The Party's Crashing Us

Moving Day

2009-06-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

Since Blogger thinks it's cool to delete an entire post without warning me beforehand, I'm moving this whole blog over to Wordpress. The new address is here. If you link to me, please update the address.

Let Us Remember: The Congos's "Ark of the Covenant"

2009-05-19T15:37:00.000-07:00

In "The Upsetter," the 2008 documentary about Lee "Scratch" Perry, Perry blames the group The Congos and all their many rastafarian friends for tainting his Black Ark studio with rampant drug use, endless mooching, and racism (he claims that God was punishing him for believing in the rasta idea of white people as devils), forcing him to burn it down in a spiritual act of cleansing.

Hearing Perry talk about his time with the Congos without hearing the album that resulted, The Heart of the Congos, you might assume their collaboration was a mess, an ugly testament to an ugly time. But The Heart of the Congos is one of the greatest reggae albums ever made. Combining Perry's Black Ark sound, with its protean bass sound and cave-like echo, and the Congos's deeply spiritual roots reggae sound, the album sounds as vital as ever, forever being what you hand to Bob Marley fans and say "This is the real stuff."

One of the single biggest influence on reggae vocalists since the 1960s has been Curtis Mayfield, and when you hear "Ark of the Covenant," you'll know why. Nothing sounds better over a huge low end than a keening falsetto, and here it's supplied by Congo Cedric Myton. Perry provides the perfect ambience for the group's harmonies, creating echo effects that sound like wind blowing through palms and hi-hats that hiss like smoke released from craters. When the group stops singing at around 2:26, you get nothing less than a clinic on Black Ark dub, with rock-like snares and gurgling, underwater reverb.

Speaking of Black Ark dub....Not to sound like a jerk, but pretty much every next level musical trick you've ever heard was done by Lee Perry first, thirty or forty years ago. From Timbaland using a crying baby as a musical instrument to M.I.A.'s bird squawk percussion on "Bird Flu" to almost anything Animal Collective has done over the past few years, Perry thought of it first, and as opposed to holding this over newer artists as a taunt, I think this fact should encourage fans of those artists to seek out something or everything by the man (plus then you don't look like an idiot when you're talking about how brilliant and original your favorite artist and how "no one else would have thought of that.")

Soulful, sad, a litle creepy, and heavy in every sense of the word, "Ark of the Covenant" and The Heart of the Congos needs to be remembered.

Ark of the Covenant- The Congos

I Will Never Like: Blu

2009-05-12T20:46:00.000-07:00

Blu bores me. Sure, he can flow and his lyrics show some degree of writerly detail, but there is absolutely nothing compelling about his personality. Were he a singer and not a rapper, this might not be a problem. I find Thom Yorke to be quite irritating in interviews and his lyrics increasingly read like the repetitive ravings of a bus stop paranoiac, but the sound of his voice can still give me chills.

Rapping requires a tremendous amount of personality and conviction, and truthfully may be closer to acting than singing, because the ultimate aim is to make the listener believe what you are saying is true. This is the reason Tupac will be forever more popular than, say, Rakim, because the former, whether he believed his own bullshit or not, portrayed the more interesting character. I'm not saying Rakim didn't possess personality or conviction, just that his persona of the uber-MC got stale quickly because, while intelligent and poetic, it was, from a dramatic standpoint, pretty one-dimensional.

Looking at it this way, rappers like Blu are bad actors. They write fluid, poetic rhymes full of metaphors and similes but deliver them in a way that signifies only their lyrical prowess and nothing else. What could be more boring? Even when he's rapping about dead friends on Johnson and Jonson's "Hold On John," Blu sounds like he's a motivational speaker giving a lecture on "What Grief Can Teach Us." No wonder so many listeners would rather listen to Lil Boosie curse the world because his friend died, because even if he's not capturing very many specific details, the visceral emotion of losing someone comes across loud and clear and isn't undercut with faux-wisdom and self-help platitudes.

I'm not saying Blu is some unfeeling, uncaring intellectual and Boosie some salt of the earth "real dude," just that the latter better understands the dramatic nature of rap music. The reason so called "positive" or "conscious" rap isn't more popular has nothing to do with listeners disliking songs with positive messages. Popular music is full of hokey songs that even the most cynical listeners find themselves enjoying purely because of the melody. But subtract the melody and have some dude just saying stuff like "R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me" and the sentiment lives and dies based on its delivery. If rappers want us to respond to their "wisdom" and "knowledge," they've got to convince us that both were hard earned and not some shit they just thought up when they were stoned. Rappers who rhyme about drug dealing and living in fear of being killed have it easier because their subjects are already inherently dramatic.

Blu, and rappers like him, epitomize the problem with lyrical prowess as the primary standard for judging rappers, and help explain the ascendancy of what Brandon Soderberg calls post-lyricism. Just putting some hot lines together and rapping them well is not enough anymore; now you have to, like a good actor, create a compelling character that can transcend the fact that, at the end of the day, you're just a dude reciting poetry.

Hold On John- Johnson and Jonson

The Right Track: Magik Markers' "7/23"

2009-05-07T17:59:00.000-07:00

Magik Markers, like Sunburned Hand of Man and Mouthus, are one of those bands that explores the crusty margins of 60s rock music, the music made by those bands who were too sloppy and/or trippy to break big. I'm talking about bands like Sweden's International Harvester and Germany's Guru Guru and LA's literal "cult" band Father Yod and Ya Ho Wa 13, groups who continue to find a small but obsessive audience all these years later because they, unlike Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead, actually sound heavy and druggy and weird enough to be called psychedelic.

"7/23," off of Magik Markers' new album Balf Quarry, is the perfect marriage of this half-broken, hypnotic noise rock and a gorgeous melody. Almost every element of the song save for Elisa Ambrogio's singing is either clanging or atonal, but her vocal melody is so irresistible that it sounds like a pop song. At around the three minute mark, there's a guitar solo that strangles out the main melody, sounding almost like a parody of it, like the band can't help but make fun of themselves for writing such an easygoing and catchy melody.

Magik Markers - 7/23

I Actually Like: Rye Rye and Blaqstarr's Blaqout Mixtape

2009-05-02T15:41:00.000-07:00

Rye Rye and Blaqstarr's Blaqout mixtape is pretty overwhelming on the first listen. It's unquestionably club music, all crazy build-up and schoolyard chants and pounding bass drums and handclaps. But you'd be doing the music a disservice if you dismissed as "only good in a club." It sounds good, if not better, on headphones because you can hear all the tiny shifts in dynamics that producer-DJs like Blaqstarr excel at, the moments that explain how music that sounds so repetitive on the surface can keep you hyped up and energetic for hours.

There are so many great things Blaqstarr does throughout that need to pointed out: The way he changes up the tempo on "Hustress (Club Version)" not by slowing down the beat, but by slowing down the whole song; the funky flanged drums and Jeezy "Ay!" adlibs on "Ay Buddy"; building a whole beat around the beginning of "Jesus Walks" on "Guns in the Air"; singing over nothing but a decaying sample on "Feel It In the Air," and the moody, almost new wave-sounding remix of M.I.A.'s "World Town."

Speaking of M.I.A.: It's disappointing that she appears anywhere on this mixtape at all, though I don't blame Blaqstarr for wanting to point out his contribution to her sound. The production on Kala owes so much to Baltimore club music, but the critical consensus seems to be that that album created a sound as opposed to borrowing one. Though M.I.A. did take Rye Rye out on tour with her, that barely covers her debt to the music she's taken so much from and which she only casually mentions in interviews .

Honestly, Rye Rye is sort of a negligible presence on Blaqout, but I don't mean that in any insulting way, just that this seems to be mostly Blaqstarr's show. The girl does have charisma to spare and is probably the first teenage girl rapper I've ever heard who sounds like an actual teenager and not some record company's idea of one. Also, her lullaby-like chorus on "Get on the Floor" is integral to the song's chilled banger vibe.

The track I've included, "Hands Up Thumbs Down" is my own edit from the full mp3 mix I downloaded over at 41yo.com, Brandon Soderberg's Baltimore Club blog. I highly recommend everyone head over there and download the full mixtape.

Hands Up Thumbs Down- Rye Rye and Blaqstarr

I Actually Like: Venice Is Sinking

2009-04-28T13:25:00.001-07:00

On Thursday, I got an email from the Athens, GA band Venice Is Sinking, informing me of the release of their new album AZAR. Since it was the first email I've ever gotten from a band wanting me to write about them, I felt flattered enough to listen to the album and, lo and behold, I actually liked it.

Venice Is Sinking play the sort of orchestral indie rock often termed "slowcore," and true to form, the tempos on AZAR don't often rise above a sitting person's heartbeat. But it's the band's stately pace that allows their richly textured arrangements to be fully appreciated. Utilizing trumpets, viola, steel drums, and the shimmer of sounds played in reverse, Venice Is Sinking remind of everything I loved about the rich and cinematic arrangements of bands like Rachel's and Low.

The two songs I'm posting for download, "Wetlands Dancehall" and "Iron Range" are my favorites on the album. "Wetlands Dancehall" begins with a shuffling, shaker-driven beat and singer Karolyn Troupe's almost operatic vocals, gradually turning into a glittering waltz. On their iLike page, the band mention they recorded Javanese seed pods for the album and I think I hear the sound of the pods flit in and out of the song's choruses.

"Iron Range" starts out sounding like a Godspeed You Black Emperor! song, with Troupe's viola weaving upwards through a bed of strummed guitars and ethereal synths, the music building towards one of those classic post-rock crescendo that give you goosebumps no matter how many times you hear them. When the vocals come in, Troupe and fellow singer Daniel Lawson use their harmonies to slowly ascend to what sounds like the highest note in both their ranges.

Buy AZAR

Venice Is Sinking- Wetlands Dancehall

Venice Is Sinking- Iron Range

Let Us Remember: Smog's "Let Me See the Colts"

2009-04-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

Smog's A River Ain't Too Much to Love is generally considered the beginning of Bill Callahan's kinder, gentler period, a period that, with the release of his new album, Sometimes I Wish I Were an Eagle, appears to have come to an end. But A River...is far from the sappy, nature-loving therapy session it's often made out to be. While songs like "I Feel like the Mother of the World" and "Rock Bottom Riser" are kind of hokey, most of the album has an awe-struck ambivalence to it, a recognition that nature is as much about death and decay as it is about peace and tranquility.

One of my favorite songs on the album is "Let Me See the Colts." As the album's closer, it sums up Callahan's guarded hopefulness in the image of watching colts being trained to race in the coming year. The song begins with Callahan bursting into his girlfriend's room and excitedly asking her to take him to see "the colts that will run next year." He tells her he wants to show the horses to "a gambling man....thinking about the future." This last image is enigmatic, since the reason Callahan wants to show the horses to the gambling man is never made clear. Are the horses supposed to make the gambler optimistic about future winnings? Or is he being shown the horses to make him stop thinking about the future (i.e. which horse he should bet on) and just appreciate the beauty of the running colts?

One of my favorite lines of the song is "The all-knowing, all seeing eye is dog tired/It just wants to see the colts." Firstly, the line's slightly ridiculous since the all-knowing, all-seeing eye would have already seen the colts run, but it's the idea that, having seen all there is to see (and presumably being both exhausted and in despair), the omniscient eye just wants that sliver of hope that comes with seeing horses run, even if it already knows all the future outcomes. You get the sense Callahan empathizes with this feeling, like he's experienced too much to be truly optimistic about anything, but he wants the brief breath of hope and inspiration that comes with seeing something that seems to epitomize all the wonderful possibilities of the coming future.

"Let Me See the Colts" would be a great ending credits song, because it imparts hope without explicitly saying things are going to be OK. Its uplift has a kind of OCD quality to it, like Callahan desperately needs to see the colts run to feel good about the future. Earlier in the song, when he wakes up his girlfriend, she asks him if he's been drinking. "No, neither drinking nor sleeping," he answers, and you can picture exactly what he looks and sounds like. It's this half crazed quality that's part of what makes the song that rare thing: a hopeful song for the hopeless.

Smog- Let Me See the Colts

All Screwed Up: 4 Deep's "Rollin' 4 Deep"

2009-04-17T20:59:00.000-07:00

Like ESG's "Smoke On," DJ Screw's version of 4 Deep's "Rollin' 4 Deep" is woozy as hell. You have to laugh when whoever is talking at the beginning of the song says "let's get crunk," since nothing this slow and bluesy could be mistaken for crunk, or at least the hyped up version of crunk represented by Lil Jon and Three Six Mafia.

Screw stretches out the beginning of the song for a couple of minutes, letting you absorb the leisurely guitar line that rings out like a a sigh, or a deep exhaling of breath. Of course, as usual, members of the Screwed Up Click are talking shit over the song, but here the talk sounds like the pleasant background noise of a party, more comforting than annoying. Besides slowing down the song, Screw has also added some sort of resonance filter, as you can hear the song dip into its low end and then emerge back up again. Stuff like this drives people on ecstasy crazy when it's used in house or techno, so I'm sure it had a similar effect on anyone high on codeine syrup (though anyone's who actually tried the latter can feel free to tell me if I'm wrong).

At around 8:10, Screw brings in the chorus. When you listen to the original song, you realize those moaning voices in the background on the Screw version are just ad-libs, or little throwaways bits of melody added to beef up the chorus. Slowed down, the effect is far more soulful and vulnerable, making even the random ad-lib "Hello, six pack of tobacco" sound slightly desperate, if maybe in a slightly self-parodying way.

After this, Screw starts this amazing delayed gratification thing he sometimes does where he'll scratch the first line of the song over and over, messing with your expectations enough times until you're resigned to just hearing the line repeated ad nauseum. For me, this creates a hypnotic effect similar to drone or ambient music, where you're no longer expecting the music to progress, just enjoying the mood it creates. Also, catch how slow he's scratching--he's not trying to show off with some Scribble Jam bullshit pyrotechnics, but instead just using the scratching as another musical element.

Once the rapping starts, the slow pace of the song is kept all costs, with Screw chopping up almost half the lines of the first verse. Every time a line gets chopped, the listener is forced to follow Screw's tempo, not the rapper's. I'm sure for many listeners, it's this very "chopping" that turns them off this kind of music because it makes listening to rap the conventional way, by following the rhythm of the rhyme, nearly impossible. If you listen to Michael Watts' "screwed and chopped" mixes (which should be called "slowed and chopped" since only Screw can make screwed and chopped mixes), there seems to be more care taken that the chopping itself doesn't obscure the rhymes, whereas Screw, on a song like Tray Dee's "Droppin' Bombz" off of the No Time for Bullshit tape, will chop a song up within an inch of its life.

Screw chops the hell out of the song's second chorus, making "real g's roll four deep" sound like "real real j-j-j-ees ro-ro fo-fo dee-deep." Then after a quick scratch, he gives the first two lines of the second verse "Coming up the block boomin' blades/ Steady hittin switches you can't fade" this bizarre, almost ODB-like cadence, which I wish was repeated three or four more times.

"Rollin' 4 Deep" appears quite frequently on Screw tapes and it's quite clear why. Like ESG's "Smoke On," it's got one of those beats that sounds perfect screwed, to the point where the original sort of pales in comparison. I've included the original (via Noz's great post on 4 Deep) so you can hear the differences I've mentioned.

Rollin' 4 Deep- 4 Deep (off DJ Screw's Codeine Fiend)

Rollin' 4 Deep- 4 Deep (off 4 Deep's What's Really Going On)

Portland's Got to Be Good for Something: Valet Covers Boris

2009-04-11T15:53:00.000-07:00

Valet's Naked Acid was one of my favorite records last year and for good reason. Few records combined all the disparate strains of 21st century psychedelic music, from drone to space rock to slightly out of tune backwoods weirdness, as well as it did. Now Valet (AKA Honey Owens) is back with a new 12" record called False Face Society on Mexican Summer, a cool, bizarrely subscription based (because lord knows the subscription based model has been a winner for the music industry!) record label.

One of the songs on False Face Society is a cover of "Rainbow" by Boris and Ghost guitar god Michio Kurihara, and it's as great as you'd imagine it to be. Starting out as a Windy and Carl drone (with some cheesy cool heavy breathing stereo pans), the song alternates between heavily treated wah-wah guitar solos and Owens's whispery vocals. Listening to the original side by side with Valet's treatment, it's clear that, while Owens can't touch Kurihara in the guitar heroics department (dude's solos sound like they could cut metal), her version is arguably "trippier" and sexier with its lower-fi, soft-focus sound.

Valet- Rainbow

All Screwed Up: ESG's "Smoke On"

2009-04-07T16:31:00.001-07:00

Over the past two months, I've developed an immense appreciation for the music of DJ Screw. At their best, Screw's mixes re-imagine and re-contextualize rap music, making it, in turns psychedelic and bizarre, haunting and heartbroken, and celebratory and slow motion funky. Since Screw made over three hundred tapes and often mixed based on playlist requests, the results aren't always as great as they could be. However, since only the residents of Houston during the 90s and early part of this decade know which tapes were playlist requests and which were curated by Screw, there is the exciting possibility that random dudes from the neighborhood understood Screw's aesthetic and could hear the possibilities in screwing up, say, Phil Collins "In the Air Tonight."

When you realize that, for almost ten years, people rode around Houston in their cars bumping this dark and druggy music, music that often requires incredible patience and tolerance for repetition (on Blue Ova Grey, Screw stretches out Ice Cube's "Loved Ones" for twelve minutes, with the first five minutes devoted to nothing but the song's first couple of bars and slowed-down, drunken shout-outs from the Screwed Up Click), it's hard not to be in awe of the whole phenomenon, something that shows, as Brandon from No Trivia says "just how weird regionalism can be." Listeners who probably wouldn't even consider something like drone music music had no problem hearing a Scarface punchline repeated so many times that it starts to fold back on itself and become meaningless, at least in the literal sense of communicating meaning through words. Like drone or ambient music, Screw's music slows down the listener, lowering your heart rate and making time seem slower and more meditative. While some people insist the music should only be listened to under the influence of codeine cough syrup or marijuana, I disagree. Listen to the music for long enough and it creates the conditions needed to appreciate it.

