powered by the clarity and purpose that major life events can bring. “Shorty’s Ark” begins as a playful roundup of animals (“Killer whale, pocket wolf, rhinoceros, and hound”), but even as he takes pleasure in these simple joys, Oldham keeps an eye on what’s unfolding in the cosmos: “They’ll remind us of eternity, so they won’t have to die.” Even “My Popsicle,” an ode to his young daughter, feels tinged with death, as if Oldham were conscious of the likelihood that songs like this one will be what she turns to when he’s gone. Sweeney is attuned to these subtle changes in the weather; his playing seems to predict storms before they register in the lyrics. Oldham sings from the beyond in “Resist the Urge,” his narrator consoling the mourning by insisting “You’re not without that much of me, I wasn’t just a body” while Sweeney plays a soft rag behind him. His guitar is gentle and sweet, and its kindness cuts against the hardness of grief. Sweeney’s playing on Superwolves is so full it has the paradoxical effect of making his instrument seem to disappear, and his poetic phrasing often says more than a single guitar should be capable of. Even the ineffable Mdou Moctar takes his cues from him; when the Sahel star and his band step in to fill out “Hall of Death,” a rolling Tuareg rock song that nevertheless could’ve been on Oldham’s bluegrass-tinged live album Funtown Comedown, Sweeney’s milky, phased-out guitar sets the pace. Sweeney is ultimately a session guitarist, albeit one of the highest-profile session guitarists of his generation; versatility is part of his job description. Whether he’s playing with Iggy Pop or Adele, Sweeney himself is always beside the point. Oldham, too, has always preferred to set up camp a few steps away from the culture at large, staying just close enough to make sure what he has to say can be heard. These are solitary ways of being—the rambler and the freelancer are both essentially alone, after all. It’s not difficult to understand what they see in one another. Perhaps more than most of their peers, Sweeney and Oldham’s particular forms of solitude have been shaped by their ongoing proximity to others; the original Superwolf was the product of two loners delighting in how easily those solitudes intertwined. Superwolves’ success, then, is unimaginable without the 16-year hiatus between albums. Both artists needed to wander, to lose themselves, to become strangers again—even if only in their artistic partnership—so they could come back together and find that the rearranged pieces somehow still fit. 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.

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

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

Rock / Folk/Country

Drag City

May 4, 2021

00125f01-a66f-4a60-bd13-10eba21615f7

Sadie Sartini Garner

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

Pinch & Shackleton is a welcome return to the seminal dubstep producers' peculiar roots. Rather than a summing of styles, it plays as a vision of what bass music was a half-decade ago.

Pinch & Shackleton is a welcome return to the seminal dubstep producers' peculiar roots. Rather than a summing of styles, it plays as a vision of what bass music was a half-decade ago.

Pinch & Shackleton: Pinch & Shackleton

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16052-pinch-shackleton/

Pinch & Shackleton

When I was first exploring bass music, Pinch and Shackleton were gateway artists. Both masters erecting sickly, muted environments, their dub(step) was arty and sprawling enough-- both made use of Middle Eastern samples-- to lure an American rock-kid into England's dance culture. The two artists have been quiet lately: Pinch retreated into dance-oriented 12"s in addition to curating his Tectonic imprint, while Shackleton moved to Berlin and released some minimal techno for a minimal-techno label (an excellent one). Announced and released last week by the astute Honest Jon's label, Pinch & Shackleton is a welcome return to each artist's peculiar roots. Despite obvious common ground, Shackleton and Pinch achieve their thick headspaces in different ways-- Shackleton the austere, death-obsessed perfectionist and Pinch the reggae-savvy producer unafraid to let a mediocre rapper sully his tracks. Rather than a summing of styles, Pinch & Shackleton plays as a vision of what bass music was a half-decade ago, two producers' onetime vision of progress. It benefits massively from a lack of artists interested in these sounds: In 2011 bass music is brighter, or deeper, or more aggressive. P&S is not very bright or deep or aggressive; its nine tracks often file forward with quiet confidence but without explicit purpose. The duo stresses clarity: Synths float well above Shackleton's exacting percussion (its complexity dialed back here), sub-bass rumble, and vocal samples applied judiciously. When the music floats hazily by, such as during the opening minutes of "Levitation", it is an intentional, manicured float. Four minutes into "Cracks in the Pleasuredome" the duo dials up shards of a Middle Eastern vocal cadence, and I'm reminded of a type of mystical-industrial fantasies Pinch and Shackleton are capable of conjuring. "Selfish Greedy Life" chatters ominously, little demons competing for attention with steam-vent bursts and saucer-like patches. "Monks on the Rum" is the duo's palette stretched on putty, diffuse and manipulated but no less composed. This is not the foggy, soft-focus paranoia of an artist like Burial, whose work has informed so much underground electronic composition; Pinch and Shackleton don't want to suggest darkness; they want to create it. They do so with familiar tones and structures, but ones that remain effective: see, after three minutes of whispering synths and whinnying flutes, if the bass drop of "Burning Blood" doesn't make you smell something. In 2011, Pinch and Shackleton are a sensory experience; their waters are crystal clear, but sometimes you don't want to know what's at the bottom of the lake. Let's be excited they're showing us again.

2011-11-18T01:00:03.000-05:00

2011-11-18T01:00:03.000-05:00

Honest Jon’s

November 18, 2011

00131fc8-6a4d-4000-a405-3ffff2386032

Andrew Gaerig

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

The Los Angeles punk duo get sober and burn off the fog of their last release for a crisper, punchier sound.

The Los Angeles punk duo get sober and burn off the fog of their last release for a crisper, punchier sound.

Bleached: Don’t You Think You've Had Enough?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bleached-dont-you-think-youve-had-enough/

Don’t You Think You've Had Enough?

Jennifer and Jessica Clavin had a near-cinematic Los Angeles upbringing—daughters of a guitarist who played noise music in the ’60s, the two formed a punk band in their garage in the Valley while still in high school. They’ve run down the West Coast checklist: toying with surf rock, visiting Joshua Tree, playing the Burger Records showcase. On Don’t You Think You've Had Enough?, the Clavin sisters remain unafraid to wear their inspirations on their sleeves. But they sound sharper and more focused than they have in a while. Some of the record’s most successful tracks, like the slow-burn opener “Heartbeat Away” and the breakup anthem “Rebound City,” stick to basics—distortion-fried power chords, thumping backbeats, bouncing bass lines. Jennifer’s voice dips into twang on “Valley to LA,” recalling fellow West Coast sisters Heart. As with Welcome the Worms, the aesthetic is culled mostly from the sexed-up glam metal of the late ’70s and early ’80s. As if to drive the point home, the music video for “Kiss You Goodbye” recalls the debauched pool party from Boogie Nights, massive hair and all. But Bleached also try on plenty of new looks. On “Somebody Dial 911,” they borrow from the goths, Jennifer’s puppy-love verses backed by basslines dripping with metallic reverb. On “Kiss You Goodbye,” they reach for gleaming funk guitars and gulped, staccato vocals. Some songs miss the mark—“I Get What I Need”’s creeping, bluesy bassline proves awkward—but most of them work, if only because the band sounds like they’re truly putting their all into their melodies and riffs, rather than leaving the heavy lifting to distortion. If it feels like the fog that had set in on their last release has been lifted, it might be because the sisters themselves feel a bit more clear-headed. In recent interviews, they talk about the clarity that has come with their recent sobriety, the ways that abstinence from alcohol can reframe friendships, change long nights out, reset the vantage point from which you examine your own past. Aside from the crisper and warmer production, this clarity comes through in their songwriting. On “Silly Girl,” they sing about cutting off a bad influence with the tossed-off dismissal of someone who’s not mad, just disappointed: “Goodbye, time for growing up/ Don’t you think you’ve had enough?” And “Hard to Kill” serves as a slick reality check as Jennifer coolly sings, “You’re so cool/You hate yourself.” After 11 tracks of scorching riffs and lyrical dunks, “Shitty Ballet” finishes the record on a surprisingly introspective note, with acoustic guitars and a stripped-down vocal performance. Bleached has never sounded this humble or vulnerable—you almost want to lean in to catch the words before Jennifer swallows them. But just after the bridge, as her falsetto slides into its faintest register, they go electric, and the song explodes. Over a whirlwind of fuzzed-out guitar and cymbal crashes, Jennifer’s voice rises to a scream muffled by distortion—“Like, oh my god!” she sings, almost with a wink. After all, control is much more interesting after you've let things fly completely off the rails. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-07-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Dead Oceans

July 16, 2019

00137cc9-c6b8-4c81-a1da-f476bb4ded6a

Arielle Gordon

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

Listening to Madlib's music, I'm reminded of the Black radical maestros responsible for some of the outermost-limits music-making ...

Listening to Madlib's music, I'm reminded of the Black radical maestros responsible for some of the outermost-limits music-making ...

Madlib: Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5541-shades-of-blue-madlib-invades-blue-note/

Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note

Listening to Madlib's music, I'm reminded of the Black radical maestros responsible for some of the outermost-limits music-making of the past half-century: Sun Ra, George Clinton, Lee "Scratch" Perry-- it's an elite club, but by no means an exclusive one. What sets these artists apart from their contemporaries and/or imitators is the fact that their effortless, genuine material occupyies the fringes of acceptable musicality without ever sounding pretentious; they translate their visions direct to tape and send them out into the world to fend for themselves. By definition, such prophets are prolific, and usually to a fault: who has time to edit existing ideas when there are already a dozen more waiting to be made musical flesh? It's a curse/blessing that makes for horribly inconsistent discographies with two or three full-out flops for every single flash of brilliance. In less than ten years, Madlib has proven himself a logical heir to this peculiar tradition. He's already got more projects under his belt than Sun Ra had hats. Beginning with his role as emcee and producer with the Oxnard, CA-based Lootpack, Madlib has gone on to infiltrate the musical consciousness with an entire backpack worth of aliases: the helium-blunted rapper Quasimoto, the one-man nu-jazz band Yesterday's New Quintet, and collaborations under his more common name with Jaydee (Jaylib) and MF Doom (Madvillian). Like the aforementioned auteurs, Madlib's projects have their share of hits and misses, but the creativity and lack of stultifying concern for critical assessment clearly shows there's a lot more coming down the line. It's a bit of a surprise, then, that an artist as multi-faceted as Madlib was invited into the dank catacombs of the original Blue Note master tapes for a "remix" project. Though he's certainly not the first to gain access to the house that Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff built, his predecessors-- Pete Rock, Biz Markie, Us3-- were cut from a considerably safer cloth; which presumably explains the decision to package the results as Madlib "invading" the Blue Note catalog, just in case his unpredictability happened to get the best of him. But, gentle executives, your gamble pays off two-fold: Madlib gets a shot at a significantly wider audience and the label has an opportunity to redeem itself for all those Kurt Elling and Joe Lovano records they've been haplessly peddling since the early 90s. Appropriately enough, Madlib's multiple personality disorder creates the "shades of blue" the title refers to. On one hand, he stars as himself, semi-dutifully remixing Blue Note classics by Gene Harris & The Three Sounds, Donald Byrd, Ronnie Foster and Bobby Hutcherson into outsider works of downtempo and instrumental hip-hop art. With the exception of Bobbi Humphrey's "Please Set Me At Ease"-- which Madlib and guest emcee Medaphoar transform into Slum Village hip-hop-- there's nothing overtly radical about the remixes, but closer listening reveals strange happenings in their murky depths, as the role reversal of foregrounded breakbeat and buried melody on the disc's centerpiece "Stepping Into Tomorrow" illustrate exquisitely. The rest of the tracks are "new interpretations of Blue Note classics" by Yesterday's New Quintet and its offshoot ensembles Morgan Adams Quartet Plus Two, Sound Direction and the Joe McDuphrey Experience. Don't be fooled: this is entirely the work of Madlib and his uncanny ability to play a disorienting number of instruments, and his equally clever habit of inventing names for each member of the fictional band(s). As a result, these pieces are slightly more linear in construction, relying more on harmony and tempo dynamics than the loops upon which the remixes are largely built, but are similarly genius in terms of both concept and execution. Madlib even goes so far as to fake a live recording for the Joe McDuphrey Experience's medley of Horace Silver's "Peace" and Herbie Hancock's "Dolphin Dance", only to give himself away by chopping up the mix beyond recognition in the middle of the piece. Judging from the results of this encounter, I'd like to see Madlib let loose upon the Saturn catalog, or crafting a Yesterday's New Quintet record of Parliament-Funkadelic tunes like the one he concocted in tribute to Stevie Wonder last year. But if his creative impulse moves along at anything remotely attuned to the speed it has so far, I'm sure there'll be five or six more Madlib-helmed records to sort through every year from here to Armageddon as he hits and misses his way to defining his own Black radical cosmology.

2003-08-12T01:00:04.000-04:00

2003-08-12T01:00:04.000-04:00

Rap

Blue Note

August 12, 2003

0013fce8-8754-4932-9ddc-1d438cc87e77

Pitchfork

Despite hit songs on both sides of the Atlantic and Best! Band! Ever! endorsements from UK scribes, Las Vegas-based The Killers' questionably titled debut album is radio-friendly style-over-substance.

Despite hit songs on both sides of the Atlantic and Best! Band! Ever! endorsements from UK scribes, Las Vegas-based The Killers' questionably titled debut album is radio-friendly style-over-substance.

The Killers: Hot Fuss

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4579-hot-fuss/

Hot Fuss

The Killers' press release is surprisingly straightforward, explicitly detailing the punchcard proving ground that this Las Vegas quartet sprang from before phrases like "bidding war" and "headlining tour" entered their daily vocabulary. But it can afford this bit of honesty, since the British music press has shouldered the load of attendant Killers hyperbole, and because the band's Hot Fuss checks most of its truths at the door to their 800-foot limo. By autumn 2003, their single "Mr. Brightside" had secured the usual Best! Band! Ever! overstatements from UK scribes, and the song's happily vacant grafting of New Order decadence to Housemartins bop bounced it hard into CMJ and SXSW. Subsequently, the band's dance card attracted Warbucksian suitors of the largest variety. And now, the resulting Hot Fuss drops on both sides of the Atlantic wrapped in this tabloid backstory, unable to separate its hype from its unabashedly referential sound. Hot Fuss floats boatloads of blasé lyrics about the pressures of being fabulous and the politics of fucking over an easily sippable blend of 80s and 90s British pop influences, rarely pausing to test the end product. Top-shelf mixing and attention to melody helps out the record's appeal as lifestyle music for sheltered bloggers and female professionals who still wear cool hairstyles. But damnit if that demographic leaves little room for a life of The Killers' own. Where are they, besides their wily references to past pop pros and a vague sense of Sin City cynicism? Not anywhere, really: The Killers are just the latest band to be born too quick inside the popular music vacuum, where expectations for broad accessibility kill dudes' potential for deeper creativity quite fabulously dead. This is disappointing, since Fuss' better moments make The Killers' knack for hooks and cool poses clear. Vocalist/keyboardist Brandon Flowers has replaced his tonsils with melodrama; he's hijacked Jarvis Cocker's accent to make his Vegas-boy rep sound that much tighter. "Brightside" isn't getting near the dejection of The Stills; it has no illusions about being anything other than a provocative single. Its relentless keyboard 'n' guitar racket shuns dourness altogether, as Flowers remarkably makes lines about a girlfriend getting off with some other guy resonate as some kind of weird triumph. "Somebody Told Me"'s deadpan couplets about having a "boyfriend who looks like a girlfriend" are similarly clever, but the cut's a brazen rewrite of The Strokes' treble-kick heroics. Yes, Casablancas, et al ripped off pieces of their sound, too, but that's the difference-- they already did the ripping. The Killers' recombination arrives too late to be recognized as first-tier thievery. At this point, Hot Fuss is just bringing it from what's already been brought. Hot Fuss opener "Jenny Was a Friend of Mine" establishes Flowers' admirable love for tones lost to rockers' rising fears of sounding too fruity. But as the album's singles follow in quick succession, rocking a sound softer than post-punk but full of the stuff that came right after it, The Killers can't figure a way to add resonance beyond adding more keyboards, more layered guitars, more cribbing of established tastemaking currency (check the intellectual-property-case-waiting-to-happen that is "Change Your Mind"). In other words, Hot Fuss has no use for subtlety. It revels in its appearance as The Shit from day one, allowing for filler-type indulgences like the impossibly aimless-- and quite possibly shitty-- "Everything Will Be Alright". Meanwhile, Fuss' UK version excises the brazenly contemporary raggedness of "Change Your Mind" for the astoundingly inane "Indie Rock 'n' Roll", a blaring joke of thick-chorded guitar and arrogant, pitch-corrected yowling that gives out cornholes to every unknown American group valiantly trying to find the cracks of creativity in its titular sound. So, it's plain that The Killers have made a record more concerned with artifice than artistry. If the intent is to place their album's principal teases on the next Now That's What I Call Music compilation, then bravo. But why does it try to squeak by as another deft pop reversion when it actually seems to be a revisionist cash dance? For the kids, I presume. But Hot Fuss is not hardcore; it's hard evidence that it's tough to focus on making great rock when you're preoccupied with cultivating an image.

2004-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00

2004-07-05T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Island

July 5, 2004

00140173-c249-4646-9b9c-7c14e71b6163

Johnny Loftus

https://pitchfork.com/staff/johnny-loftus/

The Chicago band’s second album dials back their beaming, golden-hour soft rock to a gentle lull.

The Chicago band’s second album dials back their beaming, golden-hour soft rock to a gentle lull.

Whitney: Forever Turned Around

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/whitney-forever-turned-around/

Forever Turned Around

Whitney’s music lives in the harmonious space where contemporary indie rock melts into ’70s soft rock. It’s part of what makes them so easy to enjoy, like a nuzzle from someone else’s dog. They sound nice, simple, scruffy, which doesn’t always amount to compelling music, but the band’s palatability works in their favor. At this point, Whitney are a phenomenon, a commodifiable entity. They’re legends in their hometown of Chicago: They have their own holiday and a beer named in their honor. Even to the casual indie-rock listener, they’re inescapable. And rare as it may seem, the reason for the fervor is because they’re actually good. Their second album, Forever Turned Around, is welcoming and wooly, yet slightly more isolated and somber than its 2016 predecessor. There aren’t any standouts here, no “Golden Days” equivalent that you could bop along to at a cookout. Instead, Whitney dial it back to a gentle lull. Forever Turn Around ends up being meandering, sleepy sometimes to a fault, a charmingly doe-eyed take on the kind of classic rock revivalism that plays well at music festivals. Forever Turned Around is a study in environments for falling in and out of love, finding beauty in the little things, and meditating on the passage of time. The imagery comes in the form of redwood trees, rhododendrons in bloom, and dewy grass on a cool morning. On “My Life Alone,” co-frontman Julien Ehrlich sings of “lonely nights/Waiting for the sunrise” and passing the time by watching “rivers roll,” while swelling horns and honeyed guitar stretch into AM-radio rock territory. “Valleys (My Love),” a reflection on the late stages of a relationship, is a more effective environment for Whitney to explore what it means to feel lovelorn. Fingerpicked guitar meets vintage organ, warming the space around Ehlrich’s words like blush blended into a cheek. The lyrics feel stark in comparison: “I feel like I’m holding on/To a place in your heart that’s long gone,” he sings, his voice heavy with melancholy. At its worst, Forever Turned Around is a bit boring. If you listen to it too many times you might forget it’s on; it blends into the background easily. But the mood it conjures is surprisingly rich. The album plays out like a gorgeous day at the end of the summer and the bittersweet calm that follows as the weather gets cooler. It encapsulates the idea of the saddest and most perfect time of year: You put on a song as buoyant as “Giving Up,” or “Rhododendron,” and you see a version of yourself that you may have lost touch with. Whitney haven’t changed much since their last album, and truthfully we don’t expect them to. They’ll keep releasing beaming soft rock albums coated in golden-hour light. But dependability is its own kind of virtue. Like holidays and beers, Whitney are the same each time. Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

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

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

Rock

Secretly Canadian

September 4, 2019

0014a843-eb7e-4351-8df0-0c1d0feea887

Sophie Kemp

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/

The duo’s latest album reaches back into their past but gets stuck in a strange middle ground between big-budget indie and low-budget pop.

The duo’s latest album reaches back into their past but gets stuck in a strange middle ground between big-budget indie and low-budget pop.

Tegan and Sara: Crybaby

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tegan-and-sara-crybaby/

Crybaby

It’s fitting that for a duo who have counseled and comforted innumerable teen weirdos throughout the years, Tegan and Sara have spent the last decade of their career in a strange state of arrested development. With the release of 2013’s Heartthrob, the twin sisters made a surprising—and, crucially, successful—pivot to bold, sharply-written ’80s-inspired pop, the kind they listened to as kids. That album and its lead single, the cheeky and still-dazzling “Closer,” were some of the pair’s most commercially successful records to date; unsurprisingly, they have been drawing from the same well ever since, to quickly diminishing returns. First came 2016’s Love You to Death, which spawned the brilliant single “Boyfriend,” but otherwise paled in comparison to its predecessor. And then there was 2019’s Hey, I’m Just Like You, a sweet but altogether patchy album of teenage demos redone in the band’s 2010s style. Crybaby attempts to return, at least in part, to the hook-driven indie-rock of the band’s earlier records. Working with producer John Congleton—who, ironically, is better known for working with artists like Angel Olsen and Sharon Van Etten to make their records sound bigger, not smaller—the pair actively attempt to scuff up the pristine finish of their recent output, bringing guitars and live drums back to the fore and embracing shaggier song structures and roughed up vocals. At the same time, Tegan and Sara clearly can’t entirely let go of pop music. So Crybaby is stuck in a strange middle ground between big-budget indie and low-budget pop: it’s all yelped vocals and the kind of vocal processing that Skrillex and Diplo popularized with “Where Are Ü Now,” which then proceeded to dominate pop for the next five or so years. The overwhelming flavor of Crybaby is pitched-up ornamental vocal sample, and it gives the album an embarrassing pungency, like milk left out of the fridge a minute too long; the technique appears on nearly every song, and it means that even the best songs here—brash opener “I Can’t Grow Up”, lovely would-be country ballad “Faded Like a Feeling,” the devastatingly weary “Whatever That Was”—feel like they’re demos recorded in 2014. At times, Crybaby does actually manage to identify potential new paths forward for Tegan and Sara. “I Can’t Grow Up” plays like a brighter, more melodic take on electroclash, with its yelped, anxious verses (“You spin me ‘round again/Twist my head until you hear ‘pop’”) providing some of the record’s most exciting, full-blooded moments. Touching on ideas of reliving unhealthy relationship dynamics over and over, it’s an appealingly spiky song, one far more sharply realized than much of the rest of the record. Not every song feels as deft, and many lack the incisive specificity that is the Quins’ trademark: The maudlin synth-ballad “Yellow” in particular, with its chorus of “this bruise ain’t black, it’s yellow/My sweet heart sings out like the devil” feels unusually confused, caught up in swampy attempts at wordplay. It’s understandable that Tegan and Sara are caught in some endless transit between the pop-punk of their 2000s output and the gloss of their 2010s work; the past few years have seen the pair release full-album reinterpretations of both The Con and So Jealous, write a memoir, and have that memoir turned into a TV show. But Crybaby displays neither the maturity of a band in a retrospective era, nor the sense of fun of a band trying not to grow up; instead, there’s something loose-ended about it—like it’s a companion piece to all the mythmaking and nostalgizing, rather than the other way around.

2022-11-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-11-04T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

Mom+Pop

November 4, 2022

001543c1-2276-4270-8202-65b71406c12f

Shaad D’Souza

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

On Savage Mode, the dry-voiced and deadpan trap rapper 21 Savage recounts a life that has known nothing but violence. It's his strongest release, thanks to sleek production by Metro Boomin.

On Savage Mode, the dry-voiced and deadpan trap rapper 21 Savage recounts a life that has known nothing but violence. It's his strongest release, thanks to sleek production by Metro Boomin.

21 Savage / Metro Boomin: Savage Mode

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22161-savage-mode/

Savage Mode

By the time 21 Savage (real name Shayaa Joseph) committed to rap full-time, he’d seen and gone through hell: early trouble in school, getting shot, having multiple friends murdered. His entire career thus far plays like the PTSD aftermath of these horrors. When he raps, his deadpan delivery never betrays any hesitation or doubt. His voice dry and grainy, he recounts a life that has known nothing but violence, countering with the same violence back like a shield. His matter-of-fact delivery and unchanging cadence feels like the product of a hardened soul, and a desire to prove to be more terrifying than what lurks around you—a superman complex that says if you’re not the hunter, you’re the hunted. With Metro Boomin’s brooding, eerie production fitting onto his raps like a skin-tight costume, his latest release, Savage Mode, is his strongest and bleakest work. Credit Metro on another great job as a producer: Shaping his characteristically infectious sound to match the demented heaviness of 21’s verses, he creates a brooding collection that enhance 21’s disaffected cool. Savage Mode is vibrant despite being grim and understated; it's a street record where heavy lines like *“*Wet your mama’s house, wet your grandma’s house, keep shootin’ until somebody die/So many shots the neighbor looked at the calendar, thought it was Fourth of July” somehow bounce, and you find yourself nodding and flailing your arms. Those lyrics come from the plodding-yet-bouncy “No Heart,” which finds 21 sneering at “fake tough” rappers. When he raps, “Seventh grade I got caught with a pistol, sent me to Pantherville/Eighth grade started playin’ football, then I was like fuck the field/Ninth grade I was knocking niggas out, nigga like Holyfield/ Fast forward nigga, 2016 and I’m screaming fuck a deal,” he establishes what separates him from the rappers and shit talkers that claim a street life they don’t lead, but it also stands as an explanation for so much of the bleakness of the music and the performative apathy in how he treats violence; he’s been consumed by it in the most formative years of his life. The grimness of so much of the album tends to make the few moments of sweetness hit harder. The album’s one tender song, “Feel It,” is staid and unimaginative but nonetheless unashamedly vulnerable and loving. “These streets so dirty I just want someone who really there/Can’t fake love, just want someone who really care” he raps, suddenly switching off the menace for a second; when he follows it with “I’m savage to these niggas but to her I’m gentle” you believe him. This same softer note comes through in the dreamy, contemplative “Ocean Drive” as he raps about the places rapping has taken him that he never thought he’d see. There’s a lot to like and find invigorating about Savage Mode, but as a project, it is too conventional for its own good, never deviating from or adding anything fresh to the predictable beats expected of a trap record. It swims in violence, drugs and sex and only offers faint sketches of anything deeper. Sticking so squarely to the script precludes any possibility for 21 Savage to expand or break away; instead, it just sort of meanders about in well-trod territory.  Luckily, at only 9 tracks, the project doesn’t overstay its welcome. Just because something is predictable doesn’t stop it from being a good ride.

2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Slaughter Gang

July 23, 2016

00175a77-d962-4040-867c-e3fb75d1d384

Israel Daramola

https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/

Swans are a band that conjure primal forms of power. Their second studio album since re-forming is among the group's longest and it manages to expand on their sound while simultaneously summarizing everything they've recorded before.

Swans are a band that conjure primal forms of power. Their second studio album since re-forming is among the group's longest and it manages to expand on their sound while simultaneously summarizing everything they've recorded before.

Swans: The Seer

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16964-the-seer/

The Seer

Swans are a band that conjure primal forms of power: thunder and lightning, fire and brimstone, master over slave, predator over prey. Their earliest albums came out in the wake of New York's no wave scene, a loose, radical contest to see who could make rock'n'roll sound as ugly as possible while still retaining the rhythms and forms that made it rock'n'roll. Swans, not central to the scene, countered with the possibility of wiping out rock altogether. The result was something that sounds sort of like monks chanting in front of a jet engine. Frontman Michael Gira once compared being in the band to "trudging up a sand hill wearing a hair shirt, being sprayed with battery acid, with a midget taunting you"-- a description that could just as easily describe listening to them. During the late 1980s and early 90s, Swans went through a goth phase, incorporating sparkly synths, reverb, acoustic guitars, and other signposts of what most people would call "music." But whenever things felt too comfortable, Gira would flatly drop lines like, "You never say you know me when I'm inside you," or, "I'm so glad I'm better than you are." Beauty and ugliness have never been as relevant to their music as the possibility of turning music into a space of confrontation. In the parlance of reality television, Swans aren't-- and never have been-- here to make friends. After a nearly 15-year break during which Gira focused on the dark Americana project Angels of Light, Swans reformed. Since then, they've released two albums, one studio (2010's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky) and one live (2012's We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head). "[The reunion] is not repeating the past," Gira said in 2010. He is currently 58 years old and often photographed in a cowboy hat, not smiling. At two hours, The Seer is among the group's longest studio albums and, in a sweeping gesture that only the most confident and egocentric artists can pull off, it manages to expand on their sound while simultaneously summarizing everything they've ever recorded before. The band's current palette includes a whole trunkload of acoustic instruments: bells, accordion, clarinet, dulcimer, a chorus of bagpipes, and what's referred to cryptically as "handmade violin thing." With the exception of some amplifier distortion, the album puts incredible emphasis on the human body's capacity to beat the shit out of an instrument in a far more satisfying way than machines ever could. (As an instructive gesture, Gira spends the first four-and-a-half minutes of "Mother of the World" panting in rhythm.) Noise has never been as much of a concern in Swans' music as pure dissonance; of the way certain combinations of notes literally cause the air to vibrate more violently than others. At its most chaotic, like the climax of "The Seer", the band doesn't just sound aggressive, it sounds like it's bursting apart. The tracks on The Seer aren't songs but incantations, riffs piled on riffs shifting and evolving for as long as half an hour at a time. Sometimes Gira sings; often, there's a zombie-like chorus behind him. One section fades into the next in ways more reminiscent of a soundtrack than an album, and even relatively contained tracks like "Lunacy" start and end with winding, immersive passages as the band comes to a boil. Like airplanes, Swans take their taxiing and descent as seriously as their flight. Stylistically, the album draws a jagged line through a universe of serious, apocalyptic music, from country blues to free jazz to drone and the brutal, hypnotic guitar rock Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth made while Gira was still moaning into the void. A big group of guests are important here. Former Swan Jarboe contributes, as do Karen O, and Ben Frost on my personal favorite credit, "fire sounds (acoustic and synthetic)." The bigger the group, the more familial the feeling and the more heightened the illusion is that the music is not coming from inside its players but existing, like a spirit, somewhere outside and between them. In the same way it would be hard to get the full experience of a good movie by only watching half of it, The Seer demands its two hours. To paraphrase something the author Ben Marcus said in a trenchant conversation with Jonathan Franzen about the value of experimental fiction, it is not a record for someone deciding whether or not they'd rather be listening to music or playing paintball. Of course this doesn't mean you need to peel off your own skin while listening to enjoy it. It has made my experience of cleaning the house, for example, feel very, very consequential. At each step of Swans' career, they've been somehow tied to whatever "dark" genre was most culturally prominent, but The Seer affirms what they really are and what their legacy will probably be: A psychedelic band that rejects the musical template of psychedelia the 60s gave us. Vision has always been a metaphor for both political counterculture and religious mysticism. Prophets, pulling back the veil, "seeing through" things in an interest of revealing what they believe to be the raw, burning truth-- this is what Swans have always been about, and what The Seer seems more explicitly occupied with than anything they've ever done before. Gira had come out of art school, and even Swans' most mature sounding music is rooted in the kind of catharsis through self-negation that was at the conceptual heart of 70s performance and body art. One piece from his student days involved him being blindfolded and led naked into a roomful of strangers with a tape player strapped to his body, playing a prerecorded confession of his sexual desires. The piece's coordinators had found women willing to do the same. The crux of the piece was Gira and the stranger crawling around in the room until they found each other, at which point, they'd have sex. In the world of Swans, the pain of catharsis is always in service of elevating to some higher plane of being. Granted, most people probably prefer to find this in exercise and not public sex, but when sifting through Swans' apparent bleakness, it's important to recognize that their goals are and always have been to remind us of the ways extreme states of being, however intense, a unique kind of blessing. One of their live albums was called Feel Good Now, which is as succinct a self-summary as any artist could offer: Later, Swans bluntly suggest, you'll be dead. Is this music primal? Yes. Intense? Absurdly so. On "A Piece of the Sky", Gira sings that "the sun fucks the dawn." Why the sun can't just come out normally is unclear. But there's still room for music like this, music that claws its way unapologetically toward wherever it thinks answers might be hiding. After all, without Icarus and his wings, we might never know how high the sky went or how hot the sun got. For 30 years Swans have challenged the boundaries between beauty and ugliness, music and noise, catharsis and abuse. To borrow a verb from their own violent, polarized world, The Seer is the album that transcends them.

2012-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-08-27T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Young God

August 27, 2012

001b1a2e-5971-48ab-adbe-dcbcd1ba22ce

Mike Powell

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

Twenty years after their debut, Pearl Jam reissue the LPs that marked their peak cultural impact and transformation into the world's biggest cult act.

Twenty years after their debut, Pearl Jam reissue the LPs that marked their peak cultural impact and transformation into the world's biggest cult act.

Pearl Jam: Vs. [Legacy Edition] / Vitalogy [Legacy Edition] / Live at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15263-vs-legacy-edition-vitalogy-legacy-edition-live-at-the-orpheum-theatre-boston/

Vs. [Legacy Edition] / Vitalogy [Legacy Edition] / Live at the Orpheum Theatre, Boston

In 2011, Pearl Jam celebrate the achievement of having been Pearl Jam for a very long time. It's their 20th anniversary, and they're marking the occasion with a blowout, yearlong victory lap: a massive curated festival, a career-spanning documentary directed by Cameron Crowe, and loving reissues of their second and third albums, Vs. and Vitalogy. It's an unusually protracted foray into the limelight for what was once a chronically spotlight-averse band, but they seem to be wearing the moment lightly, savoring it for its valedictory worth and gladly soaking up the adulation. In the years that spanned the original release of these two albums, they spent most of their effort scrambling to escape stardom, and Vs. and Vitalogy bear their struggle's deepest marks. This willful abdication of fame has become their most well-known, oft-told story, and seeing these records given lavish repackaging only highlights that it feels like ancient history now. Consider: The opening salvo in Pearl Jam's war against commercialism was their decision, for 1993's Vs., not to make a video for MTV, a situation with no present-day analogue. Their protracted feud against Ticketmaster seems similarly remote now that Pearl Jam seemingly never stop touring: whether you live in Albany, West Palm Beach, Ljubljana, or Katowice, Pearl Jam probably just stopped by or will be there shortly, treating their entire discography like an all-you-can-eat buffet. These days, few bands are more comfortable in their own skin than Pearl Jam, and the monolithic mass culture bearing down on them in 1993 has vanished into thin air. But even if the media context has long crumbled, the sound of a young band absolutely freaking the fuck out is still loud and clear on Vs. and Vitalogy, and it makes them Pearl Jam's most resonant and affecting records. Their huge-selling debut, Ten, hit with an impact that could not be repeated, and they would go on to make some very good music later in their career. But as a band, this remains their most vital and endearing period-- the last time the entire world cared deeply about what Pearl Jam would do next. Their music, as always, remains the least complex part of this equation. Pearl Jam's retooled take on classic rock was often lumpy and flat-footed, and they sounded hopelessly unfashionable next to their punk-influenced contemporaries. But focusing on these flaws, as most rock critics did and still do, misses out on the music's signature virtue, which is communication. It is this burning and self-evident need for human connection, more than anything else, that has always elevated and redeemed their most dubious efforts, and it was a quality personified by Eddie Vedder, an empathetic lead singer who transmitted a vivid emotional intensity. At its most winning, Pearl Jam's music exudes his best personality traits: warm, earnest, generous, passionate, and, yeah, harmlessly dopey sometimes. Consider, for example, Vs.'s cringe-inducing gun-control song "Glorified G". "Kindred to being an American," Vedder pronounces in a hokey fake-jingo accent, over a corn-pone Skynyrd guitar lick: it's the sort of wince-inducing mess we get when he attempts to be caustic. Vs. is filled with this sort of clumsily wielded, early-90s political indignation, and it can make for precarious listening. Nevertheless, Vedder's anguished tenor anchors us through some rough waters-- including "Dissident", which, for some reason, focuses on the Lifetime movie-worthy story of a lonely spinster giving shelter to and falling for a charismatic young revolutionary, only to surrender him to the authorities. It is a profoundly ludicrous song. But the way Vedder hollers "she gave him away," you'll catch yourself momentarily shaking your head in disgust at the woman's cowardice. Hell, even "Glorified G" boasts a killer bridge. In retrospect, however, Vs. appears as the moment where it became crystal-clear that Pearl Jam's ballads were ultimately stronger than their rockers. For all their clenched fury, songs like "Go", "Animal", and "Blood" mostly just thrashed awkwardly in place. "Daughter", by contrast, is plaintive and lovely, and "Elderly Woman Behind the Counter in a Small Town" has survived nearly two decades of dorm-room slaughtering intact, an effortless and sunlit acoustic ballad that Rod Stewart could have written for Every Picture Tells a Story. By the time of 1994's Vitalogy, Pearl Jam had spent a lot of energy on extra-musical fights. Recorded during breaks on their strenuous Vs. tour and subject to the communication breakdown of the entire band, Vedder took his strongest hand yet in the album's direction, pushing further from arena rock pyrotechnics. Somewhere in there, the original drummer-- good-natured hesher Dave Abbruzzese-- was fired due to "personality conflicts." (Read: he enjoyed being famous.) The resulting album is still a defiantly weird beast, though not really in the way Vedder intended it to be. Under his direction, Vitalogy became their "experimental" album-- which, in Pearl Jam lingo, translates to "the one with all the most transparently awful ideas." On "Spin the Black Circle", we are treated to the spectacle of an empathetic, intuitive surfer straining to be a splenetic NYC punk rocker, while the band behind him falls over itself trying to keep pace with a simple hardcore riff. The polyrhythmic chanting of "Aya Davanita" sounds like corporate-retreat weekend warriors seeking their inner third eye in a drum circle. The accordion-and-tuba spoken-word of "Bugs" is an avert-your eyes, car-crash attempt at Captain Beefheart surrealism. And "Hey, Foxymophandelmama, That's Me" is an eight-minute sound collage featuring snippets of dialog from mental patients. Here's the funny thing, though, about all of Vitalogy's ill-advised wandering-- it paid off elsewhere. Through all these misadventures, you can hear what was once the most rigid rhythmic backbone in rock began to stretch and pull like taffy, so that when Pearl Jam relax into a Stooges/MC5 proto-punk groove on "Last Exit", they sound rough, loose and limber like never before. In the snarling, adenoidal "Satan's Bed", Vedder actually manages one or two acerbically funny lines. It all came together on "Corduroy", which moves fluidly from quiet brooding to seething explosions to, in the chorus, a simple, humane plea, set to Vedder's single greatest melody. "Corduroy"'s famous plea, of course, was from Vedder to his own too-adoring fans. "I don't wanna be held in your debt," he sang shakily to millions-- and, entranced, they screamed it back at him. The poignancy of Vitalogy, and the source of its actual weirdness, is how it veers from Vedder's impulse to hide from everyone and his instinctual desire to reach out. Nothing captures these warring impulses better than "Nothingman" and "Better Man", two folk-rock pillars of their catalog that are as open-hearted and yearning as anything they ever wrote. Even when he was trying his hardest to scowl at the world, Vedder couldn't help feeling, all over the place, for everyone. Misanthropy was always unbecoming on him. Most of his best, most beloved, and resonant songs are about other people's problems: "Nothingman", "Better Man", "Daughter", "Elderly Woman". In concert, the kiss-off of "Corduroy" has become Pearl Jam's most joyful, communal moment. Live, Pearl Jam have always been a legendarily intense experience, and they've made an alarmingly consistent practice of making at least momentary believers out of anyone who sees them. The Vitalogy and Vs. reissues come bundled with a recording of the band at their early peak, at a 1994 show at Boston's Orpheum. It's a rousing set, and it opens compellingly, on Ten's slow-burn "Oceans". But years of live-Pearl-Jam-recording fatigue has dulled the impact of another official release-- this is a band that once decided to officially release every single show of a world tour, after all-- and Live at the Orpheum Theatre contains no real revelations. As they have done for years, they cover Neil Young's "Fuckin' Up" (the version on Live on Two Legs hits harder.) They play "Even Flow"; they don't play "Jeremy". The only real surprises are when Vedder drastically changes the words to "Immortality", and when he brings out Mudhoney's Mark Arm for a vicious rip through the Dead Boys' "Sonic Reducer". (Unable to bring himself to utter the dreaded g-word, he introduces Arm as "one of the forefathers of... uh... all the great music that everyone listens to.") It's a fine set, but it's hardly necessary. In the ensuing decade-plus after Vs. and Vitalogy, Pearl Jam have gone from utter exile to a comfortable perch on the fringes. That's where they sit now, finding refuge in their live shows, which have developed a traveling-cult aura that clearly recalls the Grateful Dead's. For the members of Pearl Jam, however, the live shows don't just bring together their faithful; they rewrite the band's own troubled history. In 2011, it doesn't matter what song they drag out in concert: "Lukin", the one-minute punk brain-fart from No Code? The poignant but relatively rare B-side single "I Got Id"? The ukulele song from Binaural? No worries: The crowd knows every word and will go absolutely apeshit for it. They can thrash joyfully through "Spin the Black Circle" as if Jeff Ament and Mike McCready didn't grit their way through the recording session. Hell, they can even play "Bugs" live now if they want. These days, they have the aura of happy, weathered warriors, proud to have just made it out together. The live show remains the most optimal set of conditions to give yourself over to their ham-fisted grandeur; go see them, if you have a chance. They'll be by soon.

2011-03-30T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-03-30T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

March 30, 2011

001ee393-d1fa-4ba5-8651-53eb2b496f0a

Jayson Greene

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

With impressive performances and a few promising moments, the young Brooklyn post-punk band clearly knows all the right moves—but it’s hard to tell what moves them.

With impressive performances and a few promising moments, the young Brooklyn post-punk band clearly knows all the right moves—but it’s hard to tell what moves them.

Geese: Projector

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/geese-projector/

Projector

A band as studious in the rock canon as Geese knows the value of a good narrative. The quintet were actual high schoolers while making their debut album, Projector, and it arrives with a virtually cinematic tagline: In a world at the mercy of TikTok teens, here comes a good old fashioned Brooklyn buzz band restoring New York post-punk to its rightful place as the only music that should matter. That’s the hype talking, not Geese—but Projector doesn’t go out of its way to contradict it. Their very first single after signing to Partisan, hell their first single ever, is nearly seven minutes, a SparkNoting of Talking Heads’ scope of influence over the past 40 years. Ask five music nerds between the ages of 18 and 55 what it sounds like and they’ll provide a different but accurate answer. Cameron Winter’s lyrics are a portrait of the aspiring Brooklyn indie rock artist as a young man, loosely connected images of empty house parties, grubby tour vans, and the way alcohol sublimates minor romantic misunderstandings into the raw material for generational classics. Even the title itself—“Disco” somehow both vague and impossibly vast—suggests “signature song” was its starting point. Geese also acknowledge the necessity for a proper mission statement. Despite being the unequivocal highlight of Projector, opener “Rain Dance” was wisely avoided as a lead single, assuming an audience that longs for the days of reading a 10/10 NME review weeks before they rush to Sam Goody and see what all the fuss is about. Geese sprint from the starting gun, an urgent performance that gives little indication of Projector’s largely mid-tempo pace. Dan Carey—the producer who has become a veritable Max Martin for young post-punk—provides a muscular mix that leaves enough space for ear-turning, barbershop harmonies and whirring synths. “Bring me back to life,” Winter asks somewhat sheepishly before it morphs to “Coming back to life!” a minute later. And once you’ve declared yourself the resurrection, “Low Era” submits that there’s only one thing left to do—strut. Geese are an impressive band, full stop. But is Projector the result of prodigious talent meeting uncanny inspiration or just what happens when kids in their formative years apply their seemingly unlimited enthusiasm and attention towards a singular obsession following a well-worn path? Geese repeatedly trace over the tessellated guitar harmonies and cut-time rhythms of Women while disposing of the meat locker ambience that amplified the severity of their lyricism. They can slice and dice like the Rapture, but their interest in proper dance music only goes so far as naming one of their songs “Disco.” In Projector’s most promising and only original moments, Geese make a tentative embrace of a reverberant grandeur that puts them more in line with U2—probably the least cool band they’ve been compared to in their short career, but still the most popular band that ever legitimately could call themselves post-punk. Geese know all the right moves, but what really moves them? As “Low Era” indicates both literally and figuratively, Geese have yet to find their voice. Winter jives in a half-falsetto (“Some are born with the psychic inflection,” big if true!) before settling on his dominant mode, an affected yawp broad enough to evoke Julian Casablancas, James Murphy, and maybe those times when Will Toledo does his caricature of the two. What Winter hasn’t done yet is develop a distinct narrative personality that can make his blasé delivery feel earned, rather than a conscientious stylistic tic. Projector is rife with clever phrases that infect Geese’s teenaged fixation on minute social interactions with the similarly teenaged tendency towards obtuse metaphors to distract from what they really mean. Even granting Winter authorial license, his ambitious, occasionally resonant, and often belabored lines about NYC ennui and what it all means scan like the thoughts of people whose worldview was largely shaped by listening to Is This It. Maybe they’re not Greta Van Fleet with a dog-eared copy of Meet Me in the Bathroom, but if Geese were in the middle of a four-band bill at the Mercury Lounge in 2002, would we remember them now? Would they still be considered legit post-punk prodigies if they were 20 and from Brookline, Massachusetts instead? Would Geese be better served if they were deemed 2021’s answer to the Stills rather than the Strokes? Maybe, but none of these hypotheticals are true. Nearly every one of their reference points may have once been intended as subversion, incubated in New York’s grimiest clubs, but for as long as Geese have been a band, Talking Heads are a classic rock institution, the Strokes can headline festivals in off-cycles and win Grammys for recapturing even a hint of their former glory, and CBGB is a restaurant at the Newark Airport. Projector is best appreciated not as the work of post-punk’s resurrectors but its cocky, charismatic trust fund kids: unconcerned with the legitimacy of their inheritance and confident that there’s no way they can fail. 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.

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

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

Rock

Partisan

November 4, 2021

001f0a56-7f8c-4fab-b288-5ff6523f3823

Ian Cohen

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

Kanye West’s stint in Wyoming created an album born from chaos for chaos’ sake. Though it can be somewhat fascinating, it is undoubtedly a low point in his career.

Kanye West’s stint in Wyoming created an album born from chaos for chaos’ sake. Though it can be somewhat fascinating, it is undoubtedly a low point in his career.

Kanye West: ye

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-ye/

ye

There is something about the crumbling of American civilization that makes you want to say “fuck it” and go full cowboy; cue Kanye West and friends cosplaying Wyoming as a concept, living out a dude-ranch fantasy beneath the Tetons. It was there, in Jackson Hole—the most economically imbalanced city in America—where Kanye threw together his eighth album in the midst of a public unraveling that, in a society where celebrity wasn’t deified, would be the stuff that ends a career. In the month leading up to ye, during which he and his team of producers and songwriters created the 24-minute album in its entirety, West proudly donned a Trump-autographed MAGA hat, sputtered that slavery seemed like a choice, and offered a steady stream of empty platitudes urging his followers to “stop thinking so much” and “google dopamine.” He was broadly considered “canceled,” a term we use because we at some point collectively decided to project our sociopolitical hopes and fears onto millionaires. And then, in keeping with his tradition of elaborate, immersive rollouts, he chartered private planes for 150 or so influencers to listen by Jackson Hole campfire to seven tracks he farted out to meet his arbitrarily self-imposed deadline. Those who are obsessed with money assume goodwill can be bought. Even “free-thinkers” know nothing really comes for free. If West has successfully pulled off anything this album cycle, it is managing expectations with all the shameless savvy of his in-laws, the Kardashians. Of course, Kanye West was never really going to get canceled. West knows better than anyone that a few decent beats to remind people of The Old Kanye are usually enough to replenish one’s goodwill, bleak as it may be. And while ye, whose diminutive title feels appropriate, may be vacant of soul and full of punchlines like, “Don’t get your tooth chipped like Frito-Lay,” it is at the very least not West’s alt-right album—that’s where the bar is set now. Nor is it the Performance Art 101 bait-and-switch some fans had hypothesized. Instead, ye reveals that the past month’s flailing attempts at iconoclasm were building up to exactly nothing: It is an album born from chaos for chaos’ sake, an album that can barely be bothered to refer to that chaos with anything more committal than a Kanye shrug. It would be convenient to say that ye fails because of his persona. It remains unclear exactly when West lost the map: Perhaps it was recently, or perhaps he has always been an ideologue representing nothing more or less than the hyper-individualist dogma of Kanye West. Until this year, the music had always been great enough to ostensibly eclipse the man himself, had we wanted that. But for most of the 2000s, loudly declaring West an asshole was, in itself, a certified asshole move, the party line of drunk uncles and least-favorite cousins. And besides that, the intersection of his art and persona was made clear eight years ago when he toasted to his own douchiness before anybody else could. If anything, ye compresses the Kanye West character, making everything about the artist feel smaller, blurrier, like you are squinting at an image once larger than life. We have reached the point where West’s once-constant churn of ideas—usually inspired, regularly awkward, but always like nothing else out there—is barely meeting the standard of “Lift Yourself,” the desperate troll banger that preceded ye, corralling every meaning of the word “scat.” The problem with ye is not that it was made by an unrepentant asshole, but that it is thoroughly, exhaustingly boring—a word I never imagined would apply to a generation’s most reliable innovator. As an art-making ethos, “first thought, best thought” works great for beat poetry and hardcore. For most pop stars, including those deemed geniuses, a few weeks to create an album start to finish is hopeless. To be fair, West has pulled his share of buzzer-beaters: a decent chunk of Yeezus’ vocals were written and recorded in the 48 hours before deadline and for all we know, he’s still fixing “Wolves.” Those last-minute edits registered as the neurosis of a perfectionist—annoying, definitely, but at least a sign of care. But ye feels rickety, almost, as if removing a bassline would send the whole thing toppling. The lyrics riff on events of the past month, sometimes the past week. When West announced the album alongside four other G.O.O.D. Music productions in late April, none of ye’s seven songs existed. You could argue that this isn’t exactly a shocking development. If there’s anything that unites the divergent sounds across West’s catalog, it’s their reactionary nature—antagonistic responses to his previous material (in the case of Yeezus) or the state of rap at large (on his earliest popped-collar mixtapes) or to his public perception (My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy). But ye responds petulantly and exclusively to reactions deliberately provoked by West himself, the kind of thing you’d expect from a YouTube celebrity whose last name is Paul. It’s as if he’d completely forgotten the music was the reason we loved him in the first place. “Yeezy Yeezy trolling OD, ha!/Turn TMZ to Smack DVD, ha!” he scoffs in an anesthetized Juvenile flow on the aptly-named “Yikes.” He is referring to his recent visit to the gossip site’s headquarters, where he was duly humiliated by a newsroom employee after suggesting slaves should have simply emancipated themselves and invoking the right-wing dog whistle of black-on-black crime in his hometown of Chicago. Somehow, still, he sounds proud. “Yikes” offers no further insight into West’s beliefs because there is not much more to say. Instead, he flips Russell Simmons’ rape allegations into a cringey #MeToo punchline; his conclusion is relief that it isn’t him in the hot seat. “Wouldn’t Leave”—a minimalist re-conjuring of The Old Kanye where Young Thug, PARTYNEXTDOOR, and Ty Dolla $ign’s voices melt into one—presents a telling glimpse into the Kardashian-Wests’ psyches. “She told you not to do that shit/She told you you was gonna fuck the money up,” West casually reminds himself on the outro, presenting the past month’s careless fuckery as a quirky tale of how boys will be boys while exposing the foul inner mechanics of brand management. It is dark, dark, dark, as one might expect of a record that opens with a song called “I Thought About Killing You,” which pretty much does what it says on the tin. “I think about killing myself, and I love myself way more than I love you, so…” West rambles over a queasy, almost negligible beat that builds into a sped-up, uncleared sample from PAN’s 2017 mono no aware ambient compilation. These are not easy statements to hear, no matter how casually West presents them, and they’re contextualized further by the album art: an iPhone photo of Jackson Hole’s horizon, snapped en route to the listening session, on which West has scrawled “I hate being Bi-Polar its awesome” [sic]. As West sells it, ye is an album devoted to the stand-off between visceral self-loathing and baroque levels of narcissism, further complicated by mental illness and a recent opiate addiction. Listening to “Killing You,” it’s unclear whether West’s violent thoughts are directed at his wife or towards himself, or if he even means it at all: maybe a homicidal fantasy is just another badass way to start an album, an inverted “Ultralight Beam.” It is the work of a broken man, whatever the case. But to meet West on his terms here feels impossible. In his world, self-expression justifies itself, and speaking your most twisted thoughts out loud is an act of bravery, one that makes “I Thought About Killing You” not just a fine thing to write and share, but a work made from a place of love. Art, then, is a way of existing beyond reproach, an excuse for everything. “People say, ‘Don’t say this, don’t say that’—just say it out loud, just to see how it feels,” West encourages further in “Killing You,” still speaking plainly, without much emotion. It is the most coherent distillation of his creative mindset that West has offered all shaky-ass year. Just do whatever, this attitude suggests: All art is good art so long as it feels honest, and anything goes so long as you worship yourself. ye is a record made entirely from this “Just say it out loud” ethos—from the dead-eyed dad jokes (“None of us would be here without cum,” is an immediate contender for worst-ever West punchline, and that’s considering “Swaghili”) to the production, a re-gifted grab-bag that borrows indiscriminately from almost every pre-existing West epoch. That “Ghost Town” is ye’s clear highlight feels loaded: handled at the front half by John Legend, stolen on the back half by recent G.O.O.D. signee and emo-rap heiress apparent 070 Shake, and held down by a grungy refrain from Kid Cudi, it is the track where West’s contributions are most easily ignored. He gargles a few half-finished thoughts, his tone not so much sad as dazed, re-using the verse melody from “Runaway” over a sample chop that, at one point, sounds a whole lot like his work with JAY-Z on “Otis.” Shake’s performance is unexpectedly magnetic, yelping, “I put my hand on the stove, to see if I still bleed/And nothing hurts anymore, I feel kinda free.” It’s an ode to total numbness, and somehow it’s also ye’s emotional climax, an irony as apt as it is depressing. By the time you’ve considered settling in, the album’s basically over, saving its most retrograde sentiment for last. “Violent Crimes” is certainly a spicy title for a song about West’s 4-year-old daughter, North, who he fears will one day become hot, illustrating these fears in disturbingly specific detail. (You can almost picture Nas in the Jackson Hole ski lodge, resting a solemn hand on West’s shoulder: “You’re 40 now, Ye. It’s time for your ‘as a father of daughters’ song.”) Over dull, sappy keys, West speculates about the ways in which North’s teenaged body might one day make his life difficult, warning, “Don’t do no yoga, don’t do pilates,” as though her hypothetical puberty was a personal affront—this from the guy who once defended, in all caps, Bill Cosby’s innocence. Of the many “father guarding their daughter’s virtue” ballads I have heard in my life, “Violent Crimes” is unquestionably the most uncomfortable listen. “How did he think this would go over?!” I wondered incredulously on first listen, but the simplest answer is, he probably didn’t. And just like that: the eighth Kanye West album, out with a whimper. So to seek answers within ye—answers that do not involve fucking Stormy Daniels lookalikes while tripping on DMT, at least—feels foolish. And maybe Kanye West doesn’t owe us answers. Maybe we cared way too much, projecting all that genius onto a guy who wore shutter shades and never missed an opportunity for a mayonnaise pun. Maybe it created a dynamic that’s turned out to be actively toxic to both music and politics. Maybe we should abolish the word “genius,” or just find heroes who give a shit. But I can admit that after ye ended unceremoniously the third or fourth time, I put on “Family Business,” and I thought about the kid from Chicago who wanted to be the biggest rapper in the world, who now lives in an empty-looking concrete mansion in Calabasas, who has stopped trying.

