Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Michael Jackson “Love Never Felt So Good”

There are three versions of this song – the original demo, the version with Justin Timberlake, and this glorious, classy disco tune arranged by Timbaland and J-Roc. You can’t go wrong with any version of it, it’s just a gorgeous, joyful song written and sung by Jackson at the pinnacle of his talent, but this is undoubtedly my favorite. I don’t think Jackson would’ve ever done a thing like this if he were still alive; he seemed very resistant to going back to his Off the Wall sound. But this is on par with the best music of his career, and even if it’s morally dubious to mess around with his discarded work after he’s died, I really do think the world is a better place with this song in it. It’s also nice to have a song on the charts that truly connects with the melodic and harmonic generosity of prime disco – compared to this, a thing like Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” is revealed to be rather flimsy.

Buy it from Amazon.

Skrillex featuring Killagraham and Sam Dew “Stranger”

You might have an idea of what Skrillex’s music is like, and if you’re very dubious of him, it’s not flattering. And a lot of Skrillex’s music probably is something like what you have in mind – jock jams as remained by a punkish hacker kid – and, well, sorry, but that music is awesome and you’ll probably come around to noticing that at some point. But “Stranger,” one of the best songs on Skrillex’s new record, isn’t quite like those tracks. It’s much more of a pop song, and the mood is fairly chill. It reminds me a lot of those really hot summer days where the heat seems to make the whole world slow down, and every blast of air conditioning feels incredible. It doesn’t NOT sound like Skrillex – the lead keyboard sounds have the same signature tonal palette of his famous “drops,” but it has a different character here. Instead of feeling like a jolt of manic energy, it has a more smeared, psychedelic effect.

Buy it from Amazon.

Owen Pallett @ Bowery Ballroom 5/14/2014
Midnight Directives / Scandal at the Parkade / Keep the Dog Quiet / Soldier’s Rock / Bridle & Bit / The Secret Seven / Tryst with Mephistopheles / Song Song Song / That’s When the Audience Died / The Passions / This Is the Dream of Win & Regine / The Great Elsewhere / Infernal Fantasy / The Riverbed // Song for Five and Six / Lewis Takes Off His Shirt /// Pretty Good Year (partial improvised Tori Amos cover) / Peach Plum Pear (Joanna Newsom cover)

When I see an artist like Owen Pallett perform, I always stop for a second at some point to think of how few musicians – however great they may be – who are anywhere near his level as a musician. The full range of Pallett’s talent includes his excellence and sophistication as a composer and lyricist, his stunning proficiency with the violin, his imaginative use of live sampling and keyboards, and his gorgeous, highly controlled singing voice. A lot of his show, in which he builds elaborate arrangements on the spot with his loop pedals and his rhythm section, seems like a magic trick, and whenever I’m not sucked into the emotional urgency or sheer beauty of the music, I wonder how on earth he’s doing it all.

Owen Pallett “The Riverbed”

Pallett’s new album In Conflict is the best record I’ve heard so far in 2014. It’s been an unusually meh year so far, but even if things pick up a lot later, it’s very unlikely many better records will come along. The record is astonishing for many of the reasons I mentioned above, but it resonates with me deeply mainly for how Pallett approaches the idea of depression and the awkwardness of establishing true connection when you’re lonely with an degree of accuracy and generosity of spirit that is hard to come by.

It’s very hard to pick a single favorite on a record like In Conflict, but “The Riverbed” is a good summary of the record’s themes, and its arrangement is the most urgent – it just feels like a crushing emotional weight that feels like it could lift at any moment, but you’re just waiting around for that relief in the hope that it will actually come. I like the way Pallett’s words hit on ideas that will inevitably spark anxiety in some people – writer’s block, alcoholism, being alone and childless in your 30s – but the implication isn’t that these don’t necessarily need to be awful things, and they come out of choices you make for yourself that even when flawed are rooted in an attempt to do what’s right for yourself. The first two thirds of the song set up the anxiety and dread, and the final third offers comfort, mainly by introducing a positive form of doubt: What if you’re wrong, and you’re not a failure at all? What if it doesn’t matter as much as you think it does? Can you let go of your pride, if that’s what is really bringing you down?

Buy it from Amazon.

