November 10th, 2016 1:11pm
Duck are essentially a synthpop duo, but their music is essentially a digital simulation of grunge circa ’91. It’s interesting to hear this sort of L7/Mudhoney vibe transposed to keyboards and drum machines – it’s just as loud and murky, but the sound is more tinny and the drum machine imposes a tighter grid on a style that’s either much more dense and wild or a little bit slack. That rolling, distorted bass line sounds amazing though, and the vocals add a playful, British femininity that nudges the overall aesthetic a bit closer to, say, Sleeper or Elastica.
November 9th, 2016 1:42pm
“Sleeping Beauty” isn’t quite like any other piece of music I’ve ever encountered. It sounds like moonlight, and feels like floating outside of yourself. It moves at a very languid pace over the course of 12 minutes between sections led by Sun Ra’s electric piano that feel weightless and serene and other parts focused on the horn section that suggest a sort of spacey grandeur that has somehow manifested itself on earth. The recording sounds as though it was largely improvised in the middle of the night, and I love how some parts can feel a bit tentative while others, like a lot of the vocal parts led by June Tyson, are like moments of genuine inspiration. This is an extraordinarily calm piece of music, and even in the context of Sun Ra’s larger discography of music aiming for transcendental cosmic experiences, it stands out as a window to some better, more beautiful world. Its existence feels like a miracle to me.
November 8th, 2016 4:11am
Really Big Pinecone’s music is somehow both restless and chill at the same time. The guitar parts have a mellow tone, but the melodies wind around in strange knots and change direction at odd intervals. It’s kinda like if Real Estate tried to channel the chaos of a Captain Beefheart record, and then balanced that with a lot of inexplicably tight vocal harmonies. “Everybody Needs Friends” is actually one of the least eccentric cuts on their new EP, and though it’s not quite as novel as a few of the other songs, the slightly more relaxed structure gives the singers a bit more space to sing. The tone is fascinating, and I think this music will resonate with anyone who’s ever been a bit uptight even when they’re stoned or drunk.
November 6th, 2016 9:38pm
There’s a lot going on in this Lil Awree-produced track but it still somehow feels very stark and minimal, like this chilly, cloudy haze engulfing A$AP Rocky and Skepta’s verses. You notice the atmosphere more than anything – that faint sax, the distant echoes of voices – but the song clicks together around a melodic keyboard part that’s so subtle I didn’t even realize it was there the first several times I heard this. (I think it’s a harpsichord setting?) The melody is mirror by Rocky and Skepta’s vocals, so it’s like this purely melodic version of the hook floating just under the haze and serving as scaffolding for the overall stoned vibe.
November 3rd, 2016 11:50am
The music sounds a bit more “teenage vampire” to me, if we’re being honest. But teenage witches are more interesting to me than teenage vampires, in part because while the metaphor of vampires is more about adults lusting for youth, witchcraft is about wanting to claim the powers of adulthood. It’s all secret knowledge and rituals and sisterhood, and often a lot of lust and rivalry. It’s barely a metaphor for being a teen girl – it’s more just an exaggerated power fantasy, like superheroes. This is the feeling Heavy Heart are tapping into here, filling this romantic and hyper-dramatic sort of shoegaze ballad with this mix of fascination, envy, and unprocessed lust for some other woman. The lyrics on the chorus get creepily possessive – “I want it, and no one can have it / so what if it isn’t worth it” – but I think the real power of this song is someone deciding that they can feel this way, and getting off on that. After all, a lot of witchcraft is just owning your desires without shame.
November 2nd, 2016 11:58am
Everything about this song screams “I’m from the early ‘70s,” to the point that the only tell is in the production, which has a very contemporary digital chilliness to it. (I am not actually certain this was recorded and/or mixed digitally, but I would be a lot of money that it was.) The piano chords sound like they’re meant to deliberately evoke hits by Todd Rundgren and Carole King, and give you a grounding in some very familiar and wholesome vibe before drifting into a dreamier type of psychedelia. This is basically a love song about taking psychedelics, and Natalie Mering sings it with a tone that feels both intimate and weirdly detached, which is pretty much exactly right for the subject matter. She always sounds like she’s not quite there with you, and moving somewhere else with the chords.
