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RICHARD PAPIERCUTS

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    RICHARD PAPIERCUTS

    IF

    [engl] Influenced in equal measure by both sides of the street and the top and bottom of the charts, Richard Papiercuts’ “IF” sets a new standard for ambitious pop music on a shoestring budget. Meticulously recorded throughout New York City over the course of a turbulent year, Papiercuts & co. traffic in shades of light and dark. Like a master of ceremonies at an underground cabaret, Papiercuts -- a mystery man of uncertain origin and pedigree -- is an expert guide to the many quandaries of a modern metropolitan existence. “IF” is unafraid to explore a complex inner life rife with anxiety and doubt, yet reveling in the sensual pleasures only the contemporary cityscape can provide. “IF” is the ultimate marriage of subversive, underground sensibilities and classic songwriting craftsmanship silhouetted on a larger-than-life canvas. This music encompasses an ordinary life played out in widescreen. We are all our own celluloid heroes, Papiercuts seems to be telling us. Embrace your starring role, be your biggest fan. “How It Really Begins” opens the album as an interruption -- the band in mid-rock-out -- a throbbing pulse peppered with sudden starts and stops, used here not as demonstrations of musical prowess, but as building blocks of tension. Papiercuts’ deep voice walks a thin line between utter sincerity and gentle mocking -- here used to excellent effect as the band engages in a sort of stately post-punk, all jagged propulsion and knowing winks. “How It Really Begins” is a suitably thrilling beginning to the masterful new album by enigmatic troubadour Richard Papiercuts. “Bull and Cup Relax” is a slowly twisting trip through latter-day psychpop, an update on Tears For Fears’ update on The Beatles. Future smash “Peanut Butter Is Back” features an instant hook that could be chanted by cheerleaders or groups of school children. Viral YouTube videos are waiting in the wings for this one.... Dousing cocaine dreams in cascades of champagne, “The Sorrow Of Faith” is a late-night lament that summons decadent images of 1980s excess -- an attempt to maintain an unsustainable harem, and no amount of silk pillows will cushion the inevitable fall. Bryan Ferry is on the phone right now, asking his manager why nobody has brought him a song this good in years. “The Sorrow OF Faith” works perfectly as both reflecting pool and enticing come-on -- it is the hand that reaches out from the darkness to clasp your own. “Twelve Days” is a beautiful pop-psych gem that gleams like The Byrds covering The Velvet Underground. The song tries to hide its darkness from you, but it is unmistakably present in the gently roiling verses. “They Tried To Change Me” taps back into Richard Papiercuts’ aggressive side, utilizing sheets of guitars and a pounded piano to air its complaints. “Now I’ve Found You” leans hard into its romantic overtures, but allows them to include family into its lovefest. “Tired Of Playing The Drums” is some kind of funhouse mirror take on a Dire Straits or Don Henley ‘80s chestnut. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and how. The smoldering Papercuts of “Personality” is the smoothest talker at the bar, and you can’t resist his charms; the music swooning and swelling along with you. After such an eventful journey, “Manhattanville” is the perfect endpoint, its deadpan coda telling us that “Life is only so long.” Richard Papiercuts is adult music made by adult adults. “IF” is an album that harkens back to the old world of Brecht and Weill, Bowie and Cale -- and is surely one of 2015’s boldest musical statements.
    Format
    LP
    Release-Datum
    06.10.2015
     
  • 01. Judgment
    02. Reunion
    03. Anita, Sing
    04. Alma
    05. After Hours
    06. Night Beats Night
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    RICHARD PAPIERCUTS