Usher “Good Kisser”

Usher’s catalog at this point is like a museum of hot R&B production trends from the past two decades – there’s not a lot tying it all together aside from his voice and a consistently good instinct for knowing what kind of sounds will be exciting at any given moment. “Good Kisser” uses the recent Pharrell renaissance as a jump-off point, but pushes that syncopated, off-kilter take on classic soul a bit further, so the track feels like you’re hearing an early ’70s Stevie Wonder song from a strange angle. Usher’s phrasing in this song is fantastic – he’s very nimble and expressive, shifting from more staccato, rhythmic parts in a somewhat pinched voice to a smoother, more delicate tone when the song drops its tension in the bridge up to the chorus. The whole song is a very well calibrated build up of excited, anxious energy and cathartic release, so it’s not very surprising that the lyrics play off that by having him lust for this person, and then go loose and ecstatic the moment he gets what he wants.

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MNEK “Every Little Word”

Uzoechi Emenike is remarkably fully formed as a singer and producer at 19 – his song have a youthful energy, but his creative choices are very sophisticated. His production on “Every Little Word” has a perfect balance of bounce and precision, and his vocal performance is controlled but not remotely fussy. The thing that really makes this song is such a simple decision – he repeats the phrase “every little word you say” in the chorus, but rather than keep it all about the same, he sings the words with the same phrasing but a slightly different tonality, with his voice going higher for emphasis. The music doesn’t follow suit, so you get this effect that in my mind reads kinda like a 3-D book where those words suddenly seem to leap off the page while everything else remains flat.

Buy it from Amazon.

Veruca Salt “It’s Holy”

Veruca Salt never really went away – though most of the band’s original lineup had departed by 1998, Louise Post essentially released a series of solo records under that name through the past decade. The original band is back together now, and they put out a new single a few weeks ago for Record Store Day. It’s not too special for ’90s bands to reunite now, so let’s get to the actually exciting news: Veruca Salt’s two new songs are both excellent, and it’s like they just snapped back into exactly what made them such a good, fun band in the mid-90s. Gordon and Post’s music on their own was never anything too special, but they clearly just have a real spark when they’re together. Creative chemistry is a weird and unpredictable thing, you know? The lyrics of “It’s Holy” seem to acknowledge this, both in terms of an excited “we’re back!” feeling, but also just being thrilled to reconnect with each other, and their inspiration. This doesn’t sound like an old band doing their old thing; this sounds very young and passionate to me.

Buy music by Veruca Salt from Amazon.

The Voluntary Butler Scheme “Brain Freeze”

The Voluntary Butler Scheme is a one-man band project, but doesn’t sound much like one – there’s a spark to the interplay between the guitar, drums, and horns in his tracks that feels very live, like it’s something that’d come out on Daptone Records. The sound leans a lot on ’60s soul, but Rob Jones’ voice is pure English pop – affable and polite, but sorta distant too. “Brain Freeze” sounds perky and warm, but Jones’ cryptic lyrics keep you at a distance. It seems to be a song about feeling ambivalent about what it takes to make a lot of money, but it’s just vague enough that it also seems like a strange display of affection.

Buy it from Amazon.

Girl Talk & Freeway featuring Waka Flocka Flame “Tolerated”

It’s a little weird to me that Girl Talk didn’t jump into hip-hop production sooner – sure, mashups are his THING, and he clearly makes a good living as a DJ, but he’s so good at energetic track-building that it seems like he would’ve been pushed into it once he became a legit star. I don’t think every rapper would be at home in a Girl Talk track, but Freeway fits in perfectly, and his shouty rhymes are ideal for this sort of blaring, heavy composition. Their entire EP is excellent, but “Tolerated” is the one that really gets across that “ridiculously excited!!!” Girl Talk vibe while also conveying genuine menace. This is fantastic summer music, or maybe more accurately, pre-summer music.

Download the EP for free from DatPiff.

Tune-Yards “Find A New Way”

“Find A New Way” starts with Merrill Garbus singing about feeling creatively stuck, and someone telling her to just “find a new way” to sing. You’d only tell her that because she makes being a bold, idiosyncratic singer seem so easy. She cycles through a lot of doubt in the song, but the part that really gets to me – perhaps more so than anything else I’ve heard recently – is the point in the song where she belts out “when I see you changing, you make me think that I can change too.” I like this because it accepts change as a positive, often necessary thing, and that seeing it happen in others is usually the best way to see that possibility for yourself. A lot of people are terrified of change, and that’s a whole other thing. This is about the anxiety of wanting change, but having no idea how to do it, and feeling frustrated by that. It’s easy to tell anyone to “find a new way,” and it’s just as easy to know they’re right. It’s just usually extremely difficult to actually find that new way, especially when you’re all on your own.

Buy it from Amazon.

