Tag: pitchfork

New Releases


The Beach Boys – Smile Sessions
But part of the allure of SMiLE will always be the pieces, and the deluxe box has a lot of them. There’s almost a full disc of “Heroes and Villains” fragments and another entire CD with bits of “Good Vibrations”. Given the nature of this release, the extras are illuminating, arguably more essential than most outtakes included with bonus albums. Having source materials hints at roads not taken, and also offers insight into the difficulty of actually creating a record on this scale, given how much we’ve heard about all the bouncing and layering that SMiLE entailed (the complexity of which is partly to blame for the project’s being late and ultimately abandoned) and how many of the basic tracks were recorded live in the studio with a dozen or more musicians at once. There were only four and eight tracks to work with on the tape of the time, so one of them would need multiple instruments just to have voices and overdubs added later. Read The Full Review on Pitchfork


Atlas Sound – Parallax
There’s a couple ways to approach Parallax, the latest and greatest heart-pouring from Bradford Cox’s home-recording project Atlas Sound. The first is without the context of who Bradford Cox is, without knowing he is diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, without knowing he’s disseminated hundreds of songs on his blog, without knowing his role as frontman of the far more accessible psych-rock group Deerhunter, without a bead on his mercurial, tortured, and aching lyrics of past projects, and without a sense that Cox is becoming the premiere artist who combines his self and his music to create an unparalleled artistic symbiosis. Without that context, Atlas Sound can feel insular and difficult to penetrate. Read The Full Review on Consequence of Sound


Youth Lagoon – The Year of Hibernation
I guess what is so appealing, to me at least, about Trevor Powers and his Youth Lagoon project, is how believable it all is. This is just some fucking kid from Idaho (much like Arrange is just some fucking kid from Florida). And I don’t mean that in any derogatory way whatsoever, despite my callous and idiotic usage of the F-word. What I mean is that when you listen to the far-off then jittery electro treat “Posters,” and hear lines like, “When I was nine years old / I had a poster…/ I knew what I wanted to be / Never was the same,” it’s trite and childlike and not all that complex. Sure. What it is, in fact, is everything we wish we could say. But instead we spend too much time obsessing over what our words might be perceived to mean; Powers connects because he isn’t trying to. I’m speaking for him like a dickhead, but The Year of Hibernation would be just as successful if nobody ever heard it. At least for him. Read the full review on Absolute Punk

New Releases

Lou Reed & Metallica – Lulu

Lulu was first previewed with an especially repellent 30-second tract of “The View” that confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions of the project– namely, that Reed’s crotchety, atonal poem-rants would be wholly incompatible with Metallica’s fidgety riffage. The clip’s most prominent lyric (“Throw it away/ For worship someone who actively despises you!”) seemed to mock both artists’ most forgiving fans for even clicking on the link. By the time “The View” was released in its full, five-minute ghastliness— with Hetfield variously professing himself to be a table, a 10-story building and, possibly, the premier member of Philly hip-hop band the Roots— the Internet had all the evidence it needed to preemptively crown Lulu the Worst Album of All Time. – Read the full review on Pitchfork

The Decemberists – Long Live the King

A collection of outtakes from the King Is Dead sessions, Long Live The King finds inspiration in the Grateful Dead, whose gently rollicking “Row Jimmy” gets covered in spirited, surprisingly boozy fashion. Similarly, Long Live The King is a loose, almost ramshackle record; the songs, particularly the home-recorded demo “I 4 U & U 4 Me” are as catchy as ever, but they’re like snapshots of a band living in the moment, without regard for whether everything is falling exactly in the right place.  Read the the full review on AV Club

Florence + The Machine – Ceremonials

On her follow-up, “Ceremonials,” Welch has struck a fantastic and necessary balance. She’s found a way to honor her Bjorkian appetites for lavish orchestral spectacle while finding the depth and subtlety of her voice. She’s become a better actor, a keener listener and still manages to let it rip on occasion. But she also knows when to hush up, like at the close of “Spectrum,” when Tom Monger’s harp gorgeously flutters and dips around her. Read the full review on LA Times Blog

