Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Beyoncé: Lemonade

Beyoncé: Lemonade

On her sixth solo album, Beyoncé Knowles Carter starts rolling mid-scene: She's just realized that her husband is cheating on her. The surrounding context is familiar to anyone who follows popular culture. Beyoncé and Jay Z are the most famous musical couple on the planet, and Beyoncé in particular is in a great place. With 2013's Beyoncé, MJ-level talent met pop-perfectionism in a moment that defined album-cycle disruption; moreover, it was a victory lap Bey took as pop feminism's reigning goddess. Jay Z, on the other hand, is a rapper who used to rap brilliantly and sometimes still sounds good when he really tries, but his music has become secondary. Over the course of their eight-year marriage and long courtship before that, Jay Z and Beyoncé's private relationship seemed to play out in song, in concert, and of course, in the tabloids. But Beyoncé's "smile pretty and give no interviews" approach to public relations over the last couple of years, combined with "the elevator incident" and subsequent speculation about the state of their marriage, and followed by their public makeup (see: VMAs 2014, On the Run Tour), has suggested that something has changed, but that Beyoncé would prefer we not know the specifics.

Lemonade shatters this theory. If the album is to be considered a document of some kind of truth, emotional or otherwise, then it seems Beyoncé was saving the juicy details for her own story. Because nothing she does is an accident, let's assume she understands that any song she puts her name on will be perceived as being about her own very public relationship. So what we think we know about her marriage after listening is the result of Beyoncé wanting us to think that. With its slate of accompanying videos, Lemonade is billed as Beyonce's second "visual album." But here that voyeuristic feeling manifests while listening rather than viewing, given the high visibility of Bey and Jay. The songwriting is littered with scenes that seem positively cinematic, so it helps that you can imagine these characters living them: Beyoncé smelling another woman's scent on Jay Z, her pacing their penthouse in the middle of the night before leaving a note and disappearing with Blue. Lemonade is a film as well, yet the album itself feels like a movie.

It's not until the record's second half that you realize Lemonade has a happy ending. At first you might think that Bey is using the album to announce her divorce from Jay's cheating ass. Because she doesn't scold, "Don't you ever do that to me again"—she drags her very famous, seemingly powerful husband publicly, in the process giving the world a modern-day "Respect" in "Don't Hurt Yourself." On the "7/11"-style banger "Sorry," she turns his side-chicks into memes, which will inevitably become "better call Becky with the good hair" sweatshirts that Beyoncé can sell for $60 a pop. Best revenge is your paper.

If you've ever been cheated on by someone who thought you'd be too stupid or naive to notice, you will find the first half of Lemonade incredibly satisfying. If you have ears and love brilliant production and hooks that stick, you'll likely arrive at the same conclusion. The run from "Hold Up" to "6 Inch" contains some of Beyoncé's strongest work—ever, period—and a bit of that has to do with her clap-back prowess. The increasingly signature cadence, patois, and all-around attitude on Lemonade speaks to her status as the hip-hop pop star—but this being Bey, she doesn't stop there. Via the album's highly specific samples and features by artists like Jack White and James Blake, Lemonade proves Beyoncé to also be a new kind of post-genre pop star. (Let us remember a time, not very long ago, when Bey and Jay attending a Grizzly Bear show with Solange made headlines.)

Both of these attributes—a methodical rapper's flow, an open-eared listener's frame of reference—meet on the slowed-down stunner "Hold Up," where Beyoncé borrows an iconic Karen O turn of phrase via Ezra Koenig, a touch of Jamaican flavor via Diplo (again), and a plucky Andy Williams sample to fight for her man while chiding him for doing this to her (!), of all people. From there, Bey's just like, "fuck it—big mistake, huge" and gets (Tidal co-owner) Jack White to join her in dueting over a psychedelic soul jam and a Zeppelin sample as she scowls, "Watch my fat ass twist, boy, as I bounce to the next dick, boy." As she accuses her husband of not being man enough to handle all of her multitudes, fury frays her voice. Even on an album stacked with some of Beyoncé's best recorded vocal performances to date, "Don't Hurt Yourself" has her belting to a whole other dimension—specifically, that of Janis Joplin and late-'60s Tina Turner. This won't be the last time Bey dips into the classic vinyl on Lemonade, either: see "Freedom," which manages to both: a) speak poignantly to Civil Rights as much as personal plight, b) sound like an Adidas commercial; this means it's the logical choice for next single, assuming Beyoncé is still releasing those.

