Fluxblog

Archive for 2010

6/24/10

The Other Side Of Your World

Goldfrapp @ Hammerstein Ballroom 6/23/2010

Crystalline Green / I Wanna Life / A&E / U Never Know / Head First / Number 1 / Dreaming / Believer / Alive / Soft & Warm / Train / Ride A White Horse / Ooh La La // Utopia / Black Cherry /// Rocket / Strict Machine

Goldfrapp “Head First”

I’ve seen Goldfrapp a few times over now, and I’m pretty sure this was the first time I’ve seen Alison in a good mood on stage. It could just be a result of performing the new songs, which convey so much love, gratitude, and relief. Head First may not be her band’s best work, but it’s a lovely record and its high points are so effective in expressing — and spreading — this hard-won bliss and optimism. The concert felt much more celebratory than past Goldfrapp shows, which felt more formal in the Supernature era, and a bit stuffy and sad when they toured for Seventh Tree. Alison changed costume a few times, starting out in a gown that looked like an unfurled VHS tape, and ending up draped in what appeared to be long, pink Muppet hair. She was beautiful and commanding, and it was nice to see her smile a few times.

Buy it from Amazon.

Goldfrapp “Ride A White Horse” (iTunes session version)

At the end of the main set, the band swung hard into electro-glam mode. Goldfrapp can do many things very well, but this particular sound — “Train,” “Ride A White Horse,” “Ooh La La,” “Strict Machine” — is something that is all their own. Halfway through “Ride A White Horse” I found myself feeling a bit annoyed that no one else is doing this sort of thing. Yes, there were a few copycat blips on the radar, like Rachel Stevens’ excellent single “Some Girls”, but my major disappointment is in bands. I realize that not just anyone can pull this off, but this is like a new blueprint for rock music, at least on a textural level. Harsh, glamorous, precise, sexy, feminine, enormous in scope yet tightly focused. We could learn a lot from Goldfrapp.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/23/10

Lifting Me Higher

The Chemical Brothers “Snow”

We hear a lot about love lifting people up in pop music, and when we do, the music typically illustrates the height rather than the depth. “Snow” goes the other way, implying a slow upward drift from the bottom of some emotional nowhere. It’s mostly static and noise sculpted into a lightly pulsating, percussion-free rhythm, with washes of ugly sound entering the mix, making it feel as though you’re gently levitating through dark clouds of pollution on your way to a cleaner, brighter place in the sky.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/22/10

If Just For Tonight, Darling

Bat For Lashes featuring Beck “Let’s Get Lost”

I’m willing to forgive whatever flaws the Twilight series may have simply because that franchise sparked the creation of this song. Beck and Natasha Khan have distilled the essence of the series’ appeal — intense longing for forbidden sexuality and drama — into four minutes of perfectly realized dark, hyper-romantic pop. This is much more like a Bat For Lashes song with Beck as a guest than vice versa, and the sound of it isn’t far off from what Natasha was doing on Two Suns. Nevertheless, Beck is ideally cast in this duet. Natasha sings with passion and desperation, but he’s cold and aloof, there but just out of reach. There’s an ache in his voice, but he mostly comes off as this fascinating and unknowable object of desire. The song makes a virtue out of something in Beck that has put a damper on his most recent albums, and it flows seamlessly into Natasha’s distinct aesthetic. It’s a incredibly sexy and beautiful piece of music, and it’s all the better for taking its cues from this sort of dubious yet compelling pop culture phenomenon.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/21/10

These Things Get Louder

The New Pornographers @ Terminal 5 6/19/2010

Sing Me Spanish Techno / Up In The Dark / Myriad Harbour / Use It / Crash Years / Jackie Dressed In Cobras / A Bite Out Of My Bed / Adventures In Solitude / Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk / Go Places / All The Old Showstoppers / Jackie / Moves / Your Hands (Together) / Twin Cinema / My Shepherd / The Laws Have Changed / Silver Jenny Dollar / Mass Romantic / The Bleeding Heart Show // Challengers / Electric Version / Slow Descent Into Alcoholism / Testament To Youth In Verse

I’m not even going to get into another rant about how much I loathe Terminal 5. Everything about the venue is horrible, music should never be performed there, fuck Bowery Presents, etc, etc, etc. If you’ve been there you know how bad it is, and if you’ve never been, you should do whatever you can to avoid it.