November 1st, 2016 2:34am
The melody line in this song and the vocal performance captured on this track are both remarkable, but I find myself obsessing on something relatively minor about the recording: There is something magical about the particular crack of the snare, something I can barely describe. It’s a perfect thwack sound, both precise and blunt. It’s firm and physical, and not at all fussy. It’s in direct contrast with the overt loveliness of the twinkling keyboard part and Ari Lennox’s voice, which has the grace of a jazz singer and the nimbleness of an emcee. It’s the perfect grounding for the song on both a musical and lyrical level, situating a romantic sentiment within something more immediate and tangible.
October 31st, 2016 12:28pm
Salaam Remi imagined No Panty as a party; a physical space to go see mixtape rappers perform live. The party became a group – Nitty Scott, Bodega Bamz, and Joell Ortiz, all NYC rappers of Puerto Rican heritage – and the group made a record, and the record sounds just like a party. Bamz and Ortiz are both great, but these songs are dominated by the raw star power of Scott. The group dynamic reminds me of the Fugees, where you have these two guys who would be the most charismatic rappers on someone else’s track put in de facto supporting roles alongside this extraordinarily expressive and confident female emcee. “Singin’ My Song” is the most immediate cut on a record full of obvious bangers, and lot of that has to do with how joyfully Scott bounces off the beat, and the way her voice bends and twists around the syllables of carefully constructed rhymes that somehow feel totally relaxed and improvised.
October 27th, 2016 11:54am
Lady Gaga is a rocker at heart, and though that was obscured in her earliest, biggest hits, she’s been gradually foregrounding that aspect of her as she’s moved along starting with The Fame Monster. Some people cynically interpret this as Gaga searching for a way to reboot herself for the marketplace, but it’s really just her becoming more herself, and allowing herself the opportunity to try out types of songs – like, say, “Joanne” – that she couldn’t take a risk on when she was dominating the charts with straight-up dance pop. Gaga is at her best when she’s excitedly trying out new looks and sounds, testing the limits of her life, and being a proud freak. At a point, the conformist marketplace of mainstream pop is an unnecessary albatross for her, and being less prominent frees her of creative limitations. Gaga the cult figure isn’t going away, which means Gaga the rock star can finally thrive. This is good, just like how it was a positive development when Kanye West and Beyoncé gave up chasing hits and decided to just do whatever they wanted instead.
“A-Yo,” a collaboration with the veteran songwriter Hillary Lindsay and producer Mark Ronson, is exactly the sort of thing I want from Gaga. It leans into rock music quite a bit – it’s in her voice, it’s in the crunch of the chords, the nods to country, that vaguely Fripp-ish solo that sounds like someone playing a guitar that has neon tube lighting from a dive bar for strings – but the song is produced like a dance pop track. This is a contemporary version of the thing Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna did so well in the ‘80s, which is present pop music as a place where elements of all popular genres merged into something greater than the sum of its parts that welcomed all types of people. As catchy and joyful as “A-Yo” gets, I don’t think it has a chance at uniting people in that way, but I appreciate the gesture and feel like this big tent approach suits the utopian freakiness of Gaga.
October 26th, 2016 12:20pm
This is a song about being surprised by your emotions, and wondering why things you let slide a few years ago now take a greater toll on your psyche. It’s a very being-in-your-early-20s type of song – it’s very rooted to the process of figuring out your own version of being an adult – but the way Julia Steiner sings about feeling restless and distracted is so vivid that it doesn’t really matter how old you are as a listener. That feeling contrasts nicely with the somewhat upbeat tone of the music, dialing down the melodrama but situating the confusion and heavy emotions in a life that is ordinary and decidedly non-awful. It puts a scale on things without dismissing them.
October 25th, 2016 12:47pm
Lance Skiiiwalker’s music has an odd wooziness to it that falls somewhere on a continuum between “way more stoned than you intended to be” and “coming down with a flu.” A lot of his first album, Introverted Intuition, is built around ambient tones, audio scuzz, and beats that seem as though they could collapse or disintegrate at any moment, but by the time you get to “Lover’s Lane” at the end of the record, the sound has gelled into something more sturdy and elegant. The string sample at the center of the song carries a lot of the tune, but it’s still very much about atmosphere – the negative space around the beat, the particular crispness of the snare hits, the way Skiiiwalker’s lover-man vocals feel slightly slow and off-kilter. It’s surprising that there aren’t more songs that conflate romance and disorientation in this way.
