Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Whitney: Light Upon the Lake

Whitney: Light Upon the Lake

Can a duo be a supergroup? Maybe that's a tongue-in-cheek designation for Whitney, the band composed of former Smith Westerns guitarist Max Kakacek and former Unknown Mortal Orchestra drummer Julien Ehrlich. Both were standout members of their former bands; Kakacek never got his due in Smith Westerns, as singer Cullen Omori's presence soaked up much of the adulation. Ehlrich, who looked about 11 years old behind the kit with UMO, was a long-limbed beast. Whatever reasons for their previous acts' dissolution and split, the two have found each other and put together something simple but always invaluable: a great warm weather rock'n'roll record.

It's hard to talk about Whitney without first talking about Girls, another sweet-and-sour rock duo that both UMO and Smith Westerns spent time on tour opening for. Girls breathed life into earnest folk-rock by writing simple, powerful songs about being in love with life and learning to enjoy the basic things. But they broke up after two albums, and their absence left an empty space that has never been filled. Whitney come closer than any band since.

Light Upon the Lake, their debut LP, is a short collection of short songs; half of them are made up of easygoing guitar flourishes, the other half feature woozy strings and slurred brass. This is the Corona of rock records, as Whitney consistently walk that fine line between identifiable and platitudinal. Take the chorus from most recent single "No Matter Where You Go": "I can take you out/I wanna drive all around with you with the windows down/And we can run all right." It's so generically wistful that it could provoke an eyeroll, but it's delivered with such gentle earnestness that it's improbably touching. Light Upon the Lake operates in a universe of endlessly repeatable joy, with a touch of melancholy to keep it interesting. The songs could be about romantic love, but they're open-ended enough to be whatever you want them to be.

The vocals are a harder sell. Berman, assuming vocal duties here, is on the whinier, Muppet-ier side of things. The overall muffled effect of the recording doesn't help to crystallize anything, either. It's like someone's stopped at a spotlight singing their heart out in their car with the windows up and you hear it from the sidewalk. It works great in terms of expressing earnestness but possibly not in terms of pleasantness. I like it because it feels very true. That said, I wouldn't hold it against you if you weren't turned off, at least initially.

Make it past that, though, and you'll find most songs to be near flawless on a small scale, working the way a great short story does. The crisp edges of these songs betray people who really know how to play their instruments, but instead of flashing that fact, they back up, writing only in vivid, broad, easygoing pop-rock strokes. "Golden Days," has all the elements of showiness—a guitar solo, extraneous brass, a singalong—but the song stays small and hummable. Low-key perfectionism is perhaps a humbler virtue than seeking the big, dynamic splash. But it has a way of sneaking in past our defenses and lingering longer—before we know, we've been singing that song under our breath for the better part of a year.  Whitney might not reinvent anything, but they sound perfect right now, and it's hard to argue with being in the right place at the right time.

June 06, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Joey Purp: iiiDrops

Joey Purp: iiiDrops

"I done been on both sides of the burner/I done witnessed both sides of the murder/I done seen a nigga killed/And seen a nigga kill a nigga." This is how Joey Purp opens up his new mixtape, iiiDrops—announcing himself as a street-savvy, thug-fluent, criminal-adjacent observer of society's darker corners. He's more on the sidelines than in the fields, but he's not an outsider looking in, either. An accessory by necessity, he's smart enough to not snitch and careful enough to make his death threats subliminal, yet still aware enough to speak as the conscience from within the belly of the beast, because he personally knows of the tolls paid on the backroads to riches. "You see the world in my daughter's eyes/If you had seen what she had seen, you'd be traumatized," he raps.

