Yeah, it's pretty great. I think the key joy of this album is just how hard it bumps. Not unlike Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavillion-transition from folk-jam freakshow pop to trunk-rattling (freakshow) dance-pop, Tomboy finds Panda moving away from the airy jangle of Person Pitch towards gut-punch visceral beats. Your favorite backpack rapper will, justifiably, probably try to rap over the breakbeat of "Slow Motion", and four-on-the-floor stomper "Afterburner" is as close to a traditional house track as Panda Bear is going to get. The less percussive numbers are often just as impressive - "Surfer's Hymn" beautifully gets at that stoned-Brian-Wilson vibe that was so great on Person Pitch and "Scheherazade" does sample-based minimalism and deeply poignant vocals better than anything James Blake has come up with. It's also thoroughly fascinating to see the kind of tones that Panda can get out of his guitar - for every instance where the guitar actually sounds like what it is, there's a few where its rhymthic strum is morphed into a sound wholly different and fascinating.
If I have a complaint - and I do, because I'm insufferable - it would be that Tomboy has an occassional tendency to succumb to No Age syndrome, which is to say that the songs here will sometimes avoid progression in favor of a kind of pointless repetition. The first minute of "Slow Motion" is as exhilarating a minute of music as has been released this year; the next three minutes of "Slow Motion" are largely indistinguishable from the first minute of "Slow Motion". It's not that I'm bagging on repetition as a musical style; it's just that on something like Person Pitch, the basic pattern of repetition was paired with a continual subtle build over sometimes 12-minute stretches - there was always the feeling of forward motion even if the album took it's time lingering on a particularly cool loop. Some of the songs here manage that kind of progression on shorter timescales - album peak "Alsatian Darn" in particular - but too often it feels more like the padding of a brilliant one-minute musical idea to full track length. Of course, those one-minute ideas are incredibly strong, so this is all a fairly minor complaint, but I think that's the key difference between this album and its classic predecessor. Panda Bear -"Alsatian Darn" (mp3)
Best album cover of the year, certainly, and quite a piece of music to boot. As the Malick-inspired title suggests, Dirty Beaches (Alex Zhang Hungtai's solo make cinematic music that's largely about atmosphere, and thrillingly, it's a kind of atmosphere not often explored by other acts - call it the brooding, tormented proto-punk side of early 50s rock and roll. Hungtai gets a hell of a lot of scene-setting mileage about of simple technique, taking sounds and instrumentation that are time-worn and familiar - his Roy Orbison-esque crooning voice/yelp, a rusty electric guitar throb, and lyrical content about speedways, sweet 17s, and other Americana cliches - and twisting them into alien structures and contexts, like grinding minimalism aiming for creepy and relentless tension, or lovelorn ballads with a murderous edge. It's a concise little album but one that's tremendously effective - one of the highest compliments I can give is that Hungtai's name-checking of David Lynch and Blue Velvet is interviews is entirely apt and warranted. One could certainly throw the same objections about repetition here that I mentioned with Panda Bear, but it's more excusable here - experimental though it may be, Panda Bear in the end wants to make pop, while Dirty Beaches really just wants to get under your skin.
He's kind of like Travis McCoy with more tattoos, more singing, and more overt weed references. Wiz benefits from some fun production on his new LP Rolling Papers, but ends up sounding like little more than a more competent version of Kid Cudi. Is that a bad thing though? The weird part about this album is despite the fact that the vocals and verses are never all that stellar, they don't ruin any songs in particular.
Well they almost do. "Hopes and Dreams" for example has a ridiculous couple lines about how Wiz could take you back to his place, or he would go to your place, but he will still be throwing money in the air and watching it fall down. "Roll Up" has one of the most stupidly saccharine hooks, with kind of silly synths. Wiz even has a dumb breakup song, titled "Get Your Shit".
But, where this album hits, the atmospherics take over and one is sort of lulled into not scrutinizing Wiz quite so closely. "The Race" has a couple clever double entendres about papers (hurr hurr), but the beat is just so soothing, that all you want to do is take a drive in the late summer sun with the windows down. "Top Floor" has that similar hazy jam mentality. "Black and Yellow" should pump you up and make you root for the Steelers, but aside from the entertaining beat, the rhymes are forgettable. Not to mention that Weezy totally killed it on "Green and Yellow", for example:
"We knocked the Eagles and the Falcons and the Bears off / Now we ’bout to cut Troy Polamalu hair off"
But for Wizzy not Weezy, the critic in me wonders what an instrumental of this album would sound like, or what a more artful MC would have done with these beats, but the homie in me just exhales, relaxes, and ignores the obvious shortcomings of an otherwise entertaining pop record.
ANDY: Man, TV on the Radio. Their first album, 2004's Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, had a couple of absolutely captivating tracks, like the vocal feats of strength on "Staring at the Sun". Their sophomore effort and best album to date, 2006's Return to Cookie Mountain, was a more complete record, with the unavoidable single "Wolf Like Me" driving the LP along. 2008's Dear Science was a largely forgettable affair if you ask me, although Raj had some loopy theory about "Golden Age" being a funk song.