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

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

Rap

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

June 4, 2018

001f3576-4551-49cd-9f92-af3ea9e5ac8d

Meaghan Garvey

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

The advance singles for Justin Bieber’s Purpose showcased his best performances to date while hinting at a successful transition beyond teen pop. And yet, the full record too often comes off like a redemptive PowerPoint presentation while suggesting that the singer’s idea of "adulthood" involves the ability to convey pettiness without emotional intelligence.

The advance singles for Justin Bieber’s Purpose showcased his best performances to date while hinting at a successful transition beyond teen pop. And yet, the full record too often comes off like a redemptive PowerPoint presentation while suggesting that the singer’s idea of "adulthood" involves the ability to convey pettiness without emotional intelligence.

Justin Bieber: Purpose

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21248-purpose/

Purpose

Purpose is less an album than a deliberate act of repositioning. As much as 2012's Believe was intended as Justin Bieber's micro-adjustment into adulthood, the advance singles for Purpose, "What Do You Mean?" and "Sorry", are his first hits without any traces of teen-pop. They're designed much in the spirit of "Where Are Ü Now", his single with Skrillex and Diplo from earlier this year, where Bieber's voice fluctuated through animated throbs. Produced, respectively, by MdL and Skrillex (who contributes six productions to the record), "What Do You Mean?" and "Sorry" are vivid tropical house tracks that sound like sunlight drifting down through palm fronds. Bieber's voice often resembles a breath contorted inexpressively through notes; here, he lets it weightlessly fall through textures. They are his best performances to date, allowing him to flex a rhythmic playfulness without communicating an iota of legible emotion. Purpose doesn't particularly follow up on the advances suggested by his previous release, the 2013 R&B experiment Journals. That record was Bieber's first attempt at casting himself as an adult, but its efforts, alternately curious and anonymous, went largely unnoticed. For its part, Purpose mostly suggests that Bieber's idea of "adulthood" is the ability to convey pettiness without emotional intelligence. On new single "Love Yourself", an Ed Sheeran co-write that also functions as a gentle kiss-off, Bieber sings "If you like the way you look that much/ Baby, you should go and love yourself." Lyrically it's needlessly mean, neither funny nor clever, and it doesn't do much to justify the severity of its perspective. The songs on Purpose have a similarly inanimate feeling; they seem to radiate more than they move. "No Sense" feels oddly hookless and almost willfully ugly, and when Travis Scott surfaces toward the end of the track, he registers as just another cold texture. Nothing here has the captivating, lopsided construction of Journals' "Confident". "No Pressure", featuring Big Sean, comes close with its shimmering, processed acoustic guitars—though the song might have appeared lighter and more nimble in the hands of someone like Usher. In general, vagueness, indecision, and faint befuddlement suit Bieber best. "The Feeling", produced by Skrillex, describes a liminal, unstable state ("Am I in love or am I in love with the feeling?"), and the track fittingly seems to slip in and out of focus. Halsey, who released one of the worst singles of the year with "New Americana", proves an ideal counterweight to Bieber, and together the two effortlessly convey the gentle intensity of a crush. At these moments, when Bieber is allowed to remain a lithe and fluttery element zippering in and out of a canvas, he sounds most comfortable. But when Bieber is required to slow down and emote, he sounds adenoidal and aggressively blank. "Life Is Worth Living", a piano ballad in which every chord seems indifferently faxed in, is one of the many songs on which Bieber struggles to justify himself to the public. "My reputation's on the line, so I'm working on a better me," he sings. As much as this record is part of his long campaign of rehabilitation, he struggles to convey a remotely sympathetic perspective. His similes tend to get terrestrial when he's talking about himself: "It's like you're stuck on a treadmill/ Running in the same place." On the title track, he sings, "Look at all the promises I've kept," as if gesturing to a PowerPoint presentation. The second half of the album is monochromatic and depressing, especially as it runs out to 20 tracks in certain versions. (Two of the bonus tracks, "Been You" and "Get Used to It", are pneumatic, funky disco pop tracks that sound only slightly removed from this year's Jason Derulo album; they're better than nearly anything on the album proper.) Near the end of the album is "Children", an embarrassing and overwrought attempt at social consciousness. It might be an attempt at writing his own "Man in the Mirror", an outward gaze among so many shallow inward ones. "What about the children?" he asks meaninglessly. "Who's got the heart?" The question hangs uneasily.

2015-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

2015-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Def Jam

November 17, 2015

001f676a-f962-40a7-b802-f6df5d3b2401

Ivy Nelson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/

Underground rap's biggest breakout of 2008-09 finally releases his major-label debut; plus, a look at the best of his many recent mixtapes.

Underground rap's biggest breakout of 2008-09 finally releases his major-label debut; plus, a look at the best of his many recent mixtapes.

Gucci Mane: The Burrprint: The Movie 3-D / The State vs. Radric Davis

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13793-the-burrprint-the-movie-3-d-the-state-vs-radric-davis/

The Burrprint: The Movie 3-D / The State vs. Radric Davis

In March 2009, Atlanta rapper Gucci Mane came home from prison after serving six months for violating parole. Then, in November, Gucci violated again and went right back to prison for another year-long bid. That means Gucci only had about eight months of freedom in 2009. In that time he still managed to release, by my count, six mixtapes (including the three-in-one-day Cold War series) and one official album. He also found time to crank out an absurd number of guest-verses, videos, and live shows, buried a long-raging feud with Young Jeezy, and made minor stars out of proteges OJ Da Juiceman and Waka Flocka Flame. Along the way, he became rap's most divisive figure, with the internet peanut gallery lining up to call him everything from a borderline-retarded grunter to rap's last, best hope. If you followed rap in 2009, you had to have some opinion on Gucci. He had quite a year. For the uninitiated, Gucci is a tough sell. The sheer volume of his output means there's no go-to entry point. He delivers all his lyrics in a marbled monotone so thick that his lyrics can be hard to make out on first listen. He never highlights his punchlines (or anything else, really); they just float by. He favors one simple, monotonic type of beat: a tense, sproingy, synth-based thing that always just sounds cheap. He raps way, way more about his cars and jewelry than anything else. Over time, though, those liabilities become strengths. Because he mushmouths his punchlines so hard, you have to listen harder and more often to hear them. And it certainly helps that his punchlines are often dizzily funny and inventively intricate: "Popping Cris, think that I need Alcohol Anonymous/ 45 in the club, I could kill a hippopotamus." His deadpan is great for "wait, did he really say that?" reactions. And even if his actual delivery rarely varies, he has some bottomless number of actual flows; he attacks the beat differently on every verse, putting inflections and pauses in unexpected places and still always finding the beat's pocket. His unrelenting focus on materialistic shit rarely rankles because he's better at rapping about that stuff than just about anyone else. Both his monochromatic beats and his staggering productivity give his work a sense of immersion, hitting the same note again and again with immensely satisfying results-- like a daylong sick-day binge on James Bond movies. And with Gucci, there's also a sense of shared experience. People are listening to this guy; he's not just another voice in the internet echo chamber. He's ascended to a very particular type of cult stardom in an age when rap stars aren't supposed to exist anymore. He's found his audience by elevating ignorance to expertly absurdist art, thus making his 2009 a worthy successor to Cam'ron's 2004 or Lil Wayne's 2005. He's been on a very, very serious roll. The October DJ Drama collaboration Movie 3D: The Burrprint remains the greatest of Gucci's 2009 mixtapes, in part because it's the purest example of his aesthetic. This is wheelhouse Gucci: Drug- and money-talk over simple, eerie Casio beats with no crossover attempts and almost no guest spots from rappers outside Gucci's close-knit camp. Gucci's boasts and put-downs are playful but matter-of fact throughout: "You are not the owner of that car that is a loaner/ I got money stacks that's tall as you cause that's just my persona." Even when he's describing crack houses in detail, he keeps telling jokes and making up goofy metaphors. There's one song about turning down ugly groupies and another about how he has to hang out with his shadow because he's so far beyond everyone else. The members of his inconsistent 1017 Brick Squad crew all nail their verses on the trio of posse cuts. But the mixtape's greatest asset might be its sneakily melodic sensibility. Gucci's delivery has a casual singsong elegance that you never quite see coming, and the result means virtually every chorus is memorable-- something unthinkable from almost any other rapper. And since Gucci almost never raps over other people's beats, that means you're getting an hour's worth of full-on songs, something that not even Cam and Wayne offered during their peak-era runs. You'd think that instinctive ear for hooks would convince Warner, Gucci's label, to let him do his thing unencumbered on the official album, The State Vs. Radric Davis. But lead single "Spotlight", a tone-deaf Usher collab that keeps exactly nothing of what makes Gucci likable; it had people doomsaying before the album ever came out. Mostly, though, the LP does a good job keeping Gucci's culty selling points intact on a larger stage. Regular collaborators Zaytoven and Fatboi turn in several beats each, and many of the other tracks, from name producers like Jazze Pha and Scott Storch, sound a lot like Zaytoven beats. Big-name guests like Wayne and Cam bring their A-games because they know they're dealing with a rapper on their level. Most importantly, Gucci maintains his singular weirdness throughout. He keeps finding unexpected ways to say the same stuff: "I be runnin' gunnin' stunnin' with a hundred killers riiiiiidin'/ And you snitchin' bitchin' tattle tellin' and scared to stand besiiiiiide me." He says some stuff that barely makes sense: "Eat rappers like Jeffrey Dahmer/ Dope color Sinead O'Connor." He has one song about wearing all-yellow everything and another where guest crooner Bobby Valentino offers to fuck you in front of your father. He sings the chorus of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" mid-verse. There are a few missteps, like the run of mid-album R&B tracks that saps some momentum. But the LP has a energy rare to major-label rap efforts. Like Wayne's Tha Carter II, it translates Gucci's mixtape triumphs into something more digestible and immediate. Of course, the album came out when Gucci was back in prison and sold way fewer copies than expected. Gucci's detractors took the opportunity to declare his regional stardom a grand illusion. Those detractors should take a good, hard listen to the late-album track "Worst Enemy"-- a rare introspective moment where Gucci extends something resembling an olive branch to Jeezy and frankly discusses his own self-destructive tendencies, all without compromising his dense, frantically hopscotching sense of wordplay. So: When he feels like it, Gucci can talk about serious matter with the same infectious verve that he uses to call your jeweler a loser. Artistically, at least, he's just getting started. And now that he's going to be locked up for a while, the world has a chance to catch up.

2010-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00

2010-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rap

January 11, 2010

001f8eb8-ba56-41fd-9a4b-67721136e65d

Tom Breihan

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

On Sage Elsesser’s Def Jam debut, smooth gospel samples set the tone for a worshipful exploration of the ancestral wisdom that guides his present.

On Sage Elsesser’s Def Jam debut, smooth gospel samples set the tone for a worshipful exploration of the ancestral wisdom that guides his present.

Navy Blue: Ways of Knowing

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/navy-blue-ways-of-knowing/

Ways of Knowing

Family runs deep in the life and music of Sage Elsesser. In the eight years since he first began sharing songs on SoundCloud as Navy Blue, his relatives have maintained a constant presence: glimmers of light amid his sparse, brooding compositions. On Ways of Knowing, his major-label debut, Elsesser draws them into the foreground and leans on their wisdom as he navigates life as an adult. The loops remain hypnotic, the bass lightly funky. But the murkiness that defined much of Elsesser’s early work gives way to the understated confidence of a man who draws strength from the roots of his family tree. Elsesser pushes those roots deeper as he reaches toward the sky. Messages from the ancestors weave between lessons learned from lovers. His confessional style—honest and open, never sentimental—makes him sound mature beyond his 26 years. How does a young man achieve such clarity? Ways of Knowing reveals its source: a family that nourished him spiritually, while providing him the freedom to grow, learn, and make mistakes. “Pillars” is the cornerstone of these themes. The song zooms in on brief moments with Elsesser’s grandmother: a daily kiss on the forehead, the sight of her late husband reflected in her grandson’s face. Their connection recalls fond memories, which lead to the acceptance of their inevitable farewell. It’s here we see the clearest signs of growth. No longer content to dwell in darkness, this Navy Blue finds joy in solemnity. When he offers a glimpse into the wreckage of his real-life relationship with the model Binx Walton on “The One” and “Fall in Love,” he lays bare his flaws and insecurities, looking back not with regret, but with hope for a better future. It’s as if he had his mother in his ear in the booth, reminding him that “expectation presents grounds for disappointment.” More than any of Elsesser’s other records, Ways of Knowing carries a worshipful tone. Not of any particular deity—even the Yoruba Orishas he references are less gods than guiding spirits—but that of the self, the ancestors, and the threads that link them. He finds an attuned collaborator in producer Budgie (best known for The Good Book, a multi-volume collaboration with The Alchemist) and his trove of obscure gospel and R&B records. Budgie’s production across Ways of Knowing is elegant and focused, its textures subtle, with flourishes that occupy the periphery, lest they distract from the message. Even his smoothed-out ’90s R&B loops sound spiritual, like the quiet storm melody from Mike Davis’ album cut “Call Me” that he loops for “Chosen.” And, in a last-minute addition to the credits, Frank Ocean collaborator Om’Mas Keith—whose contributions to Blonde memorably became a subject of legal dispute—is also named as a producer on several tracks, and plays piano on “Freehold.” It all makes for a gorgeous record that’s subdued without being sleepy and cerebral without becoming a third-eye word salad. Elsesser’s words carry the weight of wisdom—some his own, from a life lived passionately, but most passed down from his ancestors. Rhythm from his father, a Rastafarian drummer; perspective from his grandfather, who instructed a young Elsesser to read Frederick Douglass to understand the plight of his people; the tenderness of his mother, whose words encourage him to love himself; and the nuance of vanity from his grandmother, who raised a family full of artists, models, and style icons. It took all of them and more to create Navy Blue. Correction: An earlier version of this review included a lyric about Navy Blue’s grandmother’s grave that could be misinterpreted. It has since been removed.

2023-03-28T00:01:00.000-04:00

2023-03-23T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam

March 28, 2023

0020244f-85a8-4729-a467-586baa8dbc44

Matthew Ismael Ruiz

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

Taken line by line, Gary Lightbody's lyrics on Snow Patrol's third album, Final Straw, don't say\n ...

Taken line by line, Gary Lightbody's lyrics on Snow Patrol's third album, Final Straw, don't say\n ...

Snow Patrol: Final Straw

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7304-final-straw/

Final Straw

Taken line by line, Gary Lightbody's lyrics on Snow Patrol's third album, Final Straw, don't say much: "Ways and Means" features the line, "Is there a t-shirt I can wear/ 'Cause I'm soaking look at me." "Grazed Knees" contains the banal couplet, "Your breakfast will get cold/ I really have to go." And "Spitting Games" veers dangerously close to high school poetry: "My heart is bursting in your perfect eyes/ As blue as oceans and as pure as skies." But taken together, these not-too-quotable lines add up to a surprising whole: an album as argument, wherein Lightbody pleads with lovers to consider his side of the story ("How to Be Dead"), or to give him another chance ("Grazed Knees"), or simply to notice him ("Spitting Games"). Rather than dwelling the dissolved romances of his past, Lightbody dwells in the here-and-now, speaking not to his audience but to his lovers, and candidly reveals a centrifuge of conflicting emotions and awkward confessions. Writing in plainspoken lyrics that sound like the kind of speech you rehearse in your head for days, Lightbody has carved himself a niche among confessional singer/songwriters by documenting the gradual accumulation of grievances and recriminations that creates a rift between two people who ostensibly love each other. The problems he describes usually aren't as tangible or as black-and-white as, say, cheating, but Lightbody still manages to make these small predicaments dramatic and compelling. If the lyrics carry the feelings, then the music itself is restrained: tastefully plaintive vocals and churning guitars generate rigid, unwavering tempos that approximate dance music. It's a more sophisticated sound than that of the band's previous albums, or of Lightbody's side project, The Reindeer Section. In addition to adding guitarist Nathan Connolly, Snow Patrol have brought in producer Garret "Jacknife" Lee (formerly of the band Compulsion), who gathers elements from the Pixies and My Bloody Valentine, as well as from more obvious sources like Radiohead, into a straightforward, polished sound that works well for the first half of Final Straw. The pristine quality of Snow Patrol's music and Garret Lee's production, however, belies the rawness of Lightbody's words, and too often, the songs suffer from the contrast. It's not that there aren't bursts of noisy feedback or filtered vocals or the occasional programmed beats; it's that each one sounds perfectly placed, too tidy, so overthought and foreordained that the songs sound staid and stolid. This is especially noticeable in the middle of Final Straw, when Snow Patrol indulge in some Coldplay moments. "Run" exists solely for its uplifting, if oddly fatalistic, chorus ("Light up, light up/ As if you have a choice"), which will surely have concertgoers raising their lighters during the inevitable second-encore singalong. Actually, the song is unapologetically anthemic, until Lee throws in some schmaltzy strings at the climax that practically cry out to score the big smooch in some teen-friendly romantic comedy. Deploying more upbeat tempos and pop harmonies, "Ways and Means" and "Tiny Little Fractures" try to regain the momentum of the album's first half. But "Somewhere a Clock Is Ticking" crawls along at a slow pace, its gloomy atmosphere not quite enough to sustain it, and "Same" attempts a grand finale that only sounds redundant after "Run". As such, despite the surprising cohesion of its modest lyrics, Final Straw remains less than the sum of its parts.

2004-04-01T01:00:03.000-05:00

2004-04-01T01:00:03.000-05:00

Rock

A&M

April 1, 2004

00228383-7e74-4902-8df9-9229ab169636

Stephen M. Deusner

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

The UK dance producer’s effervescent debut glows from within, powered by nostalgic ’80s synth and a stacked guest list that includes Rina Sawayama, piri, and Empress Of.

The UK dance producer’s effervescent debut glows from within, powered by nostalgic ’80s synth and a stacked guest list that includes Rina Sawayama, piri, and Empress Of.

Salute: True Magic

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/salute-true-magic/

True Magic

Cars and pop music: They’re quite literally built to go together. Enter True Magic, the Ninja Tune debut from Manchester-based producer salute. Engines roar to life and cheers crescendo with each lap as producer Felix Nyajo shifts effortlessly across French touch, glitchy house, jungle beats, UK garage, and soul samples. Traversing genres with a pop sensibility alongside a heavy roster of collaborators, True Magic recalls Settle, the career-defining debut by Disclosure (who are featured on “lift off!”). salute and longtime friend and executive producer Karma Kid inject each track with LED-lit momentum and joyriding ease. salute’s first full-length has been a decade in the making. In 2014, Nyajo relocated from Vienna to the UK, immersing themselves in the British club scene at a moment when the robust, metallic rhythms of future bass pioneers like Hudson Mohawke and Rustie dominated. That tectonic purple sound influence—chip-tune buildups pieced together with sludgy bass hooks—was audible in early salute releases. Since then, Nyajo has ironed out the aggressive drops, smoothing their style into what they’ve called “fast and soulful house music.” They’ve performed for Boiler Room crowds and worked alongside modern-day pop hitmakers (the 1975’s George Daniel) and fellow rising producers (DJ Boring, DJ Seinfeld, Barry Can’t Swim). Four Tet is a fan. True Magic demonstrates the extent of salute’s evolution. Its songs are sculpted around glowing ’80s synthesizers, nodding to modern nostalgists like Daft Punk, Alan Braxe, and Kavinsky. The sleek, Weeknd-esque “Maybe it’s u,” featuring vocals from Scottish producer Sam Gellaitry, has the propulsive punch of Discovery and some of Ratatat’s cheese-grated guitar. Blending gritty bloghouse with elements of UKG, drum’n’bass, and jungle, salute emulates the aura of past hits without ripping them off. The results showcase their curatorial skill, fitting each track to their guests’ strengths. Empress Of’s satin vocals are the perfect vessel for romantic longing on “one of those nights”; piri’s cherubic tone in “luv stuck” is matched to bubblegum house on cruise control. Nyajo locates True Magic’s inspirations in vintage Japanese car advertisements, a colorful, frictionless style of clip that matched shiny new automobiles to sentimental pop soundtracks and fuzzy graphics. A sample of the Japanese jazz fusion group Casiopea’s song “Asayake” on the intro nods to a similar time period, but salute doesn’t linger: They swiftly transition to the rubbery bass of “saving flowers,” with Rina Sawayama. It’s as satisfying as running a series o f green lights. The front half of the album’s French house tilt is abruptly (and thrilling) interrupted by “go!,” featuring Japanese rapper Nakamura Minami, whose high-energy, hyper-animated style previously landed her work in the racing game Need for Speed. True Magic’s concept resembles a race, but at the end, salute counterintuitively eases off the accelerator. On the dreamy closer “drive,” singer LEILAH softly urges us to “drive faster,” even as the tempo seems to slow, and salute braids a hypnotic daisy chain of “la la las” into a glitchy house beat. Then a robotic voice calls us abruptly back, warning, “You will now return to the real world.” The unsettling closing note snaps the reverie: Like in the slick fantasy of those car ads, True Magic never needed a destination or a finish line. All the better to enjoy the ride.

2024-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Ninja Tune

July 19, 2024

00228d68-dbb5-4600-9d68-9bf92415128e

Margaret Farrell

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

RZA made his first foray outside of hip-hop with a daring score for the 1999 Jim Jarmusch film about a lonely hitman. The movie plays like a melancholy requiem for the Wu-Tang’s golden era.

RZA made his first foray outside of hip-hop with a daring score for the 1999 Jim Jarmusch film about a lonely hitman. The movie plays like a melancholy requiem for the Wu-Tang’s golden era.

RZA: Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rza-ghost-dog-the-way-of-the-samurai/

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai

When RZA met Quincy Jones in 1997, the rap producer had just finished conquering the world. Wu-Tang Forever, the Wu-Tang Clan’s unwieldy double-album follow-up to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), was No. 1 in the country, and “Triumph,” a six-minute posse cut with no hook, was playing alongside sugary Puff Daddy and Mase hits on mainstream rap radio. The dense, grimy sound RZA pioneered forever altered his genre, and the deal he’d negotiated with Loud Records amounted to perhaps the most decisive industry takeover in music-business history. There would seem to be nowhere to go next, but the man who called himself the Abbott was in awe of Jones, so he humbled himself. What should I do next, he asked the super producer, in order to crest the next wave, to climb the next summit? The answer, Jones told him, was to score a movie. Around that same time, Jim Jarmusch was toying with the notion of a movie about a sympathetic killer. The downtown New York City filmmaker conceived of the sad-eyed hitman Ghost Dog—played, in his mind, by Forest Whitaker, an actor so inextricable from his role that Jarmusch has said that if Whitaker turned him down, the movie would never have existed—as a Black man living on a rooftop, tending to pigeons and reading from the Hagakure, an 18th-century text on the Bushido code, while he waits for assignments from his mob handler. When a hit goes wrong and the Mafia decides Ghost Dog must die, he goes up against them all, one by one. The story mimicked the structure of many classic crime noir or kung fu films, but Jarmusch wanted to treat the framework just as he used the Western in 1995’s Dead Man: as a bemused meditation on humankind’s attempts to impose meaning and order on a meaningless existence. His movies were as much about sound as they were sight—Dead Man was as much a vehicle for the wordless score by Neil Young as it was for lead actor Johnny Depp—and for the Ghost Dog score, he had only one man in mind. After settling his script and securing Whitaker’s commitment, he tapped a few mutual acquaintances and requested a meeting with the RZA. The pair made strange bedfellows at first—RZA in army fatigues, Jarmusch with his silver-white pompadour and black sunglasses, like Lou Reed and Andy Warhol remixed into one person. But for both of them, the story of Ghost Dog had biographical echoes. Jarmusch grew up in 1950s and ’60s Akron, on the street where the Gambino family had their social club, during a time when the mafia’s real-life grip was fading as quickly as pop culture’s fascination with it was booming. RZA, who had gone to school with members of the Castellano family, understood the magnetic pull of mafioso culture better than anyone. He agreed to score the film before Jarmusch had even shot it. The pairing felt like a secret handshake. Even so, it took a while for RZA to adjust to Jarmusch’s strange, silence-filled style. His first compositions were made with a much more conventional movie in mind—lush, traditionally cinematic, fit for the Hong Kong action flicks that were starting to pop up on American shores, but all wrong for the quizzical, emptied-out stage on which Ghost Dog’s action takes place. In Ghost Dog, the Mafia is a joke, a bunch of cut-rate mobsters with central-casting names like Valerio and Francis and Louie and Vinny, saying things like “forget about it” and “you’re gonna get whacked.” They meet at dollar stores and hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants instead of red-carpeted clubs, and they fend off their wheedling landlord instead of breaking kneecaps. They are the Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns of the other mob movies, workers with no real boss, and they live by a Mafioso code in the same way a goldendoodle puppy feels the stirrings of wolf ancestry when it sniffs the air. The music had to be a barely felt pulse, the only lingering remnant of a time when warriors clashed steel and clans fought for honor. Jarmusch told him to go with his instincts, and so RZA went back to craft a score that better suited the mood. Along the way, he tapped into places in his creative mind he’d never been before. When you were making a track for a rapper, there had to be sturdy rhythmic footholds in place. But scoring for a film meant, as RZA put it, “the music can be as awkward as you want it to be.” “Awkward” became a useful byword for RZA’s Ghost Dog work. The tracks are left intentionally lop-sided, full of irregularities; many of them seem like bits that broke and floated free from some larger landmass. The opening theme leaves yawning silences so wide they’re like head fakes, potholes for your ear. “Samurai Theme” is built on a martial-sounding sample that triggers just off the beat, an audio companion to the sight of the ungainly Ghost Dog practicing swordplay. Like J Dilla, who also fiddled with hip-hop’s internal time clock, RZA often smudged the border between intention and accident, but he never experimented with these timing gaps as boldly as he does here. The centerpiece is “Flying Birds,” a weightless interlude that captures the film’s mood so perfectly Jarmusch returned to it again and again. “Flying Birds” plays whenever Ghost Dog’s messenger pigeons wing their way from one chipped Jersey City storefront window to another, filmed greasy and unbeautiful against gray skies—a vision of freedom, however constrained. For the RZA, it was a strikingly quiet piece of music, untroubled by shouting voices or kung fu samples. You could easily slip it onto a playlist of Warp artists like Autechre or Aphex Twin—a prospect that feels like a given today, but not so much in 1999, the year of the movie’s release, when the worlds of hip-hop and independent rock and electronic music felt much more remote from each other. In this way, Jim Jarmusch granted RZA entrée into one of the few worlds he hadn’t penetrated—the insular universe of mostly white hipsters, art students, and film buffs who might have admired RZA and enjoyed the Wu-Tang Clan, but who perhaps wouldn’t think to to slot the architect of the group’s sound alongside experimental-music figures like Björk, Laurie Anderson, or Sonic Youth. For all of Wu-Tang’s furious brand extension, Ghost Dog was RZA’s first foray outside of hip-hop, and it came at a pivotal point. As the millennium approached, the pressures on the Wu-Tang Clan had grown overwhelming, and the group was fracturing. Contract squabbling had begun in earnest, and thanks to an onstage outburst by Ghostface at Summer Jam, the Wu-Tang were officially banned from Hot 97, New York’s premier hip-hop station. One by one, the Wu-Tang Clan members asked to be released from their contract with the RZA, leaving each to fend for themselves as a solo star. RZA was unmistakably an icon, but it looked as if his brothers were drifting away from him. The path towards his future collaborations—with Björk, with Yoko Ono—and to the moody, twilit (and Raekwon-reviled) 8 Diagrams begins here. From this point, RZA would push outward into the artistic demimonde, where he naturally belonged. Soon, he would be consulting on Quentin Tarantino films, writing screenplays. Revisiting Ghost Dog today, it’s startling to see how, despite being written and directed by Jarmusch, it plays as a melancholy requiem for the Wu-Tang’s already-lost golden era, one in which Wu affiliates make unusual cameos (Timbo King and Dreddy Kruger, freestyling on a park bench) and every CD that’s loaded into a player happens to start playing Wu-Tang music. Jersey City in its most unforgiving light evoked the Shaolin of Wu myth, and some of the movie’s most indelible moments are prolonged shots of Whitaker’s impassive face through a windshield as Wu-Tang beats fill the car. Near the movie’s end, RZA himself strolls on camera to pay his respects to Ghost Dog, a fellow dreamer whose dreams changed the lives of those around him. In many ways, Ghost Dog plays like a shadow autobiography of RZA himself. Both are citizens of lost worlds, adhering to ancient codes in a fallen society where the only thing separating the visionary from the fool is commitment.

2022-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-10-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Victor

October 9, 2022

0023222d-42b4-46e5-b862-0cf05ca32abb

Jayson Greene

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

The producer-rapper follows his Pazz and Jop-winning debut The College Dropout with a collaboration with Jon Brion; together they transform West's chattering, seemingly unrealistic ideas into an expansive, imperfect masterpiece.

The producer-rapper follows his Pazz and Jop-winning debut The College Dropout with a collaboration with Jon Brion; together they transform West's chattering, seemingly unrealistic ideas into an expansive, imperfect masterpiece.

Kanye West: Late Registration

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8768-late-registration/

Late Registration

"Can I talk my shit again?" Contrary to popular opinion, hubris does have a righteous appeal. Those who claim Kanye West's antics hinder his work are missing the point. His self-importance is obvious, but the arrogance that comes pre-packaged with his insecurity is what makes West the most interesting hip-hop figure of the past five years. That's the reason he landed on "Oprah" and the cover of Time Magazine last week, rather than 50 Cent or Nelly or Slug. It's not sales; it's souls. That said, at the end of the day, it's his ear, a golden instrument, and his adventurous collaborative spirit that have made him the most fully formed artist of his genre. The sprawling Late Registration is the year's most accomplished rap album, and in turn, he's done something that his heroes-- the Pharcyde and Nas, and father figure Jay-Z-- couldn't do: deliver on a promise the second time around. With the help of co-producer Jon Brion, West has taken his jumbled personae, buoyant enthusiasm, and vision for the grandiose, and transformed his chattering, seemingly unrealistic ideas into an expansive, imperfect masterpiece. Without Brion, this album probably sounds a lot like its predecessor, The College Dropout-- full of tough horns, jacked soul, and flashes of brilliance. What the former Fiona Apple maestro brings to the proceedings, aside from a conductor's wand and a smile, is the ability to inflate and infuse West's ideas with even more life. A case in point is "Hey Mama", a track that leaked more than a year ago. The song is traditionally purty, dominated by handclaps and a flittering sample of Donal Leace's "Today Won't Come Again"; basically a trad-Kanye production. The Brion redux inserts a moaning vocoder, tin pan alley drums, a xylophone solo, and cascading synth coda, all without mucking up the heart in the middle. Flashes like this surround the sometimes urbane, often cheeky West with a new resonance. Where would "Crack Music", a blustery martial stomp, be without its soaring choir and biblically extended outro? Probably somewhere on the Game's album. Could Kanye have single-handedly fused the showboating old school boom bap of "We Major" with its build-it-up and watch it all fall down production without Brion or co-producer Waryn Campbell? Not likely. By opening the studio to admired colleagues, he's allowed himself room to think even bigger than the multi-tracked "Jesus Walks". On the mic, West sounds sharper and more battle-tested, though he'll never have the effortless insouciance of Jigga or teeth-gritting religiosity of Nas. To his credit and detriment he continues to surround himself with superior MCs like Common (on the sober "My Way Home"), impressive newcomer Lupe Fiasco (Just Blaze's life-affirming "Touch the Sky"), and the ineffable Cam'Ron, who continues his magical run with savant-like witticisms on "Gone". Even Houston's Paul Wall manages to fit "illuminate," "insinuate," and "caterpillar" into 16 bizarre bars on the woozy "Drive Slow". All this to go along with curious shouts from two conflicted giants, Jay and Nas, who hang like specters over the album. Unlike the "great" hip-hop releases of yore, the productions here are so insistent that even a charismatic voice like West's can become an afterthought. Only "Roses" delivers the endearing sentimentality of "Jesus Walks" or "Family Business". "Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix)" offers some admirable if dubious political grandstanding, but as with every colossal undertaking, you gotta pay the cost to be the boss. The album's worst track, "Bring Me Down", overwhelms with silly orchestral pomp, courtesy of Brion. It also presumes that anyone still cares about Brandy, who sounds like she's recording her voice through a Cuisinart. "Celebration", too, is a busy, empty exercise in, well, celebrating. Barring those two tracks, and a few innocuous if unnecessary skits about a fraternity for the financially impaired called Broke Phi Broke, the rest is aces. "Addiction" is unsophisticated in concept but inspired in delivery. "Gold Digger" is also simple but not subtle, tearing into the realm of the obvious with a Ray Charles-aping Jamie Foxx and recycled drums, but succeeding with humor and reverence. Opener "Heard 'Em Say" might be the most bandied about joint here, thanks to the presence of Maroon 5's Adam Levine, but guess what? He sounds great. Off-key and blue-eyed selling his soul, but like nearly every risk here, the syrupy pop works. "We all self-conscious" has not taken on a new meaning post-Dropout. Conjecture about West revolutionizing the sound of modern hip-hop is mostly a fallacy. Not much has changed, though a few Brion hacks might appear to offer someone like Cassidy an oboe loop or two. In general, what makes West's sound and personality so vital is that it is completely singular. The maddening contradiction, the goofball ridiculousness, and the furious fist-raising still comprise an original voice. Though you'll notice I hesitate to use the phrase "everyman" to describe West. Not every man could have written a headphones album that'll rattle your trunk.

2005-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

2005-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella

August 28, 2005

002440e5-b9f5-4eac-b248-07b3f467da1e

Sean Fennessey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/

On the second installment of his absurdly ambitious "50 States" project, Stevens presents the 74-minute spectacular Illinois. In the wake of last year's quieter Seven Swans, this album finds the baroque, full arrangements of Michigan reaching stunning, nuanced heights, with the help of a small army of backers-- including a choir and string quartet.

On the second installment of his absurdly ambitious "50 States" project, Stevens presents the 74-minute spectacular Illinois. In the wake of last year's quieter Seven Swans, this album finds the baroque, full arrangements of Michigan reaching stunning, nuanced heights, with the help of a small army of backers-- including a choir and string quartet.

Sufjan Stevens: Illinois

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7514-illinois/

Illinois

The best travel writers skew their journeys into pointed narratives, writing the story of the landscape by seizing all the weird, awkward bits that make it distinct. On first listen, Sufjan Stevens' latest installment of state-based chamber-folk, Illinois, sounds dangerously similar to 2003's Michigan, all chirping vocals and copious orchestration. Both records inadvertently validate East Coast stereotypes of tough Midwestern values: This is earnest, hard-working music, morally rooted and technically precise. Still, Stevens has always been a folk singer more in theory than in practice. He routinely ditches folk's scrappy, stripped-down aesthetics, but consistently embraces its stories-of-the-people unanimity. Consequently, Illinois is less about place than spirit. Stevens dutifully celebrates and indicts all the appropriate landmarks, isolating the highest and lowest points in Illinois history, but at its best, the album makes America feel very small and very real: A boy crying in a van, a girl with bone cancer, stepmothers, parades, bandstands, presidents, UFOs, cream of wheat, trains after dark, a serial killer, Bible study. Musically, Illinois is strange and lush, as excessive and challenging as its giant, gushing song titles. Despite employing a small army of backers (including a string quartet, the Illinoisemaker Choir, drummer James McAllister, trumpeter Craig Montoro, and a pile of extra vocalists), Stevens is more forefronted than on the comparably solo Seven Swans. Manning nearly every instrument in his arsenal (and some beyond-- Stevens recorded the piano parts at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn), Stevens conducts his friends with impressive grace. Stevens' pipes quiver generously; his vocals could be easily (perhaps accurately) read as precious, but they're really more intimate than emo, and always beautifully echoed by his backers. The colossal "The Black Hawk War" cartwheels slowly into a climax of strings and horns, gurgling and pushing, ostensibly signifying (with much aplomb) the violent return of the Sac and Fox Indians to Illinois. Stevens may be deploying state propaganda, or validating Black Hawk's push home, but no matter how grave its reality, the moment still lands like a giant, neon-cased WELCOME TO ILLINOIS billboard. Trumpets blare, submission looms, our eyes widen, it makes sense: Illinois. Is. The. Greatest. State. Of. All. TIME! The excellent "Casimir Pulaski Day" (named after an Illinois state holiday honoring the polish-born victor of the Battle of Brandywine) is a heartbreaking story of late winter death, bravely sung over rich banjo; the bubbly "Decatur" (the title of which is, awesomely, rhymed with "alligator," "aviator," and "emancipator") features one of Stevens' most undeniable melodies, the kind of pretty, tinkling cue that sends everyone in earshot twirling through the streets, jazz hands and all. Matthew Morgan yelps solid backing bits (see their gorgeously squeaky harmony on "Stephen A. Douglass was a great debater/ But Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator!"), while Daniel and Elin Smith (of Brother Danielson, and the Danielson Famile) chime in for a campfire finish, complete with self-applause. Stevens has a remarkable habit of being rousing and distressing at the same time, prodding disparate emotional centers until it's unclear whether it's best to grab your party shoes or a box of tissues. The gut-punching "Chicago" cagily celebrates the innate (and deeply American) tendency to employ highways as escape routes, ditching old mistakes for new swatches of land, new plates of eggs, new parking lots. Impossibly propulsive, each calm, harmonized, Illinoisemaker cry of "All things go!" pushes harder, promising liberation, by death or by automobile: "If I was crying/ In the van with my friend/ It was for freedom/ From myself and from the land," Stevens chokes, voice shaking over a haze of drums, strings, and shimmering keyboards. "John Wayne Gacy, Jr." traces, with alarming accuracy, and over a hazy swirl of acoustic guitar and piano, the pathology of Illinois' most infamous serial killer: From 1972 until his arrest in 1978, Gacy was responsible for the torture, rape, and murder of 33 boys and young men, many of whom were discovered buried under the floorboards of his Norwood Park home. Lyrically, Stevens nails the specifics (as a kid, Gacy was slammed in the head by a swing, resulting in a blackout-inducing blood clot in his brain; he routinely donned a clown suit to entertain at a local hospital; victims were typically immobilized with chloroform-soaked cloths), and shifts perspectives gracefully; anchored in first-person, the song's narrator prods Gacy's mother and father, his neighbors, his victims, himself. More than any other track here, "Gacy" highlights Stevens' literary prowess, perfectly packed with nuance and detail. At seventy-four minutes, Illinois is an exercise in patience; considering how long it takes to dog paddle through all the gooey orchestration, chugging through Stevens' meticulous arrangements and parsing out the melodies, Illinois is a bit of a commitment. Its 21 tracks consist of a handful of transitional snippets (many arresting in their own right), and plenty of good stuff ("The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulder", in particular) is buried way in the back, rewarding those who persevere, and in both theory and execution, Illinois is huge, a staggering collection of impeccably arranged American tribute songs.

2005-07-04T02:00:01.000-04:00

2005-07-04T02:00:01.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Asthmatic Kitty

July 4, 2005

00286840-871f-4501-a4e4-69844a623329

Amanda Petrusich

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

The Beatles' first undisputed masterpiece is their quietest and most folky record, reflecting the influences of contemporaries like Dylan and the Byrds.

The Beatles' first undisputed masterpiece is their quietest and most folky record, reflecting the influences of contemporaries like Dylan and the Byrds.

The Beatles: Rubber Soul

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13433-rubber-soul/

Rubber Soul

To modern ears, Rubber Soul and its pre-psychedelic era mix of 1960s pop, soul, and folk could seem tame, even quaint on a cursory listen. But it's arguably the most important artistic leap in the Beatles' career-- the signpost that signaled a shift away from Beatlemania and the heavy demands of teen pop, toward more introspective, adult subject matter. It's also the record that started them on their path toward the valuation of creating studio records over live performance. If nothing else, it's the record on which their desire for artistic rather than commercial ambition took center stage-- a radical idea at a time when the success of popular music was measured in sales and quantity rather than quality. Indeed, at the time the Beatles did need a new direction: Odd as it seems today, the lifespan of a pop band's career in the early 60s could often be measured in months, sometimes in years, rarely in three-year increments. And by 1965, the Beatles were in danger of seeming lightweight compared to their new peers: The Who's sloganeering, confrontational singles were far more ferocious; the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was a much more raucous, anti-ennui cry than the Beatles' "Help!"; and the Kinks beat the Beatles to both satirical, character songs and the influence of Indian music. By comparison, most of the Beatles music to date was either rock'n'roll covers or originals offering a (mostly) wholesome, positive take on boy-girl relationships. Above all, Bob Dylan's lyrical acumen and the Byrds' confident, jangly guitar were primary influences on John Lennon and George Harrison, respectively (and the Byrds had been influenced by the Beatles, too-- Roger McGuinn first picked up a Rickenbacker 12-string after seeing A Hard Day's Night). Dylan and the Byrds' fingerprints had been left on Help!-- Lennon, the group's biggest Dylan acolyte, played an acoustic rather than electric guitar throughout most of that record. Even Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" found him strumming an acoustic. (All this at a time when Dylan was beginning to move in the other direction and fully enter his electric period.) Harrison was growing more serious on the political "Think for Yourself", while "If I Needed Someone"-- his other contribution to Rubber Soul-- is practically a Byrds pastiche and his chiming, sure-footed solo on "Nowhere Man" also displays a debt to that band. His deft touch is all over the record in subtle ways-- appropriate for an album full of finesse and small wonders (the ping at the end of the "Nowhere Man" solo, Lennon's exhalation in the chorus of "Girl", the "tit-tit-tit" of the backing vocalists in the same song, the burbling guitar in "Michelle"). The most lasting influences of Dylan and the Byrds on the Beatles, however, were likely their roles in introducing the group to recreational drugs: Dylan shepherded the quartet through their first experience with pot, while the Byrds were with three-fourths of the Beatles when they first purposefully took LSD. (McCartney sat that one out, avoiding the drug for another year, while Harrison and Lennon had each had a previous accidental dosage.) Marijuana's effect on the group is most heavily audible on Rubber Soul. (By the time of their next album, Revolver, three-fourths of the group had been turned on to LSD, and their music was headed somewhere else entirely.) With its patient pace and languid tones, Rubber Soul is an altogether much more mellow record than anything the Beatles had done before, or would do again. It's a fitting product from a quartet just beginning to explore their inner selves on record. Lennon, in particular, continued his more introspective and often critical songwriting, penning songs of romance gone wrong or personal doubt and taking a major step forward as a lyricist. Besting his self-critical "I'm a Loser" with "Nowhere Man" was an accomplishment, and the faraway, dreamy "Girl" was arguably his most musically mature song to date. Lennon's strides were most evident, however, on "Norwegian Wood", an economical and ambiguous story-song highlighted by Harrison's first dabbling with the Indian sitar, and the mature, almost fatalistic heart-tug of "In My Life", which displayed a remarkably calm and peaceful attitude toward not only one's past and present, but their future and the inevitability of death. Considering Harrison's contributions and Lennon's sharp growth, McCartney-- fresh from the success of "Yesterday"-- oddly comes off third-string on Rubber Soul. His most lasting contributions-- the Gallic "Michelle" (which began life as a piss-take, and went on to inspire the Teutonic swing and sway of Lennon's "Girl"), the gentle rocker "I'm Looking Through You", and the grinning "Drive My Car" are relatively minor compared to Lennon's masterstrokes. McCartney did join his bandmate in embracing relationship songs about miscommunication, not seeing eye-to-eye, and heartbreak, but it wouldn't be until 1966 that he took his next great artistic leap, doing so as both a storyteller and, even more so, a composer. [Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]

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

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

Rock

EMI

September 9, 2009

0030d99e-5744-4e8c-ae9a-6a39d3846d74

Scott Plagenhoef

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

With a distinctive singing voice and confidence in spades, the breakout Afropop star swoops through a pacesetting fusion of alté, R&B, Southern rap, mall-rock, and Top 40 pop.

With a distinctive singing voice and confidence in spades, the breakout Afropop star swoops through a pacesetting fusion of alté, R&B, Southern rap, mall-rock, and Top 40 pop.

Amaarae: The Angel You Don’t Know

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amaarae-the-angel-you-dont-know/

The Angel You Don't Know

Amaarae has a voice like a cracked-open chestnut shell; it can be as silky as its interior, as unforgiving as its spines. On “Hellz Angel,” a highlight from the Ghanaian-American artist’s omnivorous debut album The Angel You Don’t Know, she lattices smoke-wisp intonations before sharpening them into rapped barbs. In a spectacular flip into double-time, she raps over busted fairground synths, “I don’t make songs/Bitch I make memories.” She can’t resist following up with a gag: “I don’t like thongs/Cuz they ride up in jeans.” She is a nonchalant kind of auteur. Yet The Angel You Don’t Know crackles with innovation, a pacesetter at a time when industry bigwigs are waking up to the long-held truth that Africa is setting the global tempo for pop music. Amaarae’s music bears the Afro-fusion influences of Nigeria’s free-spirited alté scene, as well as Western genres from mall-rock to Southern rap, sultry R&B, and glossy Top 40: disparate musical styles that soundtrack Amaarae’s own life. Born Ama Serwah Genfi, she is based in Accra but has lived in the Bronx, Atlanta, and suburban New Jersey, where Britney Spears’ eccentric masterpiece Blackout blew her mind as a teen. While Ghanaian friends once advised her to stick to Afrobeats or hiplife to succeed in the country, she was firm that diasporic living enriched her art and, smartly, resisted narrowing its scope. In lesser hands, The Angel You Don’t Know’s wide embrace of genre could feel like a mash-up, or a crafty amalgam of trending styles. Yet with her distinctive arid singing voice and close work with producers like KZ and Rvdical the Kid, Amaarae’s freewheeling confidence and singular point of view allows her to swoop through sounds, light as air. She embraces character with enthusiasm, gliding between subjectivities with the same ease that she flips between American English and Ghanian and Nigerian dialect. On “Trust Fund Baby”—which sounds like Miguel’s slinky “How Many Drinks?” stripped to its skeleton—Amaarae plays a spoiled brat taunting a pathetic lover who needs the “privilege” of WAP like an addict craves their next hit. The Afropop-leaning “Jumping Ship” is an occasion for some righteous male objectification. “Hottie, you’re an item I wanna pay for,” she sings in a murmured falsetto, as picked guitars hit like sun through slotted blinds. You can hear the lusty twinkle in her eye. Amaarae describes The Angel You Don’t Know as “non stop affirmations and incantations 4 bad bitches.” Her tongue-in-cheek side brings dazzle to the record’s light-hearted moments, particularly on Afropop anthem “Sad Girlz Luv Money” (featuring Moliy), a waist-winding anthem about securing the “mooh-la-la” that’s far more joyous than its title suggests. More imaginative still is “Dazed and Abused in Beverly Hills,” 68 seconds of indie soul that enjoyably parodies (and one-ups) the SZA knockoffs making Shazam-bait for cable-TV syncs. Another track is punctuated by a ringtone and a scream, and the album is bookended by thrilling snippets of hardcore punk, with shredding by L.A. artist Gothic Tropic. Amaarae is private about her sexuality, but she dropped hints to her romantic life on the 2017 single “Fluid,” from that year’s R&B-leaning Passionfruit Summers EP, and featured drag queen pole dancers in another of her videos. These days she’s even more upfront, and rightfully heedless of gender norms. “I like it when you call me zaddy,” she purrs over 808s on “Fancy,” sounding like a soft butch poster girl looking for fresh meat. The video is a collagist tribute to seductive hits and her punk favorites, from JLo’s proto-OnlyFans camming to a Dream Wife body horror to the bright wigs and office furniture of City Girls’ “Pussy Talk.” It’s the rare moment in Amaarae’s world that doesn’t feel wholly self-created; even then, her authorial voice is clear. In one set-up referencing Missy Elliot’s “She’s a Bitch,” Amaarae wears a black leather bodysuit dotted with cowrie shells, the pre-colonial West African currency that is central to Yoruba rituals, pairing pop imagery with a touch of the divine. But even bad bitches get the blues. On the purple-hued album closer “Party Sad Face,” she’s stuck at a predictable party and fed up. “Whole lotta gang shit/Peng tings looking out of sight,” she whisper-sings, sounding helpless and sad. She fucks to fill the void, with alté star Odunsi (The Engine) breaking his usual charmer routine for an unsettling turn as an abusive hook-up. “I’m down,” she sings numbly, ambiguously. “Down for the night.” Amaarae said that she left the darkest songs off this album, but—unless she went full Diamanda Galás elsewhere—it’s hard to imagine a more vivid descent into emotional oblivion. Beyond her chameleonic roleplay, Amaarae’s humble roots are obvious—she dreams of the day she can buy her mom a Bentley. On the dancehall-leaning “Leave Me Alone,” she affirms her own worth with the calm of a zen master, singing, among bright and balmy guitars, “All the diamonds in the world don’t outshine me.” Her polyphonic approach to experimental pop brings to mind author and DJ Jace Clayton’s description of pan-global music in the digital age as a “memory palace with room for everybody inside.” Amaarae puts metabolized sounds through a distinctive prism, hitting on an insight: There’s room in the palace for her. Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.

2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-11-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Platoon

November 13, 2020

0031e11a-bee9-4022-96ba-9948056ab275

Owen Myers

https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/

The Atlanta rapper's latest mixtape is a dense, ambitious attempt to cultivate an entirely new style. But what Young Thug brings to the table isn't just a weird, experimental approach to rapping: he also offers presence, persona, mystique, and, potentially, star power.

The Atlanta rapper's latest mixtape is a dense, ambitious attempt to cultivate an entirely new style. But what Young Thug brings to the table isn't just a weird, experimental approach to rapping: he also offers presence, persona, mystique, and, potentially, star power.

Young Thug: I Came From Nothing 3

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16953-i-came-from-nothing-3/

I Came From Nothing 3

Young Thug's name is so generic that it sounds like an excerpt from a Rev. Calvin Butts speech. It could be a trick of reverse psychology; in contrast to Thug's extraordinarily distinctive style, it seems more a knowing joke, or if he's feeling ambitious, an attempt to epitomize and subvert an archetype. His rap style, too, has this kind of fearlessness; he is obviously and unapologetically a descendent of Lil Wayne at the peak of his experimental phase, where Wayne pushed against the boundaries of a rapper's technical control. At his best, Young Thug embraces that style, but rather than making it a logical endpoint of an artist on the ascent, he uses it as the baseline. It is a given on any Young Thug track that he will be croaking, half-singing, breaking against graphite-on-paper predictability of traditional rap, and performing with such confidence that calling him the product of his influences feels shortsighted. His latest mixtape, I Came from Nothing 3, is a dense, ambitious attempt to cultivate an entirely new rap style. It is also frequently frustrating, shifting from eye-openingly original to inconsequential from track to track. Unlike Lil B, to whom he might be immediately compared, Young Thug holds onto some traditional frameworks that could give him more of a potential foothold to transcend a cult fanbase. He still makes inventive pop songs. He sticks to a familiar dope boy mystique. And although Lil Wayne is his obvious forefather, he also springs from a less discussed but incredibly influential style of Atlanta-based hip-hop. The creative stew of Atlanta's melodic underground, where Auto-Tune didn't just avert death but spawned new life, perhaps via the influence of ecstasy and the dominance of strip club culture. Artists both well known (Future) and less-known (Kwony Cash) evolved a style that has often seemed less persona-driven and more about songcraft. This is the milieu whence comes Young Thug, who collaborated early with the Rich Kidz ("100 Dollar Autograph") and Cash Out, currently with one of the year's biggest rap songs and a regular Young Thug collaborator ("I Got It"). What Young Thug brings to the table, then, isn't just a weird, experimental approach to rapping, but presence, persona, mystique, and, potentially, star power. These are often things frowned upon by "serious" music fans, imagining themselves as discerning listeners who see through those theatrics, but in rap, where music is so heavily persona-driven, it gives an artist dimension. Of course, the other, most important factor for becoming a star is crafting hits, and when he wants to, even while pushing against conservative ideas of good taste, Young Thug can deliver. I Came from Nothing 3 is less interested in these songs, though, relative to the last tape (see: "Keep in Touch", "Curtains".) Instead, it indulges, heavily, in the bright, brittle synthesizers and continually cheery enthusiasm that often overwhelms. The exception is "Foreign", a song with a hypnotic marimba loop and an incredibly memorable hook, a track that should make fantasy summer jam playlists across the country. It also manages to transcend Young Thug's cult status most effectively. Most of the LP seems to push deep into its own universe, to the detriment of those not already convinced of Young Thug's vision, but rewarding those already sold. Tracks like "Admit It" and "I Know Ya" epitomize the kind of enthusiastic euphoria that is the currency of this strain of the Atlanta underground. Songs like "Angry Sex" offer a refreshing twist, giving its subject a kind of jubilant triviality.

2012-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00

2012-08-06T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

August 6, 2012

0032e3cd-8a46-4d36-bf99-28893ec51c12

David Drake

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

The material Dean Blunt has released since he cut ties with Hype Williams collaborator Inga Copeland has hewed closer toward pop song structures. With his latest full-length, it seems he's finally decided to open up, to highlight a love for pop music that's always been somewhere underneath.

The material Dean Blunt has released since he cut ties with Hype Williams collaborator Inga Copeland has hewed closer toward pop song structures. With his latest full-length, it seems he's finally decided to open up, to highlight a love for pop music that's always been somewhere underneath.

Dean Blunt: Black Metal

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20012-dean-blunt-black-metal/

Black Metal

Though he's said that he doesn't set out to make "difficult" music, Dean Blunt certainly hasn't made much easy over the course of his career. Both as one-half of the shadowy duo Hype Williams and under his own name, the London-based art-pop provocateur has spent the better part of the last half decade turning out dense keyboard drones, giving intentionally obtuse and combative interviews, and putting on bizarre performance art live shows. But with his latest full-length, it seems he's finally decided to open up, to highlight a love for pop music that's always been somewhere underneath the found sound samples and sub-bass firebombs. The material Blunt has released since he cut ties with Hype Williams collaborator Inga Copeland has hewed closer toward pop song structures. And it's clear even from the opening strains of album opener "Lush"—a straightforward sample of Big Star's sunny-eyed strummer "For You"—that Black Metal is a whole lot more welcoming than past records have been. Blunt pairs Big Star's orchestral sweep with a slowly plodding rhythm section, his own deadpan vocals, and some lazily picked electric guitar parts that wouldn't sound out of place on a Kurt Vile record. "Molly & Aquafina"'s narcotized Americana and "100", which employs a sample of the Pastels' "Over Your Shoulder", similarly value clarity and directness, two qualities absent from much of his preceding work. Even as he jumps from those indie pop touchstones to the genre exercises on the record's second side—the imploded dub of "Punk", "Hush" and "Grade"'s dizzy rap deconstructions, the pair of occasionally frigid ambient tracks that make up a 20-minute block at the record's middle—Blunt is able to keep their knotty worlds relatively accessible. Pinned together by a series of keyboard drones, "Forever" and "X" both employ distant vocalizations from recurring collaborator Joanne Robertson as an easy point of entry amidst their occasionally abstract spheres. These are light moments, airy passages function mostly to separate the lilting first half of the record from the bleak second. But where Blunt would have once used lengthy drone passages to project alienation, here they function as a seam between the two otherwise disjointed album segments. All of Blunt's work to date—if you're willing to consider his bizarre public character as part of that work—has been wrapped up in questions of identity. He's constantly concealing personal details and controlling the discourse about him to an apparently paranoid degree, and his sonic persona, shaped by distinctly gnarled postmodern experimentation, is as hard to pin down as his image. So what does it mean that for those questions now that he's appearing on the covers of glossy magazines and making pop songs? He's at once a folk pop troubadour and a downcast dub vocalist—a staid ambient composer and a gruff grime MC. He's everything all at once, or maybe he's not much of anything at all. As with everything he does, Black Metal offers few definitive answers, but this time around the hazy images he's projecting have come into sharper focus.