It's tempting to simplify when talking about artists, to shave off their multitudes, flatten, and categorize them. Because he is part of Chicago's Savemoney crew—the loose collective of artists that includes Chance the Rapper, Vic Mensa, and others—Joey comes with a certain set of preconceptions, namely that he be a technically proficient stylist with a progressive artistic bent. He fits that bill, sometimes, but he's a little deeper and more human than that. Boastful and thoughtful, socially aware and defiantly filthy, longing for the music industry's spoils while simultaneously disregarding them—his various sides come together come together on iiiDrops, which is more well-rounded and definitive than his woozy The Purple Tape or his word-centric experimentalism as part of Leather Corduroys

Where Chance spent Coloring Book showcasing the audacity of his hope for a better tomorrow, Joey is a panoramic and holistic realist when he looks around at the forces and people that support the cycle of violence in his hometown. On "Cornerstore" he rides a horn-powered groove from Thelonious Martin and Donnie Trumpet, dropping off pinpoint observations along the way: He recalls speaking to his brother who may never come home from behind bars, confesses of marijuana dreams of drug kingpin success, notes that "White kids deal with problems that we never knew to bother/Arguing with they dads, we pray we ever knew our fathers," and watches gentrification from ground zero: "Now up in the corners where killers used to inhabit/They built a row of new condos where they tore down project buildings." He's joined by Saba (another Savemoney satellite), who matches him observation for observation: "My best friend from when I was 11, posted with the weapon/Actin' like he do not see me step into they section/We used to hoop daily and treat it like a profession/And now I'm walking by him like I'm some type of pedestrian."

Joey's songs make no distinction between the personal and political, and see systemic failures through the lenses of individuals without ever quite pointing fingers or succumbing to victimization. "We grow up being neglected by our elected officials," he raps on "Money & Bitches." "My nigga, cry me a river, I'll buy you a tissue/ I don't wanna hear your complainin', you pressin' my issue/All I know is money and bitches." There's also little difference between good thoughts and worthy wordplay—every rhyme and idea flows into a next; almost every moment is quotable and represents a greater whole. It's an astounding feat for someone who tried to lean and swag his way through his first solo project.

In a year that's been dominated by headline releases from marquee artists, iiiDrops has the making of a sleeper hit. The POV is measured and insightful, the rhyming is assured by both technical and narrative metrics, and the music is quietly confident and sharply novel—Knox Fortune and GARREN's funky broken soul on "Photobooth," OddCouple's triumphant swing on "Morning Sex," the stripped Neptunes-ish drumplay of "Girls@" and "Say You Do," updated blaxploitation psychedelia on "Godbody," a semi-paranoid summer evening pulse to "When I'm Gone." Some of the numbers sound like they belong of a producer's showcase, more than a rapper's coming out party, but Joey rides every beat with an easy intensity that makes his worldview the unifying factor here. He never allows the tracks to become the sole point of focus, and it takes Chance the Rapper—going on about dead batteries as a pick-up line to girls "readin' Ta-Nehisi Coates"—to upstage the star of this show.

Purp is adept at juggling and offering competing meanings, often from within the same song: "When I'm Gone" shuffles between a tale of relationship drama and fights with his boss, while the closer "Escape" is a Drake-like stream of boasting and history and chest-thumping prediction that plays like Purp's "5 A.M. in Chicago." But he never comes off jumbled or all-over-the-place; he not only sees both sides of murder, but also the bigger picture. On "Morning Sex," he raps, "Look in the mirror, all I see is the money / I close my eyes, all I see is the money." He's not immune to capitalism's siren, but he's aware of the opportunity costs. Unfortunately, his gaze does not extend to seeing women in whole; there's nary a girl mentioned who isn't a ho, a nag, or one or the other in the making. That's a disappointing state of affairs, but there is hope: If you look into his daughter's eyes, you can see the world. And when he looks in the mirror, he sees his mother's eyes. He's traumatized, but he's still looking.

June 03, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial

Car Seat Headrest: Teens of Denial

Sometimes, drugs are no fun. The rad night you imagined, watching 2001: A Space Odyssey and brushing against the outer boundaries of your consciousness, becomes a six-hour hell of wondering Did I leave the oven on? or Did I look weird when I said that thing to that one person or Do I just think I looked weird but was I probably not that weird despite the person obviously thinking I was? and so on. But I've never heard someone sum it up as succinctly as Will Toledo does: "Last Friday, I took acid and mushrooms/I did not transcend, I felt like a walking piece of shit/in a stupid-looking jacket."