So it is with some trepidation that I listened to Nine Types of Light. Will it be a return to form, or a continuation of the last record's blandness? I just hadn't heard anything from these guys in the last five years that even remotely resembled the sonic depth of "I Was A Lover" or "Hours". This album has somewhat conventional beginnings, with Babatunde Adebimpe's incredible pipes wasted on the nearly spoken word track "Second Song". "No Future Shock" has more of the rhythms that Cookie Mountain did so well, but again with oddly uninspiring lyrics and vocal delivery. It's oddly a track that seems like it would be have been a great b-side from The Yeah Yeah Yeahs It's Blitz, with Karen O doing her thing all over. "Killer Crane" is a nice slow jam, totally fine, but not that remarkable. "Will Do" is actually pretty sweet, if again, not as lyrically or vocally crazy.
Just when you think I'm really going to dump on this album, "New Cannonball Run" saves the day! This is the TV on the Radio I'm trying to listen to. Big fuzzy synths, fat drums, tight verses, that trademark falsetto, and...horns! The type of ambition and complexity that seemed absent on Dear Science is back once more. "Repetition" is also fun, with little guitar licks where the synths were, and "Forgotten" also has this great interplay between the light cymbals and bells, and the lower synth tones, before it explodes with all the horns and guitars and greatness.
So yeah, 10 tracks, 43 some-odd minutes, and I tend to like the second half of this record more than the first. It's not Return to Cookie Mountain, but thankfully it's also not Dear Science. Glad to hear some of the more complex jams, and I'm looking forward to seeing these guys again this summer. Hopefully it won't be like the last time, with the guys in the Birkenstocks head-banging and ruining "Staring at the Sun" for me. Fuck those guys.
RAJ:Dear Science has less sonically complex production than TV on the Radio's earlier work (although saying that Science's production is bland is typical Andy exaggeration/baiting) - but when it comes to boring trivialities like melodies and hooks, Dear Science blows away the band's other albums by simply trying to actually, like, have them. It's kind of striking how tossed-off the actual songwriting is on the band's two biggest tracks- "Staring at the Sun" is basically a cool bassline and a single verse searching for an actual whole song, and "Wolf Like Me" has an amazingly bland three-note chorus if you actually pay attention to it (which you usually don't, of course - these tracks succeed because of Dave Sitek's production sleight-of-hand). Dear Science, on the other hand, was an album with real songs that you could sing along to and sometimes even dance to (maybe "Golden Age" isn't fucking George Clinton, but you'd be hard-pressed not to call it funky - and "Red Dress" is a goddamned Afrobeat tribute). It was an album that was fun - entertainment with hints of dystopia instead of dystopia with hints of entertainment - which is why it was great (and also why it was spectacularly overrated, but that's another can of worms).
The main point, I guess, is that I don't really have any idea where Andy is coming from, just as I'm totally baffled by his assertion that Nine Types of Light is more in the ambitious and complex vein of Cookie Mountain thanDear Science, when it seems to me like the album sounds way more like the latter instead of the former. This is again stripped-down production in service of straight-ahead songwriting instead of the kind of baroque production showcase that we've seen from these guys in the past. In fact, it's kind of surprising just how conventional a lot of this songwriting is (as I've mentioned before) - this is even closer than Dear Science is to a pop album, with a whole assortment of gooey love ballads along with pretty straight-ahead rawk numbers like "Caffeinated Consciousness". When Tunde sings "Every night we're on a mission/to shift your known position/into the light" on "Second Song", that's a pure dancefloor chorus - in "Dear Science", even the bouncier tracks would start off with things like "Hey jackboot, fuck your war!"
The straightforwardness isn't a bad thing but it certainly keeps this album from being the kind of Statement About Our Times that we're used to from the band - the vibe is much more about great musicians just having fun together. Personally, I don't much care for most of these ballads - great singer that he is, Tunde has always seemed more Thom-Yorke-cerebral than convincing loverboy, and none of these earnest love songs really manage to convince me otherwise. But when the band gets into the high-energy genre-smashing freakouts that they specialize in, the results are predictably great - I agree with Andy that taut, synth-fueled groove "New Cannonball Run" is the best thing on the album (props by the way to any song that name-checks both Cannonball Run and The 400 Blows) and generally the faster the tempo the better the songs are here. So overall, a very solid record, but far from the kind of earthshaking "important" records that have been this band's bread and butter.