You should see the New Pornographers, though. Five albums into their career, they are at the point where a 100 minute show comes out sounding like a hit-packed extravaganza even if they skip over “Letter From An Occupant,” “It’s Only Divine Right”, and “My Rights Vs. Yours”. Whereas the other times I have seen the full band in concert – all the regulars plus Dan Bejar, Neko Case, and whatever auxiliary players are on hand to play strings, horns, and whatnot — the shows were a bit stiff and mannered, this one was more relaxed and free-wheeling. Given that they were playing Terminal 5, a lot of the nuances in the arrangements were lost to horrible sound, but when they went for grandeur and oomph on “Moves,” “Myriad Harbour,” and “All The Old Showstoppers,” they pulled it off beautifully. “The Laws Have Changed,” now and forever the band’s greatest song, was another highlight, as was the cheery, Dexy’s Midnight Runners-esque “A Bite Out Of My Bed.”

The New Pornographers “Moves”

I just want to put it out there that I wish I had given Together a slightly better review. At least a few decimal points higher. I still don’t think it’s on par with the first three albums, but it’s pretty great on its own terms, and a number of the songs have grown on me a lot since I last wrote about the record. “Moves”, in particular, has become a favorite, and I’ve really fallen for the way it shifts between moments of bombast and this sort of dazed affect. The latter is what really draws me in — the “slo-o-o-ow do-o-o-own la-a-a-a-die-e-e-es slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-ow do-o-o-o-o-o-o-own” hook is one of Carl Newman’s all-time best and most inventive hooks, not just for its novelty value, but for the way it seems to push the song upward towards the next catchy bit, like an escalator moving between floors.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/17/10

I’d Be There In A Minute

Baths “You’re My Excuse To Travel”

There’s a fair amount of negative space in this track, but it’s mostly just to leave enough room for the vocals, which push to the outer limits of shrill emoting without crossing the line into being unlistenable. That said, I’d totally understand if the singing here was a deal-breaker for you. I think this song is mostly sweet, despite the lyrics being fairly difficult to decipher. The general mood is bittersweet and a bit a impatient, the track kinda rocks back and forth between this humid post-rain feeling and nervous passion. If you think of songs as being like a snapshot of a person in the middle of some kind of emotional experience, I get a very good sense of who this is and what’s going on from this piece.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/16/10

Pretty Tangled Loop

Emeralds “Candy Shoppe”

Emeralds build most of their songs around lovely arpeggiated melodies that seem to spin gently like pinwheels in the breeze. This lends their music a pretty, tuneful quality that informs all of their compositions, and provides a musical through-line that is a lot more structured and “pop” than what you’d typically expect from ambient music. I hear echoes of Terry Riley in this stuff, but rather than develop themes for long stretches of time, Emeralds mostly do succinct pieces like “Candy Shoppe” that resolve in some sort of cathartic crest before hitting the five minute mark. They’re not the first to do this sort of friendly miniature minimalism, but they’re quite good at it. Each time I’ve heard this particular track, I’ve come away from it with a happy glow.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/15/10

When The World Went Crazy

Beeda Weeda “Baserock Babies”

DJ Fresh’s track for “Baserock Babies” is a marvel of retro-’80s electro-funk that somehow sounds fresh and modern despite its clear roots in the aesthetic of another era. Beeda Weeda embraces the period vibe by making the song about kids born into the ’80s crack epidemic. He’s setting the scene for a flashback, but also taking back the sound that defined the culture he was born into, making himself the conclusion to a full-circle narrative. You can kinda take this as being something of a happy ending for that cycle — it’s not exactly triumphant in tone, but it’s certainly a song that expresses a certain amount of pride in dubious beginnings, and some kind of relief that things got a little bit better rather than a whole lot worse.

Visit the Beeda Weeda MySpace page.

6/14/10

We Gotta Go To War, Let’s Put On A Show

Dominique Young Unique “Music Time”

Dominique Young Unique’s Domination mixtape is quite a jolt. The songs are short, the tempos are quick, the hooks fire at you like a barrage of laser gun zaps. For a record with a very consistent tone, the switch-ups in keyboard textures and rhythm style leave you without a sense of steady footing, so her youthful charisma on the mic holds is crucial in holding it all together in a way that feels totally confident and natural. The keyboard sounds are phenomenal on this — very French, very house, but filtered through the Miami aesthetic. It’s like blasting neon colors through speakers. This is great hip hop; it’s amazing mutated dance music.

Get it for free from Dominique Young Unique’s MySpace page.