Since the All Screwed Up series is about specific songs that I feel like people need to hear to continually appreciate the brilliance of Screw, I want to start with ESG's "Smoke On." Featured on the Syrup and Soda tape, "Smoke On" is great in so many ways. It mimics the slow, laid back feeling of being high and without a care in the world, the beat's airy G-funk keyboards sounding like the afternoon light that creeps through your window as you're zoning out on your living room couch. But since the original song was never meant to sound this druggy, it also retains its aggression and anger, sounding like a bunch of dudes who, high as they may be, are ready in second to get yanked back into the reality of defending their manhood and their status in their neighborhood.

Or you could hear it in all its passivity, its swagger and boasts empty in the face of a pleasant numbness. The chorus can sound so ghostly, as if you're smoking on and on to feel less human, less connected to your body and your mind, or, instead, less connected to things specific to you and more tuned into how it feels to just be. As pretentious as this last interpretation sounds, you can't deny it's not there in the music, just like you also can't deny that, druggy or not, part of the song is still rooted in the culture of dudes driving around stoned and showing off their cars and jewelry.

This is the complexity of Screw's music, the way it opens up songs to new interpretations and new ways of hearing, instead of closing them on some "This is gangsta music--case closed" crap.

In future installments of All Screwed Up, I hope to explore this complexity and hopefully help people realize how revolutionary and powerful Screw's music was and is.

ESG-Smoke On

I Actually Like: Woods (with a few reservations)

2009-03-31T20:06:00.000-07:00

Had I not been looking for new (non-rap) music to write about, I might have written off Woods as yet another band making shambling, slightly off center psychedelic rock music that's basically just ripping off Neil Young's Zuma. But I like lead singer Jeremy Earl's voice. Michael Hansen, from the great blog Decibel Tolls, describes it as "Elliott Smith experiencing zipper troubles" and I don't think I can come up with a better description. Pitchfork compares his voice to Neil Young, but Earl's voice is far wimpier. Though Woods play a similar form of backwoods psych to former labelmates (on Fuck It Tapes, the label the band themselves founded) MV and EE (Matt Valentine and Erika Elder), Earl's voice is far more melodious than Valentine's verging-on-atonal whine.

The song Pitchfork posted, "Rain On," off their new LP Songs of Shame, is a pleasant, folksy psych-rock song, saved from mediocrity by Earl's voice. The way his falsetto keeps pressing against its limit on the verses brings the focus where it should be: on the sound of his voice, rather than what's he's saying. The circular guitar line on the chorus acts a cool sort of answer to Earl's vocals too. "Gypsy Hand," also off Songs of Shame, has a slightly annoying sing-song melody and foolishly buries Earl's falsetto, making me worry "Rain On" might be the only Woods song I'll ever like.

Songs of Shame, and the band's previous album, Rear House, have both been released in limited edition tape form, and I'm wondering if I would appreciate the band more in that crackly, analog format than on CD. The Fuck It Tapes aesthetic and the whole idea of still, in this day and age, putting music on tapes, is about the way the archaic sound quality changes the music itself. Like the way DJ Screw can make a cliched C-Bo song about riding around the hood in his car haunting and poignant just by slowing it down, layers of tape hiss and compression can be both a comment on more established forms of music ( like I talked about here with Wavves) and a distancing tool, allowing for new and different ways of hearing song forms we've all heard thousands of times before.

Of course, this begs the question, which has come up concerning Wavves, if songs need fucked up production values to be interesting, are they really good songs at all? I don't really agree with this kind of thinking, but by suggesting Woods would sound better on tape, I'm wondering if I'm lending some truth to that kind of criticism.

Woods- Rain On

Let Us Remember: The Greatness of ELO

2009-03-25T18:36:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of people ironically enjoying the Electric Light Orchestra. What exactly is so lame about their music that it requires ironic distance? The fact that the band had silly cover art, overambitious arrangements, and dopey, idealistic lyrics makes them pretty much like every other popular rock band of their era. You can't ironically like ELO without ironically liking the Beatles or Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, because all those artists have moments as cheesy (if not cheesier) as Jeff Lynne and Co. I'm not saying you have to rank ELO with those bands, just that you can't damn one band for their excesses while completely ignoring those same excesses in another, more popular band.

And to act like adding synthesizers to rock music is lame in this day and age is just silly. If anything, the band were trailblazers. From Daft Punk's Discovery (whose title is an homage to ELO's Discovery album) to Phoenix to M83 to any random Kitsune Maison dance rock band that makes a song that sounds like a late 70s disco rock one-off, the influence of ELO is still strong. The reason the band's influence has remained so strong despite cultural and critical baggage is that they made great pop music.

Listen to "Confusion" (off Discovery) and "Rain is Falling" (off Time). Even stripped down they would be beautiful songs, but who would want to lose all the different synth sounds? "Confusion" features a harpsichord-like sound, a deeper, flanged keyboard, and that descending organ part that sounds like someone whistling. "Rain is Falling" has just as many different sounds, my favorite being the one played during in the intro that sounds like a voice singing underwater.

Face it, snobs: ELO hate has nothing to do with the actual music and everything to do with residual judgments left over from pompous rockists and the "Disco Sucks" movement.

The Rain Is Falling- Electric Light Orchestra

Confusion- Electric Light Orchestra

I Actually Like: Fabo, pt. 2

2009-03-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

I wanted to do a second part to my "I Actually Like: Fabo" post, partly because I couldn't figure out how to conclude the previous post and partly because there really is a lot more to say. While tracks like "So High" and "It Got Me" are full of anger and paranoia, songs like "Super Good" and "Spaceship Man" are more celebratory, with the latter sounding like some kind of geeked up gospel music.

Produced by DJ Speedy (who also produced the great Gucci Mane track "Running Back"), "Spaceship Man" is less about escaping the harsh world on your spaceship and more about getting so high you cease to be human. That idea may sound silly, but what else are drug music and gospel music united in except escaping the human form? Hearing a song like "Spaceship Man," you realize how boring so many party and drug songs are, because while partying is supposed to be about losing control, most of those songs seem to be about maintaining it, whether by mean-mugging everyone you see and carrying a gun or by refusing to dance. To a certain extent I get this, because if you're worried that the minute you start dancing someone is going to to jump you, well, then caution and a certain amount of sobriety is understandable.

But it's clear Fabo doesn't give a fuck about this. While most of his songs contain at least one gun reference, it's clear that, deep in his heart, it's all about the drugs. He wants to lose control, wants to get to that place you see clubgoers and churchgoers go to where they look lost in their own pleasure. That place is pretty solipsistic, and it's where genres like crunk and snap music meet rave and dance culture and produce a kind a strange reaction to "rap music," namely solitary girls and guys dancing their asses off, unconnected to the world around them.

Of course that reaction among elated churchgoers isn't considered strange, because they're connecting more to God than to the people around them. The fact that Fabo is partying on a spaceship and not in a club is telling, and separates the song from other "wildin' out in the club" songs like it. Like heaven, a spaceship isn't subject to human laws, and therefore at no point will the lights come up, the music go down, and the bartenders start cleaning up, reminding everybody that "Oh shit, real life has started again."

A song like "Super Good" is more standard snap music fare and, if you want to be super literal about it, contradicts a lot of what makes Fabo's other songs so interesting. He's "mean mugging haters," "in the VIP," and re-enacting "Love in the Club," but so what? I don't expect "Spaceship Man" or "So High" every time and neither should you. What's interesting about Fabo as an artist is that he's not just making a "spaceship" song because Lil Wayne made "Phone Home" or a drug song because that's what all snap or crunk artists do; his sincerity and conviction is unmistakable. Let's hope he stays true to himself and keeps making great music.

Fabo- Spaceship Man

I Actually Like: Fabo, pt. 1

2009-03-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

When you think about snap music, you think about silly dances and popping 909 drums, not sadness and drug-fueled paranoia. But the latter is all over the music of Fabo. Formerly of D4L, of "Laffy Taffy" fame, Fabo has, with songs like "So High," "Spaceship Man, " and "It Got Me," created a kind of snap music that brings to the forefront the darker elements that have always lurked in the margins of party rap.

While the majority of party rap songs follow the same stale cliches about hitting on hot girls at clubs and showing off your clothes and jewelry, the best songs capture that mix of joy, sadness, and self-destruction that happens when you're literally trying to party your life away. It's interesting that this kind of song appears far more frequently in regional forms of rap like hyphy and snap music than in more mainstream rap, and I would attribute this to the fact that regional acts are far more likely to play club shows, where the audience is full of working people who want to dance and drink their problems away, and where a certain amount of "fuck the world, I'm getting wasted" attitude is always welcome.

On the first verse of "So High," Fabo sounds like he's about to pass out, his mind racing with hallucinations, fears of going to jail ("It's so easy to be erased/Another judge, another case"), and a nagging desire to just get even higher. The second verse is a little less lyrically dark, but the sadness that was there before is even more palpable because Fabo is singing instead of rapping. The pathos in the line like "I can dance on the moon, and I can hardly breathe/Now that don't mean I want you bothering me" is undeniable for a number of reasons, but mostly because of the way it's sung. Note the fact that it's not "but I can hardly breathe," but "and I can hardly breathe," meaning being barely able to breathe is pleasurable. Fabo is high on feeling close to death, and he doesn't want anybody fucking up that high.

The chorus of "It Got Me" makes this kind of feeling even more explicit, with the lines "I look good tonight, I got a whole big bag of thrills/I already feel alright, but I might overdose for real/ Cus it got me, it got me..." The song's beat is full of foreboding and melodramatic synthesized strings, like the sound of a drug addiction overwhelming all other desires. Fabo raps "I do this every day, it's like religion, routine..." and it's impossible to deny that you're listening to either someone already addicted to drugs or someone who will be soon.

Fabo ft. Bobby Valentino- So High

Let's Get Deep for a Second: Drone For a Sad Day

2009-03-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

I just found out this morning that my grandmother has passed away. And since drone music is the only thing that seems to capture that subtle mix of vague and visceral emotions that appear at times like these, I thought I'd share some of my favorite artists in the genre.

Fennesz (w/ Ryuichi Sakamoto)- Oto

Windy and Carl- The Silent Ocean

Tim Hecker- Rainbow Blood

Mouthus- See Us Look

I Actually Like: Wavves

2009-03-03T19:14:00.000-08:00

For someone with a healthy threshold for low production values and liberal doses of fuzz and feedback, I have to admit that the first time I heard Wavves, I was like "Whoa, that's just unlistenable." It didn't help that the music was described as "surf-punk," which is how every mediocre punk band who plays major chords describes themselves.

But after hearing the band (really just one dude, Nathan Williams) praised everywhere, I figured I'd give the music another shot. And while I'm not completely smitten with Wavves like other bloggers, I'm definitely a fan.

First and foremost, you've got to respect Williams' branding power. With nearly every song featuring the words "California," "weed," "beach," "sun," or "girl" somewhere in the title, you've have to be retarded not to know what's trying to be evoked. Copping Beach Boys riffs and harmonies, Wavves reimagines surf music as scuzzy pop music for teenage skaters and stoners. For me, the music evokes that particularly teenage mixture of joy, anger, and hormones I had back in middle school, the kind of feeling that made my friends and I just randomly decide to destroy this kid's homemade skate park or sneak shots of vodka and practice pogoing to Blanks 77 records.

Whether Williams' songs would hold up as well sans fuzz is a good question, but also kind of beside the point. It's clearly an intentional choice on his part to record with such low fidelity, and it pays off as a tool for distancing the recycled riffs and harmonies from their more clean cut (and cleaner sounding) origins. Just like when Fennesz coats sentimental surfer fare like "Endless Summer" in layers and layers of fuzz and computer glitches, the ultimate effect is a kind of warped nostalgia. Time has roughed up these remnants of an idealized past and there is no going back. As well, the purposely ugly nature of some of the sounds puts into question whether surf music and surfer culture were as innocent as they appeared.

Underneath it all, Wavves is pop music. And while some of the material off his first album Wavves can be so fuzzed out it's difficult hear much beyond a basic caveman surf melody, everything I've heard off his second album, Wavvves, has just the right mixture of surfer harmonies and fuzzed out punk.

Wavves- No Hope Kids

Are You Serious?: OJ Da Juiceman's "Culinary Art School"

2009-02-26T17:05:00.000-08:00

Man, you know you're running out cocaine metaphors when you're stealing ideas from those culinary arts commercials that run on local TV in most cities. Here's the one that runs in Portland:

Got to love the phrase "hospitality professional." That means waiter.

Now let's talk OJ Da Juiceman. Following the Young Jeezy rapper model (slow, measured flow, purposely dopey coke metaphors, heavy on ad-libs--in the Juiceman's case "Ay ay ay!"), OJ has built quite the following, enough to convince Cam'Ron to jump on his "Make Em Say Aye" remix with Gucci Mane.

Like Jeezy, it's hard not be charmed on the first listen. The superhero charisma and the goofy bragging are an entertaining combination, plus the beats are usually the kind of low-budget trance rap I love. But unlike Jeezy, the Juiceman does not reward multiple listens. First and foremost, hearing "ay" after every line (every f'n line!) starts to get on your nerves, and if you listen to two or three Juiceman songs in a row, you might just want scream "Nay!" and punch something. As Jim "My Jewish Lawyer" Jones would probably tell you, the key to ad-libs is to sell a kind of shitty rhyme with a silly shout out, like if you were bragging about a purple Benz, you'd yell out "My Barney car!" Just yelling "ay" is not going to cut it.

Secondly, Juiceman's voice is unremarkable. Back when rap bloggers couldn't stop ragging on Jeezy because he's not Rakim, a crucial point was left out: rap is music. There are plenty of singers I love whose lyrics are mediocre to terrible, but it doesn't matter because I like their voices. The same applies to rap to a larger degree than a lot of rap fans are willing to admit. It's what people are talking about when they compare Lil Wayne's nasal whine to Dylan, or talk about how Ghostface raps like he's singing.

Thirdly, and finally, he's not making his silly punchlines work for him. On "Benjamin Franklin," he raps, referring to his money, "like best friends, you can call else Burt and Ernie," but he raps it like he's still just talking about drugs and clothes. For something so completely the opposite of rapper tough talk, the beat should have cut out so that you couldn't miss the line.

Anyway, despite my misgivings, I eagerly await OJ Da Juiceman's " Free Credit Consolidation."

Let Us Remember: "Get It Together"

2009-02-22T19:29:00.000-08:00

Listening to J. Period's mega Q-Tip mixtape The Abstract Best (which would be flat out amazing if not for over half the songs being edited for profanity; seriously, what's the deal with that? In the words of Christian Bale, "It's fucking distracting..."), I was reminded of the unimpeachable genius of "Get It Together."

I remember when I first listened to Ill Communication, my first thought was "Why so few rap songs?" You get Buddhist chants, soul jazz interludes, skate punk, and like five rap songs. But those rap songs are all brilliant. "Sure Shot"? "Flute Loop"? "Get It Together"? "Root Down"? I get chills remembering the joy I felt when those songs came on. They were basically the prize for sitting through the Beasties' self-indulgent moments.

The key to what makes "Get It Together" so great is that it sounds like four friends just screwing around, bouncing off each other's punchlines and bragging in a way that's more silly than serious ("Heart like John Starks"?). It makes you realize how rare that kind of thing is in rap today. While I'm sure Lil' Wayne could just geek out on a song like this, it's hard to imagine any other rappers as popular as the Beasties and Q-Tip were back then ever allowing themselves to be this goofy.

The beat, which samples Grand Funk Railroad, Fred Wesley (of the JBs), Eugene McDaniels, and a Moog Machine version of "Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In," sounds deceptively simple, like it's just a fuzzy bassline and drums until the chorus comes. I can hear a faint organ sound underneath the bassline, but it mostly seems like the rappers are carrying the melody themselves with the changes of pitch in their voices.

One of my favorite moments in the song is when MCA says he's "a praying mantis on the court and I can't be beat/Yo, Tip, what's up with the boots on your feet?" and Q-Tip answers "I got the Timbos on my toes and this is how it goes.." and then cracks up laughing, saying "Oh, one two, oh my God" and a sample from Tribe's "Oh My God" pops up all the sudden. The way they've clearly taken a mistake made in the booth and turned it not only into part of the song, but built on it with the sample is just the coolest thing.

Get It Together- Beastie Boys ft. Q-Tip

Are You Serious?: Ponytail at the Laundromat

2009-02-20T00:38:00.001-08:00

The above is 100% not cool. A handful of Queens residents just trying to do some laundry have to be aurally assaulted by the preschoolers-with-fingerpaint indie rock of Ponytail. On Pitchfork, the blurb to the right describes the poor folks at the laundromat as "Clorox pushers." Nice, Pitchfork--it was about time someone stuck it to people who have to go the laundromat.

Besides laziness, crap like this is the reason I don't go to very many live shows. It's just painful when the performers are having more fun than the audience, completely oblivious to how obnoxious they are. But at least when you go to a show, you've chosen to subject yourself to self-indulgent idiots.

I find the shots of the people confused by the band to be hilarious, as if we're supposed to laugh at them for not getting the band. Newsflash: There is nothing to get. This is bad music, pure and simple. That confused look is the look Ponytail should be seeing everywhere.

Since I rarely have good things to say about Pitchfork, I should point out that the review of the N.A.S.A. record by Tom Breihan was hilarious and dead on.

I Actually Like: The 50 Cent/Rick Ross Beef

2009-02-10T14:09:00.001-08:00

I remember back in 2007, Slate had an article about how YouTube was ruining rap beef. The basic idea was that rappers were spending all their time making low budget video disses instead of writing classic songs like "Takeover" or "2nd Round K.O.". There was some truth to this, especially in the 50 Cent-Cam'Ron feud where the most memorable moments came from a schoolyard taunt ("Curtisssss") and Cam'Ron in a video standing in his backyard in boxer shorts with an unexplained black eye.

But what the article completely misunderstood was that beef is never really going to be about skills ever again. Sure, a feud might pop up here or there (say Joe Budden vs. Saigon) where the whole point is who is a better rapper, but overall, beef is now about total and complete humiliation, both personally and professionally. Clever insults are antiquated; what works best is dirt.

Old pictures, court documents, ex-girlfriends, what some dude told some chick who told some dude--all of this is fair game. Beef has become like a mutant mixture of a comedy roast and tabloid journalism.