Once upon a time I listened to a ton of music from Japan. Something refreshing about it. I guess it started with Boredoms, but then took a turn to Keiji Haino, Merzbow, Ruins, etc. etc. Something was just so refreshing about this weird noise coming from East Asia. At the time, Boris's Pink was getting rave reviews out here, so I snagged it, liked a lot of it, but I wasn't a huge fan of the metal-garage burners that Boris was putting out. I did search their back catalog, and enjoyed a lot of what I heard, less concise and more expansive than Pink. But I mean, drone and half hour noise sometimes leaving you want a crisp A-B-A song form. Then Rainbow comes out, and I love it. I had that on so much. And quickly enough I realized that the reason I loved it so much had little to do with Boris, but rather Michio Kurihara's fuzz-pedal laden guitar solos. Just mind-blowing phrases; I'm not sure what gear he's using but dang. So I've listened to some of his other work with other groups, but not enough to really know what I'm talking about. But somehow recently I stumbled upon Kurihara's only solo album, 2005's Sunset Notes. This is exactly what I needed. It's Kurihara's guitar without the gloom of Boris (not to say I don't appreciate Boris's sound, it's just nice to have Kurihara's own arrangements - a bit more light-hearted, pensive, and more psychedelic). Overall, it's just a solid album. A couple tracks feature some Japanese lady, but the tension and release of Kurihara's axe-work is the obvious focus of each album - even the surf-rock track "Twilight Mystery of a Russian Cowboy." But that track is pretty uncharacteristic of the other 8 songs. The Boomkat review basically sums up my experience:
"...Yep this man is a demon when confronted with six strings and a pick, and across nine tracks Kurihara shows us his severe and virtuoso skill, drenches it in reverb and implores us to punch the sky with the kind of glee only ever gleaned from extended guitar solos. Melodic, jubilant and effortlessly experimental 'Sunset Notes' is just the album I've always wanted from Kurihara, and now sidestepping from his supporting roles in Ghost and Damon & Naomi his talents are framed quite wonderfully. It might not sound too tantalising to be sold an album which is balanced around guitar solos, but this is where 'Sunset Notes' differs from all preconceptions, and rather than sink into self-indulgence it seems that the record is made with the listener in mind. I read somewhere that Kurihara still has a full time job at a factory in Japan, and this kind of connection with 'real life' is evident as his fretwork lets us soar into oblivion, it's rock 'n roll without the meaningless excess, and in that there is real beauty."
I'm a college student with no income. Chances are if you're reading this, you are too, or you work for Lexmark and spend all of your money on cheap whiskey. None of his songs are on youtube or anything, so if you want this album, the link is below. Enjoy.
The problem with Jay-Z nowadays is not that he stopped rapping about the streets, but that he started rapping about himself - his real self, that is, not the highly theatrical version of himself that used to be his main topic. There is not a lot of drama in the situations that populate Jay-Z songs now, like Jay-Z meeting Obama or whining about AutoTune, and the real drama that I'm sure is present in his life would probably be bad for RocaWear as a business if he actually talked about it. Sociopaths and idiots (especially those that care about "realness") aside, drama is the real reason that people like gangsta rap - it's a world with huge stakes and larger-than-life anti-heroes and villains.
Raekwon (who I'm sure lives in the Tri-state suburbs and sends his kids to private school in reality) gets this, which is why his own take on high-powered (albeit still criminal rap) businessman rap in Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang is so much more interesting than something like The Blueprint 3. Raekwon doesn't sacrifice the grit and vivid detail of his street reminiscences when he transitions to loftier realms - if he was talking about using milk as a secret ingredient while cooking crack before, now he's showing off the golden rocket launcher his aunt brought him from Rwanda and traveling to Scotland to hunt down a former business associate.
The micro detail in Raekwon's stuff always feels vibrant and fresh, even if his macro goal is emphatically the same exact thing it's been since 1994 - nothing but plain ol' hard-boiled criminal storytelling. Raekwon scoffs at that traditional rockist idea of innovation or progression (understandably enough given how that rule has worked out for other Wu members - Ghost's "R&B album" is among the worst things any Clan member has done, and RZA is probably hanging out in an opium den making psychedelia right now). I suspect he'd even take issue with that Big Boi chestnut about "writ[ing] knockout songs" while other rappers "spit punchlines for money" - who the fuck has time for songs? Song, at least in the rap world, implies that you have to have a hook (which I'll define here as a chorus that isn't just Raekwon himself repeating a line), something which only 4 of the 17 tracks on the album have (and one of those "hooks" is delivered by, um, Winston Churchill).
No, even if his beat selection is reliably solid, Raekwon is all about the words in a way that nearly no contemporary rapper still is, with a style dense enough to pack multitudes into lines and even fragments of lines. To wit, in "Molasses" (fueled by a great homage to an old Liquid Swords beat):
Word to the Gold Panameras, and to the wood grain in my Lambo I go the extra mile, my flow scalpels Crew cuts, the older niggas, the same rumors from the same goons When niggas catch visions of killing capos
In four lines: a particularly exotic brand of Porsche, transitioned by a pair of metaphors into a two-line study of criminal bosses retaining power by carefully and dispassionately tracking and dealing with ambitious young up-and-comers. And this isn't a standout excerpt, it's a typical one! Even a casual listener catching the odd fragment of meaning will get the key vibe of these tracks - a gaudy noveau-rich lifestyle papering over the frantic anxiety of criminal life - but these stand up to repeated listening .
