#Jenn Pelly

[fionaapplerocks]

SwitchedOnPop podcast #163 April 2020

[nonesuchrecords]

"The Troubadour: How Alynda Segarra, a former train-hopping punk from the Bronx, became one of America’s best songwriters," titles an extensive profile in New York magazine's Vulture on Segarra, aka Hurray for the Riff Raff and their new album, The Past Is Still Alive, written by Jenn Pelly. You can read it here.

[bitter69uk]

“In the aching grit and woah-oh-ohs of Ronnie Spector’s voice was a woman from Spanish Harlem harnessing her dreams and pushing them inside out. Drama, wonder, devastation, and confidence all coalesced in her perfect pop storm. Ronnie’s colossal vocals tore out a space in the universe in the name of love, which is to say desire: for the object of her affection as much as for her awe-inducing music itself. In every note, from her early days as a fabulous, beehived Ronette alongside her sister Estelle and cousin Nedra to her self-possessed solo work, Spector tenaciously held onto her dreams … The Ronettes proceeded to seek out Phil Spector: picking up the phone, locating the number for his Philles Records, and calling directly to mastermind the hit song they desperately craved. The partnership of Phil Spector and the Ronettes started with two hungry teenage sisters in their Harlem bedroom, laser-focused on a rock’n’roll fantasy that would change music forever … They released one album, 1964’s dazzling Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Featuring Veronica, a girl-group masterpiece … The baroque pop perfection of the Fabulous Ronettes was pushed into the stratosphere of greatness by Ronnie’s overflowing mix of innocence and rebellion …”

/ From Pitchfork’s obituary for Ronnie Spector by Jenn Pelly, January 2022 /

Grab the Maybelline Velvet Black eyeliner pencil and can of Aqua Net and start ratting-up that beehive like a teenage Jezebel … Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes featuring Veronica, the sole studio album by the iconic American girl group, was released this month (November 1964) sixty years ago! The album compiles the Ronettes’ triumphant statements like “Be My Baby”, “Baby I Love You”, “Walking in the Rain” and “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up”, songs that express the yearning soul of every tough but tender teenage bad girl ever born against Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound!

[burlveneer-music]

Ava Mendoza - The Circular Train - a true solo album, electric guitar only (and a touch of vocals)

Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her third solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr — plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt’s quartet — the guitarist’s name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar’s possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down. This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza’s thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock’n’roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill. Conceptually, The Circular Train is presented as a psychogeographical train ride through certain of Mendoza’s musical homelands. The songs draw on ancestral and recent familial memories, notably of her parents’ roots in mining towns — in her father’s home country of Bolivia and mother’s hometown of Butte, Montana, each country with its own history of colonialism, racism, forced labor, the eradication of culture and the subsequent excavation of it. (more...) — JENN PELLY Ava Mendoza- guitar, vox Compositions: 1-5 by Ava Mendoza (BMI) 6 by Gussie L. Davis, recorded/popularized by Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter

[wheretheeternalare]

2023 reading list :) bolded means i liked it

Companion Piece by Ali Smith Unnatural Death by Dorothy Sayers The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy Sayers Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov Lord Peter Views the Body by Dorothy Sayers Howards End by E. M. Forster The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly The Martian by Andy Weir The Minuteman Murder by Jane Langton The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco A Mercy by Toni Morrison Kindred by Octavia Butler Subculture: The Meaning of Style by Dick Hebdige Transformer by Ezra Furman Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin Rainbow Rainbow by Lydia Conklin Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston Still Life by Louise Penny The Best American Short Stories 2020 ed. Curtis Sittenfeld I Have Some Questions For You by Rebecca Makkai A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome Right Place, Right Time: The Life of a Rock & Roll Photographer by Bob Gruen A Prayer for the Crown-Shy by Becky Chambers All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews Island Zombie: Iceland Writings by Roni Horn There But For The by Ali Smith The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell A Dream of a Woman by Casey Plett The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice Is Justice For All by Shon Faye The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia by Philip Sidney Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America by Esther Newton Bellies by Nicola Dinan A Question of Proof by Nicholas Blake Girlfriends by Emily Zhou Decolonize Drag by Kareem Khubchandani Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance by Johnny Rogan England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie by Michael Bracewell Swann's Way by Marcel Proust