Nobody does this kind of beef like 50 Cent. It would not be an overstatement to say the man's true talent is being an asshole. His videos making fun of Rick Ross are funnier and more entertaining than the entirety of the Curtis album. To a degree, this makes perfect sense. For a multi-million dollar rapper like 50 Cent, making an album has probably become a chore, because all your energy and talent has to be spent trying to make an album that will appeal to absolutely everyone. It's possible the man doesn't even like making music anymore, as pretty much everything he's done post-Curtis attests. Making fun of people probably lets him let off steam from having to make dozens of lame decisions (a reality show? another autotune chorus?) just to stay afloat as an artist.

And who's easier to make fun of than Rick Ross? Even if he didn't have a past as a corrections officer, the guy would be a joke. The reason condescending hipsters couldn't get enough of the guy circa Port of Miami was because he's a walking parody of coke rap. He can't rap, he makes impossibly inflated boasts that not only sound stupid but ring false to even the most basic sense of how cocaine distribution works, and he doesn't have even a sliver of self-consciousness. Any joy in his music comes purely from the fact that he's charismatic and that it's endlessly amusing that he expects anyone to believe he's some kind of cocaine kingpin (I've read other bloggers who write that his songs about girls are full of great, everyday details, but I've yet to investigate this).

The actual substance of the feud is quite thin. Apparently Rick Ross saw 50 Cent at the BET Awards and tried to talk to him, but 50 Cent gave him a dirty look and ignored him. So Rick Ross got on some radio show and complained about the incident. That's it--that's how the incident got started. As many bloggers have astutely pointed out, there is something pretty junior high about the whole thing, but it's the juvenile aspect of the whole thing that makes it entertaining.

Unlike Jay-Z vs. Nas or Kanye vs. 50, this isn't one of those feuds where which side you choose says something about you as a person or a rap fan. Neither artist here has been making great music as of late and neither of them have even remotely sympathetic personalities (their treatment of the mothers of their sons pretty much speaks for itself), so the fun in the beef mostly comes from seeing two millionaire blowhards tear each other apart.

Are You Serious?: Pitchfork Finds Out About Music From Kanye

2009-02-05T12:53:00.000-08:00

First Raekwon's "Back from the Slums," now some new song by some random girl produced by Dave Sitek (which is predictably boring--sorry TV On the Radio fans, I'm just not hearing the genius). What's the deal? Why is a music site with its finger on the pulse getting scooped by a guy with a busier schedule than Obama?

Party's Over, Tell the Rest of the Crew: Nick Sylvester Takes It To Hipster Runoff

2009-01-31T18:06:00.000-08:00

If any of this is going to make sense, you're gonna need to read this first.

It's Nick Sylvester, Pitchfork/Village Voice/freelance scribe, taking issue with Hipster Runoff's post "Animal Collective Is A Band Created By/For/On the Internet" Since I'm a little too tired to make a cogent argument with a beginning, middle, and end, I'll address my thoughts on both posts with that ol' standby: bullet points.

- Firstly, Sylvester pretty much nails Hipster Runoff for exactly what it/he is: "...a "failed creative type" just like the rest of us, who gets off pointing out how we're all failed creative types just so (he) don't have to confront (his) own lack of vision." That's harsh, and it doesn't do justice to how entertaining that pointing out can be, but it's true that pointing out the fact that people who want to be cool and "meaningful" are full of shit is the sort of thing that ultimately, as Sylvester points out, leads to nihilism. In the Hipster Runoff universe, we're all just pathetic, needy losers desperate to define ourselves in any way that will help us believe we're special and unique, when the truth is we're nothing but faceless and spineless nobodies. That's an ugly vision of the world, and as a philosophy for life, it's pretty much crippled by self-consciousness. You can't do anything, because everything has been done and everything is a cliche.

-Sylvester's defense of Merriweather Post Pavillion and Animal Collective is just a little too heart on the sleeve for me:

"Step into the music, the lyrics, and you realize this album is about three thirty year-olds trying to figure out how not to become grups. They are fundamentally different from the parents, living totally different lives--and yet they love their parents, probably respect the jobs they did on them, want the same for their own. The clash between knowing how screwy life is, being relatively set in your ways, and yet still wanting to remain wide-eyed--open to new possibilities the way you were at age 9, 19, 29—this is what I hear in MPP. A big vulnerable theme, and I admire them not for their answers so much as their bravery to just fucking go for it like this."

I know it's ridiculous to fault a critic for enjoying music for self-centered reasons (clearly Sylvester feels like he's in the same boat as the members of AC), but based on this description of the album, why would anyone who's not in their thirties, doesn't have kids, and didn't have a well-adjusted childhood want to listen to the album? As the entire discussion surrounding Hipster Runoff's post and its satire of people using Animal Collective as a cultural signifier attests to, music is not listened to in a bubble. Context matters. Narrative (as in "This is why/how we made this album") matters.

To give a concrete example, back when I first listened to Animal Collective's Feels, I couldn't stand it. The lyrics drove me insane because they sounded like the inane and solipsistic ramblings of someone who just got into a new relationship. References to "making funny faces in the bathroom mirror" and needy codas like "Would you like to see me often?/Though you don't need to see me often/Though I'd like to see you often/I don't need to see you often" irritated me to no end. It wasn't until I looked up the lyrics online and saw how dark and strange some of them where that I could begin to appreciate the album. For me, songs without some negativity or pain can never truly resonate because they ring false to my experience. If I were recommend an album using Sylvester's above description of MPP, I wouldn't go near it with a ten foot pole.

-Mark Richardson, who wrote the Pitchfork review of MPP and gave it a 9.5, is apparently a great fucking guy. How do we know this? Well, he was in a car full of Pitchfork critics and a song came on and he asked the name of the song. Mark Richardson is truly a model of humility if he was willing to risk the abject humiliation that could have come from revealing his musical ignorance to a car full of music critics. What this anecdote says about the vanity of certain music critics is kind of scary and the fact that Sylvester uses it to illustrate what a decent guy Richardson is makes me think he's a few more notches above down to earth than he'd ever like to admit.

-Sylvester's critique of HRO is ultimately a pretty important one, I think. As much as the site is a satire of trends in music, fashion, and culture changing daily and weekly, seemingly totally oblivious to any actual market or scene or demographic, it's also a real reflection of an immense cynicism about the power of culture or art to do anything. All those first level "alts" are pictured on the site looking naive and enthusiastic about music and life so that people older and more cynical than them can laugh at how much those kids are going to be disappointed by everything. The endless running joke of the site is the belief of all these fresh faced kids that everything is going to fall in place for them, that once when they leave high school or college, they'll move to a big city, find a great music/art scene, land a creative and fulfilling job, and live happily ever after.

I can't lie and say I haven't laughed at that joke, but it's a cruel one. If the world is as truly as empty and sad as HRO seems to think it is, the least we deserve is our illusions.

I Will Never Like: Anything by Animal Collective As Much as "Sung Tongs"

2009-01-27T19:01:00.000-08:00

Back in 2004 when I worked as a music critic for my college paper, my editor at the time gave me a burnt copy of Sung Tongs after I'd mentioned to him that I'd never heard Animal Collective. This was back at the height of the freak folk scene's popularity, and it's hard now to imagine how an album as weird and as messy as Sung Tongs could have found an audience without being lumped in with Devendra Banhart and Co. It was a sort of "collect 'em all" feeling, like once you got Milk Eyed Mender or Rejoicing In Hands, well, now you've got to get the first Vetiver album and Espers and Sung Tongs..

My first listen to the album left me mostly irritated. Musically, it sounded incoherent, and the liberal amount of screaming and meowing just made it sound like the self-indulgent mess I thought all experimental music was at the time. But my enjoyment of the other freak folk artists just kept sending me back to the album for another shot, another try.

The songs that first stood out were "Winters Love" and "Who Could Win A Rabbit." "Winters Love" still manages to conjure up for me the joy and excitement of singing around a campfire, and this is strange because I hate singing around campfires. The song's harmonies sound so much like a half remembered children's song that it tricks the listener (or at least me) into remembering their childhood as one long hike through a forest at golden hour ("Visiting Old Friends" gives me a similar feeling). For me, Animal Collective so often sounds nothing like my actual childhood and everything like the hazy, colorful memories I have when I think back on it.

"Who Could Win A Rabbit," as well as "Kids On Holiday," sounds more like my actual childhood. Dizzy, excitable, and prone to fits of screaming nonsense was me when I was playing with friends, and I'm sure we would have run around in circles to "Who Could Win..," yelling and throwing action figures around the room. "Kids On Holiday" is sung from the viewpoint of a child waiting with their parents at the airport (though I don't think most kids have the word "vulva" in their vocabulary) and it captures the mix of fear and exhilaration that comes with all that stimuli (including hectoring Krishnas, though I personally haven't seem them in an airport in ages).

Sung Tongs was recorded by Avey Tare and Panda Bear only, and I think it benefits tremendously from most tracks being built around a base of just acoustic guitar and drums. Sure, there are crazy samples and textures, but hearing that folk staple the acoustic guitar twisted and shattered and made to stutter connects the sound of AC influences like The Incredible String Band and Vashti Bunyan to musique-concrete and even Kid 606. As much as it's kind of unfair, I wish Animal Collective still built their songs on folk chord progressions instead of bloated synth and sampler noises.

For me, there has never been the same pure joy in any other Animal Collective record since Sung Tongs (with the exception of the Prospect Hummer EP with Vashti Bunyan, can't forget to mention that..). While I still enjoy their music, I also find it increasingly overloaded with electronics and a "regular dudes" whimsy that often gets grating (i.e. I've never wished to get lost in a girl's curls--please, save that sentiment for a birthday card).

The Origins of Super Ape

2009-01-24T20:38:00.000-08:00

"Super-Ape is a mighty talking Ape with a caveman style outfit from the planet Krypton. Deeply troubled by Jor-El's prediction that Krypton was destined to explode, the Kryptonian scientist Shir Kan decided to build experimental rockets as a way for he and other Kryptonians to escape before the catasrophe. In order to test the rockets' safety, he decided to first send a few young apes to different planets. Sadly, though Krypton blew up before Shir Kan and his fellow Kryptonians could escape, Super-Ape ended up on Earth where he grew up and met Superman. (Act No. 218, Jul 1956 "The Super-Ape from Krypton!")"

"Titano was originally a normal-sized chimpanzee named Toto, and was widely considered to be one of the most intelligent apes on Earth. The gentle Toto was befriended by Lois Lane when the ace newspaper reporter aided the chimp after he was accidentally struck by a pie during a slapstick comedy act at a televised charity show. Scientists later launched Toto into space aboard an experimental orbiting satellite for a week, an event that, coincidentally, Lois was covering. While in space, the animal's capsule was bombarded by intense radiation emanating from the collision of two meteorites ... one containing traces of uranium, the other being purely composed of Green Kryptonite. Upon the capsule's return to Earth, Toto amazingly grew to a height of more than 40 feet and, recognizing Lois as the cinematic King Kong did Fay Wray, picked her up in his gigantic hand. It was at this point that Lois renamed the ape Titano. Though not malicious by nature, Titano's tremendous size and strength soon began causing a great deal of damage to Metropolis. When Superman attempted to stop the simian's escapade, the Man of Steel was knocked to the ground by Titano's incredible new power: Kryptonite vision. However, Lois then used Titano's tendency to imitate the actions of others to get the beast to wear a pair of giant spectacles that Superman had constructed and treated with a lead coating that blocked Titano's K-vision. The Action Ace then hurled the creature back through time at super-speed to Earth's Mesozoic Era where he would find contentment among beasts of comparable size (S No. 127/3, Feb 1959: "Titano the Super-Ape")."

Lee Perry and the Upsetters - Super Ape

I Will Never Like: Fever Ray and/or The Knife

2009-01-17T17:39:00.000-08:00

C'mon, is this supposed to be creepy?

Who hasn't spent their first night with a new music program pitch-shifting down random songs? It's fun for a couple of hours, but then the novelty wears off. The "creepy" effect just starts to seem banal and cheesy.

Back in 2006, when I was a giddy first time SoulSeek user (justice was served when a virus corrupted my entire computer), I downloaded The Knife's Silent Shout and reviewed it for my college's newspaper, unaware the album wouldn't come out in America for almost a year. I was initially really into the album and gave it a glowing review, even dropping Pitchfork's unholy new genre name "haunted house."

But like a week later, the whole thing just sounded goofy. What had at first seemed exciting and strange suddenly seemed like a desperate attempt by a decent Swedish synth pop band (c'mon, give it up for "Heartbreats," that song is great) to make themselves interesting. It's worth noting that the best songs on Silent Shout have the least vocal effects. And really, when you have siblings singing aching love duets, do you really need anything to make that creepier?

And now there is Fever Ray, which is just the girl in the group. "If I Had a Heart" is repetitive, ponderous, and decidedly un-catchy, retaining the worst elements of The Knife while jettisoning their pop instincts. And that video? Wow.

The Debate Team: Did Fleet Foxes Deserve to be #1?

2009-01-11T17:12:00.000-08:00

When I saw that Pitchfork had named Fleet Foxes self-titled debut (along with the Sun Giant EP) as their number one album of the year, my first response was "fuck that." Based on what I'd heard from the band, there seemed little to warrant such an honor.

After listening to the album over and over for the purposes of this discussion, my mind has slightly changed. While I still don't think it deserves the honor of #1 album of the year, Fleet Foxes is far better than I gave it credit for.

What follows is a discussion between me, Daniel Krow, and Douglas Martin, who blogs at Fresh Cherries From Yakima, and records under that name and as Blurry Drones. Along with our discussion, I've attached two mp3s: one is my Afrobeat-ish remix of Fleet Foxes' "Sun Giant" (crazy how highlife sounding the guitars at the end sound when you speed them up) and Fresh Cherries from Yakima's cover of "Innocent Son."

DM: If I can be frank with all of you, I too was surprised when Fleet Foxes took the top spot in Pitchfork's Year-End Albums List.

I mean, we all know that Pitchfork is supposed to be the hub of what's hip in underground music; that's why arty fringe groups such as Animal Collective (whom I have no major qualms with), Liars (whom I adore), and Deerhunter (whom I'm starting to adore) are perpetually described as "Pitchfork Bands." With a record that pays steadfast homage to such vocal-based, easy-to-swallow 60's acts such as Beach Boys and The Zombies, with nary a peep of distorted guitar or impassioned yelping, Fleet Foxes' self-titled debut is NOT a hip record. I mean, hell, even principal songwriter Robin Pecknold wrote off the record upon its release, reportedly expecting it to flop.

Although the record was lauded by music magazines the world over, topping year-end lists everywhere, the record's modern update of Baby Boomer-era sounds was something mainstream music critics are supposed to get all hot and frothy over. The 9.0 score awarded to Fleet Foxes wasn't even the highest rating of the year (Deerhunter's Microcastle and No Age's Nouns-- the former being the obvious favorite-- were tied at 9.2), and poppy, Pacific-Northwestern folk-rock albums of its ilk such as The Grand Archives by Grand Archives and Blitzen Trapper's Furr (which, ironically enough, were both released on Sub Pop along with Fleet Foxes) did not even receive Best New Music honors. So, how did Fleet Foxes pull of the feat of being elected Pitchfork's Prom King?

This could very well be attributed from two similar albums on different sides of the Pitchfork scale released in 2006: Grizzly Bear's sophomore album, Yellow House, was instantly recognized by Pitchfork as one of the best albums of the year. When Pitchfork reviewed The Trials of Van Occupanther by Denton, TX band Midlake, it was well-received, but not favored. Both albums are distant cousins to Fleet Foxes; lush, expansive acoustic records that put a creative spin on music that time has forgotten in favor of semi-recent genres such as punk and hip-hop. The Midlake record especially foreshadows Fleet Foxes' ability to make soft-rock sound current (and even nearly revolutionary). Perhaps Pitchfork saw their lack of foresight in the instance of that Midlake album, and decided to correct matters by seeing the value of a record cut from the same cloth.

Of course, that theory is undercutting Robin Pecknold's ability as a songwriter and his bandmates' keen ear for vocal and musical arrangements. There are lots of goodies for underground music nerds, here: There's the song about watching a kid's head fall off and bloody up the snow ("White River Hymnal," also on Pitchfork's Top Songs List), the way "Sun It Rises" builds up and explodes into rainbows like choice cuts from Yellow House, the endless left-turns in song structure, and let's not forget those harmonies. The tunes on Fleet Foxes are just as much as artfully constructed as any work by a Pitchfork darling; it just so happens that there's also a keen emphasis on melody, as well as a turned back on noise and distortion.

Or maybe, just maybe, Pitchfork realizes that just because something is popular, it doesn't mean that it can't also be spellbinding. And in case you haven't noticed from all of the chatter about this album, Fleet Foxes is both popular and spellbinding.

DK: There is a lot to like about Fleet Foxes. Songs like "Your Protector," "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song," and "White River Hymnal" have classically gorgeous, madrigal-like melodies that make them sound like lost classics. Singer Robin Pecknold has a rich, slightly twanging voice that reminds you of Jim James without reminding you of how irritating that dude's voice can be. And while the band uses a liberal amount of reverb, they don't try slather it on everything like other bands desperate to sound like their favorite vinyl.

But the #1 record of the year? No way. While hailing from Seattle, Fleet Foxes are from the region I like to call Laurel Canyon Country. Laurel Canyon Country has little to do with the actual Laurel Canyon in Los Angeles, and is actually more of a chosen aesthetic. Bands from Laurel Canyon Country favor a laid-back, reverb heavy sound that borrows heavily from early Neil Young, CSN&Y, The Band, Fairport Convention, Judee Sill, etc. Except when it doesn't. Because those artists and bands were just as rooted in the blues and R & B as country and folk, but most bands from Laurel Canyon Country wouldn't touch a 12 bar blues progression with a ten foot pole.

It's easy to make the argument that artists have every right to pick and choose their influences, but let's face it, there a reason bands like Fleet Foxes or Midlake or Band of Horses don't dabble in the blues: it's uncool. Too many swarthy guys with beer guts and sweatpants wailing away on their guitars at your local blues festival have made blues genre non grata among hip music fans. But the fact remains that this grounding in all forms of American music is what connected a band like The Band to their influences.

What connects Fleet Foxes to their influences? Acoustic guitars and tight harmonies? Mandolins? A vague interest in poor Southern people?