Most rap nowadays either has veered towards pop (Kanye, obviously, but even someone like Big Boi fits here too) or relies on something beyond the lyricism (the Odd Future-Insane Clown Posse comparison really isn't that far off on paper - it's the beats and Tyler the Creator's creepy-mesmerizing swagger that make the Wolf Gang interesting). With occassional exceptions (Freddie Gibbs and Roc Marciano come to mind), Raekwon is one of the few torch-bearers for a specific kind of vital, important rap style, and as long as his abilities are as razor-sharp as they continue to be, I don't mind his staying in his wheelhouse one bit.
Also:
- It's worth mentioning that Raekwon always has his guests firing on all cylinders - Ghostface continues his recent trend of only being worth a damn on a Raekwon album, and Rick Ross of all people drops what seems like a career best verse on "Molasses". Someone's going to have to explain the line "Ankle monitors under garments, so fuck showers" to me though - does Officer Ricky not bathe?
- While we're on Odd Future - I'll grant you the genius of Tyler, but do people really think the rest of the crew gets anywhere close to that kind of quality? To make a completely inappropriate analogy, the other Odd Future members are like the not-famous Black Eyed Peas to Tyler's Will.I.Am (Earl can be Fergie in this formulation).
Once when I was about 15 and expected different things from my music I went through a serious post-rock phase, a couple years after weaning myself from my Linkin Park phase (boo, hiss). Whatever, like you were never 13. You've gotta start somewhere.
Anyways, I went to see Sigur Ros one night in high school, and it was awesome, except Mogwai was playing across town at a 21+ venue, and I wished I could've seen em both. But with Godspeed You! Black Emperor on a reunion tour (I have a ticket, am extremely excited) and Mogwai out in support of their impressively-titled new LP Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, maybe I'll get my chance.
This album is no Young Team, nor is it Come On, Die Young or even Mr. Beast. There are some rather catchy songs! Almost...pop! Of course you have your requisite monumental walls of guitar sound, but "San Pedro" reads more Sonic Youth than Slint. Like rock, without the post-. You won't find a ten to twelve minute epic like "Christmas Steps" on this album, but I'm ok with that. I guess I outgrew the need for slow building gloominess, and so did Mogwai. They've managed somehow to preserve their guitar stylings, while dabbling in almost alarming electronics on "Mexican Grand Prix" or DJ Shadow-style melancholy on "Letters to the Metro". Hell, "George Square Thatcher Death Party" sounds like an LCD Soundsystem instrumental, until the autotune (!) comes in!
"To Raging To Cheers" and "Rano Pano" are more of what we would expect Mogwai to sound like, but this newfound levity has found its way into these tracks as well. So I'm hoping if I catch these guys in April, I'll have a great time, and still get my face and ears properly abused by guitars. The album concludes with a modest by Mogwai standards 8.5 minute mini-epic entitled "You're Lionel Richie", which works as a nice post-rock coda, on an album that may be post-post-rock? Brings a smile to my face, anyways.
ANDREW: The eighth studio album from the peerless Radiohead is here. The King of Limbs was released yesterday, a day early, to be quickly gobbled up by the cultish hordes of devotees on the intarwebs. I have long considered myself one of these obsessive cult members, perhaps to be ridiculed by Raj and others, but in my travels, I've simply never heard anyone on their level. They don't have an equal. They don't have an analog. They just consistently make music that rewards repeat listening, varying widely in influences and stylistic choices. But enough hero worship of all things Radiohead. You don't have the time.
The album is a concise 8 track, 38 minute affair, but the tracks are finessed and finely layered, giving surprising depth to an album so brief. An unbelievable opener, introducing not only the album but effectively creating a vast soundscape, "Bloom" starts the album with hypnotic piano loops, a pulsating snare drum beat, and positively jazzy bass accents. Then comes Yorke, with a slow sprawling vocal line, smoothly and slowly gliding over the restrained drums. On this album many of the tracks sound as though they would be amazing live, with space to expand, and "Bloom" is no exception. "Morning Mr. Magpie" starts with much the same rhythmic structure, although this time more attention is given to Yorke's vocals, perhaps revealing a political narrative, with "You stole it all, give it back" as a populist rallying cry in these days of economic collapse. Maybe that's a stretch, but given Yorke's activism, I wouldn't put it past them.
Sigh, "Feral". Fucking awesome. This is the track where Radiohead proves it can play this post-dubstep game with the best of them. James Blake's vocal atmospherics, or those of Will Bevan, aka Burial, come to mind to be sure. But here Yorke's vocal effects, coming in spatially from all corners of the song, are paired with that relentess pulsating beat of the album's openers, fluctuating nicely in intensity and volume, providing necessary variety. I was thinking I haven't heard variations in drumming this satisfying since Caribou's track "Brahminy Kite".
"Lotus Flower" with its accompanying video, proves to be an oddly dance-friendly track with great bass (and hand claps!), and Yorke flaunting his trademark falsetto while crooning about the empty space in his heart. Radiohead at their best.