That's from an eminently quotable song called "(Joe Gets Kicked Out of School For Using) Drugs With Friends (But Says This Isn't a Problem)" on Car Seat Headrest's new record, Teens of Denial, wherein Toledo feels both boundless and deeply, deeply lame as he tries to sort out his life and shake off the chemicals. He doesn't transcend, but he sees Jesus. He coins a perfect phrase for emotionally distraught, image-conscious young hedonists—"teens of style"—and becomes sort of disgusted by them, even though he knows he and them are all one and the same. He says "Mmmhmm" a lot, which is all you can do during a gnarly trip. Built around some delicate chord changes, Toledo's pensive singing voice, and a backing band that slowly comes in as the trip gets worse, it actually sounds like a guy walking around town while sifting beautiful thoughts from the bad ones—a perfect pairing of form and content.

It's the best song about being a confused, chemically dependent 20-something I've heard in years. Its appearance on Teens of Denial, Toledo's first properly recorded album of new material for Matador, is the moment you realize he's running ahead of the pack as an incredibly imaginative, insightful singer-songwriter who's also capable of crafting a dynamic rock song. Teens of Denial follows last year's Teens of Style, a collection of re-recorded tracks taken from his prolific Bandcamp output. Teens of Style presented Toledo as a promising young voice, but maybe anyone would sound promising if given the chance to curate and improve upon their best moments over the last five years. Teens of Style was already great, but Teens of Denial is such a leap forward that it still manages to surprise. Recorded in a studio with a real band, it's a continuation of Toledo's every-Matador-band-in-a-blender sound: Yo La Tengo's soft-loud dynamics, Guided By Voices' jagged pop iridescence, late-period Malkmus' guitar theatrics, all bundled with emotive, immersive lyrics detailing a frazzled state of mind.

Thanks to Andrew Katz's propulsive drumming, some cleaner production, and Toledo's increasing ambition, it sounds more expansive—a firm declaration of talent, rather than a tease. He packs more ideas into "Vincent"'s paranoia, "Unforgiving Girl (She's Not An)"'s romantic euphoria, and the allusive, epic "The Ballad of the Costa Concordia" than some bands put into entire albums. On "Concordia," an almost 12-minute track about navigating one's inadequacies after a life of substance abuse that slowly builds to a towering release, Toledo seamlessly drops a whole Dido verse in the middle. It comes out from nowhere, but it works. (An earlier version of the album included an excellent song "Just What I Wanted/Not Just What I Needed," which daringly interpolated the Cars' "Just What I Needed," but a copyright snafu led to its cutting. The revised version, "Not What I Needed," sounds fine, though the censored mp3s making their way around the internet must be heard.)

Even with the bigger budget and brighter environs, Toledo's underriding DIY sensibility comes through. You can hear it in the margin-scrawl messiness of his lyrics, which forego neat-and-tidy narratives for  abstractions, like he's snatching flitting images that run through his brain. More important than this deft lyrical touch, though, is his ability to display it within a musically engaging song. Unlike some indie-rock songwriters, Toledo's lyrics don't just sit on the page. The choruses don't arrive at the expected moments or follow traditional shapes, but they hit hard nonetheless: The high harmonies on "Joe Gets Kicked Out" and "Drunk Divers/Killer Whales" are destined for festival singalongs, while "Fill in the Blank" is a burly, driving rock song that might even drive Car Seat's sensitive listeners to mosh a little. 

Teens of Denial is guitar-driven music filled with booksmart lyrics concerned largely with depression, which naturally means that Toledo has been championed in some circles as an "indie rock savior," whatever that means. It comes at the same time as a widespread feeling that the idea of "indie rock" itself on the wane. These arguments are often folded into an increased irritation at what might be called "white male ennui," the root cause of so much stylishly produced music over the last however many years. But depression is colorblind, and Toledo treats sadness not as a stopping point, but as transformative. (At any rate, he's also multiracial.) There's an honest reckoning with what his wallowing has led to, and rapturous exhortation when logic alone cannot solve a problem. "I've got a right to be depressed," he yells on "Fill in the Blank," moments after calling himself out as a little whiner. It's an emotional conclusion that comes at the beginning of the album, a neat reminder that even after a moment of clarity, there's always farther to go.