Which brings me to "Blue Ridge Mountains." "In the quivering forest/Where the shivering dog rests/I will do it grandfather/Wilt to wood and end" Those are lines from the above mentioned song, and they, along with the song's title, seriously rub me the wrong way. How in 2008 is a band from Seattle still romanticizing one of the most poverty-stricken places in the country? Vampire Weekend are still being trashed for daring to sing songs about Africa or Lil Jon, but Fleet Foxes get a free pass to treat Appalachia like some sort of mythical country where people turn to wood and die?

I don't want to turn this into an ideological screed. I'm not asking Fleet Foxes to start a charity for the Appalachian poor or to start incorporating covers of "Crossroads" or "Hoochie-Coochie Man" into their live set. And based on their talent for song-writing, I can't argue with their placement somewhere in the top 10, but for a band as derivative and unconnected to the things they sing about as Fleet Foxes to hold the #1 spot just makes no sense.

DM: I do see where you're going with the "Laurel Canyon Country" thing, and the other Sub Pop bands I mentioned (Grand Archives, Blitzen Trapper) definitely fall under this sort of sound along with Fleet Foxes. And there is something to be said about being able to draw a straight line between an artist and their influences. However, I think it's sort of unfair to critique a band based on what they don't draw from. As a musician, I can say that I don't draw very much from blues, but that's not to say I don't like the genre; I'm very reverent of it. It's just not the style of music I chose to play. To say Fleet Foxes should incorporate more of the influences of their influences is to say that I should take cues from Kurt Cobain and sound more like The Melvins.

Another unfortunate stereotype you brought up is the fact that the blues is not "cool," which implies that most bands under the massive umbrella of "indie" have calculated lists of influences in order to exist in favor of music nerds who know what bands are "cool." This argument is never brought up when discussing acts of any other genre. No one talks about being calculated when R&B singers swipe vocal effects from T-Pain, or when Kanye West admitted to ripping off J. Dilla's drum sounds. I think it's because everyone assumes that indie musicians are such huge record nerds, and they're supposed to "know what they're doing" when it comes to distilling their influences.

The appeal of Fleet Foxes may be because they're not THAT connected to their influences. Check out the way they construct their songs in movements instead of the old verse-chorus-verse format. Connecting yourself to your influences is the quickest way to become a pastiche. Although I feel that perhaps Robin Pecknold is veiling his personal thoughts and feelings behind descriptive energy, I'll argue that even if he were disconnected to the stuff he sings, that's not so bad. I doubt Colin Meloy of The Decemberists has ever been a male prostitute, but that doesn't make "On the Bus Mall" any less touching.

Comparing Pecknold's allusions to the Blue Ridge Mountains to Vampire Weekend's spin on afro-pop is sort of like comparing apples to grapefruits; Sure, the Blue Ridge Mountains is venomously proverty-stricken, but I think the fact that people were up in arms about Vampire Weekend was the fact that Africa is full of third-world countries. Not just the Blue Ridge, but even the most desolate housing projects in America are a far cry to what is experienced in Africa; I guarantee no project-dweller or mountaineer would ever want to trade places with a child rebel solider in Sudan. Plus, one of the first lyrics in the song is, "I heard you missed your connecting flight." I guess whoever Pecknold is singing to isn't too poor to fly.

We're also missing a big point here: The fact that Fleet Foxes and the Sun Giant EP were placed as Pitchfork's #1 in tandem. The latter release is lusher and more dynamic than the full-length, with "Drops in the River" and "Mykonos" showing that the band is moving past the "Laurel Canyon Country" tag and moving towards more idiosyncratic places. Case in point: My best friend listened to the LP and declared that she didn't like the band at all. After I put on the EP on for her, she quipped, "Well, this one sounds like they have some balls."

With the supreme amount of song craftsmanship displayed on both releases, it's little surprise that Pitchfork would get behind something so fully-formed out the gate. So, number one it is.

DK: Before I clarify some of my arguments, I want to share a particularly hilarious line from Pitchfork's Joe Tangari's entry on Fleet Foxes in the 50 Best Albums of 2008: "...Fleet Foxes flows like a river, wild and free but logical, filling what needs to be filled and moving on." Does this mean in times of heavy downpour Fleet Foxes might flood? What would this mean in musical terms? I would warn anyone seeing the band live on a rainy night that they make break into spontaneous "wild and free" two hour jams, incapable of "moving on" to the next song.

There is a problem with your big point: the Sun Giant EP came out before Fleet Foxes. This would mean, based on your friend's terms, that the band have lost balls, not gained them. Personally, I don't hear a huge difference between the two. With the exception of "Drops in the River," the rest of the songs would fit just fine next to the songs on the full length.

Your point about "connecting yourselves to your influences is the quickest way to become pastiche" is made well about Fleet Foxes' stated influences, but the band often sounds like a pastiche of bands they don't credit as influences. Take My Morning Jacket's aching harmonies (and nasally vocalist) and reverb heavy production, add M. Ward's unorthodox sense of melody, and sprinkle some of Sufjan Stevens' chamber pop dust, and what do you get? Fleet Foxes.

Even if you quibble with the other two, you can't deny My Morning Jacket is the elephant in the room. Not that I believe this, but you could easily suggest that Fleet Foxes heard the weird funk/classic rock hybrid that is MMJ's Evil Urges and thought "This is our chance, guys--we can finally release this stuff and no one will think it sounds like My Morning Jacket." If Fleet Foxes had been released six months after At Dawn, you can be sure it wouldn't have been Pitchfork's #1 record of the year.

Ultimately, I think that's what gained the album Pitchfork's top spot: timing. Had it been released during a year with releases by Sufjan Stevens or M. Ward or My Morning Jacket (back when they sounded like themselves), Fleet Foxes would have been in the top 50, but with a question mark as to whether the band would be able to "grow beyond their influences." With a dearth of high profile records that sound similar to Fleet Foxes, it was easy for the band to sound more exciting than they truly are.

Sun Giant (Misty Beethoven Remix)- Fleet Foxes

Innocent Son (Fleet Foxes Cover) - Fresh Cherries from Yakima

Are You Serious?: Pitchfork 500's Entry on T.I.'s "What You Know"

2009-01-05T16:36:00.000-08:00

In Mark Pytlik's entry on T.I.'s "What You Know," he shows off his amazing ignorance of Southern rap music. Check it out:

"Before the emergence of Atlanta's T.I., the South was, for better or worse largely constrained to a specific blueprint: Its production was minimal and cavernous, with coarse accents on the high and low ends, leavings lots of empty space for the vocals."

Yeah, right. So before T.I. came on the scene, no Southern rap producers used synthesizers. In two sentences, this idiot has managed to erase the production achievements of Mannie Fresh, Three Six Mafia, Beats By a Pound, and about a million other producers from the South who were making the kind of "regal synth patterns" Pytlik is referring to. Where does he think DJ Toomp came from: A vacuum? Did it occur to him one day in 2007 that "hey, holy crap, I bet rap music would sound great with some keyboards?"

Did no other Pitchfork writer proof-read this entry? I'm sure Tom Breihan knows this is totally false. I mean, nitpicking is one thing, but when a writer makes a mistake this blatant in a supposed "guide" to music, it just defies common sense.

I Actually Like: Flying Lotus' "Auntie's Lock/Infinitum"

2008-12-31T13:29:00.000-08:00

This song is gorgeous. Drums like crickets in the mist, a quiet wooden flute in the background, lullaby-like coos. I haven't heard a song this truly peaceful in quite awhile. I like Flying Lotus' harder stuff too, but it all just sounds busy compared to this.

Flying Lotus- Auntie's Lock/Infinitum ft. Laura Darlington

Misty and Me: "Cary Grant Never Signed An Autograph In His Life"

2008-12-18T23:05:00.000-08:00

I've been working on music by my lonesome for years, but I've rarely made anything I ever wanted to share--until lately, that is.

I humbly present, in musical equation, Burt Reynolds + German Psychedelic rock + proggy keyboard= Misty Beethoven's "Cary Grant Never Signed An Autograph In His Life."

Also, head on over to Fresh Cherries from Yakima for a remix I did of his song "Unofficial Anthem of the Suicide Girls" plus another track of mine entitled "He Knows Us Each By Name."

Fresh Cherries from Yakima is the nom de plume of Seattle's Douglas Martin, who also produces under the name Blurry Drones. "It's Saturday" is an amazing flip he did of a Blitzen Trapper song.

Listless: My Top Ten Albums of the Year

2008-12-16T14:14:00.000-08:00

Without further ado (since I'm sorely lacking in "ado" these days), here are my top ten albums of the year (with a few mp3s scattered here and there like winter's gentle frost):

10. Okkervil River, The Stand-Ins

The Stage Names was a terrible album. Overworked and too clever by half, it was an album that thought writing a song where you just add one number to iconic rock songs with numbers in them (97th tear, 100 luftballoons, etc) would somehow create pathos. The Stand-Ins, however, is great. From the forgotten one night stand in "On Tour with Zykos" to the jilted boyfriend of a star actress (no Forgetting Sarah Marshall) in "Calling and Not Calling my Ex," the characters on the album have missed the party completely and now have spend their lives with the rest of us schlumps. When you're as self-conscious and literate as frontman Will Sheff, it's always going to be better to write from the perspective of the (relatively) losing end of the rock star-fan equation, because writing from the rock star's perspective, as he did on Stage Names, he sounded unconvincing and actorly.

9. Obsession, Various Artists

This psych compilation from Bully Records is the coolest. Featuring everything from Brazilian weirdoes Novas Bainaos to Turkish guitar shredders Ersen ("Gonese Don Cicegim") and Arif Sag, it highlights the insane wealth of music out there for fans of 60s and 70s psychedelic rock. Compiled by Mike Davis of The Academy Record Store in New York City, Obsession doesn't feel thrown together like so many other psych comps, where half the songs are foreign bands covering American hits.

8. The New Deal, Various Artists

I pretty much said it all here, but I still can't believe how good of a compilation this is. No DJ shoutouts, no throwaway freestyles over tinny beats, just one great rap song after another. Sure, this leans heavy on "hipster rap" and reeks slightly of Sparks and sweaty neon bandannas, but so what? With tracks as good as Wale and Brother Ali's "2nd Time Around" and Kidz in the Hall's "Cool, Relax," you can put neon shutter shades on me anytime (actually, please don't.)

7. Zilla Rocca, Bring Me the Head of Zilla Rocca

This technically isn't an album, but you could have fooled me. When you hear Zilla rhyme, something occurs to you: "Oh, so this is how great rappers sound, I had almost forgotten..."

The fact that a rapper this talented is also just a really cool and smart blogger is still kind of mind-blowing. Add the fact that all the other rappers on the mixtape, from Nico the Beast to 2ew Gunn Ciz to ASK? are all as good as Zilla and it seems almost unthinkable: a whole crew of great rappers unknown by the majority of rap fans? A sad of state affairs but one that can hopefully be remedied.

6. Saudade, The Hooded Ones

I downloaded this album like months and months ago off Saudade's blog, but, dumb me, I didn't start listening to it until now. They're from Portland, they play ambient/drone music reminiscent of Stars of the Lid and Grouper, and they're giving their album away for free--that's an embarrassment of riches. The song "Sleep's Walk" is painfully gorgeous, while the rest of the album is just plain gorgeous.

5. Girl Talk, Feed the Animals

For as many reasons as there are to hate Greg Gillis (that stupid Microsoft commercial springs to mind), there are just as many thirty second mash-ups he's made that trigger childlike joy in me. I can't help it--the guy keeps pushing my buttons. "Popping Bottles" and Temple of the Dog's "Hunger Strike"? "Throw Some Ds" and Aphex Twin's "Boy/Girl" song? It's a Pavlovian response, I can't help it.

4.Kanye West, 808s and Heartbreak

I thought I was going to hate this album, but now I think it's the best thing Kanye's done since The College Dropout. Sure, the lyrics are pretty cliched, but emotions are real and raw and the songs almost uniformly catchy. I wish I hadn't found out that Kanye swiped the chorus to "Coldest Winter," my favorite song on the album, from Tears for Fears, but it's great nonetheless. I'm confident most rappers are going to learn the completely wrong lesson from this album ("the public wants more auto-tune, right?").

3. Grouper, Dragging a Dead Up a Hill

Liz Harris, where have you been all my life? Back when I was thirteen and idolizing scenesters in Smiths t-shirts, I could never have imagined such impossibly cool people listening to something so pedestrian as music with verses and chorus'. I figured they were listening to something like Grouper, something dark and beautifully vague, and too mysterious to come out and declare its intentions. If you can, listen to Grouper at work and see if doesn't turn your workplace into a strange and poignant place you've never been to before.

2. Valet, Naked Acid

Wow. This record is everything that's great about twenty first century psychedelic music. You've got your acid rock guitar workouts, your tape hiss symphonies, your mushroom-addled drones, your stoned nature walk ballad, your loop pedal junkie blues...This album is druggy and warped and perfect.

1. Vampire Weekend, S/T

Like the Strokes first album, I listened to this one over and over and over. Sure, it's made by a bunch of rich kids and the lead singer is a ham, but there's simply not a better collection of songs made this year. When it works correctly, pop music can temporarily transform your life, make it charmed and unique and bursting with possibility. During the first few weeks I was listening to this album, I had to go to a clinic to get my meds refilled because I had no job and no health insurance. Objectively, I wasn't in a great place, but inwardly, I felt as privileged as Ivy League kids with balls enough to declare Hyannisport, home of the Kennedy's, a "ghetto." That's the power of a great record.

I Actually Like: The New Deal Mixtape

2008-12-11T14:03:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite things about the internet is zip files of music. I just love the fact that you can download like sixteen or seventeen songs in one pop. Whether any of those songs are good is almost beside the point. This holds especially true for rap mixtapes. Lil Wayne's "Dedication 3"mixtape is pretty much awful, weighed down with too much autotune and weed carriers' empty boasts, but damned if I wasn't slightly thrilled to see the zip file icon pop up as it finished downloading.

So imagine my surprise when "The New Deal," yet another Kanye and His Hipster Friends mixtape, has some of the best rap music I've heard this year. Mixed by DJ Benzi and featuring production by Black Milk, Diplo, 9th Wonder, and Kanye, and rappers Kidz in the Hall, Blu, Skyzoo, Kanye, Common, Jackie Chain, and others, "The New Deal" is the perfect mix of great beats and great (or competent) MCs I so rarely hear anymore.

Here's some highlights (and a few lowlights):

Benzi ft. Wale and Brother Ali- 2nd Time Around - While shimmering beats with soul samples are nothing new, it would be shocking if this song was bad. However, Wale's flow always makes me slightly nervous, like he's always threatening to completely forget the beat. "I play the background whole time like Mario 3" is an instant quotable.

Colin Munroe and Joell Ortiz- Piano Lessons (prod. by Black Milk) - This song brings up a make or break feature of the whole mixtape: hipster white dudes singing the hooks. If the whole idea of "hipster rap" or faux-indie white dudes/rap artists cross-pollination sickens you, there is no way you're going to like this mixtape. The beat from Black Milk is perfect: simple, melodic, and deceptively spare (the quiet keyboard underneath the piano loop gives the beat an airy feel you don't notice until you listen closely).

Izza Kizza - Back to Miami- Bells, horns, and handclaps can make any decent rapper sound triumphant, so it's tough to give much credit to Izza Kizza for the song's success. The vocoder guitar phrase that appears around 1:55 is brilliant. Izza is apparently a Timbaland protege, so not getting in the way of the beat could be his road to riches (but I doubt it).

Charles Hamilton -We Major freestyle- For all his talent, Charles Hamilton has one stilted flow. Most of the time he sounds like he's talking over the beat instead of rapping. Like Wale and Bishop Lamont, Hamilton is stuck in Interscope Purgatory and you and I know both know he's not getting out anytime soon.

Wale and Daniel Merriweather - Pot of Gold (prod. by Mark Ronson) - Wale needs to rap like this all the time, i.e. on beat. Calling the beat "so Premier" is kind of dumb since it calls attention to the fact it's a straight Premier rip-off, er, I mean, "homage."

Kid Sister - Get Fresh- I feel slightly defensive about liking this song, but screw it, it's a great song. The keyboards on the hook remind of DJ Toomp and that's never a bad thing. Side note: Remember when Kid Sister was on the cover of The Fader after releasing like two songs? That was ridiculous.

Kanye West ft. Big Sean and Mr. Hudson - Paranoid (remix)- Kanye: No..no! Bad weed carrier...You left a mess on the remix..Look at the mess you left--look at it! Big Sean: (whimpers, adjusts scarf and fitted cap) Me: I still love this song.

Common ft. Chester French - What a World - Did Common hit his head and forget how to rap? The "Rapper's Delight" flow is for rapping grandma's and middle managers at the company wide talent show.

Donnis -Party Works - God, this beat is great. I'm not sure who produced it, but it has this amazing doo-wop sounding sample on the chorus that sounds triumphant and sad at the same time. Donnis is a generic rapper from Atlanta co-signed by Benzi.

BlaqStarr - Get Off (produced by Diplo) - Whatever filter Diplo is using on the chorus is a monster. This reminds me a lot of the production on 808s and Heartbreak. I don't think Blaqstarr gets enough credit for how weird and moody his music can be.

Mp3s (get 'em before they disappear):

Donnis- Party Works

Blaqstarr- Get Off

Portland's Got to Be Good for Something: Grouper

2008-11-10T19:36:00.000-08:00

It's kind of embarrassing I've never seen Grouper live. She played PDX Pop Now this year on a Sunday afternoon, which, all things considered, is kind of a perfect concert time for a nerd like me. But the prospect of wall to wall people packed into tiny little Rotture just did not seem appealing in the least.

Grouper is definitely one of my favorite Portland artists, along with White Rainbow and Valet. Her music is not only gorgeous, but sounds almost exactly like how I used to imagine bands like the Smiths and the Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen (yes, I thought Echo and Bunnymen would be dark and mysterious) sounded before I ever heard them. When I was twelve and thirteen walking wide-eyed through Ozone Records on Burnside (RIP), I remember seeing all the band t-shirts hung from the ceiling like flags and imagining how weird a band like the Cure must sound just based on their t-shirts. I was slightly disappointed when most of the bands whose strange t-shirts I'd idealized turned about to be just plain old pop bands.