Bey's genre-hopping doesn't always sound quite as transcendent as "Don't Hurt Yourself," however. Though certainly memorable (not least because it finds her name-checking the Second Amendment), "Daddy Lessons"—where a country guitar-line meets New Orleans brass in service of her Southern roots—is the least interesting chapter sonically, though the parallels it draws between Jay Z and Beyoncé's own cheating father still make it crucial in the context of Lemonade's narrative. It's hard to see how Beyoncé could have done without any of these scenes to tell the story (not even "Formation" in the end-credits), and though the specific sounds may not be as forward-thinking as those of her 2013 self-titled, there are clear reasons for every musical treatment she has made here. Lemonade is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn't double as an album-length ode to breaking up.

Yes, after Beyoncé makes nearly half an album's worth of glorious rage songs directed at an unfaithful partner, she gives it a little time and remembers that she was raised to value hard work and spirituality. And so, she can't give up on her marriage, the same one she spent her last two albums (mostly) celebrating. Beyoncé even kind of sells it, surmising with a tear-inducing sincerity on relaxed-fit soul jam "All Night" that "nothing real can be threatened." It's an easy platitude to make, but it's also an extremely Beyoncé way of looking at things. For a perfectionist who controls her image meticulously, Beyoncé is obsessed with the notion of realness. That's the biggest selling point of an album like Lemonade, but there's a quality to it that also invites skepticism: That desire to basically art-direct your own sobbing self-portrait to make sure your mascara smears in the most perfectly disheveled way. But who cares what's "real" when the music delivers a truth you can use. 

April 26, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Kevin Morby: Singing Saw

Kevin Morby: Singing Saw

Kevin Morby speaks the language of records. His spare acoustic sound pulls from the late '60s and early '70s, particularly Bob Dylan in baroque country mode, Songs of Leonard Cohen, and Lee Hazlewood. But where the well-read novelist Cohen was comparing mythologies and Hazelwood held forth like a wizened industry cynic, Morby's earlier work refracted meaning through the lens of his record collection. His debut album, Harlem River, featured one song about a slow train, another about walking on the wild side, and a third with a line about going down to the station with a ticket in your hand, as if were still possible to buy paper tickets ahead of time. But connecting directly to the real world isn't exactly Morby's point. His music comes from another place, one where you try and piece together meaning by tapping into a kind of collective unconscious, using whatever tools you have at your disposal. And his references add up to something more than their parts and when paired with his unerring feel for arrangement and style.

Morby's own albums keep getting better, and some of this we can chalk up to experience. Though he's not yet 30, he's been involved with a lot of records—two in his band the Babies with Cassie Ramone from Vivian Girls, four as a bass player in Woods (Morby is to Woods what Kurt Vile is to War on Drugs: a kindred spirit musically whose quirky vision needed more room than a band could provide), and now three as a solo artist. Singing Saw is his strongest album because it shows a process of refinement, and because Morby's songwriting has become less referential and more grounded. The basic ingredients haven't changed, but Morby is figuring out how to retain and amplify his strongest points—his weary and wise voice, his understanding of how the musical pieces fit together—and leave everything else behind.

On his debut, Morby's voice cracked in places, suggesting effort that transcended ability, but Singing Saw finds him cool and controlled at every turn, fully aware of his limitations but confident in what he can accomplish within them. His singing is simultaneously intimate and distant, part conversation and part stylized monologue. He's got a nasally diction with a tendency to stretch vowels that didn't exist in the world until Dylan first gazed at the Nashville skyline and a fondness for short, direct statements that could have been written a century ago. The most contemporary piece of technology mentioned on the album is a Ferris wheel; the songs feature gardens and earth and shadows and fire and tears whose prevailing downward trajectory, yes, brings to mind rain. Single lines don't really stand out, but Morby's commitment to such elemental concerns has a cumulative effect, and the album's lack of specificity becomes a strength.