    Reunion

    [engl] Hello, friend. I hope all is well with you. I am writing to let you know that my new album, Reunion, is now available in a limited vinyl edition on the ever/never label. After working with a backing band for the last two records, I decided to return to writing and recording alone in the studio, the way I made A Sudden Shift ten years ago, and the way I did for nearly 20 years before that. I started tracking for Reunion at the tail end of 2019 with my engineer, Gregg, at a beautifully appointed studio in Connecticut. That proved a slow and expensive process, and of course it ground to a halt when the pandemic struck in March 2020. I thought I’d make the best of it, start over and try fleshing out the songs at home on the Mac, so that when the world opened up again I would have a detailed blueprint for the album, and I could go back to the studio and track all of it quickly and methodically. Instead, I wound up making the entire record at home. Gregg’s mix and mastering job made these homemade tracks go bang, and thanks to his finesse, it is the best-sounding record I’ve made so far. Last night when we listened to the test pressing of the album at e/n’s offices, a friend remarked that “Anita, Sing” is an adult contemporary track. I winced, reflexively, but of course, she was right: the song is based on the changes in Anita Baker’s “Real Love,” a perennial on AC radio, and the song is partly about Anita Baker. I had worked on the track for weeks and weeks, revising the lyrics, adding bits and pieces of piano and fake brass, and I guess along the way I forgot that I had set out to write an adult contemporary ballad. Sam Cooke has been on my mind a lot these past several years, and he was on my mind when I made this record. So were Prince, Al Green, Luther Vandross, and Rick James. Not to mention all the wonderful, shameless Brits, beginning with Bowie, who fashioned improbably slick art music from strands of Motown, Stax, Philly Int’l, etc. — people like Mark Hollis, George Michael, Annie Lennox, Peter Gabriel. Of course I was also thinking about the tumult and the horrors that enveloped us in mid-2020. It would be trite to claim that this is my COVID record, but obviously, those realities animated the making of the album, materially and otherwise. “Judgment” turned out like a song that Killing Joke might have made for a car commercial; “Night Beats Night” is a groove built from pieces of “Footsteps in the Dark,” “Careless Whisper,” and maybe “You Scared the Love Right Out of Me.” If they seem opaque — and they do even to me, at times — it’s because I couldn’t find the words to adequately express the rage and sorrow of those summer months. It would be facile to say that the songs on Reunion are examples of “eighties music.” I certainly don’t hear any period effects, sonic or otherwise, and I’m not interested in nostalgia. It’s true, though, that “Alma” is based on a Motown groove that many musicians of the eighties, especially British ones, pilfered indiscriminately: The Jam, The Cure, The Pretenders, and The Smiths all had their way with it, to fabulous effects; and of course Phil Collins, who understood that in pop music there is no such thing as being too obvious, covered the whole tune and took it to number one (UK). It’s also true that half the songs on Reunion have a modular architecture: discreet sections built up and layered in different configurations to create intros, verses, choruses, and bridges. This process, a distant descendant of cubism, was first applied to pop songwriting in the mid-1980s, when digital technology made it easy to move around chunks of a song and rearrange them, and it gave rise to the 12” remix boom that extended through the end of the decade. I confess that this period, which framed my childhood, is an affective ground-zero for me: that was the music that first gripped me and shaped my sensibility, and I find myself returning to it instinctively in my middle age. I hope this record finds a home with you and that you cherish it as much as I do. Sincerely, Richard Papiercuts
    Format
    LP lim
    Release-Datum
    18.04.2022
     
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    RICHARD PAPIERCUTS

    Twisting The Night

    [engl] When we last checked in with urban troubadour Richard Papiercuts, he was leading his band through the ambitious pop of IF, his debut for Ever/Never. A major statement from an unknown artist, IF was ripping with drama and daring listeners into a twilight world rife with lust, life, and the many contradictions contained within such four-letter words. Now three years wiser, Papiercuts has shed some of the mystery to confront the camera dead-on. Twisting the Night is a glossier production, timeless while conjuring the flickering pop-surrealism of ‘80s music videos and the grandiose maximalism of Peter Gabriel, INXS, and Tears for Fears, but on a 20 hour studio time limit. Over the course of TTN's four songs, Papiercuts and his crack band sculpt stately tableaus that hew toward the dark side of pop while avoiding cliches and sentimentality. 'There’s no correction, no distortion / in the way your voice cuts through the air': So begin the lyrics to opening cut 'A Place to Stay,' which serves as a re-introduction to Papiercuts’s sound-world, this time around avoiding obfuscation and willing to meet the listener halfway. 'Starless Summer Night', an epic, seven-minute centerpiece, is described by Papiercuts as a 'lucid nightmare' in the tradition of the Elevators and Tom Verlaine, but where apocalyptic dread mingles with the everyday anxieties of fatherhood. This is big pop music for big hearts and minds. But the hit on Twisting the Night is 'The Riddle,' a shimmering anthem that whorls about like a mirage, seducing the listener as it takes its time to get into its zone. 'World and Not World' closes out the EP with hints of Madchester poking through the rhythm ’n’ wooze. 'Turn it off,' Papiercuts pleads. But we’ve got a better idea: flip the record over and start the journey again.
    Format
    LP
    Release-Datum
    07.12.2018