Pusha T’s style has always been well-suited to this sort of bare bones minimalism. It’s like cooking something with a distinct, highly nuanced flavor – you don’t want to drown it out by adding too many other elements. You want to showcase the character of the thing, and highlight nuances with subtle additions that frame rather than obscure the flavor. Pusha isn’t breaking any ground for himself – to keep going with that analogy, it’s more like a carrot just being a carrot, or a really excellent example of a carrot – but Mike Will’s production reminds you of how menacing and seductive his voice can be. The punchlines in the verses land perfectly, you can sense how carefully he controls the weight of each syllable, and you hang on his every word.
October 24th, 2016 12:52pm
A lot of hip-hop love songs spoil the mood with random crude lyrics, but “Next to You” never falls into that trap, which is usually just a way to avoid seeming too vulnerable and soft on the track. This song is as sincere as it gets, with both Jeremih and Twista coming across as guys trying very hard to be courteous gentlemen. It’s sweet and generous without getting corny or undermining its sexuality. The key thing here is respect – Twista’s densely packed lines are assertive but not aggressive, and deeply respectful of this woman’s body and mind, as well as her personal boundaries. It’s all genuinely romantic, and that’s before you even factor in the chords and melodies lifted from Rose Royce’s 1976 hit “I Wanna Get Next to You,” which makes everything sound warm and gentle as well as smooth and seductive.
October 21st, 2016 12:57pm
Saba and Noname are speaking a lot of truth in this song about systemic racism – he’s mainly focused on a legal system set up to get as many black kids in jail as possible, and she’s talking about gentrification, a comparatively subtle method to the same end of pushing non-affluent black people out of cities. This could be shrill, but it’s not, even a little bit. Both performances are very nuanced – Saba more on a lyrical level, as he expresses frustration without shrinking the problem down so it loses its complexity. His depiction of Chicago isn’t particularly sentimental, but he’s heavily invested in the place and keeps his details vivid and specific. This isn’t just any city, it’s his city. Noname has a similar approach, but her cadence and delivery add another layer of depth. She has a gift for communicating volumes of emotional detail in subtle inflections and sighs, so even a familiar riff on gentrification feels fresh if just for how many mixed emotions and variations on exasperation and grief get packed into just a few lines.
October 20th, 2016 3:49am
Anderson Paak has a dilemma: He’s got a girlfriend, but you see, everywhere he goes, sexy women are trying to seduce him! I, uhhhh, can’t relate, but he does manage to make me feel sympathetic to his plight by sounding completely sincere in his desire to stay faithful and not give in to fleeting temptation. Paak sounds overwhelmed and bewildered, like he never imagined being in this position, and afraid that he’ll fuck up something good in a moment of weakness. Knxwledge’s track is built around a sweet, sentimental string sample that emphasizes the kindness in Paak’s voice. It reminds me of how a lot of producers frame Ghostface’s verses, right on down to the quick silent pauses that magnify some nuance of phrasing to the point that it feels like a big dramatic gesture in context.
October 19th, 2016 11:56am
Being a fan of Andre 3000 in the post-Outkast era means collecting a lot of tracks he appears on in which the gulf of quality between him and the headlining artist is quite vast. It can make a rapper look bad in comparison – $ilkMoney isn’t a bad rapper at all, but when he’s contrasted with Andre, his lyrics seem undisciplined and shallow. The sentiment of his words are kinda cringe-inducing too, with him basically just talking about how quickly he gets rid of women after fucking them. Andre picks up the general theme and takes it to a much different place, telling a vivid sex fantasy about being a criminal in federal court and getting seduced by a deputy, and that spinning out into a very dramatic scenario. $ilkMoney barely sounds like he likes sex or women, but Andre’s lyrics convey a deep respect for women and an overwhelming horniness on par with Prince at his dirtiest.