Tink featuring Jeremih “Don’t Tell Nobody”

I was only dimly aware of Tink before I heard this song; now I feel convinced that she’s going to become a star and that this song ought to be one of the “songs of the summer” for 2014. There’s a light, breezy feeling to the R&B side of this track – everything feels a bit weightless when Jeremih sings the hook, and the keyboard tones indicate a chill vibe even if the vocals are all about conflict. Tink’s performance goes against all that – she sounds anxious and angry, but never so much that seems like she’s freaking out. There’s a nice sense of emotional scale here, so while she genuinely seems hurt by this dude who’s sleeping around on her, she also comes off as strong and unwilling to put up with his shit. Or, she is until their fights turn into sex and they get sucked into the cycle all over again.

Jamie xx “Girl”

Jamie xx’s music is easy to enjoy, but it’s difficult to articulate what exactly is so good about it. A lot of electronic artists occupy a similar space – a mellow groove indebted to hip-hop with some sort of vocal sample looped through it as a hook – but aside from Four Tet, not many pull it off quite as well. “Girl,” one side of his new single, feels a bit more full than what he’s usually up to, but it doesn’t quite escape his usual minimalism. As sedate as it is, it seems a little more dramatic than what he’s done in the past — there’s some vague gesture towards some kind of cinematic emotion here, even if it’s “cinematic” in a very indie film sort of way.

Buy it from Amazon.

Damon Albarn “Lonely Press Play”

I suppose that if you came to Damon Albarn’s music in the very late ’90s through the ’00s, you probably think of him mainly as a guy who is mostly bleak and moody, and makes music with a sort of grayish tonal palette. But I became a fan of Albarn’s music in the mid ’90s, so I mostly think of him as an artist who thrives on on-tempo tracks and an extremely bright tonality, and have spent a lot of time just wishing he’d snap out of this glum funk he’s been in for better part of the past 15 years. Albarn’s first solo record is the most bleak album of his career, and essentially sounds like a very accurate musical expression of clinical depression. Some of it is quite good, but a lot of it just feels listless and dull – too much of the same sort of half-hearted melodies over the same sort of grimy, minimalist arrangements. I’m not really sure what’s going on in Albarn’s life, but the emotion of this record feels very authentic to me, even if I don’t personally connect with a lot of it.

“Lonely Press Play” is one of the tracks that works, and makes the most sense as a “solo” track: It’s not tremendously different from what Albarn has done in his many other projects over the past few years, but it seems dialed back a bit, and a little less guarded. He’s often projected his anxieties on other characters or obscured them with oblique language in the past, but here he seems like a person who has simply stopped caring about putting up any kind of front.

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Iggy Azalea “Work”

Iggy Azalea is a good rapper, but I can’t listen to hear voice without feeling like I’m listening to someone do an impression of a badass female emcee. She always seems to be concentrating very hard on getting the affect just right, to the point that her performances feel more stiff than they probably should. And this makes sense – as a white woman from Australia, she probably feels like she has a lot to prove to a mainstream rap audience in America, and she clearly has no intention of being a niche act. She puts a lot of effort into telling her unique origin story in “Work,” but it’s undermined a bit by a delivery that feels a lot more generic than it should. I don’t think she even needs to abandon this affect, I just wish the mask slipped a bit more, or that she had more vocal quirks that you just couldn’t hear anywhere else.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Both “The Inevitable Shove”

Aimee Mann and Ted Leo’s first album as a duo is a study in two artists with very distinct styles trying to find a middle ground where their individual quirks complement each other. This doesn’t always work out – the songwriting is as solid as you’d expect from these total pros, but their voices don’t really work in harmony. There’s definitely times on the record where it feels a bit like you’re listening to Aimee Mann sing along to a Ted Leo record in her car, or vice versa. Their voices work really well in contrast though, especially when they are trading off verses in a way that highlights their distinct vocal styles. “The Inevitable Shove” is a great example of this – Mann is typically relaxed and sardonic in her affect, but Leo handles all the parts that call for earnest, emphatic emoting. You really get the thing you’d hope for on a team-up like this, which is basically the sense that these two very different cool people are hanging out together in the same song.

Buy it from Amazon.

Lana Del Rey “West Coast”

The most fascinating thing about Lana Del Rey is the very thing that makes her infuriating to many people: She’s a total enigma who refuses to give her audience anything other than a vivid, distinct, highly stylized aesthetic. Her mask never slips so it’s impossible to tell when she’s being serious and when she’s just fucking with you, and while I find that tension very exciting and thoughtful, people who yearn for earnest authenticity in their pop music – or even an identifying human being at the center of it all – are left wanting. But I like Lana as a trollish provocateur, and she’s done enough music and videos at this point that there is no doubt in mind that she’s a very intelligent artist with a lot to say. The ironies and contradictions are the point, the distance between “the real her” and what she embodies is meant to be foregrounded. A lot of Lana’s art is about embracing glamour as a way of making life more thrilling, and implicitly asking “Why wouldn’t you want to make your experiences feel more sexy and cinematic?” “West Coast” is very much about this frame of mind, and how the mythology of Hollywood enhances the excitement of being around – or away from – another of her bad boy love interests. Everything and everyone is an archetype in a Lana Del Rey song, but in context, it’s not a dehumanizing thing. If anything, she’s coming from a position that by turning everything into a story, the world feels more alive.