May 20, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Chance the Rapper: Coloring Book

Chance the Rapper: Coloring Book

When Chicagoan Chance the Rapper delivered his verse on "Ultralight Beam," the opening song from Kanye West's The Life of Pablo, there was a lot going on—sly homage was being paid to West; rappers were being put on notice ("This is my part/Nobody else speak"); and, most importantly, Chance was encapsulating his past, asserting his present, and telegraphing his future. He was finally positioning himself as a rapper to be reckoned with from a mainstream podium, but he was also delving deep into Christian ideology, with allusions to Noah's Ark and Lot's wife, with his "foot on the Devil's neck 'til it drifted Pangaea."

That verse rolled out the red carpet for Kanye's long-awaited album, but it doubled as an announcement of Chance's new Coloring Book (then given the working title Chance 3), which may very well be the most eagerly-anticipated hip-hop project this year that doesn't come attached to an actual record label. West billed his album as "a gospel album with a whole lot of cursing on it," but The Life of Pablo wasn't that; it was a rap album with some gospel overtures. Coloring Book, however, fits the billing, packing in so much gospel verve that it sounds like Hezekiah Walker & the Love Fellowship Crusade Choir are going to drop into half the tracks and recite 1 Timothy 4:12 in chorale. Instead, we get Kirk Franklin promising to lead us into the Promised Land, alongside appearances by demonstrated materialistic heathens like 2 Chainz, Lil Wayne, Young Thug, and Future—and the result is an uplifting mix that even an atheist can catch the Spirit to.

Thematically, Coloring Book is a far cry from Chance's previous efforts. His debut mixtape, 10 Day, was a small, heavy-lidded odyssey of being suspended from college "for chiefin' a hundred blunts;" his breakthrough, 2013's dilated Acid Rap, contained songs about being a "Chain Smoker" and confessions of "cigarettes on cigarettes/My momma think I stank/I got burn-holes in my hoodies." But here, on Coloring Book, Chancelor Bennett observes that "we don't do the same drugs no more" over acoustic piano and choristers backing his sentiments. He says the song is not about drugs, but it still comes off as a sobering admission from a rapper who once dedicated a small travelogue to taking acid south of the U.S. border.

"Music is all we got," Chance professes on "All We Got," the inaugural number featuring the Chicago Children's Choir and West returning the "Ultralight Beam" favor—but it's clear from the outset that this is Chance's show. His vocals—elastic and taut, all jerky grace, full of word-sound collages that hearken back to his spoken-word genealogy— are now almost fully dedicated to God and being high on life. "I get my Word from the sermon/I do not talk to the serpent/That's a holistic discernment," he raps before threatening to "give Satan a swirly." Although his puerility remains intact, his fervor is amplified as never before.

On "Blessings," poet-activist-singer-songwriter Jamila Woods comes through with the hook: "I'm gon' praise Him/Praise Him 'til I'm gone," while Chance drops sanctified tweetables: "I don't make songs for free, I make 'em for freedom/Don't believe in kings, believe in the Kingdom" and "Jesus' black life ain't matter/I know, I talk to his daddy." He also manages to mix in heavenly faith,  the joy of fatherhood, and redemption in a couplet and a half: "I know the difference in blessings and worldly possessions/Like my ex-girl getting pregnant and her becoming my everything/I'm at war with my wrongs." It's a heavy message delivered lightly, with tongue aflame.

Coloring Book is not all about transcendence, however. Despite asking "when did you start to forget how to fly?," Chance still has his feet firmly planted as one of the biggest independent rappers of the moment. On "No Problem" he raps, "If one more label try to stop me/It's gon' be some dread-head n-ggas in your lobby." (In a sublime stroke, the song features Lil Wayne, stretching and compacting his flow to approximate Chance's delivery while speaking on his own ongoing contractual issues with Cash Money Records.) "Mixtape" features Young Thug and Lil Yachty—two rappers who have found growing success by upending traditional music industry norms like Chance—to speak on their outsider stances. Thug doesn't get specific enough to make the song as heavy as it might have been, but Yachty's verse is strong ("Time and time again they told me no/They told me I wouldn't go…/Fuck them reviews that they put in the paper/Did what I wanted, didn't care about a hater/Delivered my tape to the world as a caterer") and helps the hook shine through: "Am I the only one who still cares about mixtapes?" (It's worth noting that Chance, who has never released a project for sale before, also released a real-time mixtape last year with fellow outlier Lil B.)