"Codex", the sparse and melancholy track with simple piano licks against Yorke's inimitable vocals, is a glorious slow burn, reminiscent perhaps of tracks like OK Computer's "Exit Music (For A Film)". The track is a necessary respite as well from all the fast paced frenetic beats of earlier tracks on the album.
Out of nowhere, a wild acoustic guitar appears! On "Give Up The Ghost" Radiohead decides to eat Fleet Foxes and My Morning Jacket's lunches too, turning in an almost folksy track. The vocals aren't unaltered though, and some of the looping and atmospherics sound more like Bibio's lo-fi electronic jams. Anything your band can do, Radiohead can do better.
At the end of the day, I'm not ready to evaluate this album against the Radiohead canon, and I recognize the album is not perfect (too short, where are the guitars, etc.) but this album is a well-crafted gem. Radiohead's music has such an intentional feel, for lack of a better description. These guys know exactly how they want their music to sound, how they want it to be distributed, and how they want it to be performed, and I can really respect that. Please chime in, BZNZmen.
PLEASE LET THERE BE A TOUR.
JESSE: In 8th grade I basically only listened to Blur, the Foo Fighters, and OK Computer. Foo Fighters died out pretty soon thereafter, but OK Computer and Blur carried over into high school. Then OK Computer died out too, though I still appreciate it as an incredible album. I’ll throw it on every once and awhile. But that’s it. I don’t listen to Radiohead, ever, even though I have more or less all of their music. And I feel the same about most of their music, that it’s all very, very good. It’s original, it’s deep, well layered, not too straightforward, but accessible enough to appeal to millions. And they’re deserving of their praise, as always. But that doesn’t make me ever want to listen to it. In this zero sum game of life, listening to Radiohead means I’m not listening to something else. And that’s how I feel when I listen to them most of the time, be it Kid A, In Rainbows, or yesterday’s The King of Limbs. Really, OK Computer and some of their Neil Young covers are basically all I ever listen to, and that’s a rarity. Perhaps it’s their ill-fated positioning on my iPod, sandwiched between Raccoo-oo-oon and Raekwon. My tastes are just such that I’d really rather listen to Is Night People or Only Built 4 Cuban Linx at really any given time. Oh well.
But about this album specifically…it’s really an extension of how I feel about Radiohead. It’s good, but nothing’s really standing out as something that I want to listen to very much. For as much as Andrew has said that it does so many things so much better than everyone else, to me it sounds like, well, Radiohead. Actually, the part of this that sounds least like Radiohead to me is the guitar in "Morning Mr. Magpie", because it sounds like U2. And just because a song has acoustic guitar doesn’t mean it sounds anything like indie folk-rock. “Give Up the Ghost” seems less focused on the fact that there’s an acoustic guitar in there then on the vocal layering and peaking of the song via electronic effects, which works very well. But to say that they’re really doing anything on the same level as Fleet Foxes or My Morning Jacket is sort of unfounded, isn’t it? Totally different goals here, I’d say. Also, did Radiohead fire Phil Selway? I like drum samples as much as the next guy, but sheesh. I could use a little variation in my percussion. I appreciate that it’s short enough to not really have any dull moments, though. 8 average-lengthed tracks, you don’t get tired of anything (which could happen, considering the use of more repetitive beats throughout each song), and there enough turns to keep you happy within the songs, sort of. But at the same time, I sort of just wish I were listening to Boredoms instead of this.
So overall, I’ve listened through this about 2.5 times. It’s good! And it’s Radiohead. I guess it’s overall like, no matter how many new things they try to incorporate into their music, it’s still surprisingly predictable. That probably has something to do with Thom’s vocals. Because they sound pretty much the same on everything they do matter what. I think I’ll try to listen through some more of their other albums more just in attempts to like Radiohead more than I do, but I won’t count on it. Call me the Radiohead grouch to Andrew's Kanye grouch.
RAJ: "Anything your band can do, Radiohead can do better"? More like, "Radiohead can do better", am I right?
But SRSly, a few brief thoughts, since Andy and Jesse have already covered this pretty thoroughly: I'm closer to Andy than Jesse on the love-of-Radiohead spectrum (although, yes, I would generally rather listen to Raekwon), but I will say that this is the first Radiohead release since Pablo Honey that hasn't felt to me like an out-of-the-gate first-listen revelation. That has a lot to do with the very intentional decision to make this album a thoroughly mellow, low-key affair, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but certainly limits Radiohead from engaging in the kind of grand gestures that mark the very best of their work.
If there's one common thread throughout all the past Radiohead albums, it's a kind of apocalyptic bombast, a tendency towards drama and full-throated emotion - the operatic sweep of "Paranoid Android", the suffocating paranoia of "Idioteque", etc, etc, ad infinitum. The King of Limbs feels a lot more muted in that sense - "Bloom", "Codex", and "Give Up The Ghost" are gorgeous and haunting, and "Lotus Flower" has the great almost-R&B vibe that you saw on past tracks like "House of Cards", but this is masterfully-crafted prettiness in place of the soaring ambition we saw on past Radiohead efforts.