2014-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00

2014-11-17T01:00:01.000-05:00

Experimental

Rough Trade

November 17, 2014

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Colin Joyce

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

The Manchester-based producer who shares a label and an M.O. with Demdike Stare turns dance music exuberance into feelings of loneliness and dread.

The Manchester-based producer who shares a label and an M.O. with Demdike Stare turns dance music exuberance into feelings of loneliness and dread.

Andy Stott: Passed Me By

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15447-passed-me-by/

Passed Me By

Exuberance is dance music's usual purview: ecstasy, adrenaline, abandon without end. But there's a whole subset of club music that dedicates itself to the inverse of what we're expected to seek amidst a sweating, heaving crowd-- loneliness, terror, misery, dread. This isn't a new phenomenon; Simon Reynolds has written of how the collective serotonin depletion that followed Britain's acid house effusions turned breakbeat hardcore and drum 'n' bass down darker paths. That music, at least, continued to engage the body, as does its direct descendant, dubstep, thanks to breakneck tempos and spleen-crushing bass. Enter Andy Stott. The Manchester-based DJ and producer is no stranger to dance music of the most visceral kind. In the latter half of the 2000s, he was best known for steely, speaker-destroying dub techno. Recently, especially under the pseudonym Andrea, he's tried his hand at shuddering, breakbeat-fueled dubstep and 160-BPM juke. But on a new album for Modern Love, he reinterprets techno in dirge-like fashion, slowed to a funereal shuffle and weighted down by a lead blanket of reverb. The term "death disco" has never felt so apt. It's a modest album, just six tracks and a short, introductory sketch-- some 33 minutes in total. It's the tempos that you notice first: his 4/4 thump moves sluggishly, like a 12" 45 spun at 33 or even slower. House and techno usually lope along at somewhere between 120 and 130 beats per minute; Stott paces his tracks at 100, 90, even 80 BPM. Forget "peak-time" club music: these are trough-time beats. And it's not just a question of speed; every sound is warbly and unstable, like a warped record pitched way, way down. Handclaps and hi-hats crumble into bit-crushed detritus; kick drums and bass frequencies turn to a jellied slush, like solid ground liquefies during earthquakes. The murky sonics often recall Philip Jeck, who uses vintage turntables with a 16-RPM setting to attain an otherworldly rumble. On a couple of tracks, ethereal female vocals float hazily over the top; "Execution" is suffused with a gravelly death gurgle that wouldn't be out of place on a Sunn O))) record. A pervasive hiss and crackle drives home the idea that we're trawling the depths of vinyl's pockmarked grooves, like one of those microscopic photos that turns a record into a lunar landscape. Dissonance makes it even more hair-raising. "North to South" plunges darkly careening tones-- a Doppler-effect buzz with the skid of braked vinyl-- through bright, queasy synthesizers. (Kompakt fans may hear an echo of Wolfgang Voigt's M:I:5 project.) "Intermittent" revels in the seams as it patches together strings, bells, and vocal fragments into a rough-cut collage. In the song's last few bars, you can hear Stott's debt to disco edits as he finally lets a tightly cropped loop unfurl into a full phrase of music that, sped up, is recognizable as 90s R&B. Only one track doesn't fit the mold: "Dark Details", which throbs at dubstep's quickened pulse. Still, even here, the percussion's muted clang gives the impression of hearing a rave piped in via plumbing-- some club, miles away, suddenly bubbling up from your sink, and stinking of muck. Like a counterbalance to its uncharacteristically spry tempo, "Dark Details" is followed by the slowest tracks on the album, the demonic "Execution" and the torpid "Passed Me By", a song so bleak it could make Burial look optimistic by comparison. Ah yes, Burial: you couldn't not mention him, really. Burial's haunted melancholy certainly paved the way for Stott's even more despondent take on dance music, and Stott is hardly alone in his doomsayer's approach. You can hear similar sounds and affect in Shackleton, Raime, Holy Other, and in moments of Demdike Stare, a project of Stott's label-mate Miles Whittaker. But where Burial and Shackleton use the flickering syncopations of dubstep and garage to keep their music moving, Stott's 4/4 beats, reduced to a deathly crawl, give his music an even more hopeless cast. "Drag," the name associated with Salem's style of music, would be apropos-- suggestive, as it is, of a body being towed, or a boulder pushed uphill. Where club culture mythologizes a circuit of endless nights and after-parties, Passed Me By suggests physical and spiritual exhaustion, Sisyphus collapsing beneath the dead-eyed twinkle of the disco ball.

2011-05-19T02:00:02.000-04:00

2011-05-19T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Modern Love

May 19, 2011

00364936-5561-40c5-ab09-49ffbcaab0dd

Philip Sherburne

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

The first Crystal Castles album without vocalist Alice Glass is also the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought.

The first Crystal Castles album without vocalist Alice Glass is also the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought.

Crystal Castles: Amnesty (I)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22243-amnesty-i/

Amnesty (I)

Perhaps it was only a matter of time until Crystal Castles redirected the anger they once reserved for the rest of the world toward each other. After singer Alice Glass quit the band due to "reasons both professional and personal," she announced her intentions to go solo. Producer Ethan Kath fired back with a statement containing all the sensitivity of a Donald Trump tweet. “i think it can be empowering for her to be in charge of her own project,” he wrote. “it should be rewarding for her considering she didn’t appear on Crystal Castles’ best-known songs.” Then, for posterity, he listed more than a dozen of those songs. “people often gave her credit for my lyrics and that was fine, i didn’t care.” Clearly, he kind of did. Just the mere act of continuing Crystal Castles seemed distasteful to many fans who’d assumed, as Glass had written, that her departure meant the end of the project. But Kath didn’t just replace Glass; he tried to scrub her from the band’s legacy. While it may be true that Glass was never the driving force behind Crystal Castles’ sound, on stage she was their star attraction, the group’s spiritual link to the punk community and the wild card that made their shows such a frightening spectacle (she always appeared on the cusp of coming to blows with anybody within reach). To many, she was the group, yet the band’s current press material doesn’t make so much as a single mention of her. Never mind that she’s pictured right there on the cover of their first album, or that her name adorns one of their signature songs; in Kath’s revisionist history of Crystal Castles, she made no meaningful contributions. So Kath’s first Glass-less Crystal Castles album, Amnesty (I), arrives under uncomfortable circumstances. Its cover certainly doesn’t make it feel any less gross. (Is that photo of several nearly identical girls intended as commentary on how easily Kath believes women can be replaced?) Even the presumptuous (I) affixed to the title could be interpreted as a taunt, a sort of “there’s more to come” for anybody questioning the legitimacy of his new lineup. But Kath’s never seemed too concerned about being cast as a villain; bad press has trailed the group since its earliest days. As he attempts to make the case that Crystal Castles was his project all along, the new music does a better job bolstering his claims than any written statement ever could. Amnesty never tops what came before, but its best moments come impressively close. Even though the band’s hostile electro-industrial fusion is less of a novelty than it was in 2008, nobody else is producing it quite like this, and Kath’s incinerating hellscapes are as jolting and tactfully concise as ever. He owns this sound. Of course, once again, Kath owes his success in part to a strong collaborator. Inheriting the unenviable task of replacing one of the most singular frontwomen of the last decade, and under such tumultuous circumstances, new recruit Edith Frances proves more than capable. Though she lacks Glass’ violent temperament and scorched-earth conviction, she possesses a more controlled, refined voice that shines on Amnesty’s dreamier tracks, particularly “Char,” the most openly emotional pop song Crystal Castles has ever done. Her lavender soprano just barely brushes against the rotted-out trap beat of “Sadist,” and it’s so outmatched by the raved-up synths of closer “Their Kindness Is Charade” that the effect is heartbreaking. Too often, though, Amnesty doesn’t give her the freedom to put much of her own stamp on the material. With its ghostly shrieks, “Frail” is so closely patterned after the old Crystal Castles playbook that many people assumed it was a leftover from the Glass era when Kath first shared it. The convulsing “Enth” feels similarly like the product of a time capsule. It’s as if Kath went out of his way to keep recording songs that sound just like the ones he did with Glass. And so as good as it often is, Amnesty feels like a missed opportunity, the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought. It could have played into the strengths of the band’s enigmatic new singer, embracing the more nuanced identity she could bring to the project. Instead, Frances and Kath evoke earlier iterations of Crystal Castles, where they could have moved forward. Fans can debate whether that’s disrespectful to Glass, but it doesn’t do the current band any favors, either. You can’t take full advantage of a new chapter if you’re too stubborn to even acknowledge that it is a new chapter at all.

2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Fiction / Casablanca

August 30, 2016

0039971c-f220-4517-8427-dba455f4cce9

Evan Rytlewski

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

Still drawing from the canon of jangly, guitar-centric 1980s college rock, the Melbourne band’s latest infuses the easygoing vibe with nuanced political songwriting.

Still drawing from the canon of jangly, guitar-centric 1980s college rock, the Melbourne band’s latest infuses the easygoing vibe with nuanced political songwriting.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Endless Rooms

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rolling-blackouts-coastal-fever-endless-rooms/

Endless Rooms

Most bands are distinguished by their frontperson; Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever are distinguished by the absence of one. The Melbourne indie rock band has three guitarists who alternate lead vocals—Fran Keaney, Tom Russo, and Joe White—and while they’re all capable singers, none is a natural made-for-the-spotlight type. Between their personable, if modest, voices and the relentless, high-octane jangle of the guitars, the effect is like one of those periodic R.E.M. songs where the bassist sings lead, except Michael Stipe doesn’t return after it’s over. It’s just always a different guy who’s not Michael Stipe up next. While vocals may be something of an afterthought for this band, the guitars themselves are anything but. They’re Rolling Blackouts’ reason for being, and they spout from every crevice of the group’s third album, Endless Rooms, like jets in an especially luxurious whirlpool tub. The album never stops paying off with fidgety riffs, voluptuous tones, and sparkling flourishes. Though the band’s purview remains 1980s college rock, they mine so many shades and distinct variations that each song feels like a pull of a slot machine. Wound by nervous, frenzied guitars, “Tidal River” teeters with the volatile edge of Heaven Up Here-era Echo and the Bunnymen, while “Blue Eye Lake,” with its accents of post-punk and psychedelia, conjures the nocturnal shimmer of the Church. “Dive Deep,” meanwhile, takes a turn toward the glammy with the record’s slickest, showiest lead guitar heroics. For a band that arrived so fully formed, their sound has only continued to grow richer, the details around its edges more articulated. Endless Rooms’ surface pleasures have a way of masking how purposeful their songwriting can be. Written amid the pandemic and the Australian wildfires declared one of the most destructive wildlife disasters in modern history, these songs fixate on class disparities and environmental destruction. Along with a memorable image of jet skiers speeding over ailing reefs, “Tidal River” is thorned with suggestions of climate change. “Ceiling’s on fire, the train’s leaving the station/It’s January and we’re on vacation,” Russo sings, with just enough of a wry edge in his voice you can miss how dead serious the subject matter is. On “Saw You at the Eastern Beach,” he conjures a landscape in decay: “The petrochemical factory glitters like so many precious stones, even through the bay windows of the quarter acre homes.” As incensed as they read on paper, these lyrics never sting enough to upset the music’s easygoing vibe, not even on “The Way It Shatters,” where White pushes back against rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the county (“If you were on the boat, would you turn the other way?” he sings). Some of that comes down to the band’s casual, every-dude presentation; Rolling Blackouts are too much of a hangout band to humor any notions of their own importance. They’re more interested in making a lovable rock’n’roll record than a pointed political statement, even though at its best Endless Rooms happens to be both.

2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Sub Pop

May 9, 2022

003a30f7-1eed-4c9f-8d29-9b0b280382ea

Evan Rytlewski

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

Collecting a few leftovers from their 2020 album The Main Thing, Real Estate continue to expand the sound of the band as well as their song lengths to mixed results.

Collecting a few leftovers from their 2020 album The Main Thing, Real Estate continue to expand the sound of the band as well as their song lengths to mixed results.

Real Estate: Half a Human EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/real-estate-half-a-human-ep/

Half a Human EP

Every two and a half years or so, Real Estate return with 10 or so songs of meticulously casual and collegial music that evokes various phases of the past four decades of indie rock without being beholden to any particular era. Martin Courtney wistfully reflects on the way imperceptible daily changes add up to a world you no longer recognize. Fatherhood, solo albums, tectonic cultural shifts, and the dismissal of a foundational member have not altered what Real Estate do or how their music is critiqued; all five of their albums have earned aggregate scores between 76 and 79 on Metacritic. “Another good record from Real Estate. They’re still doing their thing. Just another Real Estate record,” Courtney joked about the reception of 2017’s In Mind, and so they made a protracted effort not to be taken for granted on 2020’s The Main Thing. The existence of a quickie EP like Half a Human is proof that Real Estate are indeed operating with a newfound sense of purpose. Half a Human’s premiere event shared visualizers to accompany its six songs, most of which recreated the experience of staring at Winamp visualizer while passing a bowl in a dorm. The band also put on Zoomin’ With Real Estate, a “variety show” where Courtney hung out with fans on various social media platforms, bassist Alex Bleeker performed solo material, and guitarist Julian Lynch showed off his rig. It’s by far the most lavish rollout any Real Estate release has ever gotten, maybe even their first lavish rollout. But the main purpose of Half a Human lies in the mere act of releasing reconstituted leftovers from The Main Thing, giving at least another nudge to see it the way Real Estate did—their New Adventures in Hi-Fi, a chance to hear a band known for economical songwriting and brisk albums brimming with more ideas than they can handle. Though nothing immediately pops like their yacht-rockin’ Sylvan Esso collab “Paper Cup,” Half a Human takes strides to make every inclusion at least objectively interesting—an instrumental of twinkly, harmonized guitars, one that imagines an alternate history where they stayed on Woodsist as a shaggy jam band with a wah-wah guitar solo and an exploration of ambient pure moods. But a radio edit of the title track tacked onto the end serves as an unintentional critique of Half a Human—it’s just too easy to remove the two minutes of synthesizer drift and end up with a perfectly enjoyable Real Estate song about the deceptive nature of passing time. The song part of “Half a Human” is just as ambient as its actual ambient outro, the downiness of Courtney’s unruffled voice, the slight dissonant notes in the jangled guitars, and Kevin McMahon’s sympathetic production fading not so much into the background as into other Real Estate songs. The bulk of Half a Human is tied up in the title track and “The Garden,” lengthier excursions that challenge Real Estate’s current perception as merely a jam-adjacent band. As with every time Alex Bleeker takes the lead, “D+” stands out by default; his proudly untrained warble is what can pass for assertive within Real Estate. But while he’s never been given more than one lead on any Real Estate album, Bleeker’s contributions are never “the one where the other guy sings.” At least in spirit, “D+” suggests what Real Estate want to become in their second decade: an indie rock gateway to the gateway albums of the Grateful Dead—Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty, the ones that allow newcomers to start their jettison of Deadhead cultural baggage. But even “D+” doesn’t challenge the lingering familiarity of Half a Human—the type of diehard that might check out Half a Human probably heard the Bleeker solo album from whence it came. In about six months, the 10th Anniversary cottage industry will turn its attention to Days and will certainly focus on its context as much as its content. In light of how emotionally raw and extroverted solo artists are the indie rock vanguard, how did an unassuming group of guys from suburban New Jersey playing gentle, chiming indie rock become the toast of “the super young, hip Brooklyn scene”? But Half a Human already challenges the pat compliment of “consistent”: if this were really true, why doesn’t, say, “Time” or “Paper Cup” generate the same excitement as “It’s Real”? Is it, as Courtney suggests, a matter of whether or not they’re cool anymore? Would “Ribbon” or “Soon” be as beloved as the Days deep cuts they could conceivably replace had they been written 10 years earlier? Are the core values of Real Estate just incompatible with the expression of urgency or reinvention? Or, the melodies aren’t quite as concise, Courtney’s gnomic expressions of wisdom a little more forced, their pivot to extended guitar jams is more admirable than compelling. Real Estate are just living the truth of their music, no more immune to the passage of time than their subject matter. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Domino

March 31, 2021

003a8760-2ba8-41c6-bc31-0ee7a6bec1bd

Ian Cohen

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

On his third project of 2016, 2 Chainz continues to show the way to rap successfully past the age of 40: He has some of the most enduring, daring, and funny verses in the game.

On his third project of 2016, 2 Chainz continues to show the way to rap successfully past the age of 40: He has some of the most enduring, daring, and funny verses in the game.

2 Chainz: Daniel Son ; Necklace Don

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22221-daniel-son-necklace-don/

Daniel Son ; Necklace Don

You can’t find “Duffle Bag Boy” legally. The song, which hit #15 on Billboard back in the fall of ’07, doesn’t exist on iTunes, Apple Music, Spotify, or Tidal. (There’s a rip of the music video on Youtube, but it’s censored and missing the intro where Lil Wayne says “Weed and syrup ’til I die…as a matter of fact it’s gon’ kill me.”) In fact, almost the entire Playaz Circle catalog, the duo 2 Chainz got his start in during the 2000s when he still went by Tity Boi, was scrubbed from streaming services some time in the last four years, presumably due to a copyright claim against the duo’s name. So if you’re just tuning in, it might look like 2 Chainz crawled out of the darkness in 2011, fully formed, drinking champagne on the airplane. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. For one, 2 Chainz knows how fortunate he is. Daniel Son ; Necklace Don, his third project this year, is informed—at points consumed—by the circumstances in which Tauheed Epps grew up. From “Ghetto”: “Used to stay with my cousins, heat the house up with the oven/Airport tried to make us move without paying us/We told ’em, ‘We ain’t budging.’” At the end of that song, he gives a quick monologue where he says he’s “thankful for everything that [he’s] been through, for every seed that’s been planted.” And that’s what makes his insane, Technicolor flossing so joyous—it’s grounded in grainy cartoons watched over stolen cable. That’s not to say 2 Chainz is a stickler for realism. *DS ; ND *has rims on ambulances, weddings at Benihanas, condos on Jupiter. He buys mansions just to shoot dice in; he leaves his mom’s house with a thousand Nikes. Or maybe he’s at Waffle House, snapping you back to real life: “Patty melt with the hash browns, trying to avoid all the pat-downs.” The last quote is from “Big Amount,” which sounds like you’re playing *Ocarina of Time *deep in College Park. After 2 Chainz wears Yeezys to dinner and honks at pedestrians and pours water (Voss only, nothing less) on women, Drake pops up with his best verse all year. He raps about not wanting to rap, calls himself “a J. Prince investment,” is visited by the ghost of Michael Jackson, pays tribute to Bankroll Fresh, and has a nervous breakdown when someone suggests staying at the Marriott. It’s funny, it’s specific, it’s vivid—because when you’re rapping next to 2 Chainz, you don’t have a choice. Speaking generally, it’s tough to rap through middle age. (Nas might be the only famous rapper to succeed in dealing with that transition in long form.) Those who enjoy do critical success on the other side of 40 tend to be narrow-lensed specialists like Raekwon, or to be totally unmoored from questions of time or conventional identity like DOOM or Aesop Rock. 2 Chainz is joining that short list because his style is equal parts daring and durable: he’s going to write the most distinct, disorienting, and immutably *fun *verses in the entire genre. And he’s developed into an excellent technician. On “Get Out the Bed,” the passage “Gladiator, tell your neighbor/Gun on table, Buick LeSabre/Do ya now, do ya later/Dice game, pool table/Two flavors, too anxious” is razor-sharp, as is “Kilo” or the YFN Lucci-assisted “You in Luv Wit Her.” But again, 2 Chainz isn’t going to leave the past behind. The tape’s penultimate song, the DJ Spinz-produced “Blessing,” blends the excess with heartbreak. It opens: “When I’m alone in my room, sometimes it look like the mall/In the back of my mind, I ball harder than y’all/I used to have an old school that I sat on some dubs/For the first time in my life, mama knew I sold drugs.” It’s the at-what-cost moment that bridges cold nights from his childhood with the gloss of the present. Unsurprisingly, 2 Chainz brings it to life the way few others could.

2016-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-13T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

August 13, 2016

003b2377-db75-468c-81f2-08a82e866799

Paul A. Thompson

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

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 Kesha's whiskey-soaked 2010 debut, a ridiculously fun and somewhat fraught album whose garish aesthetic is being channeled anew.

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 Kesha's whiskey-soaked 2010 debut, a ridiculously fun and somewhat fraught album whose garish aesthetic is being channeled anew.

Kesha: Animal

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kesha-animal/

Animal

Squinting at the paper in front of him, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon recites a few lines in a halting, soporific tone, the kind one expects from an aging humanities professor, which he is. “I’m talking about everybody getting”—he pauses, leaning forward to verify what he’s reading—“crunk, crunk. Boys try to touch my junk, junk.” The year is 2010. Muldoon and his tweed blazer have been summoned by Princeton University’s humor magazine for an arch literary critique of Kesha’s “TiK ToK,” which a student introduces deadpan as “one of the most seminal, interesting, and frankly deeply beautiful songs of the last 20 years.” The segment juxtaposes the mannered rhetoric of the Ivy League with Kesha’s dippy slang. It’s intended to be clever, signaling that these men are attuned to a class and culture and far above her, blah, blah, blah. They sound like total losers. “TiK ToK”—that wretched and awesome concoction of white-girl rapping, lurid Auto-Tune, and ridiculous quips—was the 22-year-old Kesha’s breakthrough single. By her account, it was inspired by an epic morning when she woke up “surrounded by a bunch of hot babes” and felt she was living it up like Diddy. (Hence the single’s indelible first line.) Immediately, she established herself as everything a good girl shouldn’t be: insolent, hedonistic, and trashy, with a devil-may-care approach to dental hygiene. She droned on about clothes and phones, and deployed vernacular (“crunk” and “errybody” and “po-po”) clumsily borrowed from hip-hop. The single seemed almost designed to irritate: because of Kesha’s fried, bratty voice, or her “oh, whoa, whoa, oh”s that resembled yodeling, or her twisted suggestion that she was attracted to Mick Jagger. It was the first No. 1 hit of the 2010s, one of the era’s many glorious, stupid anthems about getting schwasted because YOLO. When asked why her music resonated, Kesha replied pithily: “It’s not pretentious …. When there’s a recession and times can be hard, dancing is free.” In a perfect bit of mythology, Kesha Rose Sebert was allegedly born at a party in the San Fernando Valley—a place that looms large in the nightmares of misogynists and pedants because it’s where young women “like” and “um” freely. She didn’t know her father. Her mother, Pebe Sebert, was the bohemian songwriter who co-wrote the 1978 country single “Old Flames Can’t Hold a Candle to You,” which became a No. 1 hit in the hands of Dolly Parton. After securing a publishing deal, Pebe relocated the family to Nashville, often taking Kesha and her brothers to recording studios. She and Kesha would work on songs together for fun after school, eventually co-writing three tracks that appear on Kesha’s debut, Animal. The family was poor, surviving for many years on food stamps and welfare. Kesha has said that one of her first memories was being told by her mom that if she wanted a kitty-cat stuffed animal at Target, she’d have to steal it. But it was fun to be broke, as the singer reflected in her illustrated autobiography, My Crazy Beautiful Life: “I love making something beautiful out of things that others have thrown away.” This scrappiness, and the refusal to equate happiness with money, would permeate Kesha’s artistic identity—from her crummy bargain-bin aesthetic to the ironic dollar sign she’d insert into her name (and later remove), to the insurrectionary spirit of “Party at a Rich Dude’s House,” which sees her “pissin’ in the Dom Perignon.” In 2005, the Seberts appeared on the reality show The Simple Life for an episode in which Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie attempt to find Pebe a boyfriend. Years later, Entertainment Weekly asked Kesha whether she still hung out with the socialites. “Oh, gross!” she replied, stressing their class differences: “Do you think that those girls dig through the garbage for their clothes?” Despite her public reputation for being bone-headed, Kesha was smart, at least by conventional metrics. In high school, she was an International Baccalaureate student who loved physics and math and had a reported SAT score of 1500. She was set to attend Barnard College on scholarship, to study comparative religion and psychology. Then Lukasz Gottwald called. Known professionally as Dr. Luke, Gottwald was a tutee of Swedish pop architect Max Martin who’d just scored his first big hit with Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone.” (Clarkson did not like working with him.) Somehow, he’d gotten his hands on a two-track demo that Kesha had recorded. One of the songs was a “gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track,” a Billboard cover story revealed, in which Kesha runs out of ideas and begins to rap: “I’m a white girl/From the ’Ville/Nashville, bitch.” Nevertheless, Luke loved her “bravado and chutzpah.” The first time he rang the Sebert home, Nicole Richie hung up on him. (This was the middle of Simple Life filming.) He called again, telling Kesha he’d sign her if she moved to Los Angeles. She was 17. She did. Once she made it there, in 2005, Luke left her to her own devices. In the beginning, she lived with a man who claimed to be her father, but when she arrived at his home and found a real-life character from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, she became convinced they weren’t related (“There’s no way that half of my DNA is made up of someone who has a video game chair,” she said). She waitressed. She lived out of her car for a while. She took modest gigs supporting other artists, writing songs for the Veronicas and singing backing vocals for Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. Other record labels wanted to sign her, but deals fell through because of her contractual ties to Dr. Luke. Still, she seemed triumphant: her gonzo Myspace profile from 2008 describes her record label as “ur mom” and her musical sound, beautifully, like “god having an orgasm.” It’s this hubris, this crassness, this hilarity that made Kesha’s persona so engrossing. After four years in limbo, Dr. Luke asked her to sing the hook for Flo Rida’s “Right Round.” She initially wasn’t credited on the No. 1 hit, but it still brought some attention to her name. Then, with seven years of material already at her disposal, she spent 2009 working on her debut album with a production team including Dr. Luke, Max Martin, and Benny Blanco. In interviews, Kesha explains its title with ludicrous anecdotes about “almost [getting] eaten by a barracuda” or wanting parrots named Wayne and Garth. But the real implication of Animal is clear: go feral, she urges, surrender to your most primal instincts. And so the album throws itself into loving and fucking and dancing, anchored by buzzing, acid-bright electronics and booming four-on-the-floors. Call it consistency or repetitiveness: the songs continuously circle back to the same topics—Jack Daniels and “sick obsession”s, broken bottles and glitter strewn across the floor. It was part of a wave of bullish turbo-pop driven by the spiritual need to escape a bummer recession; besides, maybe the Mayans were right and the world really would end in 2012. A too-tipsy Gaga urged herself to “just dance.” The Black Eyed Peas vowed to burn the roof. Then, just in time, Kesha rolled in in her gold Trans Am and proclaimed that the party couldn’t start without her. Even her sad heartbreak songs (“Hungover,” “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes”) existed in the raver universe. Sometimes Animal fit the times too well: Several songs sound like they could have been shipped off other Dr. Luke and Max Martin collaborators, like P!nk or Katy Perry. But the record is also stranger than you might imagine; music critic Ann Powers once called moments of it “nearly as experimental as an Animal Collective record.” On “Take It Off,” Kesha is titillated by the “freaks” at a drag show, and amplifying the strangeness, the song turns an old snake-charmer melody into a mutant croak. Her kiss-off to creepy old men, “DINOSAUR,” oscillates from sassy cheerleader chants (“You need a CAT scan!”) to a whistling instrumental that evokes Lipps Inc.’s “Funkytown.” Of course, it starts off with a campy Jurassic Park roar. Weirdest of all is “Stephen,” a fanatical plea to a guy Kesha says she’s been “stalking” since she was 15. It opens with stacked vocals à la “Fat Bottomed Girls” and then becomes teen girl peppy: “Why won’t you call me?” Kesha presses, in a spine-chillingly grating mew, hypothesizing the answer in a clipped British accent: “You might think I’m ... crazy.” Puckish details like these carry the record: a little “holla!” sprinkled in a verse, a slurred and giggly “I like your beard” thrown at the end of song. Whether it was whimpered obsession or boorish indifference, Animal exhibited a silly, puerile attitude toward the opposite sex. One of Kesha’s guilty pleasures was Usher’s “OMG,” which sounds like it was written by a boy who just discovered masturbating: “Honey got some boobies like wow oh wow,” Usher warbled. (“Just the fact that he uses the word ‘boobies’ is horribly amazing,” Kesha told SPIN.) Equally middle-school commentary abounds on Animal. The extended version includes a track called “c u next tuesday,” in which she accuses a guy of being a—well, look at the acronym. On “Kiss n Tell” she sneers at a cheating boyfriend for being a “tool” not a “baller,” and—in the ultimate shot to the adolescent male ego—accuses him of acting like a “chick” and a “slut.” Behind her asinine attitude was a feminist project: Kesha believed that women had the right to be as lawless, coarse, and pimp-like as dudes. On “Blah Blah Blah,” she found her counterpart in crunkcore icons 3OH!3, the kind of dirtbags who’d slap your ass outside of Hot Topic and then saunter over to the food court for a celebratory smoothie. But instead of the guys being sleazy, it’s Kesha who’s impatient to get some. “Don’t be a little bitch with your chit chat/Just show me where your dick’s at!” she eye-rolls. Kesha thought that if men like LMFAO could make songs “all about how women are pieces of meat,” she should give them a taste of their own medicine. And so “Boots & Boys” takes a literal approach to objectification by equating men to footwear. But her oafish jokes often relied on crude gender essentialism, as shown worst in the line “I just can’t date a dude with a vag” on her later song “Grow a Pear.” Ostensibly, Animal should have aged poorly: for one, who says “steez” and “crackhead” anymore? Its garish, pitch-corrected vocals came in between JAY-Z declaring the “Death of Auto-Tune and Time crowning the technology one of the “50 Worst Inventions.” But now the stigma has evaporated, and absurdity and obnoxiousness are in vogue. Kesha committed boldly to brainlessness, long before the bimbo revival and aspirational claims to being “no thoughts, head empty.” Her brand of robo-shamelessness has been embraced especially by hyperpop, which is bathed in 2010s nostalgia. You can hear her in the airhead pop of Slayyyter and Ayesha Erotica, both of whom infuse their bubblegum tracks with tawdry flair. PC Music leader A.G. Cook has remixed “Stephen.” But the most worthy heirs to Kesha’s legacy are the anarchic pop duo food house, a.k.a the producers Gupi and Fraxiom, who make smirking, willfully doltish electronica. “Tonight let’s do shit that gets us in cringe comps,” Fraxiom drones on a song that samples “Crazy Frog,” adding a Reddit-poisoned spin to Kesha’s party-all-night mutiny. The elephant in the room is that Kesha made this record with Dr. Luke, a man who she’s accused of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. Some of the alleged incidents occurred right after she signed her record deal, when she was just a teenager; to this day, she is still trapped in a multi-year legal dispute. This backstory has cast its shadow. As one critic wrote, echoed by many: “It’s hard now to listen to her early hits without hearing them as documents of abuse.” This unease recalls an observation that the writer Jia Tolentino made, years ago, during the Weinstein reckoning: “One of the cruelest things about [sexual assault] is the way that [these acts] entangle, and attempt to contaminate, all of the best things about you.” What if the things you loved about Kesha were what Dr. Luke saw in her too? Her verve, her temerity, her “chutzpah,” as he highlighted. She initially chafed at some of “TiK ToK”s most memorable lyrics, worried, for example, that it didn’t make sense to brush your teeth with Jack Daniels. But Luke and Blanco kept goading her to make the song “more simple, just dumb.” When she thought of rewriting it, Luke “literally had to fight me off,” she said, good-humoredly at the time. Besides the “gobsmackingly awful trip-hop track” that caught Luke’s eye, there was another song on Kesha’s early demo: a “gorgeously sung, self-penned country ballad,” as Billboard described. Kesha always had interests outside electro-pop; early on, she and her brother were in a punk band together, and her Myspace profile included a mile-long list of influences ranging from Boards of Canada to Regina Spektor. For the title track of Animal, which she imagined as a segue into future projects, she attempted to emulate the Flaming Lips and Arcade Fire. But, as a 2013 New Yorker profile of Dr. Luke describes, their relationship soured because she wanted her second record to be rock. He insisted that she stick to dim-witted party pop. It’s tempting to disavow Animal because Dr. Luke wanted to keep Kesha frozen in its bacchanalian image. But it’s worth remembering the songs are hers, too—or hers, period. They tell real-life stories about being shit-talked by ex-friends, preyed on by senile old men, and having a good-ass time. And while Kesha once felt so defined by tragedy that she was afraid of being openly celebratory, she has ventured tentatively back to insouciance; she’s described the ethos of her upcoming tour as “skanky Disneyland that’s covered in glitter.” For what it’s worth, her fans still call themselves “Animals.” Kesha knew that good times are something you have to seek for yourself, which is why one of the themes she returns to on Animal is fighting: fighting until you see the sunlight, fighting into the magic, fighting for your right to party. These are songs she wrote while piss broke, bumming around crappy bars and barely affording groceries. And yet, they are filled with wisecracking exuberance, not burdened by the anxiety of what will come tomorrow but content to make the most out of now. It’s not a novel perspective, but it resonates nonetheless. Much has been said about the sorry state of the world we’re in, the precarity that young people feel because of the economy and the climate. Animal shows you what it’s like to have little but feel it all: a lingering crush, temporary transcendence in the hands of a DJ, the thrill of going out and returning with glitter still on your face. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-10-03T00:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

RCA

October 3, 2021

003c5526-e9ac-4f30-98d8-b1f2651b4649

Cat Zhang

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

Following a tour together in 2017, Doug Martsch & co. tackle an album’s worth of the Texas singer-songwriter’s work, but they fail to capture the strange and messy spirit that animates his music.

Following a tour together in 2017, Doug Martsch & co. tackle an album’s worth of the Texas singer-songwriter’s work, but they fail to capture the strange and messy spirit that animates his music.

Built to Spill: Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/built-to-spill-built-to-spill-plays-the-songs-of-daniel-johnston/

Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston

In 1994, Built to Spill took one of Daniel Johnston’s most famous songs—the hymnlike “Some Things Last a Long Time”—and made a glorious mess out of it. Where Johnston’s original was just his tiny voice and some echo-drenched piano, Built to Spill’s was a manned space vessel launch. Frontman Doug Martsch sent his distorted guitar like a kicked-over paint can into every corner, soloing for minutes on end. It was maybe ill-advised and probably a little dubious and definitely fantastic. In 2017, Johnston’s booking agent contacted Built to Spill with this cover in mind. The idea was to bring Martsch and his new version of the band—longtime members Scott Plouf and Bret Nelson had quit after 15 years—to play a few shows backing Johnston on what turned out to be his final tour. As Martsch remembered it recently, talking to SPIN, the shows went fine, smooth enough—maybe a little weird. Johnston’s stamina wasn’t great. When it was over, Martsch approached Johnston, venturing that perhaps they could do this again. To which Johnston, true to form, said, well, he didn’t know. Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston emerges from this fitful meeting of two diffident souls. Martsch shares plenty with Johnston—his frail, sweet tenor, most obviously, but also the childlike clarity of his most memorable observations. When Martsch covers an artist he admires, he usually excavates something unusual—see his cover of the Smiths’ “Reel Around the Fountain” or “Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want,” for example, or his sneaky 2003 side project Boise Cover Band, where you can hear that Midwestern choirboy voice tackle two-tone reggae (Dobby Dobson’s “Loving Pauper”), glam rock (David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes”), and even Captain Beefheart. But Martsch misses the opportunity to commune with Johnston’s music, or to do anything with it, really. On the 11 songs here, he resists the urge to plug in his distortion pedals and sail away. Johnston’s songs are simple constructions, pieces of white drawing paper with only a couple of marks and a few folded lines, and the streamlined trio version of Built to Spill honors this simplicity. Martsch strums an acoustic guitar, Jason Albertini plays simple root bass notes, and Steve Gere’s drum kit ticks quietly. These renditions are subdued, and while they’re sweet, they also feel like rehearsals—nothing of the strange and messy spirit that animates Johnston’s music, nothing of the fairytale darkness that makes it haunting, sneaks into Plays the Songs. “Bloody Rainbow” sounds like “Bloody Rainbow,” but without the little hiccups in Johnston’s voice, without the slight flubs his calloused hands make on the guitar strings. “Honey I Sure Miss You” sounds like “Honey I Sure Miss You” but minus Johnston’s reedy intensity. Martsch has always been a shy vocalist, but he comes off detached here, even a little blank, and his readings here have all the conviction of a Hi, How Are You? sticker. Martsch’s most expressive instrument, by far, remains his guitar, the outlet for all his unrulier feelings. When he allows it into the mix, things get livelier. Johnston’s rickety “Good Morning You” is polished until it sounds a little like “Fly Around My Little Miss,” from 2001’s Ancient Melodies of the Future. “Heart, Mind & Soul” is one of Johnston’s more devastating creations, a defaced doo-wop song trapped flailing under a rock. Played by Martsch’s new band, it sounds a little like a Sun Records outtake. And “Mountain Top” colors in the arrangements with some lovely background vocals and whammy bar-bent guitar chords. But otherwise, he doesn’t express or exert himself. It’s too bad. Martsch has a somewhat vexed relationship with trying—the album on which he tried his hardest, 1997’s masterpiece Perfect From Now On, had to be recorded three times and nearly broke him, to the point he could barely bring himself to play the songs on the album’s tour. Anyone who has seen his band live more than once knows there is a gulf of difference between Doug bored and Doug engaged. He seems to be growing more half-hearted as the years go on. Built to Spill’s output has been sparse as of late—just one album in the last decade—and Martsch admits regularly in interviews to long stretches of writer’s block and self-doubt. In that same SPIN interview, he confessed he looked back on his band’s “Some Things Last a Long Time” cover with mortification. “I think of that song as being so beautiful and delicate,” he said, “and us just rockin’ it out like that—it just seems so random and arbitrary to me in retrospect. Like, what were we thinking?” He may have a point—the cover does go on for a little while, and maybe it gets a little ridiculous—but at least it was a statement. Built to Spill Plays the Songs of Daniel Johnston feels a bit like a shrug in comparison. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

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

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

Rock

Ernest Jenning

June 13, 2020

00413e77-ca38-42e3-aa7d-e4ad74e0928e

Jayson Greene

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

When Odd Future tumbled out of L.A. in 2010, the skilled-beyond-his-years Earl Sweatshirt tipped them into the spotlight, but just as the collective took off he vanished. Three years after his first mixtape, Sweatshirt uses his Columbia debut to convey a more varied palette of emotions. As comebacks go, it’s shockingly insular and unassuming.

When Odd Future tumbled out of L.A. in 2010, the skilled-beyond-his-years Earl Sweatshirt tipped them into the spotlight, but just as the collective took off he vanished. Three years after his first mixtape, Sweatshirt uses his Columbia debut to convey a more varied palette of emotions. As comebacks go, it’s shockingly insular and unassuming.

Earl Sweatshirt: Doris

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18380-earl-sweatshirt-doris/

Doris

When Odd Future first tumbled out of Southern Los Angeles County in 2010, it wasn’t the high-strung antics of the group’s de facto figurehead Tyler, the Creator that tipped them into the spotlight. It was Earl Sweatshirt, unbelievably young (15? 16?) and skilled beyond his years, a methodical wordsmith whose splatterpunk murder fantasies were rendered all the more unsettling by his incredible poise. The video for “Earl” (off the mixtape of the same name), wherein Sweatshirt and company down a risky drug cocktail and party until they begin to decay, was integral in setting the then-unknown collective on its crash course with hip-hop notoriety. But just as Odd Future took off, Earl appeared to vanish. Once a menacing presence over Tyler’s post-Neptunes synth wheeze, Earl was frustratingly absent from the group’s inaugural round of live shows and festival spots as well as the second round of Odd Future solo efforts. The group refused to provide an explanation for the lingering absence of its best rapper when pressed, opting instead to lead fans through a quixotic “Free Earl” campaign immortalized in t-shirts, records, and elaborate satirical fan fiction. After a winding investigation, Complex was eventually able to trace Earl to a Samoan retreat for at-risk teen boys. It seems his mother, a civil rights activist and law professor, had shipped him overseas to clear his head after behavioral problems bled into his schoolwork. Barring an expository chat with The New Yorker, Earl fell silent after the reveal until turning up unexpectedly on Twitter one night in early 2012 with a new song called “Home” that closed with Sweatshirt giddily announcing his return: “I’m baaaack. Bye.” He appeared on various ephemera afterward: a supremely anesthetized spot on “Super Rich Kids” off Frank Ocean’s Grammy Award winning Channel Orange, an unannounced freestyle on the posse cut “Oldie” from The **OF Tape Vol. 2 compilation, and tracks with OF compatriot Domo Genesis and Flying Lotus’ rap alter ego Captain Murphy. He seemed to pick right up where the maleficent EARL left off, the new verses touting the same deadpanned orgies of bloodletting and misanthropy. It wasn’t until the end of 2012 release of the single “Chum” that Earl addressed his story in song. Built around a simple, affecting piano figure and clattering boom bap low end, “Chum” was a travelogue of a lost soul seemingly back on track. In it Earl opens up about a life of struggles, from the absence of his father, one-time South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, after a split from his mother (“I just used to say I hate him in dishonest jest/ When honestly I miss this nigga like when I was six”), to discovering drugs and petty crime, finding a big brother in Tyler, and the fallout from the Complex expose. “Chum” was the most personal and direct he’d ever been on record; it was gobstopping without relying on the trick of sullying the youthful zest of his voice with grim stories of death and defilement. Loosed from the nauseating gutbucket grit of EARL, Sweatshirt uses his Columbia Records debut Doris to convey a more varied palette of emotions. He challenges the uplifting mood of “Burgundy”’s jazzy Neptunes production, addressing the illness of his grandmother, insecurities about the new material, and lingering issues with his father in one fell swoop (“My priorities fucked up, I know it, I’m afraid I’m going to blow it/ When them expectations raising cause daddy was a poet”). He’s a distant lover on “Sunday”, trading verses with Frank Ocean about trying to tend to withering relationships as studio rats and touring musicians. “Hive” captures the sobering realities of L.A.’s inner city as Earl, his voice just above a whisper, speaks of hopeless commuters biking to jobs that don’t pay their bills (“From a city that’s recession hit/ Where stressed niggas could flex metal with pedals to rake pennies in”). The resignation in his voice in these moments of reflection is every bit as communicative as his unflappable stream of internal rhymes and arresting visual images. Even in the face of the newfound depth in Earl’s songwriting, Doris’ primary concern is his wordplay, which presents itself in thickets of rhymes so dense they can register as inscrutable on first listen. “Hive”’s second verse opens with: “Desolate testaments trying to stay Jekyll-ish/ But most niggas Hyde, and Brenda just stays preg-a-nant,” a glob of offbeat references, double entendres, made up words, and brilliantly disguised slant rhymes that hit as great exercises in rhyming words well before the deeper meanings can be teased out. Doris is also relatively hookless; where heaping doses of melody helped Tyler, the Creator break form earlier this year with Wolf, here it’s just raps on raps on raps. Guests are frequent, but they either come out rhyming for dear life, as Odd Future affiliate Vince Staples does when he swipes “Hive” out from under Earl in the third verse. Or they play hype man like Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA on “Molasses” and Vince in the spirited pep talks between Earl’s verses on “Burgundy”. The focus never strays from Earl’s fractious, DOOM-influenced songwriting for long, and Doris prefers to dispense it in short, impactful bursts as the “half short and twice strong” EARL did in 2010. The album breezes by in 44 minutes, but it feels longer. Earl favors droning, lumbering productions full of intriguing sound textures, but he pulls in enough curveballs to give the album a jerky energy. In the first few minutes alone, we get the airy keys and trap drums of opener “Pre”, brash horns and live drums on “Burgundy”, and piddling video game synths battling chunky bass on “20 Wave Caps”. Between the campy drum shuffle newly added to the end of the otherwise austere “Chum” and the shrill violin trills that usher in a shock beat change in the middle of “Centurion”, Doris gets as much of its jollies from settling into dark, forbidding soundscapes as it does from unexpectedly ripping us up out of them. Without the noirish serial killer stories of earlier work to fall back on, Earl has discovered new ways to shock and disorient the listener. Doris is full on its author’s prodigious abilities as a formidable young voice in L.A.’s resurgent hip-hop scene, but it’s not as concerned with the wider significance of the moment as it is with disbelief it’s actually happening. As comebacks go, it’s shockingly insular and unassuming. Earl remains self-deprecating throughout; he produces a number of the album’s tracks under the telling moniker Randomblackdude. Even when he skirts the mainstream, he does so with cautious optimism. Earl made a television appearance with the Roots on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" this month, running through the boisterous “Burgundy” with eyes closed after a tense walk from the blue room to the stage. It was a peculiar event, the anticlimactic unveiling of a star who’d been the talk of rap circles for three years but scarcely able to relish the attention. With Doris, Odd Future’s Odysseus is finally back and chasing the ghosts out of his head.

2013-08-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-08-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Columbia / Tan Cressida

August 19, 2013

00435953-70ea-4c76-bfdd-0213aee1b637

Craig Jenkins

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

Four years after the landmark Channel Orange, two new releases from Frank Ocean find him writing richly emotional songs for a quieter, more meditative space.

Four years after the landmark Channel Orange, two new releases from Frank Ocean find him writing richly emotional songs for a quieter, more meditative space.

Frank Ocean: Blonde / Endless

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22295-blonde-endless/

Blonde / Endless

At first, Frank Ocean was simply a great storyteller. Then he became the story—an avatar for all of our fluid modern ideals. He could be the dynamic human of the future, exploding age-old binaries with an eloquent note, melting racial divisions with a devastating turn of phrase or quick flit to falsetto. He breathed hope. Then he went away. Years clicked by. It was easy to worry. There are precedents for this sort of thing, for disappearances, for the self-implosion of black genius. Lauryn Hill. Dave Chappelle. “Black stardom is rough,” Chris Rock once said. “You represent the race, and you have responsibilities that go beyond your art. How dare you just be excellent?” The Rock quote is from a 2012 profile of the reclusive D’Angelo, who felt compelled to release his first album in 14 years following the shooting of Michael Brown; the moment spurred him on. Faced with a hellish loop of police brutality, other musical leaders like Kendrick Lamar and Beyoncé came forth with brilliant righteousness as well. But not Frank. Though he posted several elegant messages online, reacting to horrors in Ferguson and Orlando, his relative silence only grew louder as tensions outside continued to rise. The stoic empathy he beamed throughout Channel Orange was missed. There was a yearning for his perspective—how he could soothe without losing sight of what’s important. How he allowed us to escape within his carefully drawn characters while never letting us off the hook. How his voice was allergic to nonsense, how it could shatter a heart into dust. It still can. “RIP Trayvon, that nigga look just like me,” he sings on “Nikes,” the opening track from Blonde, his wary exhale of a new album. In the song’s video, Frank holds up a framed photo of the 17-year-old martyr, the boy’s sad eyes tucked inside a hoodie. Even now, four years after the Florida teen was shot and killed with Skittles in his pocket, the line jolts. It’s also the most overtly political statement Frank makes across the entire record. And “Nikes” is hardly a call to arms. The song is a woozy, faded, screwed-down odyssey, replete with helium warble and dewy third eye—and it’s actually one of the album’s most propulsive tracks. On its surface, Blonde seems tremendously insular. Whereas Channel Orange showed off an expansive eclecticism, this album contracts at nearly every turn. Its spareness suggests a person in a small apartment with only a keyboard and a guitar and thoughts for company. But it isn’t just anyone emoting from the abyss, it’s Frank Ocean. In his hands, such intimacy attracts the ear, bubbles the brain, raises the flesh. These songs are not for marching, but they still serve a purpose. They’re about everyday lives, about the feat of just existing, which is a statement in its own right. Trayvon Martin would be 21 today, and Blonde is filled with feelings and ideas—deep love, heady philosophy, despondent loss—that he may have never had a chance to experience for himself. The stories Frank tells here find solace in sorrow. They’re fucked up and lonely, but not indulgent. They offer views into unseen places and overlooked souls. They console. They bleed. And yes, they cry. The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core. Like how he skewed L.A. privilege without breaking a sweat on “Super Rich Kids” or broke down the Coachella generation’s bored numbness in five minutes on “Novacane.” Recently, he’s expanded this skill beyond music. It’s in the “Nikes” video, which both takes advantage of movie magic, like lighting a man (Frank?!) on fire, only to deflate the trickery by also showing the crew of extinguishers putting him out. It’s in the oversized, seven pound, coffee table magazine Boys Don’t Cry, which came out along with the new album; in it, screenshots of internet histories—perhaps the most accurate mirror of our modern selves—are on full display, along with literally naked bodies on and around his beloved sports cars, and charmingly unfiltered interviews with fellow artists and friends. (These chats can get a bit stoner-y, though amusingly so; in one, Frank asks Lil B, “is money sexy?”) And this transparency was also expressed in the current campaign’s prolonged rollout, which at one point had fans watching Frank watch paint dry as part of a live stream lead-up to a visual album called Endless. As a piece of filmed entertainment, Endless is painfully dull, and perhaps that’s the point. As we watch Frank build a spiral staircase with his bare hands, the piece offers a sort of anti-promo message that comments on how an album’s release strategy can often diminish the art it’s built to uphold nowadays. Or maybe, you know, it’s just really dull. Either way, the Endless soundtrack is much more exciting—46 minutes of music that plays like a mixtape, sliding from song to song, demo to demo, like scrolling through Frank’s hard drive of unreleased material. It’s an intriguing peek into his process, and it contains some of the rawest vocal takes he’s ever put out—like on the strung-out power ballad “Rushes”—but it lacks the clarity of Blonde. (In a neat inversion, it now looks like Frank used the relatively minor Endless to fulfill his major label contract and then self-released Blonde, the main event—though both were exclusives to Apple Music, putting into question what “self-released” even means at this point.) With Blonde’s unobtrusive instrumentation—large swaths go by without any drums whatsoever—the album could be mistaken for background music. But then Frank’s voice enters, and the overall quietness turns into a soft spotlight, capturing attention. It’s a technique pioneered by noted minimalists like Brian Eno and Rick Rubin, both of whom are included in Blonde’s who’s who list of contributors and inspirations. Many tracks feel emptied, with only the plain strumming of an electric guitar or foggy atmospherics left behind. But they mesmerize. Even a song like “Nights,” which sounds straightforward at first with its shards of silvery chords and midtempo beat, eventually turns into a strange shredding solo before ending with what sounds like a Drake dream heard underwater. “Nights” is not an anomaly. It’s the album’s centerpiece, by an artist who is following nobody but himself. Frank is 28 now, and his voice has grown stronger and more dexterous, while some of his tales have become more abstract. “Skyline To” is essentially a tone poem about sex, summer, and California haze backed by mood and mystery. “Godspeed” nods to gospel but stays grounded in its prayer to steadfast but broken love; a short story in the magazine, also called “Godspeed,” reads like uncanny science fiction but is actually based on Frank’s boyhood. Certain things are clear, though. The big questions are on his mind. He’s aware of his mortality now. He’s thinking about families, about what it means to live outside society, whether that’s a sustainable goal. He contemplates settling down with “two kids and a swimming pool” on “Seigfried,” a song that works in words by Elliott Smith and ends with a spaced-out soliloquy about living life in the red before a random solar flare brings chaos unto earth. This is not light fare. But the touch is oh so feathery. On “Solo,” he contemplates various stages of singledom, from the jacket-throwing hedonism to the smoked-out emptiness, with nothing but a churchly organ backing him up. It’s a stunning piece of songwriting that ultimately finds some peace with being alone. It sounds like a friend. Later on, “Solo (Reprise)” marks the album’s only major vocal guest appearance, with a devastating, head-spinning verse from André 3000. It pinpoints one of Blonde’s major themes: nostalgia. André looks back on his 20 years in hip-hop and feels duped by rappers who don’t write their own rhymes. “I’m hummin’ and whistlin’ to those not deserving,” he says, amid a conclusion that will likely haunt Drake’s nightmares for years. “I’ve stumbled and lived every word, was I working just way too hard?” There is disappointment in his voice, and some bitterness. André’s disillusionment could be a cautionary tale for Frank, who often uses the album as an opportunity to look back with a rosy tint: climbing trees, Michael Jackson, cannonballs off the porch, Stevie Wonder. It makes sense for an artist who titled his first major project Nostalgia, Ultra. when he was only 23. Longing looks good on him, though, especially when he’s able to harness it to aching effect on “Self Control” and “White Ferrari,” songs that fight off despondency with a sadness that feels three-dimensional. The album ends with a final look in the rearview, in the form of spliced-up old interviews with some of Frank’s young friends as well as his brother Ryan, who was around 11 at the time. A cozy keyboard rolls in the background as the boys talk about who they are and what they wish for. Carefree laughs—the kind that adults can’t seem to utter—are looped. Harsh static constantly intrudes, though, hinting at the distortions of time. These brief talks are also transcribed in the magazine alongside photos, and when asked about his dream superpowers, Ryan says, “I want to be invisible, I want to fly, and I want to be invincible.” His bright eyes peer out from under a Supreme cap and pink bandana. He looks like he might pull it all off.

2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

August 25, 2016

00443dbd-b01b-436b-8690-a51c6852b5aa

Ryan Dombal

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

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 Daft Punk’s debut, the duo’s greatest illusion yet.

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 Daft Punk’s debut, the duo’s greatest illusion yet.