[palilalia]

PAL-087 Ava Mendoza LP/CD

"The Circular Train"

Ava Mendoza has never made an album quite as personal as her second solo full-length, The Circular Train. Through her decades of collaborations with Nels Cline, Carla Bozulich, William Parker, Fred Frith, Matana Roberts, and Mick Barr — plus years leading her power trio Unnatural Ways and playing in Bill Orcutt’s quartet — the guitarist’s name has become synonymous with virtuoso technique, raw passion, and visceral resonance, a player pushing the edges of the guitar’s possibilities. Along the way, from 2007 to 2023, Mendoza was writing these slow-burning, incandescent songs. The Circular Train is comprised solely of her single-tracked guitar playing and, on two songs, her corporeal singing. Her first solo LP of original material since relocating from California to New York City a decade ago, much of The Circular Train was honed amid pandemic years that clarified the virtues of slowing down. This expressive avant-rock is a definitive introduction to one of the most uncompromising and inquisitive visions in creative music. Mendoza’s thrilling melange of free jazz, blues, noise, classical training, and blazing experimental rock’n’roll all coheres with ecstatic feedback, with picking and solos that crest with shimmer. Sometimes she sounds like a one-woman Sonic Youth with guttural and poised vocals that equally evoke Patti Smith and blues greats like Jessie Mae Hemphill. Conceptually, The Circular Train is presented as a psychogeographical train ride through certain of Mendoza’s musical homelands. The songs draw on ancestral and recent familial memories, notably of her parents’ roots in mining towns — in her father’s home country of Bolivia and mother’s hometown of Butte, Montana, each country with its own history of colonialism, racism, forced labor, the eradication of culture and the subsequent excavation of it. These adventurous songs were composed in cars and planes, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, in Los Angeles and upstate New York — which is to say in motion. “Ride to Cerro Rico,” named for the mountain and silver mine at the center of Potosi, Bolivia, was inspired by Mendoza’s great grandmother’s life there in a Quechua mining family. “Dust From the Mines” drew from that history as well as Mendoza’s familial lineage of miners in Montana, building up to stunning swaths of shredded iridescence. “Pink River Dolphins” was inspired by a visit to the Amazon rainforest, swimming with dolphins alongside her father — the pink bufeos that inhabit both Bolivia and Columbia — and the song is dedicated to the memory of Mendoza’s late friend, the Colombian-American trumpeter jaimie branch. They shared a fascination with those intelligent and agile creatures who often communicate by echolocation. “Make a sound, it comes back around,” Mendoza sings, and later, “Echo, echo/The answer in a sound,” evoking what branch knew well: through music we navigate life. The Circular Train contains one cover, “Irene, Goodnight,” composed by Gussie Lord Davis and popularized by Leadbelly; Mendoza has been performing it for over 20 years. Almost as deeply embedded in her repertoire is the penultimate track, “The Shadow Song.” “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you good,” Mendoza sings on this song that she’s been reworking for over a decade, an emblem of devotion. “Treat your shadow kind and it might treat you right,” she repeats, becoming a blues mantra. What is a shadow self if not one’s secret world, which, once laid bare, awaits an echo, a return? — JENN PELLY 

[algebraicvarietyshow]

Incorporating Pitchfork into a men’s magazine also cements perceptions that music is a male leisure pursuit, and undermines the fact that it was women and non-binary writers – Lindsay Zoladz, Jenn Pelly, Carrie Battan, Amanda Petrusich, Sasha Geffen, Jill Mapes, Doreen St Félix, Hazel Cills; the fearless editing of Jessica Hopper and then the most recent editor-in-chief Puja Patel, to name but a handful – who transformed the website in the 2010s. It also suggests that music is just another facet of a consumer lifestyle, not a distinct art form that connects niche communities worthy of close reading, documentation and, when warranted, investigation. It was Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan who reported that Win Butler of Arcade Fire – a band entwined with the site’s rise to relevance – had been accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women (extramarital relationships that Butler says were consensual); Pitchfork that published writer Amy Zimmerman’s report into 10 women accusing Sun Kil Moon songwriter Mark Kozelek of sexual misconduct (Kozelek denies the allegations). I wonder whether GQ will invest resources into reports like this, to sit alongside e-commerce pieces on how “The Best Cordless Stick Vacuum Will Turn You Into a Clean Freak”, to take one current example from their culture news feed.

