Wrekmeister Harmonies face the darkness before the dawn on We Love to Look at the Carnageon April 10, 2020 at 8:41 pm

Enigmatic former Chicagoans Wrekmeister Harmonies recorded their seventh full-length, We Love to Look at the Carnage (Thrill Jockey), in a cold, isolated farmhouse in upstate New York with producer Martin Bisi. This time around, the core duo of J.R. Robinson and Esther Shaw added insightful, versatile percussionist Thor Harris (Swans, Shearwater) and confrontational, challenging electronicist Jamie Stewart (Xiu Xiu). Neither of these musicians is a stranger to the trevails of laying oneself open in dark and challenging work, which makes them perfect collaborators for an album whose loose concept has to do with the late hours that start well after midnight and end before dawn. We Love to Look at the Carnage is subtler and more restrained than some of Wrekmeister’s heavier records, such as 2016’s Light Falls. On these tracks, Robinson’s voice narrates a struggle against breakdown moment by moment, with clenched-jaw determination (think Nick Cave with more self-control or David Tibet with less). The band creates a thick and spiky environment in which to nestle: the way Shaw’s violin and Harris’s percussion adorn the churning riffs of “The Rat Catcher” adds grace to the horror-inducing inevitability of time passing and sweeping people away. The sepulchral windswept echoes of “The Coyotes of Central Park” give a rapt tenderness to a heavy lullaby evoking nature’s reclamation of human spaces. On their Facebook page, Wrekmeister Harmonies describe their sound as “pastoral doom,” and here that’s apt. This album is pastoral in both senses of the word: it’s spacious enough to reflect the peace and the terror of the countryside, and it can also conjure visions of rogue clergy ministering to flocks of parishioners whose desperation has sent them in search of salvation. v

Wrekmeister Harmonies face the darkness before the dawn on We Love to Look at the Carnageon April 10, 2020 at 8:41 pm Read More »

Prolific Chicago rapper Adamn Killa makes his own fun in self-isolation on Hit the Adamnon April 10, 2020 at 8:49 pm

On March 11, prolific Chicago rapper Adamn Killa debuted a new dance on Triller that he calls “Hit the Adamn,” performing it to a sample of his new song of the same name. In the clip, Adamn cocks his arm at a 90-degree angle and leans his shoulder to one side, then makes sharp crouching movements in response to the track’s thundering, minimal bass–it’s simple enough, but the connection of the song to the dance is so unpredictable that I can’t imagine anybody actually learning it. Lots of local rappers with untraditional approaches to the genre have emerged in the past five years or so, but Adamn knows better than most how to embrace the whimsy in his style without undermining his workmanlike dedication to the craft of hip-hop. On his recent self-released EP, also called Hit the Adamn, he half-whispers through raps about his place in the world of hip-hop, his flow teetering on the edge of the beat–but even when Adamn sounds like he’s tripping over himself, he never loses his footing. Wild affectations rub up against dry detachment in his delivery, creating a strange but magical friction. He releases music frequently enough (Hit the Adamn follows up February’s Life of Whodeywant) that he can quickly pivot to respond to the news, and on the new EP he uses “Wash My Hands” to address everybody’s least favorite new virus. It’s one of several songs on Hit the Adamn with hooks as catchy as jingles, and some of their instrumentals evoke nursery rhymes too (on “Throw in the Towel,” producer the Legendary Fya Man interpolates “Mary Had a Little Lamb”). This makes them perfect for replaying in your head to make sure you keep scrubbing long enough. v

Prolific Chicago rapper Adamn Killa makes his own fun in self-isolation on Hit the Adamnon April 10, 2020 at 8:49 pm Read More »