6/11/10

All Hail King Neptune And His Water Breathers

Gorillaz “Superfast Jellyfish”

The conceit of the Gorillaz has always involved animation, but Plastic Beach is the first Gorillaz album that actually sounds something like a cartoon to my ears. Even aside from the Saturday morning breakfast cereal commercial in the intro, the very sound of “Superfast Jellyfish” implies the aesthetics of animation — a certain bounciness, a roundness to the lines, an extremity of character, a boldness in the color palette. It’s all very stylized and smooth, and the inherent silliness of the music blurs with its more serious themes, not to dilute those ideas, but to make them less shrill. It’s basically a song about how commercial culture damages our bodies and the environment in the interest of convenience and cheap thrills, but it’s not argumentative or even particularly judgmental. It’s mostly just an illustration of how easily important things become abstracted by distractions. (Like, say, seductive advertising, or cartoon images of natural life that disrupts or confuses our understanding of actual reality.) The song itself is an abstracted distraction full of big hooks like the perky yet emotionally illegible chorus by Gruff Rhys, and smaller, stickier bits of phrasing in the rapped verses by De La Soul. (“While you dine like rabbits on the crunchy crunchy carrots, gotta have it!”) It’s a very carefully balanced piece of music — it could easily just topple under the weight of its own stylistic absurdity and high concept, but instead it wobbles and bops with the charm of perfect pop.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/11/10

All Hail King Neptune And His Water Breathers

Gorillaz “Superfast Jellyfish”

The conceit of the Gorillaz has always involved animation, but Plastic Beach is the first Gorillaz album that actually sounds something like a cartoon to my ears. Even aside from the Saturday morning breakfast cereal commercial in the intro, the very sound of “Superfast Jellyfish” implies the aesthetics of animation — a certain bounciness, a roundness to the lines, an extremity of character, a boldness in the color palette. It’s all very stylized and smooth, and the inherent silliness of the music blurs with its more serious themes, not to dilute those ideas, but to make them less shrill. It’s basically a song about how commercial culture damages our bodies and the environment in the interest of convenience and cheap thrills, but it’s not argumentative or even particularly judgmental. It’s mostly just an illustration of how easily important things become abstracted by distractions. (Like, say, seductive advertising, or cartoon images of natural life that disrupts or confuses our understanding of actual reality.) The song itself is an abstracted distraction full of big hooks like the perky yet emotionally illegible chorus by Gruff Rhys, and smaller, stickier bits of phrasing in the rapped verses by De La Soul. (“While you dine like rabbits on the crunchy crunchy carrots, gotta have it!”) It’s a very carefully balanced piece of music — it could easily just topple under the weight of its own stylistic absurdity and high concept, but instead it wobbles and bops with the charm of perfect pop.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/10/10

Piercing Through The Silence

How To Destroy Angels “The Believers”

You don’t need to hear Trent Reznor’s voice to know that you’re listening to his music. Over the years, he has developed a particular combination of rhythms, textures, melodic cadences, and tones that mark all of his work. I don’t have the technical background to explain it, but the man certainly has a distinct palette. “The Believers,” a song written with his wife Mariqueen Maandig and his regular collaborator Atticus Ross, take the familiar elements of his music and nudge them just beyond his comfort zone. This composition isn’t far off from much of Year Zero, but its layers of rhythm and electronic noise are tighter, while also a bit more relaxed in terms of mood. There’s a violence and tension to the piece, but it’s essentially calm, almost glassy-eyed. Maandig’s phrasing is almost exactly the same as Reznor in whispery mode, but the simple fact of her femininity softens the tone, and lends the music a sexuality that is different from Reznor’s usual brooding dude vibe. It’s a nice twist on a good formula.

Get it for free — or buy it — from the How to Destroy Angels site.

6/9/10

Backwards Century

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Hot Body Rub”

One of my favorite unrealistic fantasies is to have the means to travel backwards in time for brief visits to various points in the 20th century, mostly in NYC. It’s mostly a desire to walk around and experience the environment first hand, and to focus on small details – the look and sound and feel of things, the internal logic of culture in the moment. These things get captured in art, but it’s always skewed by interpretation. This Ariel Pink song has that sort of time travel feeling to it, but it’s really more like an impression of a time and place passed down and warped by endless replication and recontextualization that it’s more like a shared memory of something that wasn’t ever quite real. I mean, the effect of this piece almost certainly has more to do with cinematic representations of the ’70s and early ’80s than anything else, but it’s vague enough that it doesn’t come off as a reference to any specific thing. Nevertheless, you can hear this and feel as though you’re somewhere vaguely familiar, that somehow these sounds have something to do with the past. (Maybe that’s why the album it is from is titled Before Today.) It’s no time machine, but it will do.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/8/10

