shall we get on with it then? poor beleaguered little mnemo [that's my laptop] is back in action, my drobotunes library has more or less caught up with my recent acquisitions, and we've got some spiffy new sidebar sections to deal with.
[if you're still interested: i finally posted an "official" 2008 wrap-up, with my top singles as represented by a mixtape and my top albums as represented by their covers.]
speaking of album covers, '09 has been a brilliant year for them so far. let's bask in these for a minute, shall we?:
a bunch of lovely ladies playing dress up, in and around increasingly intriguing and silly set pieces. lovesit! so i haven't actually heard any of these albums yet. i have been listening to a bunch of older neko (and mirah) though, which is getting me very excited. fox confessor in particular is so effing brilliant, and tigers have spoken, which i'd generally overlooked, is plenty righteous in its own right. can't wait to hear what miss case has come up with this time (well, actually, i am waiting, delaying gratification about a week for the sake of about $7.00, to a.k.a.'s loss, amazon's gain, and my chagrin, but whatevs...)
her sometime partner in crime, a.c. newman, made a rather disappointing impression with his follow-up to the golden slow wonder (a record he hasn't topped since, with or without the new pornos.) for one thing, the cover is just plain ugly (i'll spare you the jpg, though it does look a tiny bit better in print than on screen.) the music is better than that, but it's still sub-par; it feels futzy and baroque in a way that detracts from the songs, and nullifies the clarion directness that has made his past stuff so great. of course, carl being carl, a couple of his melodic dirty-darts can't help but lodge in your craw; my picks would probably be "like a hitman, like a dancer" (ah, that good old a.c. w.t.f.) and, typically, the closer, "all of my days and all of my days off." (lame wannabe-merritt title notwithstanding.) still fond of the guy though, hope to see him next week.
the mirah album is out today – i hadn't realized it was dropping so soon until i saw it beaming (on LP, no less) from the rack at a.k.a. (those sneaky release-date cheaters.) will for sure go pick it up when i have vinyl-carrying capability, cuz that cover demands it. cmon mirahcle!!!!
oh yes, i have been getting back into the big black circles. i bought some rekkids the other week for the first time in well over a year, and then i bought a couple more. it all started when i was djing for feet active! last month without the use of my computer, and decided to pick up a little bit of this and that to make up for it: ended up with lps by parsley sound, quiet village [great for the post-yoga portion], soul/disco singer deneice williams, and early genesis [not for the party], and 12"s by cornershop, hebden/reed [w/ audion remix], nona hendryx [nyce!], animal collective [ginkgo's jam] and maybe some others.
after the party i let myself get suckered in by a 12" sale at ubiquity.com and procured some faves by nomo and owusu & hannibal, plus a grab-bag of rare groove oldies, all half-off. so... we'll see where this leads. not entirely sure how it will square with my inclinations/obsessions toward uni-format-y, but it does strike me that, mp3s having largely eclipsed cds in terms of utilitarian practicality (and now for me personally as well as the music-consuming public as a whole), the edge that vinyl's undeniably lustrous object-aura gives it is that much harder to undercut, particularly with download codes enclosed.
back to our leading ladies: i actually have heard most of the lily allen, but haven't really digested it. in general, i'm not overwhelmed, but i do really like "who'd have known," and "the fear" remains one of my very favorite singles of the year so far (sure i'm counting it, tho i did hear it in '08.) at first blush it seems slighter, subtler, than the hits off her debut, but the melody may well prove to have longer legs, and the lyrics are devilishly perfect. love the video too. why not:
(it's pretty definitely my favorite thing she's done, with mark ronson's "oh my god" a close second – and that common song is pretty good too – i was never the biggest fan of her first album, or her persona generally, and seeing her live didn't help much... we'll see if she can win me over this time.)
i have heard and very much enjoyed the other new album that was co-written and produced my man greg kurstin; the bird and the bee's exceedingly wtf-titled ray guns are not just the future (i know, i get that the military is now making ray guns, which means they're...the present, but that doesn't make the title any more sensible.) it's great. i mean, not every song on it is stunning, but an impressive majority are both instantly enjoyable and seemingly quite durable. and, admittedly, it's a light and fluffy pop album, with no great aspirations other than to be sweet and pleasurable. but greg and inara george (i feel like they're both old friends of mine, which is, er, almost true), like the goofy secret agents they play in the cover art, seem to take that mission quite seriously, and they clearly had a blast carrying it out.
in my review of their show at the tin angel last week, i called the album "[maybe] the most satisfying thing either of them has ever been involved in," which is a semi-bold statement when you consider that geggy tah's sacred cow (1994) and merrick's self-titled debut (2001) are minor classics in my personal pantheon. other than those two albums, there's not too much contest, though into the oh and all rise are definitely worthy efforts. can't say as much for inara's sub-ys effort from last year... this is a great turnabout from that, though it won't necessarily be received as such.
show review what? oh yes: i have been writing reviews of concerts (and also other things) for the city paper blog, which accounts for a good chunk of my music writing to date this year. check 'em on out. (with pixxxas!!)
paper stock:
bear is driving, rafter, your freedom party @ danger danger gallery, 1/29
high places, soft circle, kyle h. mabson @ danger danger gallery, 2/5
tindersticks [& dawn landes] @ world cafe live, 3/4
the bird and the bee [& obi best] @ tin angel, 3/4
also, here's a record review, of album #2 by local boy peasant. innocent churl is almost profligate. (but not quite.)
by the way, i also saw two other shows at the world cafe recently. the indigo girls & shemekia copeland, at a hoopla free-at-noon jawn on friday, were fluffy doo-dah fun – contrary to appearances, i found the 'girls to be both more entertaining and more 'authentic' than shemekia; their new songs were surprisingly engaging, though a room-ful of "closer to fine" made for a special little thrill all its own. a while back, devon sproule & matt curreri's gig, a pre-valentine's affair with incurable sweetie carsie blanton, was mostly notable for a slew of well-picked covers [best: "19th nervous breakdown," which i had in my head for weeks afterwards], which is usually a good thing, though less so when the artist in question one of yr favorite songwriters, and she's letting her kinda-dopey brother-in-law do half the singing anyway. oh well. cmon back around dev! i'll write ya up right.
more show reviews, and previews, and who-dos, comin' round the bend. some woo-hoo overdue review round-ups up'n'around too. 'n maybe i'll figger some other jigs to do. spring's a cumin in, and we're spring back to action. l33t active!
----
oh, p.s.: i couldn't very well talk about cover art in 1st-quarter '09 without mentioning this here flash animation, er i mean jpg. (was gonna post it but i figured i'd spare you the eyeache.) hard not to admit, too, that is "my girls" ever the song for the spring, or what. save it for a springy singy day, and it just comes busting out. he is so goofy coppin' a brian wilson drawl on "...seem like ah kerr abowwt..." ["...fowr m'gurls..."] got some more things to say about the music but maybs later.
10 March 2009
09ism
31 January 2009
friends not trends: 2008 in review (and otherwise)
the going assumption; the working understanding during much of 2008, in my head and at least a decent many others', was that it was an off year for music; lackluster, mediocre, no great shakes. in some ways, i'd still say that was pretty true – as i've harangued before, it was a sucky year for big pop singles, with nothing that felt truly epochal and zeitgeisty, or even especially inspiring ("low"? "single ladies"? "american boy"? dandy party-fodder all, my rather irrational distaste for the latter aside, but hardly the stuff of enduring greatness) – at least not until m.i.a. blasted in from the past with what was pretty undeniably the song of the year, only a year late.
if you ask me, it was also an underwhelming year for albums of the crit-o-sphere consensus-pick variety – fair enough that there are plenty people who, unlike me, were smitten by the fleet foxes, tv on the radio, and bon iver records, but you can't convince me that any of it is urgent and compelling music (tvotr could almost be if they'd get a new producer already.) but i've gotten pretty far away from the indirok party line, so it's pretty irrelevant to ask me anyway. save for the break-out indie-dance triumvirate of swoony sweeties cut///copy, niche-revivalist anomaly hercules & love affair ('08's biggest crossover success story?), and bona-fide auteurs hot chip, the widely-repped alb i dug the most this year was vampire freakin' weekend, by a band whose most notable (and greatest) quality was their endearing ordinaryness.
meanwhile, the year's biggest attention-getters, lil wayne and kanye west, mostly failed to engage me all that much, musically or otherwise. and there weren't really any other major narratives to latch onto, genre-wise or what-have-you, my valiant attempts to herald a big-beat revival notwishstanding (but just wait until '09, oh right it's already here!) save perhaps the perplexing hodge-podge of the auto-tuned/art-attuned afro-techno revolution, which isn't so much an emergent trend as a multi-strand interpretive lens that may or may not be coming into focus.