The music of Grouper is gauzy and full of tape hiss and layers of delay that makes it sound like if your plumbing started a goth band. I could probably come up with a more romantic analogy, like the fuzziness of old Super 8 film or "the warm, misty glow of distant memories" but there is, for me, a quality of rust and of sound traveling through tight, hollow places to the music that makes me think of plumbing.

I love the fact that you can barely hear the words in Grouper's music, but I'm sure not everyone will feel the same way. For me, the layers of echo and ambient noise create a sound that seems at once otherworldly and mysterious and as ordinary and comforting as the buzz of the refrigerator.

Grouper- Cover the Windows and the Walls

I Actually Like: Deerhunter's Microcastle

2008-10-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

Much like Deerhoof, I've tried to get into Deerhunter for a long time. On paper, the band sounds like perfection: signed to Kranky, weird, overbearing vocalist with a host of personal problems (not to sound callous, but this describes at least 75% of my favorite singers), equal parts shoegaze, psych rock, and ambient music. But shit, as they say, just did not add up.

Most Deerhunter songs start off interesting but go nowhere. Whereas a Guided By Voices song (and GBV are a good comparison since Deerhunter frontman/lead songwriter Bradford Cox is equally as prolific as Bob Pollard) cycles through an album's worth of hooks in one song, a Deerhunter song finds one pretty melody or one pleasantly cycling bassline and runs it into the ground. To convince the listener the song is progressing, liberal amounts of fuzz and echo are applied to every sound in the mix after, say, the 2:00 mark.

It's not like I'm sort of pop purist who can only enjoy songs with a verse-chorus-middle eight structure, because the Deerhunter songs I listen to the most are the droning, soft-focus intstrumentals. When it comes to ambient or drone or wallpaper music or whatever you want to call music that just sort of drifts by you, I love pretty much everything that doesn't sound like a Wyndham Hill compilation. But if you're going to write songs, please don't half-ass it and try to coast on one good idea.

Microcastle, unlike previous Deerhunter efforts, actually has songs that sound finished. Not to mention much more dynamic production, courtesy of Nicolas Vernhes. Check out "Never Stops" which has a wonderfully twinkling and sweeping chorus (a chorus?! who'd a thunk it?):

Never Stops mp3

Despite my enjoyment of Microcastle, I find this hilarious.

I Will Never Like: Deerhoof

2008-10-09T19:53:00.001-07:00

Being someone who never wants to miss out on something good, I've spent years trying to get into Deerhoof. Since a lot of music and movies I like now I would have hated a few years ago, I had every reason to believe Deerhoof and myself were just bound click sooner or later. One day I would exclaim "I get it! I hear the great songs where once I only heard rote 'art-punk' and a tuneless Japanese woman screaming!"

It almost happened. After getting Apple O from the library for the third time, I opened my mind wide--Inland Empire/Captain Beefheart wide--and I heard something. There was an innocent and infectious energy in vocalist Satomi Matsukazi's voice that I hadn't heard before, and I became aware of the fact that many of the songs actually had nice little melodies, even if they seldom repeated. I dutifully placed the album on my iPod and got ready to embrace Deerhoof with open arms in a matter of weeks.

Of course that didn't happen. Apple O was one of those albums that never seemed to fit a mood of mine. Sure, there was the infrequent occasions when I wanted to hear something foreign to my normal listening habits, but even then I'd get sick of the album halfway through.

Certainly the Shonen Knife/Cibo Matto factor plays a part in my inability to enjoy the band. For those unfamiliar with either of the two bands mentioned, they were both symptomatic of the 90s hipsters tendency to fetishize cute Japanese people, especially cute Japanese girls. Cibo Matto were a duo who sang a ton of songs about food (Cibo Matto is Italian for "crazy food") and were fawned over by the usual suspects: Beastie Boys, Sean Lennon, Beck; Shonen Knife were a three piece all girl punk band who also sang about food a lot and were showered with praise by Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth, who treated them as if they were geniuses.

With Shonen Knife especially, this adoration reeked of patronization. Had the band been made up of three ordinary looking American teenage girls and released the same records, no one would have ever heard of them. It was the offensive notion that somehow Japanese people are purer and less self-conscious than us ugly Americans that fueled the fandom, and that I'm sure contributed to many of the performers at the first Pitchfork Festival referring to Satomi Matsuzaki as a "true rock star" when Deerhoof performed there a few years ago. In this specific hipster mindset, the worst crime would be to try to be a rock star, but a Japanese woman with boundless energy and stilted English certainly couldn't be trying to be anything but herself, right?

I don't want to make this the whole story about Deerhoof, but it's something that bothers me a lot and I find it hard not to imagine people enjoying the band on that level when I'm listening to them.

The new song "Chandelier Searchlight," whose video is above, is certainly less abrasive than a lot of the band's songs, and the chorus is charming, but ultimately it still leaves me feeling the same sort of blah as everything else I've heard from them. It's settled: I will never like Deerhoof.

The Shape of Things to Come? Form-fitting, of course..

2008-09-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

I was all excited to post about "Shape of Things to Come" from the movie "Wild in the Streets" until I read this on the song's wikipedia page:

"As of June 2006, the Max Frost & The Troopers version of the song is being used in an advertising campaign by Target Stores."

Apparently the shape of things to come will be "comfortable," affordable, and designed by Isaac Mizrahi.

But having the song used in a commercial is actually not blasphemous (you know, not like something crazy, like using "The Times They Are A-Changin" in a commercial for a billion dollar HMO) because the song isn't an actual rebellious statement, just a dramatized version of one. I think this is why I actually like it more than a real song by a real band about how "things need to change, man..."

If you're not familiar with "Wild in the Streets," it's about a pop star named Max Frost who starts using his influence with teens to get the voting age changed to fifteen. Once this is accomplished, he gets himself voted President (on the Republican ticket--don't ask) and sends everyone over 35 to LSD-fueled "rehabilitation camps."

The scene featuring "The Shape of Things to Come" comes right after crowds of teens engaging in a sit in at the Capitol have been fired upon by police. Max (on TV presumably) appears from behind two columns looking solemn and defiant and that great muted guitar begins to build the tension up, allowing the organ to sweep in, ringing and triumphant.

Within the context of the movie, the song's got this great feeling of inevitability to it, as if it's already far too late to stop the youth from rising up and taking total control of the world. But without watching the movie, the song has a epic feel to it that most garage rock songs from the 60s lack, though that might be because the couple who wrote the song, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, were Brill Building songwriters responsible for hits like "On Broadway" by the Drifters, "We Got to Get Outta This Place" by the Animals, and "Kicks" by Paul Revere and the Raiders.

Initials BB

2008-09-07T18:21:00.000-07:00

Look at Serge Gainsbourg. What a typical Frenchman. Smoking a cigarette and acting too cool to stand up. Who does he think he is?

"Initials BB," Gainsbourg's tribute to Brigitte Bardot, is easily my favorite song of his. The chorus is hypnotic, like some sort of brainwashing tool: "Repeat after me--B initials B initials B initials BB." It's easy to imagine a giant neon sign flashing B in time with the beat.

Most Gainsbourg songs irritate me. Either he talks through most of a song (probably because he was too hungover in the studio that day) or Jane Birkin (Gainsbourg's longtime girlfriend and "musical" partner) does her famous "I don't need to sing, I can just exhale" act, causing the song to expire in a fog of Gitanes smoke and Gallic superiority. But "Initials BB" is perfect.

As a public service, here is what happens when you're too cool to stand up in your own music videos.

The Rising Storm

2008-08-27T20:59:00.000-07:00

Please please please, I'm begging all 3 and 1/2 of my readers (I'm the 1/2 reader, because--to paraphrase Bret from Flight of the Conchords--"I'm not really a fan"), check out The Rising Storm blog. For fans of psych-rock, country-folk, prog-folk-psych-country, or just plain old rock and roll music, no blog can introduce you to as many forgotten but amazing bands as "The Storm."

The video above is of the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, an artist I'd never have heard of without The Rising Storm. Below are two more songs you can find on one of best blogs around:

"Slip Inside This House" The Thirteen Floor Elevators

"Gather Round" Love

I Can't Hear The Noise Over Your Yelling

2008-08-15T19:02:00.001-07:00

I got a Prurient CD at--of all places--my local library. I've been slowly trying to dip my little toe into the muggy green swamp that is noise music. I like noise when it's used to add texture and dissonance to melodic music, but I'm unsure if I can listen to nothing but shrieking feedback and static.

My friend Sam from high school used to brag about listening to Nurse With Wound's high pitched feedback on his Walkman--he said he found it calming, but maybe that had something to do with his ADD. At the time I thought he was nuts, but more and more I think I understand what he was talking about. If you listen to music looking to be endlessly surprised and inspired, sooner or later you realize the well has run dangerously dry. I find the more I listen to really poppy records (the most recent example being the Vampire Weekend album), the more they break down into their component parts. First I like the whole song, then just the chorus, then just the bridge. After a week or two, when a song off the album pops up in my iPod shuffle, I skip it, knowing its been basically emptied of all pleasure at this point.

Not so with noise music. There is nothing instantly pleasurable about what sounds like between-the-stations radio static played over a smoke alarm running low on batteries. The ear's first reaction is "Hey whoa, what the hell--get that away from me!" But stay awhile with the sound and you cross a threshold. Your ear starts to get acclimated to the strange, unpleasant noises coming out of your headphones. Your heart rate drops. You submit to the noise and calm travels throughout your body.

And Dominick Pernow, AKA Prurient, starts yelling.

I don't want yelling in my noise music. I live in a city and take public transportation, so I get my daily fill of yelling no problem. And if for some reason I don't, my kindly neighbors help out and scream at each other in the courtyard outside my apartment. I'm sure all that yelling is super cathartic for ol' Dominick but I suggest he invest in a pillow--it works wonders.

Also, as the above video illustrates, yelling your guts out looks and sounds ridiculous. I know noise fans would answer that with the retort that I must not really like noise music if I can't appreciate such displays, but I think too many of them are hung up on how extreme and "evil" noise is, which I think is missing the point entirely. Noise music shouldn't be a contest of who can sound the most fucked up, because, let's face it, that's an easy contest to win. At its best, noise challenges the ear to listen and appreciate sounds it usually cringes at.

That being said, a lot of the Prurient album was quite good. When Fernow isn't yelling, his music is hypnotic mix of drones and noise that soothes through repetition (this description describes 99% of drone music, but that's an issue for another post). So the lesson here is: Shhh...let the noise speak.

Could We Interest You In a Tasteful Tote?

2008-08-09T17:49:00.000-07:00

I found this tote bag following an ad on Pitchfork for Sufjan Steven's record label Asthmatic Kitty's new "pomegrante friendly" grocery tote bag. Check out the site for yourself.

I'm trying to understand why seeing this tote bag and reading it described as "large enough to haul as many veggies and yummy goods as you'd need for a perfect dinner" brings out a hatred in me that should be reserved for actual bad things, i.e. the Bush administration, sweatshop using corporations, homophobes and racists, American Apparel ads, etc.

Firstly, there's the name: Asthmatic Kitty. It conjures up images of a bunch of super skinny hipsters decked out in scarves and striped sweaters (full disclosure: I own three such sweaters) ladling pity on poor little weezing Mr. Kitty as he huffs and puffs with his cute little lungs, trying to desperately to secure the bare minimum of air to survive for the next second or so. And that's not a good image.

Secondly, Adam Gnade, the author of the first vegan recipe zine included--for a limited time!--with the tote bag is described as a "storyteller." No one who tells good stories is described as a "storyteller." For the record, "storytellers" are failed children's book authors. They haunt local libraries, telling stories too cliched and lacking in humor to interest anyone under four years old (oh, and how it makes their blood boil when a precocious four year old figures out the moral to the story when they're in the middle of telling it. "Well, let's just wait and see if that's what Simon the rabbit learns..")

Thirdly and finally, not to make a big generalization, but the kind of people who use the word "yummy" and brag about handwriting and illustrating their vegan recipe zines are passive-aggressive monsters. I'll allow that humans can be kind and empathetic and sensitive, but they can't be that way all the time. Your anger and frustration have to get expressed somewhere, and if you fetishize sweetness and cuteness, chances are you're not one for facing conflict head-on. Instead you patronize and condescend, hiding behind the flimsy excuse that you "didn't intend it to come across that way." Asthmatic Kitty and co. don't hate you, they just think some of the things you do are stupid and destructive and it'd be majorly cool if you could stop doing those things like right away.

In conclusion, asthmatic cats needs vets, not your sympathy; "storytellers" secretly hate your children, and anyone who buys the above tote bag is passive aggressive (or in need of a tote bag).

The Evil That is "Turkish Star Wars"

2008-07-19T17:12:00.001-07:00

To all who watch this, view with caution. While you, the naive, the unitiated, the childishly curious, marvel at how blatantly the filmmakers of "Turkish Star Wars" have ripped off footage from the real Star Wars, remember this: I sat through the whole f'in thing.

Believe me, this sequence made even less sense to me that it will make to you, and I saw all that preceded it. Sure, the evil turkish Darth Vader rip-off wants to destroy the earth (and he does, thus the footage stolen of the destruction of Leia's home planet Alderan), but that has nothing to do with a) F-Wings trying to blow up the Death Star, b) storm troopers getting shot at, and c) the hero trying to wrest the sword away from TDV (Turkish Darth Vader), who is both simultaneously blowing up planets and fighting our hero in the desert.

And while the countless jumps during the fight scene are charmingly absurd (my brother swears he can hear the trampoline squeaking on the soundtrack), by the time I could have appreciated them I already had a violent hatred for everyone involved in the production of the movie in any capacity (yes, even the best boy).

"Turkish Star Wars" is not a movie so bad it's good, it's a movie so bad it will corrode your soul.

"I'll Try to Just Solve the Reds.."

2008-06-23T15:28:00.001-07:00

Six Reasons Why This is so F'n Funny (No, pointing out why something is funny does not make it less funny, it just pisses off people without analytical minds..):

1. The "Catch It!" adline from the ESPN commercials. Because you can't advertise sports without a sports metaphor/pun. Also, scary question: what if they don't catch it? Watch out, Butterhands, that's not just some pigskin, that's the May 1976 match up between the Bengals and the Packers, featuring the Bengals' secret weapon halfback, Donald "Burroughs Adding Machine" Raymond.

2. Why is Brian Dennehy a) on heroin or b) hanging out Robert Evans? I'm pretty sure Dennehy spent the 70s guest starring in poorly rated cop shows, not hanging out with the coked-out producer of the Godfather.

3. Where the hell does he come up with the Rodney Allen Rippy reference? Rippy was a Gary Coleman-esque child actor who did ads for Jack in the Box in the 70s, as well as starring in the short lived Harlem Globetrotters saturday morning show, "Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine." Kudos to Patton for not only picking a hilariously named 70s child actor, but for picking one so obscure that research about him will lead to the "Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine." YouTube Rippy and you will also find video of him admonishing Sally Fields for swearing at the Oscars. Icing on the cake, I tell you, icing on the cake...

4. I've just learned a "cigarette boat" is a sleek speed boat with a characteristic "v" shaped hull, known to reach up to 80 knots in calm waters and 25 knots in those crazy five to seven feet Caribbean waves. Boy, Mac, those Montego Bay waves are doozies, ain't they?

5. It's not so much the acts described as the celebrities involved. Tom Wopat, also known as Luke Duke from the Dukes of Hazzard. Gil Gerard, from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. The aforementioned Rodney Allen Rippy. There is no way these D-listers would be hanging out on Robert Evans' boat, but their names are so funny sounding it hardly matters.

6. The word "solar plexus."

Small Angry Germans with Guns: Watching Stroszek

2008-03-27T16:33:00.000-07:00

- Stroszek is supposedly the film Joy Division front man Ian Curtis watched hours before his suicide. I find that fact odd, since the film isn't so much depressing or gloomy (though it has elements of both those moods) as it is bizarre. I suppose the film has a fundamental strangeness to it that could spook somebody in an agitated and despairing state. Suffice to say, do not watch this movie high.

-Bruno Stroszek is played by Bruno S., a street musician who was born to a prostitute and spent most of his life in an asylum. Director Werner Herzog used him in his earlier film The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, and according to the book Herzog on Herzog, he wrote Stroszek specifically for Bruno when Bruno found he'd lost his part in Herzog's version of Woyzeck to Klaus Kinski. Herzog also mentions in the book how odd and wonderful Bruno's way of speaking is, and though I don't understand his German, there is something perfectly expressive about his voice; he almost sounds like a character on a kids show.

-One of the two pimps who harass Bruno and his prostitute friend Eva looks like he's in a Hawkwind cover band. Or more likely a roadie for a Hawkwind cover band. The dude is tall and blond with a handlebar mustache and a wardrobe of silk shirts and gold jewelry. I think getting roughed up by a guy who looks that tacky has to hurt your dignity, because you keep thinking "If He-Man was a pimp, this is what he'd look like!"

Hawkwind Does Not, I Repeat, Does Not Endorse Pimping

-Bruno S. is a little too charming of a street performer for my taste. Aren't street performers supposed to be kind of shitty? That way when you drop a dollar in their guitar case, you can think "Man, how great could they be if they didn't have to perform on the street?" If you're charming and talented as Bruno is, with his xylophone and accordion, people on the street are going to think "Wow, he's good. I bet he makes a ton of money," and then not give him a cent.

-In a truly bizarre scene, Bruno meets with his former doctor from the asylum, who, after hearing of Bruno's troubles with Eva's two pimps, takes Bruno to the premature baby ward. There he shows him a small baby and illustrates its strong reflexes by sticking his finger out and letting the baby tug itself upright. Then the doctor picks up the baby by its legs and lets it hang there and cry, as if this is also supposed to be a profound, enlightening experience for Bruno. This is a difficult scene to watch especially because it's clear we're watching a very real premature child.

-After the three (Bruno, Eva, and Scheitz) move to Railroad Flats, Wisconsin (actually Plainview, Wisconsin), we meet Scheitz's "nephew" who may actually be someone he met in the Air Force. The only words the nephew knows in German are "the dog is loose" and he explains at least two or three times that the town is called Railroad Flats because of, you know, all the railroads. In one of the funniest scenes, the nephew does a bizarre dance/sex-simulation where each pelvic thrust is a coin. When he moves his right hip, he says "nickel," when he moves his left, he says "dime" and when he thrusts forward, he says "quarter." He keeps repeating it until it becomes a mantra: "nickel, dime, quarter, loose change, nickel, dime, quarter.."