Daft Punk: Homework

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daft-punk-homework/

Homework

Daft Punk’s Homework is, in its pure existence, a study in contradictions. The debut album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo arrived in 1997, right around the proliferation of big-beat and electronica—a twin-headed hydra of dance music fads embraced by the music industry following the commercialization of early ’90s rave culture—but when it came to presumptive contemporaries from those pseudo-movements, Homework shared Sam Goody rack space and not much else. Daft Punk’s introduction to the greater world also came at a time when French electronic music was gaining international recognition, from sturdy discotheque designs to jazzy, downtempo excursions—music that sounded miles away from Homework’s rude, brutalist house music. In the 21 years since Homework’s release, Daft Punk have strayed far from its sound with globe-traversing electronic pop that, even while incorporating other elements of dance music subgenres, has more often than not kept house music’s building blocks at arms’ length. 2001’s Discovery was effectively electronic pop-as-Crayola box, with loads of chunky color and front-and-center vocals that carried massive mainstream appeal. Human After All from 2005 favored dirty guitars and repetitive, Teutonic sloganeering, while the pair took a nostalgia trip through the history of electronic pop itself for 2013’s Random Access Memories. Were it not for a few choice Homework tracks that pop up on 2007’s exhilarating live document Alive 2007, one might assume that Homework has been lost in the narrative that’s formed since its release—that of Daft Punk as robot-helmeted superstar avatars, rather than as irreverent house savants. But even as the straightforward and strident club fare on Homework remains singular within Daft Punk’s catalog, the record also set the stage for the duo’s career to this very day—a massively successful and still-going ascent to pop iconography, built on the magic trick-esque ability to twist the shapes of dance music’s past to resemble something seemingly futuristic. Whether you’re talking about Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s predilection for global-kitsch nostalgia, their canny and self-possessed sense of business savvy, or their willingness to wear their influences on their sleeve like ironed-on jean-jacket patches—it all began with Homework. It couldn’t possibly make more sense that a pair of musicians whose most recent album sounds like a theme park ride through pop and electronic music’s past got their big break at Disneyland. It was 1993, and schoolboy friends Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s rock band with future Phoenix guitarist Laurent Brancowitz, Darlin’—named after a track from the 1967 Beach Boys album Wild Honey that the three shared an affinity for—had disbanded after a year of existence that included a few songs released on Stereolab’s Duophonic label. (Melody Maker writer Dave Jennings notoriously referred to their songs as possessing “a daft punky thrash,” which led to the pair assuming the Daft Punk moniker.) While attending a rave in Paris, Bangalter and Homem-Christo had a chance encounter with Glasgow DJ/producer Stuart McMillan, the co-founder of the Soma Recordings dance label; like any aspiring musicians would, they gave him a demo tape of early Daft Punk music. The following year Soma released Daft Punk’s debut single “The New Wave,” a booming and acid-tinged instrumental that would later evolve into Homework cut “Alive.” A follow-up, “Da Funk” b/w “Rollin’ & Scratchin’,” hit shops in 1995; according to a Muzik profile two years later, its initial 2,000-platter pressing was “virtually ignored” until rave-electronica bridge-gap veterans the Chemical Brothers started airing out its A-side during DJ sets. A major-label bidding war ensued, with Virgin as the victor which re-released “Da Funk” as a proper single in 1996 with non-Homework track “Musique” as its B-side. During this time, Bangalter and Homem-Christo casually worked on the 16 tunes that would make up Homework in the former’s bedroom, utilizing what The Guardian’s Ben Osborne referred to in 2001 as “low technology equipment”—two sequencers, a smattering of samplers, synths, drum machines, and effects, with an IOMEGA zip drive rounding out their setup. Bangalter and Homem-Christo’s work ethic while assembling the bulk of Homework was of the type that makes sloths appear highly efficient by comparison: no more than eight hours a week, over the course of five months. “We have not spent much time on Homework,” Bangalter casually bragged to POP. “The main thing is that it sounds good… We have no need to make music every day.” The songs were crafted with the intention of being released as singles (“We do not really want to make albums,” Bangalter claimed in the same interview), Homework’s eventual sequencing a literal afterthought after the pair realized they had enough material to evenly fill four sides of two vinyl platters. “Balance,” the pair said in unison when asked about Homework’s format-specific sequencing in Dance Music Authority following the album’s release. “It is done for balance.” Indeed, Homework is practically built to be consumed in side-long chunks; taking the album in at a single 75-minute listen can feel like running a 5K right after eating an entire pizza. Its A-side kicks off with the patient build of “Daftendirekt”—itself a live-recording excerpt of introductory music used during a Daft Punk set at 1995’s I Love Techno festival in Ghent—and concludes with the euphoric uplift of “Phoenix”; the B-side opens with the literal oceanic washes of “Fresh” before stretching its legs with the loopy, Gershon Kingsley-interpolating “Around the World” and the screeching fist-pump anthem “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.” The third side keeps things light with the flashy, instructional “Teachers” before getting truly twisted on “Rock’n Roll,” and the fourth side takes a few rubbery detours before landing on the full-bodied “Alive”—the thicker and meaner final form of “The New Wave”—and, quixotically, a slight and rewound “Da Funk” return, aptly titled “Funk Ad.” Bangalter explained to POP that the title of Homework carries a few meanings: “You always do homework in the bedroom,” he stated, referencing the album’s homespun origins before elaborating on the didactic exercise that creating the album represented: “We see it as a training for our upcoming discs. We would as well have been able to call it Lesson or Learning.” That instructional nature is reflexive when it comes to listeners’ presumptive relationship with the album, as Homework practically represents a how-to for understanding and listening to house music. Nearly every track opens with a single sonic element—more often than not, that steady 4/4 rhythm inextricably tied to house music—adding every successive element of the track patiently, like a played-in-reverse YouTube video showcasing someone taking apart a gadget to see what’s inside. Such a pedagogic approach can have its pitfalls; there’s always a risk of coming across as too rigid, and Daft Punk arguably fell victim to such dull, fussy didacticism later in their careers. But they sidestep such follies on Homework by way of the purely pleasurable music they carefully assembled, piece-by-piece, for whoever was listening. Under the umbrella of house music, Homework incorporates a variety of sounds snatched from various musical subgenres—G-funk’s pleasing whine, the cut-up vocal-sample style of proto-UK garage made popular by frequent Daft Punk collaborator Todd Edwards, disco’s delicious synths and glittery sweep—to craft a true musical travelogue that also hinted at the widescreen sonic scope they’d take later in their careers. Above all, the album represents a love letter to black American pop music that’s reverberated through Daft Punk’s career to date—from Janet Jackson’s sample of “Daftendirekt” on her 2008 Discipline track “So Much Betta” to Will.i.am’s failed attempt to remix “Around the World” the year previous, as well as the duo’s continued collaborations with artists ranging from Pharrell to Kanye West and the Weeknd. The spirit of house music’s Midwestern originators is also literally and musically invoked throughout. Over the winding house-party groove of “Teachers,” Daft Punk pay homage to their formative influences, ranging from George Clinton and Dr. Dre to Black house and techno pioneers like Lil Louis, DJ Slugo, and Parris Mitchell—and in a meta twist, the song’s structure itself is a literal homage to Mitchell’s 1995 Dance Mania! single “Ghetto Shout Out,” an interpolation clearly telegraphed in the middle of Daft Punk’s astounding contribution to BBC’s Essential Mix series in 1997. Alongside Daft Punk’s preoccupations with American popular music, Homework also carries a very specific and politically pointed evocation of their native Paris in “Revolution 909,” the fourth and final single released from Homework that doubled as a critique of anti-rave measures taken by the French government after Jacques Chirac assumed power in 1995. “I don’t think it’s the music they’re after—it’s the parties,” Homem-Christo told Dance Music Authority, with Bangalter adding, “They pretend [the issue is] drugs, but I don’t think it’s the only thing. There’s drugs everywhere, but they probably wouldn’t have a problem if the same thing was going on at a rock concert, because that’s what they understand. They don’t understand this music which is really violent and repetitive, which is house; they consider it dumb and stupid.” “Revolution 909” opens with ambient club noise, followed by the intrusion of police sirens and intimidating megaphone’d orders to “stop the music and go home.” The accompanying Roman Coppola-helmed music video was even more explicit in depicting the frequent clash between ravers and law enforcement that marked dance music’s rise to the mainstream in the early-to-mid-’90s; amidst a kitschy instructional video on making tomato sauce, a pair of cops attempt to disperse a rave, a young woman escaping one of their grasps after he becomes distracted by a tomato sauce stain on his own lapel. It’s been rumored, but never quite confirmed, that Bangalter himself appears in the video for “Revolution 909”—a slice of speculation gesturing towards the fact that Daft Punk’s Homework era was the time in which the duo began embracing anonymity. The now-iconic robot helmets wouldn’t be conceived of until the Discovery era, and the magazine stories that came during Daft Punk’s pre-Homework days were typically accompanied by a fresh-faced photo of the pair; during Homework’s promotional cycle, however, they donned a variety of masks to obscure their visages, including frog and pig-themed disguises. In conversation with Simon Reynolds for The New York Times in 2013, the pair cited Brian De Palma’s glam-rock masterpiece Phantom of the Paradise as artistic inspiration for their decision to retain visual anonymity, and Daft Punk’s press-shy tendencies (since Homework, the interviews they’ve chosen to take part in have been few and far between) are firmly situated in a long tradition of letting the music do the talking in dance culture—from the sci-fi evasiveness of Drexciya and Aphex Twin’s relative reclusiveness to the preferred reticence of Burial and his contemporaries in the UK bass scene. But refusing to turn themselves into rock stars upon Homework’s release also afforded Daft Punk a crucial element that has undoubtedly aided their perpetual ascent to the present-day: control. Retaining a sense of anonymity was but one of the conditions that the pair struck with Virgin upon signing to the label before Homework’s release; while the music they released under the label (before signing to Columbia in 2013) was licensed exclusively to Virgin, they owned it through their own Daft Trax production and management company. But Homework proved influential in other, more explicitly musical ways. G-house, an emergent dance subgenre in the mid-2010s dominated by acts like French duo Amine Edge & Dance, borrows liberally from Daft Punk’s own musical mash of hip-hop’s tough sounds and house music’s pounding appeal; the dirty bloghouse bruisers of Parisian collective Ed Banger—founded by Pedro Winter aka Busy P, who acted as the group’s manager until 2008—would literally not exist were it not for Homework, and that goes double for the party-hardy bloghouse micro-movement of the mid-late 2000s, which Ed Banger’s artists practically dominated. Parisian duo Justice, in particular, owe practically the entirety of their 2007 landmark † to the scraping tension of “Rollin’ & Scratchin’.” It’s tempting, too, to tie a connective thread between Homework and the brash sounds that proliferated during the peak heyday of the financial descriptor-cum-music genre known as EDM; close your eyes while listening to “Alive”’s big-tent sweep and try not to imagine the tune destroying a festival crowd. But for all of Homework’s aggressive charms, it’s also retained a homespun intimacy in comparison to how positively widescreen Daft Punk’s music became afterwards. “We focus on the illusion because giving away how it’s done instantly shuts down the sense of excitement and innocence,” Bangalter told Pitchfork in 2013, and the fact that two Beach Boys fans fiddling around in their bedroom could conceive of something so generously in-your-face and playful as Homework might still stand as Daft Punk’s greatest illusion yet.

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

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

Electronic

Virgin

December 2, 2018

00449942-d806-4143-acdf-1a03a4a43639

Larry Fitzmaurice

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

The London-based singer’s jazzy debut album shines most brightly when she gets explosive, yet her muted moments also resonate.

The London-based singer’s jazzy debut album shines most brightly when she gets explosive, yet her muted moments also resonate.

Morly : ’Til I Start Speaking

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/morly-til-i-start-speaking/

’Til I Start Speaking

Four years ago, Katy Morley accepted solitude. After putting out two lovelorn, trip-hop-influenced EPs, the Minneapolis-born, London-based singer, whose pen name is Morly, released “Sleeping in My Own Bed,” a track that emphasized her newfound fulfillment with a jazzy full-band arrangement. This song appears remixed and remastered on Morly’s debut album ’Til I Start Speaking, functioning as the final entry of a trilogy—following the lethargic title track and the smoky reflection “Dance to You”—about contented singledom. Throughout the album, Morly drifts between resigned longing and reciprocated love, painting in every shade of heartbreak and romance along the way. ’Til I Start Speaking shines most brightly when Morly gets explosive, yet her muted moments also resonate. During the climactic bridge of “Dance to You,” she sings, “I can’t grow inside your glow/And I’d rather be an artist than his wife,” as the storm of toms, minor-key pianos, and distant oohs and aahs surrounding her reverts to the track’s primary melody. This swelling accompaniment makes Morly’s confidence in this realization palpable; she recognizes that she’s more capable of understanding herself alone. Yet more common is the listless melancholy that defines “Superlunar II,” which depicts the opposite feeling: “I need you/You’re my proof/That death is worth the wait.” Her icy production works here: The track’s obvious romantic tunnel vision doesn’t require much fanfare, and the haunting chord progression flickers in the dark, lingering like a deep obsession. Morly’s songs are most powerful when she shines a direct light on her life. On the minimalist piano ballad “Twain Harte,” she explains exactly what she did about a passion clouding her vision. “They must have followed you across the sea/Pulled down the line/Because I’m so in love with you” isn’t a metaphor: Morly recently moved from L.A. to London to be with her partner. When Morly gets even more specific, the results are captivating. “At home/Dinner cooking on the stove/And Nina singing to my soul,” she sings at the outset of the gorgeous guitar-and-Mellotron haze of “Up Above.” The first time I heard it, I instantly visualized her in a tiny big-city kitchen, steam rising above her head, a slightly warped I Put a Spell on You LP spinning on a record player. By conjuring these moments out of thin air, she shows that she can be arresting simply by recounting her day-to-day experiences with specificity. Yet there is a moment where Morly manages to evoke a vivid scene by applying broad strokes. On “Jazz Angel (Bill),” she hears “an old song that makes me feel young” coming from behind a neighbor’s door. It’s a lonely, noir-tinted portrait of life in the city, and like the most affecting Morly songs, it’s a foggy window right into her heart. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-08-23T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Cascine

August 23, 2021

00465de6-5d5d-49f5-b5e3-d8b95606a6fb

Max Freedman

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

Montclair, N.J. band Pinegrove's debut LP Cardinal recalls some of the most consistently likeable rock bands of the past 20 years in their most easygoing phases: There’s the rootsy shamble of early Wilco, the wiggly guitar solos and general guilelessness of pre-prog Built to Spill. But beneath the amiable surface is an intense work about one of the most important things imaginable: how to make our friendships really matter.

Montclair, N.J. band Pinegrove's debut LP Cardinal recalls some of the most consistently likeable rock bands of the past 20 years in their most easygoing phases: There’s the rootsy shamble of early Wilco, the wiggly guitar solos and general guilelessness of pre-prog Built to Spill. But beneath the amiable surface is an intense work about one of the most important things imaginable: how to make our friendships really matter.

Pinegrove: Cardinal

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21507-cardinal/

Cardinal

Montclair, N.J. band Pinegrove's debut LP Cardinal doesn’t initially come off like a hefty work. Its eight songs, which never move at too hurried of a pace, recall some of the most consistently likeable rock bands of the past 20 years in their most easygoing phases: There’s the rootsy shamble of early Wilco, the wiggly guitar solos and general guilelessness of pre-prog Built to Spill. Songwriter Evan Stephens Hall’s voice betrays his New Jersey roots, taking on a geographically non-specific drawl than nonetheless makes you feel welcome wherever you are. Still, it doesn't scream "rootsy": the slow songs are the ones where Pinegrove sound like they’re waiting to derail, whereas "Visiting" and "Then Again" have the sentiment and aerodynamic thrust of pop punk. All together, you might call it alt-country, though it’s more in the spirit of Saddle Creek circa The Execution of All Things, Album of the Year, and Lifted—there’s banjo and twang and formalist structure. But unlike the trad-leaning No Depression style, this music sounds like it was made by young people, artists who created a dialogue with their fans by speaking to their specific concerns in an effusive, colorful language that mirrored their own. It's only when you spend time soaking in this language that *Cardinal'*s deeper themes emerge. The character Hall plays is a familiar one within lovelorn indie rock—he’s the well-read, verbose guy doomed to recount time and again the failure of words to express what he really wants. "Cadmium" was inspired by a book compiling letters sent between two authors, the first of which was a square of the titular color. As a seemingly sturdy barroom shuffle collapses, Hall yelps about the impossibility of just telling it like it is. "Aphasia" references a speech and language disorder, though it appears to be more of an emotional hangover that Hall shakes off on his way toward clarity. "So satisfied, I said a lot of things tonight," he sings, the victory not in what he said or even how he said it, just that he was willing to do so in the first place and put his pride on the line. Cardinal includes some material from Pinegrove's Everything So Far compilation, which might initially disappoint longtime fans. But "Size of the Moon" and "New Friends," which reappear here, scan as completely different songs in their new context*:* The cutesy reference to Nancy Kerrigan has been cut from "Size of the Moon," and the experience of playing the song live dozens, if not hundreds, of times has led to a newfound confidence of Hall’s vocals and a tighter performance. The full-band surge added at the bridge, when Hall screams "I don’t know what I’m afraid of!", seems to tacitly acknowledge the big-room anthem they’ve created. Pinegrove's Bandcamp bio describes them as "hard at work in the promotion of introspective partying!", which might sound silly at first. Indie rock typically presents introspection as the opposite of partying, after all, and as an activity it is supposed to be incompatible with things like band promotion and exclamation points. But Cardinal feels like one big determined push outward, an album-length fight against solipsism without losing your sense of self in the process. There's nothing frivolous about that, and nowhere does the band make the seriousness of their mission more apparent than in album-closer "New Friends," the other song that originally appeared on Everything So Far. Here, it draws a closed circle around Cardinal by commenting on the album opener "Old Friends": Hall resolves to make new friends—"I liked my old ones, but I fucked up, so I'll start again." It sounded wistful and clever on Everything So Far, but set off on "Old Friends," where he admits "I should call my parents when I think of them/ I should tell my friends when I love them," it cuts deeper. And then Pinegrove’s mission finally makes sense. "Introspective partying" may sound frivolous, but it deals with one of the most important things imaginable: how to make our friendships really matter.

2016-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00

2016-02-10T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Run for Cover

February 10, 2016

0047a93d-3a7f-4c11-b2f8-b0a7c848db32

Ian Cohen

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

Arcade Fire's lush, imaginative 85-minute fourth album is a triumph, but not a victory lap; the band never sounds content enough for that. Instead, Reflektor is an anxious, occasionally downright paranoid album that asks big, barbed questions aimed not just at the man who may or may not be upstairs, but the more terrestrial gods of rock history, too.

Arcade Fire's lush, imaginative 85-minute fourth album is a triumph, but not a victory lap; the band never sounds content enough for that. Instead, Reflektor is an anxious, occasionally downright paranoid album that asks big, barbed questions aimed not just at the man who may or may not be upstairs, but the more terrestrial gods of rock history, too.

Arcade Fire: Reflektor

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18667-arcade-fire-reflektor/

Reflektor

It's likely that the first time you heard the Arcade Fire's monstrously anticipated fourth album Reflektor, you were—to borrow a phrase that Win Butler spits out like a bite of bad food during the record's disco-noir title track—"staring at a screen." This past Thursday, the band posted to Youtube an 85-minute video which cued up the entirety of the double-album to visuals from Marcel Camus' kaleidoscopic 1959 film Black Orpheus. If something that happens on the internet can be considered An Event, then this certainly was one; in the same moment I saw the band's official tweet announcing it, two people simultaneously instant-messaged me the link. It was late afternoon on the East Coast, lunchtime on the West, and in that moment I did exactly what thousands of other people in those and all other time zones did: Stopped what I was doing, closed some extraneous tabs and programs, and listened. The auto-updating comments became a chronicle of knee-jerk first impressions: fervent gushing ("The bassline on 'Joan of Arc' is fucking epic"), groan-worthy puns ("I can't even reflect how excited this makes me!"), and egregious misspellings ("I don't understand what all the fuzz is about"). This scene would have seemed bizarre—and likely a little sad— to us decades ago, and it's frightening to imagine how quaint it will seem in the future. But this is how a lot of people at this moment in time—the one in which Reflektor was made, and the one it distrustfully interrogates—discover new music: Alone; together. All four of the Montreal-based band's albums have been about the tension between those two words, taking up subjects like suburban isolation and the false community of religiosity, but Reflektor is larger, at least in scope, than anything Arcade Fire have done before. Of course, the stakes have been raised considerably since we've last heard from them: Their previous album, The Suburbs, was the unexpected winner of the Grammy for 2011's Album of the Year. And yet, no one involved in this record sounds to be resting on the laurels of their achievements—that includes producer and LCD Soundsystem retiree James Murphy. Reflektor is a triumph, but not a victory lap; the band never sounds content enough for that. This is instead an anxious, occasionally downright paranoid album that asks big, barbed questions aimed not just at the man who may or may not be upstairs, but the more terrestrial gods of rock history, too. With either Ziggy Stardust, the Fly, or maybe that first guy who played Daft Punk to the rock kids as their guide, Arcade Fire have spiked their usual clenched-fist earnestness with a small but welcome pinch of irony—and this is what makes it feel vital in a way that a lot of recent guitar-based music is not. "Do you like rock'n'roll music?" Butler asks in a mock-Elvis shudder at the beginning of glam-rock earthquake "Normal Person". "Cuz I don't know if I do…" The only way to make a Big Rock Record in 2013 is to make one that is skeptical of what it means to be a Big Rock Record in 2013. On their last tour, the Arcade Fire played for the first time in Haiti, the country where vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Régine Chassagne's parents were born. Their time there served as the inspiration for Reflektor; Butler spoke recently about the experience of playing for audiences who'd never heard many of the classic rock groups we take for granted, and instead "connecting to people on a purely rhythmic, musical level…completely stripped of context." You can hear the Caribbean influence in Reflektor's emphasis on kinetic rhythms and deep grooves, but also in its somewhat irreverent attitude towards Anglo rock history. Reflektor is at once nostalgic for—its sense of sprawl feels like a throwback to the heyday of AOR—and iconoclastic about the past. It sounds like it has ingested a bunch of the great art-rock records you're "supposed" to learn to appreciate in your formative listening years—Low, Remain in Light, Exile on Main Street, The White Album, Here Come the Warm Jets— and thrown them into the fire, in an attempt to make new shapes from the smoke. Reflektor's sound is lush and imaginative, but never in a way that suffocates you with the fumes of its polish. It's limber and loose, as though the songs were performed live; the arrangements breathe, seethe, and sweat. As their detractors will be quick to point out, Arcade Fire's greatest crime in the past has been sometimes coming off too stately and self-serious (The Suburbs in particular had a buttoned-up quality that failed to capture the frenzied energy of their live shows), but on the first half of Reflektor they often feel like they're deflating their own sense of grandeur. It's nice to hear a band that showed up on the scene quite literally dressed for a funeral now sounding like they're having (at least a little) fun. Goofy asides, unexpected left-turns, and tiny imperfections bring these songs to life: Check the odd, muttered phrases scattered throughout the intros, the parts on "Normal Person" when Tim Kingsbury's high E string seems to get clipped by the fretboard, or, maybe most thrillingly, the tempo fake-outs in "Here Comes the Night Time". That song, one of the album's best, begins with a celebratory Carnival beat, but then—the sonic equivalent to the tricks they've been playing in recent concerts and TV performances—suddenly switches to a slower, dub-inflected pace. There's a charming scrappiness to that moment as the band reorients to the rhythm, like a marching band suddenly realizing they're going the wrong way and trying, calamitously, to turn around. There's always been a physicality about the Arcade Fire's sound—we're talking, after all, about a band whose members used to find it necessary to wear helmets on stage—but the rhythm section has never popped on one of their albums the way it does here. That emphasis has Murphy's stamp all over it (Butler says they all learned an important lesson early in the recording: "If you can get James tapping his foot, you know you're on the right track"), and so do the punched-up backing vocals. This is the first Arcade Fire album on which Chassagne doesn't sing lead, but her crisp, smartly arranged harmonies on songs like "Reflektor", "It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)", and "Joan of Arc" make her a major presence. (Same goes for Colin Stetson, who did the album's horn arrangements and whose uneasy bass sax is the title track's secret weapon.) Even Reflektor's most straightforward pop songs like "Joan of Arc" and "We Exist" are fractured and haunted, reminiscent of the way Achtung Baby summoned the ghosts that had always been dormant in U2. When people talk about Murphy's production on Reflektor, the Eno comparisons will be obvious, unavoidable, and earned. Reflektor unfolds over two discs, and which you prefer will depend on how many packets of earnest magnificence you take in your Arcade Fire. Disc 1 is raw and grounded; Disc 2 is airier, more cosmic, and a little less self-aware. The record's most divisive song is the second half's centerpiece, "Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)", which—Julie Taymor style—aims to be nothing less than all the Beatles songs at once ("Hey Jude" and "Revolution 9" included). It inevitably falls short, but it's hard not to admire the effort. Lyrically if not sonically, the album's weakest link is the slinky "Porno", whose heavy-handed lyrics ("Take the make-up off your eyes…Little boys with their porno/ They don't know what we know") feel a bit too much like bleeding-heart teenage poetry. And yet, even if the shoulda-been-B-side "Porno" feels like a lapse in judgment, it springs from the same source that helps the band continue to be so vital. Arcade Fire are eternal, defiantly emotive teenagers, and that's what kept them sounding like genuine underdogs even as they've become one of the biggest bands in the world. Nearly a decade after Funeral, Butler still sings like everything is at stake. For this band, growing up has not meant cooling the flames so much as beckoning them higher. The figures at the center of the Side 2 suite of "Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice)" and the wonderfully Cocteau-glacial "It's Never Over (Oh Orpheus)" are not the Springsteenian everypeople of Funeral and Neon Bible, but instead the star-crossed lovers in a Greek myth. And yet, even on Disc 2 it's hard to shake the feeling that Orpheus and Eurydice are just the B-plot; the great love story on Reflektor is the one between music and listener. With its clipped snippets of airwave chatter (the BBC's Jonathan Ross makes a cameo), warped VHS hum, and retro-luminosity that nods to a time when synthesizers connoted un-jaded wonder and revelation, Reflektor is designed to be an homage to the many ways music is transmitted, discovered, and incorporated into people's lives. Chassagne has said that her earliest and most stirring musical memories were "listening to [her] neighbor's music, the sounds coming through the walls" and then trying to replicate them on piano; in the same interview, the Texas-born Butler spoke similarly about U2's (much maligned) Pop Mart tour. Reflektor's scope is vast enough that it speaks to both of these experiences—and to our own. In the end, it doesn't feel like a critique of this screen-glazed moment so much as a validation of it. They've given us something in the present tense that, these days, feels depressingly unfashionable: An Event—an album that dares to be great, and remarkably succeeds.

2013-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Merge

October 28, 2013

0048e831-c0bd-4f69-83e8-6cc91b7ad593

Lindsay Zoladz

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

Big Sean's Dark Sky Paradise is by many lengths his best album, approaching the elusive sweet spot where his music works as mindless fun while still leaving you just enough to chew on. Kanye West, Ariana Grande, John Legend, and others guest.

Big Sean's Dark Sky Paradise is by many lengths his best album, approaching the elusive sweet spot where his music works as mindless fun while still leaving you just enough to chew on. Kanye West, Ariana Grande, John Legend, and others guest.

Big Sean: Dark Sky Paradise

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20220-dark-sky-paradise/

Dark Sky Paradise

Established rap careers can die suddenly nowadays, and not too long ago it looked as if Big Sean’s might wilt away early, if not exactly tragically. Though Sean's existence as a rapper was more acknowledged than appreciated, it was undeniable that he had a way of running into hits, and sometimes creating them, too. But his second album Hall of Fame, released in the summer of 2013, floundered: After scoring a run of Top 40 hits off both his debut album and various G.O.O.D. Music releases (like "Clique", which was fleshed out from his demo), Sean spent much of the last year and a half watching single after single expire upon arrival. "Control", the Kendrick Lamar showcase that rattled every rapper in New York, was the album’s biggest story for somehow not making the cut. Hall of Fame was not just a problem commercially, but artistically as well. Over the course of his career, Sean has honed his on-mic personality into a charming sort of gleeful obnoxiousness. He is good at being dumb, even if sometimes he is too dumb. His "ass" riff that opens G.O.O.D. Music’s "Mercy"—"ass-quake," "ass-state," "ass-tray"—are his most quintessential lyrics: funny and stupid in not-quite equal measures, but memorable in their shameless goofiness. He is the class clown of rap, entertaining or annoying seemingly at random, but just witty enough that he’s enjoyable to have around. Too little of that persona was present, though, on his weirdly dour and entirely too serious second album. Where Sean’s debut Finally Famous was blandly listenable but anonymous—with its big hits driven by guests Chris Brown, Kanye West and Nicki Minaj—Hall of Fame felt like an overcorrection meant to position him as a rapper’s rapper, the kind of guy who you tune into to focus on lyrics. Big Sean has an appeal, but that is not it. Dark Sky Paradise, his newest, does not wholly shed his aspirations for a certain level of legitimacy, as the nonsensical but very official-sounding title would implicate. But it is by many lengths his best album, and the first one that gets closest to hitting an elusive sweet spot where his music works as mindless fun while still leaving you just enough to chew on. The best example of this is "I Don’t Fuck With You", the song that kick-started the album and perhaps saved Sean’s career as we know it. Put online in September along with three other tracks, the song is an obvious banger with an instantly catchy hook and some truly great lines—"I just bought a crib, three stories, that bitch a trilogy"—that also leverages his broken engagement with "Glee"’s Naya Rivera in a way that feels authentically inspired. That song is where everything clicks for Big Sean, and the confidence he seems to derive from fully harnessing his powers seeps from its pores. Not all of Dark Sky Paradise is as successful, but when it’s at its best it feels like it came from the same place: a guy rapping more ferociously than he ever has because he knows that he’s better than he ever was. It’s that quantifiable oomph in Sean’s rapping that makes Dark Sky Paradise feel immediately more substantial than anything he’s released. Lyrically, he still straddles a line between being knowingly bald-faced and straight up showing his ass too often—"Headed to the game for OK seats/ Now I’m courtside at OKC"—but there’s palpable kinetic energy in the way he raps now, spitting in an almost-literal sense, his words splattering across beats in places that he may not even have intended. There’s a controlled but energizing chaos to songs like "Dark Sky (Skyscrapers)", the standout Kanye feature "All Your Fault", and especially "Paradise", which was uploaded to SoundCloud alongside "I Don't Fuck With You" but appears here with a new, and fantastic, second verse. On these songs, Sean’s eagerness imbues his music with a sense of urgency that makes his typically dopey lyrics—"I was in Florida, no Marlins, nigga/ I’m that Shawn, no Marlon, nigga"—feel not just like rib-nudging cracks but legitimate boasts. Unfortunately, the album only sustains that energy for about half its run time. After "Paradise"—which is preceded by the admirably boogying R&B palate cleanser "Play No Games"—Dark Sky Paradise becomes dreary and ponderous much like his second album, with leaden beats running past the five minute mark for no apparent reason. The album picks back up with its closing two tracks—the slightly treacly but skillfully executed "One Man Can Change the World" and the DJ Dahi-produced "Outro", which chops up a soul song (Darondo’s "Didn’t I") about as well as Kanye ever did—but it’s hard not to feel like the album’s second side represents a major missed opportunity. The deluxe bonus tracks—most notably the Ariana Grande collaboration "Research", which has a beguilingly tricky beat—help redeem the proceedings, and if you’re the type of person who doesn’t mind actively perfecting tracklists, you can make a pretty solid little rap album by replacing the album’s soft midsection with those three songs. Regardless, Dark Sky Paradise is a big leap in the direction of the ideal Big Sean full-length. Whether he will ever make it there is certainly an open question, but in the meantime the smirkiest rapper in the business finally has an album that justifies all that self-satisfaction.

2015-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

2015-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

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

February 25, 2015

0049f02d-e182-4de5-bdce-049d64c71184

Jordan Sargent

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

Filled with people, stories, and dialogue, the New York songwriter’s second album flows like an emotional breakthrough, tying together disparate observations into a serene and unified vision.

Filled with people, stories, and dialogue, the New York songwriter’s second album flows like an emotional breakthrough, tying together disparate observations into a serene and unified vision.

Cassandra Jenkins: An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cassandra-jenkins-an-overview-on-phenomenal-nature/

An Overview on Phenomenal Nature

Three songs into An Overview on Phenomenal Nature, we hear a sampled monologue: “So, these are real things that happen,” it begins. The speaker is a security guard at Manhattan’s now-closed Met Breuer museum, and the person on the receiving end, recording the voice memo and presenting it to us, is songwriter Cassandra Jenkins. A New York native as interested in telling stories as she is in collecting them, Jenkins seems to kick into action when people preface their thoughts this way—when she senses someone about to reveal something honest and intimate and useful. Phenomenal Nature, Jenkins’ second album, is filled with direct quotes, stories, and dialogue. Often, her characters have names: There’s David, Warren, Grey, Darryl, Lola, Peri, Hailey Gates. Some of them, like Gates, are the focus of entire songs, while others, like the museum security guard, pass through in momentary scenes. The overall effect is less diary than documentary, as we follow a single subject through the world, supplemented with key insight from experts. Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Jenkins keeps the album focused and breezy. In just over half an hour, it features one perfect song (the dazzling “Hard Drive”), five excellent ones, and an instrumental coda. Surrounding her voice with saxophone and fretless bass, drum loops and field recordings, acoustic instruments and new age synth, Jenkins’ accompanists mirror the conversational tone of her writing, ensuring that the revelations aren’t limited to the lyric sheet. The whole thing flows like an emotional breakthrough, tying together disparate observations into a serene and unified vision. With the exception of “Michaelangelo,” a thematic overture that summons the understated wisdom of Aimee Mann, Jenkins composed the entire album in Kaufman’s studio over the span of a week. Plainspoken and intuitive, her writing zooms into a specific period in her life. In summer 2019, she was prepared to join David Berman on his comeback tour as Purple Mountains when, just before opening night, she received news that he had died by suicide. Throughout these songs, she guides us through the immediate aftermath—grief, helplessness, canceled flights—along with a more imagistic fog of loneliness and confusion. While Jenkins’ early work offered a cozy spin on glammy Americana, here she and Kaufman carve a new atmosphere that feels particularly suited to this material. “Empty space is my escape,” she sings in “Crosshairs,” and her collaborators take these words as a kind of prescription, letting their melodies and rhythm materialize around her like constellations. Often, the cadence of her storytelling informs the sound of the band: Her search for enlightenment amid the depressive limbo of “New Bikini” casts them as a kind of ambient lounge act, while the solitary ghost story of “Ambiguous Norway” emits a heavenly campfire glow, like the ballads from Bon Iver rendered as sci-fi. Jenkins’ goal as a writer is to remain present, receptive to the poetry of daily life. But anyone who has dabbled in meditation knows the other side of that pursuit: the anger of feeling stuck in your own head, the frustration at your own frustration, the fear that maybe you’ve veered too far off course to ever get centered again. Despite the lapping calm of “New Bikini,” with its luxurious saxophone accompaniment from Stuart Bogie, there is a storm brewing below the surface. In each chorus, Jenkins recalls a friend’s advice—“Baby, go get in the ocean/The water, it cures everything”—and reconsiders it with optimism, skepticism, or sarcasm. Over the course of the song, you can hear her outlook dissolve from peaceful, cosmic nothingness into the more void-like, everyday kind. Despite the trauma in her subject matter, Jenkins’ writing summons a graceful, almost aspirational quality of lightness. She draws on the language of self-help—the mind-body connection, chakras, carving yourself from marble—but she also leaves room for pain to exist unresolved, unprocessed. She fills her music with community and friends, but she also understands that no one has it all figured out—least of all the people who claim to. This is why a song like “Crosshairs,” with its heartsick plea to “fall apart in the arms of someone entirely strange to me,” does not come across like rock bottom desperation: From Jenkins, this is a prayer, her belief that shared vulnerability can lead to its own kind of strength. The album’s gravitational center, and her peak as a songwriter, is “Hard Drive.” Over a steady, slow-building arrangement, Jenkins recites each verse in her speaking voice, undistracted, letting us into four distinct scenes: an art exhibit, a bookshop, a driving lesson, and a friend’s birthday party. Here, Jenkins meets a psychic who offers a few words of hope and guides her through a breathing exercise. Somewhere along the way in Jenkins’ retelling, a transformation takes place. Singing in the second person, she becomes the psychic. The drums cycle uphill and the band crescendos toward a psychedelic sunrise of pedal steel and ringing, open, major chords: “We’re gonna put your heart back together,” she promises. “Are you ready?” Her voice glimmers with the confidence of someone who already knows the answer. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

2021-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Ba Da Bing

February 19, 2021

004c2293-d760-4b97-9adb-1d9b7a9dda94

Sam Sodomsky

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

Repeat after me: MF Doom is not Zev Love X. Zev Love X is not MF Doom. Or so he ...

Repeat after me: MF Doom is not Zev Love X. Zev Love X is not MF Doom. Or so he ...

KMD: The Best of K.M.D.

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4571-the-best-of-kmd/

The Best of K.M.D.

Repeat after me: MF Doom is not Zev Love X. Zev Love X is not MF Doom. Or so he would have had us believe for the last half-decade. Last year, hip-hop paragon MF Doom (aka Daniel Dumile) completely flipped his pancakes and released three albums under divergent personas: Take Me to Your Leader as King Geedorah, Vaudeville Villain as Viktor Vaughn, and another installment in his Special Herbs series as Metal Fingers himself. The move brought him his greatest success to date, and cemented his position at the forefront of underground hip-hop. Before the masked man terrorized the undieground with raspy rhymes and hallucinogenic beats, of course, he was Zev Love X, and he represented Five-Percenters and bouncy black power sophisticates with the underappreciated collective K.M.D. It wasn't meant to last: After just one album, his brother and bandmate DJ Subroc was struck by a car and killed, and the band's subsequent album was shelved by Elektra Records. Zev reappeared underground in 1997, after nearly five years in hibernation, and has since come correct with an array of records invoking and sampling everything from Stevie Wonder to 1950s monster movies. In anticipation of K.M.D.'s upcoming reunion, Nature Sounds has cobbled together this best-of collection featuring much of the trio's out-of-print material. Of course, the disc amounts to little more than a refresher course for the K.M.D.-impaired, considering the group only released two proper albums. The first, 1991's Mr. Hood was a sprightly bit of Sesame Street-sampling brilliance that built a narrative around the album's ignorant namesake; the second was mired in controversy for much of the last decade: 1993's Black Bastards, whose cover featured a Sambo-like cartoon character being lynched, was put on hold by Elektra, and didn't see official release until 2001 on the Sub Verse label. To this day, Doom believes Elektra's motives went beyond the cover art, noting the more aggressive nature of the album as a possible reason for postponement. So this compilation has been hashed together, somewhat lazily, in hopes of reigniting some interest for the nearly forgotten Long Island crew. Both album's best tracks are lifted and placed in chronological order, without any apparent rhyme or reason, save a few Busta Rhymes-featured remixes at the album's end. Even the liner notes are slapdash, with snapshots of scribbled notebooks scattered throughout. There are no credits or thank yous, just written-in chaos, which is apropos of K.M.D.'s sound, but unfortunate for a greatest hits compilation-- especially one whose subject's history is so notorious. The good news is that virtually every track is a standout, from the rolling piano bump of "Humrush" to the wildly original "What a Nigga Know". "Nitty Gritty", however, showcases hip-hop's Five Percent godfathers, Brand Nubian, and exemplifies how they were always better at this type of thing. Zev, Subroc and Onyx were capable and energetic MCs, but lacked the charisma and flow control of Sadat X or Grand Pu. Most of the beats here are self-produced, and the raw sound, while intentionally grimy, exposes less than up-to-date technology in the studio. Even now, MF Doom is prone to taping samples off his VCR. The more incendiary diatribes from Black Bastards are smarter and more focused. By shedding their animated jester-characters, the trio's rhymes punched through the paper-thin walls of alcoholism ("Sweet Premium Wine"), drug abuse ("Stop Smokin' That Shit") and womanizing ("Plumskinz") without succumbing to the pedantic or pretentious tendencies of some of their contemporaries. What's most appealing than this release, though, is that it provides the opportunity to hear a more helium-voiced Doom as a young and hungry MC, less deluded by death and drugs and more driven by racism and poverty. His evolution into a gruff rapper's rapper would have been hard to envision given some of his goofier appearances here. It should be interesting to see what the schizophrenic genius cooks up for K.M.D.'s forthcoming Mental Illness. Until then, this shoddily assembled set should tide you over.

2004-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

2004-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Nature Sounds

February 15, 2004

00529f9c-9a5f-4d57-99cd-e253beed15dc

Sean Fennessey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/

Slint's landmark second album has been reissued in a box set that includes outtakes, live cuts, and a feature-length documentary by Lance Bangs. The record's greatest legacy might be the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement.

Slint's landmark second album has been reissued in a box set that includes outtakes, live cuts, and a feature-length documentary by Lance Bangs. The record's greatest legacy might be the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement.

Slint: Spiderland

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19182-slint-spiderland-remastered-box-set/

Spiderland

“We’re from Louisville, and we thought you needed to hear this.” These words are heard deep into the rarities portion of this 3xLP box set, as the introduction to a live recording dating back to a 1989 Chicago show in support of Slint’s raucous debut album, Tweez. And just what did Slint think their audience—who, judging from the faint smattering of applause, barely cracked the double digits—needed to hear at that moment? A freakin’ Neil Young cover, and a wholly reverential, note-for-note eight-minute reading of “Cortez the Killer”, at that. But the moment is significant nonetheless, and not just because “Cortez” proved to be the root DNA of the ominously methodical music they would go onto explore; that brief spoken introduction counts as an extremely rare document of Slint actually asserting their worth in public. In many respects, the story of Slint is an exceedingly familiar one of influence accruing in absentia, of mavericks who were ignored in their time and had to wait years to get their due. Except unlike other members of the criminally neglected alt-rock trailblazer club—from the Stooges and Big Star to Pixies and My Bloody Valentine—Slint didn’t just fail at becoming the world-beating superstars that their record labels and music-critic boosters alike hoped they would be. Through their initial 1986-1991 existence, Slint were obscure outsiders even within the subterranean confines of the American indie-rock underground. Compared to the get-in-the-van, play-anywhere ethic practised by fellow 1980s-hardcore students, Slint rarely performed live, and when they did, it was rarely as a headliner. Interviews were scarce; band photos all the more so. Spiderland—their second, final, and ultimately most revered album—wasn’t some painstaking, Loveless-scaled masterwork belabored over in the studio for months on end; it was a collection of six pared-down basement jams recorded over a single weekend, with many of the lyrics rush-written at the last minute. And Slint were so uncertain of their purpose upon the album’s completion, they actually included a call-out for female-vocalist auditions on record’s back cover, before just deciding to disband altogether prior to its official release. With Spiderland’s chilling, dead-of-night ambience, its predatory rhythmic gait, spine-tingling guitar plucks, and short-story narratives recited in unnervingly hushed tones, Slint had essentially crafted the mysterious soundtrack to their own disappearance. Even that seemingly innocuous, Will Oldham-shot album cover of the band members playfully swimming in a quarry looks just like the sort of photo you see on an 11 o’clock news bulletin about four local teens who went missing on a camping trip. It wasn’t until their friends—in bands as stylistically divergent but spiritually connected as the Jesus Lizard and Palace Brothers—achieved some degree of national renown in the mid-90s that Slint began its transformation from footnote to boldface; to read interviews with these and other affiliated groups in magazines such as RayGun, Alternative Press, and Option was to play a game of Spot the Spiderland Namedrop. By 1995, Slint started turning up on major-label-issued movie soundtracks; by ’96, Gavin Rossdale was dialing up Steve Albini—who recorded Tweez—to bring some of that corrosive crunch to Bush’s Razorblade Suitcase. And with the similarly atmospheric, equally explosive likes of Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor dominating the late-90s indie-rock conversation, Slint ceased to be just some band that had broken up too soon and became an entire subgenre of music unto itself. But well after they ascended to sainthood status, Slint’s sense of timing remained as curiously off-kilter as the tempos of their signature songs. In 2005 the band reunited, a good five years after the post-rock they’re credited with spawning had peaked in popularity. And now, after a few years of intermittent touring, we have the 23rd-anniversary box-set reissue of Spiderland, featuring a much-needed remaster courtesy of Shellac’s Bob Weston, 14 previously unreleased outtakes, a handsome 104-page photographic history of the band (with a foreword from Oldham), and director Lance Bangs’ thorough and intimate feature-length documentary, Breadcrumb Trail. On the surface, it’s the sort of hefty package that adheres to the standard process of classic-rock-level canonization. But true to the band’s spirit, the set is ultimately a grandiose act of self-effacement. Because for all the mystique Slint have acquired over the past two decades, no one has been more mystified by the band’s rising posthumous reputation than Slint themselves. (I mean, just look at the cover of the box set—notice something missing?) Rather than trumpet the album’s immense influence on subsequent generations of indie rockers, emo kids, and doom-metalheads alike, everything about this set works the other way to disassemble a quote-unquote classic into its basic raw materials. The demos practically break down Spiderland on a riff-by-riff basis, as we hear the songs devolve from pre-production dress rehearsals to rudimentary acoustic sketches recorded on cassette. The visual materials, meanwhile, trace Spiderland’s genesis back through the unheralded but highly fertile 80s Louisville post-hardcore community (which served as a sister scene to the Touch & Go/Drag City stables in Chicago), all the way to the formative relationship struck by band principals Britt Walford and Brian McMahan when they were kids attending a downtown alternative elementary school. Early in Bangs’ film, Walford claims he was bored with rock‘n’roll by the time he was 11; by the time they were teenagers, he and McMahan were already bored with hardcore, having served time in horror-punk torchbearers (and certified Friends of Danzig) Maurice and Hüsker Dü-styled thrashers Squirrel Bait. When the duo formed Slint with Maurice guitarist David Pajo and bassist Ethan Buckler, there was little to suggest the band would amount to anything more than another of Walford and McMahan’s impulsive extracurricular projects, which at that point had included everything from videotaped improv comedy routines to cassettes featuring nothing but the sound of their flatulence, samples of which reportedly seeped into the mix of Tweez. Though obviously indebted to the caustic, caterwauling post-punk of their producer’s former band, Tweez also gleefully subverted underground orthodoxies: In contrast to hardcore’s stern, anti-authority-figure rhetoric, the band named each of the album’s songs after their parents, while Pajo’s avant-Halen squeals and Buckler’s muscular but dextrous basslines meant Tweez wound up not too many slam pits removed from late-80s funk-metal phenoms like Faith No More and Jane’s Addiction. (Dissatisfied with Albini’s recordings, Buckler left the band shortly after Tweez’s release, and was replaced by Todd Brashear.) When Slint began working on the songs that would form Spiderland in 1989, the initial wave of post-hardcore indie rock was on the wane, with scene stalwarts either trading up (the major label-bound Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr.) or breaking up (Black Flag, Mission of Burma) or both (Hüsker Dü). Recorded by their friend Brian Paulson, Spiderland would forge a new indie-rock lexicon by applying hardcore’s emotional intensity to music that, formalistically speaking, was its complete inverse. Even in its heaviest moments, Spiderland wasn’t so much about rocking as stalking: Songs prowled instead of pummeled, with clean, glistening guitar lines (inspired by Pajo’s obsession with Minutemen’s D. Boon) accentuating lyrics that were muttered rather than screamed, all enhanced by a strategic use of space that meant the silences between the notes accumulated their own crushing weight. The album’s definitive bookend tracks—“Breadcrumb Trail” and “Good Morning, Captain”—don’t so much shift from quiet to loud as from bleak to blinding, with McMahan and Pajo emitting the sort of frequencies that make you cover your eyes instead of your ears. And when the band do encroach on something resembling conventional rock—like with the meaty, metallic, morse-code riffage of “Nosferatu Man”—it’s to a sadistic, merciless degree of excess, until you feel like the poor bastard in the movie Se7en whose stomach explodes after being force-fed too much spaghetti. Spiderland’s volcanic outbursts naturally count as the album’s most bracing, memorable moments. The one drawback is that they occasionally obscured and overshadowed McMahan’s monologues, which remain eminently unnerving for both their delivery (not so much “spoken word” as melody-averse singing imbued with cold-blooded, dead-eyed dread) and their amazingly immersive economy. Even a simple opening line like “Don stepped outside” (from the distorto-folk centerpiece “Don, Aman”) instantly sets a vivid scene of simmering unease, of needing to escape from some stifling, suffocating situation; the devastatingly melancholic “Washer” scans as a break-up ballad, but could also very well be the prelude to a murder-suicide. (Fortunately, Weston’s new master gives McMahan’s voice a greater clarity, while the amplified-vocal demos of “Good Morning, Captain” and “Nosferatu Man”—not to mention the supplied lyric sheets—allow you to follow the words more closely.) Back on Tweez’s “Carol,” Slint hinted at the darkness lurking in the backwoods of suburbia “past where they paint the houses”; forsaking its predecessor’s inside jokes for outsized drama, Spiderland ventures past that point of no return where the mundane turns horrific, with songs of vampiric lust and county-fair roller-coaster rides and boat trips gone terribly wrong. When Slint do inevitably unleash the noise, it’s less a sonic device than a narrative one, to mark the moment after which, for the songs’ protagonists, nothing will ever be the same again. And that seemed to be the case for the band itself. The one Slint legend Bangs’ film does confirm is that, after recording the harrowing vocal climax on “Good Morning, Captain,” McMahan checked himself into a hospital. And the fact that nothing more is said of his stay supports the theory that for Slint, Spiderland was something of a transformative, Deliverance-type experience for the band members—what began as a casual amusement among friends unwittingly lead them into somewhere very dark and disturbing, the details of which are never to be discussed publicly. (The box set reveals a couple of instrumental bed tracks from heretofore unpublicized, eventually aborted post-Spiderland sessions—the fragmented “Todd’s Song” and the drum-machine-ticked “Brian’s Song”. Their drifting, meandering nature suggests returning to the same headspace was too daunting a proposition.) Where Pajo would go on to enjoy some success with Tortoise, as Aerial/Papa M, and as an alt-rock ringer for Interpol and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, McMahan's post-Slint outfit, the For Carnation, has been dormant since 2000. Brashear—who wasn't involved in the reunion tours—now runs a video store. And Walford, once the galvanizing wünderkind of the Louisville scene (and, briefly, a Breeder), likewise receded into the sidelines as a supporting player for various Drag City acts and old blues-circuit singers alike, while sporadically working on music in private. (It's only now that he's reemerging with his first proper band in two decades, Watter, whose debut album comes out next month on Temporary Residence.) However, the album’s shadowy aftermath doesn’t necessarily make Spiderland a more intriguing artifact; likewise, the fact its creators were actually a bunch of goofball pranksters from loving, supportive, well-to-do families in no way diminishes the album’s grim majesty and visceral potency. If anything, the elucidating peek behind the curtain that Bangs’ documentary provides makes the album feel like an even more singular, remarkable achievement. Spiderland has always felt like the work of old, wizened souls who had endured great physical and psychological trauma and barely survived to impart their cautionary tales. But even with the visual evidence presented here, it’s still hard to fathom that music this visionary, disciplined, and emotionally resonant was being made by a bunch of guys still in their teens. (Slint may have a great band, but they were even better actors.)  Spiderland’s greatest legacy is not that it motivated a cluster of semi-popular bands in the late-90s and early 2000s to adopt its whisper-to-scream schematic. It’s the boundless inspiration it perpetually provides for all the bands that have yet to emerge from the basement.

2014-04-16T02:00:00.000-04:00

2014-04-16T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Touch and Go

April 16, 2014

0052e229-4dc5-480a-bfa2-4405a07bd5f4

Stuart Berman

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

The Berlin-based producer’s new album is a spellbinding fusion of atmosphere and texture, forever on the point of mutating into new shapes.

The Berlin-based producer’s new album is a spellbinding fusion of atmosphere and texture, forever on the point of mutating into new shapes.

ZULI: Lambda

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

Lambda

For as long as he’s been putting out music, ZULI has stayed two steps ahead. The Egyptian producer switches up styles not just from record to record, but often from song to song. His debut EP encompassed noise-rap beats, lo-fi techno, Detroit-inspired futurism, and crickets chirping over bell tones. The leaps between releases are even greater: After the extreme abstraction of his moody 2018 LP Terminal, in which hip-hop and footwork were pulled apart at the seams, ZULI sank his teeth into a set of no-holds-barred breakbeat smashers on 2021’s ALL CAPS EP. A Cairo native, the artist born Ahmed El Ghazoly spent much of his childhood in London before returning to the Egyptian capital, a double displacement that he says gave him his sense of restlessness. “I think the move between countries instilled an urge to rebel against my surroundings,” he told an interviewer in 2021. He was talking about his preference for “niche” sounds over popular styles, but he’s just as reluctant to relax into a niche of his own making. Now, on Lambda—his first major release in six years—he changes course yet again, jettisoning the rhythmic force and focus of his previous records in favor of a spellbinding fusion of atmosphere and texture that spills over with nebulous emotion. Lambda opens like a sunrise over a ruined city, vast chords of cinematic scope and symphonic grandeur swelling and morphing. A lurching electro rhythm rises and fades, speeding and slowing before abruptly falling silent, but what really drives the action are the tiny vibrations rippling across the surface of the music, a riot of unpredictability. ZULI’s productions have always felt unstable, but they’ve never been more precarious than they are here. His chords are a swampy morass; his textures shudder like ground liquefying in an earthquake, minuscule particles suddenly gushing in streams and bursts. This palette—a thick slurry of buzzing synths and blown-out distortion—carries across the breadth of the album, lending a feeling of uniform intent that makes it the most cohesive release in his catalog. Despite the extremity of the sound design, Lambda frequently feels like ZULI’s attempt at pop. In “Trachea,” a heavily processed voice groans and gurgles over chords that gleam with the imposing majesty of Jean-Michel Jarre; in “Syzygy,” UK-born, Hamburg-based performer MICHAELBRAILEY’s shrill falsetto soars above a shapeshifting backdrop of synths and piano that’s reminiscent of Arca’s mutant assemblages. The majority of the album’s tracks feature some sort of singing, usually woven deep into the gelatinous mix. “Syzygy” kicks off an interconnected three-song suite in which voice and synths alike are ground to dust; in “Plateau,” a highlight, Abdullah Miniawy’s mournful incantations twist like smoke, twined with melancholy clarinet and a tremolo figure that delightfully, however accidentally, recalls the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now.” Only once, on “10000 (Papercuts, Pt. 1),” do the vocals feel like the main event, as MICHAELBRAILEY intones a mantra of self-doubt and desperation over a roiling sea of molten bass and chimes. The song’s overt drama lays all its cards on the table; it lacks the intrigue of murkier, more ambiguous tracks like “Fahsil Qusseer,” an overcast trip-hop etude built around a poem written and recited by the producer’s father, Osama Elghazoly, or “Ast,” in which Coby Sey raps meditative, free-associative verses over a tape-warped music-box beat that becomes increasingly tangled over its two-minute run. (ZULI’s twisted productions work remarkably well with relatively straight-ahead rapping; I’d love to hear what he might do in collaboration with someone like Armand Hammer’s billy woods and Elucid.) The sense that these mercurial soundscapes could suddenly veer off in any direction—careening from distortion-encrusted power ambient to illbient tone poem or electroacoustic composition—is part of what makes them so compelling. Even after many listens, Lambda’s abrupt shifts in both style and emotional resonance remain surprising. It took me ages to pinpoint the heavy beats running beneath tracks like “Trachea” and “Release +ϕ,” given the rolling waves of synth swallowing them up. ZULI has previously pushed back against expectations that he should somehow represent Cairo in his music: “They always try to inject political narratives, projecting their own ideas of what an Egyptian musician should be, and I feel like the concept of ‘an Egyptian musician’ is kind of ridiculous considering that we’re like 120 million at the moment,” he complained in that 2021 interview. “I don’t really consider myself an Egyptian, I’m just a musician.” On Lambda, he takes his resistance one step further. In refusing to deliver the kind of club productions with which he’s long been identified, he has created an album that sounds breathtakingly original, even by his standards.

2024-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-22T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Subtext

July 22, 2024

00530429-c1c6-463b-b7f3-ec7d0cb1ea4b

Philip Sherburne

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

Stephen McBean's boogie outfit makes a more concerted effort to reconcile the band's inner darkness and light, leaning as much on pop as psych.

Stephen McBean's boogie outfit makes a more concerted effort to reconcile the band's inner darkness and light, leaning as much on pop as psych.