[there weren't even major genres or trends that got me excited on a more personal level, although i did listen to a fair amount of sleepy twinkly ambientronica (colleen, lullatone, theodore, yokota) and the still-scarequote-worthy "balearic" (hatchback, studio, air france) and glanced briefly at b-more (tittsworth, rye rye.) i've had flirtations in recent years with soul, country, folk and reggae, none of which made very strong showings on my radar this year, but the ethno-beat likes of nomo, el guincho, m.i.a. (as a guest-shotter and general booster), and most especially my recent enthusiasm over radioclit in their various guises – not to mention the shaabi cds i picked up in egypt, or reading about the international selections in tom moon's 1000 recordings book – have me feeling like 2009 may be a year that i try to delve deeper into world music, whatever that ends up meaning. in '08 however, much of my extra-curricular investigation focused on various strains of "classic" british indie-pop from the '80s and early '90s: in an effort to shore up my historical understanding of this stuff (which seems to have influenced a lot of swedes), and under the guidance of AMG (and the liner notes to the legends' facts and figures), i bought albums by felt, lloyd cole, momus, heavenly, the field mice, the auteurs, prefab sprout, and dexy's midnight runners, exactly none of which have managed to make much of an impression, thus far. oh well...]
so much for all that. on an almost completely unrelated note: 2008 was an awesome year for music. as has been pointed out more than once, there's no such thing as a bad year for music. an uninspiring spell for music-that-other-people-like is nothing but a perfect chance to go out and discover what else there is out there to get excited about.
in this case, i found it, by way of my AMG gig – this was my first full year back to being a music journalist (by vocation, even!) several years after having packed it in – and the opportunities it allowed me to hear some artists that i may not have encountered otherwise, especially scandinavians: the astonishingly sincere twee-meisters billie the vision & the dancers, bleeding-heart synth-disco purists juvelen and cloetta paris, art-pop songstresses britta persson, maia hirasawa, and firefox ak, and lo-fi texturalists silje nes, fredrik, and hanne hukkelberg. (a few scandi-pop artists i'd heard before, who didn't release anything of note in '08, nonetheless formed a significant part of my aural diet for the year, largely through my "expert" AMG assays of their excellent back-catalogs: the tough alliance, the ark and bertine zetlitz.)
i also found it with some trusty old favorites, like crypto-fantasist kelley polar, pavlovian powerhouse rex the dog, and neato neo-beatnik why? (what's up with this spelling it in all-caps business? it's as bad as the mysterious made-up comma in the tvotr album title.) also true-blue troubador billy bragg, sludge-rawk guitar-hero al sparhawk (whose retribution gospel choir made the only honest-to-goodness rock album to make my list, right up there at #37), domestic vignettist darren hayman (a lovely rediscovery, both with his new bluegrass bandmates watkins trout & lee and the slightly older project the french), transatlantic twin sweethearts of the radio marit larsen and taylor swift, and the trustiest oldest favoritest of them all, david byrne, who seemed to get way more attention this time around for a way more low-key album, mostly because he got another old dude to write less interesting chord structures for his songs. [sadly, i didn't find it with my other, increasingly-less-dependable old favorite, fat elvis the talk-show-host, who put out, come to think of it possibly the worst, and certainly most slapdash, album of his entire career, and with the silliest title to boot - but, sigh, i've gotten over that one. interestingly, i did find it with my goodfriend matthew sweet, not so much on his 2k8 offering but the delightful four-year-old kimi ga suki * raifu.]
i found it, too, with some total weirdos. it was a great year for weirdos – or perhaps i should qualify that; weirdos who mix some amount of pop in with their weirdness, or vice versa (which makes it far weirder than straight-up weirdness, which is old hat and mostly just boring.) i'm thinking in particular of abstract-expressionist melody masher/noise-terrorist nerd dominique leone, foppish imps (impish fops?)/goofball space-cadets the chap, dadaist retro-wonk/blues-addled alien lifeform pop levi (a late addition to the party, but a tremendously welcome one; his sophomore-step-up, never never love, which shot way up on my list after just one listen, was otherwise dissed and generally slept-on, which is both a shame and a mystery since it's totally accessible and fresh and fun...the weirdness there is more about him than his music per se.) somewhat less enthrallingly, there were those nutsos nôze, whose album was more of a befuddlement than anything. and most of all, there was the incomparable, irrepressible max tundra, who both out-weirded and out-popped the lot of 'em, and also has the distinction of holding down the top spot on my last.fm most-played artists list.***
but best of all, i found it right here in west philly – to be specific, over at the vegan luncheonette, which is where i met '08 great emily bate... already my neighbor, soon to become my friend, and now my bandmate – but first, first, first came the first-rate the fever in the feast, which grabbed me from first listen, and which i just can't say enough good about.
should i be apologizing? look, loving music is absolutely subjective; writing about it ("critiquing") is hardly any less so... and what could possibly be a better way of relating to a musician than, well, relating to her? to be honest, though, our friendship is only one, reasonably insignificant, contributing factor in my fondness for tFitF. which, incidentally, i can actually quantify, about as objectively as is conceivable: as my last.fm charts corroborate, when you factor out "compulsory" listening for review purposes, as well as the fact that the higher-placing artists all had multiple albums contributing to their tallies, it was almost certainly the album i chose to listen to most often in '08.***
although i submitted a request for the assignment, i didn't review emily's album (that is, i haven't yet) – not so much because of bias concerns or conflicts of interest, but more because i feel like i won't be able to write about it in a way that conveys how special it has been to me... or, maybe, more precisely, because i'm afraid that examining it with a view to expressing it in words will force me to see my friend's funny li'l folkysongs as, "objectively," maybe not entirely so special after all.
(which is a silly thing to worry about. that's the whole game of criticism, after all, but it hardly ever has that effect; at least in my experience, reviewing is far more likely to increase my enjoyment and appreciation of albums than to diminish it. which is what explains my tendency for rave inflation.)
or maybe that's not it. a simpler explanation might be that i just enjoy it too much to want to do much of anything else with it besides keep on listening. and singing. and sharing.
2008's been a great year for friends, both musical and actual. here's to hoping that i find at least a few, at least as fine, in 2009.
______________
***[bonus mini-essay!]
2k8 was definitely a different year for me in terms of my relationship to music. it was the first year that i did the vast majority of my listening with mp3s rather than physical objects. over the course of many months, i transferred my entire cd library to digital, all of it stored on my trusty (if sometimes a bit pokey) drobo: the current tally is 57660 songs, or 424.9 days. correspondingly, i spent untold hours in accreted discrete moments of intermittent frittering, pleasurable or painful or both, attempting to organize the constant flood of incoming iTunes data. also, i taught myself a fair bit about laptop djing; also, i got my first iPod (rubylith), lost it, and got another one (obsolith); also, i signed up for the rather ominously-named last.fm.
i'm still not sure if that was a good idea – i did it out of curiosity, but it has become a kind of compulsion; i check it constantly, avoid listening to undocumentable media (cds, for instance) as much as possible, and i'm inordinately peeved that the legends (whom i really don't think are all that great) are still standing as my third most-played artist, just because i apparently took a long time to review a couple of their albums back in the summer sometime...
anyway, last will tell you that my fourteen most-played artists of 2008 (or rather, from the time i joined, around may, until right this instant) were as follows: max tundra, cex, the legends, emily bate, marit larsen, owusu & hannibal, kelley polar, britta persson, firefox ak, cloetta paris, laurel music, amy diamond, miss li, billy bragg. i don't buy it, or at least not completely... i do a lot of my listening, and especially computer-listening, for practical purposes; mix-making, as well as record-reviewing [the names in italics are those that i didn't write reviews of in '08, which is pretty telling.] my continuing gig at amg was, of course, another huge aspect of my musical milieu this year, and the direct reason there are so many scandinavians on that list... all of which means it doesn't entirely match up to my "pure" preferences.
anyway, it's obviously an imperfect (though fascinating) system, and it's not really worth griping or quibbling about... on the other hand, though what's the fun of lists if not to argue about them.
