December 9th, 2014 1:14pm
When Billy Corgan announced that Monuments to an Elegy would be a nine-track album of ultra-epic guitar rock, I naturally assumed the songs would all be on the long side. You know, along the lines of stuff like “Soma,” “Hummer,” “Silverfuck,” “Porcelina,” “Thru the Eyes of Ruby,” etc. My hopes were up, for sure. The actual record is a very different thing – out of nowhere, Corgan drops the most concise album of his career. It’s over and out in just over 30 minutes, and the longest song is just a hair over 4 minutes. The songs do have an epic quality, but mostly in terms of bombast and implied scope. “Tiberius” packs a lot into 3 minutes, and it’s not hard to imagine a younger Corgan letting the song expand to at least 5 minutes. There’s a lot of discipline in this record, which is not exactly a form of artistic growth likely to get people excited, especially when you’re known for being the extremely prolific writer of over-the-top alt-rock. I like the super-saturated feeling of “Tiberius” and some of the other tracks on Monuments to an Elegy, but I find the songs sort of exhausting too – there’s an overload of treble that is taxing on the ears. I think Corgan’s voice and style generally does better when given a lot of space to breathe.
December 8th, 2014 1:41pm
This is a wonderfully bratty little song that’s basically like if the girls of Icona Pop shifted their attention towards berating the DJ at a club. It’s funny, there’s never been a shortage of pop songs that praise DJs, but it’s hard to come by a song like this, which is just totally antagonistic and belittling. Like, the gist of the lyrics is “hey asshole, why don’t you do this right for a change, just play what we want and don’t pay attention to us while we’re having a good time.” It’s unreasonable, but like, we’ve all been annoyed by shitty DJs, right? Super relatable.
December 4th, 2014 1:38pm
First, a note of clarification: This is the title track from the Wu-Tang Clan’s new album, A Better Tomorrow. It is not the Wu-Tang Clan song called “A Better Tomorrow” from their album Wu-Tang Forever. I don’t really understand why they thought it’d be a good idea to make two completely different songs with the same title, but the RZA works in mysterious ways.
I have been a Wu-Tang Clan for a very long time, and despite becoming somewhat unreliable over the years, they remain my favorite rap act of all time. If I had to make a list of my 10 favorite rappers, at least five of them would be on it. That kind of love can lead to high expectations for some, but I think I’m pretty reasonable about it: I just want to hear these guys rapping, preferably together. A Better Tomorrow is a flawed record and definitely not in the same league as Enter the Wu-Tang, Wu-Tang Forever or The W, but honestly, I’m content to just hear Method Man and Inspectah Deck doing their thing. I like hearing Masta Killa and U-God, because where the hell else are you gonna hear them? So, in the sense that I’m happy for them all to just show up, I’m cool with the record. I like a few of the songs a lot. There’s only one track that I find embarrassing. Not a bad average.
However, I think Craig Jenkins’ review of the album on Pitchfork is very accurate. RZA’s musical obsessions and personal growth as a producer are now out of sync with the rest of the Clan, and it’s resulted in a lot of performances that seem more perfunctory than inspired. I have empathy for both sides of that situation, but I mostly wish RZA had compromised a bit more. No, that’s the wrong word: Collaborated. Back in the glory days of the Wu, his greatest talent was always knowing the best way to frame the talents of his rappers. Now that he’s gone the other way, it might be time for him to listen to those guys because they might have good ideas about the best ways to frame his skills.
December 3rd, 2014 1:44pm
I have listened to this song several times by now and every time it sounds a little different. Some of this has to do with some ambient haze in the arrangement that serves as a sort of musical fog, but it’s mostly in the way the structure of the song keeps shifting and diverging while somehow seeming as though it’s stuck in one place. It’s basically a glam song presented as a strange audio illusion. Or maybe it’s just a glam song being played at the same time as the score of a spooky movie?
December 2nd, 2014 1:48pm
Ghostface’s new record is a concept album in which he plays a guy who’s fresh out of a 9 year jail stint, and goes home to discover that the woman he loves has ended up with someone he hates. This song sets up the romantic plot, with Ghostface frustrated and distraught over this turn of events, and seemingly unable to process the notion that this girl would move on with her life instead of waiting around for him. It’s not a rational thought, but it’s not a rational song – this is all about heartbreak and crushing disappointment, and the stuttering beat and the cooing soul samples perfectly frame Ghost’s portrait of this guy’s wounded ego.