The Spotlights Makes You Nervous

Drake “Karaoke”

Hip hop is a genre full of totally reprehensible people, but it usually doesn’t matter because the rappers are charming, funny and compelling. Drake is not any of those things. On the scale of things, he’s not a bad dude, but he may be the least likeable rapper I’ve ever encountered: Dull, uncool, excruciatingly whiney. If you listen to Thank Me Later from start to finish, it is obvious that hanging out with this guy would be kind of a nightmare. At his best, he comes off like a character in the sort of fiction where the point is that everyone is a horrible, narcissistic douchebag. At his worst, he just seems like he’s out of reality television.

Drake mainly writes about being uncomfortable with the fame and money he worked hard to attain and being heartbroken by women. Most of the songs on the record owe a huge stylistic and thematic debt to Kanye West’s 808s and Heartbreak, though he doesn’t come close to that record’s mixture of vulnerability, humor, ambiance, and artistic risk-taking. Kanye is no less petulant, but he’s a character. He bitches and moans, but he can get you on his side. Listening to Drake drone on can be like getting cornered by a self-absorbed bore at a party. The mystifying thing is how in spite of his unpleasant persona, lack of charisma, and mediocre talent as a rapper and singer, I still basically like a lot of his music, and the album works as a whole. How does this make sense?

“Karaoke” makes sense because the tone of the piece is plaintive and shell-shocked enough to mitigate Drake’s icky sense of entitlement. It sounds cold, but very human. He’s trying to figure out what’s going on in his life, to suss out what is “real”. The basic emotion of the song and the record as a whole is always up front, even if Drake articulates himself in a way that makes him come across as an ass: He just wants to feel grounded. We all wanted to feel grounded, right? Sure, you might make this emotional connection in spite of Drake, but it’s still there in the music.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/7/10

That Sort Of A Squirrel Thing

Connie Converse “Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains)”

This song was recorded sometime in the mid-1950s, and was essentially lost to time until it was reissued last year by Lau derette Recordings. Connie Converse was a songwriter living in New York City, she was totally unknown in her time, and eventually disappeared without a trace. That’s a good story, but this is a great song, and easily one of the best I’ve ever heard about the virtues of living a lonely life. There’s no self-pity in this music. Her solitude is a choice, and she sings about not feeling alone, because she senses the presence of her former partner in everything around her. She is playful and witty, but doesn’t entirely downplay her feelings so much as remove the intensity. She sounds totally at peace with her life.

The melody of the song is lovely, the structure is slightly odd and rather poetic. She begins the song by singing “in between two tall mountains / there’s a place they call lonesome / don’t see why they call it lonesome / I’m never lonesome when I go there” and this refrain bookends the main body of the song, with its descending melody leading us down into the supposed valley of lonesomeness.

Can someone please pass this song along to Annie Clark of St. Vincent? She would sound amazing covering it, and ought to record it. Lyrically and musically, it’s really not too far off from a lot of music she’s written herself!

Buy it from Amazon.

6/4/10

You Can Move Mountains With Your Point Of View

The Mynabirds @ Bell House 6/3/2010

Lemon Tree / LA Rain / Wash It Out / Give It Time / Ways Of Looking / What We Gained In The Flood / Numbers Don’t Lie / Right Place / Let The Record Go / Good Heart

The Mynabirds are exceptional as a live act, balancing out a sharp professionalism with sweetness and warmth. The live arrangements are tweaked slightly from what you hear on album — there’s no horn section, for example — but the group fills in the space with rich backing vocals and a greater emphasis on the rhythm section. It helps that the Bell House has exceptional sound. I love the room sound of the studio recordings, but the crisp, precise mix at this show was gorgeous in its own right.

The Mynabirds “Ways Of Looking”

“Ways Of Looking” is about dealing with disappointment, or more precisely, admiring the way another person processes setbacks and bad news. The song is gentle and languid, with Laura Burhenn sounding wounded yet calm over guitar chords that evoke overcast skies and recall the Velvet Underground. It’s nearly serene in tone, so it can be easy to miss that it’s also a love song. There’s no drama or turmoil here, only respect for someone’s strength and gratitude for their support. Amidst all the risk and uncertainty, “Ways Of Looking” finds comfort in the moment, and a healthy perspective on the past, present, and future.