27 January 2009
all that crashing's makin' me glitch!
xxxxxxxxx grrrrrrrrrrr xxxxxxxxxx [_hib(er/[ror])nation terminated???////]
hey there, mincetapes faithful. happy belated january? it has been a fine oh-fine oh-nine so far, but an altogether wretched time to be my computer... my poor beleaguered little mnemo has been crashing, spontaneously, sporadically and often, for the last several weeks, and giving me a few other headaches besides... i won't get into the techy specs here, but the upshot is that it has not only functionally prevented me from completing the handful of computer-dependent (and blog-relevant) items on my projects agenda, it's also sapped a lot of my time, energy, and will, which i might otherwise have turned to barreling foolhardily through on those projects nevertheless... anyway suffice to say i have really not been as productive lately as i shoulda coulda woulda been.
primary among them said projects: making some final tweaks to the 2k8 new years eve dance mix to ready it for on- and off-line distribution, assembling my year-end favorites lists in img-enhanced blogpost fashion (as opposed to the ongoing-yearly side-bar fashion currently accessible, which i have been diligently updating and reshuffling) and attending to my stack of outstanding (in both senses!) to-be-reviewed records for AMG...
in other words, i've still got a lot of loose ends left over from 2008, even as 2009 is descending quite upon us... sorry me sorry you. soon i hope.
on a happier note: a hands-full handful of crashes over the course of the evening somewhat miraculously failed to dampen the goodvibes this past friday at feet active, the monthly dance'n'yogaparty (inaugurated last month) for which i am now co-dj (alongside with dj mr. rob't ginkgo)... amazingly, only one time out of the handful did a crash come when music was actually playing from my laptop (perhaps inauspiciously, it was during cocoa tea's smiley-silly "barack obama") - otherwise we were able to juggle our way around it quite nimbly; the convenient/circumstantial grace-save being that rob't and i spent most of the evening (nearly four-hour shared set) switching back and forth almost every song, with our nifty combined two-turntables/two-laptops/two-mixers setup. (like i once saw a-trak and diplo do...turns out you don't even gotta be a superstar deejay.) pretty seamlessly too, even though we'd never dj'd or even practiced together (i'd heard him spin once, that's it.) that was a lot a lot a lot of fun. more to come, i think.
of course, there were a few moments where one of us took the helm for a longer mini-set. my two most noteworthy strings were the (topical) bringin-it-back run of parliament's "chocolate city">"funky president" [title phrase looped>] aretha "hat" franklin's "rock steady" (and, a bit later, "jiggle it">"hold on i'm coming">"1 thing") and, to close out the dancing portion, more or less, will.iam's self-sampled "impatient" > kelley polar's "a feeling of the all-thing" (!) > the dø's "unissasi laulelet" (!!) > that radiobeat/alphaclit thang (!!!) (the de-facto feet-acto' anthem), with bonus obama speech quotesamples, and ginkgo then capped it with the new animal collective jam "brothersport," which i'm pretty sure i enjoyed more than i'd ever enjoyed an a.c. song before... woowoowoot!
and – on another note; last weekend i went to new york to see this guy:
that's max tundra, known to his mama as ben jacobs (and probably other folks too; i wasn't sure what to call him tho, so i just went with max), making his actual u.s. debut performance, opening for the rosebuds. which i didn't see. i saw him the next night, at was was supposed to be his u.s. debut, at le poisson rouge on bleecker st.
the venue, as predicted, was new and hip, but also quite a nice place to be, with cool stenciling work and especially on the two oversized and comfy thrones that are rather inexplicably situated in the downstairs entrance hallway. the djs spinning beforeshow (incl. philly refugee dave p.) weere no great shakes (this was ostensibly a dance-night; the nyc sister party to making time, but the floor was far from rocking – blame it on the djs, not the max tundra funs.) anyway, things completely shifted when m.t. took the stage. i didn't really know what to expect (owen pallett's ravings notwithstanding) but nothing about the set was a disappointment.
first impression: max is a very little guy...the word "homunculus" came to mind, not the nicest but one i could easily imagine him fitting into his lyrics and then singing it so hyperfast you'd never catch on to what he was saying in the slightest. he can sing quite fast, and also quite soulfully, and always with his arms out in an arresting declamatory posture, which looks commanding and preposterous at the same time, which is a fair description of his performance as a whole. sometimes though he couldn't sing quite fast enough, or at least he didn't get back to the mic in time and he'd miss a line or two (like in the nutso "merman," which is like in 19/8 or something) but again you'd never notice unless you'd paid some close attention to the recordings. but that was just part of the fun, watching him race against his own dizzying backing track, take a swig of water and rush to be in place for the next carefully timed mini-keyboard solo, or melodica lick, or, best of all, couple notes on the glockenspiel – his was in a plastic carrying case (sadly, he didn't remove the hinged lid, so we could only watch in silhoutte) and he'd take his vocal mic off the stand and hold it in one hand up to his mallet in the other, as he struck his couple of notes (just a tiny addition to the dozens whizzing by at any given moment) with tremendous precision.
he's a pretty sick one-handed glockenspieler, and also a pretty sick piano player, with some clear jazz chops. and he's a crazy spastic gesticulating dancer – his dancing and rocking out felt like as integral a part of the set plan as his actual playing. and, by the way, he writes some pretty incredible songs too. the setlist was basically everything i could have asked for, and more, drawn about equally from PEBY (see, if you haven't, my review) and MBGATE. last-album favorites like "lights" and "lysine" were all there, and most excitingly the great title track (which i put on fight them on the beaches ages ago), for which he picked up an actual guitar and jangled around a bit, and then extended the chopped-up disco-ey bit for a while in a way that made it seem like a sample (?) which doesn't actually seem possible. and he hit all the highs from parallax as well; opening with "which song," rocking us all with "orphaned" and "the entertainment," and closing (after ridiculous two covers, "so long farewell" and - was it - the "mortal kombat" theme) with "until we die," which felt like an actual cohesive song (albeit an extended, proggy one) and a real emotional moment in a way it never quite had on record. (with, if nothing else, some of simplest, most heart-tugging lyrics.)
and then the djs took back over, and were actually a lot better than previously; some of us stuck around to dance, but mostly the place cleared out pretty quick – i think everybody knew that no dance-party tunes (not even lindstrøm's remix of lcd soundsystem) could hope to match up to the excitement and exuberance of what we'd just experienced.
here's hoping max makes it back for that fabled "u.s. tour" he alludes to so off-handedly in "which song." (based on what he said to me after the show, sounds like a high likelihood that he will be back, probably as the support for an entirely appropriate and equally exciting act that i am not at liberty to disclose.)
tundra, as is much-remarked, spent the last six years making this album on his ridiculously antiquated commodore amiga (c. 1988) – every time he has a glitch with it he just buys a new one, since they're both incredibly cheap and impossible to get service for. still, you wonder how much time and data he's lost by stoically sticking to that set-up. makes me want to be a little more patient with mine. soldier on, little mnemo. hopefully we'll have those mixies and listies up for you in not too much longer...
16 January 2009
oh, wait...
ok, ok. before we slip any further into oh-fine oh-nine, time for a proper 2008 year-end best-of round-up re-cap run-down, all proper-like.
albums first [1-24]:
now singles. not doing a list [there's one here if you insist, but i'm pretty typically noncomittal about any rankings apart from my #1 ("sandcastle disco"), #2 ("entropy reigns..."), #0 ("is it you?") and, er, alternate-reality #1 ("girls with my same name")...] instead, here's a mix:
title: Fun and Interesting: 2008 in Pop
date: 23 december 2008
format: cd-r
packaging: red prefactured sleevelope, with assortured colorfous markerings on the disc
1] "Sandcastle Disco" / Solange Knowles
2] "Entropy Reigns (in the Celestial City)" / Kelley Polar
3] "Far Away" / Cut Copy
4] "Broken Heart Tango" / Cloetta Paris
5] "Wrestlers" / Hot Chip
6] "Fun and Interesting" / The Chap
7] "Oh My God" / Ida Maria
8] "Black Fur" / Fredrik
9] "Girls With My Same Name" / Emily Bate
10] "Ten Steps" / Marit Larsen
11] "You Belong With Me" / Taylor Swift
12] "Lily From The Middleway Street" / Billie the Vision and the Dancers
13] "Sly and the Family Stone" / Hayman, Watkins, Trout & Lee
14] "Official Girl" / Cassie
15] "Watch Your Step" / Juvelen
16] "The Entertainment" / Max Tundra
17] "Here He Comes" / Tittsworth ft. Nina Sky & Pitbull
18] "Shake It To The Ground" / Blaqstarr ft. Rye Rye
19] "Fantastic Six (Radioclit Remix)" / Alphabeat [vs. Radioclit]
20] "Blind" / Hercules and Love Affair
21] "Life is Long" / David Byrne and Brian Eno
it's designed as a mix, first and foremost – a bit of a throwback to the way i used to do things – but also as a general representation of my favorite music of 2008, with a particular emphasis on favorite songs, and especially dance jams (which tend to dominate my conception of "singles.") i think it works out pretty well on all accounts. it made a great post-dinner, pre-midnight (dance)party mix on new years' eve, complete with a little respite in the middle for dessert 'n' bubbly, and minorly toast-tweaked transitions in the beaty bits.
