Send "Autre Ne Veut " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Before starting to read this review of Autre Ne Veut's Body EP, I assume you took a few seconds to investigate the above cover image. It is what you think it is. Not only is it attention-grabbing, it's a good metaphor for the music of this yet-unidentified New York-based artist. You probably wouldn't refer to the extreme close-up of a female sex organ as pornography-- the clinical, uncontextualized presentation is absent any eroticism. Pornography's aim is to provide pleasure, usually presenting the most attractive and desirable package possible. The same is also typically true of pop music, yet Auture Ne Veut is every bit as obstinate as Body's cover about taking pleasure-producing elements and making them raw and discomfiting. In much the same way the photo delivers a view of sex so intimate and vivid it might leave you squeamish, Body's music forswears the niceties of pop and R&B, instead rubbing its squirmingly real feeling in the listener's face.Body picks up where Autre Ne Veut left off on his terrific 2010 self-titled debut, utilizing pop hooks and R&B declarations predominantly mined from the 1980s, but presenting them as garish and unhinged. The results fleetingly inspire nostalgia, only to warp those comforts into something unsettling and queasy. It's terrain also covered by the likes of How to Dress Well, the Knife, and Ariel Pink: Autre Ne Veut shares those artists' mix of a strongly expressive pop instinct and an arty deconstructionist bent. Starting with disorienting synths and unnerving background vocals, EP opener "Sweetheart" immediately announces its disruptive intentions. Autre Ne Veut's vocals bend and leer drunkenly, sometimes sounding sickeningly sweet or affected, sometimes painfully sincere, as he competes with layers of swirling keyboards and blasted-out beats. It's followed by the lone throwaway of the four cuts, "Not the One", a scant two minutes of guest vocalist She Wolf's single repeated lyric ("This is not the one that you've been promising me") sliced and diced and plied with spooky synths....full text |
| Xlr8r |
| Autre Ne Veut is easily the hardest pill to swallow when it comes to the extremely nebulous indie-R&B thing. Though his nasally, often grating voice stands apart from his peers first and foremost, the music that drives the Brooklyn artist's discordant pop also requires a certain amount of patience; at first, you may need to give it the benefit of the doubt. But as we experienced with Autre Ne Veut's self-titled LP for Olde English Spelling Bee from last year, the more time one spends with his strange sounds, the more one can appreciate what he is doing. On the new four-song Body EP, a record largely about personal relationships and identity, that process is streamlined to great effect. While "Not the One" and upbeat closer "Your Clothes" are both decent tracks in their own left-of-center ways, opening slow jam "Just Return" and lead single "Sweetheart" make up the meatier portions of Body. The first tune on the EP starts out employing a crunchy beat reminiscent of James Blake's "Unluck," which is soon after paired with a couple of melodically unhinged synths and Autre Ne Veut's inimitable rasp. These mismatched pieces somehow quickly coalesce into an exciting and uniquely coherent pop song, which sets a precedent for the remainder of the Body EP, one that its creator consistently follows in a variety of his own twisted ways....full text |
| Factmag |
| Autre Ne Veut’s self-titled album last year was a minor masterpiece: the sound of teen memories layered up and crudely compressed into an undercooked lasagne of late nights spent listening to chart pop on a Walkmen, torturing yourself over the girl or boy you couldn’t get, and Cruel Intentions. On Body, he’s taken this perverse approach to pop music and twisted it even further. If you’ve heard Autre Ne Veut, then you won’t find much that surprises you about Body. It’s a natural step up, with clearer production and mastering values that, rather than strip the music of its personality and sensibility, accentuate those squeamish harmonic clashes that make Autre’s sound so irresistible. In many ways, it’s a more powerful record than ANV, with more punishing backing and some extreme moments of attention to detail: flickers of texture and subdued squeals that you only consciously pick up on when you really listen. But while it is a step up, it’s also familiar: both in Autre’s voice, which is one of the most distinctive assets of any modern American pop artist, and the songwriting, which sticks in your head to the point where it’s easy to convince yourself that these must be covers. In short, it’s the sound of a great modern artist getting better, with a vagina (kind of) on the sleeve....full text |
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