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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 | 10 | 00012c3a-6a7c-4cdc-922f-69a1ee4f918e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ |
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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 | 7.2 | 00034f30-e737-493a-bb30-e877bca9f023 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ |
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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 | 8.3 | 0003d139-5a41-434e-9f15-ea59e315ba6c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ |
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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. | null | 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 | null | October 29, 2007 | 10 | 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 | 7.3 | 0006dd8c-2a16-493b-aba4-e9d772b0125a | Marc Weidenbaum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-weidenbaum / |
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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 | 6.6 | 00085250-1963-4427-9617-774f569fa1f7 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ |
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Beyoncé's little sister issues her second album, most of which rides the classicist Motown framework repopularized by Amerie and producer Rich Harrison. | null | 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 | 7.3 | 0009f6cb-8ea3-457c-8e1a-46573de330f5 | 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 | 8.3 | 000a32c8-f375-4fb4-8e17-085212be93f9 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ |
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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 | null | G.O.O.D. Music / Def Jam | September 18, 2012 | 6.5 | 000c50d7-fcc8-4c64-9ffe-12c3cf92f589 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ |
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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. | null | 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 | 9.2 | 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. | null | 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 | 8.5 | 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 ... | null | 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 | 9 | 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 | 7.7 | 000f04a1-57c3-4264-bf9c-402bb2e62982 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ |
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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. | null | 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 | null | Numero Group | November 11, 2015 | 8.8 | 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 | 8.1 | 00102087-ece4-4361-a1c0-a4c19414152a | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ |
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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 | 8 | 00125f01-a66f-4a60-bd13-10eba21615f7 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ |
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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. | null | 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 | null | Honest Jon’s | November 18, 2011 | 7.3 | 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 | 7.2 | 00137cc9-c6b8-4c81-a1da-f476bb4ded6a | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ |
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Listening to Madlib's music, I'm reminded of the Black radical maestros responsible for some of the outermost-limits music-making ... | null | 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 | 8.6 | 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. | null | 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 | 5.2 | 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 | 7.8 | 0014a843-eb7e-4351-8df0-0c1d0feea887 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ |
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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 | 6.1 | 001543c1-2276-4270-8202-65b71406c12f | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ |
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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. | null | 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 | 7 | 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. | null | 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 | 9 | 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. | null | 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 | null | March 30, 2011 | 7.6 | 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
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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 | 6.6 | 001f0a56-7f8c-4fab-b288-5ff6523f3823 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ |
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~14k album reviews.
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Approximately 14 thousand album reviews and scores from Pitchfork
- Curated by: hlky
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Citation Information
@misc{Pitchfork,
author = {hlky},
title = {Pitchfork},
year = {2024},
publisher = {hlky},
journal = {Hugging Face repository},
howpublished = {\url{[https://huggingface.co/datasets/bigdata-pw/Pitchfork](https://huggingface.co/datasets/bigdata-pw/Pitchfork)}}
}
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Contains information from [Pitchfork](https://huggingface.co/datasets/bigdata-pw/Pitchfork) which is made available
under the [ODC Attribution License](https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1-0/).
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