New Releases


M83 – Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
M83 have never stood for half measures in any aspect, but Gonzalez is absolutely going for it here in a way that sheds new light on known tricks: The hair-triggered drum rolls of “New Map” recall Before the Dawn’s searing car-crash fantasy “Don’t Save Us From the Flames”, but Gonzalez’s nervy punctuation at the end of each line sells the idea that he’s along for the ride this time rather than being a passive observer. Dead Cities’ “In Church” was the sound of blissful acquiescence, but amidst the swaggering synth-metal of “Midnight City”, Gonzalez hollers, “The city is my church!” empowered and present, finding a voice for the evangelical zeal always implicit in his work. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Real Estate – Days
In contrast with the self-titled album’s stoned, friendly vibes, Days simply exudes confidence. They’ve clearly stepped up their production values in every respect; this time around, Etienne Duguay’s drums don’t sound so smothered or submerged, Matthew Mondanile’s guitar glides through each track with a sense of reverberating nostalgia clearly influenced by his solo work as Duktails, Alex Bleeker plays base with steadier and simpler purpose, and Martin Courtney’s vocals are layered and harmonized with more care and complexity than they ever were before. Then there are the tinier details that get the opportunity to shine through, like the subtle bells on opener “Easy,” the soft backing keyboards on “It’s Real” and “Out of Tune,” and the distant tambourine-woodblock combo on “Kinder Blumen.” The fact that Real Estate would even choose to include these embellishments in the first place suggests a willingness to grow, while their restrained use reflects a band that doesn’t feel the need to prove their growth; as the saying goes, they show us that they’ve expanded their sound instead of just telling us. Read the full review on 130BPM


Class Actress – Rapprocher
Like most acts that attempt to reclaim glamorous early-‘80s New Wave, Class Actress lives in a completely different era. Like Neon Indian’s first album, the somewhat lo-fi production values and vintage instrumentation never get in the way of the songs, but instead manage to stand alongside them hand-in-hand. This has to do mostly with the fact that the songs themselves on Rapprocher are just infectiously catchy. Whether its the insatiable choruses of “Love Me Like You Used To” or “Weekend,” Class Actress clearly has little interest in the washed-out vocals and melodic inaccessibility of other lo-fi acts. Read the full review on Paste

New Releases


Zola Jesus – Conatus
There has always been something almost subliminally idol-killing about the Zola Jesus project, and it really comes into focus here. Danilova’s childhood opera aspirations are subverted into something nearly opposite. Opera singing is narrative and flows smoothly from deep within. Danilova is more allusive and tortuous. Her voice keeps getting caught in her throat, where it’s stressed and twisted by transient emotional surges. Though the theatricality and the epic-pop trappings may evoke artists like Dead Can Dance, the vocals have the passion of blues singing. Danilova is equally iconoclastic when it comes to industrial influences like Throbbing Gristle, finding ways to make abrasion as musical as possible without sacrificing tension. Her touchstones have been digested into a personal style that is much more substance than reference. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Mastodon – The Hunter
The Hunter sees Mastodon taking a much more riff-heavy approach — shorter songs, more bombast — without compromising their epic feel. A purist raised on the literary universes encompassed on the band’s last three albums (Leviathan, 2004; Blood Mountain, 2006; and Crack the Skye, 2009) could pine for the 13-minute cosmic journey, but The Hunter is just as expansive as any of Mastodon’s earlier efforts, despite the lack of Hawkwind-style noodling. Having a pop radio producer at the helm seems not to have diminished the band’s determination to push boundaries, but rather to have made that desire more concise, more focused, and somehow more powerful. The shine given to The Hunter is definitely worthy of Warner Bros. (the parent of Reprise), and a measure of rock-radio friendliness hasn’t been a barrier to metal bands in the past. Read the full review on Tiny Mix Tapes


St. Vincent – Strange Mercy
Describing Annie Clark’s work as St. Vincent comes down to a toss-up between cinematic and clever. Both in the studio and in her videos, Clark is captivating, expansive, and yet undemanding. She slyly earns your attention with bombastic hooks, witty turns of phrase, or by mentoring a kid who just got a merit badge for “mind sandwich” (all done together in the video for “Jesus Saves, I Spend”), and then she reels you in further. She convinces you to take another step closer to the difficult subjects she intends to work out. Many were drawn in by the title track of her debut, Marry Me, for its cute power, the smoky vocals, the pretty girl singing directly to you with stark emotion. But what sticks in the end are her clever twists (“Let’s do what Mary and Joseph did… without the kid”) and the huge scope of such a simple song. Read the full review on Consequence of Sound

New Releases


Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks – Mirror Traffic
Despite originally wanting to title the album L.A. Guns and putting the hard-rocking “Senator” forward as the first single, Malkmus largely lays off the Guitar Hero: The fretboard theatrics are used more sparingly and deployed to much greater effect on “Forever 28” where a “Mr. Blue Sky” bounce is interrupted by Thin Lizzy runs, or in the thrilling summertime riff of “Stick Figures in Love”. Only three songs break the five-minute barrier, and these feel far less claustrophobic than the extended tracks on the last three Jicks records. “Share the Red”‘s shambolic waltz, for instance, goes down easier than the 10-minute-long interlocking duets of “Real Emotional Trash”. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Beirut – The Riptide
You see, “The Riptide” is a demonstration. It’s an explanation that, from here on out, the band know exactly what they’re doing; they have the style, they have the skills and they have the willpower. But “The Riptide” is not the full execution. It’s a map; an overview of what is to come.