Chapter 14: The Loose Change Technique

-Man, the guy from the bank who comes to take Bruno's house looks like Stephen Merchant from the British Office and Extras. It's just...uncanny.

-When the bank forecloses on Bruno's house, Scheitz grabs a shotgun and declares that he'll kill everyone involved with the conspiracy to take his home away. The two drive downtown to the bank, but when they find it's closed, they rob a haircut place instead. Scheitz berates the barber, shouting "I know you're in on it too!" As disturbing as this sounds, there is something so hilarious about a small German man with a shotgun ranting about a conspiracy against him that I almost hoped the rest of the movie was just going to be Bruno and Scheitz riding around robbing people, while Scheitz screamed about the vast machinations of the conspiracy against him.

Ol' Fred Krueger: Watching Nightmare on Elm Street

2008-03-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

Since I'm incapable of writing two or three essays a week about movies, I think I'm going to switch to the far easier bullet point format. Enjoy.

-In the movie's first nightmare, as Fred Krueger chases Tina through a boiler room, a lone sheep appears, running down a hallway and bleating its little head off. I know Krueger is a sick man and all, but you've got to be pretty perverted to keep sheep around just to watch them run terrified through a dark and humid boiler room. Regardless, sheep bleating is incredibly creepy, and thus should be featured wherever creepiness is absent.

- When ne'er-do-well Rod runs into Tina on the way to school with her friends, he tells her "I had a hard-on last night with your name on it." You've got to love a line that stupid, as well as the fact that it's spoken by a character named Rod.

-You can see even in the first movie how lame of a character Freddy Krueger was going to become. All it was going to take was some idiot screenwriter or producer watching the first movie and thinking "That Freddy...He's the real movie. Let's give him some quips and catchphrases." And in that tragic moment was born the seed that would become Freddy vs. Jason.

-Nothing spells action like John Saxon:

"You might remember me from such films as Cannibal Apocalypse..."

-When Krueger kills Tina in her dream, we see her stomach cut open and her body dragged to the top of the ceiling, leaving blood all over. Since Rod was the only one in the room with her, he's the only and obvious suspect. However, forensically, shit just don't make sense. If you stab someone to death in their bed, blood is not going to end up on the ceiling. Life is not a samurai movie; when stabbed, people don't let out a geyser of blood. The Springwood CSI unit has a lot of explaining to do..

-You've got to love the spunk of kids from 80s horror movies. When they hear weird sounds or see pools of blood, they don't hesitate--they investigate. Sure, they're doubling their chances of getting brutally killed, but they'll be just kicking themselves for days if they don't find out where that horrible, horrible sound is coming from.

-After Rod is killed in his jail cell (Freddy makes it look like he hung himself), Nancy's mother takes her to one of the crappiest sleep clinics in the nation. Not only does their sleep-monitoring program look like accounting software, but when Nancy wakes up from her dream with cuts on her arm and Freddy's hat, the only conclusion they can come to is that she's nuts. Hey, guys, when she got into bed did she have a brown fedora with her? No? Then where did it come from? It's kind of hard to hide one of those in a hospital gown. I bet a bunch of of the doctors got a drink after work and just kept repeating "A brown fedora hat? I mean, what the fuck?.... I mean, seriously, what the fuck?"

-Nancy's alcoholic mom's drink of choice: Bacardi, baby!

Destroying lives since 1862

-When Johnny Depp's mom asks him what he's watching on TV, he tells her "Miss Nude USA." Excuse me, but no such pageant exists. And if it did, it would be lucky to last a half an hour, what with no evening gown or swimsuit competitions. Let's all be good people and not imagine the talent portion of the show..

-Seeing Johnny Depp's bed eat him, his television, and his tape player, and then spew out a giant geyser of blood a few seconds later is so awesome it hurts. Screw a sunset, that's the true definition of the sublime.

-Why does Krueger's sweater go from red and green to red and black? Because I have a perfectly good red and black sweater that might not have been ruined had the movie stuck to its original color scheme. Now I have to be the jerk who says "Freddy Krueger's original sweater was red and green" every time someone refers to my sweater as "the Freddy Krueger sweater."

Cat O'Nine Tails: Grave-robbing Ain't A Thang

2008-02-03T14:01:00.000-08:00

Call me a snob if you want, but nobody makes horror movies like the Italians. Granted, American horror movies are often better paced, better acted, and actually make sense, but so what? Give me the aging prints, the bizarre but wonderful obsession with using a different color filter in every set, and--last but not certainly least--the wood paneling.

The wood paneling is in full bloom in Dario Argento's "The Cat O'Nine Tails," a giallo and the second in his "animal trilogy" (along with "The Bird with Crystal Plummage" and "Four Flies on Gray Velvet"), "Cat O'Nine" stars Karl Malden as blind ex-reporter searching for a vicious killer alongside hot shot reporter Giordiani (James Franciscus). The plot, involving a team of geneticists and their research on the bizarre XYY gene pattern and its connection to criminal behavior, is hilariously lame (how can any human being have an extra chromosome?) but part of the fun is how bereft the movie is of actual thrills.

Don't get me wrong: "Cat O'Nine" has plenty of gruesome deaths (though they're a little tame by Argento standards). For fans like me, who haven't been "thrilled" by a movie since they were they were fifteen, the true worth of any horror movie rests on the amount and the quality of the gore.

But much of the joy of "Cat O'Nine" for me comes from its cheesiness, its implausibility. For a blind man and a desk reporter, Malden and Franciscus have incredible access to everyone involved with the murders, from the head of the genetics team and his daughter (who Giordiani hooks up with) to the mysterious gay German geneticist that Franciscus finds in the quintessential 70s gay bar. Few of the players balk at answering questions only the police have business asking. Silly as well is how the two sleuths brush off the brutal deaths of the people they've interviewed with a "Well, who do we talk to now?" nonchalance.

In one of the most movie's most implausible scenes, Malden and Franciscus break into a tomb to find the secret contents of a necklace of a slain dead girlfriend. There is no discussion of how they're going to explain to a police or anyone else how they acquired what's in the necklace, just a singled-minded focus on solving the case that apparently allows for popping open a casket or two.

I sort of have a soft spot for this sort of implausibility and lack of explanation in older horror movies and thrillers. Nowadays, great lengths are gone to to make silly situations plausible, with the end result still seeming contrived. Malden and Franciscus could have dressed in gravedigger uniforms or bribed a cemetary worker to keep watch and the scene still would have seemed far-fetched.

Argento's use of POV shots from the killer's perspective is both cheesy and artful. Instead of quick, jumpy cuts that tell us exactly what the killer wants, Argento follows him down halls and behind doorways. When he beats up a security guard, we see him lock the man in a room and look nervously down at the man through the locked door's window. On the soundtrack, we hear the killer's labored breathing. While POV shots are often standard in slasher movies, Argento's use of them humanizes the killer.

As a thriller, "Cat O'Nine" is meh, and as a horror movie, it doesn't reach the great heights of gore of Argento's masterpieces "Inferno" and "Tenebrae," but its charm rests in its very weaknesses: outdated plot devices, implausible scenes, and clunky pacing.

In the special features of the DVD, there is a trailer for the movie that shows us quick shots of the movie's most salacious moments: the geneticist's daughter disrobing, a victim choking, the killer's fall down an elevator shaft. With Ennio Morricone's dissonant jazz score playing and a voiceover intoning that "Cat O'Nine out-psychos Psycho," you almost believe the movie was more exciting than it actually was.

But that, ironically, is why I liked "Cat O'Nine Tails": the charm of how far away it was from being what it claimed to be.

Addendum: My girlfriend Jessica has pointed out to me that not only is it possible for humans to have more than two chromosomes, but the XYY gene is real and associated with overly aggressive behavior (apparently many politicians have it too).

The Big Trail: Worst Western Ever?

2008-01-22T12:53:00.000-08:00

"The most important picture ever produced"? Maybe if you're being sarcastic. "The Big Trail" leaves a big trail of something.

But I'm jumping ahead. Lately my brother has become obsessed with movie westerns, especially those directed by John Ford and Howard Hawks. Not a big fan of the genre myself, I'm always wary of watching his newest rental, and movies like "The Big Trail" just validate my distaste for westerns.

Notable as not only the screen debut of John Wayne, "The Big Trail" was also one of the first movies to be filmed in the then new 65 mm wide-screen format. Directed by the talented ("Big Trail" aside) Raoul Walsh, the movie tells the story of the travails of a California bound wagon train. And it is also a big steaming pile of cinematic dung.

Exhibit A: John Wayne's acting. Rarely have I seen an actor so completely out of his element. Wayne's line readings are tone-deaf and exaggerated, summoning up the image of a man just ten minutes away from being flat-out drunk. As my brother Ethan has rightly pointed out, Wayne's singular skill as an actor is to portray confidence. Take that away from him and it's like the star quarterback fumbling through the lead part in a high school play. Or better yet, imagine Wayne's acting as the avant-garde saxophonist in a straight laced jazz quintet. Man: "No one's ever made to the Oregon territories.." Wayne: "Skree--onk! Well, I reckon--schreeby-bop schreeby-zoo!"

Exhibit B: The dialogue. Take a look at some of these memorable exchanges, courtesy of imdb.com:

Red Flack, Wagon Boss: Well, if it ain't Bill Thorpe, hey? I always thought you was hung and planted, I expect.
Bill Thorpe: No, my time ain't arrived yet.
Red Flack, Wagon Boss: But it looks as though it might be drawing close.
Bill Thorpe: Well, I've been promised a hanging bee if I don't get out on the Penzy Belle, and the Captain promised me a necktie party if I set foot on the boat. It's a case of nowhere to go.
Red Flack, Wagon Boss: It appears to me you do your shooting by daylight with too many people looking on, hey?
------------------------------
Ruth Cameron: They say you're going to hunt down Flack and Lopez.
Breck Coleman, Wagon Train Scout: That's what I aim to do.
Ruth Cameron: But you can't do this awful thing - take two lives.
Breck Coleman, Wagon Train Scout: Frontier justice.
-------------------------------
And my personal favorite..

Gussie: Zeke, did you hear that terrible crash?
Zeke: Hear it? I seen it! That was your wagon!
Gussie: Was my mother-in-law in it?

Yee-ha, that's some solid screenwriting! But to be fair, it's really the delivery of the actors that captures that elusive "Hee-Ha" dialect essential to your crappy western. I don't care how large and borderline-offensive you read the above lines, you're going to miss some of magic in the original readings.

Exhibit C: Tyrone Power. Looking like 80s wrestler The Barbarian, Power's performance channels only the best in cliched melodrama villains, with an extra helping of aloofness and barely disguised contempt for the material. The latter is explained if you believe the legend that Power was beaten brutally by Raoul Walsh after the former tried to force himself on leading lady Marguerite Churchill.

Man, if you could just only hear this...

2007-12-01T11:58:00.000-08:00

There's a hilarious scene in the first season of Mr. Show where Bob Odenkirk brags about his charity work reading the Sunday comics to blind people. Reading Calvin and Hobbes to David Cross (playing a blind man), he soon gets enraged because he can't explain the panels adequately. "Aww, if you could just only see it! It's so funny!"

I often feel that way writing about music because I want people to understand what the hell I'm talking about without just imagining it. Since my current computer has no sound card and is too old to run iTunes on (yes, that old), I can't post mp3s. Anyway, I'm going to test my writing abilities by trying to explain current songs I'm enamored of, with the help of that most outdated technology, the written word.

"Shell of Light" off Burial's Untrue: The last fifty or so seconds of this song off reclusive (and as of yet unidentified) dubstep producer Burial's new album sounds like either a) an 80s r&b song playing underwater, or b) said type of song with the bass turned up listened to through two different walls. While mostly I hate hearing music diffused through walls since it's just irritating white noise I can't tune out, every once and awhile hearing a song that way moves me immensely. "Shell of Light" recreates those moments.

"Young Hearts Run Free" by Candi Staton: I first heard this song on a cheaply made disco compilation I got at the library called Boogie Wonderland. At once heartbreaking, gorgeous, and triumphant, the song has an out of this world chorus that seems to float above the low end of the song like it needs to soar above the pain and bitterness down on earth. A plea to young people to not love so easily that you get trapped in a relationship you can't escape, the song is proof positive disco can be as sad and soulful as soul music.

"Ballin' In Normandie" mashed by ABX at The Hood Internet: Nowadays, you look a like a jerk for infusing about a mash-up. The critical consensus, as retarded as it seems, has become that mash-ups are lame and boring and no one with real talent would ever consider attempting one. This is bullshit. Firstly, what's the point of rap acapellas if not to put something new under them? Secondly, as much as I love the production on current hip-hop records, it's also exciting to hear what rappers sound like over violas or dubby Animal Collective sounds. "Ballin In Normandie" is a mash-up of a Project Pat rap and a Shout Out Louds song. Sampling a viola and jaunty acoustic guitar from the Shout Out Louds, ABX creates a colorful and chipper backdrop for Pat's bragging and threats. Instead of menacing, Pat sounds joyful, which is wonderfully unusual. All hail ABX and The Hood Internet.

Give Up the Funk

2007-10-18T09:30:00.000-07:00

It seems like all the music blogs I read (that's like five or six) are buzzing about Sasha Frere Jones' article in the new New Yorker called "A Paler Shade of White." Tom Breihan and Rob Harvilla, both Village Voice writers, argue about it here. And this morning, Brandon over at No Trivia, had this to say about the article. I expect more reaction in the next few days.

To put it simplistically, Frere Jones (or SFJ as he's called) thinks indie rock (indie rock here defined as non-mainstream rock music, regardless of whether the bands are actual independent labels) has become too white. Eschewing the importance put on rhythm by African and African-American music, bands like Arcade Fire and the Decemberists and the Shins stick to styles of music that mostly skirt black influence . He attributes part of this to the fear white musicians might have of trying to borrow from genres like gangster rap without looking like a joke or being labeled a thief of authentic black culture.

SFJ further complicates his argument by explaining that, unlike in the days when rock bands like Cream or the Stones covered blues songs to give the artists they loved exposure (as well to give themselves authenticity), black and white artists are on the same playing field when it comes to exposure. No rock act has to cover Snoop Dogg for someone to hear about him.

Towards the end of the article, it becomes clear SFJ's true issue with indie rock is that it's not energetic or danceable enough. That may be a fair criticism, although obviously subjective, but he begins the article by attacking, of all bands, The Arcade Fire, for lacking "ecstatic singing" and "elaborate showmanship." The rap equivalent would be to attack Busta Rhymes for not rapping with enough passion and abandon. If anything, The Arcade Fire could be accused of being too dramatic and over the top. Many of their stage shows have featured men in motorcycle helmets bashing into each other and spontaneous (well, sometimes) exits out into the crowd and onto the street outside, banging away the whole time.

For me, the idea that indie rock is too white is ridiculous. Musicians have the right to play whatever kind of music they want. If the Decemberists love The Soft Boys and Neutral Milk Hotel (and lately Jethro Tull), that's great. If the Shins like 80s new wave guitar bands and the Beach Boys, more power to them. Only people who don't really like those bands would want them to stick funk bass lines or hyphy synth sounds in their music.That's really all this boils down too: people who don't like certain popular bands wishing they'd change their music so it sounded better to them.

As a fan of rap and soul and numerous other African and African-American art forms, I'm reminded of conversations with people who wish "rap wasn't so materialistic" or that "r&b had more soul like it used to," as if they just want to like the music but can't. But what's so wrong about not liking it? If you dislike rap, that's fine. If you dislike whiny, precious indie rock, that's fine too. But if you want to like rap if only it was more like jazz or you want like rock if only it sounded like funk, you're waging a losing battle. So leave those bands alone, Sasha Frere Jones, and go listen to whatever it is you actually like.

Shocking Stink

2007-10-05T08:58:00.000-07:00

As remixers, DFA (James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy) are pretty much untouchable. Their remixes of Goldfrapp's "Slide In," Unkle's "In a State," Chromeo's "Destination Overdrive", and Tiga's "Far from Home" on the vinyl version of "DFA Remixes Chapter. 2" are easily the best of their kind. A DFA remix (with the exception of their half-assed reworking of Justin Timberlake's "My Love") is pretty much a guarantee of quality. As well, their roster (The Juan McLean, Hot Chip, Gavin and Russom, Black Dice, LCD Soundsystem) is amazing for not only its diversity but its consistency.

So why'd they sign Shocking Pinks?

After reading this review, I was pretty much sold on the Shocking Pinks first album for DFA.Describing the album as containing "scruffy Jesus and Mary Chain dream-pop, ecstatic My Bloody Valentine haze, droning C-86 confessionals, and bedroom New Order bass lines" appealed to the geek in me in a way that now I'm not too proud of. Turns out the JAMC dream-pop is extra scruffy, the My Bloody Valentine "haze" sounds a lot like a cheap synth pad buried deep in the mix, and the New Order bass lines need to be turned up, oh, I don't know, six or seven notches to actually be New Order bass lines. Only the "droning C-86 confessionals" is dead on because, firstly, droning is the only way to describe Nick Harte's (Shocking Pinks frontman and only member) vocal style, and secondly, only on cheap 80s mix tapes by twee English teenagers can I imagine music so poorly mixed and amateurish.

But maybe that's unfair. After all, C-86 bands like Tallulah Gosh and The Field Mice actually wrote a lot of catchy songs, something Nick Harte can't do to save his life. I could have forgiven all of his flaws--the buried, half spoken vocals, the drums constantly mixed into just one channel (oh, did I forget to mention that?), the aforementioned cheap synth pads--if the album had at least a handful of catchy songs. Instead, Harte uses my favorite indie-rock trick of singing half the lyrics, playing a bridge, than singing the rest and playing the bridge again before fade out. I swear, only "musicians" do this, because amateurs are too focused on just writing a song poppy enough to hide their inability. Harte used to be the drummer for The Brunettes, an insufferably cute indie-pop band from New Zealand, so I don't think he completely lacks musical talent, but his songwriting is so lazy and half-assed it's hard not to think he should stick to banging on drums (Decide for yourself: here are links to songs here, here, and here.)

