Album Of The Week: Courtship Ritual Pith

I might as well get some boring full-disclosure stuff out of the way first: Nick Sylvester, a great friend and former colleague of mine, produced this album, and he's putting it out on Godmode, his label. The fact that Nick worked on this album has a lot to do with the fact that I listened to it in the first place, but it has nothing to do with Pith appearing in this column this week. And maybe I should get used to writing paragraphs like this one, because with the direction Godmode has been going lately, this probably won't be the last time an album on that label lands an Album Of The Week distinction. Nick is a former rock critic, maybe the best of his generation. He doesn't really write anymore, for reasons too calamitous and goofy to get into here. So instead, he's directed his critical ear toward the task of actually putting out music. If you listen to Common Interests Were Not Enough To Keep Us Together, the label compilation he released earlier this year, you'll hear hard-scraping postpunk, psychedelic noise, and dizzy synthpop. Shamir, a 19-year-old singer from Las Vegas, has built a name by wailing chiffon, exultant disco-house, and he was on that compilation. So were Courtship Ritual, a Brooklyn duo whose two members play in Shamir's backing band and who, on their own, have crafted a spare, haunting, rhythmically focused form of indie-pop that's capable of pushing in a ton of different directions. Pith is their first album, and you need it in your life -- not because my friend put it out, but because it's great.