a lot of it consists of representative album tracks as opposed to singles strictly-speaking or even stand-alone songles, which is a pretty accurate reflection of how i listened to music this year (on albums, for review purposes or otherwise, rather than as songs, despite making the Great Switchover to an ipod/itunes-based listening system. most of my top twenty or so albums are represented, with notable omissions including why? (whose brilliant "fatalist palmistry" was on harvest gleanings alongside crucial 2k8 jamz by m83, hatchback and sheryl crow), neon neon (almost made it, but "raquel" is kinda long), and pop levi (too late, alas!)
the sore thumbs, then, are things like the "fantastic six" remix (a sneaky way of including alphabeat and radioclit, two acts i didn't really give their due until too late in the game, but in any case it's still my single favorite piece of work associated with either of them), and blaqstarr/rye rye's awesome "shake it to the ground," a great one-off single in a singles genre that my awareness of has suffered for just that reason (see also the tittsworth cut, not a single but better in my book than any of his tunes that were), and, maybe most sorely, cassie's "official girl."
it felt kinda weird to include that b/c it's basically just a straightforward, mainstream r&b/pop single. given another few weeks i might have swapped it out for brandy's truly striking "camouflage" (from another very strong album that i heard too late), but as it is it stands in well enough for a) the other cassie jam that really ruled a lot of my year b) the generally lackluster string of songs that passed for hit singles in 2008, including songs by beyonce, rihanna, missy elliott, lil mama, snoop dogg, kanye, t.i., flo-rida, lil wayne, mariah carey, katy perry, pink, britney, ne-yo, usher and jordin sparks that may or may not have made my sidebar but failed to find a real home in my heart. (the best of that lot being, almost certainly, "sexual eruption," "love in this club" and "no air") almost all of the above, however, did make the 2k8 new years mix... more on that to come!
22 December 2008
Merry MiX-mas! (and, um, cHappy cHaDJnukkah?)
'tis the season!
i DJed for three entirely different sorts of parties in the last week: a house dance party last saturday, a drag pageant after-party this saturday, and a congregational hanukkah party last night. all three were in west philly, all three were benefit events, and they were all a lot of fun and dancing, but otherwise very dissimilar vibes... and i played three quite different kinds of DJ sets.
at the house party, when my software DJ set up was effing up and i had to make-shift it with iTunes when it crashed every 15 minutes (oy oy oy stressache!!! but it worked out...) i played a fairly typical rossy mix of mid-to-up-tempo dance jams, electroni-pop flavored with some heavy soul mixed in and hip-hop sprinkles. left-field highlights incl. of montreal's "elegant caste," "i know what i know," "do wah diddy", and max tundra's batshit "orphaned." requests for kanye, fischerspooner, mgmt and 'retro.'
at miss west philly fabulous, the after-party kicked off in full-on diva-queen spectacle mode, with glitter raining from the ceiling fan as the winners of the pageant were crowned and trophied, and i played "you make me feel (mighty real)" > "hot stuff" > "gimme gimme gimme (a man after midnight)" > "hung up"... [some speaker/soundsystem issues but it got sorted soon enough.] i switched gears to hip-hop and booty beats before too long -- though not before i played don armando's second ave rhumba band's "i'm an indian too" and, of course, somebody had to come up to ask if it was by "an artist who identified as being of indigenous origin" or to that effect... [short answer: um...i'm not sure, i think they were mostly just latino and black... some interesting commentary on the issue here and here though...] tons of requests, more than i could keep up with, tho i tried: beyonce, rihanna, m.i.a., santogold, "no diggity," brothers johnson, kool and the gang, siouxsie/queen/u2 (none of which i had), young leek, busy signal, t.i., and j&mc to close it all out. i kept it pretty hip-hop/dancehall/bmore for a while (the bug, /rupture, ce'cile, rye rye!), but eventually i had to bring it back around to the diva anthems, starting with, i think, "please don't stop the music," then my two current favorite funky disco jams - eddie kendricks' "going up in smoke" and coke escovedo's brilliant, epochal "i wouldn't change a thing" - and then "i wanna dance with somebody" and cece p.'s "finally," into i think "sandcastle disco" woot woot! aw yeah.
and finally, at the hanukka hoo-hah (where i also served double-duty as accordionist for the klez band) i played completely different things from that. only one song overlap with what i played at either of the other parties. it was a sorta pan-ethnic (balkan/afrobeat/parisian/icelandic/bollywood/egyptian/malawian/motown) drums-and- horns-heavy globalized beat odyssey, ethno-techno, with some massive tunes courtesy of the currently unstoppable radioclit, and other travels, and some throwbacks, winding up back around with some old-school (for me) pop and 'lectro faves, and then another of my current obsessions (little boots' "stuck on repeat," which sounded kind of boring actually.) anyway, it was a lot of fun, and i finally got my setup working well enough that i was able to record the whole thing!!
so you can hear it!! - go here to download. it's mostly live; i just made some rough minor tweaks in garageband to nice it up a little bit.
here is the track list:
Kako Kolan Da Se Vijem - Zlatne Uste Balkan Brass Band
Quand Esct-Ce Qu'on Arrive - Balkan Beat Box
Broken Dreams - Basement Jaxx
Lets Get Wet (Louder Mix) - SoCalled
Bongo Song - Zongamin
One to One - Nomo
Roforofo Fight - Fela Kuti
First Down - Fatboy Slim
Fantatic 6 (Radioclit Remix) - Alphabeat
Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan - Matmos
Le Rhythme et La Cadence - Dimitri From Paris
There's More to Life Than This - Björk
Jimmy - M.I.A.
Tamenouni Enek - Mohamed Hamaki
Sister Betina - The Very Best
Cobrastyle (Radioclit Remix) - Teddybears
Circles - Soul Coughing
Take Me To The River - Talking Heads
Strange Overtones - David Byrne and Brian Eno
End of the Road - Gladys Knight and Pips
Psychedelic Shack - Temptations
Caveman Boogie - Lesette Wilson
Stuck on Repeat - Little Boots
Spare Parts Express - Orbital
my only regret is that i didn't manage to work in ricardo villalobos' fizheuer zieheuer, which would have been a more fitting comedown/finale. (listen to it there on youtube and interpolate it in in your mind.) the big huge honking standout is that radioclit alphabeat remix, which sounds absolutely nothing like the original (which i also love a fair amount) - i think all they took from it was the "whoo whoo!" - but may be the most happy-making piece of music i've heard all year. it just effervesces. sing it with me: ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah! ah-ah-ah ah! ah! ah! (disco-disclosure: i bugged out to that same track, in the same space, on friday night, as spun by a certain dj ginkgo, a fellow with whom i shall have to have some words...)
so there you go, a little holiday present for you all... enjoy enjoy! and dance dance dance!
more to come too... all of this DJing has got me suddenly really-excited about 2008 music. fueling my fire these days, in particular - in addition to radioclit - are rye rye and yelle, two break-out upstarts (from baltimore and bretagne, respectively) who seem not to be getting the typical amount of love from the predictable places... not sure why that would be. many thanx to xtorrent too, which i've just gotten to start working again.
anyway, the plan now is full-speed-ahead on making a new years mix for '08 - i'd been feeling kinda iffy about it but now i'm pumped. my current thought is that i may also do a stand-alone, unmixed best of 2008, with some track overlap but intended more for listening than dancing per se. my top ten tracks list is coming into focus. (just gotta figure out how to integrate some recenter lovelies.) stay tooned for that.
and in any case, i fully hope to have a maxi-mix ready for revellers in plenty of time for new years - by next sunday, at the latest (and likeliest.) so get hyped for that too.
19 December 2008
top teen tunes!