Buy it from Amazon.

Sunny Day Real Estate “Lipton Witch”

It’s strange to think that Sunny Day Real Estate reunited after nearly a decade, wrote and recorded “Lipton Witch,” and then completely lost the will to carry on. I mean, I get it on an interpersonal level, but artistically… surely they noticed that this was one of the very best songs they’d ever done together, right? “Lipton Witch” has an urgent, explosive sound that the band largely abandoned after Diary in favor of knottier compositions or more pensive material. The song is all forward momentum and catharsis, with Jeremy Enigk singing vague, conspiratorial lyrics in his usual tortured rasp, but sounding more triumphant than defeated. If this is truly the end of the band, “Lipton Witch” works well as a final statement: Musically, it brings them full circle, and tonally, it sounds like a happy ending. Or, you know, as happy as they’re going to get.

Andrew Jackson Jihad “Temple Grandin”

Andrew Jackson Jihad has been around for about a decade, so they’re hardly new to sounding remarkably similar to The Mountain Goats, but wow, they sound remarkably similar to The Mountain Goats. Sean Bonnette certainly has his own voice and lyrical style, but the music sensibility is very close to where John Darnielle has been over the past several years – a very particular way of playing acoustic guitar, a very particular sort of melodic phrasing, an emphasis on lyrics above all other things. Bonnette isn’t on Darnielle’s level on that front – not a lot of people are, really – but his words are very vivid and rooted in the kind of bitter, ironic tone of a lot of ’00s emo rock. “Temple Grandin” is both oblique and extremely specific, with words that bring up a lot of bile and ideas about cruelty and convenience, but don’t take shape as a specific narrative. It’s just one of those things where you wouldn’t want to be the person addressed in the song.

Buy it from Amazon.

Total Control “Flesh War”

My friend Maria sent this to me recently because she knew I’ve become very interested in new wave, and hey, this sounds like new wave! And yes, it does sound like new wave, or at least the more grim Joy Division/New Order/Depeche Mode end of it. But it’s NOT actually new wave, because this is a pastiche of a specific style, whereas actual new wave was about idiosyncratic artists being as distinct and strange as possible while also making bold, accessible pop music. It’s not about a particular style so much as it’s about individuality and imagination. This is a really great song – to me, this mainly sounds like a song that should’ve been on one of the last two Interpol records – but it’s a very post-00s kind of rock song because it’s just making no effort to be distinctive beyond reminding people of other music they probably like. And like, even as much as Interpol is heavily indebted to Joy Division, they really do have their own thing going on if just because Paul Banks is such a bizarre lyricist and singer. As appealing as “Flesh War” is, I’m not really picking up anything special about their personality. I’d like more of that from them – they clearly have the fundamentals down.

Here’s the Total Control page on Soundcloud. Their album is out in June.

Thee Oh Sees “Encrypted Bounce (A Queer Sound)”

“Encrypted Bounce” sounds like Can if they were from sunny California instead of dark, dour Germany – the relentless groove and bad-trip vocals are there, but the guitar parts relieve the tension of the rhythm rather than add to it. The bottom end is pretty heavy, but most of this track feels completely weightless, with all the trebly parts seeming to float upward like helium balloons let loose. I find this song to be really comfortable – there’s just something very calming about the certainty of that beat and the incredible looseness of just about everything else going on in the song.

Buy it from Amazon.

TEEN “Rose 4 U”

The first two releases by TEEN were frustrating to me because while I was very impressed by some aspects of the band – Teeny Lieberson’s voice, her particular melodic sensibility, the band’s taste in keyboard tones – the songs were, for the most part, too stiff and inert. But now that they’ve got a new bass player, it all totally clicks. Boshra AlSaadi has a very warm and funky style, and it loosens everything up and keeps their treble-heavy music from sounding too flat or brittle. “Rose 4 U” makes the most of the band’s new dynamic – everything in the song pivots off AlSaadi’s groove, in sometimes very unexpected ways. I especially love the way it keeps building as it moves along, and when everything drops out to foreground the vocal harmonies, it comes back feeling vaguely Motown-ish in the finale.

Buy it from Amazon.