October 18th, 2016 12:03pm
The Game’s new record is presented as a musical autobiography, and the music itself quotes iconic rap songs – “Colors,” “The Message,” and “C.R.E.A.M.,” pretty obvious stuff, to the point where I have to question how much of enjoying those particular songs is just clicking into something familiar. But “The Juice” is less about referencing and more about evoking the spirit of a particular era – the early to mid ’90s, when rap was still heavily sample-based but not so dense with them that they became economically infeasible. There’s something very interesting to me about listening to this guy reminisce about the past and the music that shaped him, and then insert himself into that music now as a veteran rapper. He sounds completely at home, but also a little like a time traveler into the recent past.
October 16th, 2016 11:56pm
I suppose we’ve come a long way if a young rapper is saying “I hate my boyfriend” in a song and getting blown by a football player in the video and people aren’t really talking about it. But then again, that might be because it’s getting swept under the rug. I hope that’s not the case, because “Empty” is a warm, thoughtful song in the vein of early Kanye and current Chance, and it’s a window into the mind of a young guy who’s torn up by nostalgia, mixed emotions, and a yearning for romance and connection. It’s a very accessible tune, but a bit strange outside of the matter-of-fact queerness – tuba is used as the primary bass instrument for a whimsical and off balance effect, and the children’s choir that comes in near the end undermines the adolescent angst in a way that feels at least somewhat pointed. The main attraction here is Kevin Abstract’s voice, which conveys a very specific type of young male vulnerability. There are points in this song where he flips from seeming petulant to wounded in a second, and it’s just so heartbreaking and sweet.
October 14th, 2016 12:47pm
In a way, “There Was A Door” is an update and revision of Fugazi’s “Suggestion,” a song about street harassment and a desire to exist in the world without worrying about the attention of potentially threatening men. The crucial difference is that while “Suggestion” was written and performed by men, and had blunt lyrics designed to get through to the dumbest, most aggro guys at a punk show, “There Was A Door” is written by a woman and gets into the nuances of the experience and the emotional toll of living with constant anxiety about it. The lyrics aren’t designed as rhetoric; it’s all about one woman’s thoughts and emotions, and so the words can be a bit scattered or oblique. The second half of the song is more direct and declarative – “all I’ve wanted for the place I live is respect for this vessel I’m in” – and pushes back on men who cannot respect boundaries. (“FAMILY” doesn’t mean you can touch and “JUST JOKING” is not a reason enough for me to not bite but be polite.”) But I like the way it all flows together, from poetic reverie to assertive response. It feels like a direct translation of complicated feelings in song.
The song itself sounds rather bright and cheerful, but has this odd structure that is constantly shifting into higher gears as if the band is too restless and excited to stay in one position for long. The music feels a bit disconnected from the sentiment of the song, and the odd way the words are stuffed into the meter suggests that maybe this is just an arbitrary home for these thoughts. But then, the sound of this is extremely mid-00s, and a ton of artists around that time were all about packing reams of extremely wordy lyrics into pop melodies.
October 12th, 2016 12:26pm
Lee is one of the most ambiguous names – gender neutral, racially vague, no notable associations with any particular era. In the context of this song, in which Dick Valentine gives voice to a jealous man whose girl has been stolen by someone named Lee, the name is deliberately enigmatic. He’s so worked up that you wonder what Lee is all about, but there’s no lyrical details to use as clues. Lee is a void. Everything in the song is either about this guy’s perception of this woman, his rampant paranoia, and his belief that she was something that belonged to him that has been taken away by someone called Lee. It’s pure ridiculous masculine insecurity set to a peppy new wave beat.
October 11th, 2016 2:37am
Kate Tempest adapted her last album, Everybody Down, into a novel. It’s a rare album that could logically make that transition between art forms – Tempest’s lyrics are dense and vivid, and she’s extremely good at detailing the inner lives and complexities of her characters. If anything, the adaptation seems redundant. Her new album, Let Them Eat Chaos, is written and performed in the same style, but if she were to adapt this one into another medium, I’d hope it’d be film. The premise of the record is that it’s all taking place at the same time in the wee hours on a block in South London, and the songs are like a camera panning around and zooming in and rewinding on all the people there. “Ketamine for Breakfast” focuses on Gemma, a woman who may or may not be recovering from addiction, but is at least telling herself that she’s not as bad as she used to be. Tempest drills down into her psyche in just a couple minutes, but a lot of the detail is carried by images and flashes of memory. People describe records as “cinematic” all the time, but this is a rare piece of music that seems directly influenced by the narrative and editing logic of film.