Buy it from Saddle Creek.

6/3/10

A Pair Of Mirrors That Are Facing One Another

Vampire Weekend “White Sky”

“White Sky” is a stroll through uptown Manhattan, taking in the art and architecture that is available to everyone while quietly pondering the barriers between the public domain and the private property of the powerful and wealthy. The tension is faint, but it’s there: You walk through this area, always dimly aware of the immense luxury just out of view, and all the places where you don’t belong that share a border with the common culture. The boundaries are at once glaringly obvious and weirdly invisible; security guards and doormen are merely a second line of defense after the sheer banality of class stratification.

Resentment is usually mitigated by aspiration — you can get a contact high off the big money and high culture; you can dream of ways of insinuating yourself into this world. In the final verse of the song, Ezra Koenig’s protagonist pictures herself in this context:

look up at the buildings

imagine who might live there

imagining your Wolfords in a ball upon the sink there

I love that last line; it’s so specific and loaded with implication. You can read this a few ways, but it makes the most sense to me if she’s only just a visitor, her access granted by personal connection and sexual availability. It sounds cynical, but it doesn’t have to be. There are certainly worse ways of attaining social mobility.

Buy it from Amazon.

6/2/10

For Friendship’s Sake

Tame Impala “It Is Not Meant To Be”

Tame Impala’s songs sound as though they have a destination, if not a clear direction. “It Is Not Meant To Be” seems to burrow down through layers of psychedelic sound, searching for some kind of center. It’s dizzying stuff but it doesn’t feel lost or confused, so it’s easy to have faith in their instincts. The bass is especially beautiful in this track — it’s the most driving and forceful element in the arrangement, but it has a soft, comfy tone. It’s the kind of bass line you could lie down on and take a nap.

Buy it from iTunes.

6/1/10

I’ve Seen Demons Live Through Hell

Roach Gigz “Magic Gas”

Roach Gigz is a stoned charmer with a slurred, high-pitched voice that’s exaggerated enough to seem cartoonish, but has just enough grit in it to keep him from sounding entirely goofy. Not that goofy is a big problem for him — the broadness of his character is what draws you in, and his rhymes play to that strength, erring on the side of playful, teasing verses that fall somewhere between the gleeful mischievousness of Eminem and the puckish absurdity of Lil’ Wayne. (Or how about this: The charisma and tone of Boots Riley, but without the dogma.) His debut mixtape is consistent and fun, confident enough to come across as bold, but relaxed enough that it doesn’t sound like he’s working too hard to impress anyone. It’s refreshing stuff.

Get it for free from Roach Gigz.

5/27/10

The Boom The Bass The 808

!!! “AM/FM”

The atmosphere to this is thick and humid, the sort of summer weather that makes you feel almost too aware of your body. There some moments where the song seems to pop like a bubble, and you get this feeling along the lines of getting a quick blast of AC, or the minute just after the humidity breaks and it starts to rain. !!! are great at this sort of evocative funk.

Visit the !!! MySpace page.

Holy Ghost! “Static On The Wire”

This one seems like it was built specifically for roller disco, and so it’s a shame almost no one does that anymore. Maybe it’s more about the idea, though — you don’t necessarily have to be doing the act itself to enjoy that feeling of dancing and gliding. You just do it through imagined space rather than physical space.

Buy it from Amazon.

Mz Streamz “Go Go Girls”

This track isn’t profound, but I like the way that Mz Streamz wraps her words around it. It’s tight, but just loose enough that she complements the bounce of the beat, and she has room to show off her charm. She sounds like she’s smiling while rapping, which is always a good thing when the song is meant to be fun.

Visit the Mz Streamz MySpace page.

5/26/10

Look I Found Her

James Blake “CMYK”

“CMYK” is haunted by R&B ghosts. Vocal samples drift through the track, distorted and abstracted, but left just familiar enough that we can catch some of the words and identify the source material. You could rely on cultural memory to fill in the gaps — Blake is sampling Kelis and Aaliyah — but it’s not necessary, you can pick up on the tension just by listening. He’s contrasting perspectives, giving us the voice of the angry woman who has been cheated on and the voice of the Other Woman, not in conversation or conflict, but just floating along in the same continuum, as if to put us in the place of the man who is playing them both. It’s all just faint echoes of some emotional mess.

Buy it from Amazon.


©2008 Fluxblog
Site by Ryan Catbird