Black Mountain: Wilderness Heart

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14620-wilderness-heart/

Wilderness Heart

"Is it safe for the cowards to do what they've already done?" It's a rhetorical question, of course, but coming from the well-bearded mouth of Stephen McBean, the sentiment is especially pointed. For in his 10-plus years of making music, McBean has never been one to retrace his steps, venturing outward from the dirgey folk-rock of Jerk With a Bomb to the ever mercurial noise-pop of Pink Mountaintops and the earthquaking boogie of his most successful outfit to date, Black Mountain. But even the popular perception of Black Mountain as 1970s-style riff-mongers is unfairly myopic, with the seeming anomalies in their discography-- the carefree jangle pop of "No Satisfaction", the hypno-drone trance of "No Hits", or the raised-lighter sing-along "Stay Free"-- proving just as prevalent as the Black Sabbath worship. In their heart of hearts, Black Mountain are really just peaceful hippies, but ones who aren't afraid to deploy heavy artillery to assert and protect their way of living. (Run their hearts around at your own risk: If their philosophy could be displayed on a VW microbus bumper sticker, it would read "Make Love Then War.") On the band's third album, Wilderness Heart, there's a more concerted effort to reconcile the band's inner darkness and light, a symbiosis reflected in their choice of producers: Randall Dunn, best known for his work with doom-metal giants Boris and Sunn O))), and D. Sardy, whose lengthy list of multi-platinum clients includes Oasis and the Rolling Stones. Couple those big-name producers with the decision to record in L.A., not to mention their mainstream toe-dip on the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack, and all signs point to Wilderness Heart's being Black Mountain's go-for-broke commercial bid. But while the new album is certainly more streamlined and luminous than 2008's weighty, apocalyptic In the Future-- no 17-minute prog-rock suites to be had here-- the sharper focus doesn't dilute the band's cannabis-clouded cool. In FM-radio terms, Wilderness Heart is Black Mountain's Houses of the Holy, an album that shimmers as much as it bulldozes, humors as much as it rages, while flexing a more pronounced pop sensibility that mostly works in the band's favor rather than to their detriment. And just as John Paul Jones' Mellotron-based set piece "No Quarter" was arguably the highlight of Houses, Wilderness Heart's most striking moments come courtesy of keyboardist Jeremy Schmidt-- his thick, Deep Purplish tones on the Camaro-rattling "Old Fangs" prove heavier than the glam-metal riff chugging underneath it, and instead of dropping in the de rigueu**r guitar solo, the band lets him slather on dreamy layers of laser-beam synth drones. Likewise, his Mellotronic backdrops on the stoner-folk reveries "Radiant Hearts" and "Buried by the Blues" refashion these downcast acoustic interludes in a more majestic light. Schmidt's spotlight turns are indicative of a broader shift in Black Mountain's M.O., where the band is becoming less reliant on a monolithic power-chord attack and playing more to the strengths and subtleties of its individual members. Sure, Wilderness Heart boasts Black Mountain's fiercest thrasher to date in "Let Spirits Ride"-- which takes the proto-speed-metal riff of Black Sabbath's "Symptom of the Universe" for a joyride-- but the real revelation is the playfully loose, stutter-grooved "The Hair Song", which despite being built upon contorted acoustic-guitar strums and slides, hits as hard as anything else in the band's canon. The song also charts the increasing confluence of McBean and Amber Webber's voices-- where they were initially presented as stark contrasts, the two are now practically finishing each other's sentences. And in some cases, Webber even steals the song from de facto frontman McBean, her chorus turn on "Rollercoaster" elevating the track out of its sludgy morass. For an album that presents a more assured, swaggering Black Mountain, it's a minor disappointment that Wilderness Heart doesn't so much climax as gradually wind down, without a show-stopping finale to crown the victory lap. But even in their quietest moments, the band can still leave you unsettled-- the closing track may be the first Black Mountain acoustic ballad dedicated to a girl, but not coincidentally it's a name ("Sadie") strongly evocative of the Manson murders and the tenuous line between blissful, free-loving hippiedom and violent anarchy. And as the song fades out into an ominous tribal-stomp procession, you're still not sure which side Black Mountain are going to lean toward next.

2010-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00

2010-09-09T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Jagjaguwar

September 9, 2010

005338f7-3105-46c0-b148-a877c8846899

Stuart Berman

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

Accompanied by some of the best players in the scene, the country maverick performs bluegrass versions of highlights from his back catalog, revealing the hidden roots of his idiosyncratic songwriting.

Accompanied by some of the best players in the scene, the country maverick performs bluegrass versions of highlights from his back catalog, revealing the hidden roots of his idiosyncratic songwriting.

Sturgill Simpson: Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sturgill-simpson-cuttin-grass-vol-1-the-butcher-shoppe-sessions/

Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions

Back in June 2020, Sturgill Simpson confessed his bluegrass dreams to an empty Ryman Auditorium. “I decided after climbing the ropes of country-music stardom and then completely destroying that career to make a rock’n’roll record. Now I have great ambitions of a life of gravel parking lots and Porta Potties,” he joked during the livestream concert, flanked by a small band featuring some of the greatest talents in bluegrass. His jab was affectionate: Simpson says he was a fan long before he moved to Nashville and became one of the biggest country stars ever to insist that he wasn’t really country. His new album Cuttin’ Grass Vol. 1: The Butcher Shoppe Sessions, a collection of bluegrass versions of songs from Simpson’s own back catalog, grew out of a fundraising challenge with his fans, but you get the sense Simpson eventually would have gotten around to recording a bluegrass record anyway, if only because the genre’s emphasis on acoustic instrumentation and technical chops flies in the face of what many perceive to be Nashville’s reliance on slick production and cookie-cutter stars—qualities that, fairly or not, he has repeatedly lambasted. In that Ryman Auditorium livestream, Simpson stressed the influence of bluegrass on his own playing and songwriting. Whether he was revving them up for his early punk-country group Sunday Valley or exploding them on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, Simpson was heavily influenced by the rhythms, melodies, and sentiments of the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, and others. But he’s also a master of concision, often refusing to repeat some of his catchiest passages and typically eschewing the verse-chorus-verse format. There’s a military precision to his songs—fitting for a guy who spent three years in the Navy and then used that experience as the thematic foundation for his breakout album, 2016’s A Sailor’s Guide to Earth. So his tunes slide easily into bluegrass, a style that prizes individual precision within a larger group dynamic. Simpson has recruited a band of barnstormers for Cuttin’ Grass, which he recorded at the Butcher Shoppe Recording Studio with friend and producer David Ferguson. Almost every player on the album was up onstage at his Opry and Ryman shows, and they’re all among the best at their respective instruments. Guitarists Tim O’Brien and Mark Howard toggle fluidly between lead and rhythm to ensure everything moves at a steady clip. Banjo player Scott Vestal and fiddler Stuart Duncan treat “All the Pretty Colors” like a Cubist canvas, finding new angles in the central melody and slyly reinterpreting Simpson’s metaphor about heartache washing all the color out of his world. If anyone dominates these arrangements, it might be Sierra Hull, a mandolin prodigy whose picking is as sensitive as her backing vocals, especially on a tender, soulful version of “Breaker’s Roar”—arguably the most transformed song on the album. The best bluegrass players balance blazing technique with close attention to the song and deep knowledge of the canon. Even when the picking is deft, it’s rarely showy; instead, there’s a modest ostentation to Cuttin’ Grass, which simultaneously plays up the cosmic quality of Simpson’s songwriting but also grounds it in earthy arrangements. Dreams are constantly intruding on reality in his songs; God infuses everything, light constantly battles darkness, and death just takes us to another plane. “Gonna transmigrate to my destination far beyond time in an eternal dream,” he sings on “Just Let Go,” right before the band joins him on the chorus: “Am I dreaming or am I dying?” It’s a murder ballad where the ego gets the knife. Cuttin’ Grass at times plays like a covers album, with the artist and the subject both the same, but overall it’s a de facto greatest hits, surveying nearly the full breadth of Simpson’s career. Granted, his success should have put the lie to “Life Ain’t Fair and the World Is Mean,” which sounds like sour grapes from an artist who can convince a major label to fund the anime film that accompanied his lackluster 2019 rock’n’roll record SOUND & FURY. Otherwise, his choices are compelling, especially the three songs from Sunday Valley, which only released one album and one EP before Simpson went solo. He and his bluegrass band transform them from rowdy, rusty alt-country numbers into this collection’s biggest revelations. The best of the lot, “I Don’t Mind,” takes the conventions of country music and subtly inverts them. Against Miles Miller’s two-step drum pattern, he describes heartache as an existential conundrum, striking a bittersweet balance between defeat and desire. “If you think you can ever love me again, please go ahead, I don’t mind,” he sings, as the players offer their consolations. The appeal of Cuttin’ Grass goes beyond the novelty of hearing familiar songs in a new setting. This isn’t Pickin’ On Sturgill Simpson. Rather, these performances emphasize the cosmic and the sentimental in Simpson’s catalog. What’s missing, however, is the sense of possibility that defines his other albums, even the lackluster SOUND & FURY. As a country artist, Simpson is determinedly subversive; as a bluegrass artist, he’s incredibly conservative. There are none of the abrupt stylistic changes that made Sailor’s Guide sound as big as the world and none of the sonic experiments that made Metamodern Sounds such a trip. Simpson can’t quite sustain a double album in this style, and Cuttin’ Grass loses some steam toward the end. However, there are more than enough bracing moments here to make you wonder what Volume 2 will sound like, especially if it’s all those ’80s covers he promised his wife. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

High Top Mountain / Thirty Tigers

October 24, 2020

00538f83-1aff-4b3c-8331-75e30508dd79

Stephen M. Deusner

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

Merge reissues the first three albums from these indie rock legends.

Merge reissues the first three albums from these indie rock legends.

Dinosaur Jr.: Dinosaur / You're Living All Over Me / Bug

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11719-dinosaur-youre-living-all-over-me-bug/

Dinosaur / You're Living All Over Me / Bug

I'm shocked at the relatively low-key reaction to Merge's Dinosaur Jr. reissues. Do today's cardigan undergrad massive not appreciate one of the key DNA strands of what we once unironically referred to as Alternative Rock? Was this the final victory of new wave? Will no one else admit to sporting a homemade puffy paint Black Flag t-shirt for the whole of ninth grade? It's not wholly surprising, given the deathless nature of early 80s nostalgia at the moment. The SST bands (and Dinosaur were proud to be on the label until they realized Greg Ginn's accountant was Houdini) rocked unashamedly, something very few bands do in 2005. It's understandable, given how many current rock bands came up in the 90s, a decade of unashamed rocking by unreconstructed doofuses like Collective Soul. Irony and earnestness are a precarious balance, and once hardcore went mainstream, beginning with Nirvana and peaking with Dashboard, a swerve towards brittleness and arched brows was inevitable, maybe even desirable. (Bright Eyes, "O.C." Mixtapes, and Matrix-rocking girl-pop shoot that theory to hell. Oh well!) The band was nothing if not earnest, but those impulses were balanced by a gentle, aw-shucks bewilderment. They were-- and either enough time has now elapsed, or I'm going to turn into a pumpkin for writing this-- the quintessential slacker band. I'm not going to detail the WMD-grade antipathy going on in the band at the time these albums were recorded, but clearly J, Lou, and Murph had yet to develop what Dr. Phil would deem fully formed personalities. They're forgiven this because, in true "Behind the Music" style, their inability to interact with any sense of decency may have been part of the combustion that made them one of the best guitar rock bands of my lifetime. Dinosaur were initially called Deep Wound, and played a particularly speedy and rectilinear form of hardcore that somehow wound its way across the pond and into the hands of the bands who would basically create grindcore and death metal. After the usual line-up shuffling (off to college, home from college, I don't like you anymore) and maturation (wow, there's other music than rat-a-tat 200bpm speedcore out there), they became Dinosaur. J Mascis switched from drums to a guitar that he took to playing as loud and hard as possible because it didn't have the bruising capabilities of his beloved kit. Lou Barlow played bass, not badly but too enthralled by half with Peter Hook. Murph played drums and was Murph. Dinosaur (the Jr. got safety pinned on after they became famous when a dinosaur Dinosaur came crawling out of the woodwork to protest) is, like many albums made by people just out of high school, stylistically incontinent. (This a polite way of saying it's a fucking mess.) There was all this cool music out there, new and old, and Dinosaur wanted to sound like all of it, with a hardcore base. Opener "Bulbs of Passion" cribs from Sonic Youth; "Forget the Swan" is an outtake from The Cure's Three Imaginary Boys; "Cats in a Bowl" shoulda called itself "Burger Marionettes", etc. All the songs feel like they go on longer than they should. The confusion is right there on the back cover photo. J wears his love of the Birthday Party atop his head. (Nice pendant, dungeon master.) Lou looks like Sally Jesse Raphael has just violently possessed the body of Superchunk's Mac with styling by Bill Cosby. Murph looks like he should be working at 1985 Texaco (or be in Journey's "Separate Ways" video). This is actually quite charming in a moment when bands spring fully formed from a stylist's imagination into their perfectly mediated debut albums within six months (coughkasbiankaiserchiefsbraverycough). It's amazing what a little growing up in public and support from your idols will do for you. In two short years, Dino went from bar band nobodies to a pop-noise outfit with a panzer attack and a heart of gold. The move to SST surely bolstered their confidence, and J's zen despondency over the guitar (he may have wanted it to sound more like drums, but you get the feeling he would have been just as happy playing a zither if it could get really heavy) burst into a particular volcanic ooze of proto-indie. Dino cut all the excess ruffage from their diet, and Murph and Lou locked into a tuff little unit that made Joe "I like rock, me" Carducci and Ginn want to sign them in the first place. Even the solos feel like they're being corralled by their burgeoning pop instincts. If they lumber, it's a tuneful lumbering. They discovered the sweet spot between Black Sabbath and the Buzzcocks, which every carpetbagging grunge chancer (and one or two geniuses) took to the mall a few years later. (Though, to be fair, without the grunge chancers, I'd have maybe never heard of Dino in the first place.) The album opens with skreeching chalkboard feedback before switching up for REM engineered by Swamp Thing. The opening of "Tarpit" casually invents all the parts of emo Rites of Spring didn't invent first, but then decides to, like, totally fucking shred. "Poledo", on the other hand, invents everything icky and solipsistic about indie rock in the 90s: Lou fishing for chicks in his bedroom with a four-track, an acoustic guitar, and some Stockhausen-by-way-of-Fisher-Price pause-button edits. It all climaxes with their immortal (and surprisingly reverent) cover of the Cure's "Just Like Heaven", which is a lot of fun but can't hold a candle to any of the live versions of this era, where J took the second solo as an opportunity to rend a hole in the space-time continuum. If you have any interest at all in rock music, the electric guitar, good songs, the freed weed, or teenage ennui, buy this album. Key lines: "I'll be waiting by your window/ Please come pat me on the head/ I just want to find out/ What you're nice to me for." Bug was recorded a year later as Dino crested on a wave of goodwill, good press, and international touring. "Freak Scene" is probably indie rock's greatest guitar performance and the band's greatest pop song, somehow finding room for Psychedelic Furs jangle, Edge-style ascending harmonies, Eddie Van Halen in the drunk tank, pickled country, and a cherry on top in three and a half minutes without feeling at all cluttered. "What a mess," maybe, but worlds away from their debut. Bug is a tighter and cleaner a whole, and you can hear why they would soon be courted by major labels getting their noses open by first alt-rock drops of blood. You can also hear the influence/feedback loop Dino had after razing London, specifically the combo of distant sounding feedback washes and Byrdsy plucking that closes "No Bones", a sound cut-rate shoegazers would milk for another six years at least. "Yeah We Know" turns like a tank's treads flipped in the mud, each crunching snare hit at the end of the verse tricking you into think the song's about to end. "Pond Song" showcases what a subtly clever drummer Murph was when the noise got stripped away, and "Budge" is a testament to the virtues of straight-ahead pounding. "Keep The Glove" is a jaunty little end tune, but it was pretty sadistic to make Lou scream "why don't you like me?" over and over on "Don't", when it was increasingly clear on stage that no one in this band liked anyone. It all collapsed, absurdly half-assedly, shortly after the Bug tour when J made Murph fire Lou who didn't even get the hint at first. Dino were pretty much done at this point, though Mascis released a few more decent albums under the name-- Where You Been, in particular, was a fine slice of overlong, rangy grunge pop. Barlow formed Sebadoh, indie rock's longest running ugly late-night post-breakup phone call, and then what Stephen Malkmus neatly summarized as "the thing with the loops." Murph diminished into the west and remained Murph. The world suffered through a lot of bad loud-quiet-loud by guys in gas station jackets. The albums went out of print, and we sufficed with an aptly named best-of, Ear-Bleeding Country. Now Merge has reissued them in excellent new mixes (the SST version of You're Living All Over Me in particular sounded as if it had been recorded on gauze through a metal funnel) with good photos, liner notes, and slightly rejigged tracklists. Unfashionable or not, here's a band who cut through on nothing but heft, volume, songcraft, earnestness, and a kind of underrated virtuosity. Even if the on-record response was whatever, man.

2005-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

2005-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

April 7, 2005

00584b0d-3d54-47fc-8842-d65f0587a1a1

Jess Harvell

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

Long-awaited follow-up to 1994's critical smash Hex finds the band in remarkable form, again drawing comparisons to former contemporaries Talk Talk and The Durutti Column.

Long-awaited follow-up to 1994's critical smash Hex finds the band in remarkable form, again drawing comparisons to former contemporaries Talk Talk and The Durutti Column.

Bark Psychosis: Codename: Dustsucker

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1132-codename-dustsucker/

Codename: Dustsucker

Too often in the (still) geeky-white-kid-dominated indie world, rhythm gets cast aside as a marginal sidekick to ambitions such as writing the perfect melody or scoring an NME-abetted college radio chart-topper. Dancepunk tried valiantly to remedy this but, in a way, only made things worse: Musicians who seemed to have little or no interest in a groove took a crash course in ESG and sought to control rhythm's basic tenets because it was the thing to do. As a result, the image of the awkward white kid sloppily banging out a rigid disco beat on a shitty drumset is now more farcical than endearing, and the fun of records like The Rapture's Echoes has been overshadowed by pale imitators. It's nice, then, that Codename: Dustsucker, built from the ground up on "found drumming" from ex-band member Mark Simnett and new tracks from Talk Talk's Lee Harris, thrives on and reveres rhythm rather than merely tinkering with or flat-out ignoring it. Dustsucker arrives a decade after Bark Psychosis' previous album, Hex, and the band's subsequent dissolution. That 10-year hiatus may seem slight in a year in which Brian Wilson fans were relieved of their 37-year wait for Smile but, like the former Beach Boy, Bark Psychosis deliver. And, like Hex, Dustsucker sounds utterly unique, eschewing even the broadest classification. This album is percussion-centric, and that's to say nothing of the temperance and agility of the drummers' playing. It's also an album smitten with texture, space, and silence, a seamless blend of acoustic instrumentation and electronic processing on which its piecemeal compositions generate massive momentum within predominantly slothful tempos. On "Shapeshifting", one can hear a constant push-and-pull between the acoustic and electronic elements, as plaintive strummed guitar nudges against a stiff drumbeat with metallic, Gamelan-like flourishes. The record is also filled with huge, billowing clouds of resonance, which occasionally inundate its tracks in a morass of sustained sounds. "400 Winters" lingers and lingers, drawn out by massive amounts of reverb, plenty of held notes, and an ethereal underpinning of backward-looped vibraphone. Though melancholic, the song is ultimately too hopeful to be dragged down and it's easier to bask in its hazy formlessness than moan about its lack of variation. But while "400 Winters" manages to stay afloat, some tracks suffer from lethargy. "Inqb8tr" is opulently adorned in multiple layers of effects and textures, but is too congested to endure its eight-minute runtime. But even when Dustsucker's songwriting falters, the percussion is distinct, lending direction to the record's stacked orchestration. "Reserve Shot Gunman" emerges from directionless darkness with a propulsive, vaguely Latin groove. A mercurial bassline gradually annexes notes until finding a melody that, in lieu of vocals, provides the track both a face and a backbone. "From What Is Said to When It's Read" incorporates huge, tympanic tom sounds as a kind of melodic element, while "Shapeshifting" rides an unflinching vamp through a two-minute coda that features no melody, only noisome sound effects and drums. Dustsucker may be languorous and dense enough to put off those who are on edge, but even when the album grinds to a halt under its excessive weight the scenery is beatific. And what the songs lack in structural certainty or melodic eloquence they usually make up for in the remarkable depth and vibrancy of their textures. Considering the band's 10-year layoff, it's a somewhat understated return-- and one painted in broad strokes. But the album's unerring intimacy implores closer looks. In 2004, the fact that this record exists at all is significant, and fans of Hex should find plenty to like under its moody lightning.

2004-10-04T02:00:04.000-04:00

2004-10-04T02:00:04.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Fire

October 4, 2004

00589a53-bcdf-4eac-9b68-ab5e1fb6f63c

Pitchfork

Sufjan Stevens' multimedia work inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, premiered in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is released as a CD/DVD set.

Sufjan Stevens' multimedia work inspired by the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, premiered in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is released as a CD/DVD set.

Sufjan Stevens: The BQE

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13593-the-bqe/

The BQE

The BQE, Sufjan Stevens' multimedia work celebrating the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, premiered in 2007 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Onstage, it was an audiovisual three-ring circus, with 16-millimeter video screening images of the roadway while costumed female hula hoopers gyrated in the foreground. Now, he has packaged the experience in a boxed set, complete with an essay in the liner notes, the DVD, a comic book, and a View-Master reel. On one hand, this is exactly the sort of quixotically huge undertaking Stevens has a weakness for. And yet, once you strip away the bells and whistles, The BQE is essentially a traditional 40-minute orchestral suite, a lightweight showpiece in which the ghosts of Gershwin, Ravel, Respighi, and other standard-orchestra-repertoire crowd-pleasers surface. In fact, until an electronic interlude crashes in about halfway through, The BQ**E could easily pass for the sort of palette-cleanser that might have opened a major orchestra's subscription concert in the 1950s. The fact that Stevens would devote his energy to something as unwieldy and time-consuming as an old-fashioned orchestral suite while his fans wait patiently for an Illinois followup is perversely endearing, like learning that J.J. Abrams has put the final season of "Lost" on hold so he can realize his dream of reciting The Iliad. But luckily, The BQE isn't much in need of the polar-bear-on-tricycle-style praise that greeted Elvis Costello when critics learned that he wrote his Il Sogno ballet suite by hand: "Look, it's a pop musician, and he's composing!" The BQE is a bubbly, fun, fast-paced, and deftly written piece, full of compositional fireworks, jazzy interludes, and stylistic detours. It opens in full faux-pompous mode, trumpets blaring and woodwinds fluttering, before dissolving into a languid Romantic episode, the pillowy string writing and dewy, twinkling piano recalling Rachmaninov at his drowsiest. From there, Stevens flits through a dozen different moods and textures, a rustling-leaves pizzicato section collapsing directly into a kaleidoscopic, double-time electronic version of itself. The variations come and go breathlessly, each folding into the next without much attempt to locate the connective tissue linking them. The effect is superficial, but pleasantly bracing, like flipping quickly through the pages of a book. The accompanying DVD, which Stevens shot himself alongside cinematographer Reuben Kleiner, is supposed to drive home the connection the work has with this project's famously clogged namesake. However, instead of animating or complementing the bustling music, the visuals bog down the project. The split-screen shots of the highway have a very staid, Ken Burns quality to them, and feel as though they could have been produced completely independently of Stevens' music. If Stevens was setting out to evoke the odd exhilaration of urban chaos-- and he seems to have been, rhapsodizing in the liner notes about the roadway's "steep grades, sharp turns, [and] detours... [creating] a rollercoaster obstacle course for the unsuspecting driver"-- then it's ironic that the video he's produced is completely devoid of kinetic energy. Long, motionless shots of the congestion on the BQE don't give you much of a fresh perspective on traffic; they mostly feel like, well, sitting in actual traffic. When the sun sets and we're invited to gaze upon lit-up city skylines and red suns, it's a relief, mainly because we're no longer stuck in gridlock. As with Run Rabbit Run, Osso's recent string-quartet reworking of Stevens' second album, Enjoy Your Rabbit, it's tough to know for whom The BQE project is intended. It seems doubtful that the work will find a second life in orchestral programs, and it feels equally unlikely that fans of any of his previous albums will be clamoring to hear this work live. As such, The BQE is probably best classified as an unusually successful vanity project, as well as evidence of Stevens' restless creativity. However, even at the close of the Brooklyn Academy of Music premiere, Stevens came out to sing some songs; one hopes that he gets back to singing and writing some more of those soon enough.

2009-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

2009-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Asthmatic Kitty

October 19, 2009

0059daa0-338e-43be-9b56-fb7ef5668537

Jayson Greene

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

New York-based singer Fatima Al Qadiri creates spectral versions of traditional Islamic songs. On her debut EP for the Tri Angle label, her voice is layered and tweaked to create an intriguing tension between organic sounds and digital processing.

New York-based singer Fatima Al Qadiri creates spectral versions of traditional Islamic songs. On her debut EP for the Tri Angle label, her voice is layered and tweaked to create an intriguing tension between organic sounds and digital processing.

Ayshay: WARN-U EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15902-warn-u-ep/

WARN-U EP

If you're interested at all in the intersection of ghostly, leftfield music and beat-oriented pop, then you're probably familiar with Tri Angle. Since launching about a year ago, the boutique label has pretty well dominated this dark, ethereal corner of the indie universe, introducing or helping introduce about a half-dozen of its most intriguing artists (Balam Acab, How to Dress Well, Clams Casino, Holy Other). But if you think you've got Tri Angle pegged at this point, you may be surprised by its latest release, the debut EP from Fatima Al Qadiri, aka Ayshay. A New York-based singer and producer born in Senegal and raised in Kuwait, she makes digitally processed vocal music with an unusual global bent. Al Qadiri is also a journalist and writes DIS magazine's eye-opening Global. Wav column, which is devoted to highlighting obscure international sounds not usually covered by Western music outlets. Her own songs wouldn't be out of place there. Mixing Julianna Barwick-style vocal layering with traditional Islamic songs, she sings mostly in Arabic and builds spare, haunting tracks from her own voice. An airy falsetto in its natural state, her singing is tweaked and stretched, occasionally pitched downward to sound deep and foreboding, and stacked upon itself to create the sensation of some kind of otherworldly group chant. There are no other instruments, no beats, no gestures to pop songwriting of any kind-- it's music that lives in its own realm. As unconventional as it sounds, WARN-U is, generally speaking, an affecting listen. Just hearing Al Qadiri recreate a version of this sacred music (which sounds like prayers, or at least the kind of hymns you might hear in a religious setting) is striking in its own right, and the addition of computerized elements creates an unsettling tension. The songs feel ancient and futuristic at the same time, like there's no identifiable place or time to pin them to. If that was Al Qadiri's artistic aim here, then she's achieved it, but in doing so I think has sacrificed some approachability. While at times beautiful and certainly inventive, WARN-U is somewhat one-note, and it can be difficult to differentiate between the three short original tracks. It's also free-form to the degree that it can sometimes be difficult to engage with. That's where L.A. production duo Nguzunguzu come in, who close things out with a 12-minute "megamix" of the EP's original numbers. Also globally minded but considerably more playful, Nguzunguzu are a great remix choice, and they give Ayshay's material a bright, neon makeover, adding in lots of fluttering drums, handclaps, and trunk-rattling bass. This is where WARN-U is most accessible and arguably most enjoyable, since the addition of structure helps bring Al Qadiri's more avant-garde leanings back toward earth. That a key track here comes from an outside source detracts some from the overall impact, but this is still a boundary-pushing work with strong ideas at its core. Whether or not you fall for it will likely come down to taste, but at the very least, WARN-U doesn't sound like anything else.

2011-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00

2011-10-07T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Tri Angle

October 7, 2011

005b64a9-d87e-4c80-a35b-e5cc897a73dd

Joe Colly

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

Daft Punk’s new album, Random Access Memories, finds them leaving behind the highly influential, riff-heavy EDM they originated to luxuriate in the sounds, styles, and production techniques of the 1970s and early ’80s.

Daft Punk’s new album, Random Access Memories, finds them leaving behind the highly influential, riff-heavy EDM they originated to luxuriate in the sounds, styles, and production techniques of the 1970s and early ’80s.

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18028-daft-punk-random-access-memories/

Random Access Memories

In the electronica landscape of the 1990s, Daft Punk first came over as a novelty. Funny band name, funny sound, funny masks, and a funny (and incredibly fun) hit called “Da Funk,” found on their debut album, Homework. They’ve come a long way since, but the playfulness remains, and so does their ability to surprise. Every new step in their career, whether positive (the landmark Discovery, their life-altering pyramid live shows), negative (the inert Human After All, their forgettable score for Tron), or somewhere in between (the film Electroma) has been met initially with a collective sense of puzzlement: “Now what’s this all about?” Random Access Memories, the fourth proper studio album from Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, continues the trend. But the differences between their first three albums and this one are vast. RAM finds them leaving behind the highly influential, riff-heavy EDM they originated to luxuriate in the sounds, styles, and production techniques of the 1970s and early ’80s. So we get a mix of disco, soft rock, and prog-pop, along with some Broadway-style pop bombast and even a few pinches of their squelching stadium-dance aesthetic. It’s all rendered with an amazing level of detail, with no expense spared. For RAM, Daft Punk recorded in the best studios, they used the best musicians, they added choirs and orchestras when they felt like it, and they almost completely avoided samples, which had been central to most of their biggest songs. Most of all, they wanted to create an album-album, a series of songs that could take the listener on a trip, the way LPs were supposedly experienced in another time. Daft Punk, in other words, have an argument to make: that something special in music has been lost. You can’t have an argument without a thesis, and they start the album with one called “Give Life Back to Music.” The song’s opening rush brings to mind “old” Daft Punk, but then come percussive guitar strums courtesy of Nile Rodgers followed by orchestral surges. From the jump, it’s clear that the particulars of the sound are important. In a strictly technical sense, as far as capturing instruments on tape and mixing them so they are individually identifiable but still serve the arrangements, RAM is one of the best engineered records in many years. If people still went into stereo shops and bought stereos regularly, like they did during the era Daft Punk draw from, this record, with its meticulously recorded analog sound, would be an album to test out a potential system, right up there with Steely Dan’s Aja and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Daft Punk make clear that one way to “give life back to music” is through the power of high fidelity. Another way is to work with artists young and old who have inspired them. Rodgers pops up again on “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Get Lucky,” and on both songs he’s joined by Pharrell on lead vocals. These two songs basically find Daft Punk attempting to make their version of a Chic song, which, in itself, is not a particularly notable goal. But the French duo’s craftsmanship carries the day. Pharrell, despite being the biggest contemporary star on the album, sounds anonymous—his vocals are pretty much just functional. But even that is arguably in line with Daft Punk’s reverence. Disco, after all, was often a producer’s medium, and lead singers weren’t necessarily meant to be the the focus of attention. So it comes back to songwriting and production: How strong is the groove, how memorable are the hooks? “Get Lucky,” a deserved hit, works on both counts. “Lose Yourself to Dance,” on the other hand, is OK, but plodding, perhaps the weakest song on the record and a good example of the potential pitfalls of Daft Punk’s backward-looking approach. Other songs in the record’s first half—“The Game of Love,” “Within,” and “Instant Crush”—don’t make a huge impression initially but are best understood as part of a broader whole. “Game” and “Within” are downtempo, slightly jazzy robotic soul, delivered in the kind of gorgeous vocoder that Daft Punk have perfected. Musically, “Instant Crush” sounds a lot like a great song by Daft Punk’s pals Phoenix, and the processed lead vocal from the Strokes’ Julian Casablancas holds a simple tune that’s catchier than anything he or his main band have managed in a while. All three tracks function well in the context of the record, throwing the tour-de-force “Giorgio by Moroder” into sharp relief. “Giorgio” is a stunning piece of pop-prog that seems partly drawn from the groundbreaking producer’s experiments in long-form, epic disco, like his side-long version of “Knights in White Satin”. Moroder’s only contribution to the song is an interview that offers a thumbnail history of his life as a musician, one that recounts how how he heard the sequenced Moog as the future of music (see “I Feel Love”). The construction of “Giorgio by Moroder” is masterful, moving from easygoing beats to a for-the-ages, chill-inducing synth line, to orchestral crashes, to a brilliantly goofy guitar solo. It’s a fitting tribute to Moroder’s spirit and legacy. RAM’s best songs come in its second half, another clue that it’s meant to be heard in full. It builds as it goes. “Touch”, the record’s literal centerpiece, is where things start to get interesting. It’s telling that the songs featuring the two oldest and deepest influences on the record—Moroder and Paul Williams—are the most over-the-top. (Williams’ role in the 1974 cult film Phantom of the Paradise became an early obsession for Daft Punk.) These pocket symphonies allows the duo to take their concerns to the furthest reaches of ambition—and good taste. “Touch” packs in a Cluster-fied spacey intro, some showtune balladry, a 4/4 disco section complete with swing music trills, and a sky-scraping choir, all in service of a basic lyrical idea: love is the answer and you’ve got to hold on. It’s strange, disorienting, and emotionally powerful, with a silliness that doesn’t undercut the deep feelings in the least. It encapsulates what makes Daft Punk such an enduring proposition: their relationship to cool. Their vulnerability comes from embracing cheese while also understanding the humor and playfulness in it, holding all these ideas in mind at once. This quality is also heard in “Fragments of Time”, featuring lead vocals by legendary house DJ Todd Edwards. The laid-back melody embodies another often disparaged musical moment: ’70s singer-songwriter excess that East Coast critics liked to write off as the sound of El Lay—the Eagles, Jackson Browne, Michael McDonald. Conveying the openness and innocence that marked pop radio as the ’70s ended, “Fragments of Time” sounds something like a sequel to Discovery’s “Digital Love.” Contrasting “Digital Love” and “Fragments of Time” also raises an interesting paradox: though everything about RAM, from the session musicians to the guests to the means of production, is meant to sound more “human,” the album at points sounds more sterile, almost too perfect. To my ears, this quality isn’t necessarily to its detriment, as much of its appeal ultimately comes from its surface beauty, the sheer gorgeousness of the overall sound. But I suspect this feeling is at the root of why, judging from early reviews, some listeners were underwhelmed. The continual churn of the internet, experience tells us, favors quick connections, conveniences, ephemeral pleasures. But there are areas of culture popping up that seek to slow down, focus on details, and wallow in the kinds of media that it still takes money to create. This is the space that Daft Punk seek to occupy, which in and of itself can be seen as problematic. For those who embrace the more egalitarian approach to music production created by access to cheap tools and cheap distribution, Daft Punk’s mind-bogglingly lush record scans as elitist, possibly even dismissive of the creativity that is happening on a smaller scale. To really understand where they’re coming from here, you have to go back to the height of the album era, which was really just a blip in pop music history. Three things made it different: 1) it was the time just before MTV; 2) it was the time just before the CD; 3) it was the time just before the Walkman. All three hit around the dawn of the ’80s and had a profound influence on how recorded music was experienced. MTV, in addition to foregrounding the visual presentation of artists, returned music to a singles-focused realm. The CD did its part too, making skipping ahead so easy and allowing for the listener to jump around at will. (It also made artwork less important and introduced the idea of records as “data.”) And the Walkman’s convenience opened up new spaces for listening while decreasing sound quality, a trade-off that has driven the technology behind popular music consumption ever since. So RAM is best appreciated as a counter to these trends. It’s not that “all music should be this” but that “some music could be this.” By the time you make it to the album’s astonishing final stretch, it’s hard not to think that Daft Punk have succeeded at what they set out to do. The arrangements on “Beyond” and “Motherboard” are breathtaking, and Panda Bear, after many so-so collaborations, aces his vocal turn on “Doin’ It Right,” a terrifically uplifting bit of electro-pop. And then it ends with “Contact”: It’s the most old-school Daft Punk song here, and it’s also the only one based on a sample, pulling its main riff from a 1981 song by the Australian band the Sherbs. Daft Punk and collaborator DJ Falcon first used “Contact” in a DJ mix in 2002, and now it finds its way on an album about time and memory in 2013. You get a feeling of time collapsing with it, seeing where Daft Punk have been and where they could go. “Contact” will likely close some future live multimedia extravaganza, and people will go insane, and they will return to this album with new ears. You never know, but my guess is that people will be listening to Random Access Memories a decade hence, just like we’re still listening to Discovery now. You’ll forget the YouTube interviews with the collaborators, you’ll forget the day they announced the suits, you’ll forget the day the “Get Lucky” snippet leaked, you’ll forget every rumor, you’ll forget the SNL commercials. But the record will remain, something that channels the past but sounds like little else right now, an album about rediscovery that's situated in the constantly-shifting present.

2013-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-05-20T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Columbia

May 20, 2013

005bc752-8efa-41a1-8d46-85fff95376d9

Mark Richardson

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

The former teen-pop star’s rueful new album explores who you become when the life around you falls apart and you have to build a new one from the ruins of the last.

The former teen-pop star’s rueful new album explores who you become when the life around you falls apart and you have to build a new one from the ruins of the last.

Mandy Moore: Silver Landings

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mandy-moore-silver-landings/

Silver Landings

At the start of the last decade, Mandy Moore began working on her seventh album with her then-husband Ryan Adams. It never materialized. Moore said that she and Adams wrote songs together that Adams never scheduled the studio time to record. He allegedly prevented her from trying to hire other producers to help complete the album, and would tell her she wasn’t a real musician because she couldn’t play an instrument. She didn’t finish the record, and her music career stalled out; she was writing, she was working, yet nothing was happening. The years got swallowed up. Moore and Adams divorced in 2016, and that year she joined the cast of the time-jumping romantic drama This is Us. As the show’s success grew astronomically, Moore’s music seemed to shrink to an equally distant point in the rearview mirror. Where do our past selves go? How can we possibly start all over again, when so much time has passed and the world around us has warped out of recognition? These are the questions that stir like dust through the air of Moore’s seventh album and first in almost 11 years, Silver Landings. She abandoned the material she wrote with Adams and instead co-wrote every song on the record with Dawes’ Taylor Goldsmith, whom she married in 2018. She also brought back producer Mike Viola, who helmed her previous album, 2009’s Amanda Leigh. Surrounding herself with this adopted musical family gives the album a feeling of domestic warmth and security. But Moore’s lyrics speak from a shakier place; she can’t experience the security of the present moment without also seeing it crash into the insecurity of the next. That’s where the album’s lead single, “When I Wasn’t Watching,” finds her. “Where was I when this was going down?” Moore sighs. “Maybe sleeping in/Maybe out of town.” Potential lives she could’ve lived flicker across her mind: “How do I start to retrace the steps I haven’t even taken yet?” Moore captures this stranded, disembodied feeling with remarkable economy and clarity, and the music sounds as brimming with shadow-selves as she is. “My favorite version of me disappeared/Through longer days and shorter years”—If she’s not singing or acting, Moore seems to ask, if instead she remains anchored forever to the current second, who, or what, is left over? If there’s a shared theme among the songs on Silver Landings, it’s who you become when the life around you falls apart and you have to build a new one from the ruins of the last. She never focuses on the damage directly, but instead on the first, tentative steps one takes afterwards, when at any minute it feels like the ground might crumble away beneath you. “Easy Target,” co-written with former Death Cab for Cutie member Chris Walla, could be a sequel to “When I Wasn’t Watching” even though it precedes it in the track list, Moore trying to reenter the world with all of her vulnerability intact. “Through all of the noise,” she sings, “going out on a limb again,” the instruments glittering around her as they would in a Fleetwood Mac song. The whole album kind of sounds like Fleetwood Mac, or at least descended from the same 1970s Los Angeles studios that incubated similarly crisp records by Jackson Browne and The Eagles, glassy marbles of sound with storm clouds of color swirling inside. Guitars ripple, organs pour into the ear. The kick drum is a soft implosion. The recording is so clear you can hear acoustic guitar strings creak like door hinges as fingers shift around on them in “Forgiveness,” the closest the record comes to expressing bitterness. “I wanted to be good enough for you,” she sings, “until it wasn’t good enough for me.” The song moves patiently beneath her as her resentment slowly thickens over four minutes. But just as the past has a way of clarifying the degree to which someone hurt you, it can make your feelings toward other parts of your life more tangled and unfocused. On “Fifteen,” Moore attempts to survey the early teen-pop career she gradually left behind. When she debuted in 1999 with the single “Candy,” Moore entered the teen-pop cosmos alongside Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, and Christina Aguilera. Her life changed very rapidly. “Missed prom/Missed graduation/No college in the fall,” she sings—as if she both longs for and can’t imagine having the normal life she didn’t get to live—“On the road with a boy band singing for the people in the mall.” The deadpan quality of these details would come off as cynical and embarrassed about this phase in her life if she didn’t also seem to feel affection for her own naivete: “No regrets, with a few exceptions/Every wrong turn was the right direction.” If anything “Fifteen” embodies the true purpose of Moore’s new music: to extend her hand backwards through time to love and forgive herself. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Verve Forecast

March 12, 2020

005c3a56-a908-47a5-aa07-368338e71d9a

Ivy Nelson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/

It's been six years since the Brazilian singer's debut. Now she returns with an album that both utilizes and breaks free of samba and bossa nova classicism with deep, downtempo beats.

It's been six years since the Brazilian singer's debut. Now she returns with an album that both utilizes and breaks free of samba and bossa nova classicism with deep, downtempo beats.

Luísa Maita: Fio da Memória

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22435-fio-da-memoria/

Fio da Memória

In 2010, São Paulo’s Luísa Maita released her debut album Lero-Lero and entered into the family business. Her mother, Myriam Taubkin, was a concert producer while her father, Amado Maita, released what’s now considered a holy grail album back in 1972. Lero-Lero continued in her father’s tradition with an album full of hushed acoustic sambas, which she later opened up to DJ reinterpretation from Fatboy Slim-approved producer Tejo to DJ/rupture. A follow-up was not soon forthcoming, not that Maita vanished from the spotlight completely. She covered Caetano Veloso and Elis Regina for a few tributes, lent vocals to fellow “samba sujo” singer Rodrigo Campos’s debut album, and two of her songs from *Lero-Lero *were featured on the soundtrack to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood. Her voice could also be heard both during the closing ceremonies of the London Olympics and on promos for the recent Rio Olympics. Coming six years after Maita’s debut, Fio da Memória proves that the wait wasn’t in vain. Rather than delve deeper into samba and bossa nova classicism and let others update it with remixes, Maita and cohorts modernize the deep history of the music themselves. The result is a striking album full of spare but heavily percussive downtempo tracks that foreground the smokiness, subtlety, and empowerment in her voice. Maita’s Portuguese barely rises about a purr on opener “Na Asa,” but its message is clear. “If you want to be reborn/Your power is in your wings,” she sings against a backdrop of a martial snare, finger snaps, and a deep, spacey bass drum. For the most part, the drum programming, track-filtering, and sampler duties fall to producers Tejo and Zé Nigro. But while electronics propel most of the tracks, both are tasteful to never let it overwhelm the band itself, providing another rhythmic tick to the uptempo rumble of “Porão” and adding psychedelic trickles to the title track. Tejo gives a ’90s trip-hop thump to “Volta,” while a distant samba drum line gets tweaked and teased by Nigro into many layers for “Folia.” But Maita and her band are more than capable of conjuring a smoldering atmosphere on their own with live instrumentation, too. “Olé” seethes with stitches of guitar, bass, and cowbell, then flares to full fire as Maita whispers about finding liberation from an old love and freedom to love again: “I will stand up for myself…and I will find what is mine.” Maita’s freedom from both her love of the past and the samba tradition is delectable. The underlying drum pattern on “Fio da Memória” is a samba, but Maita and her collaborators blur it in digital delay, synth fuzz, and processed drum hits, transforming that telltale pulse into something unfamiliar. “I wanted to revisit the Brazilian rhythms and other sounds that I have heard growing up from a contemporary, electronic and urban perspective,” she said in the lead-up to the album. Her mesmerizing voice playfully toys with such sentimentality: “Your story was stolen/By someone who loved you too deeply and also wept.” Rather than be heartbroken, she sounds gleeful to break from tradition.

2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00

Global

Cumbancha

October 4, 2016

005ee740-c06d-43c4-acd5-393e63879bdd

Andy Beta

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

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 2001 resurrection of Nas, a canonical comeback album that came out swinging and never backed down.

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 2001 resurrection of Nas, a canonical comeback album that came out swinging and never backed down.

Nas: Stillmatic

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-stillmatic/

Stillmatic

In the summer of 2000, at music mogul Steve Stoute’s birthday party in New York, Nas and JAY-Z ended up in an unexpectedly tense conversation about the state of hip-hop. The pair had never exactly been friends. After growing up in housing projects five miles and a borough apart, the rappers met in the early 1990s on a tour that included Jay’s mentor, Jaz, and Main Source, the group that had introduced Nas to the public with his incendiary guest verse on 1991’s “Live at the Barbeque.” They were not the main attractions; Nas would pop out to rap about snuffing Jesus and Jay would play hypeman for Jaz. The tour went off without a notable hitch, save for the incident in Washington, D.C. when members of the crowd, upset at a sound system failure, chased the performers back to their tour bus. “We were figuring we gonna have to knuckle down,” Main Source’s Large Professor would tell XXL in 2002, until Jay pulled a TEC-9 out of his gym bag and told the more famous artists not to worry. With his astonishing 1994 debut, Illmatic, Nas was anointed the savior of a certain strain of formalist, autobiographical rap. Two years later, Jay released his own debut, Reasonable Doubt, on a label he co-founded with Biggs Burke and Dame Dash. Nas was supposed to appear on Reasonable Doubt’s “Bring It On,” but, according to Dash, kept flaking on scheduled recording sessions. His voice still made the album, though, sampled in the hook of “Dead Presidents II.” Nas’ second album, It Was Written, came out a week after Reasonable Doubt. On its first song, “The Message,” he sneers at rappers driving around New York in Lexuses with TV sets in the headrest; the line came to him when he saw Jay behind the wheel of one. For several years, the feud—if you could even call it that—stayed at a simmer. But around the turn of the century, little barbs started jutting out of songs and freestyles. At first it sounded like bickering over the throne left vacant after the death of The Notorious B.I.G. Then things grew more personal, each rapper claiming he’d paved the way for the other’s style, career, persona; Jay began teasing a relationship he’d had with the mother of Nas’ daughter. There were no names yet, but the lines got more pointed. Anyway—the conversation at the Stoute party. According to Nas, who recounted the conversation in the fall 2001 issue of Felon magazine (on the cover: “PEE WEE KIRKLAND SPEAKS OUT ON: GROUND ZERO”), Jay started by throwing his own people under the bus. He said that his protégé, Memphis Bleek, was a big fan of Nas. He said that Beanie Sigel would never sell more than 600,000 records. He said that unlike 2Pac and DMX, he and Nas were “lyricists”—that Pac and X only had “starving” fans buying their albums. “I looked at him like he was crazy,” Nas told the interviewer; he had just recorded with DMX, and had made plans to fly to Las Vegas and smooth over the tension with Pac before his death in 1996. Even more audacious was Jay’s alleged claim that he’d finally surpassed Big as an artist. (Sometime after this interview, on record, Jay would hedge—slightly: “And if I ain’t better than Big, I’m the closest one.”) “Then,” Nas said, “this slithering snake goes and does that Summer Jam bullshit.” On June 28, 2001, during Hot 97’s annual festival at the Nassau Coliseum—where, five years earlier, Nas had famously stopped his concert after learning of Pac’s death—Jay rapped, first over Kanye West’s flip of the Doors’ “Five to One” and then, when the cheers grew deafening, acapella, an early version of a song called “Takeover.” Initially he went after Prodigy, whose childhood dance recital photos were plastered on a video screen. (Earlier in 2001, when Jay had convinced Funkmaster Flex to let his new signees freestyle for an hour on Hot 97’s airwaves, he made sure they were given the Mobb Deep rapper’s “Keep It Thoro” beat before tearing into Nas et al.’s “Oochie Wally.”) But at the end of the performance, he took aim at a different target. “Ask Nas,” Jay shouted over the din. “He don’t want it with Hov!” A few weeks later, Nas responded with a freestyle over the beat from the “Paid in Full” remix. This is where he came up with the title Stillmatic. In a verse denser than most of the new ones from 1999’s tepidly received I Am…, Nas accuses Jay of biting his style back when the less established MC rapped “like the Fu-Schnickens”; he derides Jay’s “fake coke rhymes” and calls him, quite plainly, a liar. “Un was your first court case,” Nas notes, referring to the stabbing of record executive Lance “Un” Rivera, for which Jay eventually received three years probation. “You had no priors.”  It didn’t stick. The Blueprint dropped on September 11, 2001 (it “couldn’t even be stopped by bin Laden,” Jay would later brag), complete with the full version of “Takeover.” The verse that Jay stopped short of performing at Summer Jam, the one about Nas, was revealed as one of the most scathing disses in rap history. After some perfunctory cracks about “Oochie Wally” and those Karl Kani ads he, now, takes his turn calling Nas a fraud who patterned an identity on his. “You ain’t live it,” Jay raps, You witnessed it from your folks’ pad Scribbled in your notepad and created your life I showed you your first Tec, on tour with Large Professor Then I heard your album ’bout your Tec on the dresser Jay even addresses the disembodied Nas on “Dead Presidents II,” taunting him for not receiving any royalties on the song. Perhaps more damning than any specific allegation of fabricated biography or financial maneuvering was the sense that Nas had not only failed to live up to the hype Illmatic inspired, but had become something of a joke. He had fallen, as Jay puts it, “from top ten to not mentioned at all.” The history of rap beefs is a history of rappers who did not have to take the bait. (Nas would have known this well, growing up in Queensbridge and seeing local star MC Shan lured into a battle by the upstart KRS-One, who claimed to take offense to a point of historical accounting but was in fact carrying out a personal grudge against Mr. Magic and the Juice Crew; KRS leveraged the spat into a position as one of the most iconic rappers of his generation.) And yet, beyond simply engaging, Nas seemed to accept Jay’s premise about the state of his career and reputation. Stillmatic is framed conspicuously as a comeback album, and twice on its first two songs, Nas evokes the image of his body coming out of a grave—not as a Christ figure, as he might have shaded the scene in the ’90s, but as a man who’d been buried alive. Someone looking at a balance sheet would be confused. Nas had followed Illmatic—which was rushed onto shelves to combat bootleggers and sold poorly despite its instant canonization by critics—with It Was Written, which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was certified double platinum two months later. In 1999, he released two albums: April’s I Am… (also No. 1, platinum by May) and November’s Nastradamus (a slip to No. 7 that still earned its plaque within a month). But he also alienated swaths of his audience, starting with the purists who balked at the Trackmasters’ pop sensibilities, which guided half of It Was Written, or at the mafioso persona Nas adopted for much of the other half. He had planned to make his third album a sweeping double-disc called I Am… The Autobiography, tracing his life from beginning to hypothetical end. But bootlegging, which had only accelerated in New York, was also moving onto internet file-sharing sites, and the bulk of the album was widely available long before the label could put together cover art or a marketing calendar. Frustrated, Nas kept a few of the leaked records and rushed to replace the others, rapping agitatedly over busy faux-Timbaland (or, occasionally, C-grade actual Timbaland) or downright creepily. While both albums have redeeming qualities—and Nas would release weaker albums in the future—this was, for the time, an unquestionable nadir. Through these years, when Nas went to the studio, he recorded in marathon sessions, writing long verses and labyrinthine narrative raps. This approach yielded innumerable impressive songs, but that proliferation, along with a self-sustaining reputation as someone whose best work was damned to languish on DAT tapes, ensured that new material would be leaked by studio and label employees, sample-clearance specialists, and assorted hangers-on whenever possible, each knowing any scrap would be eaten up by mixtape DJs or online collectors, often for a significant price. So when it came time to record Stillmatic, the album on which his reputation would now hinge, Nas retreated to the Bahamas. Alongside his A&R and a longtime friend, Lord, Nas wrote and recorded there for three weeks, ruminating on his present situation and mining stories from his and Lord’s lives back in Queens. At several points throughout Stillmatic, Nas turns to examine his adult life, specifically the way money and fame have corroded it. But this introspection gets blotted out, again and again, by grudges and complexes—and by details smaller, warmer, from longer ago. Memories spring to the surface as if by random access: cigarette burns on the sofa in his childhood home, plastic bags from the CTown Supermarket, the faces of the older women you could and couldn’t curse in front of—the surnames of those in each category. It is not exactly nostalgic, though you wouldn’t call it haunted, either. It’s as if everything is happening at once; as he raps over a warped Stacy Lattisaw record on the intro, “This is my ending and my new beginning,” a Mobius strip that cuts through unattended stairwells and limousines with hourly rates recoupable to Columbia Records. Maybe the word is burdened. There was presumably no greater preoccupation during the Stillmatic sessions than “Takeover.” The bin Laden line from Blueprint 2 is barely an exaggeration; that song, and The Blueprint as a whole, made an immediate impact, by nudging Jay, who was already a superstar within hip-hop, into the clubs and canons guarded by corporate executives and rock critics. The “one-hot-album-every-ten-year average” he cites became conventional wisdom about Nas’ career (despite its obvious absurdity—It Was Written is as good as anything Jay had recorded to that point). What’s worse: Jay delivered the song with a mix of menace and bemusement, reducing Nas, when convenient, to a lapdog nipping at his heels. Rather than reflect this coolheadedness back at Jay, Nas decided to rip out his throat. “Ether” was recorded over Ron Browz’s chintzy beat, and in the lineage of many great diss songs, it slow-plays its best material: Though it begins with a sample of Pac saying “Fuck Jay-Z”—and while it strings “I will not lose,” the spine of Jay’s “U Don’t Know,” through its own chorus—its first two verses contain relatively few personal details, save for the evocation of Jay’s “Hawaiian Sophie” cameo. Nas chooses instead to tout his own influence, and to place himself in one of those graves. When he digs out, though, Nas is positively brutal. Just a few bars into “Ether”’s extended third verse, he’s wondering if Jay had been abused as a child—this, he argues, is the only thing that would explain the way Jay had been writing about women. “Scared to smile?” he prods. “They called you ugly?” He scoffs at Jay’s claims of having been a drug kingpin, recalling instead an eager aspiring artist who would phone Nas’ home unsolicited, showing up to dinner Wearing Jaz’s chains—no Tecs, no cash, no cars No jail bars, Jigga—no pies, no case Just Hawaiian shirts Nas rehashes Jay’s claim to have eclipsed Big and mocks his and Dame’s Big-and-Puffy cosplay; he alleges that Jay did not, in fact, stab Un Rivera, and was being “made” to take the fall; he paints him as a fawning protégé in perpetual search of a mentor, from Jaz to Big Daddy Kane, Irv Gotti to Big. Nas actually coins the term “stan,” as in obsessive fan, in this verse, a reference to the song by Eminem—who he says “murdered” Jay in their collaboration on The Blueprint, a ridiculous claim that has nevertheless been internalized by generations of rap fans. In a final act of pettiness, Nas dropped “Ether,” along with the album’s actual second single, “Got Ur Self A…,” on December 4, Jay’s 32nd birthday. The reaction was immediate and it was totalizing. Within the week, Jay had issued a response with “Supa Ugly,” which desperately explicates his relationship with the mother of Nas’ child, and for which Jay’s own mother forced him to apologize. But there was no coming back; “Ether” was the knockout blow. Despite the gossip value of “Supa Ugly,” when Hot 97 pitted the two tracks against one another in a listener poll, Nas trounced Jay. The latter knew it. “Jay’s on the phone with me, convincing me that this has to happen in life: We have to go through ups and downs,” a Roc-A-Fella A&R would later recall Jay saying to him on the phone. “We have take losses in order to get greater wins.” Like “stan,” “ether” entered the lexicon as slang for the highest form of evisceration. And yet, despite the stickiness of Eminem’s supposed “Renegade” win and the sense of Nas’ 1997-2001 as a period spent in the wilderness, the victory was not really about historical recordkeeping. It was a triumph of timing, craft, and tone. If anything, the beef underlined how Jay and Nas had always reflected one another and moved uneasily into the other’s professional territory—Nas the wunderkind, whose attempts to cross over were seen as phony, and Jay, the commercial behemoth who felt that he’d mortgaged his credibility to get there. The knottiest verses on Stillmatic—its introduction, “2nd Childhood,” even “Ether”—recall the cobweb raps of Illmatic and It Was Written. This added density almost always comes in the form of flooding detail; the songs become technical showcases. The sparer tracks are indebted in part to Pac, whose freewheeling improvisation Nas seemed to channel in bursts on I Am… and would continue to tinker with for years. But where the negative space in Pac verses suggested a first-take looseness, it has the opposite effect on Nas—the forced economy makes his writing seem more structured, more premeditated. This is clear on the Phil Collins-sampling “One Mic,” both when Nas explodes (the “get busy/load up the semis” burst in the second verse) and when he drops into a hush (“Diamonds are blinding/I never make the same mistakes” in the third). On “Smokin,’” the air between words underlines the threats in an otherwise casual delivery, and on “Rewind,” where Nas tells a crime-movie vignette in reverse, the lack of clutter makes each step in the murder plot chillingly inevitable. There is no uniformity to the production on Stillmatic—it lurches from “Ether”’s artificiality to Premier’s analog warmth, the playful ’80s revivalism on “Destroy & Rebuild” to “One Mic”’s melodrama. When Megahertz flips the Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning” for “Got Ur Self A…,” it has the superficial novelty quality of a mixtape track from the period—that is, unless you remember Jay having rapped, a year earlier, that the theme song to The Sopranos plays in his head on a loop. If there is any unifying force, it’s the overcast sky from the album cover, which seems to hang over almost everything. The oddest and most satisfying beat on Stillmatic is Large Professor’s sorrowful Ernest Gold flip on “You’re da Man,” a song that treats Nas’ celebrity as a new circle of hell. He writes about the jealousy he clocked from his earliest brushes with fame, the innumerable men he saw mimic him while praying for his downfall. Despite his early adoption of melodies into his hooks, Nas is seldom given credit as a particularly musical rapper; here his vocal intonations add tremendous depth to the text, as when he quips, “Look at me now: ten years deep,” a  straightforward boast that warps into a lament. In the second verse of the song’s original version, Nas literalizes his angst in a scene that recalls centuries of literature about devilish secret societies: At church, on my hand was a preacher’s blood I swallowed dirt from a graveyard, in need of love I vomit blunt residue—I want revenue, dreaming And pump lead at you devils trying to take my freedom It drove me crazy: the day I drank my own urine, my own semen With a nine to my brain That scene’s exclusion from the retail release made the demo a totem for collectors; more than that, it burnished the legend of Nas as someone too volatile for the record industry’s tastes. But most interestingly, it reveals how brutalized he had come to feel by that industry, by forces beyond his control or understanding. As emotionally raw as the song is, the details and events appear at a distance, as if Nas is insulating himself. The direct contrast is with “Destroy & Rebuild,” where Nas airs grievances with former friends and collaborators from Queens. The fracturing of these relationships would presumably be painful, and while hurt feelings seem to animate that song, there is also an apparent glee, perhaps at the opportunity to tackle solvable problems—to clean up, as he puts it, “my own backyard.” Nas follows “Destroy & Rebuild” with “The Flyest,” a charmingly overproduced AZ duet that functions as a victory lap but is, frustratingly, betrayed by the filler that comes next. Stillmatic’s original pressing included “Braveheart Party,” a song so clumsy and cloying that it makes “Oochie Wally” sound like “Verbal Intercourse.” It was removed, at Mary J. Blige’s request, from subsequent CD and vinyl batches and does not appear on digital streaming platforms. (Blige cited “personal reasons” in her plea to Columbia.) Unlike most post-facto edits, which usually—especially after the advent of DSPs—bring with them a vaguely authoritarian air, this one had an uncomplicatedly positive effect on the album. The blemish that remains is “Rule,” the Trackmasters’ reinterpretation of Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” that Nas and Columbia released less than 30 days after September 11. It’s not a totally pollyannaish song—Nas raps about the alienation he feels as a Black American, about African mineral rights, about military spending—but the schmaltz is unavoidable. (When he raps, unconvincingly, that “we must stop the killing,” it’s unclear who and which.) Yet something curious is tacked onto its end. After the beat has stopped, Nas delivers a short monologue over a 19th-century military reveille that undercuts what came before it: “Men, women, and children killed by the police… niggas ain’t gon’ forget that, man. You know what I mean? So what this war show me is, like, whatever you want out of life, whatever you feel is rightfully yours—go out and take it, even if that means blood and death. That’s what I was raised up on, that’s what this country’s about. This is what my country is. And my country’s a motherfucker.” The following “My Country” casts Nas and Millennium Thug as a Rikers Island convict and an American soldier in a desert, respectively, who send letters to one another about their experiences. The latter’s imagistic writing (“You could see the sea and the stars look closer to me”; “Every time I hear the wind I think a slug went in”) is contrasted with Nas, who turns inward—to memories of his father holding him above his head as a toddler, cursing the place they both live. The rappers’ voices only overlap once, when they refer to their respective situations as billion-dollar businesses. Rather than pursue a strictly structural critique or retreat to safer ground, Nas ends this post-9/11 coda, and Stillmatic as a whole, by extending the argument from “My Country” into something more elemental, even spiritual. “What Goes Around” is about poison: ecstasy and cocaine, prescription drugs and vaccines, white Jesus and Coca-Cola, the Queens public schools Nas attended as a child. It’s a song where, when someone dies, Nas invites you to imagine trudging to a florist and filling out a condolence card—but also to see the rain that accompanies death, to feel the metaphysical fracturing that can’t be explained or legislated away. “What is destined shall be,” he raps to end the album proper. “George Bush killer till George Bush kills me.” Stillmatic shirks the expectations placed on Nas as a teenager and the baggage he carried with him into his 30s. But there’s little joy in this, and the catharsis is only intermittent. So he turns to score-settling, clawing back what was taken from not only him, but the smiling women across the hall, the revolutionaries he cites at the end of “My Country” who were killed by the state, the friends who went away and never came back. By its end, he’s no less burdened—but his burdens are finally his own.

