Best New Tracks - Pitchfork

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Death Grips: "Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)" Posted: 14 Nov 2013 02:00 PM PST "Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)", the final track from the newly leaked Death Grips album Government Plates, is nearly seven minutes long, and never settles, for three consecutive seconds, into comprehensibility. Think about the speed with which your mind seizes on and processes even the tiniest scrap of recorded music—we ID big pop songs from their opening seconds, they are specifically engineered to make sure we can do so. Now think about the harrowing intensity required to throw our relentless pattern-seeking ears off balance for that long. Death Grips are serious about chaos—as a creative strategy, as a way of life, as a healthy tonic to proscribe to whoever they can lure near them—and their best music processes and atomizes this impulse. "Whatever I Want" is Death Grips operating at their sensory peak, a falling-elevator-shaft collision of recorded sounds that interrupt each other ceaselessly. There are a million ideas here, and every sound—the too-bright synth arpeggio; the brief four-on-the-floor pulse; the new age keys and backwards drums—is the sound of arriving calamity, a heavy object plummeting towards fragile netting.

Angel Olsen: "Forgiven/Forgotten" Posted: 14 Nov 2013 11:00 AM PST Front page photo by Zia Anger Most of the songs on Angel Olsen's bewitching full-length debut Half Way Home may have been acoustic, but no matter: her voice box is its own portable source of electricity. Olsen's live-wire vocals lit up muted, sparsely arranged folk numbers like "Acrobat" and "Tiniest Seed"—the latter of which offered up a line that captured the album's underlying tension: "It's known that the tiniest seed is both simple and wild." But how wild that seed's grown: On "Forgiven/Forgotten" the explosive lead-off single from her second album Burn Your Fire for No Witnesses, the instruments around her finally match the intensity of her voice. Foreshadowed earlier this year by her rollicking single "Sweet Dreams", "Forgiven/Forgotten" is an inspired blast of scorched-earth psych-pop—all charred distortion and kick drum blows that sounds like somebody's trying to stomp out a fire. Olsen's voice grows in power as it rushes towards its bared-heart chorus, "I don't know anything! I don't know anything! But I love you." At that, the kick drum steps off. May as well let it burn.