June 17th, 2010 6:00am
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.
June 16th, 2010 6:00am
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.
June 15th, 2010 6:00am
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.
June 14th, 2010 6:00am
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.
June 11th, 2010 9:27am
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.
June 11th, 2010 9:27am
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.
June 10th, 2010 8:58am
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.
June 9th, 2010 9:11am
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.
June 8th, 2010 8:24am
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.
June 7th, 2010 6:24am
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!
June 4th, 2010 8:57am
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.
“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.
June 3rd, 2010 10:03am
“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.
June 2nd, 2010 9:12am
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.
June 1st, 2010 8:59am
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.
May 27th, 2010 9:09am
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.
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.
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.
May 26th, 2010 8:27am
“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.
May 25th, 2010 8:46am
“Walk in the Park” is about as pensive and leisurely paced as its title implies, with each part of its arrangement progressing in time like thoughts slowly forming into an epiphany. It sounds so patient, yet purposeful in its gently insistent rhythm — the song knows where it has to go, but isn’t about to rush its way to something important. It operates on the awareness that the big moment is about to arrive and then quickly slip away, so the lead-up is extended. It’s like trying to hold on to something you don’t even have yet.
May 24th, 2010 9:11am
“Every Ghetto, Every City” is a song of proud, unapologetic nostalgia. It’s specifically about Lauryn Hill’s youth in the northern New Jersey of the 1980s, and it gets into enough vivid concrete details to make a very particular experience seem universal. You don’t need to have adolescent memories of beef patties and coco bread, doing the wop, or the fireworks at Martin Stadium to plug into the sentiment of this song, which is as more about our need to build a mythology out of our memories than it is about one woman’s life. You recognize the moments, and you fill in your own references to all the little things that made up your childhood, and served as the foundation for your experience as an adult. We all have our origin stories, so they may as well be iconic, at least in our own mind.
May 20th, 2010 8:31am
Though the sound of “Find Me Out” is poised and calm, its lyrics are paranoid and insecure, sung from the perspective of a woman totally convinced that her partner will eventually shift his attention from her best qualities to her worst flaws. Dougall sings with a cool, composed tone, underplaying the anxiety and self-loathing in the lyrics while playing up the feeling of quiet dread. It’s all muted fear, extended into this seemingly never-ending lull as she waits and waits for her worst case scenario to come true. It probably won’t, of course. It’s always a bit mystifying when someone loves you when you don’t fully love yourself, but just because you don’t get it, it doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
May 19th, 2010 9:03am
“Ffunny Ffrends” is hypnotic and woozy, shuffling about as the vocal and guitar parts double a melodic part that is essentially loose and easy-going, but becomes insistent with repetition. There’s a nice, hazy quality to this song, and it’s not necessarily to do with the lo-fi recording of the track. The space would feel open either way, though I do like the way the mix has a “soft focus” effect on the composition. It sounds a bit old and weathered, particularly when the piece shifts into an inspired, seemingly off-the-cuff guitar solo.
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