I think maybe DFA is a little pissed off at their success and are trying to throw curveballs at their audience. Their other new signing, Prinzhorn Dance School, is an ultra minimalist art punk band that wouldn't really blow the mind of someone looking for another Hot Chip. As music nerds, I think they're resentful that fans are pigeonholing them as a dance music label, and a "slick" one at that. On a certain level, I totally sympathize. DFA represent a sensibility, not a sound, and making only "good" music is a quick path to mediocrity. But there is a fine line between music that's difficult but ultimately engaging and lazy stuff like the Shocking Pinks record. DFA remains bulletproof, but they won't be for long if they keep releasing stuff this bad..

The Loser

2007-09-18T21:47:00.000-07:00

So it looks like Kanye won. Reading the article, I couldn't help but feel like talking about the contest being a "marketing strategy" really insults the people who went out and bought the records. I mean, of course no matter who won, Universal profited, but I think people went out and bought a certain record because they wanted to side with one of the artists. I considered buying Graduation on Sept. 11 because I was disgusted by 50 Cent's belittling of rap artists for "reading too many books" and his assertion that record sales matter more than the craft. I'm sure a lot of rappers believe that, but to say it in interviews is like daring people not to buy your record. Does he think the public are such automatons that they won't read what he says and will just buy the record on the strength of a single?

As much as has been said about Kanye bringing vulnerability back to rap, I think 50 is and will always be the more interesting character between them. Have his records gotten stale? Sure. But his insecurities and flaws as a person are far more fascinating than Kanye's because they lurk under the surface of his persona. His contradictions aren't paraded out for all to see, like badges of honor. Since College Dropout, Kanye's "complex" personality more and more looks like a guy who won't take a good hard look at himself (especially when, as he says, his "wrongs" help him write his songs, and sell a ton of records). Over at No Trivia, Brandon Soderberg has spent entry after entry extolling the virtues of Graduation, explaining how humble and complex of a record it actually is, despite its surface subject being fame and "the good life." As much as I respect that opinion, I don't hear it in the music.

50 Cent, however, strikes me as someone truly fascinating because he seems perpetually trapped in a combative mode. Having made his millions by attacking other rappers and appearing to the world as some kind of thug superhero, it's clear that he can't calm down and enjoy his success. All over Get Rich or Die Tryin' or The Massacre are references to not only not needing other people, but to viewing friends as just enemies in waiting. This could be written off as just tough talk if 50 hadn't displayed this distrust so clearly in the past few months. Insulting his own crew of rappers and his label, 50 has isolated himself even further. Sure, he may have been on Rap City joking with the G-Unit, but it's clear most of them are just hanging around him now for the paycheck.

In one of the Beef documentaries, 50's old friend Bang Em Smurf recounts how, at the height of his success, 50 not only wouldn't help him out with bail money (even after, according to Bang Em Smurf's story, he had "taken care of" 50's shooter) but got on a mixtape and claimed he was "God" to Smurf. However much of the rest of the story is true it's hard to tell, but the recording of 50 saying he was God to Smurf is real and it paints a disturbing picture when placed next to the dozens of other incidents of 50's megalomania.

It's clear from his comments during the Kanye West feud that 50 truly believed he was somehow invincible. Why else would he have painted himself in such a corner? If you're going to talk all kinds of shit, then you had better have an album good enough to make everyone forget what you said, and if you have a clunker of an album, you should probably shut up and hope your name alone sells enough copies. 50's strategy, for all his "business savvy," was to both talk a ton of shit about being a hit maker, not an artist, and then release a terribly dull album. That strikes me as the work of someone who isn't really in touch with reality.

The problem is that 50 has long ago stopped tapping into his own psyche for inspiration. His records sound by-the-numbers even by gangsta rap standards (if you're not parodying yourself, you shouldn't release a sex rap called "Amusement Park" after having already released a song called "Candy Shop"--that's some Spinal Tap shit and even further evidence 50 is not all there). He's obviously scared he'll alienate fans and hurt his tougher than tough image if he reveals too much of himself. But the history of hardcore rap contains plenty of artists who managed to express their fear and vulnerability within the genre's often limited strictures.

I have to admire Kanye West for constantly growing as an artist both musically, and to a lesser extent, lyrically, but I sometimes want him to just go away. For a superstar of his stature, he has a pathetic mix of arrogance and neediness that just makes me uncomfortable. I saw a clip on YouTube of Kanye on "Entourage" which is just hard to watch because Kanye's acting is so transparent--his face both says "Fucking A, I'm on 'Entourage,' that is so cool" and "Hell yeah I'm on 'Entourage--why wouldn't I be? I'm Kanye fucking West." Kanye is clearly warring with himself, but not in a way I find at all interesting. If he thinks that he's God gift to the world than he should act like it, but he also shouldn't be angry and hurt when people talk shit, because people are going to talk shit. I'm "hating" on him right now. That's the reality of being someone with that kind of fame--part of the reason people "hate" is to feel like they're not just mindless consumers of someone else's genius.

I may sooner or later buy Graduation and maybe even get into it off the strength of the music, but when it comes down it,I'm just more interested in what's happening in the loser's corner.

The Unmagnificent Lives of Adults

2007-09-17T21:13:00.000-07:00

I've been listening to a lot of The National's new album, "Boxer," and I'm becoming a huge fan of Matt Berninger's lyrics. In the song "Mistaken for Strangers," he has three perfect lines that just blow me away:

Oh you wouldn't want an angel watching over you
Surprise surprise they wouldn't wanna watch

Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults

For me, those three lines make a meal out of a million "little girl lost in a city" songs. In fact, they pop the bubble of a bunch of other song cliches, including, among others, the vampiric hipster girl steals your soul cliche and the good girl meets bad people narrative, the latter often finding its way into otherwise good songs, like The Hold Steady's "Crucifixion Cruise."

What I love especially about the "Another uninnocent.." line is that it points out how boring self-destruction and bad behavior actually is. The man or woman the song is about is far from a doe-eyed innocent (the elegance of their fall reveals they've fallen before) and where they're falling is right smack dab into the banal dance of drugs, sex, and indecision. No matter how much pop culture tries to pretend the lifestyles of attractive people in their twenties and thirties are some larger metaphor for the whole of society, hauling out sad abstractions like "We've all had these kind of relationships" and passing off "lifestyle" columns that seem tailored to fictional "hip, young singles" as somehow relevant, the truth is that adult life is unmagnificent. That doesn't mean it's bad or not worth living, just that it's not the romance it's sold as.

The "angel" line is just as funny and true. I can just imagine the character, half faux-ashamed, half bragging, saying "I wouldn't want an angel watching me--he he he..." The line makes me think of an alternate "Wings of Desire" in which angels have to follow around skinny boring hipsters (or frat boys or sorority girls, same lifestyle just with better music) as they hop from party to party, scene to scene, bed to bed, pretending their life is more exciting than it really is. Poor angels...

Slug and Lettuce

2007-09-12T20:34:00.000-07:00

After much procrastination, I finally finished an entry on Atmosphere's Slug (pictured above in maximum lameness--a My Chemical Romance t-shirt? No wonder fourteen year olds love this guy) for Brandon Soderberg's Biographical Dictionary of Rap. I'm not a huge Atmosphere fan ( I had to buy his first Felt album with MURS to help write the entry), but I feel like I did the man justice, or at least blogger justice.

"At heart, I think Slug wants to be a singer-songwriter, not a rapper. He's got a record label offshoot of Rhymesayers for signing rock bands, he name checks Tom Waits as an influence in interviews, and he raps about how, as a kid, he hated when LL Cool J started rapping about girls, even though any rap fan knows LLs been rapping about the ladies from the beginning. In this article , Slug says that a Cage song sampling Built to Spill's "I Could Hurt A Fly" was " one of the first hip-hop songs that touched me in a way outside of me wanting to bop my head or punch a cop." I'm not trying to make a federal case here, but isn't it odd that a guy who raps for a living would associate hip-hop with exclusively those two reactions?"

Please check out the entry, as well as the other entries on Beanie Sigel, J-Dilla, and Masta Ace. Brandon's idea is an awesome one and I think it could be a really exciting way for bloggers to come together to talk about hip-hop on the Internet without gay-baiting each other or using "U' for "you."

Top 10 Party Crashers: Sampler Smackdown, Pt. 2

2007-08-28T15:57:00.000-07:00

Here's part 2 of comparing sampled songs to the songs they were sampled for.

6. "Spirit in the Dark" by Aretha Franklin vs. "School Spirit" by Kanye West: As much as I love Aretha Franklin (especially "Since You Been Gone" and "Baby I Love You"), "School Spirit" just has an infectious spirit (pun intended) that "Spirit in the Dark" doesn't. The way Kanye stretches out Franklin's voice in the sample it sounds like she's saying "e-voo" or "evil," followed by a slightly lowered pitch "in the dark." The main verses use the humming refrain of the latter part of "Spirit in the Dark" to great effect, creating a earnest chorus to off-set Kanye's bitter lyrics. Besides being an amazing song, "School Spirit" is pretty the summation of Kanye's "College Dropout" album. Lines like "Told 'em I finished school and started my own business/They say "Oh, you graduated," No, I decided I was finished/Chasing all your dreams and what you got planned/Now I spit it so hot you got tanned" perfectly capture the album's theme of being trapped in a life path that's stifling and oppressive. What is odd but charming is how the beats use of fraternity stepping ("Alpha step, sigma step..") and the gorgeous humming refrain make being miserable in college sound kind of fun. I always chuckle at the line "This nigga graduated at the top of his class/ I went to Cheesecake, he was a motherfucking waiter there" because Kanye's delivery and the joy in the music makes the situation sound more like a funny scene in an after-college comedy, instead of a depressing comment on how much a college degree is worth nowadays.

7. "Family Affair" by Sly and the Family Stone vs. "Family Affair" by Ghostface Killah: How long did it take for Pete Rock to make this beat? As much as I dislike the Roots, the way they sampled "Everybody is a Star" on "The Tipping Point" kept intact the song's melody (as well as adding on a bunch of unnecessary backing vocals) while Pete Rock's beat just samples the bass line and Sly singing. Ghostface sounds best over maximalist soul tracks like The Stylistics "You're a Big Girl Now" and Isaac Hayes' "Walk On By" since they compliment his emotional delivery. The original "Family Affair" is one of the best soul songs ever, managing to be sad, creepy, and funky all at the same time. Frankly, even a good sampling of the song probably couldn't beat it--it's untouchable.

8. "Theme from 'Tenebrae'" by Goblin vs. "Phantom pt. 1 and 2" by Justice: As much as I like Justice, Goblin are the kings of horror movie music (Bernard Hermann doesn't count since he mostly scored thrillers). Their music mixes disco and prog rock in such a charmingly cheesy way that it makes the Argento movies they score seem far cooler than they actually are. Listening to "Phantom," it's hard to hear what Justice adds to the original except a more jagged rhythm and a ton of filters.

9. "Sure Shot" by The Beastie Boys vs. "Daylight" by Aesop Rock: "Life's not a bitch/She's a beautiful woman/You only call her a bitch because she won't let you get that pussy/ Maybe she didn't feel y'all shared any similar interests/ Or maybe you're just an asshole who couldn't sweet talk the princess"? This is why Aesop does not rock. Beasties win.

10. "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" by Crystal Waters vs. T.I.'s "Why You Wanna": Since I'm lame enough to have heard the T.I. song before "Gypsy Woman," I assumed the latter would be the sort of slow burn disco song Donna Summer did it so well, the kind of song where the energy of the performance makes you dance (or nod your head) faster than the actual BPM. Actually, "Gypsy Woman" is a more a house song than a disco one (I know some people don't hear the difference but if you don't start differentiating somewhere, 70% of electronic music with singing on it is disco). The tempo is quick and, unlike "Why You Wanna," the horn line circles in on itself. The way the horn line is sampled on "Why You Wanna," the last note is left unresolved, like the melody isn't finished. This bothered me at first, but it benefits the song tremendously, because it leaves the listener hanging on the last note, waiting for resolution, only to jump back into the beginning of the horn line.

Top 10 Party Crashers: Sampler Smackdown Edition, pt. 1

2007-08-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

I thought it'd be fun to write a post comparing songs that have been sampled to the songs they were sampled for. I'm sure it's been done before on other blogs and in magazines, but hopefully I can pull out some surprises and maybe even piss some people off (always the highest praise a blog can receive)--though I might need more than four or five readers to accomplish the latter feat.

1."Just Don't Want to Be Lonely" by Main Ingredient vs. "Dead Muthafuckas" by Cam'Ron- No contest, Cam wins this one. The strongest part of "Just Don't Want to Be.." is the laid back hook, which is exactly what gets sped up in the chorus of "Dead Muthafuckas." As much as it's cool now to complain about the staleness of sped up vocal samples in rap songs, the combination of huge beats and helium vocals still gets me every time.

2."The Ecstasy of Gold" by Ennio Morricone vs. "Blueprint 2" by Jay-Z- It's no surprise Jay-Z used this Morricone song for his second attack on Nas. After a melodramatic piano build, the song is all grandeur, full of triumphant horns and an anthemic melody Metallica fans have been humming for years (the band uses the song as their onstage intro music). As good an MC as Jay is, you don't want to hear him whining about Rosie Perez over one of the most gorgeous instrumentals ever.

2. "Nautilus" by Bob James vs. "Daytona 500" by Ghostface Killah- I first heard "Nautilus" on the Master Sounds radio station featured on Rock Star's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The song, along with James' cover of Paul Simon's "Take Me to the Mardi Gras," has been sampled on numerous rap songs. including LL's "Rock the Bells" and Slick Rick's "Children's Story." Since "Nautilus" is a cheesy fusion song and "Daytona 500" is an undisputed classic, you'd think this would be a no brainer. However, my vote goes to "Nautilus." Firstly, I love cheesy fusion songs--some of Herbie Hancock's best songs are the kind of shiny, fluffy disco instrumentals that house DJs in the 80s sampled the hell out of. As much as I've come to appreciate more traditional hard bop jazz, there is still a part of me that only really likes the kind of jazz that sounds like free form funk or disco. Secondly, the beat to "Daytona 500," like a decent amount of early RZA beats, just does not do it for me. While propulsive, it lacks melody and dynamics, though I suppose you could argue the scratchiness of the beat adds texture. Add to this the fact that the chorus is thin and cliched, and the title goes to "Nautilus."

4. "Hunters of Heaven" by Harumi vs. "Big Lost" by Diplo: I first stumbled upon the Harumi song on an mp3 blog and thinking they were a Japanese psych band, I downloaded it. Turns out "they" was Harumi, an obscure Japanese songwriter and super producer (Bob Dylan, VU) Tom Wilson, who teamed together to make a psych pop record for Verve in 1967. According to this review, the results sucked. Having only heard "Hunters in Heaven," I have no opinion, but the horn line is amazing. When I first heard it on Diplo's "Florida," I was convinced I could place the sample because it just sounded so familiar. As far as which song is better, I'm going to have to go with "Big Lost" because its energy and groove have managed to make the Harumi song sound better just by association.

5. "Every Breath You Take" by the Police vs. "I'll Be Missing You" by Puff Daddy and the Family: Even though "I'll Be Missing You" is cheesy and cliched and sentimental (not to mention arguably exploitative), it's a better song than the original because it treats "Every Breath" like the sappy love ballad it is. Even though the song is supposed to be about a stalker, there is not an ounce of menace in Sting's voice or in the music. I'm sure to this day there are couples who think of it as "their song" because they don't pay much attention to the lyrics outside of the chorus. By turning the song into an elegy, Puff Daddy understood it better than its creators.

Top 5 Party Crashers

2007-08-09T10:56:00.000-07:00

"The life cycle of the turtle is a wondrous thing..."

Since I'm consistently too tired to write a long post about one subject (oh, M.I.A. post, we fought it out but we're still friends), I've decided to take a page from one of my favorite critics/arch-nemesis Greil Marcus. His column "Real Life Rock and Roll Top Ten" used to drive me nuts with its various obsessions (situationism, Elvis, Sleater Kinney) but it always had at least one entry that was worth reading. Thus, I introduce:

The Top Five Party Crashers

1. Lil Wayne in the New Yorker: It's odd over the last couple of years how the New Yorker is suddenly covering rap. My brother and I laughed our asses off when, in the article on Houston rap, Sasha Frere Jones said that, unlike other rappers, Houston rappers aren't afraid to rap about death and racist cops. We were like "Does he even listen to rap?" The Dylan comparison in the article seems weird at first until you think about it. Wayne's love of words and his relentless delivery reminds me of Dylan circa "Bringing It All Back Home." And if you think comparing a lyrical genius like Dylan to a mere rapper is insulting, just listen closely to the lyrics to "It's a Hard Rain Gonna Fall"--the song is leaden with clunker lines.

2. Vitalic- OK Cowboy: Ridic. Maybe it's because I just listened to this album while buzzing off a crappy cafeteria (my work has a cafeteria) Vanilla Creme coffee with extra sugar, but this sounds like the greatest techno album ever made. A lot of the songs feature that electronic classical, "Bach Rocks" moog sort of sound that Daft Punk does on "Voyager" and "Verdis Quo." Songs like these always remind me of the soundtracks to 60s Sci-Fi movies or old educational films about the breeding cycle of turtles in the Galapagos.

3. The Old Grey Whistle Test, Vol. 3: I checked out from the library the third volume of performances collected from the English 70s music program, and while for sheer starpower the collection is kind of weak (no Bowie, no Roxy Music, no Stones, all who are on earlier volumes), there are some amazing performances from unexpected artists. Roger Daltrey's version of Leo Sayer's "Giving It All Away" is just begging to be put in a Wes Anderson movie. At first listen, the song seems kind of lame, another in a long line of boy-loses-his-innocence songs that the 70s are full of. But for me, the magic of the song is how cheesy it is. In a weird postmodern twist, the song is both too lame and overdone to be sincere and yet open to being sincerely appreciated for being so cheesy. It's a sort of similar phenomenon to people who appreciate Justin Timberlake songs because they're excited by how excited everyone else is about them.