I'm not going to trash this album because there's obvious skill, care, and inspiration present in these tracks, but kind of like Jesse, I don't feel particularly compelled to revisit anything off this album except for "Lotus Flower" and maybe "Bloom" (for the record, I think "Feral" is a total misfire - an amalgam of various electronic influences that never cohere into a song or structure that's particularly interesting, kind of like "Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors" from Amnesiac). Now I'm going to go listen to the new PJ Harvey album some more.
In addition:
- Andy was totally just baiting everyone with his band references, but I will forgive him because of his deft Pokemon reference.
- What the hell kind of U2 song does "Morning Mr. Magpie" sound like, Jesse?
In Ghost Colours, the 2008 album from Cut Copy, is to New Order as Zonoscope, the latest album from Cut Copy, is to, like, Duran Duran. This is more or less intended as a compliment! Where the last album trafficked in the lockstep dance precision of the artists formerly known as Joy Division, Zonoscope dives hard into glorious pop cheese. It's a much more goofy, unself-conscious affair - it's not a stretch to imagine that dudes toked and pretended to sing like Billy Idol for a while (really - see "Blink and You'll Miss a Revolution") then listened to the tapes later and decided it didn't sound half bad. And it doesn't! I'm not going to say exactly that the band is better off for their more shaggy-dog approach to the record, but the album has more than a few points where it's damn near irresistible - songs like "Hanging Onto Every Heartbeat" and "Need You Now" are John-Cusack-with-a-boombox-outside/The-Human-League level corny, but it feels churlish to resist them given how fun they are.
The album does deviate from my opening analogy at a few key points, in detours that do and don't work. The best left turn is "Where I'm Going", where the band decides to ditch synthesizers completely and write a straightforward guitar pop song, which ends up sounding like a superlative unearthed British Invasion b-side. Then there's the last two songs on the album, "Corner of the Sky", and the 15-minute long "Sun God", which aim at a more straightforward 4/4 homage to 90s house (I think? All you house-heads would know better than me). "Corner of the Sky" is brief and appealing, and "Sun God" isn't exactly objectionable, but it seems clear that these guys are more fun as pop maestros than as extended dance-vamp DJs. Outsize ambition doesn't particularly suit these guys* - they're never been about much more than refining nostalgic sounds until they come up with pop diamonds. That's no small feat, of course - and it's great to see a band mining the past with as much care and skill as this Australian duo.
*I seem to remember Andy having a pretty great theory about "Hearts on Fire", the first single of In Ghost Colours, as some kind of meta-commentary on the history of dance music, although the details of his interpretation escape me. Andy?
Martin Scorsese once said that "Cinema is a matter of what's in the frame and what's out." The latest music video from director Patrick Daughters delightfully does away with the second half of that dictum, as Daughters wields the edges of his frame like razor blades and wrecking balls. Daughters is one of the true visionaries working in the music video form (best known for his one-take Feist videos, but truly great because of his Depeche Mode and Department of Eagles videos), in part because he likes to merge thought-provoking cinema-theory gimmicks with a truly gleeful spirit of filmmaking. The "Fever Dreaming" video revels in its carnage, and it also comes up with the best macabre joke/jolt of an ending since Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer. All that said - No Age guitarist Randy Randall needs to get over his thing about climbing on top of things to play guitar on them, which he has done at every single live show of his I've been to (which, for various circumstances, has been far more shows than I actually wanted to see) and is now dragging into his videos. It's a little played out, bro!
Real talk, hipsters - does anyone actually enjoy the sound of Satomi Matsuzaki's voice? Any Deerhoof fan (and I loosely include myself in this category) will tell you that there's more than enough compensatory musical joy in every other element of a Deerhoof record to make up for whatever issues you have with Matsuzaki's neutered Ono wail. But is there anyone who sits there listening and thinks to themselves, "Man, I love hearing this childlike Asian woman sing!" My theory about Deerhoof has always been that the experimental-noise-rocker-bros who started the band recruited Matsuzaki because they were worried about their indie cred - Deerhoof may jam together shards of music into complex and unpredictable song structures, but those shards are pretty straightforward grabs from psychedelic rock and pop and things that aren't abrasive at all! So they throw a cra-aaaa-zy sounding Asian lady into the mix to instantly up their weird factor, which always struck me as a touch Orientalist and icky.
In any case, the rest of Deerhoof generally pulls off things that can be exhilarating, and their latest album Deerhoof vs. Evil has the explosive creativity of much of their best work (not to mention toned down weirdness in Satomi's vocals). I haven't spent too much time with this album yet, but it's already clear that this is a very, very solid piece of work that combines unclassifiable genre-melding with off-kilter time signatures and killer songwriting. Cases in point linked below: "The Merry Barracks" finds vicious riffs and guitar spasms at war while straight-up hummable melodies waft above it all. "Super Duper Rescue Heads!", on the other hand, is a relatively straight-forward synth-powered pop track with some meaty electric guitar work that helps to cut the song's overall sweetness. I'll even go as far as to classify it as chillwave, because it's basically gotten to the point where anything with a synth gets that label tacked onto it, and I'm a big fan of lazily latching on to trends.
