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Alejandro Ghersi, the 24 year-old Venezuelan producer Arca, is endlessly fascinating and, until now, has worked to maintain the relative anonymity of his artistry. The release of Xen, cleverly billed as his debut album by Mute, brazenly unleashed the floodgate of his carefully crafted mystique, both literally and figuratively. In preparation for the album's release, Ghersi broke his silence and discussed Xen (his tenacious and feminine alter-ego) and the intimate particulars of his own persona with several publications. But Arca's music--as with the indomitable &&&&& mixtape and the game-changing UNO-released Stretch EPs--tends to speak for itself, and Xen, more nuanced and formidable than the sum of its predecessors, is no exception to the rule.
Clocking in at 39 minutes with fifteen tracks, Xen is an evanescent sprawl of tempestuous instrumentals that alternate from frail to antagonistic, tender to terrible, pop-sensible to avant-garde. It's not an easy listen.
Opening track "Now You Know," the lengthiest album cut, is meticulously arranged, sourcing familiar textures from previous musical endeavors by the producer that reach new, profound territories. It's as if this music has been produced from the fourth state of matter, incomprehensible plasmaspheric lifeforms that drift soundlessly through space, lifetimes away.
Xen embarks on a dramatic, expansive and wordless journey. Some cuts conjure up faint images of 1980s Dario Argento film scores or the frenetic, glitch-heavy experimentalism of Björk, while clinging fastidiously to his own, wildly idiosyncratic predilections. In addition to the found sounds and field recording samples that make up this astral oddity of a debut album, Ghersi employs his voice throughout in the form of grunts, groans and guffaws, distorted beyond recognition. It's likened to the physical manipulation of Alejandro Ghersi's body on the music video for "Thievery," where visual artist Jesse Kanda (frequent collaborator and roommate) creates a ghoulish, seemingly genderless apparition out of his skanking form.
Tracks like "Sisters," "Slit Thru" and the schizophrenic lead single "Thievery" adopt percolated, reggaeton rhythms that gyrate and groove with peculiar and perturbed dance-sensible mannerisms. Conversely, the sparse, two-minute "Sad Bitch" and the cyclical whirr of "Family Violence" are provokingly disjointed, misaligned by disproportioned rhythmic configurations that sound so wrong but feel so right. If the true definition of insanity is doing something over and over again while expecting different results, then "Family Violence" is absolutely deranged. Propelled by abrasively looped string-textured phrases that rip and tear through stagnant space, the track is vilified by a humble dose of electronic distortion and synthetic embellishments that expound and intensify as the madness persists. These hacksawed motions sound like they've been programmed with laser beams; it begs to pose the question of what is real, what is actual analog instrumentation and what is being sampled and digitized to create the illusion of real strings?
Another track, "Wound," similarly utilizes string arrangements. Following the most texturally riveting relic on Xen (the electrified-wet crackle of "Fish"), "Wound" establishes aesthetic opposition in its stoic, reserved stillness. The strings make up the absurdly beautiful soundscape where Arca most explicitly reveals some semblance of humanity through a taut and tethered vocoder croon. These "strings" contribute to a lasting sense of suspension and tension that mounts toward what could only be a drop, or that moment in electronic dance music where the beat unfolds and the full kinetic potential of the track is realized. But here the drop never comes. Or it does, but through a vicious denouement of synthesized falsettos, amorphous basslines and oscillating string melodies.
Xen is a challenging record, but, by far, it's one of the 2014's most rewarding musical artifacts. Look to the disorderly recklessness of "Bullet Chained" for the most satisfying release of carefully curated chaos. Peer into title track "Xen" for some of the most violent and sensational beat constructions on the record. But elsewhere, Arca settles on a internalized despondency that's wary, vulnerable and deadly serious--most effectively pronounced on album closer "Promise," as hopelessly unresolved as it is spiritually illuminating.
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Album Review: Azealia Banks - "Broke with Expensive Taste"
Certain artists inspire certain kinds of listening. The psychic skulduggery and roiling energies of Tame Impala, for instance, might elicit subliminal insight, a slow and sensual severing of the body from the mind. The wordless melodic nuances of BADBADNOTGOOD explore more corporeal terrains, where rhythmic anomalies induce trance-like, metronomic movements--a kind of disembodied hearing through intangible touch. I've spent much of the last two years meditating on the Harlem-raised rapper-vocalist Azealia Banks and all the sensational trappings that accompany her brief, boisterous career in music and fashion, the sonic schema her idiosyncratic brand of hip-hop demands. There's an irreconcilable tension present in her music, a double-edged spectra of pop-sensibility (ranging from hardcore witch-hop to sexy electro-soul to campy world beat funk (see "Gimme a Chance")) that's both brazenly ballsy and undeniably sophisticated. On Broke with Expensive Taste, Azealia Banks evokes a kind of listening that's temporal, challenging and provocative, utterly insistent upon keeping the listener stymied and envisaged, rearing upwards and on in perpetual anticipation for the next big drop.