December 1st, 2014 3:49am
I can’t help but feel like there’s something very radical and subversive in a young black man being so silly and bubblegum on their first major rap single. There’s a lot of bragging going on here, but it’s not aggressive or macho at all, and his voice is so androgynous that I honestly thought this was a female emcee the first couple times I heard it. There’s something really fresh about this – it’s not necessarily breaking ground and is in its own way very retro, but this is an extremely confident single and it sets him up as a very intriguing new star. It makes me think of the lyrics to Björk’s “Big Time Sensuality” – the song feels like something important about to happen, and the sound is very much a blend of “the hardcore and the gentle.”
November 26th, 2014 1:36pm
Over the course of this year, Real Estate is the band I listen to most often without necessarily identifying as a fan. The music is extremely listenable – the melodies and harmonies are always lovely, it stirs up a lot of bittersweet melancholy feelings, and works well as a nice, unobtrusive soundtrack to both work and idle time. But there’s something about the “background music” thing combined with the extremely low key and faceless quality of the band that makes it very hard to form any sort of fan connection. It’s not as though there is no character to this music – it has a very particular sense of aesthetics and thematic concerns – but this is a band that is almost entirely focused on craft and making music that’s easy to dismiss as wistful jangle rock for introverted indie dweebs. It’s not like it isn’t, or there’s something else going on here, but it comes down to the difference between being merely adequate in a genre, or being exceptional. No one is better at doing this particular thing than Real Estate.
November 24th, 2014 12:55pm
One of the benefits of being an outsider in hip-hop is that you have license to completely avoid a lot of standard tropes because you have no hope of fitting in with the mainstream stuff. Young Fathers, a trio from Scotland, are so indifferent to the boundaries of standard hip-hop that they sometimes don’t even come across as a rap act – this track spends most of its time in a very late ‘90s alt-rap zone, but it’s pulling from so many genres at once that it just seems like a weird little mutant song. Still, it’s ridiculously catchy, so you can just as easily enjoy it without ever trying to classify it. Which is probably the point.
November 20th, 2014 2:13pm
A good chunk of the TV on the Radio catalog is made up of songs by either Tunde Adebimpe or Kyp Malone that deal with a romantic conflict in which deep love and affection is at odds with behavior and feelings that are slowly poisoning their relationship. Both of these guys are obsessed with idealized romance being corrupted or destroyed by the humanity of the people involved, as though any passionate love affair is just like Icarus flying towards the sun. What really makes these songs work, and “Careful You” in particular, is the way they never lose sight of the kindness and soulful connection at the start of the relationship, and address their lovers with affection and respect no matter how toxic things have become. In this song, Tunde really makes you feel like it could work, even if he has no idea how it could be salvaged. There’s a lot of heart in this song, but it’s mostly broken.
November 19th, 2014 3:20pm
I saw Thee Oh Sees for the first time last night, and I came away from the show feeling like I truly understood the band in way I hadn’t before. My grasp on the band’s dynamics were pretty hazy going in, to the point that I had assumed a woman sang a lot of the parts that John Dwyer actually sings in falsetto. But beyond that, witnessing Dwyer in action makes everything about the music click into focus – it’s all very physical and joyful; the act of playing music as this tactile, athletic expression. Dwyer plays his guitar the way I always wish I could, with this loose-limbed nonchalance and that thing where a guitarist will just do some cool gesture than results in a cool sound and it doesn’t totally make sense. Just like Stephen Malkmus, he makes playing guitar look extremely easy, and also totally unfathomable. Dwyer’s natural ease is crucial to the band’s entire aesthetic – even when the songs are very structured, it all feels very intuitive and alive in the moment.
November 18th, 2014 1:34pm
The New Pornographers @ Hammerstein Ballroom 11/17/2014
Brill Bruisers / Myriad Harbour / Moves / War on the East Coast / Sing Me Spanish Techno / Crash Years / All the Old Showstoppers / Jackie, Dressed In Cobras / Another Drug Deal of the Heart / The Laws Have Changed / You Tell Me Where / Testament to Youth in Verse / Wide Eyes / Marching Orders / Adventures in Solitude / Jackie / Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk / Backstairs / Silver Jenny Dollar / Champions of Red Wine / Born with a Sound / Mass Romantic // Challengers / Dancehall Domine / The Bleeding Heart Show /// Use It / Slow Descent Into Alcoholism
This was an excellent show but I don’t really have anything to say about it other than that I have seen The New Pornographers many times since 2001, and their always-strong harmony game has reached a new level. The pure vocal power in this show was impressive, enough to feel like a big punch in the set’s most bombastic songs. They are incredible, and you should go see them.