[eta: here is a MixTube of all the songs discussed in this post. listen as you go!]
i picked up the veronicas' hook me up the other day (good ol' $2.99) and just listened to it again... it holds up very well, which makes me feel better about having written such a glowing review of it a year ago, despite the fact that i've barely listened to it since then. it is, in fact, a pretty great record. i'd forgotten about the how riled up some of us were getting at the time about the somewhat questionable girl-kissing references in "take me on the floor" (and also on skye sweetnam's contemporaneous "[maybe i should] kiss a girl")... little did we know then that that sh[l]ockstress katy perry would come steal that stale thunder and somehow warp it into 2008's most reviled, inanely 'zeitgeisty' pop inevitable.
anyhow, hook me up finally got a u.s. release this year - "untouched" even made it onto the p4k top 100 tracks list (which is notably ho-hum, but in a pleasant way; a low-key list for a low-key year.) not surprisingly the domestic version comes with a bonus track, advertised as such on the cover sticker (but not listed as a bonus): "goodbye to you", which i didn't realize until just now is a cover of a 1982 hit by scandal. hm. not sure what to say about that, since i don't really know anything about scandal. i do have the basic sense that they're not nearly as hip or worthy as tracy bonham, but what i do i know. (they did come from the magic decade, after all. and i suppose we owe them something for being the butt of all those lame patty smith/patti smyth jokes.)
i was gonna say that it's a sort of strange addition to the album, probably the lightest and frothiest thing on there - and an especially stark contrast to the high melodrama of the now-penultimate track "in another life" - generally pretty dispensable, although it's musically in keeping with the rest of the record. indeed it pretty much straight jacks the electro-candy groove from the title track, just sped up a bit. the verse melody is naggingly familiar ("solitary man"? "good riddance (time of your life)"?) but probably just generic; the most notable part is probably the silly squelchy synth solo, which nods almost undeniably to the organ solo from del shannon's "runaway," one of the greatest proto-teenpop hits (surely: who else would run away besides a teen or younger.) turns out that keyboard lick (and of course the melody) are also present in the original version too, so the v's didn't do a whole lot here worth noting except to revive the song for the benefit of weirdball birth control ads and fellow '80s-babies like me who missed out on it the first time. oh-kay.
speaking of teen-pop (because i haven't been, much this year at all), i wanted to mention a couple of my favorite recent jamzz, from artists who aren't quite so teen-centric (or, well, teen-aged) as they used to be, but have been showing a bit of that teeny-boppin' spark, more or less surprisingly.
the new beyoncé record has grown on me a fair amount - now i actually think the premise of splitting it into a ballad half and a banger half was a fairly smart or at least creative move (although it's still silly to split so little music onto two discs and call it an album), since they really are doing totally different things. no dispute that the ballad half is "better," more substantial and actually more engaging ("halo" in particular has been in my head a lot), but my favorite song on the whole package might be the entirely silly "radio."
it's a great and very fresh-feeling gooshy '08 club track production-wise - sounding, it must be said, a good deal like something we'd expect to hear from rihanna - but what makes it especially fun is how far it strays from typical beyoncé territory emotionally. it's beyoncé like we've maybe never heard her; not the mature, scorned-but-powerful icy-perfection goddess diva woman (though we get that again, a bit too explicitly so, in the next track), but an enthusiastic, excitable, slang-talking little kid.
i mean, who over the age of 16 would say something like "i think i'm in love with my radio/cuz it never lets me down." are there still people who actually feel that way? probably so (i hope so!), but the sentiment still feels decidedly like a throw-back, if not to the "golden age" of radio pop (um, whenever that was), at least to ll cool j c. 1985. i also just love the scene-setting opening stanza, in which she establishes her recent-to-current radio-rap cred, in highly un-beyonce-like fashion, by slurring "like erryday" and making sure she's rocking those stunna shades. it's totally preposterous, but in a very different direction from the way b is usually preposterous. and she totally hams it up - to hilarious effect, but at the same time it's an entirely convincing performance.
my favorite jam on the new taylor swift album isn't nearly so out of character for its artist (who after all is still a teen, and a full eight years younger than B), but it is striking for its highly teen-specific setting, as well as for its blissfully bountiful overabundance of melody (seriously, the song has like two-and-a-half separate choruses, and the verse melody is pretty catchy in its own right.) that's "you belong with me" - take a listen.
fearless has gotten a fair amount of ink for its 'maturity' - the song "fifteen" in particular, which does indeed seem like something that could be sung to a 15-year-old from somebody much wiser in years - but it's got plenty of youthful heart, and never more than on this track (the biggest standout for me, but that's probably just a quirk of what i happened to hear first, since plenty of the other songs seem like they're just as good.) "she wears short skirts, i wear t-shirts/she's cheer captain and i'm on the bleachers"... just says it all, no? [nb. "bleachers" rhymes with both "t-shirts" and "sneakers." that's some songwritin for ya.] and you have to love the snarkiness of "i'm listening to the kind of music she doesn't like." [eta: and check out the accompanying image in the cd booklet, taylor as bespectacled band dork while her beloved fawns over the ditzy hussy with her bra showing:
notice that taylor is wearing neither t-shirts nor sneakers in this image... also: "go, tiger"]finally, the recently rather quiet paris hilton, whom i and others discussed under the umbrella of "teen-pop" back in '06 even though neither she nor her presumed audience were teen-aged, and her music had a pretty obvious adult slant, has released one of the most teeny-sounding songs in recent memory. (i wasn't at all sure she'd actually get back to making music at all, so this comes as a very pleasant surprise...new album due in 09!) from it's title on down, "my BFF" nods to classic late-90s/early-00s teen-pop. it makes me think, in particular, of toybox and aqua, though the whole max martin parade of poppettes could be invoked as well.
lyrically, unrepentantly g-rated - the conceit is basically the same as "is it you?", except that paris is looking for a friend, not a lover. (it is the theme song from her reality show, of the same premise.) a little silly coming from a 26-year old, ya know? musically too, it's squeaky-clean and peppy, eurodance-style kidpop. so wholesome you want to gag (and it's actually pretty catchy, which might make it better or worse.) and this is paris hilton we're talking about? good one girl.
10 December 2008
fruits of my labors
Title: Harvest Gleanings
Format: CD-R
Date: October-November 2008
Packaging: non standardized, as of yet [boo], save for yellow-orange [goldenrod-pumpkin?] sharpie in rounded lower case
[1] The Pioneers | Tunng
[2] Zeno of Elea | Kelley Polar
[3] Parade | The Knife
[4] Keep Your Silver Shined | Devon Sproule
[5] If A Song Could Get Me You | Marit Larsen
[6] Both Sides | Margaret Berger
[7] Peace Be Upon Us | Sheryl Crow
[8] Kim & Jessie | M83
[9] Get What You Deserve | Bertine Zetlitz
[10] Happy Hour | Britta Persson
[11] Watch/Watch (Girls) | Owusu & Hannibal
[12] Forever Utd | The Tough Alliance
[13] Gimme Love to Give | The Ark
[14] Strangers In The Wind | Cut///Copy
[15] Fatalist Palmistry | Why?
[16] Baby I'm Broke | Lucky Soul
[17] Mlle. LaBelle | Emily Bate
[18] Turn Me Towards The Light | Aberfeldy
[19] Nesso | Hatchback
[20] Facts of Life | Juvelen
i keep toying around with the idea of re-inserting "goodbye" by dominique leone as track 3, and lopping of the juvelen tune, leaving "nesso" as the closer. (there's not room on a CD for all 21 songs - i tried once and made it work, with a truncated version of "kim & jessie," but that's no good at all.) as it stands, "nesso" is shortened somewhat, and the transitions into and out of it don't have anything like the fluid grace of the track itself. i've been waffling about "facts of life" - it makes for a very different kind of closer; resounding and anthemic rather than amiably trailing off - but it is a pretty great song, and its central sentiment pretty much hits the nail on the head: "this world is crazy but we've got each other to love." i guess it's probably time to leave well enough alone...
the title harvest gleanings came from a bible verse that we were playing around with on yom kippur: "...and the stray gleanings of your harvest you shall not collect." [one working title for the mix was daze of aw, which i still think is a good phrase, for describing the effect of overwhelming cuteness, especially if it has something to do with the high holidays - close but not exactly what i was going for.] apart from the obvious seasonal associations with harvests, it's a decent description of what this mix contains, if you consider my work to be sifting through music to see what i can find (as it is, more or less) - these are the gleanings of my musical harvestings, c. 2008.