That confidence extends to musical choices, including Morby's tendency to let the small details of the sound do the work—he would never play five notes if four could get the meaning across. And while the core elements of his aesthetic—his deep voice with just the right halo of reverb, gently plucked acoustic guitar— are a constant, subtle instrumental variety abounds, which Morby sometimes takes great joy in pointing out. On "Dorothy," he sings "I could hear that piano play, it'd go like…" and the buzzing uptempo arrangement falls away leaving a beautiful tumble of keyboard notes, and he follows it a bar later with a paean to a trumpet player that a horn player answers. "Singing Saw" seems to say something about how a single tool can be used either creatively or destructively, and features the titular instrument prominently (and very beautifully).

For Morby, any day-to-day situation or mundane observation could spark something for his next album, and sometimes being that tuned-in can be a curse. "Got a song book in my head," he sings on the album's title track, and he climbs a hill past the houses to find somewhere quiet where he can leave them behind. He claims in press notes that he wrote the song about his neighborhood in Los Angeles, and his first album, Harlem River, was in part about his stint living in New York. But while many people in L.A. notice the traffic and the food and the sunlight and the celebrity culture, Morby hears the coyotes and sees the moon.

April 15, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Parquet Courts: Human Performance

Parquet Courts: Human Performance

When Parquet Courts debuted in 2011 with the supremely bratty American Specialties cassette—its Dada-esque cover art a repurposed Chinese takeout menu—Andrew Savage, who is also a visual artist, presented the facts unsentimentally. "Facebook pages/ Boring boring!/ Rock'n'roll has got me snoring," he gasped over a skeleton of atonal guitar-noise, ultimately landing upon the most sacred of conclusions: "Music! Matters! More than ever! Free your brain and conform never!" Lucky for us, Parquet Courts have spent the past five years heeding their own call.

With Human Performance, their third proper album and first for London's legendary Rough Trade Records, Parquet Courts offer a fine testament to rock's continued power and relevance. They might mine the past for feedback and eccentricities, but their astute lyrics tackle the present head-on—co-songwriters Savage and Austin Brown write as if their songs might have real-world consequences. Parquet Courts emerged at a good time, when we yearn for something slightly more intellectual and aware and less about vibe—a longing that has spread into all areas of music culture. While not explicitly political, Parquet Courts are definitely a thinking band, and a critical one, which is equally important when the world is falling apart. Perhaps some of this sharpness comes from their roots in the DIY punk and hardcore underground with their previous bands, including Wiccans and the criminally overlooked Teenage Cool Kids.

At its best, Human Performance is Parquet Courts in a mellower, heart-stopping Velvet Underground mode, but it is also at turns upbeat and funny, sensitive and odd. Compositionally, these are the most dynamic Parquet Courts songs yet. You could no longer brush these guys off as mere Modern Lovers rip-offs, as you might have around 2012's clangoring, whip-smart Light Up Gold. Human Performance presents a more earnest, emotional side of the band. It's kind of touching to hear Brown—author of such genius dispatches as "Socrates died in the fucking gutter!"—sing a simple, open love song like the wistful road ballad "Steady On My Mind."

As ever, the fever-pitch of New York life is alive and fast-walking within these songs—zig-zagging the concrete to blaze past all the downward-gazing multitaskers too busy texting to get on where they're going. Human Performance captures the humor and horror of New York in 2016, alive with post-Cagean street noise, with a faster-louder Ramonic ideal, with the erratic rhythm of train delays, a bus that never shows up, or the "skull-shaking cadence of the J train rolls." Something about Parquet Courts' intense-yet-witty existential energy reminds me of the legendary NYC tour-guide-cum-philosopher Speed Levitch (immortalized in '90s doc The Cruise), who has long approached New York as if the city itself were an epic poem.

The sour rattle of Human Performance's absurd and charmingly cartoonish opener "Dust" juxtaposes so many elements—jaunty piano riffs, discordant car honks, sweet organs—that you could imagine it soundtracking the opening sequence to a demented musical. "Dust is everywhere/ Sweep," Brown taunts on loop, and it is not a stretch to hear the decrepitude as a metaphor for the finely-ground wreckage of Western civilization that we have all inherited. There is dread implied, but "Dust" mostly makes you laugh. Parquet Courts' take on New York life grows legitimately and rightfully severe on "Two Dead Cops," a sobering and compact punk song that is literally about two cops who were murdered in Savage's Bed-Stuy neighborhood.