[fionaapplerocks]

Pitchfork is being 'folded into GQ magazine' which is corporate speak for 'you are (almost) all fired'.

@jennpelly

I don't know what will happen to the Pitchfork website or Youtube channel , but now might be a good time to revisit some of the many great interviews they have done over the years.

[nonesuchrecords]

Congratulations to Hurray for the Riff Raff, whose new album, The Past Is Still Alive, Pitchfork named one of the Best Albums of the 2020s So Far! "Nine albums in, Alynda Segarra made the record of their lifetime," Jenn Pelly exclaims, "one of their generation’s most fearless folk-rock storytellers." 

Kudos as well to Jeff Parker and Yasmin Williams, whose respective albums Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy and Urban Driftwood also made the list.

[thelonguepuree]

In the living room of his tiny, late-’80s home in Aberdeen, Washington—the small town where it has been said there is nothing to do but “smoke pot and worship Satan”—Kurt Cobain filled a bathtub with half a dozen turtles. They are model beings for shy, hardened people: wise, solitary, with wearied eyes, and the envious ability to escape inside of themselves completely. “Turtles basically have this ‘fuck you’ attitude,” Cobain explained in Michael Azerrad’s 1993 biography Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana. Giving voice to his aquatic comrades, he went on, “I’m stuck in the tank, I’m miserable, I hate you, and I’m not going to perform for you.” Being a classic water sign—sun in Pisces, moon in Cancer—Cobain naturally related: Those tough exteriors were facades for an overwhelming sensitivity to the merciless world, a feeling Cobain voiced with every note. Nirvana spent seven tortuous years and three hard-candied albums bottling the feeling of first seeing that this world is bullshit. Siphoning colossal power out of classic rock and delivering it back to the disempowered, Nirvana voiced the precise moment at which innocence is revealed to be merely a myth. No band before or since has made contempt so catchy, disenchantment so explosive, or disaffection so affecting. Negativity became a genre, a frisson of excitement, and an odd comfort. Nirvana’s beautiful melodies made ugliness a virtue. Sex Pistols said “no future” but for Nirvana things were worse. “No recess,” Cobain convulsed on “School,” from 1989 Sub Pop debut Bleach. “You’re in high school again.” Hell on Earth is not to come. It is right fucking now. We call that teen angst, but it is not only for teenagers. It hums in the background of life, flavored by the sour taste of knowing that things are mostly unfair. At any time, any age, it is possible to feel utterly disconnected, misunderstood, maladjusted, an alien dropped to Earth, suspicious, sullen, hands in pocket, headphones on: Nirvana. A Nirvana song is a coming-of-age line in the sand endlessly redrawn. It is an excavation of all the frustration below a quietly jaded heart. A Nirvana song is a reality in which you never fell off your skateboard. It is a Walkman that is a portal to some semi-universal misfit energy across time and space, an invitation to smoke weed as far away from the human race as you can manage on a Wednesday, the combustion that occurs when sequestered pain is finally unleashed. It has no gods and no masters. Cobain’s voice became a friend in the heads of lonely people on difficult terms with society everywhere, screaming but also subliminally whispering you are not alone.

Jenn Pelly, review of Nirvana’s Incesticide, Pitchfork, 2018 (x)

[spankymerve]

Remember that time when we all praised Jenn Pelly’s stanning for a sex creep because she once wrote an article about how you could tell how rapey a band was from their lyrics?

[theydontsleeponthebeachanymore]

we need this piece rn