even more specifically, all but four of these songs are from releases i have reviewed (or, in two cases, will do soon) for AMG. ten of the twenty are from this year, six from last year, the rest fairly recent too. nine of the twenty are from scandinavian artists - which is actually fewer than i expected, although it's still striking considering that this is not a particularly pop-oriented mix. also notably, nine of them are by female artists, or groups with female vocalists – my mom said it could almost pass for one of the chicks mixes that i make for her, which is true. [n.b. this does not include the artists named kelley and dominique]
so what's on it? a lot of artists i have written about here before (well, almost all if you count the amg roundups), many of whom are quite near and dear to my heart:
tunng, perhaps more than any other artist, sum up the spirit i was going for – i've really enjoyed exploring their albums this year, and am sorry i didn't discover them sooner, but this bloc party cover is actually from a non-album single. the frontiersy subject matter is also thematically appropriate to the harvest idea, not that there's really a lyrical theme to this mix.
kelley polar has made one of my very favorite records of the year, though i have continued to procrastinate actually reviewing it, possibly because i'm afraid i'll discover it's not as good as i want it to be, though more likely because its special strangeness is going to be really tough to put into words. this is a pretty good example. i have no idea what kind of song this is.swedish synthpop musical all-around heroes the knife at their most folksy and organic, singing (aptly) about tromping around in the wilderness, i think. from their s/t debut, which i only got this year, and is nearly as mindblowingly good as their more celebrated second and third albums. i love this song. keep an ear out for "we raise our head for the color red," lyrics that cropped up later, even less comprehensibly, in "heartbeats."
devon sproule, my darlin', was one of the reasons i knew i had to make this mix. i carried this song around in my head for almost two years, and then for another year after i actually got a recorded copy of it, all so that it could make its way here, and to you. a perfect fall song.
marit larsen, my other darlin', happily popped up with her lovely second album just in time to make it onto the mix. actually this song was the only thing i'd heard from the album when i compiled the mix, otherwise i might have chosen something that wasn't the lead single. but it works out okay, 'cuz anyway you slice it this is an irresistable song right off the bat that only gets better the more you hear it. poppy, to be sure, but not offputtingly so, and rootsy enough to fit in. (at least, i hope those things are true. if not screw it.)
margaret berger is a pretty unlikely candidate for such a low-key mix, being the new queen of disco and all, but this utterly gorgeous ballad from her otherwise relatively unremarkable debut has a comforting calm that just keeps drawing me back in. just so pretty. (for a long time i was looking for a way to juxtapose it with the guy sigsworth remix of mirah's "la familia," which has a strikingly similar bell line, but what's the point really. that remix, by the way, is featured on the practically-finished sleepy mix, which will turn up here v. soon.)
sheryl crow has never meant a great deal to me, though i usually like her singles, but i really enjoyed her album this year - this is the song that got me into it, and it's still by far my favorite. unabashedly earnest and sentimental, corny almost (that goofy chorus), but surprisingly hip and grooving even so.
m83 have usually left me cold in the past (and i haven't been able to get into the rest of saturdays=youth either) but this song is flat-out awesome. as my uncle pointed out, the production is totally over-the-top '80s-mimicry, except that snare drum sound is a lot better. i can't decide if kim and jessie are supposed to be boys or girls.
bertine zetlitz is a [norse] goddess. in order to help spread the gospel, i have prepared a best-of compilation... [contact me for more info.]
britta persson is a strange sorta person. damn she wishes she was your lover. frankly, it doesn't sound like such a good deal to me; she seems kinda insecure and unstable. but she's not bad to listen to, in a '90s-reviving kinda way.
it turns out that owusu & hannibal have more than one obsession-worthy song after all (the one being "what it's about," which i've raved about at least a couple of times.) i'm not quite sure they have more than two, though. (this one has a weird breakdown to silence in the middle, and then builds up into its own semi-remix/reprise, so it sort of counts as one and a half.)
i know i've seen them live, and written their biography and reviews of all their albums and everything, but i still don't really get the tough alliance. like, at all. do people care about them? are they important? did marc hogan at pitchfork singlehandedly manufacture a whole load o' hype that nobody much else (except for me) bothered to follow up on. can't tell. this song's pretty catchy though...
i < style="font-weight: bold;">the ark. this is a silly song, with some very silly lyrics, but it's pretty hard to argue with the message.
cut///copy. hmmph. i think that they are really really really good. i just kinda wish i liked them more. wooosh!
yes. why? "gemini (birthday song)" one of the highlights of the october mix (one of only two artists to be reprised here), and he/they didn't disappoint with the follow-up... starts with a blast and it doesn't let up...lyrics, melody, hook, message, this song's got it all. "i am still alive, in love and wide-eyed in my time." (though the opening stanza is the best.) i think some other folks noticed it too - it was one of the 75 or so prescribed options for "best song of the year" in the ridiculous p4k readers survey.
lucky soul. ohhhhhhh god...... just listen to it, ok? (why is this band not ruling the world yet?)
emily bate. hi emily! she said the other day that it's about "romantic friendship," which is more or less what i would have said. (friendship with roommates, no less.) except for the first verse which is about weird grammar.
aberfeldy are a bunch of sweethearts. those twinkles. those tiny little space-zapper sound effects. those harmony vox. riley's cute lil voice. now this song puts me in a daze of aw.
hatchback is one blissed-out dude. i bet he'd be fun to take a road trip with. make sure he brings along his trumpet.
juvelen is pretty much the man... i might have mentioned him once or twice. this song sorta splits the difference between his dance jams and his slow jams. i already quoted the chorus for ya...
and that's it. didn't really mean to go through all the tracks but i guess i just did. thanks for listening, and let me know if you want a copy.
05 December 2008
achy breaky auto-tune
i've been listening to kanye west's 808s & heartbreak, and i actually think i might like it. i guess a couple of other people like it too (though not so much my colleague mr. kellman), so maybe that's not so surprising, but i haven't really actively liked any of mr. west's output in a long time. i haven't listened to any of his albums close to their release dates since i guess college dropout (mostly because i've been so turned off by his lead singles; i might have been more slightly more interested in the albums without those, but listening to them has been generally underwhelming.) so there may be some correlation there - not sure how much the appeal of this one stems from lowered expectations, plus actually bothering to care about it. or maybe i am finally learning to hate the single, love the sin.
anyway, 808s definitely has a few things going for it. first of all the title, which is way better than his stupid college-themed ones, and smartly picks up on the 808-'08 connection that you'd really think would have been played up more (notwithstanding the black devil disco album that i'm still too bored by to review.) also it makes me think of decks efx & 909, which i've never heard but always thought was a catchy name.
this is also the first time that i've really engaged with the autotune phenomenomenon. obviously i've heard it, all over the place, but never thought here nor there about it save that it was part of what was making mainstream hip-hop so uninteresting these days. (being that it's one of the dominant things about current hip-hop, and it's gotten really uninteresting; annoying actually.) but this is a little different - it so overdoes the autotune thing that it doesn't come off as a gimmick at all (or maybe it's just so played out by now that there's no way for it to sound novel or even gimmicky anymore.)
instead, it's a bizarre but actually effective expressive choice. not just for the obvious cyborgian/techno-alienation interpretive reasons, but on simple sonic terms too. i'm even less interested in kanye's pain than i am in t-pain, but the robotic sounds are interesting enough (and actually, in subtle ways, varied from track to track) that i don't feel a need to engage with the emotions they're supposedly representing. also, the autotune goes a good distance to masking kanye's voice, delivery, and lyrics, which i've always found pretty much insufferable. anybody could be singing here, it doesn't really read as kanye, per se.
i like how it's continuing and extrapolating modern mainstream hip-hop's love affair with electronica. which is a totally weird love affair in that it's pretty much one-sided and also clumsy, based on samples of varying subtlety (daft punk obv., booka shade, i guess "dragostina din tei" counts), and just lots of signifying synths and vocal efx. i guess it's not so much electronica as electronics in general. (not that that's exactly a new thing for hip-hop) synth-pop (>synth-hop. have people been using that?) also interesting that it seems like mostly a mainstream phenom, not underground? (not sure though. have to check out black milk's tronic, and i guess the people that are really doing it are successful enough that i don't think of them as straight hip-hop anymore anyway - like the hipster-hoppers and the (post?-)grime guys.)
