Blog Profile / Pitchfork: Reviews
| URL : | http://pitchfork.com/reviews/recent/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Music / Rock & Pop | |
| Posts on Regator: | 5466 | |
| Posts / Week: | 20.8 | |
| Archived Since: | May 7, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Applescal: Dreaming in Key
The young Dutch electronic producer Pascal Terstappen has numerous assets, any one of which would be enough to build a strong aesthetic. He has a keen ear for melody, a terse, supple way with rhythm programming, and a sensitive dowsing rod for strange gems and ores hidden under timbral crust. Show More Summary
Spectral Park: Spectral Park
Out on a stroll in the council block housing near his home in Southampton, Luke Donovan happened on a box of beat-up records. Intrigued, he brought his findings home, slapped one down on the turntable, and started strumming. The result...Show More Summary
Salva: Odd Furniture EP
Two years ago, Paul Salva's Complex Housing emerged as the work of a producer with seemingly every stylistic option at his disposal. From house to grime to bass, he'd find a way to make anything knock on his own terms, no matter what kind of dancefloor you pointed him toward. Show More Summary
Paul Banks: Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be
This review began with me typing the words "Paul Banks" into the Datpiff search bar. If I got nothing else out of Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be, a rap mixtape from the lead singer of Interpol, I will always have that moment. Show More Summary
Kool A.D.: 19 / 63
When the Das Racist narrative began to take shape, the trio was almost always presented as a New York rap act. That handy descriptor overlooked the fact that Kool A.D., the rapper born Victor Vazquez, is a Bay-blooded rapper. His recent...Show More Summary
The Spinto Band: Cool Cocoon
The Spinto Band had the portfolio of power pop lifers before they had ever made a widely available album. When 2005's wry, multi-hued, and remarkably enduring Nice and Nicely Done came out via Bar/None, the Delaware band had alreadyShow More Summary
Lady Lazarus: All My Love in Half Light
As Lady Lazarus, California dreamer Melissa Ann Sweat crafts intimate miniatures, mostly for solo voice and electric piano, and then slowly drowns them in oceans of reverb. As short patterns of chords or intervals revolve hypnotically, overlapping layers of echo and decay well up around them until only the tips of the keyed notes glint out. Show More Summary
Sasha Go Hard: Round 3: The Knockout
One of the less frequently discussed aspects of the Chicago drill scene is that female artists played an active part in it from the beginning, back when barely anyone outside of an enthusiastic audience of South Side high-schoolers even knew that it existed. Show More Summary
Lisa Germano: No Elephants
Throughout the 1990s, Indiana songwriter Lisa Germano released a string of brilliant, incisive, criminally underheard records whose best lines landed like jokes told in airless rooms. "You wish you were pretty, but you're not/ Ha-ha-ha," she sang at the beginning of an excellent record with the cruelly ironic title Happiness. Show More Summary
Various Artists: Night Slugs: Allstars Volume 2
If you want a sense of where things are headed in bass music through the near future, it's always a good idea to keep tabs on the Night Slugs label-- not because it adheres to or forecasts any specific scenes and movements, but because it doesn't. Show More Summary
Umberto: Confrontations
Kansas City musician Matt Hill, who returns to Not Not Fun for the release of this fourth album under his Umberto alias, is still searching for a suitably blood-soaked visual counterpart to his glossy electronic work. Hill's music takes...Show More Summary
Clogs: The Sundown Song
Three weeks after Clogs released The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton in March 2010, the woman for whom it was named died. Lady Susana Walton had been married to the composer Sir William Walton. She created their home, the tropical...Show More Summary
Veronica Falls: Waiting for Something to Happen
Struggling to pin down Veronica Falls' sound, an interviewer recently told frontwoman Roxanne Clifford, "You know, you aren't twee." To which she replied, with exaggerated enthusiasm and perfect comedic timing, "Thanks!" It's easy to...Show More Summary
The Underachievers: Indigoism
The Brainfeeder-affiliated Brooklyn rap duo the Underachievers are part of New York City's loose knit Beast Coast collective, which counts Joey Bada$$ and his Pro Era crew along with Flatbush Zombies among its membership, and the A$AP Mob as friends. Show More Summary
Foals: Holy Fire
For nearly two minutes, "Inhaler" does not sound like the triumphant return of one of Britain's most successful modern bands. In fact, it sounds claustrophobic-- hookless, even. During what feels like the chorus, Yannis Philippakis can't quite get hold of a melody that sounds like it might never resolve. Show More Summary
Cult of Luna: Vertikal
In the solemn and self-serious realm of post-metal, no band serves as a working template quite as much as Neurosis. For the last quarter century, the California group has blended massive atmospherics with steely-eyed ferocity, resulting in albums of grand arches and, at best, total immersion. Show More Summary
K-X-P: II
As a listener, the way that frontman Timo Kaukolampi talks about his band K-X-P's sophomore LP II might make you a little concerned about your own mental health. And for good reason, as K-X-P are band not to be trusted, perhaps even feared. Show More Summary
José James: No Beginning No End
New York-via-Minneapolis singer José James was once comfortable being the oddball talent of the contemporary jazz scene, an unknown quantity in a world with plenty of known ones; “When it's all said and done, jazz with a capital J is where I'm coming from,” he told Billboard in 2010. Show More Summary
Ulrich Schnauss: A Long Way to Fall
Ulrich Schnauss has never been a risky producer. He has released volumes of material as a solo artist and with Engineers, much of it tied to the ambient pop drift of early 1990s shoegaze. Schnauss deserves some credit for forecasting...Show More Summary
Pissed Jeans: Honeys
If you're into Pissed Jeans' music because you relate to it, well, Matt Korvette is sorry it's come to this. Call it Commiseration Rock: Over the past decade, the Philly-via-Allentown band has occupied a very specific niche, making violent, shout-along sludge punk about situations that find men at their wimpiest and most impotent. Show More Summary