NICK: Go to http://vickileekx.com/ and download ViCKi LEEKX, batshit-bananas one-file mixtape by M.I.A. Do it now.
This absurd year could not ask for a more fitting epitaph. After two listens and into a third I remain convinced that M.I.A. will have the last laugh. This year you were not lukewarm on M.I.A. You were with her or you were against her. I was with her and still am. I liked /\/\/\Y/\ a lot and I thought the "Born Free" video was amazing. "Teqkilla" is in my top four or five tracks of the year. I even thought it was cool that she posted that Times Magazine writer's phone number on Twitter. You fuck with someone's shit like that, you better be prepared to reap the whirlwind, that's what I say.
If "of the year" meant not "best of the year" but "most of the year," which is to say, "embodying the year most perfectly, for better or worse," who else but M.I.A. could be called Artist of the Year? (Yes, okay, I know who else, let me finish.) /\/\/\Y/\ is not a pleasant record to listen to and God knows ViCKi LEEKX isn't either. But neither was 2010 a pleasant year to live through. 2010 was the year Facebook surpassed meatspace to become America's most popular plane of reality. In 2010 it stopped being fun and we kept doing it because we couldn't stop. 2010 was the year of Four Loko and Robot Unicorn Attack.
Say what you will about /\/\/\Y/\ as an album, but as a document of this fucked-up time it could not be more perfect. It was shot through with that feeling of breaking-apart that we all knew this year even if we did not talk about it because it was too near to us. In 2010 everything was underlaid with surreality and paranoia. Something was happening, something we all wanted to ignore, and /\/\/\Y/\ grabbed us by the hair and shoved our faces in it. No wonder we didn't like it.
It is now well-established that Pitchfork knows jack shit about music. How they feel about an album has nothing to do with it and everything to do with them. Pitchfork hated /\/\/\Y/\ so much because, decadent aesthetes that they are, they couldn't handle it. It was too much for their delicate constitutions. So they started a backlash and then relaxed in the bathtub with Grizzly Bear. But mark my words: M.I.A. will have the last laugh.
RAJ: Well hell, Nick, I was lukewarm on M.I.A. this year. There's fundamentally interesting things about everything she's been doing recently - there are also fundamentally stupid things about all of it as well. I probably would love Maya (I refuse to use the backslashes) if I really thought it was a provocative, uncompromising "document of this fucked-up time" about alienation and Google being connected to the government and what have you. And there are definitely moments where I see where people are coming from - the sonic chaos of "Teqkilla" and "Stepping Up" is pretty potent as a representation of digital alienation and the attempt in "Lovalot" to get into a terrorist's headspace is as daring as it is unprecedented for a pop song. But Maya is also the sound of M.I.A. hedging her bets hard - nearly half the album is just awful garden-variety pop that manages to be more bland and insincere than most of the Billboard Top 40. Call the album's incoherence an artistic stategy if you must, I'll just call it haphazard and poorly executed.
(Same half-brilliant/half-idiotic thing with the "Born Free" video for that matter. The cinematic elements of it are downright virtuosic in their execution and it's probably a fair point that Westerners tend to avoid empathizing with victims of genocide and should maybe think about it more. But could there be a more heavy-handed way to go about that idea? Like, look, I'll even grant you the shooting-the-little-kid thing if you really need to get the horror of it all across, but I don't see any reasonable way to justify the neccessity of that shot where the disintegration of a kid stepping on a landmine is filmed in loving gory slo-mo detail.)
All that said - this mixtape? It's obviously a retreat from the abrasive experimentation of the album, but retreats don't usually sound so goddamned triumphant. Nick said Vicki Leekx (Jesus, again with the capitalization) isn't a pleasant record to listen to, and I guess wecan debate what pleasant means, but this thing is immediately club-ready in a way that the album certainly wasn't. In fact, the beats here are out-and-out fire one after another - shades of Kala, and I'm one of those Kala-was-best-of-the-past-decade-level types. Old material here is completely revitalized with new beats, and all of the producers are completely on point - we already know what Diplo, Blaqstarr, and Switch can do when they're at their best, but Rusko here finally proves his ability to work effectively as a collaborator, and the presence of Danjahandz (the actual guy behind FutureSex/LoveSounds while Timbaland was mugging) is downright thrilling - there's no actual pinpointing of who did what, but the Meds and Feds remix certainly sounds like Danja working on a fascinating avant-dancefloor level.
And I guess I have to get into M.I.A.'s identity politics here a little bit because of the fascinating "Marsha/Britney". The track starts out with M.I.A. declaring that what she hates most is "fame hos" - red flag right away, since that's pretty much what everyone's been calling M.I.A. for the past year! And as she rolls through a takedown of your average shallow nail-painting ditzy Britney type, more flags pile up - "she's always claiming that she's part Navajo" (leaning on your backstory!), "You wanna be the next best thing... But you can't sing!" (have you heard "Tell Me Why"?). And then the hook "Hey Marsha! Whatcha do yesterday? What I read on the blog story/don't add up to what you told me".