[btw, the other thing mainstream hip-hop has a love affair with these days is m.i.a. and santogold. (not that they're one thing, but in this context they may as well be.) which is also weird b/c it seems like they are not being treated as rappers or even really as artists, just as hip cred-grabs and sonic source material (q.v. the stupid sample on "swagga like us" and santi's nothing vocal contribution to the new jay-z joint, though that does include a rap at least.) i still can't quite believe that "paper planes" was a #4 hit this year... in some ways it seems like the song of the year (again?) more on that later, maybe.]
anyway. the other thing about 808s, though, is that it's not actually a hip-hop album. i guess it's some weird mongrel form of synth-r&b-pop. which may explain a lot of things, like why the autotune is less annoying, and why it's a kanye album i don't really mind - considering that two of the things that annoy me most about him are his dumb-wannabe-clever rapping (as opposed to will.i.am's dumb-wannabe-dumb rapping) and his sore-thumb sampling. the only samples i'm aware of here are a tears for fears song that i don't know (so it doesn't bother me, i guess, but it's also not obvious which part of the song is the sample, which is a good thing) and the beat from nina simone's "see-line woman," which is used fairly subtly and effectively (it's just the beat, not the hook or anything) and is a pleasant reminder of the nina simone sample 'ye used for (both) talib kweli's "get by" and john legend's "i used to love her," which still sounds like some of the freshest sampling he's done.
people are talking about this as a tangent to his main career trajectory, which probably makes sense, even though in some way it's a logical extension of the synths and pop fetish (and lack of heavy hip-hop signification) of graduation. certainly, if he continues in this vein we'll have to reassess just what kind of artist he's trying to be - and that could be pretty exciting; it's territory that hasn't really been staked out yet, maybe. but presumably this is just an oddball, one-off experiment. a lot of weird but distinctive records turn out to be surprisingly durable, especially those that are somewhat confounding at first blush. i'm not necessarily counting on it with this one, esp. as few of the individual songs have really grabbed me as songs, per se - it's definitely cool that kanye is writing sorta straight-ish pop songs, but that will ultimately be less significant than whether he's capable of writing good ones. time will tell, i guess, whether this curiosity will blossom into something more lasting.
03 December 2008
AMG review round-up, volume IX: scandinavian singer-songwriter special
some of my current favorite practitioners of singer-songwriter (which by the way is a genre), all of them from norway (marit, ane kinda) or sweden (everyone else) except for herman dune, who are from sweden and switzerland by way of france and apparently the lower east side or something. (also, herman dune and billie the vision are technically "bands," but we'll let it slide...) so, roughly in order of how good they are (or, rather, how excited i am about them at the moment):
Nordic roots-pop starling Marit Larsen scored her second Norwegian number one with "If A Song Could Get Me You, the utterly charming lead single from her sophomore outing The Chase (which itself debuted atop her country's album chart.) In a typically starry-eyed twist on the song-about-a-song concept, the tune finds Larsen proposing to write a song in whatever style it will take to win her beloved's affections: "I could try with a waltz/I could try rock and roll/I could try with the blues." There's no doubt that she's capable but, as it turns out, she doesn't spend much time with those styles on The Chase (though "Steal My Heart" and "I've Heard Your Love Songs" are both waltzes, and lovely ones too; respectively dainty and sumptuous.) Conspicuously absent from that list are pop and country, the two genres that most closely encapsulate her general musical approach. Larsen began her professional career as one half of the teen pop act M2M, and she hasn't strayed too far from that group's trendsetting brand of earnest, accessible bubble-folk - growing into her twenties may have helped her develop a satisfying emotional complexity to accompany her penchant for pop melodicism, but her intrinsic sweetness remains resoundingly undimmed. Meanwhile, her lavish sentimentality, narrative lyrical bent, and colorful instrumental choices (mandolin, banjo, harmonica, and dobro, along with more baroque, orchestral touches) suggest a link with country that was evident on her solo debut and is even more pronounced here (sometime between the two albums, Larsen started a low-profile sideline stint playing in the Oslo-based traditionalist bluegrass band Elwood Caine.)
Of course, there's not necessarily much of a gap between classicist songwriter pop and country music in its chart-friendly contemporary incarnation. It doesn't feel like a stretch, for instance, to describe Larsen as a Scandinavian Taylor Swift, considering that her differences from the rising country star have more to do with geography and vocal inflection than anything musically substantial (though she has a not-insignificant seven years on Swift, experience-wise.) Much like Swift's own sophomore album, which was released around the same time, The Chase is an expertly crafted musical statement that balances rootsiness and polish, leavens its maturity and poise with undeniable flashes of youthful energy, and displays considerable mainstream appeal regardless of genre classifications. Indeed, it exudes confidence, not just musical and writerly, but - this album's most striking difference from its predecessor - emotional as well, as Larsen chides an indecisive new lover ("Is It Love?"), announces her plans to walk out on a sleeping, unwitting partner ("Ten Steps," whose sanguine empowerment marks a complete reversal from the crippling paranoia of the debut's "This Time Tomorrow"), and reflects calmly on the existential strangeness and unsettling simplicity of post-breakup life ("This Is Me, This Is You"), all with an assertiveness and aplomb worlds away from the passivity and hesitance that permeated Under the Surface. Even as it deals with some difficult situations, then, The Chase is far from a downer; and when things are working out in Larsen's favor - as on the light-hearted title track and preposterously giddy new-love ode "Addicted" - it's absolutely effervescent.
(bad cover art alert in effect for everything that follows except maybe maia hirasawa)
The title track of Ane Brun's fourth studio album (only her second U.S. release), "Changing of the Seasons" makes reference to all four -- "the relief of spring, the intoxication of summer rain, the clearness of fall, how winter makes me reconsider it all" -- but there's no question that this is music for the more pensive and bittersweet of seasonal shifts: the onset of autumn, the drift into winter. As we often do when the weather draws us inward, these poetically tender songs contemplate the comforts and challenges of togetherness and solitude, reflecting on relationships with a mix of resignation and sweetness, a mature emotionalism that is no less poignant for its reassurance and composure. Brun's keenly observed relationship songs turn on touchingly deployed metaphors (love as a jigsaw puzzle; a faded daydream of tree house domesticity; the emotional armor of a reticent lover turned tangible and rusty) and moments of subtle emotional shifts: restless disenchantment dispelled by a waking lover's instinctive embrace; the difference between asking someone never to leave and realizing that the asking is irrelevant. She invests isolation with a comparable complexity, variously plucking up her bruised confidence ("Raise My Head"), honing in on the fleeting seconds of unexpected calm amid bouts of anxiety ("Ten Seconds"), surrendering to find solace in the recordings of Gillian Welch (and Norwegian ambient producer Biosphere), and offering a curiously soothing fatalism in the lovely "Lullaby for Grownups." Befitting the ruminative tone of the words, the music strikes a balance between sparsity and lushness, augmenting Brun's acoustic guitar with touches of marimba, bouzouki, and piano as well as elegant, enveloping string arrangements, many of them by rising star Nico Muhly. At the center of it all is Brun's curious and affecting voice, conveying the blend of expressiveness and restraint that these songs seem to invite, and recalling vocalists as disparate as Dolly Parton, Joni Mitchell, and Tori Amos, sometimes all at once. A thoroughly captivating work from an undeniable talent.
Next Year in Zion reportedly marks the first album that head Herman Dune David Ivar has written while he was happy. It certainly shows, as many of these songs are practically bursting with love and good cheer. In other hands, unabashedly lovestruck fare like "On a Saturday," "My Best Kiss," and "When the Sun Rose Up This Morning" might come off trite, but the Dunes approach them with such warmth and unaffected sweetness that it's easy to be won over. Not everything here is so unrelentingly sunny, but there is an endearingly shambolic, lived-in quality to David-Ivar's sappily prosaic narratives and quirky slant rhymes that reflects a persistent, modest optimism in the face of irrational fears ("Baby Is Afraid of Sharks"), awkward roommate situations ("Afternoon Dance Party"), the fugitive criminal lifestyle ("Lovers Are Waterproof"), and even environmental devastation ("Poison in the Rain.") The music reflects that lyrical positivity with a laid-back, infectious charm that draws on American folk forms (with occasional calypso, mariachi, klezmer, and flamenco accents) and also harkens back to '50s and '60s pop in way a reminiscent of Jonathan Richman and Jens Lekman. Beyond the Richman/Lekman-esque core duo, Next Year in Zion is fleshed out with percussion from El Doctor Schönberg, girl group backing vocals by the Babyskins, the N'awlins flavor of the Jon Natchez Bourbon Horns, and electric guitar solos courtesy of the Wave Pictures' Dave Tattersall. Though it initially comes off as fairly slight, this reveals itself to be a rewarding, idiosyncratic effort that bears repeated listens; a pleasure from start to finish. [no clue about the title.]