2023-01-29T00:00:00.000-05:00

2023-01-29T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Ill Will / Columbia

January 29, 2023

005f6be1-3922-44c8-90af-49cb8751c31a

Paul A. Thompson

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

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 Joni Mitchell's eighth album, an iridescent meditation on solitude, a masterpiece in her catalog and across all of music.

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 Joni Mitchell's eighth album, an iridescent meditation on solitude, a masterpiece in her catalog and across all of music.

Joni Mitchell: Hejira

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joni-mitchell-hejira/

Hejira

Joni Mitchell was running away. From what or where to have never been as vital in Mitchell’s songs as her in-betweens—between relationships and cities, between heartbreak and repair, between chords and tenses. From her early song “Urge for Going” through her travelogue classic Blue and beyond, Mitchell typified the woman wanderer, rarely represented in music. Hejira, her sprawling eighth album, embodies this quintessence. The road rolls out of her like a surrealist painting on the cover, combining bold realism and abstraction. Mitchell interprets the Arabic title meaning “departure” as “escape with honor.” She was returning to herself. “I suppose a lot of people could have written a lot of my other songs,” Mitchell once said, “but I feel the songs on Hejira could only have come from me.” To begin with, however, in the spring of 1976, Mitchell was running from a doomed engagement, the chaos of touring, an increasingly inhospitable music business, cocaine, and home. It started, more or less, on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. A clip from Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film chronicling that drug-and-nostalgia-soaked tour shows Mitchell outpacing her generation. It’s November, 1975, and she sits in Gordon Lightfoot’s house with her acoustic guitar and her black beret and a new song that would open Hejira a year later: “Coyote.” She wrote it on and about the tour—exposing sex-drugs-rock myths in lyrics about her peers’ “temporary lovers and their pills and powders to get them through this passion play”—but more accurately, she was composing “Coyote” in real time, improvising with her surroundings. To her right, backing her up and following her lead, was Dylan. Mitchell’s longstanding admiration of Dylan led her to Rolling Thunder, and because she admired Dylan, she did not look back. She was busy being born. She had just released her misunderstood jazz-pop masterpiece The Hissing of Summer Lawns. It may be true that a younger Mitchell’s lyrics were liberated by Dylan’s 1965 single “Positively 4th Street.” It may be true that Dylan fell asleep in 1974 when she played him Court and Spark. But by 1975 the tables had turned. Dylan was revived in the wake of his Joni-inspired comeback, Blood on the Tracks. (“The most important thing is to write in your blood,” Mitchell had once said.) And during this acoustic performance at Lightfoot’s, with the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn on a third guitar, the look in Dylan’s eyes confirms what all knew, that at this moment Mitchell is the towering genius. She had called herself a “singing playwright” since Blue, and she always narrated the dialogue, characters, and setting with her crescendoing soprano and the unconventional tunings of what she called her “chords of inquiry”—“They have a question mark in them”—as much as her lyrics. But “Coyote” adds new dimensions to the title. In a low speak-sing register, this fable presents “coyote” as the womanizing cowboy cornering Mitchell, “A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway,” and total mayhem. In one scene he’s “got a woman at home/He’s got another woman down the hall/He seems to want me anyway.” Two scenes later, “Coyote’s in the coffee shop/He’s staring a hole in his scrambled eggs/He picks up my scent on my fingers/While he’s watching the waitresses’ legs.” The titular “Coyote” is the playwright Sam Shepard, with whom Mitchell happened to have a brief affair. In her wittily wide-eyed first line, she captures the tour’s insanity while outsmarting this guy who she likens to a predatory animal: “No regrets coyote!” At the end of the ’70s, Mitchell told Rolling Stone it was never her goal to be the queen of her generation, or the best. Her goal was to remain interested in music. Her steady gravitation toward jazz was proof, from Blue’s approximations of its textures to the experimental yet accessible Hissing of Summer Lawns. She considered the electric jazz fusion of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way to be the previous decade’s definitive record and absorbed its astral atmospheres. She was an avant-gardist among rock’n’roll people in an era when improvised music was creating rock stars of its own. Still, Mitchell inhabited that slippery space unique to those ahead of the times. Rolling Thunder didn’t only fuel the luminous and literary “Coyote.” It also broke her down physically and left her addicted to cocaine. (She allegedly told the tour to pay her in coke and wrote ever-longer poems high late into the night: “Everybody took all of their vices to the nth degree and came out of it born again or into AA,” she said in 1988.) A month after, attempting to start her own tour for Hissing, her wrecked state and endless battles with her drummer John Guerin​​—the self-described “jazz snob” to whom she was engaged—resulted in its abrupt cancellation. So the circus gave way to a spirit journey. Mitchell found herself sitting at Neil Young’s beach house wondering how to recuperate from such self-annihilation, longing to travel. Soon two acquaintances—one, an Australian former lover; the other, a lover-to-be​​—showed up together at her door in Los Angeles. The boys were going to drive cross country; their destination, for the Aussie ex with a 20-day visa and a grim custody battle, was Maine. “We were going to kidnap his daughter from the grandmother,” Mitchell said. “You could have made a whole movie about that trip.” (Paging Todd Haynes.) Thirty-two years old with no license, Mitchell drove this band of outsiders east before looping back solo, down the coast of Florida and then along the Gulf of Mexico, “staying at old ’50s motels and eating at health food stores.” She adopted fake names like “Charlene Latimer.” She was often disguised in a red wig. She wrote most of Hejira on the guitar she kept in her white Mercedes. “I was getting away from romance, I was getting away from craziness,” Mitchell said, “and I was searching for something to make sense of everything.” Hejira exalts the art of being a woman alone. It is restless music of road and sky, of interior and exterior weather suspended, epic and elemental. Her narratives unfurl with driving forward motion, telling stories of black crows and coyotes, of cafes and motel rooms; a bluesman and a pilot; psychics, hitchhikers, mothers, a guru. She contemplates eternity in a cemetery. She sees Michelangelo in the clouds. She hears jazz in the trees. Blue’s optimistic “traveling, traveling, traveling” gives way to an insatiable “travel fever,” each cartographic song extending the road further from Savannah to Staten Island to Canadian prairies, from Beale to Bleecker Streets. Her solitude distills the details into ascetic elegance. The stark arrangements on Hejira, free of traditional structures, with only a few players on each song, are iridescent like glitter on icicles or sand. Mitchell stretches the unresolved tone of her “chords of inquiry” into a nine-song epiphany. The fretless bass, spare percussion, and unusual harmonics depict her wintry lucidity as well as the extremes of her existence, which she had accepted in service of her creativity. The protracted song lengths were allegedly a product of her drug addiction, while their clarity was inseparable from her process of getting clean. She had started playing with the jazz fusionists of L.A. Express on Court and Spark—musicians who wouldn’t “put up a dark picket fence through my music,” as she once put it—and during a pit stop on her road trip, guitarist Robben Ford played her an advance copy of the debut album by Jaco Pastorius, an electric bass player who, like Mitchell, was really more of a painter. The 24-year-old had a tendency for introducing himself as “the greatest bass player in the world.” Mitchell (and most of the best bassists in his wake) wouldn’t have disagreed. She called the eccentric Floridian the bass player of her dreams. Pastorius used a knife to pry the frets off his instrument and transform it, playing more fluidly, flexibly, or as Mitchell called it, “figuratively” than anyone. Having only recently joined the intrepid Weather Report, Pastorius overdubbed parts atop four cracked-open Hejira songs, rhythms that liberated the music. Hejira’s tenor is one of personal reconstitution, but Mitchell populates the lyrics with characters she met along the way, some literal, some symbolic, each representing a fundamental component of her character. “Furry Sings the Blues” describes her actual visit with the bluesman Furry Lewis near Memphis’ crumbling Beale Street, one birthplace of the blues, and could be an allegory for the corruption of a music business that left its pioneers behind, another parking lot paved over paradise. (That’s Neil Young on harmonica.) “A Strange Boy” recounts her disappointing tryst with her travel companion and his confounding immaturity, standing in for the overall inadequacy of men that Mitchell had contended with so often. It’s attuned to mystery, representing this guy she couldn’t crack in amazing dialogue, like, “He asked me to be patient/Well I failed/‘Grow up!’ I cried/And as the smoke was clearing, he said/‘Give me one good reason why.’” On the discordant “Black Crow,” Mitchell likens herself to the bird overhead, brooding, searching, diving. But the most powerful of these itinerant encounters occurs solely in her imagination. On “Amelia,” she becomes the sky. Her ode to Amelia Earhart is soaring and celestial. “Like me,” Mitchell sings of the disappeared aviator, “she had a dream to fly.” This austere six-minute ballad takes the form of a conversation “from one solo pilot to another,” Mitchell has said, “reflecting on the cost of being a woman and having something you must do.” Ambition must often go it alone, and Mitchell accordingly subtracts bass and drums entirely. What sounds like sweeping pedal steel is really Larry Carlton’s electric lead guitar and vibraphone. The song’s harmonic character is an arresting question mark, both unsettled and at ease, just like solo travel, knowing there might be something, someone missing yet savoring the space created by absence. Mitchell spoke of Hejira’s “sweet loneliness,” to which “Amelia”’s major chords and resilience attest. “Amelia, it was just a false alarm,” goes Mitchell’s refrain ending each verse, ending every romance, too. As she sings of “driving across the burning desert,” likening six vapor trails to “the hexagram of the heavens [...] the strings of my guitar,” and how Earhart was “swallowed by the sky,” the whole forlorn song seems to go that way. Stars glint in its upper edges. Clouds and flight, metaphors for freedom and what tempers it, had long been two of Mitchell’s central obsessions. She called descendants of the Canadian prairies, like herself, “sky-oriented people,” and writing on a plane in 1967, she had looked down on clouds to contemplate life, arriving at her standard, the timeless “Both Sides, Now.” But nine years on, in “Amelia,” she equates her living in “clouds at icy altitudes” with her long-standing depression that left her admitting she’s “never really loved.” When she pulls into “the Cactus Tree Motel” to sleep on the “strange pillows of my wanderlust,” the inn’s name is an allusion to her 1968 song about a woman “so busy being free.” Her life’s motifs knock the door in Georgia, too, on the winking torch song “Blue Motel Room,” where rain turns the ground to “cellophane,” a word Mitchell famously used to describe her defenseless Blue era; “Will you still love me?” she yearns coolly, echoing a formative influence. Of all the land Mitchell traveled, though, the space and otherworldly plantlife of the arid Sonoran Desert seem to have made the greatest impact, as evidenced on “Amelia.” The desert is an isolated landscape pitched to infinity, a place to confront yourself and your insignificance in the scheme of things. On her song named for a desert creature, “Coyote,” she voices her desire “to run away” and “wrestle with my ego.” Her ego-erasing quest comes to a head on “Hejira.” The title track is a sprawling monument to her decade of turning personal catastrophe into philosophy, laying bare her cardinal themes. “Possessive coupling.” “The breadth of extremities.” “Comfort in melancholy.” Unlike Hejira’s other songs, it contains few proper nouns: it specifically confronts the existential expanses of muted despair instead, illumination eclipsed with pain in the music's depths. She’s “traveling in some vehicle.” She’s “sitting in some cafe.” She’s “a defector from the petty wars that shell shock love away.” If heartbreak redeems itself by creating knowledge, then “Hejira” locates the precise coordinates where that shift occurs. Nowhere in her catalog does she create a richer or more rigorous self-portrait. I know no one’s going to show me everything We all come and go unknown Each so deep and superficial Between the forceps and the stone On “Hejira,” Mitchell interrogates her 32 years. She had made profound sacrifices for the sake of her art, which perhaps accounts for the music’s intensity: When you feel you’ve sacrificed everything for your work, you bring everything to it. She looked for answers in every corner of the country her car could reach. She poured in every reserve and inexhaustible query. What are the uses of solitude? How close to nerves and bone can you get? Is art worth the sacrifice? Could she ever fully be seen? Her music stretches into a dissolving horizon suggesting the questions are unanswerable. Its unresolved charge suggests that life will be a cycle of finding meaning in the questions. In the spartan space, Mitchell invites us to complete the picture. Staring at headstones on “Hejira,” “those tributes to finality,” pondering death, she considered her life. “I looked at myself here,” she sings, “Chicken scratching for my immortality.” Even Joni Mitchell must sometimes feel meaningless, at the top of the mountain, wondering what everything is worth. She always said she embraced granular details in her autobiographical art songs because it made a better story, and people should “know who they’re worshiping.” Here she offers a metaphysical magnification of her most atomic truths. We’re only particles of change Orbiting around the sun But how can I have that point of view When I’m always bound and tied to someone Two other of Hejira’s songs illustrate as much. “Song for Sharon” is Mitchell’s reckoning with her position as single and childfree in her 30s, subverting the status quo in subject and in form. She’d addressed this reality before, like on For the Roses’ “Woman of Heart and Mind.” But in this nine-minute letter to her long-lost friend back home, Sharon Bell—who took a conventional path, “a husband and a farm”—she went further, surveying the advice she’d received from other women about how to give her life meaning: “have children,” “find yourself a charity.” With unbothered resolve and an even-handed tone—not innate for Mitchell—she situates herself between these two pathways of womanhood, seeking the common ground between herself and Sharon, or maybe between herself and all women, like her mother and grandmother who suppressed their dreams. “Song for Sharon” blows up the myth of the pop renegade with no direction home. Staring the past in the eye, Mitchell admits (in a call back to Blue’s “All I Want”), “All I really want to do right now is find another lover,” the last word drifting like smoke. The most significant of its 10 verses was inspired by the actress Phyllis Major, who died by suicide in March of 1976. “A woman I knew just drowned herself,” Mitchell sings about the wife of Jackson Browne, who she herself had also dated, and whom she despised. (Her 1994 song about domestic violence, “Not to Blame,” was written in the wake of accusations against Browne, too.) “It seems we all live so close to that line,” Mitchell sings, “And so far from satisfaction.” “Song for Sharon” becomes a multifaceted song of solidarity with a diversity of women seeking dignity and respect. Its length illustrates the endlessness of such a task. Hejira built a new sound to match the feminist paradigm it presented for being a woman in the world, with autonomy, adventure, and pleasure all as virtues. In the mid-’70s, the trope of the solo male traveler seeking enlightenment in meandering solitude was well-defined by tales like Walden and On the Road, even Siddhartha. Women travelers were unknown. Mitchell’s position “made most people nervous,” she sings on the beautiful, gently loping album closer, “Refuge of the Roads,” which describes her meeting with Tibetan Buddhist spiritual teacher Chögyam Trungpa. But her role brought others to life. In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir had posited, in The Second Sex, that “the free woman is just being born,” and when she arrived so would her poetry. Hejira is evidence, a shapeshifting aesthetic to voice a still-emerging mode of being female. “Here’s the thing,” Mitchell told Rolling Stone in 1979. “You can stay the same and protect the formula that gave you your initial success. They’re going to crucify you for staying the same. If you change, they’re going to crucify you for changing. But staying the same is boring. And change is interesting. So of the two options, I’d rather be crucified for changing.” Time had another idea. For years, the prevailing Mitchell narrative positioned Blue as her creative peak, Court and Spark as her commercial apex, and everything else a fascinating slow fall. This is, of course, incorrect. Creatively, if not commercially, Mitchell’s entry to jazz—the second half of what biographer Michelle Mercer calls “her Blue period” from 1971 to 1976—was more akin to Dylan going electric and cresting on an upward stride. She had adapted a new language for her trio of albums leading to Hejira like Dylan’s triptych leading to Blonde on Blonde. Hejira’s influence remains as boundless as the music. Along with inspiring the Rolling Stones, Hejira is among the Mitchell albums that a young Björk held in the highest esteem. In recent years, Danielle Haim, Weyes Blood, and St. Vincent have anointed it as their favorite. In 2019, pop experimentalist Jenny Hval wrote a song about the act of listening to “Amelia.” Hejira created a precedent for the pantheon of art about women alone in motion that now includes Agnès Varda’s Vagabond and Patti Smith’s M Train. The month of Hejira’s release, in November of 1976, Mitchell played “Coyote” as part of the Band’s Last Waltz. She herself didn’t tour for three years after, living “in exile from a mainstream audience,” as Rolling Stone put it when she resurfaced with her Charles Mingus collaboration in 1979. She either understood her staggering achievement or lost what little remained (had it existed) of her faith in the “star-maker machinery” of highly commercial music. She knew “no one’s going to show me everything,” as she sings on the title track, so she fulfilled her dreams herself. She wished for a river to skate away on. Hejira became one. Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan

2022-12-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

2022-12-04T00:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Asylum

December 4, 2022

005f81e5-b37a-46de-925f-97e6f9704ef6

Jenn Pelly

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/

The ambitious debut from 21 Savage features many of the best producers around, but the young rapper doesn't have the finesse to break out beyond his horror-film style.

The ambitious debut from 21 Savage features many of the best producers around, but the young rapper doesn't have the finesse to break out beyond his horror-film style.

21 Savage: Issa Album

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21-savage-issa-album/

Issa Album

21 Savage skulks through verses like a villain in a slasher flick. On the cover of his Slaughter King mixtape he sported a hockey mask like Jason. His mixtape titles all evoke horror gore. His verses are built around heart-racing, hair-bristling anticipation. He preys on victims and terrorizes them, using intimidation and sadism, then jolts through quick shots of graphic violence narrated with stoned apathy. His songs are striking in their bluntness, breathless and macabre. Many rap marksmen ground their shootout confessions in the context of social inequality, making the distinction between hood survivalism and outright barbarism. 21 doesn’t care. He doesn’t dissociate murder from morality. He’s the self-professed Bad Guy praying to his Glock and his carbon. Alongside Metro Boomin, he refined his menace into a sting with Savage Mode, succinct in sound and ruthless vision, a 30-minute joyride inside the mind of Bishop from Juice. Capitalizing on the momentum, 21 Savage has returned with his debut, again accompanied by Metro, this time with assistance from Southside, Zaytoven, DJ Mustard, Jake One, Pi’erre Bourne (of “Magnolia” fame), and more. Issa Album, named for an interview segment gone viral, attempts to balance newfound fame with deep-rooted realness. He hasn’t softened, but he’s fixated more on riches than body counts. When he isn’t numbing his pain with the money, he’s struggling to put words to his emotions. 21 spends more time dealing with the living (his crew, his boo, and the girlfriends of rivals, specifically), and the feelings they impart. “I made it off the block, bitch I beat the statistics,” he rapped on Savage Mode, and Issa revels in the freedoms afforded by new money. It’s more ambitious, venturing down previously unexplored paths. But 21 simply doesn’t have the required finesse to cover more ground with nuance. With each passing release, 21’s deadpan muttering gets less effective. The imagery, which has always been somewhat lacking, is even more flat on Issa, the writing more clumsy. “Bank Account,” “Dead People,” and “Money Convo” all make the same banal comment about an increased cash flow, simply acknowledging the excess and enjoying counting the cash; he could’ve gotten the same result recording a money machine processing bills. Whenever he extends himself he comes up short (as on “Numb,” which aims to be a triumphant rags-to-riches revelation but somehow never musters a lick of enthusiasm). It isn’t difficult to draw a line from songs like “FaceTime” and “Special” back to Savage Mode’s “Feel It,” but his emotionless inflections do significantly less for attempted bando ballads this time around. On the latter, as he continuously reiterates how in his feelings he is and how special she is in the plainest possible terms, it feels empty. “The internet won’t help you understand me,” he raps on “Famous,” seemingly insulating himself from criticism. But the quip is absurd coming from someone so easy to read. Great production can hide many sins and on Issa, the hottest beatmakers in rap come to 21’s aid. Zaytoven fills a pair of Metro boomers with his signature piano embellishments, but Issa is highlighted by the En Vogue-warping “Thug Life” and the flute frenzy on “Baby Girl.” Unlikely bunkmates Jake One and Southside team up for gripping oddball productions; “Dead People” sounds like compressed and inverted Super Mario Bros. background music. 21 produced “Bank Account” himself, and its clean minimalism is one of the surprises. The others come in the form of more evocative writing and an unexpected guest. On “Nothing New,” he carefully surveys the streets around him. “Police gunned his brother down, this shit too hard to handle/Loading up his chopper, he gon’ show ‘em black lives matter,” he raps in a rare showing of empathy. “Whole Lot” gets juiced by uncredited ad-libs from Young Thug, which sprinkle the margins with his charm. “Close My Eyes” balances killer coldness with survivor’s remorse. 21’s admission, “I see dead bodies when I close my eyes,” can be read as a violent fantasy or the haunting price of taking life. He is so compelling when he digs deeper into his psyche this way, providing more than superficiality, but there aren’t enough of these moments to sustain Issa Album, which is as basic as its title.

2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Slaughter Gang / Epic

July 12, 2017

005f9019-be32-4158-ad08-b59f6ecd5c21

Sheldon Pearce

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

Wiz Khalifa's sixth album has been promoted as his most "personal" project, but the introspection here mostly entails reiterating his come-up tale, punctuating it with an ellipsis and "but I’m rich now" tacked on for good measure.

Wiz Khalifa's sixth album has been promoted as his most "personal" project, but the introspection here mostly entails reiterating his come-up tale, punctuating it with an ellipsis and "but I’m rich now" tacked on for good measure.

Wiz Khalifa: Khalifa

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21565-wiz-khalifa-khalifa/

Khalifa

For most of Wiz Khalifa’s career, he’s been lumped into the category of "stoner rap," but the Pittsburgh native is an aggressively functional smoker, a pot enthusiast with a Steel City work ethic. His anthems have won him a dichotomous fan base: one-half living off his gigantic heartfelt singles that have nil to do with pot-smoking and the other the loyal, chest thumping Taylor Gang kids with aspirations of someday affording his KK (that’s "Khalifa Kush," Mr. West). It’s worked out well for Khalifa; he’s managed to compartmentalize an audience that doesn’t need to know the other half exists as long they’re being fed a steady stream of relevant tunes. His sixth studio album, Khalifa, would suggest he’s splitting the difference—creating an album that is more personal (hence its partially eponymous title). After all, Wiz’s relationship with pot is a very personal thing (to him) and so is his need for success. He’s also a father, which presents another opportunity to dig deeper. But "digging deep" isn't really in Wiz's repertoire, and apart from some faintly nostalgic bars about his come-up here and there, listeners panning for introspection will mostly come up empty. Wiz is on a whole other plane now, thanks to perhaps the biggest hit of his career ("See You Again"), a song that wasn’t even on his album. So instead of living through the struggle like some of his previous works suggest, this project reflects on escaping it: The track "Cowboy" verbalizes those earliest days of cutting corners in PA, set to Jim Jonsin and his production duo FNZ’s soothing beat. He alters and repurposes that come-up tale throughout most of the album, punctuating it with an ellipsis and "but I’m rich now" tacked on for good measure. Like he says on the Metro Boomin-produced opener "BTS": "humble beginnings, rich ass endings," but he keeps regurgitating that sentiment through the duration of 13 songs. That doesn’t mean the album is without bangers. The Rico Love-assisted "Celebrate" is a mellow ode to the good life of sex and blowing checks. "City View" dabbles with an '80s-skewed beat compliments of a production from Metro Boomin and Lex Luger. "iSay" is another one, because Juicy J always delivers, even over rumbling keys. The only track with hit potential, though, is "Bake Sale" with Travis Scott, which sounds more like a Travis Scott record than a Wiz Khalifa one. And of course the pot anthems are present. "Call Waiting" offers us Wiz Khalifa the singer, where he coos about marijuana like it’s his most faithful companion, and "Lit" where he and Ty Dolla $ign volley back and forth over who rolls and smokes the most. But this is all to the detriment of promising a more private work, since that’s basically just "Work Hard, Play Hard" with a different SKU. The only real glimpse into the life of Cameron Thomaz is on "Zoney," where he goes into greater detail about his life: "Coming up I always thought I’d be the runner up / Gave my all but it felt like it wasn’t enough." He closes the track with a sweet dialogue between him and his son, Sebastian, where it sounds like baby Bash is calling Pittsburgh "Pixburgh" like a true native. Maybe Khalifa isn’t meant to be all that personal; after all, he didn’t name the album Cameron. It delves as far as it can without hitting government-name territory, and for that the true fans will embrace it. But how many times can you retell the same story? Good thing stoners have a short memory.

2016-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Atlantic

February 12, 2016

0062dccd-271d-47b6-8793-8e0409ab63bf

Kathy Iandoli

https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/

This invigorating compilation of African dance music from the 1980s and ’90s is a nostalgic snapshot of the Ugandan DJ’s youth—and a celebration of the selector’s ability to connect disparate sounds.

This invigorating compilation of African dance music from the 1980s and ’90s is a nostalgic snapshot of the Ugandan DJ’s youth—and a celebration of the selector’s ability to connect disparate sounds.

Various Artists: Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-kampire-presents-a-dancefloor-in-ndola/

Kampire Presents: A Dancefloor in Ndola

Ndola, Zambia’s third largest city, is best known internationally for copper mining and the imposing Levy Mwanawasa stadium. On the evidence of A Dancefloor in Ndola, a new compilation from East African DJ Kampire, the city should also be celebrated for its joyful party vibes and cosmopolitan dancefloors, whose music is so riotously funky it threatens to shake the Levy Mwanawasa to its foundations. Kampire, born in Kenya to Ugandan parents, lived in Ndola from the ages of two to 18. A Dancefloor in Ndola is inspired by the songs she absorbed during this period—in particular, via her father’s record collection—including a range of music from Eastern and Southern Africa, from soukous to township bubblegum, drawn largely from the 1980s and early ’90s. There is a heavy emphasis on women singers, including Congolese heroes Pembey Sheiro and Feza Shamamba and South Africa’s V-Mash and Di Groovy Girls. The album isn’t mixed but it’s admirably constructed. Kampire, like any DJ worth their salt, is skilled at teasing out connections between disparate sounds. A Dancefloor in Ndola shows the art of the DJ as selector, joining the dots between musical trends in a way that flows effortlessly onto the dancefloor. Several years and thousands of miles lie between Princess Aya Sarah’s “O Wina Tienge” and the African House Party Project ft. Splash, Patricia Majalisa, and Dalom Kids’ “P-Coq,” the first and third songs on this compilation. But Kampire’s clever selection highlights the similarities between the florid, funky soukous of the “O Wina Tienge” and the rolling pop house of “P-Coq,” with sturdy kick-drum thump, call-and-response vocals, and late-’80s/early-’90s sonic palette running through both songs’ sinuous grooves. The way that “P-Coq” then gives way to V-Mash’s gloriously headstrong “Naughty Boy,” whose clubby production and vocal strut suggest a South African Madonna at her most Brat, makes for a jubilant extension of musical throughlines. This combination—bass-drum-heavy beats, time-stamped electronic instrumentation, and intricate vocal arrangements—dominates A Dancefloor in Ndola. The parallels with wider club culture are self-evident. Princesse Mansia M’bila’s “Ngoma Mansia” and Samba Mapangala and Orchestra Virunga’s “Mashariki” are absolutely pounding, repetitive and hypnotic in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has experienced Tanzanian singeli (or, indeed, emerged from a club into broad daylight). But there are enough exceptions to the rule for the compilation to breathe. The syncopated saxophone skip of Lady Isa’s “Djambo” provides blissful air midway through, while Founders Band’s “Kimbera” tops off the record on a less regimented note. Its fuzzy and slightly imperfect sound turns out to be the perfect way to end A Dancefloor in Ndola’s theoretical night out. Kampire also masters the DJ’s art of ferreting out obscure records and turning them into your new favorite songs. Perhaps the African House Party Project’s “P-Coq” was well known locally when it was released in 1991, but its appearance here elevates the song to the upper ranks of early-’90s house anthems, thanks to its yearning vocals and production that fuses local musical ideas with house’s voracious appetite for new sounds. Di Groovy Girls’ “Ririmi Rotsombela,” an effervescent piece of township bubblegum for which Kampire provides her own “Dance Edit,” is so catchy, from its irresistible synth riff downward, that it feels like it should have been world-conquering. Most listeners to this compilation will never visit Ndola, but the evocative power of A Dancefloor in Ndola makes you feel like you almost have—like you too might have sweated out a night at the center of Zambia’s Copperbelt Province to the continent’s greatest electronic pop bangers. This is dance music at its transportive, revelatory best, a real reminder of what an astute, inventive DJ can do.

2024-08-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-08-05T00:01:00.000-04:00

Strut

August 5, 2024

0063d311-baa4-4fd4-bd58-5a7723aff1c6

Ben Cardew

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

The old Jack White suddenly steps out from behind the curtain with 42 minutes of amp-busting blues punk. Even the last couple of White Stripes albums weren’t this stacked.

The old Jack White suddenly steps out from behind the curtain with 42 minutes of amp-busting blues punk. Even the last couple of White Stripes albums weren’t this stacked.

Jack White: No Name

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-white-no-name/

No Name

Somewhere between his increasingly fussy solo albums, and certainly by the time he started policing audiences’ cell phones, it became clear that Jack White was not the uninhibited nonconformist he played so convincingly with the White Stripes. Since that duo disbanded in 2011, White has systematically sucked almost all the fun from his image, revealing that this avatar of effortless cool was actually bound by a complicated code of unwritten rules he was more than happy to lecture music publications about. It’s been a heel turn akin to watching the coolest senior in your high school return as the district’s biggest stickler of a substitute teacher. What a difference one record can make. Of all the considerable feats pulled by White’s raucous, ripping, unrelenting sixth solo album, No Name, perhaps the most remarkable is how cleanly it wipes the slate after a decade-plus of traditionalist scolding, divisive experiments, and creative misfires. No Name reconnects White with the primal impulses that made the Stripes so undeniable. It’s a comeback that instantly announces itself as a contender for White’s best solo record: 42 minutes of amp-busting blues punk that reveals the old Jack White was behind the curtain all along, hungry and undiminished, waiting for the right moment to make his reentrance. Thanks to savvy guerilla marketing, No Name arrives with its lore prewritten. It was surprise-released July 19 at White’s Third Man Records shops, where uncredited, white-sleeved pressings were slipped into the bags of unsuspecting customers. This wasn’t like the time White hid 7"s inside of reupholstered furniture, though. He wanted the world to hear and discover this record, and Third Man’s social accounts encouraged fans to “rip it” and share. The project’s raw immediacy initially suggested it might be throwaway, a palette cleanser before White resumed his usual studio tinkering, but its triple-octane riffage and seething, sticky hooks pointed to something more lasting and substantial. Even the last couple of White Stripes albums weren’t this stacked. The all killer, no filler ethos is a far cry from Fear of the Dawn, the absolutely gonzo solo record White released in 2022. Where that record invited listeners to marvel at its virtuosity and gawk at its sadistically counterintuitive creative choices, No Name leans into his most intuitive, meat-and-potato impulses. Opener “Old Scratch Blues” thrashes with the gravity of Led Zeppelin’s most titanic riffs, while “That’s How I’m Feeling” plays like a belated stab at one last great, aughts-style rock revival single. “Bombing Out” may be the most convincing two and half minutes of scuzzy hardcore you’ll hear from a 49-year-old this year. White’s churlish demeanor belies the radical empathy of his worldview. On “It’s Rough on Rats (If You’re Asking),” he asks for consideration of the have-nots (“As bad as we got it/It sure must be rough on rats”). On “Archbishop Harold Holmes,” he sermonizes over itchy, AC/DC-caliber guitar licks that “hate is trying to take someone else’s love for yourself/But I’m here to tell you that love is trying to help someone else.” With its pit-starting thrash, “Bless Myself” similarly leans into White’s screaming-pastor shtick, preaching the virtues of divorcing spirituality from organized religion: “‘God on command/God on demand’/If God’s too busy I’ll bless myself!” Of course, the lyrics never matter as much as the authority with which he sneers, spits, and barks. It’s amazing how dialing up the conviction can turn “uh oh, Jack White is rapping” into “fuck yeah, Jack White is rapping.” In a certain light, a back-to-basics project like this could seem like a retreat, an easy win for an artist who hasn’t scored in a while. Yet there’s real risk in releasing an album that so brazenly invites comparison to White’s best work, especially amid the hardening conventional wisdom about the irreplaceability of Meg White. With No Name, White resets the narrative: If he fell off, it was on his own terms. Now he’s back and in total mastery of a domain no other act claimed in his absence. Maybe he really can turn it on like a light switch.

2024-08-07T00:02:00.000-04:00

2024-08-07T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rock

Third Man

August 7, 2024

00650398-b69e-49b9-a702-7afdee0becce

Evan Rytlewski

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

After years of anticipation, the idiosyncratic Detroit rapper returns with an unpredictable new album full of vocal quirks and unlikely punchlines.

After years of anticipation, the idiosyncratic Detroit rapper returns with an unpredictable new album full of vocal quirks and unlikely punchlines.

Veeze: Ganger

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/veeze-ganger/

Ganger

Sometimes the ease with which Veeze raps makes it seem like he’s not even trying. When he’s beside more emotive emcees—like on the three-man weave “Making a Mess” with Pooh Shiesty and Big30 or the glorious posse cut “Meg Thee Stallion”—his hazy, syrupy murmurs sound as though he doesn’t care whether the words make it out his mouth. But beyond this unbothered facade is an expansive skillset and idiosyncratic imagination. Early tracks like 2019’s “Rusty” and 2020’s “Law N Order” became instant pillars of the Michigan rap scene, with fragmented, unpredictable bars—“I mixed his juice, now his stomach hurtin’ like he ate Taco Bell”—that distinguished Veeze from more conversational storytellers like Babyface Ray and Peezy. Since that initial explosion, he’s released music infrequently, admitting that rap and fame just weren’t priorities: “I was trying to fall off.” Luckily the 29-year-old Detroit rapper is at the peak of his powers on Ganger, the long-awaited follow-up to his 2019 debut mixtape, Navy Wavy, wielding vocal oddities and chuckle-inducing, stream-of-consciousness bars. Veeze passes through varied production like he’s lazily window shopping on Fifth Avenue. He oscillates between laid-back joints fit for an evening smoke session (the penultimate “Tony Hawk” and dreamy “Safe 2”) and boisterous, percussive beats that could soundtrack a late-night car chase (“OverseasBaller”). There’s even a track that sounds like the Breaking Bad theme song, then kicks into a souped-up bossa nova rhythm (“Weekend”). For the average rapper, this is treacherous territory. But Veeze is a Swiss Army Knife, able to adapt his scratchy, unrushed delivery to any environment. On the murky, GLA-produced “No Sir Ski,” he sounds like he’s underwater as he slurs his way through NBA player references. By the next track, he’s firmly on dry land, rapping with uncharacteristic clarity over an exuberant Bone Thugs-N-Harmony flip. Sometimes his vocal manipulation leads him off the deep end, like at the end of the opener “Not a Drill,” when he evokes a baby throwing a temper tantrum, or on the standout “Boat Interlude,” where he and Lil Yachty sound like they’re impersonating Doctor Doom. The deviations inject personality into moments where Veeze could have played it safe. Meanwhile, Veeze’s writing on Ganger feels like a direct line to his twisted thoughts. He bounces from one idea to the next, weaving through endless pop culture references, forcing you to pay attention to each line. His punchlines range from hilarious (“That drank all in my belly like Winnie the Pooh”) to uncomfortable (“Cup dark, had to ask him how much cotton he pick”), as if he’s rattling off joke pitches in the Wayans Bros. writer’s room. Veeze will claim to want to be the greatest rapper alive, then spell his own name wrong in the next line. He will tease that he’s too big for Rolling Stone, then grumble about the pressures of fame. “I need the quickest way to get up to a meal ticket,” he raps in the third verse of a song titled “Unreleased Leak,” hiding quiet desperation in the midst of flexes and boasts. There’s a refreshing vulnerability here from a rapper primarily known for his blasé approach. For brief moments, Veeze also lets the listener in on his true motivations, the underlying drive churning beneath his too-cool surface.

2023-07-05T00:02:00.000-04:00

2023-07-05T00:02:00.000-04:00

Rap

Navy Wavy LLC

July 5, 2023

006a0b30-25b5-4c7b-a786-a539a6cfcfda

Matthew Ritchie

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

The songs that comprise SVIIB, School of Seven Bells' latest and possibly final LP, were written shortly before member Benjamin Curtis died in 2013 from sudden-onset lymphoma and completed by band co-founder and Curtis' partner Alejandra Deheza after his death. While it's remarkable that SVIIB exists at all, let alone in such fine form, what’s even more remarkable is how resilient, even joyful it is. These are generous songs, the product of deep caring.

The songs that comprise SVIIB, School of Seven Bells' latest and possibly final LP, were written shortly before member Benjamin Curtis died in 2013 from sudden-onset lymphoma and completed by band co-founder and Curtis' partner Alejandra Deheza after his death. While it's remarkable that SVIIB exists at all, let alone in such fine form, what’s even more remarkable is how resilient, even joyful it is. These are generous songs, the product of deep caring.

School of Seven Bells: SVIIB

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21511-sviib/

SVIIB

“Ablaze,” from School of Seven Bells’ fourth and likely final LP, is composed of the same elements SVIIB have threaded together for years: heroic riffs, a colossus of a percussion track and Alejandra Deheza’s weightless sighs. The emotional clarity, however, is new; the song is an ode to redemptive love, delivered with full earnestness and complete surrender. “You saw the stars in me,” Deheza sings, and her often-glassy voice and SVIIB’s usually-huge mixes turn into something more plaintive, almost a cappella: “You told me how you saw the stars/You told me that till I believed.” It’s among the most life-affirming five minutes of pop music in recent memory. It is quite possibly perfect. “Ablaze” is also the first song on SVIIB, making the album’s first words “how could I have known?” The subtext is unavoidable and wrenching. Deheza’s former bandmate and creative-and-more partner Benjamin Curtis died in December of 2013 from T-cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma, and understandably, SVIIB took a long break; the only song they released was a cover of Joey Ramone’s “I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up),” recorded from Curtis’ hospital bed. The songs that comprise SVIIB, though, had existed for a while; specifically since 2012, recorded during a couple idyllic sessions. “We were finally in this place of just perfect peace, just being best friends,” Deheza said in an interview last year. So she wrote the lyrics to SVIIB as a largely biographical memorial of their relationship, romantic and platonic, through breakups and hardships and emotional pits. Even the title, its faux-Latinized shorthand (and it being the group’s only self-titled release), now reads like the heading to a last chapter, a deliberate final statement. School of Seven Bells have aways made tweaks and refinements from their essential sound, and SVIIB doesn’t depart from it. But where their earlier material sometimes seemed detached, or more concerned with mystic metaphors than emotional clarity, SVIIB is viscerally felt. Every track on SVIIB is one Curtis had worked on before his death, and the conceit—and the fact that Deheza followed it through to the album’s completion—lends eerie resonance to lyrics like “open your eyes, love, you’ve got me crying.” SVIIB is undoubtedly a hard listen at times for those who have followed the group, particularly when its context breaks into the songs. “Confusion" is bleak and tremulous—the exhaustion in Deheza’s vocals is not acting—and in the right mood, completely gutting. But while it’s remarkable that SVIIB exists at all, let alone in such fine form, what’s even more remarkable is how resilient, even joyful it is. These are generous songs, the product of deep caring. “A Thousand Times More” surges and reassures, the musical equivalent to a personal cheering squad; even the lover’s tiff of “On My Heart” is devoid of sour notes, collapsing into a swoon after its bridge and staying there. Nor is the album stuck in the heady, bodiless realm. “Signals” is deadly serious and deadly dramatic, God, guns, glitches, snakes, bass choirs and congregations all making lyrical appearances, but all before a sledge of a riff in the chorus that hits as hard and sure as sudden attraction—a huge hook, right to the nerves. “Open Your Eyes,” though it retains some of the group’s typically idiosyncratic songwriting and meandering phrasing, is the most straightforward pop ballad SVIIB have recorded—Deheza’s speak-singing resembles a number of current radio hits, and change a few chords and the piano and percussion would evoke closing credits. But the song would not work any other way. SVIIB’s career, from beginning to likely end—has been a process of paring down their sound, jettisoning all extraneous material until all that’s left is emotional truth. And SVIIB is not only the group’s most technically accomplished work, their perfected swan song—it feels true. You couldn’t ask for a better memorial than that.

2016-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00

2016-02-09T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Vagrant

February 9, 2016

006b4651-d919-4835-976f-3ec91eef9f93

Katherine St. Asaph

https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/

Q-Tip's long-delayed experimental album, cut at the beginning of the decade with contributions from jazz musicians, is finally given a proper release.

Q-Tip's long-delayed experimental album, cut at the beginning of the decade with contributions from jazz musicians, is finally given a proper release.

Q-Tip: Kamaal the Abstract

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13471-kamaal-the-abstract/

Kamaal the Abstract

Kamaal the Abstract is not a great record by any means. But it is an interesting one, a unique effort by an artist struggling to mesh two disparate musical systems, gambling that inherent internal friction could spark some excitement. Unfortunately, the road to 6.3 is paved with experimental intentions. Kamaal the Abstract first leaked at the beginning of the decade, the follow-up to Tip's solo debut Amplified. While the status of the latter record has only grown in the ensuing years, thanks largely to Dilla's rise as a cult production hero, Kamaal's nature as an experimental cul-de-sac feels more cemented with time. But the ink never dries in the history books; if anything, the 2000s may have finally given Kamaal and Kamaal an opportunity for creative redemption. The collision of jazz and hip-hop, of course, isn't a new concept, especially for an artist who worked with Ron Carter on Tribe's second LP. But with Tribe, never mind Digable Planets, Guru, or US3, incorporating jazz often felt like more of a stylistic affect than concrete engagement, just a couple of looped bars and a brief instrumental solo from a big name on a track outro. Since bebop revolutionized jazz in the 1940s, attempts to integrate the genre with pop forms have been risky. Tip's pops used to say hip-hop reminded him of bebop for a reason; at their best, jazz and rap both feature interconnected conversations and content being generated over a short time in their parallel worlds. But rap music's complexity is tied up in language, the melodic and harmonic aspects stripped down so as to focus the listener on the verbal. Post-bebop jazz usually hinges on harmonic complexity. Kamaal the Abstract, to its great credit, is unafraid of (messily) combining these values. Tip seems to have focused primarily on jazz's harmonic intricacies, evident on opener "Feelin'" or "A Million Times", which are unafraid to eschew pop song structure to get at the meat of what makes post-swing jazz harmonically interesting. But sometimes this nuanced backdrop sounds an off-note for the subject matter; while a bunch of ideas were going on in any Tribe-era Q-Tip verse, Tip's redundant boilerplate womanizing over Steely Dan-style chord changes on "Heels" just doesn't fit. Even worse, Tip's singing throughout the record -- a shallow signifier for this more "soulful" approach, perhaps? -- feels unnecessarily cautious. Very Andre 3k. But jazz gets shortchanged, too. For the most part, the solos feel safe and not particularly notable. Guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel's presence followed the release of an exciting, adventurous solo LP The Next Step, so it's confusing to hear his cameo reduced to rhythm guitar on the extended, platitudinous jam "Do You Dig U?". Even the incredible Kenny Garrett, who does get an extended solo feature on the stop-start funk “Abstractionisms,” seems to be holding back. It feels like the soloists were so conscious of the album's pop music concessions, they felt they had to dumb it down, afraid to cut loose, as if they were recording for “The Late Show” or a random studio session. Despite Tip's willingness to combine the stylistic approaches of jazz and hip-hop, many songs feel imbalanced this way, with potentially exciting material undercut by underwhelming performances or half-finished ideas. It is worth recognizing that the Miles and Mizells of the world were extraordinarily rare. Few artists could perfectly balance of jazz's intricate complexity as a live performance with lightning-in-a-bottle pop perfection as a piece of recorded art. Which is why "Even If It Is So" is such an accomplishment. With a simple repeated piano vamp over acoustic guitar, the song features the rapper riffing compassionately about single motherhood alongside a memorable horn hook. The music perfectly reflects the song's theme of subdued respect, the incredible beauty of strength in the most harrowing situations. It also leaves you wanting more, the kind of song you'd love to hear extended and embellished, perhaps in a live setting. Which is the key to this record's possibility; each track is a loose framework of unfulfilled promise. There's been a lot of talk about the growing importance of the live show to artists in the RapidShare era. While Kamaal isn't the brave, experimental success it wants to be, it doesn't exactly feel like the cul-de-sac it once did. It suggests a promising future, where the world of live shows offers Q-Tip and these soloists a chance to stretch out, while recalling their roots in entertainment, which isn't so evident here.

2009-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00

2009-09-18T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rap

Jive

September 18, 2009

006b8259-8196-4706-8e9d-c90ba4307ff0

David Drake

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

On their vital, bristling third LP, the band is at their most concise and vitriolic. Their songwriting suggests the world is an increasingly terrible place and we should all be scared to death.

On their vital, bristling third LP, the band is at their most concise and vitriolic. Their songwriting suggests the world is an increasingly terrible place and we should all be scared to death.

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Always Foreign

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-world-is-a-beautiful-place-and-i-am-no-always-foreign/

Always Foreign

Like most floridly-named, heavily populated post-rock acts before them, the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die are utopians. Their vision of Earth 2 was fully realized on 2015’s brilliant Harmlessness, a marquee indie event that celebrated feminist vigilante justice, made evil cower in its own shadow, and encouraged everyone to pursue self-care and self-actualization with wild abandon. Two years later, its opener “You Can’t Live There Forever” plays as a kind of cruel foreshadowing of a paradise lost. For one thing, that song’s lead vocal came from D. Nicole Shanholtzer, dismissed from the band in 2016. And now, they’re maybe finally having second thoughts about their name. On TWIABP’s vital, bristling third LP Always Foreign, primary songwriter David Bello looks at his Puerto Rican and Lebanese heritage, his upbringing in West Virginia, and his status as an artist in a realm that fetishizes anxiety and comes the same conclusion as the rest of us: The world is an increasingly terrible place and we should all be scared to death. “I’ll make everything look like it’s rad,” Bello sings early on. Everything really did appear to be rad on both Harmlessness and their 2013 debut Whenever, If Ever, albums that were almost mercilessly uplifting. They were cinematic rock music promising happy endings: “The world is a beautiful place/But we have to make it that way,” they sang on Whenever, If Ever’s eternal set-closer “Getting Sodas.” The strain of that work is already apparent on Always Foreign’s opener “I’ll Make Everything”, wearily promising “a story of love,” and “The Future” stops short of delivering an unambiguous message of hope: “The future just got here again and again now/The present was awful but it’s all past now.” The best we can do, it seems, is just tell ourselves is that it can’t get any worse. The shift from magical thinking to realism has made TWIABP a noticeably more pragmatic band. Musically, the first half of Always Foreign finds them arriving at familiar destinations but taking far less time to get there. “I’ll Make Everything” builds towards a regal procession, “The Future” hits a pop-punk sprint at a four-minute mile pace. These would be codas on previous albums but now they’re the songs in themselves. The concision creates an illusory effect, putting the focus on what’s not there: No more desolate stretches of exhausted ambience, off-kilter sequencing, or fan trolling during the album leadup, which were all the sort of things that were often associated with the band when Shanholtzer was still in it. Her absence is even more glaring given that she’s in the crosshairs for most of Side A. TWIABP has never written anything as flat out nasty as “Hilltopper” (“I hope evil can see this and you get what you deserve”), but even as an immensely satisfying and even necessary release—accurately described by the band as “R.E.M. on Dischord Records”—it’s hard to read anyone else’s story into it. TWIABP ensure that’s not the case even as the animus lingers throughout. The writing of Always Foreign coincided with both the exit of Shanholtzer and the election of Donald Trump, and it manages the exceedingly tough task of bringing unrelated personal and political trauma into a cogent polemic. The two converge during Bello’s accusatory midsection of “Marine Tigers”: “Can you still call it a country if all the states are broken/Can you still call it a business if all you do is steal?” As it progresses, Always Foreign implicates not just a specific person, but an entire capitalist system predicated on parasitic greed; Bello sings, “Making money is a horrible and rotten institution,” and it might as well have been the album title. “Marine Tigers” shares its name with a recent memoir written by Bello’s father José, recounting the racism and hatred he faced after his migration from Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1940s. “Color seemed to be the stronger divider of people. It still is. In my child’s eye, it became clear that if I was going to hate a race, it would have to be the human race,” reads José’s epigram in the video. His son taps into that disillusion nearly 70 years later and finds it just as toxic. “You walk around the new neighborhood, but your heart’s not in it/To learn any more about this country/The apartment you had to live in.” This cultural queasiness never relents once and the song doesn’t bloom like all of their previous epics, it implodes with an indiscriminate blare of horns and drum rolls, an outburst of decades worth of repressed self- and societal-recrimination. His disdain spills over into “Fuzz Minor” a song that doesn’t even crest or crescendo, it simply pulsates with pure hate. “Call me A-rab, call me a spic, I can’t wait until I see you die” barely makes it out of the din and while it’s a blunt insult at an obvious target, such a wish feels like the only acceptable outcome for the current administration. The impulses of Always Foreign makes for a disorienting initial listen—TWIABP have never been more immediately accessible or lyrically dense and challenging. Though only eight minutes shorter than Harmlessness, Always Foreign feels twice as compact. They’ve never written better pure pop than “The Future,” or anything as bare and emotional as the conflicted funeral song “For Robin,” or anything as adult-indie as “Gram,” which has the burnished, brassy splendor of a National track. But Bello’s impassioned, impressionist tale of West Virginia’s opioid epidemic is the polar opposite of Matt Berninger’s measured take on jejune domestic dramas. TWIABP’s records alone are enough to justify their status as one of indie rock’s most exemplary, consistently rewarding bands of the past decade. But from the moment anyone says their name aloud for the first time, TWIABP asks, “Are you in or are you out?” and rewards full immersion with a steady stream of singles, EPs, well-intentioned and ambitious flops, inside jokes, Easter eggs, covers, special-run T-shirts and endless Twitter gags. While Always Foreign is by no means a happy record, it’s still a joy to listen to, driven by the same belief in community, evolution, and possibility that earned their debut EP the title of Formlessness. But their “us against the world” M.O. isn’t theoretical on Always Foreign. By keeping their friends close and their enemies as far as away as possible, their heaven on earth is smaller, but just as welcoming. Correction: An earlier version of this article included a lyric whose meaning could be misinterpreted.

2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Epitaph

October 2, 2017

006d4d17-4a01-4853-ac40-9624b0c0cf7d

Ian Cohen

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

Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, Kanye West's third album is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet, indicating that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself.

Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, Kanye West's third album is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet, indicating that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself.