Azealia Banks' debut full-length release, Broke with Expensive Taste, was postponed nearly 21 months following legal complications with major label Interscope (who, after investing $2 million in the artist, dropped her earlier this year but subsequently relinquished all rights to tracks which would appear on BWET). Banks effectively self-released the record last week, with distribution granted to her manager Jeff Kwatinetz's imprint Prospect Park.
Broke with Expensive Taste is the most precise and poignant product by Azealia Banks to date, whose collective brand of music was convoluted by a string of unsystematic, sporadically released singles. The record looks beyond musical missteps like the severely underwhelming Pharrell collaboration "ATM Jam" or the hypnotic cadence and narcissistic soliloquy of "Bambi." Instead, Banks recycles the breakout 2011 single "212" and the Fantasea mixtape standout "Luxury," her most straightforward and effective showcase of velvety vocal work and quick-witted, mile-per-minute spoken word prowess (all synced to the starry-eyed and salacious beatwork of Machinedrum). The violently surging rhythms of "212," in its oral tenaciousness for all things derogatory and indecent, are every bit as relevant as the day it debuted.
Album opener "Idle Delilah" embodies all the things that initially attracted me to Azealia Banks: She's a left-field pop-rap provocateur absolutely defined by her ceaseless ferocity and unabashed weirdness. According to Twitter, she wrote the song as a fable, extrapolating upon the story of a famed slave owner in the early 20th century whose six-year-old daughter was murdered by his own slaves in an act of revenge. The following track "Gimme a Chance" employs St. Vincent collaborator Toko Yasuda, big band horn arrangements, unnecessary vinyl scratching and an unexpected meringue breakdown. Theophilus London's feature on the "JFK" is the only of its kind credited on the album--Ariel Pink provides production on "Nude Beach A Go Go" (which also appears on his forthcoming album Pom Pom)--but otherwise Banks consolidates the spotlight on BWET. Lead singles "BBD," "Heavy Metal and Reflective" and "Yung Rapunxel," whose abrasive textures provide a satisfying counterpoint to the litany of IDM productions throughout (courtesy of Lone, M.J. Cole, and Bodikka), are sandwiched strategically in the centerfold. The faux-trap-cum-Euro-house production by AraabMuzik on "Ice Princess," is striking and strangely harmonious against Banks' low-end, vicious flow: "My jargon fuck you on frigid/ Cool it down or get avalanched/ Igloo’d cold-cased and bodied/ And ice-cubed up in the lobby/ Bitch, white fox, peep the opulence…/Ice box the coolest confidence."
After all the hype and hullaballoo, the release and perception of BWET could very well be deemed underwhelming. In all its apparent eccentricity, the album still feels fraught and, sometimes, flippant. Banks' artistic limitations are defined by an inability to look past the parameters of her strangeness, a refusal to discard the very tropes and guises that cemented her role as the not-so-subversive pop-rap mogul. Hooks and verses, from track to track, blur dangerously into one another, with the artist often riffing off ideas she's already used (see the introductory sections of "Luxury" and "Miss Camaraderie"), but this record is anything but cohesive. It's a fantastic, fissured and ambitious piece of music, which demands a conscious unfastening of whatever inhibiting pop presets are programmed in our minds. Most importantly, though, Banks accomplished this feat on her own terms, without ever compromising herself or her music. Broke with Expensive Taste was well worth the wait.
Out of Sight, Out of Mind: How America Failed James Brown
It’s challenging to righteously contain the retrospective legacy of James Brown. His music—the driving force of R&B, the palpitating energies of funk that lean lax and low on the “one”—presented a radical paradigm shift to what American mainstream pop sounded like, how it grooved. It hit harder and faster, a purposive agency boasting a definitive sense of urgency. As such, the James Brown of 1964 to 1974 was the apotheosis of cool, an unequivocal inspiration for Black America motivating social and artistic change while providing millions of African-Americans with an unwavering sense of cultural identity. But by the tail end of the twentieth century, the years leading up to his sudden departure in 2006, James Brown represented a very different set of ideals in the eyes of Black America, the generation of youths raised at his steps. His legacy was diminished by a dense history of drug abuse, domestic violence and a newfound, ethically contentious stance towards race relations.
This final snapshot is what the overwhelming millennial populous associate with the James Brown Experience: It’s an absolute injustice to his wealth of recorded and live material (which spans nearly half a century) and a testament to the twenty-first century mode of pop culture consumption, where advanced technology, social networking and the manufacturing of instant journalism radically invert the private-public dynamic. People used to listen with their ears, not their eyes.