The fourth album from the lovable misfits in Billie the Vision & the Dancers doesn't offer any significant changes from the three that came before it; it's just another easily enjoyable batch of sweet, playful, sincere ramshackle twee pop. There are still plenty of love-lorn lyrics centered around the fictitious everypeople Lily and Pablo, though Lars Lindquist also pens some particularly personal narratives, recounting his childhood move from Denmark to Sweden in "Stuttering Duckling," tenderly delving into candid sexual realism in "You're Not Giving Up on Me," and detailing an eye-opening, guilt-ridden experience in London's queer nightclub scene in the poignant "Swedish Sin." Other highlights include the bright, sunny pop of opener "Lily from the Middleway Street," the shuffle-ska "Groovy," a guest vocal from Annika Norlin (of Hello Saferide) on "I Belong to You," and a surprisingly effective Guns N' Roses interpolation on the break-up ballad "Liar and a Thief."
(from here on, we can play connect the dots from artist to artist...)
As suggested by the shift from the bright yellow-orange of Madame, Madame! to muted violet on the cover of If I Were a Melody, Andrea Kellerman's second album as Firefox AK is a markedly moodier affair than her first, simultaneously darker, edgier, and more subdued. It actually encompasses a broader emotional range, from lush, mellow material like "The River" and the nearly beatless "Shero" to the aggressive thrust of first single "Winter Rose" -- a duet with her husband Rasmus Kellerman (aka Tiger Lou), who wails the chorus hook ("Give me some pleasure/Give me some joy/Just give me something I can destroy") with a blank-eyed electro-clash angst -- and the pummeling hard house of the well-named "Techno Tears." Still, the overall effect is less immediate, and more understated, than the infectiously scrappy Madame!, which may have something to do with the relative absence of gritty, rock-styled guitars. The word "mature" feels slightly incongruous, but if nothing else Melody is more accomplished and self-assured from a musical and production standpoint -- none of it was recorded in a bedroom this time out, and it shows. Kellerman and her production/programming accomplice, Viktor Ginner, spent several months in Berlin working on the album, and they clearly soaked up a lot of inspiration from the electronic dance scene there, resulting in a decidedly modern-sounding collection of more refined (not necessarily more relaxed) beats and pieces that recall the sophisticated techno of Ellen Allien and the Kompakt stable, as well as the electro-pop of the Junior Boys (whose Matt Didemus mixed the album) and Kellerman's countrymen the Knife. None of this comes at the expense of her sumptuous way with vocal hooks -- this album has plenty of them, amply showcasing Kellerman's sublime vocals, which were either much better recorded this time or else have developed considerably (probably both). They resonate with unusual warmth against the synthetic austerity of the arrangements, especially on the poignant "Pushing," with its stirring chorus shift from minor to major, and "Flutter of a Wing," which comes closest to the simple pop pleasures of the debut despite an unsettling lyric inspired by the lack of birds during Kellerman's time in Berlin. Although it may take a few more spins to sink in, Melody is a dramatic step forward from its predecessor, a complex and rewarding effort that places Firefox AK right at forefront of modern electronic pop.
Hello Saferide's second album is called More Modern Short Stories from Hello Saferide, in perhaps self-effacing but apt reference to the literary qualities of journalist/frontwoman Annika Norlin's frequently verbose songwriting. Coincidentally or not, the most inspired moments here, musically as well as lyrically, come when she dresses up her typically autobiographical/confessional mode with an injection of creative fiction: the martial "Overall," wherein she and producer Andreas Mattsson role play concerned parents fretting over their neo-Nazi son (shades of XTC's "No Thugs in Our House"); the rocking "Middle Class," which indulges in Bonnie and Clyde fantasies about a complete stranger; and standout first single "Anna," which imagines the charmed life of an overacheiving daughter she could have had with an ex. Of course, it's not too hard to hear Norlin's neuroses and insecurities playing out in these flights of fancy, but at least they offer a bit of psychological distance that's missing from slightly cringe-worthy fare like "25 Days" (Norlin as needy new girlfriend), the teenage sex diary "X Telling Me...," and "Parenting Never Ends," in which she asks her mother to take her back into the womb (Norlin clearly has parenting on the brain.) It's not that she lacks the verbal facility or pop sense to make this material worthwhile, but engaging with Hello Saferide means engaging with Norlin's personal psychodramas and emotional fatalism, and not every listener will feel comfortable or invested enough to do that. For those who are, Modern Short Stories offers a somewhat more mature, less giddy, but no less charmingly complicated version of the young woman who was introduced on Introducing, with couple of lovely Swedish folk-pop ballads ("Lund" and "Arjeplog") to boot.
Maia Hirasawa first gained notice as a backup singer for Annika Norlin's Hello Saferide, and fans of that band will certainly recognize a similar brand of sweet, intimate, folksy pop on the Japanese-Swedish singer/songwriter's humbly titled debut album. That said, Hirasawa does carve out a strong identity for herself here, one that's sometimes whimsical but not as overly cutesy as her former band (school children vocals notwithstanding); if anything more prone to overeager sentimentalism, but not so earnestly straightforward in her expression of it. Drawing musically from a palette of jazz and broadway-style piano ballads as well as folk and pop, she's generally inclined toward muted, wistful reflection, frequently undercutting even her bubblier, more optimistic seeming pop tunes with shades of lyrical uncertainty and ambiguity. That's especially true of the album's two biggest-sounding moments -- the bouncy full-bore pop single "And I Found This Boy" and the jazzy "Crackers," which features a brass section and a vocal duet with cabaret-pop starlet Miss Li. Some of the calmer numbers, like the string-laden waltz-ballad "Gothenburg" and the charming opener "Still June," with its intoxicatingly lush self-harmonies, offer glimmers of genuine hope, all the sweeter for being unanticipated. Throughout, Hirasawa displays an unusually versatile and expressive voice, reminiscent of Regina Spektor in its distinctive personality and emotional range, which is a large part of what makes Though, I'm Just Me so effortless and pleasurable. A quiet gem of a debut.
(and, for those who wonder if i ever write negative reviews...)
Miss Li's debut album introduced her scrappy, exuberant, modern take on classic cabaret-style jazz-pop. It's definitely not the sort of music you'd expect from a Swedish twenty-something, which makes this, at least initially, a very striking release, and it's undeniably a blast of energy, though there is something vaguely bland and tiresome about it in spite of its zesty exterior. The basic M.O. is established right off the bat, in the brief title track, with its handclaps, swingin' oompah rhythm, and brassily belted barstool tale of a night of boozing (the opening count-off turns out to be the number of beers she's drinking) leading to a desperate, meaningless one-night-stand, complete with spoken aside. From there on we get hot 'n' bothered torch ballads ("Give It to Me"), slinky shuffles ("Backstabber Lady"), jokey piano ditties ("I'm So Poor Won't You Lend Me Some Money"), and so forth; a survey of show tuney styles that doesn't come off as self-conscious pastiche so much as earnest if amateurish genre work. Fortunately - crucially - Li does have the pipes to pull it off, and perhaps even more importantly, the attitude: she attacks the material with a gusto that can't help but be a little infectious, clearly having too much fun to worry about whether she sounds corny. It's a perfectly apt approach for such unabashedly theatrical music, but it's a little hard to shake the notion that this is just a girl playing dress-up, and despite some seriously accomplished instrumental contributions from her bandmates, Li's rather hamfisted piano playing creates the sense that she's still in rehearsal.
Miss Li's second album appeared a mere six months after her first, and it's cut from similar cloth, with ten more songs of the mongrel musical theater pop that's this impish Swedish songbird's version of cabaret jazz. The most notable differences this time out are a couple of unconvincing stabs at political/social commentary -- the snarky "I'm Glad I'm Not a Proud American" and "Kings and Queens" (sample lyric: "Rich men in pretty suits aren't meant to make up all the rules/when all they really care about is guns and bombs and bigger boobs") -- and a few halfway decent ballads, which could almost be affecting if Li had a bit more vocal restraint. Her charm, such as it is, stems from her campy amateurism, which is infectious enough to sell hammy numbers like "I'm Sorry, He's Mine," an ode to stealing a friend's man that one could imagine Lily Allen sinking her snide little teeth into, and bouncy trifles like "All I Need Is You." But frankly, unlike the similarly precocious (and prolific) Nellie McKay, with whom she shares more than a few influences, Li doesn't really seem to have the originality, songwriting talent, or charismatic spark to make you care when she tries to get a bit more serious.