Carl Newman’s lyrics have always walked a thin line between crypticism and open emotion, so in most of his songs you can get a good sense of his sentiment even if some lines, however evocative, are mystifying in their specificity. You definitely get that in “You Tell Me Where,” the grand finale of Brill Bruisers, and one of the most impressive songs the New Pornographers have ever made. To a large extent the power of the song is due to its vocal arrangement, which alternates the lead between Newman, Neko Case, and Kathryn Calder before ending with a full-on choral blast at the climax. The lyrics address some sort of falling out, and each of the singers convey a different sentiment – Newman’s parts are bitter and passive-aggressive, Neko is melancholy, and Calder is chilly but diplomatic. It’s Calder’s part that gets under my skin, and reminds me too much of bad emotional situations I’ve been in, where the idea of compromising yourself to please someone else seems like a more valid option than making an effort to have anything you actually want. But there’s a twist in here, where the acquiescent tone shifts to sarcasm, and the big climax – “I think I could change and become what you want me / to think, we could finally be done” – only reads as defiant. It’s a big “fuck you” of a song, and ends the record on this huge feeling of catharsis and relief.
November 17th, 2014 1:20pm
Caribou @ Webster Hall 11/14/2014
Our Love / Silver / Mars / Leave House / All I Ever Need / Bowls / Second Chance / Jamelia / Back Home / Odessa / Your Love Will Set You Free / Can’t Do Without You // Sun
I went into this show thinking that it’d be cool to see Caribou but not really knowing how the music would feel in live setting, and came away from it thinking that they’re one of the best live bands I’ve seen in some time. The songs sound more or less the same in concert, but the power of the live musicians – especially the drummer, who plays a mostly electronic kit – really pushes everything to the next level. The physicality of the music is multiplied several times over, and tracks that feel more chill on record feel urgent or ecstatic in the show. They leave you on the best possible feeling too, with “Sun” extending into a long multi-peak finale that was so exciting and satisfying that I don’t think anyone would’ve minded if it went on another five or ten minutes.
November 13th, 2014 1:28pm
Sloan @ Bowery Ballroom 11/12/2014
Forty-Eight Portraits / Keep Swinging (Downtown) / Unkind / 13 (Under A Bad Sign) / You’ve Got A Lot On Your Mind / Three Sisters / I Hate My Generation / Carried Away / Suppose They Close the Door / You Don’t Need Excuses To Be Good // If It Feels Good, Do It / C’mon C’mon / Misty’s Beside Herself / Take It Easy / Who Taught You To Live Like That / Ready For You / The N.S. / Blackout / Love Is All Around / On the Horizon / Someone I Can Be True With / Ill Placed Trust / Cleopatra / The Other Man / Money City Maniacs /// We’ve Come This Far / The Marquee and the Moon / 500 Up
Sloan’s current tour is very generous, with two full-length sets full of songs mainly taken from their new record Commonwealth, and cuts from the middle period of their career, from Navy Blues through Never Hear the End of It. It is not generous if you’ve come to see them play anything from One Chord to Another – it seems they’ve put set staples “The Lines You Amend,” “The Good In Everyone,” and “Everything You’ve Done Wrong” on hiatus for a while, maybe until they get around to doing a 20th anniversary tour for that record around 2016. As a person who has seen Sloan a bunch of times now I was kinda happy to get a break from those songs, and to get more from that middle era, which is definitely my personal favorite chunk of their catalog. I believe this was my first time seeing them play “The Marquee and the Moon,” and it was a major highlight of the show for me, as gorgeous and dramatic as I would’ve hoped.
The first set of the show was presented in the style of Commonwealth, with each of the members playing a three-song mini-set, except for Andrew, who did his side-long “Forty-Eight Portraits” in its entirety at the start. This was pretty much the only place in the set they could get away with that song – it’s sooooo long and meandering that it’d kill momentum entirely if put in the middle somewhere. Jay’s songs from the new album came off the best live, and pushed them into a space that’s a lot more elegant than the three other songwriters in their default positions. I was particularly impressed by the lead guitar parts in those songs – it’s so smooth and pretty on record, but jumps out at you more in person.
November 12th, 2014 1:24pm
Here we are with another project by a former member of LCD Soundsystem – this time it’s Al Doyle, who is also in Hot Chip. It’s interesting to me how all these records seem to run with one element of the overall LCD sound, so you can tell it’s all coming from a similar aesthetic space while all being distinct. In this case, Doyle and his Hot Chip bandmate Felix Martin are working with cold keyboard tones and very precise programming and sequencing to build atmospheric, subtly poignant synth pop. It’s not too far off from what these guys normally do in Hot Chip, but there’s something about the way a track like “The Sunlight” gradually unfolds and opens up that strikes me as far more emotional than that band, but very in line with the big-hearted music of James Murphy. (Who is notably the one core member of LCD we haven’t heard from this year.)
