November 24th, 2016 2:45pm
Bruno Mars fakes it so real he is beyond fake. His commitment to throwing himself into what is basically an elaborate impression of James Brown is so complete that it somehow goes beyond pastiche – this is just who Bruno Mars is now, and it all comes naturally. Mars emulates Michael Jackson on other songs, and it’s never as convincing as his Brown routine, partly because Jackson’s aesthetic is a peculiar mix of superhuman technical prowess and hyper-specific tics, and Brown’s is more about blunt force and attitude. Mars can pull that off, and updates it just enough to keep it from being a museum replica of ‘70s funk. It helps that he’s a good flirt. “Perm” is basically a three-and-a-half minute flirt that’s aggressive without being disrespectful, and is mostly just an invitation to dance. Part of why this works is Mars understanding that this is supposed to be a bit silly, and so when he tells you to “activate your sexy,” it comes off as funny and cool rather than dorky and delusional.
November 23rd, 2016 3:56am
The hooks in “Together” are strong enough that they don’t actually require a particularly interesting arrangement – you could just highlight the melody with a serviceable beat, and you’d have something solid and fun. Kaytranada didn’t settle, and I’m very grateful for that. His beats are extremely well designed, delivering an irresistible and immediate rhythm with accents that are surprising but not distracting. The rest of the arrangement is just as intricate yet understated, with every keyboard chord, click, and clap merging into a perfectly formed groove to frame AlunaGeorge’s vocal. The craft is just amazing, and with all due respect to AlunaGeorge, I’d love to hear what this guy could do with an A-list pop star like Beyoncé or Rihanna.
November 22nd, 2016 12:49pm
I love the way Michael Kiwanuka’s lead guitar contrasts with the sentimental string arrangement and gentle piano chords in this song – it’s a much less restrained performance, and one that seems as though it could fall apart at any moment. There’s an odd tension to it, and the particular shade of distortion on it feels a bit tinny and pinched. This part could’ve been much more slick and graceful, but Kiwanuka deliberately evokes an awkward, strained emotion. His vocal part expresses grief for a broken relationship, and his voice is melancholy but very smooth. He’s suggesting a feeling that doesn’t really come out until the final third with the solo, which is cathartic, but only up to a point. The song ends with some feeling of release, but it doesn’t feel quite resolved. As it goes silent, you’re left with the impression that this guy is going to be stewing in this misery for quite a while to come.
November 21st, 2016 3:23am
“Visions” is built around a sweeping, melancholy string section hook that sounds like it’s been yanked from the score of some 1950s melodrama. It sounds like small scale misery blown out to monumental proportions, and Joey Purp’s verses follow that lead with lyrics drawing a line from everyday tragedy to its roots in systemic racism: “It’s the places we live in that they refuse to go, so when we speak about struggles they can refuse to know.” It’s a fairly bleak track, but it’s very elegant in its sadness. There’s always something remarkable and inspiring when artists flip grimness into grace.
November 17th, 2016 3:55am
“Condemnation” is Depeche Mode playing against type, at least on a surface level. It’s essentially a gospel ballad, and the synthesizers and drum machines that define most of their work are either sidelined or minimized in the arrangement. Whereas most of their work is programmed and produced in a way that doesn’t attempt to simulate the notion of a “live” performance, “Condemnation” very much sounds like music played in a physical space. You can hear the room, and the reverberations of the snare hits. Dave Gahan’s vocal performance seems very physical too, with his inflections and stresses suggesting a strained, grimacing face.
As much as “Condemnation” is an atypical Depeche Mode song, it’s representative of Martin Gore’s strengths as a songwriter. Lyrically, it’s a good example of his obsession with guilt and shame. There’s two ways of reading this one: It’s either a song from the perspective of someone who’s literally been put on trial for a crime he says he hasn’t committed but is resigning himself to condemnation, or it’s from the perspective of someone who is hyperbolically imagining themselves as being persecuted in this way. Either way, it’s about making yourself a martyr, and it’s a very Martin Gore sort of pessimistic melodramatic fantasy.
It’s also a fine example of Gore’s intriguing way around a melody. Gore’s melodies are strong and accessible, but always veer slightly out of expected paths. I wonder how much of this is just his natural instincts, or if he writes a more expected melody first and revises it a bit to make it more interesting and distinctive. It’s all rather subtle, but it’s a key part of what makes his songs work, particularly when he’s venturing into the realm of genre pastiche as he is here.
November 15th, 2016 11:45pm
It’s interesting how a decade and a half of R&B revivalism has resulted in music rooted in ‘60s and ‘70s aesthetics no longer sounding retro, per se. Time has looped around so someone could hear Lady Wray’s record and hear Adele, Solange, or Amy Winehouse rather than Motown or Stax, and be totally justified in that. Lady Wray doesn’t sing like someone stuck in the past. The production feels more retro than the song itself, and Wray’s vocal performance has a toughness that’s a lot more Mary J. Blige than Aretha Franklin. You can hear it in the guarded optimism in her voice – “Smilin’” puts a positive spin on troubles, but she sounds like she’s prepared to be heartbroken and disappointed.
November 15th, 2016 1:30pm
A live show by Thee Oh Sees tends to veer back and forth between the band’s two primary modes – frantic bursts of garage punk, and hypnotic Krautrock grooves. It’s all driving rhythm, all the time. This stuff slays live, and John Dwyer knows exactly how to keep people dancing and moshing through his band’s entire set. But on record, Dwyer’s psychedelic palette is much more expansive. “At the End, On the Stairs” absorbs elements from bossanova and jangly folk rock, and places its emphasis on Dwyer’s vocal melody and the soft, feminine qualities of his voice. The sound suits him well, and is something I’d love to hear him expand on in the future. I mean, this is a lovely tune and all, but I’d be lying if I didn’t mention that I kinda wish at some point in this track he switched gears, shouted “woooooo!” and everything got louder and faster. The song doesn’t require that sort of payoff, but I’d like to hear him do a thing like that.
November 14th, 2016 1:50pm
“Dis Generation” is as much about passing the torch to a new generation of rappers – Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$, J. Cole, and Earl Sweatshirt are specifically named as heirs – as it is a celebration of the Tribe guys and Busta Rhymes still making excellent music together into their mid-40s. Like pretty much everything on the new Tribe record, it’s a joy to hear these guys again, especially when it’s so obvious that everything on the record was done with a sense of creative urgency and genuine enthusiasm. There’s a casual confidence to this music – any and all worry that they’re out of step with trends has long since evaporated, and every rapper on the track leans into the tics, rhythms and quirks that made them distinct in the first place. They trade off lines, not verses, so they sound especially present, and there’s moments when Busta or Q-Tip sound impatient and excited to get another turn at the mic. They just sound thrilled to be doing this with each other while they still can.
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.