The bars here are so hard that it ain't one gosh-darned part you can't tweet, but the tracks carry their weight like their brother's keeper. "Summer Friends" hisses with soft humidity;  "Juke Jam" is the soundtrack to a candle-lit bedroom; "All Night" moves its feet to Chicago house, courtesy of a roller-rink jam from Kaytranada. But the bulk of this record is handled by musical ensemble the Social Experiment. They're Chance's trusted collaborators—together they released last year's Surf, spearheaded by Donnie Trumpet—and they've been refining a sound of expansive but intimate live jazz-indebted soul for the past few years. Here, they take listeners to church with organs on "How Great," steel drums on "Angels," and choirs, choirs everywhere. On the "Blessings" reprise that closes out the album, there's an uncredited "All of the Lights"-esque group harmony courtesy of Ty Dolla $ign, Raury, Anderson .PAAK, BJ the Chicago Kid, and others.

Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, and is destined to be on year-end lists aplenty. It's a more rewarding listen than Drake's recently released VIEWS; it's nearly as adventurous as The Life of Pablo. In execution and focus, it comes as a joyful, praise-dancing rejoinder to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly. It feels a bit silly to compare Coloring Book to Butterfly, but it feels even sillier not to. When music comes like this—personal and panoramic, full of conversations with God, defying hip-hop norms while respecting them, proving that the genre can still dig deeper into its roots—it needs to be contextualized as what it is. This is an ultralight beam; it's a God dream.

May 17, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead: A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead, who titled their ninth studio album A Moon Shaped Pool, have a unique grasp on how easily profundity can slip into banality. Their music is obsessed with the point where great truths harden into platitudes, where pure signal meets wretched noise. In the past, Thom Yorke has sharply peppered his lyrics with everyday cliches to suggest a mind consumed by meaningless data, but on the new album, he largely moves beyond cynicism. He is now considering simpler truths in a heretofore-unexplored register: wonder and amazement. "This goes beyond me, beyond you," he sings on "Daydreaming." "We are just happy to serve you." There is no concealed razor under Yorke's tongue as he offers this thought, or in the pearly music that surrounds him. It sounds for all the world like the most cloistered and isolated soul in modern rock music opening up and admitting a helplessness far more personal than he's ever dared. Yorke has flirted with surrender before, and on A Moon Shaped Pool, that submission feels nearly complete.

The album is framed by two older pieces of music that act as gateways to the darker, unfamiliar waters within. Opener "Burn the Witch" has been floating around, in some form or another, since Kid A. "This is a low-flying panic attack," Yorke announces, explicitly linking to the bad old days of air crashes, iron lungs, and wolves at doors. (In fact, several of the song's lyrics—"avoid all eye contact," "cheer at the gallows"—first appeared in the album art to 2003's anti-Bush polemic Hail to the Thief.) Meanwhile, Jonny Greenwood's brittle modernist string arrangement reinforces the angst, turning the orchestra into a giant pair of gnashing teeth. It's a vintage splash of Radiohead stomach acid, a cloud of gnats unleashed in your cranial nerves.

It also feels like an exorcism for what follows: a plunge into something scarier than the military industrial complex, or the insidious nature of propaganda, or human nature's disturbing tendency towards unquestioning obedience. Yorke separated from his partner of 23 years and the mother to his two children last August, and on "Identikit," he sings "Broken hearts make it rain" and "When I see you messin' me around, I don't want to know."

That isn't to say that this is necessarily a "break-up album." Separations (particularly those involving children) take place in the harsh light of day, with lawyers' appointments and checklists and logistical arrangements. Radiohead albums are the stuff of dreams and nightmares, and the band retains a healthy resistance to clarity; their music is a maze of signs you can peer into any way you like. Even so, the impact of trauma, a sort of car crash of the soul, is palpable. The music here feels loose and unknotted, broken open in the way you can only be after a tragedy. "There's a spacecraft blocking out the sky," Yorke observes on "Decks Dark," as choral voices pass overhead. The scene is straight from 1997's "Subterranean Homesick Alien," but here Yorke doesn't sound "uptight." He sounds utterly drained, as if impending invasion doesn't concern him at all.