November 11th, 2014 1:33pm
I don’t think I’m actually invested in the Foo Fighters enough to be properly disappointed by a new Foo Fighters record, but I do think most of the songs on Sonic Highways are kinda dull, especially compared to the material on their previous album, which I’d say is one of the better records of their career. The second half of the album feels like a slog to me, and while I think it’s interesting for Grohl to let his songs sprawl out a bit, the melodies lack a spark. “The Feast and the Famine” is the one cut on Sonic Highways that seems like a classic Foo tune, but that’s in large part because it sounds just like several other classic Foo tunes. But this is the kind of song Grohl does best – urgent and aggressive, but also highly sentimental and very catchy in a sleek and dynamic way. It’s a song about growing up in D.C. and falling in love with hardcore, and while it integrates traces of D.C. punk, Grohl’s impulse to self-mythologize seems a bit at odds with the ethos of that culture.
November 7th, 2014 12:37pm
I feel like you drop Kendrick Lamar into most anything and he’d figure out how to make it work, so I’m not surprised that he’d be good on a Flying Lotus track. It is cool, though, how much they complement each other. Kendrick brings out a warmth and humanity in Flying Lotus’ music that can get buried beneath a trebly clutter, and Flying Lotus pushes Kendrick toward a pensive, melancholy tone you hear on a lot of Good Kid, mAAd City, but has been missing from a lot of his features work in the time since.
November 5th, 2014 2:29am
I can’t remember how often I listened to “Handshake Drugs” three years ago when the lyrics were basically my life, or if I’m only noticing that now. The sentiment of the song is extremely passive, with pretty much every line being about something happening to Jeff Tweedy, or someone or something influenced his actions. It’s a feeling of disconnection from who you are, and just floating through life hoping for something that makes you feel like a person. It’s a very specific kind of depression, where every feeling just flattens out and the ego gets vague. You’re willing to be shaped by someone, because you just figure they know better than you. But that’s terrible, because anyone who wants to change you so much that you’re basically someone else doesn’t like you at all. It’s not a great feeling, and yet this song always feels so comfortable and pleasant. There can be a lot of pleasure in feeling neutralized sometimes.
November 4th, 2014 1:50pm
There’s a lot for me to love in “Cruel World,” but the part that really gets me is the way Lana sings “You’re young, you’re wild, you’re free / you’re dancing circles around me / you’re fucking craaaaazyyyyy” with this genuine sense of anguish and dread. Part of what makes it work is in the vocal production – the particular tone of the reverb brings out a cold, metallic quality in Lana’s voice, which has an interesting contrast with one of the most emotive performances of her career. But it’s also in the words, and the way she sets up this structure in which the pensive verses take place in a present where she wants to get away from a poisonous man, and the chorus flashes back to scenes that are thrilling, terrifying, and confusing all at once. There’s so much alienation in that chorus, and it’s a feeling anyone with introverted tendencies will recognize – knowing that you’re in a situation that’s meant to be fun, but only fills you with crushing anxiety.
November 3rd, 2014 1:06pm
It’s been a very good year for DFA Records, with a lot of the former members and miscellaneous associates of LCD Soundsystem putting out strong music that lives up to the high standard set by James Murphy. Museum of Love, a band featuring LCD drummer Pat Mahoney, is the most interesting and moving thing that’s come out on the label this year, in part because he’s the guy who is really running with the element of the LCD sound that made the band as big as they were: introspective balladry set to beautifully layered, rhythmic music. “And All the Winners” would’ve fit in pretty well on This Is Happening, really – it’s got a similar tonal palette, and Mahoney sings it with a feeling of resignation that matches up well with where Murphy was at on “I Can Change” and “Home.” This is a song about having a deep ambivalence about the ideas of “winners” and “losers,” and how being on either side of that depends on someone’s point of view. But despite that, there’s no mistaking that this is a ballad for all the underdogs out there.
October 31st, 2014 12:22pm
This is such a simple, sweet, and empathetic song. It’s sung from the perspective of a broke Mexican immigrant who is just trying to make things work, and praying to god for any sort of blessing. The melody feels so warm and familiar; I’m sure I’ve heard it before somewhere before. The part that really kills me is how David Lowery sings stuff like “I’ll be a good boy for the rest of my life.” Something about that, maybe the way it’s something you’d literally think as a child, gets me in the gut.