4. "Bangin' Screw" off Paul Wall's "Get Money and Stay True": I checked out Paul Wall's second album from the library on a lark, but I've been pleasantly surprised. Most of the production is done by Houston rap/house music DJ Mr. Lee and it's full of lush, buzzing keyboards and synthetic choir voices. Paul Wall is still a pretty generic rapper, but he flows well and that's all the music needs. My favorite song is "Bangin' Screw," which has a beat that reminds me of the music from the old NES games, "California Games," where you could surf, skateboard, and BMX bike. The song's about driving around Houston listening to the late great Houston DJ Screw (pioneer of the chopped-and-screwed style of production) and it feels very nostalgic. It feels nostalgic to me too, but more because the music reminds me of playing old Nintendo games during the summer, buzzed from soda and candy.

5. Slate.com's "Ham of the People" article on Al Pacino: It never occurred to me that Pacino might enjoy hamming it up--I always just assumed he was resigned to chewing up scenery because that's what directors wanted and what paid the bills. He's certainly gotten the most reaction from his over the top performances (My brother and I are constantly repeating the line from Michael Mann's "Heat" where Pacino taunts Hank Azaria by telling him his mistress (played by Ashley Judd) has an ass "you want to take a bite of!"; we can't imagine how anyone on the set kept a straight face after that line). His performance in "Any Given Sunday" often feels like a parody because he was injecting pathos in what was basically a grizzled caricature of the long suffering football coach who lives only for the game. When he makes his before-the-game speech about how he's lost everything in his life to football, it's hard not to laugh.

Cheese Is the New Cool

2007-08-05T21:49:00.001-07:00

It's a lot harder to feel cool for liking Italo-Disco after watching this video.

I Feel My Pores

2007-07-29T14:23:00.001-07:00

"Fireworks," off the new Animal Collective album "Strawberry Jam," is an amazing song. It manages to capture so many different moods, some of them so specific they almost need to be combined like those big clunky German words. For example, when I first heard the song, riding the bus back from my parent's house to my own, I felt joy-in-the-immeasurable-moment-of-awe-of-hearing-beauty-you-didn't expect-tempered-with-a-"oh shit"-this-moment-has-to-end-and-I'd-really-rather-not-let-it.

As usual, the song invokes something childlike, but not in any sentimental way. The rush of stimuli that Panda Bear a.k.a Noah Lennox (I think it's Panda Bear singing) sings about seems to keep temporarily paralyzing him. From fans asking about his mood and new AC songs to the way sweating can make you feel ugly, Lennox seems both high on his band's success and always anxious about the fact that he can't decide how he feels about it.

The video, frankly, is a little boring. If the song weren't so good, I'd probably turn it off after thirty seconds or so. Why the band spends most of the video standing there trying to look amazed I wish I knew, but it just seems a little forced. The scene where a hand keeps making weird gestures through a car window is like two steps above a video made for public access (not that someone couldn't create a cool video using a public access aesthestic, this just isn't that video.) But just hearing the song is enough until I can figure out how to post mp3s on this blog.

Here I Dreamt I Was a Soldier..

2007-07-20T11:44:00.000-07:00

"And then Neil Patrick Harris says 'What a cougar!'"

About two weeks ago, I was watching that mediocre, paint-by-numbers, probably-robot-written sitcom "How I Met Your Mother." Why? Burnt out from work most days, I find an odd comfort in watching mildly entertaining sitcoms. Something about being tired fries the critical part of my brain, leaving me to just passively absorb.

Towards the end of the show, I heard a familiar jangling guitar riff. After a few moments, I placed it: The Decemberists' "Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect." Since the show had been all about how the main character Ted could use the fact that he was an architect to get any woman he wanted into bed, it was clear why the show had picked the song. I wasn't really outraged when I heard the song; I've heard other Decemberists songs in TV shows and I'm long since over my obsession with the band (Increasingly, I find their costumes and props and silly audience participation bits verging on cartoonish, like a slightly less tongue in cheek They Might Be Giants.)

But when I first heard "Here I Dreamt...," I was in awe. I was a sophomore at the Evergreen State College, working in my free time on a screenplay about mentally unstable high school student who models himself on Jay Gatsby, and the song sent my imagination reeling. The song's archaic language--"balustrade" and "furrowed" and "courtesan"--and its wartime set pieces ("And here I dreamt I was a soldier/And I marched the streets of Birkenau") kept ringing out in my head as I wrote. I had the main character, Sam, spin a tale of how his grandfather escaped a Blitz bomb in London by committing adultery with a nurse at the very time bombs rained down on his home and wife. This act of adultery cursed the man forever, as he had to marry the mistress he thoroughly disliked and lose the woman he truly loved, his only happiness left in amassing a large fortune that the main character inherits. This story is concocted to hide the fact that all the money Sam supposedly inherited actually comes from selling pain pills and weed to businessmen.

Silly as it all might sound, I was euphoric writing this tall tale as I listened to "Here I Dreamt.." on repeat. The song and its characters seem to exist in the ideal version of war, full of colorful characters, bittersweet bar songs, and clothes that high school drama kids covet. If you listen to any recording of Marlene Dietrich singing to the troops, you'll understand the strange feelings of romance that can sometimes surround the past worlds of either world war. As unrealistic and idealized as this fantasy is (knowing you could die any day is bound to suck the "poetry" right out of war, even for soldiers on leave in exotic foreign countries), it's what I tapped into when I heard the song.

Hearing the song two weeks ago, I realized how contrived it could sound. Part of the appeal of singing about soldiers in past wars or pirates or Cold War spies or anything else from the bucket labeled "Past" is the odd sense of innocence those people and places and times seem to retain. When Tom Waits sings about murderous carnival barkers or a man that's just a head who plays beautiful jazz piano, most listeners don't think "Thank God those freaks don't live in my time," they think: "Cool. I wish my life was as weird and exciting as the world was back in the day." The most disgusting spectacle, the most mundane horror, becomes novel and exotic because it's not like our present disasters. As much as I love the album, Neutral Milk Hotel's "In An Aeroplane Over the Sea" can never approach its subject--the horrors of the Holocaust--without a little bit of poetry, a little bit of beauty rubbing off onto it. When Jeff Magnum sings that, though the world would like to see Holocaust victims eyes "filled with flies," he'd "love to keep white roses in their eyes"--is that for their benefit or his?

What I'm trying to say is that maybe having a stupid sitcom ruin what used to be one of my favorite songs is a good thing. Instead of stirring me up with romantic notions of past wars, the song can remind me of boring old now, with its bad presidents and global warming and inane sitcoms I only enjoy because work has worn me out.

Got the Whole West Coast Doin' The Robot

2007-07-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

One of my brother's friends mentioned a few months back that his girlfriend, a Vassar undergrad, and her friends were going to have a "hyphy" party and that she had called him one night in search of more hyphy slang. She knew "Ghost ridin' the whip" and "stupid" and "scraper"...What else was there?

To me, this is the epitome of what the hyphy movement has become: the slang is more famous than the music. Besides that Mistah F.A.B. song where he samples the Ghostbusters theme and E-40's "Tell Me When To Go," what hyphy song has really made an impact outside of the Bay Area? A compilation has recently been released entitled "Hyphy Hitz" and it begs the question: what hits?

Back when E-40's "Ghetto Report Card" came out, I gave it a glowing review in my college paper. After hearing an endless line of stale E-40 tracks with beats that sounded like the "Funk" demo on a cheap keyboard, it was exciting to hear something as off-kilter and energetic as "Go Hard or Go Home" or "Sick Wid It II." It reminded me of the kind of more-is-more attitude of Cam'Ron's Dipset, though 40 and his producers preferred big squelchy synth sounds and echo-chamber bass drums to sharp strings and military snares.

But over time, "My Ghetto Report Card" has begun to sound stale. Where once the beats sounded huge and in-your-face, like (to quote Keak Da Sneak) three or four people on a car hood "trying to cave in your roof," they now sounded weak and anemic. Part of the problem may be E-40, whose flow is quick and nimble but at heart basically laid back and chill. In my opinion, a genre like hyphy needs a fiery rapper to compete with its hyperactive energy and 40 is not that rapper.

That rapper may be Turf Talk. A cousin of E-40, Turf Talk has a whiny but raspy voice that seems highly influenced by Eminem. Just like Em, Turf Talk stretches syllables like a middle schooler just learning how fun is it to talk dirty. Last month, he released his second album, "West Coast Vaccine (The Cure)," which I purchased a used copy of after a recommendation from P-Fork and Village Voice writer Tom Breihan.

Songs like "Super Star," "That's That Turf Talk," and "I'm Ghetto" have an infectious energy that makes you realize the true potential of hyphy when it's done right. "Super Star" has a merry-go-round melody courtesy of old school Bay Area producer E-A-Ski (who has switched his style up quite well from his warmed over G-funk days) that Turf rides over with an easy and bratty confidence. "That's That Turf Talk" is produced by Tha Bizness, though it sounds like a Rick Rock beat with its mix of horns and big, (there is no other word for it) farting synthesizers. The song's hook sounds like a techno marching band parading the field with MPCs and air sirens, with the crowd in the stands shouting "Turn it up!" and "Make them speakers bump!"

"I'm Ghetto," from which the title of this post is taken from, has a ringtone-ready melody of bells and (what sounds like) champagne glasses on the verses and big synth chords on the chorus. The chorus, where Turf brags that he's ghetto like "strawberry kool aid," sounds like an early acid house song, back when just the huge sound of the Roland TB-303 synthesizer was enough to make a whole song. The fact that the usual musical choice for a "I'm from the ghetto" song would be a cut up jazz or soul sample meant to signify the soul (pun intended) of the marginalized makes "I'm Ghetto" even more refreshing and fun.

Don't get me wrong: "West Coast Vaccine" is far from a classic. As cocky and charismatic as Turf Talk is, he's simply not compelling enough as a personality to pull of anything but a really good album (at least not yet). Part of me wants to hear an album from a hyphy artist that's all hyper all the time, but I wonder if that would blunt the edge of the music. Whatever my issues with the album, it's proof that there is still life in the hyphy movement.

The Scariest Movie Ever

2007-07-12T10:09:00.000-07:00

Ah, Andrew Bujalski: How does he do it?

I've been watching a lot of Bujalski's 2003 film "Mutual Appreciation" but I've yet to finish it for reasons I'll soon explain. On the surface, the movie is about a dude (Alan, played by Bishop Allen frontman Justin Rice) who moves to New York to play music and find a girlfriend, but it's actually the most frighteningly realistic portrayal of twentysomething hipsters I've ever seen. Unlike the two million other movies about twentysomethings in bands looking for love, "Mutual Appreciation" isn't look-at-me clever or tooth decay sweet or even cruelly satirical. The characters in the movie talk like real people, so much so that it gets a little obnoxious.

In one scene, Alan gets drunk and starts rambling about starting a club/space where "like-minded people" (presumably artists and musicians) can get together and be a resource for each other. His idea is annoyingly vague but his enthusiasm is endless, and when his friend Lawrence tells him he'll help out with the club if he's given a specific task, Alan gets angry and tells Lawrence he's ruining the whole project. Lawrence's girlfriend, Ellie, however, is excited by Alan's theoretical "space" and keeps talking in semi-patronizing tones about what an "amazing" idea he has.

The scene is fascinating for a variety of reasons, but I'll only talk about a few. Firstly: Alan's idea. I've heard this idea, in different forms, from at least six or seven people, all of whom were drunk at the time and as overly enthusiastic as Alan. It's a variation on the classic "We have so many talented friends--why don't we get them together and make something cool?" insight that almost everyone I know has come up with at some point. Invariably, the idea loses its luster the morning after and no one ever mentions it again, which is exactly what happens in the movie, though we technically never see the morning after.

Secondly, Ellie's patronizing enthusiasm is a dead on portrayal of the kind of insultingly "supportive" way so many people I know talk with their friends. Because she enjoys Alan's excitement, Ellie goes overboard in her praise for his idea, without actually appearing to be excited herself. At various points in the movie, Ellie refers to Alan as a "rock star," and considering he's played one show and recorded nothing more than a demo, this sounds unbelievably patronizing. Since Alan is insecure about himself and his art, all this over-the-top praise and ego massaging is bound to have the unintended effect of making Alan feel even more insecure because of the huge discrepancy between what people say about him and his own estimation of himself. To put it more simply, if you make something (a song, a poem, a painting) that you consider mediocre or worse and your friend tells you it's "brilliant," you're not only going to feel lied to, you're going to feel the soul-crushing distance between what you made and actual brilliance.

Finally, the way Lawrence explains that he needs his friend to give him a specific task to do or he's useless is note perfect. It reminds me of the way people from my generation constantly say things like "I'm a really visual learner" or "I'm a person that thinks in abstractions." In the interest of (relatively) full disclosure, this is a big pet peeve of mine. I think educated people easily have the capacity to think outside of their comfort zone and purposely use the "I'm a____" to preempt any one from challenging their point of view or way of thinking.

On the back of the "Mutual Appreciation" box, the movie is described as being about "miscommunication." I think instead the film is about a certain kind of communication favored by educated, middle class hipsters. This form of communication prizes civility and "niceness" above all else. That's not say that the type of people I'm talking about can't be rude or sarcastic or malicious, only that the default mode of conversation is low-key civility. Everything's basically chill, everyone is basically cool, a pretty good time was had by all. It should come as a surprise to no one that this sort of communication can communicate very little and "Mutual Appreciation" captures that perfectly.

I'm not kidding with the title of this post. For anyone who's spent time with people like Alan or Ellie or Lawrence, you know how painful it can be to be around them. There's something scary about watching a movie that so perfectly replicates the boredom and frustration of hanging out with boring, self-involved hipsters.

For a different perspective, read Chuck Klosterman's take on the movie.

Intelligent Dork Music

2007-07-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

Why am I suddenly into weird electronic music?

Back in high school, I had a friend who was a serious electronic music snob. Besides being a bit of a jerk sometimes (he once told me, out of nowhere, "I think you're a cool guy, just don't murder anybody because then I'll have to testify against you"), he worshiped avant-garde electronic artists like Autechre and Oval like a religious devotee. He introduced me to the term "IDM," which used to mean "Intelligent Dance Music" but now it just means the speaker is stuck in the nineties.

How IDM differs from other dance music is that you can't dance to it (except when you can). IDM can encompass such mini-genres as glitch, dub ambient, folktronica, and microhouse, depending on who you ask. It's a highly contentious genre, even to this day, and the moment you mention a few artists (the video game sounds of Plaid, the blippy low end of Black Dog, the Wyndham Hill-meets-Kraftwerk sound of The Future Sound of London, the "This sounds like a modem starting up" weirdness of Autechre), you get a bunch of "fans" jumping down your throat about what you don't know and where you can stick said ignorance. This was a daily trial on the IDM message board my high school friend introduced me to and the board eventually sucked itself into its own black hole of elitism.

Partly out of enthusiasm for my friend's enthusiasm and partly out of curiosity, I tried listening to some "IDM" and I was bored to tears when I didn't drift off into unintended sleep. Even Plaid's Bubble Bobble symphonies were only good for playing for friends and laughing at how much it reminded us of slumber parties spent playing NES. The problem I had with the music at the time was that it had no discernible structure: no hooks, no choruses, no melody you could follow through the entire song. It didn't help that my friend's favorite artists were the most experimental; he was seriously giddy when he heard that Autechre's new album at the time was made with a software in which the computer completely randomized the group's compositions. The idea of music made almost entirely by computers delighted him to no small degree.

Frankly, my vanity kept me listening, even after I had napped through nearly CD my friend let me borrow. I desperately wanted to like the music--it was so weird, so chilly, so cool. Ever since I worshiped the kids smoking cigarettes and rocking Pink Floyd shirts outside the gym in middle school, I've always wanted to be capital C cool. The kind of cool that is less about being emotionally distant and laid back and more about knowing about all the bands, the movies, the books, and the art that no one else does. Listening to weird music that sounded like machines talking to each other seemed to me the ultimate in cool, the kind of personal trait so strange and unique it couldn't help but define me for others. "Dude listens to that weird electronic music from Europe..."

I somehow thought listening to IDM would change my lifestyle. When you like music that obscure and inaccessible, I thought, you need new friends, new, cooler, more sophisticated friends with ergonomically short hair and black glasses. You need a new wardrobe, preferably from Europe. You need to buy subscriptions to glossy magazines that review Japanese free jazz and cost $11 dollars an issue on the newsstand. You need to purge your living space of useless junk and buy cold, black metal furniture.

Alas, I could not get into IDM. When I moved off to college in Olympia, I sold all my IDM cds at Rainy Day Records so I could buy all the new indie rock and pop I was getting into. When I started listening to Belle and Sebastian, my high school friend called it "pity party music for people who love to dwell in their own sadness." At the time, that was exactly what I wanted. I wanted bookish, sensitive sounding music about people too smart or too weird for everyone around them (which wasn't too far from what I wanted from IDM--a feeling of shared uniqueness and coolness with other unique and cool people).

Flash forward almost eight years. I hear Four Tet's "Rounds," an album made up of tons of tiny, sometimes noisy samples of everything from Kevin Ayers records to Bali finger percussion, for the second time. The first time I heard it, I had, predictably, fallen asleep. But this second time I heard new things, melodies and themes and patterns I hadn't heard before. Whether this had to do a liberal consumption of a certain drug in the period between my first and second listen (I'm referring, of course, to St. John's Wort) I can't be sure, but I heard it all with new ears. Suddenly discovering the music's structure allowed me to appreciate the unique mood it created. As opposed to the endless singer-songwriters and indie bands I'd been listening to, Four Tet's music didn't explain itself--his songs weren't sad or happy or bittersweet or clever; they were sad like the way the smell of leaves in the fall reminds you of loss, or happy like the odor of a roommate's cooking lifts your spirits moments before you fully smell it.

Hearing "Rounds" like that was the beginning of my ongoing appreciation of all forms of electronic music. I've come to love the way the music doesn't force an interpretation on you, or the way little changes in the music can feel like big ones if you listen close enough.

Which brings me back to my friend from high school and the Vladislav Delay album at the top of this post. My friend once brought over a VD record to play on my dad's record player. The record was full of abrupt cuts and weird percussive noises, layered over with big, sweeping chords of melodious drones. I remember my dad remarking "This makes it sound like my player is broken." I laughed, but pretended that the joke was on my dad, not my friend's poor taste in music. Two days ago, I purchased a copy of Amina, VD's 2001 album and marveled at how time had changed me enough to enjoy the sound of a broken record player.