A song title like "Glass Eyes" hints at many of the band's longstanding morbid preoccupations—the semblance of humanity in something cold and dead, or the violation of the biological body by foreign objects— but the song is a bloodflow of strings straight into the heart. "Hey it's me, I just got off the train," Yorke sings, and it's a strikingly ordinary image: The Paranoid Android himself, picking up the phone and calling someone to tell them he's just arrived. "I feel this love turn cold," he confesses as the ballad draws to a close, the phrasing an echo, subconscious or not, of his Kid A sign-off "I'll see you in the next life." A throbbing cello appears like a lump in the throat; the song fades away.

Throughout the album, Yorke's everyday enlightenment is backed by music of expanse and abandon. The guitars sound like pianos, the pianos sound like guitars, and the mixes breathe with pastoral calm. "The Numbers," a song about the impending apocalypse brought on by climate change, meanders along, its groove as wide as an ocean. Even the malevolent synth wave that passes through "Ful Stop" sounds like a visitor, a momentary darkness rather than a caged spirit. As the song builds, the band works up a coursing groove that will feel familiar to longtime fans, with its interlocking guitars and an arterial bustle of rhythms serving to launch Yorke's wordless moan. It's a sound that Radiohead has spent the last decade honing, but the payoff here is deeper and more gratifying than it has been in a while.

The added dimension comes from Yorke, who pumps fresh oxygen into these songs, many of which have existed in sketch-like forms for years. On the lonely folk hymn "Desert Island Disk," he sings of an epiphanic experience: "The wind rushing 'round my open heart/An open ravine/In my spirit white." As a vision of transformation, it feels like the inverse to Amnesiac's "Pyramid Song," where his only companions were the dead; here, he is "totally alive."

And then there's "True Love Waits." It's an old song, one that has been around in various forms for over two decades, but unlike "Burn the Witch" or the other teased sketches and scraps that Radiohead diehards pick apart on forums, it's long been a part of their canon. It appeared on the 2001 live album I Might Be Wrong and, dragged into 2016, feels like a relic from a different geological era. "I'll drown my beliefs," Yorke sings, "just don't leave." It is the message they leave us with, this very open-hearted song that has always felt like an open wound in their discography, a geyser of feeling erupting out of scorched earth. It's very inclusion is a striking moment of transparency.

The version here is just Yorke and a piano, so reverberant and echo-drenched that it feels like we've stuck our heads inside it. Yorke croons tenderly, never opening up into his chest voice. It's sung to one person this time, not crowds. In its mundane visions of "lollipops and crisps," the lyrics purposefully skirt doggerel, an acknowledgment that cliches can be, in fact, where all the action is. "I'm not living/I'm just killing time," the 47-year-old admits. You can write a line like that and set it to music; you can perform it for years in front of adoring millions; you can carry the idea around in your heart and mind. But it might take a lifetime for it to strike, as it does here, with a newfound power. The truth, as always, lies in plain sight, right there in the kicking and the squealing, the panic and the vomit. Some truths just take longer to see than others.

May 11, 2016 at 12:00PM
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Pitchfork's Best New Album -- James Blake: The Colour in Anything

James Blake: The Colour in Anything

 It's not James Blake's fault that The Color in Anything came out in the middle of a rainy week. Or it might be; the circumstances seem almost planned. Maybe the team plotting the surprise release of this album was watching storm fronts, waiting for ideal new-James-Blake-album conditions. On first impressions alone, they succeeded wildly: When bed sheets are in disarray, when grey light seeps into wet windows, and the sky is an interminable reminder that there is always a chance of showers, his particular brand of impressionistic melancholy is hard to resist. Stay in bed or descend out into the streets, it doesn't matter, his music finds a way to summon personal rain clouds that follow you wherever you go. 