It makes sense that this is the album to finally see a release of “East Harlem” – a song Condon originally wrote when he was seventeen. Though it appeared on the “Live in Williamsburg”, it was not in finished form. Condon has been tweaking this song for years, performing different variations of it live, adding and dropping things, changing what he had (I personally had the pleasure to hear this final version of the song live in June, and can testify to how surprised I was by their changes); but it was always recognisably the same song. Of course it’s “The Riptide” when he decides to set in stone the final version of the song. The album’s about Beirut growing up, and “East Harlem” is the perfect song to represent that. Most notably, Condon’s flat singing really finds its sense of place now – becoming a layer of the music rather than becoming an imposing lead. Read the full review on The Silver Tongue


Jay Z & Kanye West – Watch The Throne
The album’s highlight, and an instant classic, is “Made in America,” a solid, slow-paced Frank Ocean-teamed jam about the American dream that reveals the main difference between West and Jay-Z: humility. Above a weirdly magnetic synthetic beat and dots of pretty piano clusters crafted by producer Sak Pace of the Jugganauts, Ocean begins by gently listing a string of saints — “sweet king Martin, sweet queen Coretta, sweet brother Malcolm … sweet baby Jesus” among them, and West offers a verse that starts off humble, but by the end he’s bragging about his power and slamming his critics — while Ocean sings “We made it in America.” Read the full Review on The LA Times

New Releases


The Horrors – Skying
Skying continues the evolution set in motion 2009’s Primary Colours, but with an emphasis on melody and pop form. This time, the band recorded and produced in their own studio, crafting a sound that recalls both the gothic pomp of 80s new wave and the big-screen dreaming of early-90s shoegaze, just as it was beginning to transform into chart-conquering Britpop. That the record can be heard as a catalogue of influences is nothing new for this outfit. They’ve routinely been tagged as “record collector rock” for their unabashed aping of influences from the Cramps to Can– and indeed their well-selected covers indicate a group that has spent some time in record shops. Skying isn’t likely to change that perception. The insistent chorus and Badwan’s breathy delivery on “I Can See Through You” comes off like the Psychedelic Furs run through the effects rack of My Bloody Valentine. “Monica Gems” nods to Suede with its decadent guitar swirl and Badwan’s moaning sighs. On “Endless Blue”, a horn section pops in for the floating intro as if borrowed from a James Bond theme by way of Blur or “This Is Hardcore” before the song abruptly surges into an impressive rock nosedive. The debts owed here are obvious, but the taste is impeccable, and the application is more often than not convincing. Read the full review on Pitchfork


The Rosebuds – Loud Planes Fly Low
Losing love and finding love are equally potent muses, and The Rosebuds are adept at turning both into seriously catchy songs. The North Carolina indie-pop sweethearts got divorced after 2008’s Life Like, and Loud Planes Fly Low is the sound of Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp working through their failed past to arrive at a functional future. Making the record was reportedly grueling, but the resultant emotions are the realest felt since the duo’s exuberant 2003 debut, Rosebuds Make Out. “Swooning” and “romantic” might be odd adjectives to use at this juncture, but they still apply in full force. Read the full review on The AV Club


Patti Smith – Outside Society
Punk-rock-poet-priestess, Mapplethorpian-anti-pin-up-queen, rabble-rousing-riot-grrl-archetype: Patti Smith is your go-to rock icon when it comes to underbelly doppelgangers of Pat Benatar or Stevie Nicks. Since the release of her 1975 debut Horses, she’s done the audacious thing (30-odd years later, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Nigger” still shocks), the Top 20 thing (she made Bruce Springsteen’s “Because the Night” a viable, and successful, single), and the oddball reinvention cover thing (her take on Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” with none other than Sam Shepard on banjo, is a spooky Americana delight). This 18-song primer, out August 23, spans Smith’s entire career, thankfully skirting the more ponderous poet-concept pieces in favor of straight-up rock music. Read the full review on The Boston Phoenix