Kanye West: Graduation

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10658-graduation/

Graduation

While rap music famously thrives on the kind of drama surrounding this week's 50 vs. Kanye record-sales standoff, even this showdown's closest followers would probably admit there's something faintly procedural about it. Maybe it's because album sales don't really work as a precise measure of absolute popularity anymore. Maybe it's because 50's a shadow of his former self and no longer considered among the best, biggest, or most anything. Or maybe it's because Universal labelmates 50 and West seem more like they're doing this for us than for themselves. This is a prize fight between two heavyweight boxers moving in polar-opposite directions; the former weakly flailing through a creative crisis and a serious absence of hunger, the latter trying to transcend America by setting his sights on nothing less than the entire world. For all the pageantry, the most substantial takeaway from Kanye's new album is the realization that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself. Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, West's third album in four years is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet. It also caps off an incredible (maybe even unprecedented) run: In terms of consistency, prolificness, and general all-around ability, it's hard to find anyone in mainstream rap who can touch what he's achieved within the same timeframe. Where College Dropout and Late Registration mostly functioned as contagious nostaglia trips, Graduation finds him settling into the pocket; instead of looking inside for answers, he's looking out to the world. When he raps "I shop so much I can speak Italian" on "Champion", it's obvious he's holding up worldliness as a point of pride. His production choices reinforce that belief: Here, Kanye splices his well-articulated production style with a brand new set of influences-- most of them European. What he ends up with is a record that splits the difference between two distinctive styles: his familiar strings and brass, helium vocal samples, and warm soul samples on one side; corroded rave stabs, vinegary synth patches, and weirdly modulated electronic noises on the other. (Ironically, the latter all have roots in West's hometown of Chicago.) While Graduation is far from the electro-house record some fans predicted when the Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger" first leaked, Kanye's interest in French house and rave extend beyond that one track. The stunning "I Wonder" combines a gentlemanly, piano-led sample (courtesy of 70s folk/jazz artist Labi Siffre) with a frizzy synth lead and alien-sounding keys, only to drown it all out with a massive swoop of strings; the weirdly dystopian club track "Drunk and Hot Girls" lurches along at a snail's pace, mixing Can's "Sing Swan Song" with a blend of gypsy music and detuned electronics for maximum queasiness; and the string-led "Flashing Lights" marries a Bond-worthy coda to staccato sounds and cut-up vocal samples. Where lesser producers have tried to bridge this gap only to wind up with beats that sound like bad mashups, West and co-producer DJ Toomp (T.I., "What You Know") make the juxapositions feel utterly natural. Combined with some other familiar source material ("Champion", for example, nicks from Steely Dan), that undercurrent of experimentation puts Kanye's talents to good use. And that's barely scratching the surface. Aside from the patchy "Barry Bonds" (on which an inspired West confounds the odds by drastically outsmarting an uncharacteristically lazy Lil Wayne on the mic), nearly everything here feels tight and inventive. The aforementioned "I Wonder" and "Flashing Lights" are immediate highlights, as is the old-school gospel rave-up of "The Glory" and future smash "Good Life", which features T-Pain pitting his autotuned hooks against a bed of summery, squealing synths. Previous singles "Can't Tell Me Nothing" and "Stronger" somehow take on new life in context of the record, and even the Chris Martin-aided "Homecoming" feels like it hits the right notes. Lyrically, West is magnanimous, corny, self-aggrandizing, and likeable in the all the usual ways. The difference here is that he's dialed down his inner conflict. The neurotic inner monologues of his most engaging verses are virtually absent here. If there's one criticism to be made of Graduation, it's that in striving for universality, he's sacrificed a more personal dimension of himself. The only time we even really get close to the mental hand-wringing of his early albums is on the closing "Big Brother", where he details his lifelong admiration for Jay-Z and hints at the post-Dropout turbulence between the two, before riffing on his own chorus to conclude: "My big brother was Big's brother/ So here's a few words from ya kid brother/ If you admire somebody you should go head and tell 'em/ People never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em". Of course, West's true genius has always come out in his production work, and hearing him find natural ways of fitting these disparate elements together is worth the increased number of Louis Vee brags. While it might not be as substantial a record as we're used to hearing from him, it is his greatest leap forward, and further proof that few are as skilled at tracing out the complicated contours of pride, success and ambition as he is.

2007-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00

2007-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella

September 11, 2007

0070555c-10b3-4e93-9e0f-0a71af0ee8e5

Mark Pytlik

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

On his fifth album, Kendrick retreats from the limelight and turns to himself, highlighting his insecurities and beliefs. It’s ambitious, impressive, and a bit unwieldy.

On his fifth album, Kendrick retreats from the limelight and turns to himself, highlighting his insecurities and beliefs. It’s ambitious, impressive, and a bit unwieldy.

Kendrick Lamar: Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kendrick-lamar-mr-morale-and-the-big-steppers/

Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers

Kendrick Lamar is a giddy dramatist. He loves to pack his music with perspectives, personifying his many characters and muses with distinct voices, cadences, and beat switches that bring them to life. Those virtuosic tics have made him one of rap’s most celebrated storytellers and stylists; he is the first and only rapper to have won a Pulitzer Prize. For some, Kendrick’s elastic narration and indignant dispatches on Black life have made him a figure of supreme moral authority in hip-hop—a role he spurns on his fifth studio album. Kendrick spends Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers gleefully immolating his cherished reputation, swinging between caustic taunts and plaintive confessions over slick funk and soul production that gleams like shards of a mirror. The double album offers rap’s most jarring heel turn since Future cut loose on Monster, taking an unfocused but probing look at Kendrick’s most elusive character: himself. Five years have passed since Kendrick released the punchy and vivid Damn. and curated the easygoing soundtrack for Black Panther—eons in the rap world, and quite a chunk of regular time too. Aside from the splashy launch of pgLang, his opaque media company with Dave Free, and a few scattered features, Kendrick has kept a low profile. His final album for his longtime label home Top Dawg Entertainment enters a world shaped by the pandemic, #MeToo, and the global protests against police brutality, events Kendrick comments on across the record while recounting how he’s spent his hiatus. His main priority, however, is clarifying who, exactly, Kendrick Lamar represents. The short answer is his family and his homies. The search for the longer answer propels the album. Prompted by narrator Whitney Alford, his romantic partner since high school, Kendrick opens the record by framing his honesty as dangerous, the first of many disclosures to come. “I been goin’ through somethin’/Be afraid,” he says, a warning that is followed by frantic double-time verses that slink around oblique piano stabs and brisk drums. His rapping jerks and lurches as he reveals he’s going to therapy and wracked by grief and shame, feelings that he copes with through luxury purchases and infidelity. Even as he details a specific fling, his storytelling frays, held together by the repetition of his paramour’s eye color rather than mise-en-scène or dense rhyme. Throughout Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Kendrick seems to actively reject the elegance and structure of past songs like “Duckworth.” and “Good Kid,” writing in quick strokes and sketches that channel his messy admissions. Ideas scamper around like field rabbits and he avoids clean hooks, denying the listener easy access to his thoughts. It verges on antipop. His flows streak across “Count Me Out,” bouncing off the kick drum, dancing with the chords. The “Kim”-inspired “We Cry Together” stages a noxious melodrama where Kendrick and Zola star Taylour Paige trade barbs that feel almost improvised despite being tightly rhymed and metered. Eminem can finally retire happy.  His commitment to untidiness extends to the production, which is smooth but askew, rhythms and chords stacked precariously. Many of the songs, most of which have at minimum three producers, seem to split at the seams. On “Rich (Interlude),” Duval Timothy’s piano lines drift apart and glom back together, rain into vapor into clouds. On “Purple Hearts,” the drums fall away for the entirety of Ghostface’s stellar verse, strings and splashes of piano shadowing the rapper’s meter. The performances don’t always tap into the lushness of the production, but the beats and occasional R&B sample here and there give the often rambling verses some much-needed shape. Kendrick meanders to the album’s high points, stopping for strange and goofy hot takes on cancel culture, a neuron-melting non-issue that explains literally no rich and famous person’s actual life. His candor turns pugilistic on “N95” and “Worldwide Steppers,” tracks that find him praising Oprah’s moxie (“Say what I want about you niggas, I’m like Oprah, dawg”) and lamenting a time he paid for unhealthy catering. “I am not for the faint of heart,” he says after a preamble by Kodak Black, whose inclusion here and throughout the album brings to mind DaBaby and Marilyn Manson’s appearances on Donda. It’s unclear whether his presence is meant to make a case for redemption or musical kinship. Kendrick’s verse, rapped in the tight pockets of a throbbing vamp, steamrolls into trolling lines that detail vengeful hookups with white women that might be described as Ice Cube’s “Cave Bitch” meets Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. The bars aren’t particularly inflammatory in the context of the song, which casts Kendrick’s Becky cravings as one fiber in the global tapestry of imperfect people who deny and sidestep their flaws. But Kendrick clearly gets a kick out of needling the listener, a current that runs through the album. As his ribbing starts to feel empty—“Hello, crackers!” (“Savior”); “A celebrity do not mean integrity, you fool” (“Rich Spirit”)—the stated purpose of his venting grows shaky. Is his goal to be honest or impish? Does he want to bare his soul or his fangs? On “Auntie Diaries,” the tale of two relatives whose experiences with gender shaped his accountability to family, he attempts the former but fumbles into the latter. In trying to impart a lesson about how he learned then unlearned to say the f-slur, he makes himself the main character in his queer relatives’ stories and he uses the slur wantonly. Few rap listeners will be new to the word and his intentions are clear, but aren’t there other stories he can tell about the trans people in his life? Kendrick has never been a perfect character actor, but in the past he at least imbued roles with some mark of individuality. Compared to Jay-Z’s “Smile,” which manages to tell the story of Hov’s mom coming out of the closet and mixes flexes and intimacy, “Auntie Diaries” lacks depth. On the penultimate track, “Mother I Sober,” Kendrick finally responds at length to Whitney’s initial assignment. Dropping his voice to a teary murmur, he relates a bleak tale of domestic and familial violence that ensnared himself, cousins, and his mother. Instead of lurid details, the story pivots on stony silences that exile everyone to the confines of their minds, where they bottle up pain instead of processing it. “I wish I was somebody/Anybody but myself,” Portishead’s Beth Gibbons murmurs for the hook, her ghostly timbre capturing the dissociation the violence has wrought. The song ends with singer Sam Dew crooning, “I bare my soul and now we’re free,” a tidy conclusion that provokes more questions than it answers. But the song at least has a mission and a through line, and Kendrick labors to probe his feelings and hangups, a sense of effort lacking elsewhere on the album. Despite all its aggrieved poses and statements, the often astonishing rapping, the fastidious attention to detail, and its theme of self-affirmation, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers ironically never settles on a portrait of Kendrick. Perhaps that slipperiness is the thrust of the album, which might be read as his answer to a question he asked a decade ago, before he was anointed as hip-hop’s conscience: “If I mentioned all my skeletons, would you jump in the seat?” That fear of being defined by trauma and shame resonates throughout, but Kendrick and his blemishes are so defined by negation—of white gazes, of Black Twitter, of weighty listener expectations—that by the time the record ends, Kendrick’s “me” is just as nebulous as the effigy he’s spent the album burning. Gods are born in vacuums.

2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

2022-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

pgLang / Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope

May 16, 2022

00721338-db0f-49e0-a49c-e1695e6e5f70

Stephen Kearse

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

SY’s ninth record marked a new era for the band. While they didn’t leave the freaky stuff behind entirely, they started serving it up with a spoonful of sugar.

SY’s ninth record marked a new era for the band. While they didn’t leave the freaky stuff behind entirely, they started serving it up with a spoonful of sugar.

Sonic Youth: Washing Machine

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-youth-washing-machine/

Washing Machine

Sonic Youth’s superpower was always their ability to contain their experimental sprawl just enough. Formed as much as an art project as a musical one, they’ve always been a part of the fringe. But their place within experimentalism’s wild terrain was solidly centrist. Way weirder stuff sat to the left, like the no wave scene of musicians who pummeled their instruments more than they played them, and to the right, art nerds with milquetoast pock-rock groups who occasionally borrowed from the silvery shine Sonic Youth lacquered over most of their songs. Their fifth album, 1988’s Daydream Nation, was the bullseye in the center of the Venn diagram between in and out, a gleaming collection of anthems with guitar noise and beautiful riffs doled out in equal measure. Perfection is a difficult thing to bounce back from, especially when it coincides with the end of the ’80s, a decade whose Reagan-era doom was hospitable to making a racket in protest. In the years after Daydream Nation, they released a number of uneven albums, Goo, Dirty, and Experimental Jetset, Trash, and No Star. Within each, though, were a few perfect moments that pointed a way forward. Towards the end of 1992’s Dirty is “JC,” a song that, in hindsight, served as a blueprint for 1995’s Washing Machine. The fuzz is still present, but it’s paired with the engine of Steve Shelley’s steady hip-hop drumbeat. The song is sung by bass player Kim Gordon, who actually really speaks more than sings, each line like a challenge to the one before it. “You’re walking through my heart once more, don’t forget to close the door,” she sings as an elegy for a friend who was murdered. Despite its more traditional rock structure, the song is still decorated by the wide expanse of feedback by guitarist Thurston Moore. Arguably, it has quite an ugly final 30 seconds, perhaps unnecessary after a deeply moving three and a half minutes. That must have been an argument Sonic Youth heard enough, as come 1995’s Washing Machine, their squall had softened into sparkles. At least sometimes. The album begins with “Becuz,” a nasty romp led by Gordon’s groovy bass playing and her whispered sneer. Like on “JC,” Shelley’s backbeat anchors the song as it begins to swell. After two minutes, the whole thing gathers into that typical Sonic Youth feedback tornado, this one fairly heavily resembling the sound of a dentist drill. But something different happens: The song’s basic structure reassembles and keeps going, like the melody wrestled control back from all the disharmony. The tension created by that push and pull is the prevailing theme of the album, these longtime purveyors of scuzz finally taking a peek at the bright side. “Junkies Promise,” which follows “Becuz,” begins with a sharp snap of feedback, before falling into a cocky noise-rock song for three minutes, with Moore doing a strong Iggy Pop imitation with his vocals. And then, for whatever reason, the song totally pivots. Actually, it pivots twice: first into a rhythmic chug, the preamble for the more interesting, kind of funky coda. In structure, it’s not so different than “JC,” a feral moment at the end for a bit of punctuation, but instead of playing in the sandbox, the whole thing coagulates, Shelley switches to the toms, and the band gets its groove on. They seem about as surprised as we are, and the song drops out mid-riff. It is a gorgeous ascent to new a plane for Sonic Youth. Not that they didn’t have pretty moments before—Daydream Nation is full of them—but they seem willing to give over entire tracks and their narratives to beauty, not just use a touch of gleaming guitar as an accent piece before returning to chaos. “Unwind” in particular is a revelation, even though it is also nothing new. The songwriting is typical Sonic Youth with the structure up front and the freedom in the back. But here everything is softened. Moore doesn’t bark as he sometimes does, instead he purrs. If he sometimes (literally) used a screwdriver on his guitar, here it sounds like he’s using a paintbrush. If they’re a New York band at heart, this song definitely took a Mediterranean vacation. “Love is out into the sundry light, you sing, unwind,” Moore sings to end the song’s first part before the freeform moment begins. There, something insane happens: Shelley breaks out a maraca. It’s deeply seductive and totally unexpected. The guitars and bass follow the loosened vibe and finally unwind. The album’s middle section is hit and miss, though the same could likely be said for all alternative rock records made in the mid-’90s. The doo-wop influence of “Little Trouble Girl” is sweet, if more of a novelty, though the Kim Deal guest vocals are a welcome surprise, making the band sound surprisingly radio-friendly. “No Queen Blues” is serpentine in nature, adjacent to ’70s stoner rock. “Panty Lies” is the best of the trio, with Gordon illustrating the mental aspect of seduction, “Don’t just stare, ’cause she’s not wearing underwear/Oh how rude, at least she’s got your attention square/Don’t you realize, it’s just her disguise.” She also—and there’s not really another way to say this—scats, which is another bizarre and pleasing surprise. The album’s final two songs could not be more different from each other. “Skip Tracer” is a showcase for Lee Ranaldo, the band’s second guitarist, who is given a spotlight or two as lead singer on most Sonic Youth albums. He’s something like the Kelly Rowland to Moore’s Beyoncé, beloved but in the background due to the band leader’s overwhelming star power. Taken together, Ranaldo’s Sonic Youth songs are consistent across eras and “Skip Tracer” is perhaps his finest moment. The song starts with one large strum, like a gong announcing the entrance of an emperor. Its echo hangs in the air for 20 seconds before the song resets to complete silence and begins in earnest: “None of us know where we’re trying to get to, what kind of life we’re trying to build;” “L.A. is more confusing now than anywhere I’ve ever been to/I’m from New York City, breathe it out and let it in;” “The guitar guy played real good feedback, and super sounding riffs/With his mild-mannered look on, yeah he was truly hip.” It’s a treatment for an indie film, a blues song, a memoir wrapped in one, a highwire act Ranaldo pulls off like he’s Bukowski doing an audiobook. And then comes “The Diamond Sea” which is the most Sonic Youth song you can imagine, and not just because it’s 20 minutes long and mostly guitar noise. At the time of its release, the song received a radio edit, chopped down to 5:30, which does a pretty good job of replicating the original’s ups and down, but entirely misses the point. Most of the 15 minutes it discards are comprised of the band taking a long exhale, noise replaced with the suggestion of noise, the unstructured notes sounding as delicate as windchimes. Sour twangs and small pings of cymbal dash in and out, and occasionally there is a more aggressive guitar whir. And then actual noise returns. It sounds like machinery gone haywire and then eventually dying. It’s a calculated moment, though, this scuffed-up exclamation point on the end of a freeform poem. With a band like Sonic Youth, so concerned with tapping into outer realms, the pockmarks are necessary. Enjoying this bliss? We all know it’s not going to last.

2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Geffen

May 9, 2019

00756136-1388-422e-8f64-c8d3f09c7f0b

Matthew Schnipper

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

The New York producer tailors his overdriven techno epics to unusually introspective ends, sculpting stripped-down arrays of synth and drums into spare, expressive forms.

The New York producer tailors his overdriven techno epics to unusually introspective ends, sculpting stripped-down arrays of synth and drums into spare, expressive forms.

AceMo: Existential

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/acemo-existential/

Existential

Over the last year, the New York producer AceMo has been prolific. Between his solo efforts and his gleaming jungle revisions with frequent collaborator MoMa Ready, he’s released four EPs in the last 12 months, each stuffed with his uniquely scuffed techno tracks, while maintaining an exceptionally busy calendar of live gigs. AceMo is committed to the grind, but he’s never given the impression of putting out music just for the sake of it. Each of his releases feels purposeful and considered, and though he rarely gives interviews, he’s clearly in tune with the long history of dance music as a vehicle for messages that resonate beyond the club. His 2016 album Black Populous came with a poem that meditated on the energy, history, and resiliency of the people that gave the record its name, and his 2018 track “Where They At???”—a favorite of like-minded DJs—shouted out all the people who give the dancefloor life and vibrancy (“Where the black girls at?/Nomadic girls at?”). Existential, which AceMo self-released in December, extends that tradition. “As agents of Earth, we must emphasize the existence of each other,” he wrote on Instagram, underscoring the philosophical and spiritual dimension of his music. “WE ARE ALL RAVE ANGELS.” There is a possibility, AceMo’s music suggests, that you can find something in dance music deeper than bass. Accordingly, Existential’s eight tracks tend to operate at epic scale. They are towering pieces, with an average running time of nearly eight minutes, built around synthesizers that swirl in ways that feel both gaseous and enormous: Opener “Existential” sounds like a club floating in a distant nebula, daring you to stare upward in awe more than it begs you to dance. As awe-inspiring as they can be, these tracks feel also more insular and meditative than much of what AceMo has released to date. The stark ambience that opens “Man From Water pt. 2” bubbles upward into a distinctly introverted take on dance music, wrapping overdriven drums in spare synth melodies. AceMo certainly isn’t the first to sand down the genre’s sharp edges to make something more approachable for home listening. You can hear spiritual similarities to contemporaries like Galcher Lustwerk and the Mood Hut label and historical antecedents like Drexciya; it’s not even that far from the dubby dance refractions that Slowdive tried out on some of their spacier work. But AceMo sounds more at home than ever before in the low-lit glimmer of tracks like “Message to the Future (Waterfalls),” whose mantra-like qualities fit the austere simplicity of his production style. He’s rarely ever been the type of producer to layer more than a couple of different synth parts at once, but in these slow-moving pieces that restraint really shines. “Love Dimensions” shows it off best, as the chattering percussion and slowly unfolding basslines wrap around one another in shifting, amorphous ways. The intersections of these simple elements create surprising geometries and unexpected colors—leaving ample room to get lost in the spaces between the beats and find whatever truth lives there.

2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

self-released

January 13, 2020

00787aa3-2403-4491-a52f-cf2cfc7821cc

Colin Joyce

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

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 masterful, groundbreaking sound that laid the foundation for post-rock.

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 masterful, groundbreaking sound that laid the foundation for post-rock.

Talk Talk: Spirit of Eden

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/talk-talk-spirit-of-eden/

Spirit of Eden

The timbre, amplitude, frequency, and duration of every note on Spirit of Eden tell a great, sad story of pop music, a war of art and commerce that birthed a new genre in its wake. Its breadth and scope are intimidatingly large: Silence is as important as tone, stasis is as important as movement. Inky chord progressions resolve into mystery, and lyrics leave only afterimages. The emptiness of its first two minutes allows you to adjust to the dim light of an album recorded in almost complete darkness. Then it just glows. Never once do these six songs reveal the thought or labor that went into them, never once is there too much or too little. One moment (a muted trumpet, for instance) is always placed exactly where it should be alongside another (feedback from a blues harmonica), thousands of hours of tape painstakingly laced together as part of the vision and spiritual largesse of its composers, singer-songwriter Mark Hollis and co-writer/producer Tim Friese-Greene. It is a deep blue book of sound, humid with melancholy. Rare is rock music this simple made with such toil and unbearable emotion that there’s no better way to classify Spirit of Eden than by the elemental virtue of its sound, the very first thing of all music. If only Talk Talk’s record label felt the same way. What if the massive EMI corporation had known that when Talk Talk delivered the masters to Spirit of Eden in the spring of 1988, the record would be a once and future marvel of pop music, the nexus into which jazz and minimalism poured and out of which a new post-rock flowed. Legend holds that when the A&R man at EMI heard it, it brought him to tears—not just because of its tidal beauty, but because he knew it wasn’t going to sell. A hugely successful UK band turned their sound inside out and delivered this whisper of a record, some slow, faint echo of their former synth-pop heartbeat. Talk Talk’s six-year career as a commercially viable band was, at that very moment, dead in the water. Which was odd, because Hollis and Friese-Greene were convinced Spirit of Eden was going to sell four million copies. When they finished the psychotic, 11-month recording process, they were sure this interior, fully realized album would go platinum just like their third album, 1986’s The Colour of Spring—a fragile, autumnal collection of synth-pop shaded with knotty impressionism. Led by its two charting singles, “Living in Another World” and “Life’s What You Make It,” Colour propelled Talk Talk’s rise, selling over two million copies. They were experimenting with more ambient textures than their first two records (1982’s The Party’s Over and 1984’s It’s My Life), which were heavy with synthetic drums and guitars and found the band struggling to break out of the New Romantic box their label had put them into. Fame, doing press, being the least bit genial: All the trappings of the music industry never suited Hollis during those airbrushed synth-pop years. He was a university dropout and a former punk, gaunt in look and voice, and obsessed with the granular, metaphysical side of art. In interviews, he would point to Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ orchestral jazz masterpiece Sketches of Spain, or the zen experiments of John Cage, or Vittorio De Sica’s avant-garde film The Bicycle Thieves as touchpoints for his inspiration. He is given to speaking like a Buddhist in a cockney accent, sentences that seem born of some kind of guru algorithm (“I’ve always been of the belief that to play one note well is better than to play two notes badly.”) At once truculent and soft-spoken, Hollis once got into a fight with the guy from Spandau Ballet because Hollis referred to everyone in the room, including himself, as scum. It was the grueling world tour behind Colour that sealed it for Hollis. After a show in Spain, on September 13, 1986, Hollis, then only 31 years old, said he was done playing live forever. He couldn’t get the intricacies of the songs from The Colour of Spring to sound right on stage, not to mention six shows a week and all the cliches of tour life that led to a blur of detachment. Besides, he (and everyone else in the band) had just become fathers. The bell of a quiet adulthood was sounding. He decamped to the country in Suffolk and surrounded himself with the idylls of his family and a large stable of domestic animals, “18 at the peak.” It was with this energy—part exhaustion, part bucolic splendor, part restless creativity—that Talk Talk re-entered the studio in May 1987 to begin work on what would become Spirit of Eden. All the hit singles from the band’s early days were paying off, literally, as EMI gave Talk Talk carte blanche to make the pop magic happen again for the fourth time. The band turned Wessex Studios, a former church in London, into a cocoon of darkness save for a few desk lamps in the control room, a sound-triggered strobe light around Lee Harris’ drum set, and a 1960s oil-wheel projector that cast globules of color onto the ceiling where the band worked. The hours were 11 a.m. to midnight, five days a week, smoke from incense and hand-rolled cigarettes fogging the space. Soon the sense of time seemed to slip away from everyone. For three months, the group recorded in their psychedelic burrow. Hollis, Friese-Greene, Harris, and bassist Paul Webb built the chilly framework for Spirit of Eden, layering deep pockets of rhythm that could grow from a breath to a howl at a moment’s notice. “Desire” seems oceanic and blissful, the kind of unhurried languor the album has offered for 17 minutes—until a damn cowbell comes raging in, and Hollis rips into a bluesy chorus as if to undermine the entire mood established until that point: “That ain’t me, babe.” Once the band had the basic shape of the album, they invited a revolving door of musicians to audition their sound and ideas for a spot on Spirit of Eden. They ran tape and let a harmonica player or violinist improvise for up to three-and-a-half hours, only to use maybe one or two seconds of it. Without a set budget or time constraint, texturing these songs was purely about discovery and experimentation, splicing and editing little snippets of sound and lofting them into place within the song. It went on like this for months: One person coming in for an oboe part, another for a bit of trumpet. Hugh Davies—assistant to the avant-garde pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen—even brought in his homemade theremin-like instrument the shozygs. “I know the album feels like seven guys playing live in a room,” said engineer Phill Brown, “but every note is ‘placed’ where it is. The album is an illusion.” Hollis and Friese-Greene once brought in a 25-person choir to sing over “I Believe in You,” a brittle song touched with icy, crackling electric guitars that Hollis wrote in part about his older brother, the former punk rocker Ed Hollis, and his struggles with addiction. “I’ve seen heroin for myself,” Hollis sings, hugging the words, sounding like the vampiric inverse of Nina Simone. The anemic and honeyed quality of Hollis’ voice defines the sound of Talk Talk and Spirit of Eden, suspended in a fearful tenor octave like he’d drown if he sang any lower. On “I Believe In You,” when he lets the word “spirit” fall thinly out of his mouth, he defines the resonant frequency of a song that could never contain a 25-person choir. By all accounts, the chorus sounded incredible, moving the tea lady who worked at the studio to tears. The next morning, Hollis listened to the playback and told the engineer to erase the chorus completely. It was later replaced by the Choir of Chelmsford Cathedral, six cherubic boy sopranos. To map this album, to find the provenance of each sound, would be an insane feat. You’d think Spirit of Eden had a score, a massive tome of reference that a conductor could glance at before signaling to the organist to come wafting in. But this vast mosaic of sound would just be window dressing if it weren’t for the dynamics Talk Talk include here, the rudiments of what would be used so effectively in the future by bands like Spiritualized or Radiohead or Explosions in the Sky. “Eden” shrinks and grows in macro and micro ways, using the felt march of a floor tom to build up the song and carve out an enormous space inside of which Hollis sings words that are biblically charged: “Rage on omnipotent.” His voice is frail, but the words could be carved into the side of a mountain. Even as well-composed as these songs are, they have a feel to them, a swing, like a jazz combo locked into each other’s impulses. It is what makes Spirit of Eden a groundbreaking hybrid of style. How could something so meticulous feel so free, so cathartic, how could all this labor create this effortless space for the mind and soul to wander? It is the music of commercial liberation, the seeing of creative ideas to their unadulterated conclusion. The thrill of this music is the same thrill of listening to some of the great works of jazz, classical, and pop: the soul of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, the obtuse landscapes of Morton Feldman, the production and patience of Brian Eno. Today, this coming together of spirit and sound still feels like a radical and mysterious feat of popular music. This was the feeling Hollis and Friese-Greene left the studio with, a wonderful sensation of doing something new, reaching to where, finally, their music wanted to get to for the better part of the decade. Of course it would sell four million copies. In the playback room, the label tried to figure out what to do with this band who would not go back to the studio to record a proper single and would definitely not tour their new album. As Friese-Greene once recalled, “I remember sitting in a pub down the road from Mark’s and [discussing how] we thought we’d broken the mold and could turn the tide of history by going back to a world where the single wasn’t king. How sadly mistaken we were.” With no real marketing plan in place, Spirit of Eden faltered on release. Fans of their former sound were spurned by an album whose only constant rhythm was in the thick spine of Webb’s ambient-dub electric basslines. It was hardly singable, surely not danceable, and unlike anything that was happening on the charts at that time. With a lukewarm critical reception and a barely authorized three-minute re-cut of “I Believe In You” used as a single, the album hardly dented the charts. It ended up selling about 500,000 copies in total, a shrug for a then-major label, platinum-selling band. Acrimony between the band and EMI festered into a court battle that ended with Talk Talk parting ways with the label and securing a contract with Polydor for what would end up being their final album, 1991’s Laughing Stock. That album took the post-rock aesthetic of Spirit of Eden in a more acoustic and wide-open setting—and ended up just as brilliant and luminously adorned. It was another hard-fought year in the studio, trudging to the completion of another commercially unsuccessful masterpiece. At their wit's end with each other and the music industry, Talk Talk soon disbanded. “I like sound. And I also like silence. And, in some ways, I like silence more than I like sound.” It’s another Hollis zinger, but never was there a sentiment so apt for the man. Like a mute slowly placed into the bell of a trumpet, Talk Talk’s final albums gradually pulled focus away from the sound of pop music near the end of the century. Over here, in this pasture, was an untilled field of possibility to use with just some guitars and drums and bass. Spirit of Eden was the great inhale of religious feeling, one rock and pop music had been expelling for years and years. The thrill and stasis of a held breath carry the album from beginning to end. “Take my freedom,” Hollis sings on the closing hymn, as the band uses its last bit of thrust before drifting away.

2019-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Parlophone

January 13, 2019

0079c01d-b1c3-4194-9c1a-2124758cd412

Jeremy D. Larson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/

Beyoncé’s fifth album, surprise-released on iTunes in December, finds the singer hitting a new peak. Working with a large cast of collaborators, she shifts gears to pull off her most explicit and sonically experimental music to date, exploring sounds and ideas at the grittier margins of popular music.

Beyoncé’s fifth album, surprise-released on iTunes in December, finds the singer hitting a new peak. Working with a large cast of collaborators, she shifts gears to pull off her most explicit and sonically experimental music to date, exploring sounds and ideas at the grittier margins of popular music.

Beyoncé: Beyoncé

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18821-beyonce-beyonce/

Beyoncé

Should Beyoncé choose to settle in the world of Adult Contemporary one day, she’ll have most of the legwork already done. She’s spent the time since 4, an album that playfully extolled the virtues of marriage, crafting a role for herself in that sphere with the ambitious grace of a good politician. Imagine the fun she had requesting the big hair and bigger fur to help President Obama ring in his second term, or in gussying herself up like Marie Antoinette to promote an international arena tour called The Mrs. Carter Show. The hedge-betting deals with Pepsi and H&M, the (now-defunct) lifestyle blog/newsletter à la Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, the reunion with Destiny’s Child, the exquisitely dull autobiographical documentary—she's seemed entirely poised to join Jay Z on his cloud of moneyed middle-age. In retrospect, the adult gloss feels like an elaborate foil to the trouble she’d been cooking up in private all along. Beyoncé, her fifth solo album, repositions the singer as the Houston-bred Yoncé, a woman lustier and surlier than B, more playful than Bey, fiercer than Sasha but softer and more natural than the lot. The album is brassy but elegant, its post-coital breath smelling faintly of cheap liquor sipped from a crystal flute. It finds Beyoncé shifting gears to pull off her most explicit and sonically experimental music to date, exploring sounds and ideas at the grittier margins of popular music. It’s tempting to read Beyoncé’s hard edges as an attempt to ride the success of Rihanna or Miley Cyrus’ risqué agendas—but to do so would be to look past the album’s true provocations. Beyoncé pushes boundaries not because it sells sex at every turn, but because it treats a power-balanced marriage as a place where sexuality thrives. At a time when when young people are gripped by an ideological fear of monogamy’s advertised doldrums, Beyoncé boldly proposes the idea that a woman’s prime—personal, professional, and especially sexual—can occur within a stable romantic partnership. Monogamy has never sounded more seductive or less retrograde as when dictated on Beyoncé’s terms. The innuendo can be bawdy and overblown—“Can you lick my Skittles/That’s the sweetest in the middle” on “Blow”—but sincerely so. And who would allow Jay Z’s instantly infamous breasts/breakfast line anywhere near the stargazing boom of “Drunk in Love” but someone truly infatuated with him? What’s more is that the erotic themes don’t feel out-of-step with the album’s more decorous moments, like the stadium-filling “XO” or “Blue”, its requisite treatise on motherhood. In Beyoncé’s world, there are illicit doors to be unlocked in the halls of tradition and vice versa. The record reverberates with the energy of a conservative pop star navigating trends without grasping for them. Its crew of 44 writers, producers, and directors skews heavily toward the hip-hop realm and incorporates niche talents, something Beyoncé tried on 4 when she teamed with artists like Switch and pulled visual ideas from little-known European choreographers discovered via YouTube. It’s the collective effort of an all-star team with a deep bench, with contributions from mainstays like Pharrell and The-Dream, to fresh faces like Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, a creative director from streetwear brand Supreme, and a practically-unknown producer named Boots. Beyoncé’s best songs often reject traditional pop structures in favor of atmosphere—she may have taken some cues from her sister Solange, who now leads a particular wave of collaborative, left-field R&B. The record, her darkest and lushest yet, has a tendency to echo, stop abruptly, or place two separate songs in the space of one. Its most bracing moments are also its toughest and weirdest, like “***Flawless,” a two-part growler that makes feminist TED Talk fodder sound legitimately menacing. Timbaland and Justin Timberlake join The-Dream on “Partition” in service of the mean-mugging Yoncé, who snarls and bares her teeth as though the most revered rapper of all time is nobody but her little husband. At the center lies Beyoncé’s practically unfair abilities as a performer—you get the sense that Lady Gaga or Ciara could no sooner pull off the scale or quality of Beyoncé than you or I could pull off a suitable rendition of any of its songs in a karaoke bar. Beyoncé has loosened up her delivery, too, in a way that highlights her elasticity and shows her pop-cultural antennae tuned to the right channels. Who could’ve predicted that some of the most infectious snippets of pop music in 2013 would not arrive by way of anthemic chorus or assembly-line arrangement, but in Beyoncé’s ad-libbing? You already know the ones: Surfbort, she grunts on “Drunk in Love,” slinging a hashtag like it’s the name of a line of Ikea chairs, the single word serving as both shorthand for woman-on-top and a neat summation of an entire era of trends in rap cadence. You’d also be hard-pressed to find an internet-savvy person in America who hasn’t been possessed by the idea that he or she woke up like this, brain emblazoned with Beyoncé’s half-second I’m so flawless I gave myself a seizure dance. She's achieved the rare feat of validating meme culture by capturing its sneaky potency and delight rather than falling into its cheap, dehumanizing traps. This is a “visual album,” sure, but it’s also a package of modern codes and discreet campaigns, a field of meaningful virtual dioramas. In this sense Beyoncé has a newfound spiritual ally in Drake (Worst! YOLO!),—he shows up on Beyoncé on the bruised “Mine”— her only peer to successfully streamline an internet-rooted mindset into a large-scale pop arena and seek profundity in the process. Which is all to say that Beyoncé has delivered on the promise she inadvertently made by dropping an album and its expansive visual counterpart late on a Thursday night in December on iTunes, free of traditional fanfare. Call it a coup or just another victory for her mammoth PR apparatus, but consider the alternatives: The strategy probably would have failed if the quality wasn’t there, and the album could not have achieved such an impact without its rogue—in spirit, at least—method of distribution. Beyoncé was unleashed upon the world in a way that could only succeed right now, with an aim to make the audience consume it the way it would have long ago. It’s a line that could be ripped straight from the mouth of an investment-drunk tech startup founder, but it’s true: Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.

2014-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-01-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

Folk/Country / Pop/R&B

Columbia

January 6, 2014

007ba149-9310-48b4-92fc-2aa44086b6e5

Carrie Battan

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

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and ...

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and ...

Radiohead: Kid A

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6656-kid-a/

Kid A

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Colin Greenwood tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Radiohead's new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months. The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap. The staccato piano chords ascended repeatedly. "Black eyed angels swam at me," Yorke sang like his dying words. "There was nothing to fear, nothing to hide." The trained critical part of me marked the similarity to Coltrane's "Ole." The human part of me wept in awe. The Italians surrounding me held their breath in communion (save for the drunken few shouting "Criep!"). Suddenly, a rise of whistles and orgasmic cries swept unfittingly through the crowd. The song, "Egyptian Song," was certainly momentous, but wasn't the response more apt for, well, "Creep?" I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Radiohead had the heavens on their side. For further testament, Chip Chanko and I both suffered auto-debilitating accidents in the same week, in different parts of the country, while blasting "Airbag" in our respective Japanese imports. For months, I feared playing the song about car crashes in my car, just as I'd feared passing 18- wheelers after nearly being crushed by one in 1990. With good reason, I suspect Radiohead to possess incomprehensible powers. The evidence is only compounded with Kid A-- the rubber match in the band's legacy-- an album which completely obliterates how albums, and Radiohead themselves, will be considered. Even the heralded OK Computer has been nudged down one spot in Valhalla. Kid A makes rock and roll childish. Considerations on its merits as "rock" (i.e. its radio fodder potential, its guitar riffs, and its hooks) are pointless. Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. And not because it's jazz or fusion or ambient or electronic. Classifications don't come to mind once deep inside this expansive, hypnotic world. Ransom, the philologist hero of C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet who is kidnapped and taken to another planet, initially finds his scholarship useless in his new surroundings, and just tries to survive the beautiful new world. This is an emotional, psychological experience. Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Radiohead hated being Radiohead, but ended up with the most ideal, natural Radiohead record yet. "Everything in Its Right Place" opens like Close Encounters spaceships communicating with pipe organs. As your ears decide whether the tones are coming or going, Thom Yorke's Cuisinarted voice struggles for its tongue. "Everything," Yorke belts in uplifting sighs. The first-person mantra of "There are two colors in my head" is repeated until the line between Yorke's mind and the listener's mind is erased. Skittering toy boxes open the album's title song, which, like the track "Idioteque," shows a heavy Warp Records influence. The vocoder lullaby lulls you deceivingly before the riotous "National Anthem." Mean, fuzzy bass shapes the spine as unnerving theremin choirs limn. Brash brass bursts from above like Terry Gilliam's animated foot. The horns swarm as Yorke screams, begs, "Turn it off!" It's the album's shrill peak, but just one of the incessant goosebumps raisers. After the rockets exhaust, Radiohead float in their lone orbit. "How to Disappear Completely" boils down "Let Down" and "Karma Police" to their spectral essence. The string-laden ballad comes closest to bridging Yorke's lyrical sentiment to the instrumental effect. "I float down the Liffey/ I'm not here/ This isn't happening," he sings in his trademark falsetto. The strings melt and weep as the album shifts into its underwater mode. "Treefingers," an ambient soundscape similar in sound and intent to Side B of Bowie and Eno's Low, calms after the record's emotionally strenuous first half. The primal, brooding guitar attack of "Optimistic" stomps like mating Tyrannosaurs. The lyrics seemingly taunt, "Try the best you can/ Try the best you can," before revealing the more resigned sentiment, "The best you can is good enough." For an album reportedly "lacking" in traditional Radiohead moments, this is the best summation of their former strengths. The track erodes into a light jam before morphing into "In Limbo." "I'm lost at sea," Yorke cries over clean, uneasy arpeggios. The ending flares with tractor beams as Yorke is vacuumed into nothingness. The aforementioned "Idioteque" clicks and thuds like Aphex Twin and Bjork's Homogenic, revealing brilliant new frontiers for the "band." For all the noise to this point, it's uncertain entirely who or what has created the music. There are rarely traditional arrangements in the ambiguous origin. This is part of the unique thrill of experiencing Kid A. Pulsing organs and a stuttering snare delicately propel "Morning Bell." Yorke's breath can be heard frosting over the rainy, gray jam. Words accumulate and stick in his mouth like eye crust. "Walking walking walking walking," he mumbles while Jonny Greenwood squirts whale-chant feedback from his guitar. The closing "Motion Picture Soundtrack" brings to mind The White Album, as it somehow combines the sentiment of Lennon's LP1 closer-- the ode to his dead mother, "Julia"-- with Ringo and Paul’s maudlin, yet sincere LP2 finale, "Goodnight." Pump organ and harp flutter as Yorke condones with affection, "I think you're crazy." To further emphasize your feeling at that moment and the album's overall theme, Yorke bows out with "I will see you in the next life." If you're not already there with him. The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.

2000-10-02T02:01:40.000-04:00

2000-10-02T02:01:40.000-04:00

Rock

Capitol

October 2, 2000

007c6413-d053-4c5f-8d00-352eaa2429d4

Brent DiCrescenzo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/

Sonic Highways is the name of both the Foo Fighters' eighth record and an accompanying HBO series documenting its cross-country production process, wherein the band recorded each of its eight songs in a different city. The regional essence of a given song is barely perceptible without the exposition.

Sonic Highways is the name of both the Foo Fighters' eighth record and an accompanying HBO series documenting its cross-country production process, wherein the band recorded each of its eight songs in a different city. The regional essence of a given song is barely perceptible without the exposition.

Foo Fighters: Sonic Highways

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19864-foo-fighters-sonic-highways/

Sonic Highways

Foo Fighters have now been Dave Grohl’s chief concern for 20 years. The first 10 were spent minting the band’s platinum-plated modern-rock sound, and the subsequent decade was spent trying to remold it… only to have it settle back into its predictable color and shape. Indeed, it’s hard to distinguish one Foo Fighters album from another, since they all draw from the same well of arena-punk fist-pumpers, gentle comedown ballads, and arm-swaying sing-alongs that fall somewhere in between; as their Greatest Hits compilation made all too clear, a Foos song from 2007 sounds an awful lot like one from 1997. To his credit, Grohl seems well aware of the fine line between being unerringly consistent and relentlessly formulaic, and has tried to provide each new record with a fresh narrative. But these strategies have essentially amounted to hanging different frames around an unchanging picture—like a double-album opus that simply segregated the Foos’ habitual whispers and screams, or a back-to-the-garage throwback seemingly designed for garages big enough to house private jets. That said, Grohl's latest plan to drum up interest for a new record could be his most ingenious: make the most elaborate, expensive EPK in music history and have HBO distribute it. Sonic Highways is the name of both the Foos’ eighth record and an accompanying, eight-part TV series documenting its ambitious, cross-country production process, with the band (alongside Butch Vig) recording each of its eight songs in a different city. It effectively blows up the concept of Grohl’s 2013 film, Sound City, to a national scale: visit a renowned musical mecca, speak to the legends that put it on the map, and hope some of their mojo rubs off onto new recordings. As a documentary, the Sonic Highways series takes full advantage of Grohl’s unique status as a punk-spawned celebrity to deftly intertwine mainstream and underground rock histories. For instance, so far we've seen how Chicago-blues icons like Buddy Guy and noisy nihilists like Big Black were both fueled by the same impoverished necessity, or how hardcore pioneers Minor Threat and go-go greats Trouble Funk shone a light on the Washington that lurks in the shadow of Capitol Hill. As a promotional film for a new Foo Fighters album, however, it makes you wonder why its trailblazing subjects’ transgressive influence didn’t seep into the sound of final product. Though it's all relative, Sonic Highways is the most adventurous Foo Fighters album to date, but it bends their trusty template in ways that bear little relation to the project’s underlying musical-history-tour gambit. (It’s not like hanging out with Bad Brains inspired a sharp left turn into light-speed D.C. hardcore, or digging up Roky Erickson’s roots in Austin has introduced sunbaked psychedelia into the mix.) Rather, at eight tracks and 42 minutes, Sonic Highways is paradoxically the Foos’ leanest record while boasting their most sprawling compositions, taking a more scenic route to their usual destinations. Where most Foo Fighters songs have shown their hand by the first chorus, the highlights here gradually build up in step-like fashion: “Something From Nothing” may boast a typically teeth-clenching Foos climax, but it rides a surprisingly funky (if uncannily Dio-esque) organ groove to get there; “What Did I Do?/God As My Witness” stays well within Grohl’s power-pop pocket, but its stop-start/two-part structure suggests Big Star’s “Back of a Car” given a musical-theater makeover. And even songs that travel a straight-and-narrow path have a welcome sense of patience about them, revealing new melodic nuances along the way (like on the dreamy jangle-pop of “Subterranean”) or, in the case of "Congregation", unexpected dynamic shifts: what starts off as a standard-issue, cruise-controlled rocker in the “Learn to Fly”/“Times Like These” mold acquires a more intense energy, thanks to an extended soul-stomping breakdown buoyed by Zac Brown’s finger-picking. But given the great logistical effort that went into the album’s creation—and the fanboy reverence Grohl exhibits toward his interview subjects on each "Sonic Highways" episode—it’s unfortunate that the regional essence of a given a song is barely perceptible without the televised exposition. Beyond illustrating that upbeat pop-punk is an odd forum for a discussion of the '68 D.C. race riots (see: “The Feast and the Famine"), the album boasts a bounty of special-guest ambassadors who are given little room to assert their personalities amid the Foos’ chromatic crunch: the New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band doesn’t have much to do on “In the Clear” but chirp up its mid-tempo riff; Joe Walsh’s bluesy fills get lost in the fast lane of “Outside”; and good luck parsing out the presence of Joan Jett on “I Am a River”, a gaudy Macy’s Day Parade of a power ballad that, just when you think can’t get any more overblown, piles on a false ending and string-section finale. The composite cityscape seen on Sonic Highways’ front cover proves to be all-too emblematic of the album’s overall sound: a hodgepodge of aesthetic signifiers that get swallowed up into a monolithic whole. Watching "Sonic Highways", you get the sense that the real purpose of the whole endeavor wasn’t so much to reinterpret the musical traditions of a given city as simply broaden Grohl’s lyrical perspective beyond his usual relationship-focussed ruminations and self-help affirmations. In some of the episodes that have aired so far, we see a shot of Grohl sitting down after completing his interviews to write a song based on all the local lore he’s absorbed; the episodes then conclude with the Foos performing the resultant track, as the lyrics—loaded with knowing references to “muddy water,” “the 13th floor,” and “bluebirds”—are splashed across the screen practically begging for I-see-what-you-did-there acknowledgement. Ironically, in trying to tap into the mystique of America’s most storied cities, Foo Fighters completely demystify their own creative process, effectively turning the Sonic Highways project into a glorified homework assignment—educational, perhaps, but laboriously procedural.

2014-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

2014-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

RCA

November 10, 2014

007cc12d-449f-4dab-b09d-fdf08734b28f

Stuart Berman

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

After the sprawling Rifts, one of drone's top new artists returns with a more focused yet more complex album.

After the sprawling Rifts, one of drone's top new artists returns with a more focused yet more complex album.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Returnal

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14326-returnal/

Returnal

For fans of drone-heavy psychedelia, these are bountiful times. Emeralds, Tim Hecker, Kevin Drumm, Gavin Russom, Ben Frost, Black to Comm, and Oneohtrix Point Never are among a current wave of artists synthesizing their way to a kind of liquid nirvana, sculpting music into impossible shapes right there in the air between your speakers. Oneohtrix Point Never is the alias of Daniel Lopatin, a Brooklyn musician whose tarnished sci-fi yearnings are evident in his titles-- "Betrayed in the Octagon", "Transmat Memories", "Laser to Laser", "Hyperdawn"-- and in his penchant for sad, sourly tuned analog synthesizers. Oneohtrix Point Never's music is in love with technology but finds it nevertheless a source of sadness, anxiety, and gleaming fatigue, as well as redemption. Last year, his album Rifts collected two and a half hours of previously released material-- the albums Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind, plus selections from various CD-R and cassette releases-- that added up to a remarkably singular vision. Returnal is much more compact, only eight tracks in 40 minutes; by design, it's more focused, sounding mostly like a set of music created with a specific set of instruments in a concentrated span. But it goes further than Rifts. It's denser and more complex. The clear 16th-note arpeggios that drive so many Oneohtrix Point Never tracks, when they appear at all, have been layered and blurred to the point of losing their definition. There's plenty in the swarming sound to compare to Emeralds' recent album Does It Look Like I'm Here?, which was also released by Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego label. The album begins with a chaos that's uncharacteristic for Oneohtrix Point Never-- a wailing voice, feedback squeal, synthesizer drones, and overdriven drum blasts combust like a rocket on its launch pad. The track, "Nil Admirari", is an unexpected invocation of noise music, and also the only cut of its kind on the album. (It's not hard to see Rehberg's confrontational touch behind its sequencing.) In contrast, "Describing Bodies" is comparable to the ethereal shimmer of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. It emerges into earshot like a shape in the fog: A densely layered bed of strings supports a meandering synthesizer melody, but whatever motion is in the notes is all but swallowed up by the mass. "Stress Waves" is caught somewhere between the pulsing cycles of 60s minimalism and the untethered drift of Berlin's Chain Reaction label. It's gorgeous, heartbreaking even, but abstracted in a way that keeps it from tipping into the maudlin. Elsewhere, the arpeggios familiar from Rifts and Zones Without People return on the title track. It's a nostalgic sound, drenched in retro-futurist melancholy, conjuring a nightclub of the near future as it might have been imagined by some straight-to-VHS movie from the early 1980s. After the agonized atomic blast of "Nil Admirari", this is the record's other big surprise. Electronically processed and harmonized vocals lend it a palpably pop touch; throw a kinetic minimal techno rhythm underneath it, and it might be the Knife. "Ouroboros" is Lopatin at his sweetest, with keening synthesizer melodies not so far removed from something Boards of Canada might make; beatless, it moves with a rare, stately grace. And then "Preyouandi", the closing track, takes the album subtly somewhere else. The slow, blurred synthesizers are of a piece with most of the album; muted, incidental vocals feature the same processing as the voice on "Returnal". But the soundfield rattles with percussion and delay, a glitchy rumble reminiscent of Vladislav Delay at his most dissipated. Paired with the opening "Nil Admirari" it bookends the record in percussion, something not often heard in Oneohtrix Point Never records-- and rarely heard quite this way. You could call this ambient music, or Kosmische; it's certainly indebted to Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. But it also sounds unusually original, which is a word you don't get to use so often. I'm tempted to say that it's an unusually tactile music, as though you could hear Lopatin feeling his way across the surfaces of his machines. (It is, without a doubt, incredibly sensuous music.) But I'm not sure that that's true, either, given the way the sounds so often seem to materialize out of thin air. Having softened his attacks and smeared his notes into indefinite shapes, he seems to sever the music from any kind of causality, so that it simply floats freely, morphing, rippling in a dance of infinite regeneration, like some perfect lifeform.

2010-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

2010-06-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Editions Mego

June 11, 2010

007deac7-0518-4b99-9c31-40b1ef01e88a

Philip Sherburne

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

The artist formerly known as Makeout Videotape releases an EP of unsettling soft rock that mixes freaky sleaze with a surprising dose of swooning sensitivity.

The artist formerly known as Makeout Videotape releases an EP of unsettling soft rock that mixes freaky sleaze with a surprising dose of swooning sensitivity.

Mac DeMarco: Rock and Roll Night Club EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16476-rock-and-roll-night-club/

Rock and Roll Night Club EP

Before signing to Captured Tracks, Montreal's Mac DeMarco made fuzz pop records with Makeout Videotape, who, based on their album art alone, had strange leanings. On Rock and Roll Night Club, he gets weirder and churns out an unsettling brand of soft rock. Take the album's second track: "You're rockin' straight through midnight with me, Dojo Daniel, on 96.7: The Pipe. Up next, we've got a triple shot of Mac DeMarco comin' at ya, stuffin' it down the chute." That skit is delivered by an unsettling, near-demonic voice. It's a jokey moment, but it plays an unexpectedly crucial role for the rest of the EP: It makes the rest of the songs sound comparatively not-creepy. With vaguely grimy imagery like "standing on the corner/ Tryin' to keep it clean," delivered in his deep, breathy, sleazy voice, it's easy to get weirded out by the album's focal point, which is DeMarco. But stacked against a fictional DJ saying "stuffin' it down the chute" in an even deeper, even sleazier voice? DeMarco goes from being the sleaziest guy in the room to an outright Lothario. Obviously, the tone here is both goofy and surreal if Night Club can support a creepy DJ skit near the beginning of the album. That weirdness also spills over into his lyrics. "Baby's Wearin' Blue Jeans" has DeMarco fixated on a woman specifically because of her pants, namedropping both Wrangler and Lee in the process. "Straight leg or a boot cut/ I'm begging darling please/ Stay with me forever/ And don't take off those jeans." His smoky voice and denim infatuation is complemented by an echoing, light guitar, which throws in a surprisingly welcome yacht rock aesthetic. Sometimes, it's difficult to parse his irony from his sincerity, especially in "She's Really All I Need", which mixes Partridge Family optimism with harsh realities. ("I feel like I'm dying" and "Don't bring me down man/ Wearin' that frown man.") It's probably safe to assume that at least 80% of Night Club is laced with a meta joke that nobody's in on except DeMarco. It's usually still pretty funny, or in the very least, intriguingly odd. He's got a good ear for hooks, too. Behind the hazy, warbling sound quality of the title track, "Blue Jeans", and "European Vegas", there are some excellent, albeit simplistic, guitar hooks. For songs with a fairly limited set of instrumentation-- one guitar, minimal percussion, a quiet undercurrent of bass, the occasional second guitar-- he pulls out some lovely, shimmering melodies. On the same coin, every now and then, he pushes one hook way too far. "Moving Like Mike" is the worst offender, and not only for its Lil' Bow Wow-reminiscent title. The song just repeats the same three phrases over an uninspired Jimmy Buffett acoustic guitar riff. The biggest surprise comes at the end of the album with "Only You" (which is lifted from Makeout Videotape's Ying Yang) and "Me & Mine", the pair presenting an entirely different aesthetic than the sleazefest that dominates the record's first half. They introduce a jangling, breezy assertiveness that's normally reserved for Real Estate songs. Gone is the deep voiced, jean-focused weirdo from 20 minutes earlier. Here's a guy who's singing in a sincere-sounding pained falsetto over sunny guitars. One song earlier in "I'm a Man", he sang, "I've been creepin' around" in his go-to lower register. On "Only You", he asserts, "Here I am, brand new day," and he sounds like a new man. It's tough to say which DeMarco is preferable: the swooning clear-eyed baritone of the last two songs or the unsettling deep-voiced emoter of the first eight. Really, I'm a fan of both versions-- the goofy creep and the straightforward crooner. Ultimately, even if one side's more of a caricature, it's a relatively short jump between the DeMarco who sings that "the boogie woogie woman keeps lookin' my way" and the DeMarco who sings, "I'm done crying over her."

2012-04-10T02:00:04.000-04:00

2012-04-10T02:00:04.000-04:00

Rock

Captured Tracks

April 10, 2012

0083d51f-e7b9-4569-b2ca-530191a5af43

Evan Minsker

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

Nic Offer, now focused solely on this band after the unfortunate dismantling of Out Hud, hones in on what !!! do best-- create incendiary disco-punk raveups.

