Patrick Sisson - Writer, Journalist, Cultural Documentarian, Music Lover

Category: Pitchfork

Article Pitchfork December 14, 2009 Link 91. HEALTH “Die Slow” [Lovepump United] It’s fitting that HEALTH’s most melodic song to date manages to rip and rend something sweet from a grind. It’s a hook that could have been fashioned from sheet metal, but adorned with wiry guitar and Jacob Duzsik’s airy vocals, the cycling, jagged […]

Review Pitchfork November 30 Link 6.8 Jahdan Blakkamoore’s solo debut begins with familiar sounds: a coy flute melody, a clapping cadence, and then the sub-aqueous bass notes of Baby Kite and Nokea’s “Reef”, the slow burner that kicks off DJ /rupture’s Uproot mix. The track– co-produced here by Rupture and Matt Shadetek and rechristened “Get […]

Article Pitchfork November 25, 2009 Link Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy Edited by Nikolaos Kotsopoulos; Black Dog publishing This thick tome might as well be called the field guide to krautrock (“notice the long, unkempt hair and colorful plumage on Gerd”). The original genre tag in part represented the condescension directed toward this vibrant […]

Interview Pitchfork November 23, 2009 Link A lecturer in music culture at the University of East London, Scottish producer, DJ, and theorist Steve Goodman is anything but an ivory tower intellectual. How many of your professors have spun at Fabric? Under the name Kode9, he has immersed himself in the subject he writes about and […]

Music Review Pitchfork November 10, 2009 Link 7.7 “Life is nothing but death and taxes/ And all the trees that get the axes,” Pylon singer Vanessa Briscoe Hay dryly coos on “K”, against a backdrop of prickly guitar tones and a taut bass line. “I’m tired of moving my jaw,” she also sneers, in case […]

Music Review Pitchfork October 23, 2009 Link 7.2 When instrumental rock bands get tapped for soundtracks, it can be kind of a gut-check that tests how a wider audience may view their music. Sigur Rós’ folkloric melodrama and emotive language made sense as a backdrop for Vanilla Sky, itself a sort of sci-fi fairytale about […]

Music Review Pitchfork October 12, 2009 Link 6.7 Showcasing his stuttering spin on hip-hop beats, 23-year-old Glaswegian producer Ross Birchard, who records as Hudson Mohawke, demonstrates no shortage of ideas and energy on Butter. Like the album’s neon-scorched cover, which includes hawks with mohawks, he doesn’t do restraint or subtlety. “Joy Fantastic” has to be […]

Music Review Pitchfork October 2009 Link 6.9 A Strange Arrangement, in addition to being the name of Mayer Hawthorne’s falsetto-laced debut, also describes the story behind the making of this one-man soul studio. Performing in L.A. as DJ Haircut, Michigan-born hip-hop fan Drew Cohen thought it would be interesting to record his own sample-friendly music. […]

Music Review Pitchfork June 2009 Link 4.5 “Oh you don’t know the half of it.” Said in an over-the-top manner, this was David Bowie’s inauspicious kick-off to an over-sentimental start to “Life on Mars”. Like the rest of his 1999 performance on “VH1’s Storytellers” series, it poses a question, or more accurately, suggests the audience […]

Music Review Pitchfork September 2009 Link 5.6 Getting called a virtuoso or mad scientist comes with some heavy baggage for a musician, so it says a lot about Tom Jenkinson, who records as Squarepusher, that he’s been repeatedly labeled as both. Getting tagged with these contradictory stereotypes– a classically trained workhorse mastering the canon versus […]