New Releases


Bon Iver – Bon Iver
If you caught Vernon live after For Emma, you gradually saw him putting more and more emphasis on his band, moving Bon Iver from that solitary project into something that felt more like the work of a group. And Bon Iver, with its rich and layered arrangements, extends that development in a striking direction that’s both logical and surprising. Blending natural instrumentation supplied by recruited players– such as string arranger Rob Moose (Antony and the Johnsons, the National, Arcade Fire) and a horn/woodwind section that includes versatile saxophonist Colin Stetson– with an array of electronic and treated sounds, the album combines varied textures in ways that are ambitious and unusual but often subtle enough to miss on first glance. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Jeff The Brotherhood – We are the Champions
For a raw rock combo that in their early days seemed singularly committed simply to sweet riffs and rousing energy, on Champions JEFF prove themselves through a confident embrace of dynamics — stretching the boundaries of their economical ensemble past the brink, with thrilling results.

Sure, the primal, in-your-face energy is still there and potent as ever — the breakneck, jackhammer hi-hat and pummeling power chords of “Cool Out” will transport you to a Trans Am speeding at 90 mph down the darkest of highways while you pass a spliff to your shotgun-rider and rigor mortis begins to overtake the body in your trunk. “Shredder” relentlessly shells the listener with an assailment of head-bangin’, top-shelf Sabbath and Motörhead riffs that more than befits its name. And that’s almost nothing compared to the will-make-you-start-punching-people-uncontrollably-if-you’re-not-careful stoner-rock tour-de-force “Ripper” that follows a few tracks later. Read the full review on Nashville Scene


Tedeschi Trucks Band – Revelator
Here’s another perfect balance: Susan Tedeschi, whose soulful voice can handle blues and ballads with equal, rich ease, and Derek Trucks, her husband and certainly the best slide guitar player on the scene. Both have been leading separate bands during the first ten years of their marriage. But now the couple has joined forces, writing together and melding their groups into a single, 11-piece all-star band. The first recording by the Tedeschi Trucks Band blends wonderful, natural performances with great songs. Ideal balance. Revelator is outstanding in the extreme. Read the full review on PopMatters

New Releases


Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
Helplessness Blues is comparatively deeper, more intricate, and more complex, a triumphant follow-up to a blockbuster debut. Working again with producer Phil Ek, they’ve crafted a cavernous record that allows more room for them to breathe and stretch. The album’s longer, episodic cuts contain disquieting shifts in tone. “The Plains/Bitter Dancer”, for example, begins as a spindly, psychedelic folk tune reminiscent of some of the Zombies’ more introspective moments, and then, after a brief pause, bursts suddenly into the type of gangland chorus Fleet Foxes have practically trademarked by now. Read the full review on Pitchfork


Beastie Boys – Hot Sauce Committee Part Two
What makes “Hot Sauce” so vital is that the Beasties sound hungrier than most musicians currently posting their first Internet demos. This is vintage Beasties, all exuberant pass-the-mike battle rhymes and gritty break-beats so funky, it’s near impossible not to head-bob through the entire record — or slam dance, as the hard-core thump on “Lee Majors Come Again” so inspires. These aesthetics prove not so much dated as timeless: The Beasties don’t sound as if they’re repeating themselves as much as creating fresh grooves with a sensibility that’s proved enduring. Read the full review on LA Times


Bill Callahan – Apocalypse
One of his most remarkable tricks– and one he returns to all over Apocalypse– is the ability to sound both controlled and casual at the same time. The songs here are filled with silly, borderline bad ideas that an artist with less confidence might’ve scrubbed after taking a long walk and a good rest. “Baby’s Breath” speeds up and slows down in a way that sounds unrehearsed, devolving into distorted guitar toward the end. The sloppy backing track on “America!” quotes what sounds like Civil War songs and 50s jungle-rock. (It also casts Johnny Cash and Kris Kristofferson as part of an imagined U.S. military force and ends on an acidic joke about American imperialism: “Well everyone’s allowed a past they don’t care to mention.”) A few songs feature, prominently, the flute. Read the full review on P4k

New Release

Autechre – EP’s 1991 – 2002
So there’s plenty of pleasure here, but plenty of difficulty as well. As the years went on, Autechre became masters of bright melodies that they then drowned in distortion– their own abstract variation on “noise pop.” 1999’s EP7 might be their most beautiful release, but it’s also one of their most disorienting, built from what seems like several hundred gigs worth of glittering little chunks of sound. From then on, Autechre’s music would be about things endlessly falling apart and rebuilding themselves and falling apart again in spectacular fashion. On “Gantz Graf”, one of their most convoluted beat-and-riff creations becomes subjected to so much abuse that it collapses into screaming noise, as if the track itself is pleading for relief. There’s a lot more to listen to in Autechre’s later music, and a lot less to hang onto. The music constantly mutates, so it’s hard to get bored, but if your attention drifts, it becomes ever harder to figure out how you got from one minute to the next. It’s no wonder they were embraced as much by the free improv community around the turn of the millennium. It’s music that invites a listener to boggle at its moment-to-moment inventiveness or tune it out entirely. Read the full review on Pitchfork