Nic Offer, now focused solely on this band after the unfortunate dismantling of Out Hud, hones in on what !!! do best-- create incendiary disco-punk raveups.

!!!: Myth Takes

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9956-myth-takes/

Myth Takes

With his midriff-baring t-shirts and loose-limbed dance moves, !!!'s Nic Offer is a total goofball in the unselfconscious way that only really cool guys can get away with being. If you've ever attended a performance by !!! or Offer's former band, Out Hud, then you're familiar with his repertoire: the Christ-like wingspan, overhead clapping, shimmying hips, gangly duck-walking, dervish spins, scissor kicks, and humpy pelvic thrusts. It's like the mutant spawn of step aerobics, Flashdance, and Electric Boogaloo in an arena-ready package: ridiculous, extravagant, and completely awesome. Offer's stage presence isn't just deeply entertaining; it's an ice-breaker that gives us permission, by example, to forget ourselves and celebrate with abandon. You can tell he's having a hell of a time, and his enthusiasm is infectious. This wanton enthusiasm permeates Myth Takes, !!!'s most consistent album to date. They've always been polyrhythmic pop experimenters in the vein of Talking Heads or Arthur Russell, leavening guitar-and-horn driven disco-punk with adventurous dashes of trance, funk, soul, krautrock, and points beyond. Given this aesthetic dilettantism-- plus !!!'s supple rhythm section and knack for explosive hooks-- the band, on paper, seems to have developed a template that should turn out smart bangers every time. But in practice, !!!'s songwriting has sometimes struggled to keep up with their prodigious ideas. For every pitch-perfect dancefloor meltdown like "Me and Giuliani Down By the School Yard (A True Story)" or their take on the Magnetic Fields' "Take Ecstasy with Me", the band's previous albums often squandered their momentum with boggy, static grooves and bizarre tangents. I'm not one to chastise bands for ambition, even when it leads them astray, but there's something to be said for zeroing in on what you do best. What !!! does best are the incendiary disco-punk raveups that, happily, take up most of the space on Myth Takes. Any tentative or half-baked delivery is all but absent from Myth Takes, which rampages through the annals of kinetic music without letting genre tropes override or diffuse the songs' impact. The cerebral always takes a backseat to the visceral, and the album, while varied, is united by relentless propulsion. The title track's elastic bass and spaghetti-western guitar licks are a tense backdrop for Offer's smarmy scatting-- not to mention an effective foil to the ominous funk-laden following track, "All My Heroes Are Weirdoes". Mobile bass and telegraphic synths dominate the sex-jam "Must Be the Moon", a sort of pimp-strutting nursery rhyme for the 21+ set ("One drink, two drinks, three drinks, four!"). "A New Name" holds two contrasting modes in balance: earthy funk verses and a spacey soul-noir chorus that sloughs off tiny ice-chip tones, testifying to the importance of bassist and sound engineer Justin Vandervolgen's subtle tweaks. No longer experimenting for experimentation's sake, every beat-breaking decision on Myth Takes serves to reinforce the monumental rhythms. When the album is at its less-than-best, it's because the band is playing against its strengths. From a technical standpoint, Offer's not an amazing singer. He's terrific at sultry murmurs, yelps, and chants, and luckily, he stays in these modes for most of the album. He doesn't fare as well when he just sings, as we discover on "Sweet Life". For one thing, he sounds hesitant, and his outsized party-starter persona slips a bit. For another, his lyrics tend toward the absurd, and you can only get away with lines like "sleeping underneath the blanket of dread" if you deliver them with serious bluster. But middling memories of "Sweet Life" are quickly obliterated by the impossibly funky squelch of "Yadnus", which is also a turning point-- the album's final third sinks into relative abstraction. The last three tracks' murky digressions bring the album to a brainy close that's satisfying after the brawny pageantry of its front end. By sequestering the cerebral stuff that erratically peppered their prior albums to a closing come-down*, Myth Takes*, presents !!! as a band that's figured out exactly what it's good at. If they stay the course, continuing to streamline and focus, we can expect many fine albums to come.

2007-03-02T01:00:01.000-05:00

2007-03-02T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Warp

March 2, 2007

0084be75-c1ab-4f8f-8b67-e032bfee4a7c

Brian Howe

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

This Young Thug protégé’s latest mixtape locks in on a vibe and rolls wherever it goes. Usually it doesn’t go too far.

This Young Thug protégé’s latest mixtape locks in on a vibe and rolls wherever it goes. Usually it doesn’t go too far.

Gunna: Drip Season 3

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-gunna-drip-season-3/

Drip Season 3

Gunna’s first major feature appearance came early in his career, when Young Thug plucked the Atlanta rapper out of relative obscurity and placed him on “Floyd Mayweather,” a highlight of his 2016 event album JEFFERY. Memorable as that song was, though, it was easy to miss Gunna’s contributions, and not only because it cast him against Gucci Mane and Travis Scott. Many casual listeners initially assumed his performance was part of Thug’s, since their voices, flows, and styles overlapped so seamlessly that fairly close attention was required to tell where one ended and the other began. It’s no mystery what Thug, who signed Gunna to his YSL label, heard in the young rapper: himself. These days, there’s no mistaking the two. While Young Thug’s voice has continued to evolve into ever wilder forms over the last two years, Gunna still sounds more or less like the same subdued echo of his boss that he did in 2016. Where Thug thrives on constant invention, pushing against even the currents that he helped create, Gunna is a weather vane content to ride the wind—a perfectly proficient rapper with a fairly conservative variation of the singy murmur that’s proliferated in Atlanta rap since Future’s ascent. On Drip Season 3, the latest installment of Gunna’s flagship mixtape series, he locks in on a vibe and rolls with it wherever it goes. Usually it doesn’t go too far. Young Thug shows up twice, and in those two appearances he shows nearly as much range as Gunna does on the entire tape, applying his tactile rasp to “King Kong” and yelping out an R.I.P. to Hugh Hefner (“He like my daddy!”) on “Oh Okay.” Welcome as his contributions are, the title of that last track inadvertently sums up the muted response almost every song on Drip Season 3 provokes, these two included. Given Thug’s track record with songs about legendary primates, “King Kong” in particular feels like a missed opportunity. The title promises a tower-scaling beast of a song, but instead the beat is glum and the performances are weary. It should be so much more fun than this. Drip Season 3 is filled with moments like that, finished tracks that fail to make good on the promise of their ingredients. For his part, Gunna is a capable rapper, and he peppers his free-associative lyrics with enough flashes of wit and randomness to suggest maybe he could grow into something more. “Working like Gotti, my crew almighty/No TGI Fridays, eat five-star, we dining,” he raps on “Almighty.” He’s got top-tier producers in his corner, too, including Metro Boomin, Turbo, and Wheezy. But there’s no spark in many of these songs, and Gunna isn’t a dynamic enough rapper to anchor a 52-minute project. By the time the tape reaches its nadir on “Mistress,” a romanceless “Penthouse Forum” boast with a numbing chorus (“Baby got big titties/...Squirt a lot of water out her kitty”), he feels like a pitching prospect trying to fake his way through the order a second time with just one pitch. We’ve already seen proof that Gunna can make his modest range work for him. With last year’s unusually serene Drip Season 2, he created an aching, emotive mood piece that was genuinely moving at times. A talented rapper could build on that sound. But Drip Season 3 is a reversion toward anonymity, toughing up its presentation just enough to destroy the allure of its predecessor, but not so much that it actually bangs. It’d be unfair to expect Gunna to keep pace with his mentor’s iconoclastic drive, but you’d think that a guy who came up under Young Thug would understand the last place you ever want to position yourself is in the middle of the road.

2018-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

2018-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

YSL

February 9, 2018

0085da01-e7c1-4b5b-8aae-59c81bd1ab90

Evan Rytlewski

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

On her debut album, the young viral star moves beyond the lo-fi bedroom-pop of her early recordings and into a restrained, detailed style of songwriting all her own.

On her debut album, the young viral star moves beyond the lo-fi bedroom-pop of her early recordings and into a restrained, detailed style of songwriting all her own.

Clairo: Immunity

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

Immunity

Clairo’s breakout single “Pretty Girl” went extremely viral: a lo-fi video shot webcam-style amid dorm-room decor, and a sardonic popular-feminist message (“I could be a pretty girl, shut up when you want me to”) that was an easy in even for those who didn’t normally scour the online lands for bedroom pop. But preceding that chorus was a verse with a precisely observed snapshot of the moment one notices there’s nothing anymore where heartbreak used to be: “Polaroid of you dancing in my room… I think it was about noon/It’s getting hard to understand how you felt in my hands.” It’s a careful bit of writing belied by its hype, and an early indicator that Claire Cottrill’s heart lay in songwriting, not content production. And with a new EP soon after, Cottrill had already moved past it: “I’m hoping [Diary 001] can close off the bedroom-pop era of Clairo, and I can move on to some other things.” On her debut album Immunity, she proves this decisively. Immunity brings in new personnel—produced by Rostam Batmanglij, mixed by Dave Fridmann, assisted on drums by Danielle Haim—for a new direction. Clairo’s often compared to one of her teenage idols Frankie Cosmos, both for making lo-fi pop and for becoming entangled in some exhausting discourse about her father’s bankroll and industry ties. But where Frankie Cosmos’ spiritual precursor is college rock, Clairo’s, at least on Immunity, is soft rock. The uptempo tracks are breezy and chill; the ballads are lush and deeply felt. Reverb’d keyboards abound. Several tracks have children’s choirs, but—if such a thing is possible—subtle ones. The fit is surprisingly natural; she certainly sounds much more at ease here than on the likes of an earlier collaboration like “B.O.M.D.,” where Danny L Harle’s trop-pop fripperies sound in retrospect at odds with Cottrill’s plainspoken voice. Perils do lie this way; much of Immunity approaches the very sad, very posh, and very produced ballads of adult-contemporary drears like London Grammar or Låpsley. (“Feel Something” comes closest to this sound; not coincidentally, it’s the weakest cut.) But, crucially, the album only tiptoes up to the edge of huge production and no further. It’s truly remarkable how many of these tracks, if they were produced even one iota larger, would collapse into mush, and how much restraint it must have taken not to blow them up that big. Opener “Alewife” builds, but modestly: a recorder counterpoint, a little drum fill, some light guitar fuzz, less of a breakdown than a heart skip. “Closer to You” could have been easily overpowered either by the 808s and Heartbreak-style AutoTune on the verses or the power-ballad guitar on the chorus; it isn’t. The children's choirs and vocal processing on “I Wouldn’t Ask You” aren’t there to make the song swell but to dissolve away, leaving a sparse, almost hymn-like arrangement of piano, Cottrill’s un-vocoded melody, and nothing else. “Sofia” is powered by a “Dancing on My Own” synth chug—about the most surefire banger fodder there is—but one that remains in the background beneath crackly, distorted guitar (a late addition). The closest thing to trend-chasing is “Softly,” a Y2K pop-R&B ballad like something TLC or Mya might have recorded as an album track—which is far from bad. The restraint isn’t just there to be tasteful, but to keep the focus on Cottrill’s voice and words, which have become touchstones for what seems like a full generation of listeners. “You can barely hear what I’m saying on all of my demos on Soundcloud. Maybe that was a style thing or an insecurity thing. Maybe it’s both,” she told Vice of her old music. That’s standard interview stuff, the lorem ipsum of the lo-fi artist who’s graduated to hi-fi. But it’s also true: up front and clear, Cottrill’s voice exudes a quiet warmth and intimacy, whether confessing a personal crisis on “Alewife” (named for the Boston T stop) or realizing she’s fallen for a girl friend in “Sofia"—going from “I think we could do it if we tried” to “Oh my god, I think I’m in love with you" in two verses’ span, as if she’s only just realized it mid-track, in real time. Last year, Clairo came out as bisexual, and she’s said much of Immunity is about the accompanying experience: crushing on friends, looking for unspoken signs, generally dealing with feelings that one’s still grappling with being possible, let alone reciprocated. For every outright love song there’s one, like breakthrough single “Bags,” that dwells in the everyday and the liminal spaces therein. What Clairo sings about is mundane but charged—watching TV, “wasting time on the couch,” but also dropping hints (like a subtle Call Me By Your Name reference in the verse) and tentatively offering that if the song’s subject were to make a move she wouldn’t mind, really. The melody of the chorus is morose, a flattened affect and a resigned shrug: “I guess this could be worse/Walking out the door with your bags” All the feeling is in the instrumental, chiming above, quietly gorgeous. “Can you see me using everything to hold back?” Clairo sings, and though she’s referring to her crush, she could just as well be singing about Immunity. The effort sounds effortless. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Fader Label

August 2, 2019

00860576-4e9f-40eb-9ab0-f43984ab0a2b

Katherine St. Asaph

https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/

With a shift in tone and tempo, Katie Crutchfield creates a vivid modern classic of folk and Americana. It’s the sound of a cherished songwriter thawing out under the sun.

With a shift in tone and tempo, Katie Crutchfield creates a vivid modern classic of folk and Americana. It’s the sound of a cherished songwriter thawing out under the sun.

Waxahatchee: Saint Cloud

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/waxahatchee-saint-cloud/

Saint Cloud

With Katie Crutchfield’s fifth solo album comes the spring, its essence bottled so powerfully you could name a perfume after it: Saint Cloud, by Waxahatchee. Its sensory trigger has the power to replace the memory of whatever you call this atrophic season happening around us. Instead, Saint Cloud is all lilacs and creek beds, Memphis skylines and Manhattan subways, love and sobriety, the sound of a cherished songwriter thawing out under the sun. This transformative effect was absent on Crutchfield’s previous solo work. Don’t take that as a knock on her intimate, lo-fi 2012 debut American Weekend or 2013’s remarkable follow-up Cerulean Salt, whose songs of love and harm still land like a hundred little knicks to the flesh. Even as Crutchfield revved up the sound and the stakes on 2017’s searing Out in the Storm, finding darkness deep within her psyche, her songwriting remained bound up in grungy distortion, spare arrangements, and blocky rhythms. Three chords and the truth was always her credo, but Crutchfield needed more room for that credo to thrive. And so Crutchfield decided to build songs that she could stroll right into. Twirl, even. She resides inside a world that drapes over her like the sky-blue dress she wears on the album’s cover. If that sleeved dress and the old pickup truck didn’t clue you in, Saint Cloud is an album in the thrall of Americana and the country music of her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama: Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones. Produced with a warm and deft touch by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger), the album never chugs or lurches into a rock groove. It’s made of simple blues patterns, nothing-fancy chords, and the steady backbeat of a band working only for the song. Every note rings and chimes: a light organ here, the slight twang of a Telecaster there, gently plucked leads on an acoustic back there, all perfectly appointed for Crutchfield’s songwriting. It feels like you’re in possession of a family heirloom. That ease comes in part because this is the first album Crutchfield wrote after getting sober in 2018. On the outstanding “Fire,” she sings that she’s “wiser, slower, and attuned,” words that also serve as the mood throughout Saint Cloud. Her lyrics wind around and corkscrew a bit more on this record than previous ones, but it’s a feat that Crutchfield pulls off with a daredevil command of verse. “Fire” rings of desperation and conquest, a promise to make oneself meek, small as a bird, even turn into liquid, just to live inside someone: “And when I turn back around/Will you drain me back out/Will you let me believe that I broke through?” Crutchfield told Rolling Stone that she had difficulty writing while sober, but these are some of the most careful and evocative lyrics she’s ever composed. There’s a subtle difference between writing that digs and writing that discovers. If her older records did the former—peeling back layers of innocence and isolation to get to the nerve-endings—Crutchfield is now a discoverer who sees the world anew. Much of Saint Cloud is wide-eyed and detailed; she sings as if amazed at what she feels. “The Eye” is all about being levitated in those dizzy moments of love. Crutchfield lets the lyrics tumble out of her in a litany, absolutely goofy that her partner will give her something “to think and sing and follow.” The song peaks as Crutchfield builds vocal harmonies that gather behind this image: “A scientific cryptogram lit up behind a jet stream,” and for just a second, as if to highlight the ear-to-ear grin behind the song, a bluegrass chorus of Crutchfields all pile into the words “lit up.” Because Saint Cloud is so fresh and budding on the outside, Crutchfield can hide her anger and fear inside it. This new contrast gives great dimension to her storytelling, allowing all the sourness and rot at the fringes of her songs to come and go at will. “War” takes on a rambling ’60s Dylan feel, that lets her talk about how she’s prone to “come in hot” and “fill up the room,” but she’s quick to add—as we all do in heated moments—that it has “nothing to do with you.” The trauma buried at the heart of “Arkadelphia” is so palpable that the slow-burn tempo makes it glow white. She sings softly, “If we make pleasant conversation/I hope you can’t see what’s burning in me.” Crutchfield is still the patron saint of emotional chaos, but her songs suggest that she’s becoming more of a protector, a homebody, looking to take everything out of storage and either throw it away or keep it safe in a home. The climax of the record, “Ruby Falls,” is where all of the ambition and aesthetics come together. As she walks down 7th Street in Manhattan, Crutchfield’s wisdom collects into buckets: “Real love don’t follow a straight line/It breaks your neck, it builds you a delicate shrine,” and, “You might mourn all that you wasted/That’s just part of the haul.” Her pen moves ornately across the page, the aperture of her songwriting flies open. The unsparing indie style of Chan Marshall or Liz Phair remains, but Saint Cloud is something far bigger. It isn’t just talking to Lucinda Williams’ 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, it pulls up right beside it, a vivid modern classic of folk and Americana. It’s a record that suggests maybe if you slow down, life slows down with you, and everything is in bloom.

2020-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock / Folk/Country

Merge

March 27, 2020

00861be8-2b9a-4543-9013-0635b54be60d

Jeremy D. Larson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/

The hip-hop/nu-soul producer who played a large role in recent albums by Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse enlists some famous friends for a covers album that includes takes on songs by Radiohead, the Smiths, and Coldplay, among others.

The hip-hop/nu-soul producer who played a large role in recent albums by Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse enlists some famous friends for a covers album that includes takes on songs by Radiohead, the Smiths, and Coldplay, among others.

Mark Ronson: Version

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10299-version/

Version

I'm sure Mark Ronson's a real talented DJ, a kickass producer, and a formidable music connoisseur, with or without the rock'n'roll silver spoon inherited from his step-daddy, Foreigner co-founder Mick Jones. Hell, even his block party of a debut, 2003's star-studded Here Comes the Fuzz, had its share of interesting musical ideas. However, it's hard to look at Version-- a guest artist-boosted showcase that comes on the heels of Ronson's production work for Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse-- as anything but a cash-grab. Not that cover albums can't be eclectic, but there's little-to-no coherence between the songs chosen here except for the fact that the artists who wrote them are UK chart mainstays. While song selection seems suspect on Version, it's not the deal-breaker. Ronson is a phenomenal multi-instrumentalist, but someone's gotta cut him off at a certain number of horn and string sections. For example, hearing a moody, standoffish anthem like the Smiths' "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" (its presence here a cheeky nod to critics who'd call this entire album superfluous) get dusted off and given the Pygmalion treatment smacks of indie blasphemy, the canned strings and Daniel Merriweather's schmaltzy croon clumsily converting Morrissey into a blaxploitation theme. To Ronson's credit, what should be the most egregious track on the album, a cover of Radiohead's "Just", is actually a standout. Nicked from last year's abysmal Radiohead tribute album Exit Music: Songs With Radio Heads [review], the track finds Phantom Planet's Alex Greenwald adding a playful dose of white-boy funk, and is one of the few instances where Ronson's hip-hop proclivities come in handy. Still, slapping a brand new bag on these pasty-white-dude tunes more often bombs than not. Maxïmo Park's "Apply Some Pressure"-- re-interpreted here with help from MP singer Paul Smith-- loses its jagged post-punk edge amidst the lush horns and thin symphonic outro, and the Zutons' "Valerie" gets mauled by Amy Winehouse, bent and twisted until it sounds like a spare part of "Rehab". What this all boils down to is that Ronson probably would've been better off remixing these songs than dolling them up with droves of big-name mercenaries and genre-fucking. Most of Version's tracks have little replay value, shaking your attention before you can say, "So that's what 'God Put a Smile Upon Your Face' would sound like played by a high school marching band." And of course, a handful of the originals just weren't that great to begin with. Maybe I'm giving Ronson more credit than he deserves, but the guy's too talented to smash square pegs into readymade round holes and abet the ongoing implosion of pop music as we know it.

2007-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00

2007-06-11T02:00:02.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Columbia

June 11, 2007

00864578-08ba-4822-8b2e-010395c51d2c

Adam Moerder

https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/

Layering disaffected vocals over glitchy beats, the duo’s second LP is a deadpan testament of the terminally online. It’s both mundane and disorienting, irritating and soothing.

Layering disaffected vocals over glitchy beats, the duo’s second LP is a deadpan testament of the terminally online. It’s both mundane and disorienting, irritating and soothing.

New York: Rapstar*

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/new-york-rapstar/

Rapstar*

New York are masters of anhedonic pop. The drolly named duo—26-year-old Estonian performance artist Gretchen Lawrence and 24-year-old Senegalese-American visual artist and model Coumba Samba—ostensibly draw from club music and hip-hop, but you can’t imagine their second album, Rapstar*, giving anyone the energy to lift their feet from the ground. It’s remarkably dead-eyed music, characterized by Samba’s sardonic deadpan and chilly minimalist glitches that sound like the Sheffield experimental duo snd as covered by the girls from Gossip Girl. The most excitable that the two musicians sound on Rapstar*—which is not very excitable at all—is when they splice their voices together on the title track to deliver a terse, twisted assessment of modern life: “The government will fuck you/And claim you deserve it.” Where so much prototypical “Gen Z music” uses maximalism to capture a sense of overwhelmed disaffectedness—think Babyxsosa beginning a song by yelling and ending it as if she’s been distracted by her phone—New York take a different tack. Rapstar* is both mundane and disorienting, down to its format: On Bandcamp and streaming services, it’s been inexplicably split into two volumes, subtitled Side A and Side B, meaning that you’ll have to make a playlist of all the tracks to listen in one go, or otherwise fiddle with Spotify halfway through, as if you’re flipping a record. On “bronx,” Samba repeats the phrase “In the Bronx I walk” until it takes on the character of Sisyphean struggle; on “no bra,” New York–based performance artist No Bra mutters about “Making out with no dress” over a subliminal, mutant footwork beat and improvised piano, making for an unpleasant but resolute answer to the question, “What does a sex jam sound like for a generation that reportedly hates sex?” It is frequently irritating music, but if you’re someone who’s frequently irritated by the world around you—who, for example, wants to scream about the fact that there are two Blank Street Coffees within 100 feet of Tottenham Court Road station—it can feel kind of soothing, a representation of modernity that depicts life as neither distorted and maximalist nor gloomily dystopic, but somewhere in the middle. New York’s debut, 2022’s darkly funny No Sleep Till N.Y., leaned enough into electroclash and ’00s signifiers—skinny jeans, the aforementioned Gossip Girl lilt of Samba’s voice—that it could broadly be tied into a broader reappraisal of “indie sleaze” and blog house, an idea furthered by last year’s “night n day,” on which they flipped the hook of Ladytron’s “Seventeen” into something even creepier and more depressing than the original. Rapstar* still kind of sounds like “Shoes,” particularly on “kicks,” on which Samba recites lyrics about shoe addiction over an IDM hum, but it also feels less indebted to the past than previous New York music. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that Rapstar* is being released on Relaxin Records, which is run by Alina Astrova (aka Lolina, fka Inga Copeland), whose music, like New York’s, seems interested in contrasting deconstructed musical forms with the straightforward immediacy of pop music. New York’s music doesn’t necessarily scan as pop, but it does perfect a vernacular that speaks to the overly detached, ironically branded way people talk online. On “low,” Rapstar*’s final song, Lawrence whispers lyrics that sound like bargain-bin affirmations designed to narrativize an otherwise dull existence: “Zone out when you talk/Indie girl on the go/Lazy for attention/Hearteyes for the dough.” It’s the kind of cruelly ironic, halfheartedly you-go-girl sentiment you might sing to yourself before clocking on and zoning out.

2024-07-24T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-07-24T00:01:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Relaxin

July 24, 2024

0086bcb0-c2fa-482c-abcf-75241a80a517

Shaad D’Souza

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

The St. Louis rapper’s new album showcases a fly confidence that the thin writing can’t always match.

The St. Louis rapper’s new album showcases a fly confidence that the thin writing can’t always match.

Chester Watson: Fish Don’t Climb Trees

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chester-watson-fish-dont-climb-trees/

Fish Don’t Climb Trees

Chester Watson wants to understand his place in the cosmos. The producer and rapper’s new age boom-bap evokes sleepwalking with its narcoleptic rhythms and restless motion; even in the disorienting unreality of dreams, he is constantly plodding forward, searching for answers. His debut album staged his wandering style as a hazy spirit quest through Japanese folklore. On Fish Don’t Climb Trees, the St. Louis rapper strips away the layers of metaphor and murk, aiming for lucid accounts of his shifting thoughts and emotions. Fish Don’t Climb Trees is titled after an apocryphal Albert Einstein quote: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” On the title track, Watson mines the saying for both its encouraging sentiment and its surreal imagery. “Just a fish up in the mountains outta my element, feeling at home/Thoughts blank when I'm settling deep into zones,” he raps through a shroud of jazzy bass strums and wispy melodies. His normally groggy voice sounds resonant and clear. Watson seems renewed: The largely self-produced album features a neater take on his signature sound, which is typically waterlogged and bugged out. The crisp percussion on “Grey Theory” snaps and twists like a color guard. The yawning vocal samples of “Money & Love” billow between the drums. His rapping is just as smooth. He talks a lot of fly shit, frequently mentioning touching down in foreign cities and rocking fresh fits. “Chest out, I be working,” he boasts on “East End,” one of the album’s many flexes. As a performer and producer, he’s still shedding the Earl Sweatshirt, DOOM, and Brainfeeder influences, but those touchstones are increasingly guideposts rather than endpoints. While this newfound swagger livens his songs, the underlying ideas are still thin. Though Watson casts himself as a roving shaman who lives “outside of time and space” as he says on “Daze,” none of his lines feel truly otherworldly or alien. “Bora bora, aurora borealis/Kingdom hearts I feel like Sora Sora,” he says on the leisurely “Bora Bora.” He more often references the fantastical than evokes it, tossing pop culture allusions into humdrum rhymes. Despite all his talk of third eyes and psychedelia, Watson never manages to produce imagery and word combinations as hallucinogenic as the “endoplasmic reticulum within cytoplasm” of $ilkMoney’s “giant portal wizard snake.” Nor does he achieve the stoned elegance of a ZelooperZ line like, “I say what I want like the bible bitch.” That lack of style underscores the vagueness of his introspection. He often mentions demons and alludes to personal battles: “Going through struggles but I cannot end it/My heart and spirit got tug of war tension,” he says on “Mirrors.” Sounds intense. None of those scuffles play out in the music though. Any sense of turmoil is derailed by throwaway boasts like, “Walk in the building like, ‘Psh, I'm lit.’” Watson is welcome to withhold, but until he can ballast that reservation with some kind of compelling stylistic or narrative perspective, he’s going to remain adrift.

2023-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

2023-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

POW

July 6, 2023

0087769e-0b70-4203-9f37-df8f8af87bba

Stephen Kearse

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

Damon Albarn, Dan the Automator, UK producer Actress, and others traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to meld their sensibilities with those of local musicians. The result is an interesting if uneven album that feels like a more realized version of Albarn's Mali Music project*. *

Damon Albarn, Dan the Automator, UK producer Actress, and others traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to meld their sensibilities with those of local musicians. The result is an interesting if uneven album that feels like a more realized version of Albarn's Mali Music project*. *

DRC Music: Kinshasa One Two

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15874-kinshasa-one-two/

Kinshasa One Two

David Toop imagined future music in his book Ocean of Sound as "all winking lights and digital exchanges across alien cultures." In July of this year Blur/Gorillaz frontman Damon Albarn brought a group of producers to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in an attempt to forge some of those exchanges of his own. Along for the ride were XL Recordings boss Richard Russell, frequent Albarn collaborator Dan the Automator, and self-styled "R&B concrete" producer Actress. Over the course of five days, local musicians came and went, bringing with them various esoteric instruments and lending their vocals to different songs, while Albarn's producer-collective worked as a unit to fashion the finished product into Kinshasa One Two. Video from the recordings highlights the cross-cultural gap that needed to be bridged, with Albarn communicating via hand gestures and vocal inflections, and the rest of his team surrounding the local musicians with the "winking lights" of their digital gadgetry. In a sense this is a more fully realized vision of the Mali Music project Albarn released in 2002. That record saw him gingerly feeling out whether harmony could be extracted through the osmosis of his trip-hop and pop-oriented outlook and the work of Malian artists including Afel Bocoum and Toumani Diabaté. In contrast, Kinshasa One Two is a more confident recording, with Albarn still working outside his comfort zone but given little chance to think or breathe due to the self-imposed time limit on the project. All the colors feel a little brighter here, especially when the energy of the Congolese musicians is allowed to shine through. With so many people involved, both locally and from the imported crew of producers, it's no surprise that Kinshasa One Two feels unfocused at times. There's no underlying narrative or musical structure to this record; instead it's a grab bag of ideas and impulses, assembled as an approximation of the raggedy and lively way in which the recordings were conceived. For much of this album, it doesn't feel like the two contrasting approaches solidify into a satisfying whole, with stems of ideas stretching out toward one another but never fully germinating. Instead, the focus gently rocks back and forth. At times ("Hallo", "African Space Anthem") the gap between DRC Music and Gorillaz is negligible. "Hallo" comes across like this album's "Stylo", with its featherweight pop groove and Albarn's strained falsetto demonstrating his undeniable pop know-how. On "K-Town" the group moves closer to the exuberant Ethio-jazz swing of Mulatu Astatke's "Yègellé Tezeta", while "We Come From the Forest" leaps into a frantic pace via the great swoons of thumb piano that click and clack into place. The latter is a stark demonstration of the successes and failures of this project, where the bubbling electronics of Albarn's team become cursory and intrusive, causing the vigorous backbone laid out by Bokatola System (who surface four times on this album) to feel like it would work better in isolation. So Kinshasa One Two often comes across an album that doesn't know what it wants to be, and that's mostly in keeping with the nature of the way it was conceived. But the raw power of the music from the region, which is presumably what attracted Albarn and his group to make this record, often feels curiously lacking in this context. Perhaps that's an inevitable consequence of mixing up these different styles. But the weak, Portishead-lite beats aren't missed when you hear the vocalist Love performing the song "Love" a cappella, and the ultra-distorted hidden track at the end of the album derives a brash charm from its coarse textures. The unshackled nature of those pieces makes the contributions of the Congolese musicians elsewhere on this record feel restrained. There's none of the unhinged joy you might find on a Sublime Frequencies recording like Group Inerane's startling Guitars From Agadez, which causes it to feel like unnecessary restrictions were being imposed for the sake of balance between the musicians involved. It's when the quest for equilibrium eases up that the quality rises a notch or two in either direction. The contribution of Washiba is barely detectable on the slamming, LFO-circa-"Freak" techno of "If You Wish to Stay Awake", while the softly spun groove of "Lourds" is pleasingly dominated by the forceful personality of Yende Bongongo. Occasionally successful collaborations arise, usually when the loopy impulses of both sides are fully indulged; the rattle and bump of "Customs" is particularly notable in that regard. But often it's hard to reconcile the songs here with the lively video clips from the sessions on the DRC Music Tumblr, and that's its central flaw-- a little spirit got lost along the way, somewhere between the performance and the final mastering, possibly due to the sheer weight of numbers involved in the recording process. Despite those reservations, Kinshasa One Two is worthwhile both as a cause (all proceeds from sales go to Oxfam) and as an experiment, albeit one that requires some judicious editing to extract the tracks that really count.

2011-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-10-04T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp

October 4, 2011

0089733a-7ced-45c2-bf9a-cc4886347735

Nick Neyland

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

The usually-vitriolic indie rapper finds a sense of peace on his sixth studio album, which largely trades in frenetic rhymes for introspective narratives.

The usually-vitriolic indie rapper finds a sense of peace on his sixth studio album, which largely trades in frenetic rhymes for introspective narratives.

Homeboy Sandman: Kindness for Weakness

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21863-kindness-for-weakness/

Kindness for Weakness

In years past, Homeboy Sandman’s scattered, ruminating cadence would’ve been enough to keep your attention. Though on recent work, like 2014’s White Sands EP with producer Paul White and the full-length Hallways, the rapper seemed more tempered when unwrapping his views. “Minimum wage they can pay you/You can praise, you can choose who you pray to,” he exclaimed a couple of years ago on “America, the Beautiful,” a sarcastic take on the nation’s so-called freedom. Sandman has always tackled real issues, but it’s usually been in spurts, packed within unique flows often praised by rap purists. In an era of glossy pop hybrids, the Queens MC is technically precise, a throwback to shell-top Adidas and truck gold chains. “My shit is ever-present,” Sand once told me. “In hip-hop, it’s like it's mandatory to have a specific style. I don't have a way that I always sound.” Midway through his new album, Kindness for Weakness, the 35-year-old rapper swerves again, opting for spoken-word on “Talking (Bleep),” a squawking funk-jazz hybrid that recalls Miles Davis’ On the Corner. With humor and candor, he critiques delusional fans, rude strangers, and even The Huffington Post on the flat-out rant. Historically, Sand’s albums have had some sort of antagonist—cops, the term “rapper,” unhealthy foods—but “Talking (Bleep)” is actually a rare vitriolic moment on a record full of soul-searching reflection. *Kindness *finds the lyricist at peace with himself and his surroundings. He isn’t so combative here; instead, he’s happy with what he has and doesn’t sound so irritated by things he can’t control. “God got reasons for shit that’s gut-wrenching,” he muses on “God.” “I don’t have enemies, God don’t have henchmen.” Sand still captivates lyrically, but on songs like “Heart Sings,” “Eyes,” and “Seam by Seam,” he trades frenetic rhyme patterns for introspective narratives. There’s a creative freedom to this album that comes from years of setbacks and hard work, when you’ve finally found a lane and are content in it. Sidestepping urgent themes, “Earth, Wind, Fire, Water” and “Speak Truth” are simple posse cuts on which rappers yU, Aesop Rock, and Shad trade quick bars about nothing in particular. Transitional songs like “Sly Fox” and “Nonbelievers” are breezy and playful, putting Sand’s rhythmic dexterity on full display. The album feels resolute, though it occasionally suffers from brief lapses that derail the proceedings. “It’s Cold” starts as a gritty ode to New York City nights, but guest vocalist Steve Arrington sounds especially grating. Instrumentals “Gumshoe” and “Funhouse”—produced by RJD2 and Eric Lau, respectively—seem random and don’t fit within the LP’s scope. To that end, Kindness feels like a nice collection of songs without a clear direction and it doesn’t have the immediate rewind factor of previous efforts Subject: Matter or First of a Living Breed. At this stage of his career, with little left to prove, Sand is making comfortable music that aligns with his place in indie rap. All topics are on the table and clever lyrics are guaranteed. Just don’t box him in.

2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-05-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Stones Throw

May 10, 2016

008a1e24-e58b-4c80-976d-bb9a41967857

Marcus J. Moore

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

On his second album, the Nigerian star pays tribute to Benin City and its history with spring-loaded rhythms and gleeful provocations.

On his second album, the Nigerian star pays tribute to Benin City and its history with spring-loaded rhythms and gleeful provocations.

Rema: HEIS

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rema-heis/

HEIS

At the O2 Arena in London last November, Nigerian Afrobeats star Rema came onstage riding a glowing red-and-black horse and wearing a mask inspired by Queen Idia, a cultural icon dating to the 16th-century Kingdom of Benin. The musician hoped it would be a devastating statement on the UK’s continued hoarding of African art, including famous sculptures of Idia. Elsewhere in the show, he performed atop a giant bat, referencing a familiar sight in the skies over Benin City. But the theatrical tribute to Rema’s hometown and his people’s history was met with reactions ranging from confusion to conspiracy theories questioning whether he was part of the Illuminati. The colossal international success of Rema’s 2022 single “Calm Down” accelerated the rise of a feather-ruffling new voice in Afrobeats, one keenly aware of his potential to ascend to the level of the genre’s big three—Burna Boy, Davido, and Wizkid. That fateful show in London spurred the creation of Rema’s second album, HEIS, a record that kicks back with spring-loaded rhythms and gleeful provocations and brings the defining elements of his city front and center. Up until now, Rema was often spotted with a cuddly human-size teddy bear. On HEIS, the 24-year-old artist adopts a roguish anti-hero character, represented by a bat, who flexes with the grandiosity of a U.S. rapper: Rema as both Bruce Wayne and Batman. Alexander Wang, icy wrists, and Richard Mille all wrap around the beat of the wordy yet contagious “Yayo”; on the chorus of “Hehehe,” he unleashes a cartoonishly sardonic laugh. He’s in Venice sipping Henny on the Miami bass-inspired “Azaman,” which sounds like he’s winking at you from what could be the top deck of a yacht. Rema hadn’t touched base in Benin City since 2018, having moved to Lagos before launching his career with breakout first single “Dumebi.” HEIS reconnects with his home city’s energy: Percussion moves in unbreakable clusters, dusty guitars are swapped for laser-gun synth, and strings outline the album in an ornate gold frame. “Black Bentayga, smoking a reefer,” Rema begins the title track, with Arabic strings rising around him as though Amaarae’s Fountain Baby is filling the Bentley’s speakers. At just 28 minutes, HEIS moves with ceaseless hustle. Where Rave & Roses opened with a cauldron of sentimental chords and guitar, HEIS begins with four blunt bars of 16-bit synth stabs before springing into uninterrupted action. “Follow me run, you tear your ACL,” he raps on “Azaman.” Far from the chiseled stylings of Asake and Wizkid, Rema opts for an antsy stream of consciousness with the momentum of a Ferrari. Just as the pace threatens to slow, “Ozeba” stages a blind date between snapping kuduro and the sort of deep-voiced vocal inflection Playboi Carti has toyed with recently. The chemistry is immediate. The final moments of HEIS tease a full-on heel turn. The penultimate “Villain” samples the featherweight piano of Lana Del Rey’s “A&W”—itself a song that cycles through characters and states of moral alignment—and turns it into a sinful amapiano body-winder. “Please don’t be mad at the fact that your baby na my baby don’t take it personally,” Rema sings through a Cheshire cat grin. “Now I Know” snaps out of this fantasy to touch on raw wounds. “All of my childhood I lost ’cause I wan feed family,” he cries, thinking of the struggle of caring for his loved ones after the death of his older brother at 15. It’s a moment of revelation from an album of blood-pumping madness. In going back home, Rema recasts an act of defiance as a thrilling character arc and a snapshot of his home city. It’s as exhilarating as a street race, as gothic as the bats flying above him.

2024-07-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-07-17T00:01:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Mavin / Jonzing World / Interscope

July 17, 2024

0090e3af-2f85-4f45-9f94-4ebd32d607ed

Nathan Evans

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

In the wake of Jay Reatard's passing, this San Fran garage-punker is one of rock's better razor-sharp throwback tunesmiths.

In the wake of Jay Reatard's passing, this San Fran garage-punker is one of rock's better razor-sharp throwback tunesmiths.

Ty Segall: Melted

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14347-melted/

Melted

San Fran garage-punker (and former one man bander) Ty Segall pens crackling classic-sounding rock'n'roll tunes about as lean and economical as they come, pushing his rangy shoutalong hooks so far forward there's rarely room for pesky little details like verses. Although he's thrown quite a few more colors into his instrumental palette in recent years, he's still mostly working way out in the red, leaving nuance to others. Melted, his latest, boasts a 30-minute runtime that feels closer to 15. Segall gets in, gets out, and gets it done nearly every time. Melted kicks off with quite the 1-2-3-4 punch: the swarming "Finger", the strummy "Caesar", the bopalong "Girlfriend", the two-faced "Sad Fuzz". Each tune spends a little time getting situated then settles into a wide-eyed amphetamine groove, levels well blown out, Segall's slack, bratty howl smeared liberally over top. "Girlfriend" in particular feels snappy and effortless. Segall's not taking much time figuring out how to beef up his sound, and while just about everything's bathed in the same warm haze and power trio crackle, he manages to jam the odd nooks and crannies of these straightaway songs with a little squiggly sci-fi guitar, barrelhouse piano, recorder, even the odd vocal collage. Segall's made some fine music in the past, but it's always felt a little hit-or-miss on an LP level, with hooks buried by freneticism and too little emphasis on his natural talent as a singer. Melted seems in some ways like his first proper record-- he's in control of every element of his sound on these first four rippers. Melted gets a little soft in the middle, its title track lost in a sea of haze, "Mike D's Coke" coming off almost like a third-rate Ariel Pink number. The tracks exhibit a little more range than his Buddy Holly/early Kinks/Ramones triangulation, but they don't hit as hard, slowing the record's momentum. But things pick up rather nicely from "Imaginary Person" on out, riding a wave of sweaty insistence on through to the all-too-hasty end. "Imaginary" is a beast, clattering for a spell before breaking into a surfy chug. "My Sunshine" bakes and "Bees" floats by, but it's the muddy blues of "Mrs." that really leaves its mark, a murder ballad in the "Hey Joe" mold that Segall slows down just long enough to completely kill. You're not going to hear many rock records that'll kick you square in the pants quite like this one this year, provided Segall doesn't up and crank another one out by December; the kid's got heart, brains, and quite an ear for a hook, and he throws himself body and soul into these tunes. Segall makes quite an impression in half an hour's time, and Melted's the best foot he's put forward yet. It still seems like his best records are ahead of him, like he's still got a couple of things to nail, but as it stands, Melted could charm the sweat out of anybody.

2010-06-15T02:00:04.000-04:00

2010-06-15T02:00:04.000-04:00

Rock

Goner

June 15, 2010

00920386-cdda-485d-9950-75a28128444c

Paul Thompson

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

On the pair’s second collaborative album, the stakes of their street sagas intensify as the Detroit rapper contends with the aftermath of a traumatic car accident.

On the pair’s second collaborative album, the stakes of their street sagas intensify as the Detroit rapper contends with the aftermath of a traumatic car accident.

Nicholas Craven / Boldy James: Penalty of Leadership

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nicholas-craven-boldy-james-penalty-of-leadership/

Penalty of Leadership

In January of last year, the Detroit rapper Boldy James was involved in a car accident that left him in critical condition, with broken vertebrae in his neck and various other orthopedic injuries. When he was eventually released from the hospital, he was paralyzed from the neck down. “Screws and rods all in my shit, I couldn’t do nothin,’” he says on the outro to “Brand New Chanel Kicks,” the lead single for Penalty of Leadership, his haunting second full-length with Montreal producer Nicholas Craven. He recorded that song at his home while in a wheelchair and neck brace, barely a week after he left a physical rehabilitation center. You can hear the strain—his smooth upper baritone, usually fluid and nonchalant, sounds sleepy and stiff. But that doesn’t stop the somber magic of Boldy’s writing and the psychedelic charm of Craven’s sampled chimes; here, their morbid fairy tales are as poignant as ever. It takes a lot to humble a rapper like Boldy: The vast majority of his songs feature more close calls and dead ends than many people will see in a lifetime, but the crash seems to have jostled something loose in him. What made last year’s Fair Exchange No Robbery so special was Craven’s unvarnished loops and Boldy’s rhymes; the samples unfurled naturally before folding back into themselves like origami, while the bars—blunt and elegant as a fat pinky ring—found the sweet spot between bitter wins and triumphant losses. On Penalty of Leadership, the duo takes another step in this direction, using the grief of Boldy’s accident as a springboard for stories that are variably uplifting and unsettling. Contending with mortality always plays a crucial role in Boldy’s songs, but here, the paranoia and scars from friendships snuffed out too soon linger more than usual. Take “Evil Genius,” where he weighs the consequences of his “thug livin’” against the memories of his departed friends and his future as an artist: “Shit that they gon’ hold against me when I’m Grammy-nominated/I just wish the bro was with me; look at all the time we wasted.” The swelling accordion and raspy drums are streaked with digital echoes; the effect is as melancholy as the references to powder white enough to make snow angels. His cutthroat chronicles of his hometown—punctuated by vivid details like specific street names—are usually delivered in a cocksure monotone. Stacked alongside the trauma Boldy recently survived, his words feel even more dire. There is still plenty of business-as-usual storytelling. True to form, Boldy’s imagery is effortlessly sharp, but the unease over what he risks losing puts an asterisk on everything he does. On “Murderous Tendencies,” robberies are sandwiched between harrowing odes to lost comrades and dead perps with tongues hanging out of their mouths like Michael Jordan. Stories of moving drugs and sipping lean hit different when you have to think about how that money can get your son suspended from school (as on “No Pun Intended”) or how your daughter’s “Straight As” could be cut short by being “caught slippin’ where you don’t belong.” He’s still proud of his status among the rabble-rousers of his city, but he’s also more cautious and willing to consider how his remaining family and friends fit into the equation. Boldy is an adaptable MC, but unlike the Rorschach-style expansiveness of his previous collaborations with the Alchemist and genre-straddling Detroit producer Sterling Toles, Craven’s beats are as direct as Boldy’s writing. Neither has to do much work to meet the other in the middle, and Craven’s ear for beguiling samples sets up and maintains the energy of his creative partner’s tragicomic tales. The clunky organs and whispering violins on “Soccer Mom” are solemn yet campy, helping his bars elicit chuckles and sighs alike. On “Early Worms Get Birds,” thudding drums and piano chords give Boldy and guest Double Dee room to drop puns about Brock Lesnar and Madonna, showing that Boldy and Craven are capable of being whatever they need each other to be. The pair’s chemistry is still potent enough to chill the blood running through your veins, and Boldy’s brush with death makes Penalty of Leadership a heavier and more reflective listen than their previous joint album. The Detroit rapper’s street sagas have always been white-knuckle levels of intense, but with higher stakes, the concrete feels icier, the creases on the dollar bills feel sharper, the weight of a Kel-Tec pistol enough to break a finger. The further the duo burrows into the darkness of their psyches, the brighter the gems they unearth.

2024-01-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

2024-01-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

Rap

Nicholas Craven Productions

January 26, 2024

00929336-1e75-45a1-a656-4655acdac4a8

Dylan Green

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

Emerging from prison clean and sober in May, Gucci Mane releases an album looking to capitalize on his massive influence. Featuring Kanye West, Young Thug, and Drake.

Emerging from prison clean and sober in May, Gucci Mane releases an album looking to capitalize on his massive influence. Featuring Kanye West, Young Thug, and Drake.

Gucci Mane: Everybody Looking

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22157-gucci-mane-everybody-looking/

Everybody Looking

After a Twitter “meltdown” for the books, Gucci Mane violated probation and went to jail in 2013 persona non grata. In May, he emerged as if from a chrysalis, healthy, clean, and sober. He was greeted with acclaim that, while not as intense as his fever-hot peak in 2009, suggested a much broader cultural consensus about his music. One hopes it’s because the world finally caught up with the creative breadth of his work, but more likely it’s because they’ve recognized that work's consequences. Following his late-’00s mixtape supernova, Gucci Mane became a vector, both creative and collaborative, for a new generation of hip-hop stars: Migos, Chief Keef, and Young Thug, to name a few. In the three years he was away, this influence narrative became conventional wisdom, and a shortcut to argue his significance; those who doubted his creative capabilities couldn’t deny his impact. The title of the first project since his release, Everybody Looking, could as easily describe this influence as it does his status as a trending topic. (It’s also a reference to his 2010 track of the same name, which would be the best song on this compilation by some miles were it included.) For several years, everybody—at least in the realm of underground street rap—really was looking to Gucci for where to go next. For the most part, Everybody Looking is a Gucci Mane mixtape in the most familiar sense. It will please fans looking for Another Gucci Mane mixtape. Everyone else will likely find it a bit spotty. Certain songs fall into familiar—now six- or seven-year-old—formulas. His vocals, no doubt out of practice, sound a bit rusty. But most of all, it just feels unfinished, rushed—halfway between a tribute to the improvisational tapes of his classic era and a fully-rendered album statement, it’s best considered a stopgap to tide over fans. A few records on Everybody Looking stand apart, suggesting the seeds of a better, unrealized project. While Zaytoven’s “Out Do Ya” feels like a by-numbers 2009 pastiche, his turn on “Waybach” sounds fresh. The gritty Mike Will–produced “Pop Music” is a dark double-entendre that recalls the clever urgency of Gucci’s earlier work without falling into caricature. “Gucci Please” features hypnotic songwriting and a flow pattern that’s yet to suffer from overexposure. And bonus track “Multi Millionaire Laflare” is the moment his rapping sounds its most inspired: “Wrist so rocky got your bitch jockin’ ASAP/Every nigga tote a yopper, nigga, we a K-Camp.” None of these records push too far into new terrain, but they do make the case that there’s gas in the tank. The space between those moments find Gucci sliding into a frozen approximation of earlier formulas. His lyrics can lean boilerplate. This is blatant on “Richest N**** in the Room,” where he peddles a familiar autobiographical tale he’s been spinning since the beginning. It’s a long-running songwriting archetype for him, but one with which we’re familiar at this point; without new details or a fresh approach, it’s more like hitting the requisite checkboxes than creating. The most unique and interesting aspects of Gucci’s life right now involve his three-year sentence, new healthy lifestyle, and flowering lovelife; they are occasionally alluded to throughout, but for the most part this project is unified by frequent references to his looming influence. While interesting to consider—in a wonkish sense—this is less than fascinating as the subject of music. It’s also become, just in the past year, less true; single “All My Children,” a reference to his aesthetic offspring, might have better been titled “All My Grandchildren,” as the new generation shows a closer debt to Guwop’s spiritual heir Chief Keef. If albums are carefully selected, heavily A&Red projects designed to maximize an artist’s potential and impact, mixtapes have been a method for under-funded artists to perform a flanking maneuver. Notionally, a mixtape is different than an album in that it’s faster to put together, and perhaps a bit less consequential song-for-song, its best ideas spread out over multiple releases. Yet at his recorded peak in the late 2000s, Gucci gained such creative momentum he drowned out carefully-crafted releases by seemingly “bigger” artists. Everybody Looking is a tribute to that era. But it’s not that era, and Gucci is no longer that artist. Though his music typically transcended the “disposable” mixtape medium in the late ’00s, those tapes were strategic efforts at pushing to a higher level. Once he got there, partially thanks to his label but perhaps also of his own design (he’d expressed the desire to work with Timbaland and the Neptunes in interviews), the A&R system threw him onto generic pop-rap records, underestimating his songwriting significance, seeing him—as many have before and since—as a wacky character simply in need of pricier framing. This one-dimensional view of him as a charismatic character, rather than a craft-driven artist with his talons plunged deep into the fabric of American music, meant that recognition of his formal innovations was delayed. This artist was telling us where American music was going, and we tried to force him to follow us instead. Rather than working on records which emphasized and refined his own ideas, we ended up with “Spotlight” and “Gucci Time.” Who does everybody look to when their idol looks to others? An ideal future Gucci album, then, forgets about his “influence” as an end goal in itself. “Influence,” after all, is merely a side-effect of vision, originality and creativity. Moments here—as on recent guest verses for Dreezy and Kodak Black—suggest he’s still got it. Rather than chasing some past mixtape “golden era,” here’s hoping he faces the new challenge of making an album that celebrates him for being him.

2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Atlantic

July 26, 2016

009785ff-0508-4938-af2a-8848178babe1

David Drake

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

On Tindersticks' ninth album, their best with their retooled lineup, the pop-noir balladeers strike the sweet spot between experimental sprawl and sultry soul.

On Tindersticks' ninth album, their best with their retooled lineup, the pop-noir balladeers strike the sweet spot between experimental sprawl and sultry soul.

Tindersticks: The Something Rain

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16307-tindersticks/

The Something Rain

It was a mere coincidence that Tindersticks' original lineup dissolved not long after their most faithful students, the National, broke overground with their third album, Alligator. But in retrospect it's hard not to view that moment as a symbolic passing of the torch, akin to proud working-class parents sending their kids off to an Ivy League school in anticipation of future success. While the National's more melodramatic take on Tindersticks' patented pop-noir balladry has landed them in hockey arenas and presidential-campaign videos, Stuart Staples and co. have been defiant in their refusal to follow their disciples' charge into the mainstream. Since signing to Constellation and introducing a revamped lineup with 2008's The Hungry Saw and 2010's Falling Down a Mountain, Tindersticks have gradually drifted away from the string-swept epics that defined their astounding first three albums and the studious soul tones that defined the next three; by loosening up their performances, amplifying their psychedelic side, and projecting a greater degree of playfulness, they've practically become the world's most dignified jam band. While the more freewheeling approach has provided this veteran group with a renewed sense of inspiration by stretching their signature sound into uncharted territory, their first two Constellation efforts didn't yield the sort of cardiac-arresting emotional wallop that's synonymous with the Tindersticks brand. But with The Something Rain, Tindersticks strike the sweet spot between experimental sprawl and hot, bothered soul, and if it doesn't achieve the same weightiness as their 1990s-era name-making triptych, it's fully on the level of their exceptional early-2000s releases Can Our Love... and Waiting for the Moon. Tindersticks have traditionally favored low-key opening tracks to gently lure you into their harrowing headspace, but The Something Rain effects a pronounced break from that logic with "Chocolate"-- for one, it clocks in at nine minutes, making it the lengthiest track in the band's dense catalog. More significantly, it marks a return to the spoken-word soundtrack format of their 1995 signature "My Sister", setting a short-story account of a first date to a molten acid-rock refrain that gradually erupts into a brass-blasted climax that heralds the welcome reintroduction of long-time associate Terry Edwards. And just when you start to question why such a seemingly mundane narrative warrants such an over-the-top presentation, there's a "gotcha!" denouement to the story that constitutes the band's most broadly humorous gesture to date. In both tone and form, "Chocolate" is by far the most atypical track on The Something Rain, but its audaciousness translates into the fiery performances that follow. Where Tindersticks tend to deploy 1970s soul and R&B signifiers to cut through their albums' prevailing air of despair-- and the cheerful, cha-cha-cha strut of "Slippin' Shoes" and the gorgeously languid ballad "Come Inside" serve a similar purpose here-- Something Rain standout "Show Me Everything" uses its smoky Hammond-organ groove, shots of brass, and female backing singers to coax a masterfully intense vocal turn from Staples, with images of latex-gloved hands pressed against glass that ooze with seedy suggestion. "This Fire of Autumn" works a similar trick to equally captivating effect, but at a quickened tempo that turns more anxious with each verse/chorus pass; glockenspiels have rarely been used to such unnerving effect. Where Staples' downcast narratives were the driving force of the band's early works, the retooled Tindersticks' power lies in their skills of arrangement; structurally, these songs don't really change once they begin, but they accrue considerable force through the layering of complementary string/horn patterns and Staples' pushing his perennially bruised croon to heightened levels of desperation. That makes the heady rush of "Frozen" all the more amazing-- though the song never breaks out of its skittering, wah-wah-accented rhythm, it still feels completely weightless and disorienting, with Staples' echo-drenched voice contorting in and out of the mix while Edwards' free-flowing horn squawks swoop in like stormy gusts of wind. And each time Staples repeats the line, "If I could just hold you," it starts to sound less like a call to a faraway lover than the predatory intimations of a stalker. It may have taken them two albums to find their proper footing with their new line-up but, with The Something Rain, Tindersticks provide a wholly convincing reminder that they are, by definition, an incendiary device.

2012-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

2012-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Constellation

February 23, 2012

0098abd7-f38a-4a3e-8d60-bb518edc58cf

Stuart Berman

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