For those who did not grow up in an era when James Brown dominated the radio, the most immediate lifelines to experience the artist seem to be through antiquated hip-hop samples and histrionic film soundtracks. But the incalculable sprawl of influence James Brown imparted upon present-day R&B, hip-hop and electronic dance music is outrageously underestimated. James Brown is everywhere: in every high-pitched howl, every untz-untz, every hard bop, every pop, accented in every snare hit and made new with each shimmy and shuffle of contemporary dance.
In his heyday, James Brown was never granted the kind of critical praise he earned. Major music publications had a determinedly “rockist” approach to pop criticism, often neglecting the guileless lyrics and rhythm-based grooves of “race music,” which defined artists like James Brown and his peers. When the ubiquitous scope of his music became too much to disregard, publications tasked (primarily) white men to write about James Brown, journalists who were enamored by the exoticism and physicality of his performance, the ungainly mythology of his adolescence and rise to fame.
As James Brown grew older, I believe he grew more reflective, self-aware of how his own ascension complemented the religious folklore and extraordinary mythos proliferated by centuries of black insurrection. In his biography The One, R.J. Smith writes on how, late in his life, James Brown took to comparing himself to Moses of the Old Testament. His gospel was one to reckon with.
Brown’s boyhood, like his contemporary Bob Marley, was spent in the countryside in long stretches of isolation; his father would often be away for days or weeks at a time. He was abandoned by his mother early in life. Eventually, he moved to Augusta, Georgia and was raised in a brothel (owned by his aunt) that sold bootleg moonshine, and was arrested as a teenager for stealing clothes from a car. That’s the kind of peremptory dialogue talk show hosts of the 1960s and 70s used to introduce James Brown to the American mainstream. He was presented as an underprivileged “street nigga” blessed with the gift of song and dance and the determination to be great.
Yet by 1966, Doon Arbus (among the first female writers to confront the JBE) in the New York Herald article “James Brown is Out of Sight” had exposed new, revelatory insight. Deconstructed first-hand, in a live setting rather than retrospectively on the other side of a television set, Arbus describes Brown in “an ecstasy of agony,” precisely illustrating the exhilarating hysteria of that huge, glorious spectacle:
“It is over, this elaborate personal dream of the head and body and sweat of James Brown, who really believes in himself so fervently that the whole crowd is ready to follow him, even if he can only lead them to some private narcissist vision of James Brown. They know it is not for them to ask what it all means. All that really matters is the sheer energy of his belief.”
I have no reservations in saying James Brown was the greatest artist rock and roll has ever known--ever will know. Being an entertainer was the only successful job he ever had, and through the duration of his life he pursued music with a relentless fervor, toured scrupulously and meticulously, often recording in disparate studio spaces while on the road.
In 1969, New Yorker pop critic Ellen Willis, in her essay exploring the significance of an aesthetic disparity between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, wrote, “Rock is a socially acceptable, lucrative substitute for anarchy; being a rock-and-roll star is a way of beating the system, of being free in the midst of unfreedom.” Rock music was James Brown's way of escaping the peril of poverty: He performed so he could eat. That was his way of beating the system.
Nevertheless, as a case study, the definition of a “rock-and-roll star” presented by Willis is surely disputed by the unique phenomenon of James Brown. Yes, there were few black artists of the 50s and 60s who faced the same boldfaced kind of “unfreedom” he did. And it’s true, music and the consequence of its fame gave Brown a shot at self-emancipation. But anarchy was far from his directive. His own personal political predilections were firmly capitalist, unabashedly do-it-yourself, exemplified by his cordial relationship with former President Richard Nixon. No, it seems that in many ways, and as a concurrent trend throughout his career, James Brown’s music (even in its astonishing idiosyncrasy) sought a certain sense of conformity, an aural accordance with the common people.
Take, for instance, “Please, Please, Please.” In 1956, it was the inaugural track released by the Godfather of Soul, credited to James Brown & the Famous Flames. It’s one line, a handful of words that coil and kink in a trance-like cadence for just under three minutes. It’s an open gesture, the sonic equivalent of James Brown, hand outstretched, ready to take yours and wrench you into an inescapable groove. This 1964 performance of “Please, Please, Please” on The TAMI Show (sharing the bill with the Rolling Stones, Marvin Gaye and the Beach Boys) is nothing less than legendary.
By the concluding year of the 60s, funk had arrived. Reconfigured from the suave, sauntering R&B balladry of 1962’s “I Don’t Care,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat” introduced the world to the ugly, crude, and sensational accoutrements of funk. I’m convinced that if Mr. Brown had not come across this groove—had he not revolutionized pop music with this sweeping new sound—someone else would have. But it sure enough wouldn’t have held a candle to the therapeutic belligerence and unceasing volatility of the JBE.