Atmosphere – The Family Sign
The Family Sign is a heavy, moody album. There’s not nearly as much humor here as with Atmosphere’s previous two releases, but that doesn’t make it any less of a quality addition to the group’s catalogue. Slug and Ant are, once again, in near-perfect concert with regard to their vision for what the album should sound like, and what sort of thoughts and emotions it should convey and evoke. Further, it’s fascinating to see Slug settling completely into his role of narrator—one that will assuredly continue to inspire awe for albums to come. Read the full review on Hip Hop Dx

Gorillaz – The Fall
Each track on The Fall hails from a different American city, and unlike on past Gorillaz records, the guest stars are kept to a minimum. An exception comes with perhaps the album’s best song, “Bobby In Phoenix,” a positively enchanting mix of Bobby Womack’s larger-than-life soul-man crooning and a spare, modern bed of Dirty Projectors-inspired acoustic R&B licks and synthetic textures. But the effect isn’t that different on “Revolving Doors,” where Albarn sings a Kerouac-style travelogue over a bluesy jangle and a simple hip-hop beat. The Fall’s overarching mellowness sometimes makes it difficult to sink in, but the end result is more than a tour diary. It’s as eclectic as any Gorillaz record, and nearly as rewarding over repeated listens. Read the full review on The AV Club

New Releases


Foo Fighters – Wasting Light
In many ways, the album represents the band in a midlife crisis: the return of Pat Smear, the use of analog tape, and recording in a garage. It comes across as a general effort to get rid of the excesses of 2007′s Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace and 2005′s In Your Honor. So much of this story begins to sound a bit gimmicky: a return to the band’s roots in a DIY fashion with appearances from old friends, while quietly keeping the record label in the background. But really, it isn’t a gimmick at all. Foo Fighters are at the top of their game and got there in a no-bullshit way, so there wouldn’t be a point or need for that kind of facade. How do we know? Because even at the top, Dave Grohl really just wants to scream his balls off. Read the Full review on consequence of sound


TV on the Radio – Nine Types of Light
However, as Nine Types of Light suggests, perhaps they just needed to get out of Brooklyn. The new album marks two significant changes in TVOTR’s methodology: It was made in the wake of a one-year hiatus following six years of non-stop recording and touring; and it was recorded in Los Angeles, where Sitek has been steadily building his celebrity clientele list over the past few years. Both factors seem to have influenced the sound and feel of the album: Nine Types of Light is unquestionably TV on the Radio’s most patient, positive recording to date, taking its cues as much from Dear Science’s serene ballads (“Family Tree”, “Love Dog”) as its brassy workouts. Each of the band’s albums has opted for a tone-setting opening salvo, and mission statements don’t come more concise and clear-headed than Tunde Adebimpe’s ecstatic, falsettoed hook on Nine Types’ first song, “Second Song”: “Every lover on a mission/ Shift your known position/ Into the light.” Read the full review on Pitchfork


Bob Dylan Live at Brandeis 1963
It’s the music that matters most. Alongside “John Birch” is the even more powerful and equally scathing “Masters of War.” A still-shocking commentary on the arms race set to a traditional folk melody (originating in the English folk song “Nottamun Town”), “Masters” was so plain-spoken in its venom that anyone could understand it. Like four of the concert’s seven songs, it would appear on Dylan’s second LP, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, released just a couple of weeks after the Brandeis concert. In that LP’s liner notes, Nat Hentoff recounted Dylan’s confession that “I don’t sing songs which hope people will die, but I couldn’t help it with this one.” “Masters” was Dylan at his most startling as he attacked proponents of the miltary/industrial complex. Even listening this many years later, it’s no surprise that the song attracted so much attention with plainly-intoned lines like “even Jesus would never forgive what you do.” “Masters” makes the bile of “Positively 4th Street” seem quaint by comparison: “I hope that you’ll die, and your death’ll come soon/I’ll follow your casket in the pale afternoon/And I’ll watch while you’re lowered/Down to your deathbed/And I’ll stand over your grave/Till I’m sure that you’re dead.” The Brandeis performance is expectedly hair-raising. Read the full review on The Second Disc