Now, I guess it's possible that M.I.A. is just completely delusional, but I'm going to give her credit and say she's self-aware enough to know that all these criticisms obviously have been aimed at her, and her response is effectively "So what?". Yes, she's guilty on some of these things, but so is your average garden variety pop star, and the "blog stories" aren't exactly trying to tear them to pieces they way they've gone after M.I.A. All this because M.I.A. is making people think - about globalization, about terrorism, about genocide - while your more vapid stars really aren't. So yeah, maybe M.I.A. is prone to empty revolutionary sloganeering and not having a position paper to back up each of her pop songs, but she seems to be arguing that that kind of thing is better than nothing - which is a pretty remarkable self-assessment of her own limitations and her own strengths. And certainly a better response to press criticism than the childish tweeting the phone number thing.
But all of that is unimportant compared to the actual truth of the music here, which is just stunningly hot. Cop it immediately - for cranky types like myself who demand track separation, this is a split up version.
Other thoughts: - It really confuses me why M.I.A. still bothers to work with Diplo. There was no dick move this year larger than Diplo going to both Twitter and the New York Times to badmouth an album and an artist he had been working with - especially when said artist is the primary reason that he has a career in the first place.
- I know Pitchfork is a pretty easy punching bag, but it seems a little unfair to just say they couldn't handle Maya - I mean, Pitchfork praise of No Age and Animal Collective (back in their more abrasive days) is no small part of the reason why both bands have major careers now. I really would like to see a convincing argument about why exactly Pitchfork is so evil - like, sure, they make bad calls, and the subset of music that they approve of is maybe more limited than it should be, but find me a music publication that doesn't have those same exact problems. Also, I like Kanye West and Grizzly Bear.
Brief thoughts on a few things. Chime in as you see fit, BZNZmen.
Gorillaz - The Fall
RAJ: Why did Damon Albarn insist on calling this thing, obviously more of a doodle he used to kill tour bus time than any real kind of song collection, an album? I'd like to think it's a way of getting out of some "must release six albums" kind of contractual obligation with this totally free release, because that would neatly fit my view of Albarn as a super-cool rockstar-icon screw-The-Man kind of bro. In any case, this thing probably has the most value as a tech demo - Albarn put this together using only a few select instruments and a wide variety of iPad apps, and by those standards, the production quality is shockingly good, probably on par with the traditionally-recorded-in-studio Plastic Beach. Of course, there isn't much actual songwriting going on here. These are more early demos than crafted songs, although there's a few select tracks that are catchy enough that they merit revisiting. That said, I'm still pretty happy that this was even released. Albarn is obviously closer to the hip-hop world than a lot of his peers, and this feels like his emulation of the mixtape trend - just unleashing unrefined creativity to the world for free, not unlike Lil Wayne spitting from the dome. It would be a more interesting world if more rock stars gave us unrestricted access into their instinctive creative impulses.
Gorillaz - "Revolving Doors"
Gorillaz - "Hillbilly Man"
James Blake - s/t
RAJ: As Troy pointed out in the comments a few days ago, the real question with James Blake's debut full-length was what relation it would have to the three great EPs he put out over the past year. Somewhat disappointingly, the answer is that he pretty much abandoned the R&B-influenced off-kilter dance tracks of the CMYK EP and the electronic atmospherics of The Bells Sketch EP completely. The self-titled album sounds entirely like an extension of his Klavierwerke EP- subtle electronic manipulations of Blake himself singing and playing piano. Burial comparisons have been thrown out for this Blake mode, but it might be more accurate to point towards spare indie rockers like Bon Iver and The XX.
The album does start off very strongly, with three tracks that exhibit a really effective version of Blake's ghostly-vocals-bouncing-around-inside-a-machine aesthetic. The click-stutter beat in "Unluck" is the one solid groove here, while "Wilhelm's Scream" and "I Never Learnt to Share" modulate and warp repeated mantras to mesmerizing effect. The latter track in particular repeats the phrase "My brother and my sister don't speak to me - but I don't blame her", and there's this tremendously moving point where the last "her" becomes a "them", a minor switch that speaks volumes and is also accompanied by a sweet outro.
But after those first few tracks (which, not coincidentally, would have been a fantastic EP by themselves), the album quickly starts to get a little too same-y. There's a few blown-up test tubes in the more electronic tracks that follow, and there's also a group of tracks which are really just Blake singing and playing acoustic piano ballads only the smallest discernible electronic influences - and while the guy has a decent voice, it's not really enough to make those spare tracks particularly interesting. There's definitely enough in this album to show that Blake has immense promise, but I'm having trouble fathoming why he seemed intent on limiting himself, given the awesome things he's been able to achieve in a wide variety of other genres and subgenres.
Building off Chomps' excellent idea - I'm curious to see what the SRS dudes think about Kanye's coke-bender magnum-opus freak-out of an album. FEEL FREE TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS IF YOU THINK IT'S NECESSARY!!!!!11111one