There are songs on Human Performance that defy logic; they should not work and yet somehow, they do. On the trudging, visceral centerpiece "Captive of the Sun," the Beaumont, Tx.-bred Brown's rhythmic delivery is basically rapping. (He has written at length about his intense personal connection to the "outsider art" that is Houston rap.) Earlier, bassist Sean Yeaton makes his songwriting debut in the group with the stream-of-conscious curiosity "I Was Just Here." It takes on a classic New York dilemma—a jarring elegy for a Chinese restaurant that has recently closed much to his surprise and chagrin. "You look so nice/ Chinese fried rice/ Wouldn't you know/ That place just closed," the band laments with an alien Devo affect, in turn evoking the beloved underground punk-band-of-the-moment, Indiana's Coneheads.

The latent weirdness of "I Was Just Here" reminds me of the time Savage wearily shouted-out the true freaks of Zappa's backing band, the Mothers of Invention, in a cheeky Teenage Cool Kids song called "Beg to Differ." In fact, there are several moments on Human Performance that recall Teenage Cool Kids' 2011 cult hit Denton After Sunset (in which Savage romanticized Texas in a way to rival John Darnielle). In some of Human Performance's best songs—like "Berlin Got Blurry," with its winding Spaghetti Western riff and wandering spirit—there's a bright directness he hasn't shown since back then. Denton After Sunset was a love letter of sorts to the place Savage came from; it showed his adept understanding of the evocative power of geography, something he's carried into his New York songbook.

Alongside the likes of Courtney Barnett and Sadie Dupuis, Savage remains one of the best rock lyricists of his generation. In the past, he has written philosophical punk songs about cats, candy, and existence; about Stalinist art and opera. Here, he cuts inward, clawing further into his own soul. Human Performance's bare, stunning closer "It's Gonna Happen" recalls the heart-wrenching simplicity of Lou Reed's starry 2000 ballad "Turning Time Around." But it's earlier, in the arresting one-two punch of "Human Performance" and "Outside," that Savage's writing shines most elegantly. These are break-up songs, for sure, but sometimes it's hard to tell if Savage is breaking up with a lover or with himself. At the core of the soulful "Human Performance" is a difficult, messy question: Am I good person, or am I fooling everyone, including myself? Savage's tender ruminations on love and loneliness are deeply self-critical: "I told you I loved you/ Did I even deserve it? When you returned it," he croons, sounding like Dylan circa Nashville Skyline. The layered feel of the track's chorus reminds me of the "multi-latch gating" technique that Tony Visconti used to produce "Heroes"—each time Savage screams, the echoes sound further away, more unhinged and desperate, tempered by lovely organ lines and jazzy drum patterns.

The sub-two-minute "Outside" follows, and it is the sunniest, snappiest Parquet Courts tune ever—a song about admission, about accepting your flaws and finding peace. For such a short song it is impossibly beautiful. "Dear everything I've harmed/ My fault lies on my tongue/ And I take it holy as a last rite," Savage sings, his voice shining with palpable abandon and relief, a kind you only get from telling the truth. "Outside" is ultimately about turning honesty and imperfection into virtues, and that purity is doubled by its indelible melody. Little details, like a lopsided beat and an endearing note sung flat, only serve to deepen it.

Human Performance is a bracing snapshot of a band on a roll. As punk turns 40 on both sides of the Atlantic this year, it's fitting that this record is out on Rough Trade—that era's arty, leftist wing of outsiders-among-outsiders. You'd be hard pressed to find a contemporary rock band honoring the classic Rough Trade legacy as well as Parquet Courts, in both sound and spirit, while doing something audacious and new. In a sense, they even revive Rough Trade's O.G. connection to eccentric Texas psych-rock, from back when conceptual artist Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola was the label's heady spokesperson, producing crucial records by the Raincoats and the Fall, and collaborating with members of Pere Ubu and Swell Maps. Parquet Courts deserve to be discussed within this lineage. Intelligence is addictive, and there is accordingly a quiet mania to Parquet Courts fandom that matches that of their forebears. On Human Performance, Parquet Courts send a generation-skewing message that avails not, time nor place: it is cool to really think.

April 08, 2016 at 12:00PM
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