In keeping with his last two albums, The Colour in Anything is a hard, frank, and unsparing listen. But if you listen closer, you will notice some tonal shifts in the fog. For one, Blake shed the monomania of his past work, allowing other voices and sounds to creep in. He's noted in interviews that The Colour in Anything is meant to represent a sea-change, personally, musically, and geographically. The disposition of this record is suppose to reflect its milieus: Southern California, friendship, and new love. Seven of its seventeen tracks were co-produced by Rick Rubin. Much of the album was also mix and mastered at Rubin's Shangri-La studios in Malibu. Frank Ocean and Justin Vernon appear throughout, lending writing and production help. There's also Connan Mockasin, who appears, bass in hand, for a song. James has stepped out of his London bedroom and invited collaboration at an unprecedented level. Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake's wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.

All that said, in the best way possible, in no way shape or form is The Colour in Anything a rapid departure or reversal of what Blake does well. He still paints in deep blues and greys. His production is still unparalleled, spacious, and impossibly textured. His voice is still chilly and metallic, but maintains all its choir boy charm. His music is still towering and menacingly sad. He sings almost exclusively about lost love ("While you were away, I started loving you"), miscommunication ("I'm sorry I don't know how you feel"), miasma ("I hope my life is no sign of the times"), and defeat ("I want it to be over"). It can be brutal to hear the microscopic variations of themes hammered over and over again, making the album's pace something between apocalyptic and glacial. Each listen is draining in its way, and when it's over it feels like decades have passed. It can be so self-indulgent and extravagantly sad that it comes close to ruin porn. But it's worth it. And there are positive messages to eke out of the experience, vitally important ones; that it's all right to be hurt, or alone, that heartbreak helps fuel the flow of life.

As contemporary electronic music moves towards more caustic, crunchy, and self-referential tropes, Blake's music is almost resolutely old fashioned. It deploys auto-tune, expressive (bordering on Platonic) percussion, minimalist pianos, and throwback sub-bass warble and womps. He distills his influences of R&B, gospel, and the wide patina of British dance music in such strange and ineffable concoctions that it makes it difficult to not rewind certain chunks of drum breakdowns and airy synths continually. The melancholic funk of "I Hope My Life (1-800 Mix)" or the dive bomb synth swoops of "Radio Silence" show Blake's ability to orchestrate moments that mimic the stark romantic bombast of a Caspar David Friedrich painting. 

Yet ironically Blake's own grasp of lyric writing is still immature. He is never clever, catchy, or subtle. If anything he can even be comically melodramatic ("Where is my beautiful life?") or annoyingly whiny ("I can't believe that you don't want to see me"). It makes it so that you wish he would just hum and slur his words into indistinct hunks of emotion.There are also several missteps in how his voice is treated throughout the record. A high pitched vocal processing in "My Willing Heart" is nearly unlistenable. Guest Bon Iver's "hooooo" at the start of "I Need a Forest Fire" is laughable in its wimpy approximation of bravado. 

But these flubs are all forgivable. For the most part his singing can be vertiginous, isolating, and induce rapture when stretched into vast choruses. And when he's alone at the piano, turning off the electronics, Blake approaches the sublime. He may never be able to reproduce the discomfiting beauty of his cover of "A Case of You" but he can still yoke tears from dry eyes in vulnerable songs like "F.O.R.E.V.E.R." or the album's title track. In closer "Meet You in the Maze," arguably the album's best song, he abandons instruments all together and sings in a multitudinous acapella that washes away the harrowing experience of the last hour in a rush of catharsis. It's the closest the album comes to an anthem, and it's heartwarmingly about self-care, discovery, and acceptance. After the probing self-consciousness that preceded it, these five minutes of fragility feel healing. "It's me who makes the peace in me...Music can't be everything," he sings, a moment of pained honesty showing that amidst the grand big-budget drapery of this album, it's goals are actually quite modest. At the end of the day Blake just wants to prioritize happiness and self-knowledge above all else. It's a thoroughly unhip statement that makes you believe smiling, even if it hurts, is the coolest possible thing in the world you can do.

May 10, 2016 at 12:00PM
via Best New Albums - Pitchfork http://ift.tt/1rDSi0y

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