Today is Record Store Day, and international celebration of your local vinyl purveyor complete with in-store performances, limited-edition releases, and warm fuzzy feelings. There's a pop-up store in my hood today only by Numero Records, and I was going to go see if I can't cop that clear vinyl edition of Tomboy...although there were only 1000 of those nationwide, and many stores opened at midnight, so I'm not holding my breath. I am a little proud to say that this now international holiday of music geekery was founded by my hometown record store, Bull Moose Music. Holla.
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.
Hopefully the New Jersey spring will consistently show its head sometime soon. Until then, enjoy some tunes mostly from well before my time, new Thurston Moore, and a special peak into my four-track recorder in 2006, among others. Put it in for a 30 minute drive to nowhere.
1. The Jive Bombers - Bad Boy (Bad Boy - 1957) 2. Tubby Hayes - Embers (Tubby's Groove - 1960) 3. David Bowie - What In The World (Low - 1977) 4. The Rising Storm - To L.N. - Who Doesn't Know (Calm Before - 1967) 5. Six Organs of Admittance - Thicker Than A Smokey (School of the Flower - 2004) 6. The Beach Boys - I'm Waiting For The Day (Pet Sounds - 1966) 7. The Byrds - I Am A Pilgrim (Sweetheart of the Rodeo - 1968) 8. HG&TN - Catamaran (4-Track Doodlinz - 2006) 9. Deerhunter - Strange Lights (Cryptograms - 2007) 10. Thurston Moore - Benediction (Demolished Thoughts - 2011)
edit 3/31/11:
Humble readers, if you want this mix, go buy the songs on iTunes or download them yourself, because I just got the following e-mail:
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You know what this means, everyone? Someone is looking at our blog! Or The Beach Boys have hired someone to program something to make sure that their music isn't put up for free on mixes for college students! And that I'm a terrible person!
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