For a majority of the 1960s, James Brown was highly regarded as the most important and influential African-American man in the nation. He was a cultural icon that inspired pride, hope, optimism, and pervasive positive energies; James Brown displayed more power over blacks than most politicians and activists of equal or greater public stature. But the weapon he bore was a two-pronged sword. On one hand, Mr. Brown was asked to represent an entire race, beset with centuries of violence and injustice. Conversely, as an American celebrity, this artist was bogged by specific demands from his country, possibly disturbed by the civil responsibilities ilicted from his fame. Throughout his career, he painstakingly negotiated both.
The double consciousness of African-American identity and mainstream American celebrity identity is a tenuous one, where black coolness becomes synonymous with power. The ways in which an individual handles said power is often determined by how much of it they are granted. In Questlove’s six-part expository essay titled “How Hip-Hop Failed Black America,” he ruminates on the cultural cache of blackness in White America. “Certain African-American cultural figures — in music, in movies, in sports — rose above what was manifestly a divided, unjust society and in the process managed to seem singularly unruffled,” he wrote. “They kept themselves together by holding themselves slightly apart, maintaining an air of inscrutability, of not quite being known. They were cool.”
In the essay, Questlove cites Miles Davis, Lena Horne and Sly Stone as African-American purveyors of cool, and although he never mentions James Brown by name the exposition is absolutely riddled in subversive head nods to the JBE. “Singularly unruffled” is the appearance he maintained for much of 60s and 70s, while simultaneously tapping into both the White and Black market with equal vitality. But Mr. Brown—it seems—was not a trustworthy man. Abandoned by his mother at the age of four, he never truly seemed to rise above issues of trust with his wealth of band members and lovers. James Brown’s cool, in the second half of his life, manifested as dangerous powers.
Further in the essay Questlove writes, “Taken to the extreme, cool can be sociopathic; taken to the right levels, it’s a supremely intelligent mix of defense mechanism and mirroring.” Here, in analyzing James Brown, the three words “sociopathic,” “defense” and “mirroring” speak multitudes. The entertainer experienced several distinct stylistic phases in the manner he presented himself (i.e. hot pants and moustache era J.B., afro and bellbottoms era J.B.). What’s ceaselessly interesting about James Brown, as Questlove elaborates, is how figures of Black cool “simultaneously drew the gaze of white cultural observers and thwarted that gaze.” With the ascension of James Brown, Black America was no longer submitting to the cultural constructions of White America; instead the latter was adamant in thoroughly studying the former. By 1979, though, Mr. Brown was no longer thwarting this gaze but actively and wholly submitting to it.
Thulani Davis, in her 1980 Village Voice article “J-a-a-a-ames Brown!” extracted the foils and faults of the JBE and foresaw the sustaining trajectory his life would take for the subsequent 26 years. “When I was in college,” she prefaced, “I liked to speak of his Africanness by claiming Brown was the embodiment of the phenomenon of the Diaspora.” She uses words like “narcissistic and wonderful,” “selfish and fun” to recount the marvel of James Brown, but by close of the essay she has developed her initials observations with a new lens, “While I have always loved James Brown by ignoring his unsophisticated notions about what is good for a race, I have had to keep dancing with the idea that he is not alone and that my generation did not manage to change the world (yet!).” Davis cites unfavorable quotations by Mr. Brown: “he’s told some interviewers white people are the best friends blacks ever had,” “Jewish people ‘taught’ blacks about their rights,” “blacks are ‘crippled,’” “that ‘you got to open up the farms again and put black people back to work with what they can work with—their hands.’”
Thulani Davis accuses James Brown of being “out of step with the generation raised on his steps,” describes how the provocative allure of the JBE can simultaneously seduce us and disgust us. More than Ms. Franklin, light years away from Space Cadet Clinton, Davis wrote, “James Brown, I think, takes himself more seriously than any of these people and because of that has been more difficult to deal with.”
James Brown endured his role as black cultural ambassador, but it appears that this man ultimately fell victim to the flipside, the absolute tragedy that is the failed state of the American Dream, proliferating pervasively through our culture of urgency, sensationalism and extreme narcissism.
The notion of American icons in popular culture, of a certain prolific stature, embodying this narcissism is a repeated one, seen expressly through contemporary Black artists like Michael Jackson, Kanye West and essentially every major label rap act post-The Chronic. Christopher Lasch wrote on this phenomenon in his 1979 book The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. Lasch speaks on gargantuan narcissistic personalities manifested within popular culture in particular terms: “He cannot live without an admiring audience”; “[his individuality] contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his ‘grandiose self’”; “For the narcissist, the world is a mirror.”
There were other narcissistic personalities preceding James Brown whose own lives tapered off to tragedy, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra to name a few, but the matter of race was one which was integral to observing the legacy of the JBE. He had to bear the unjust responsibility of representing an entire race of oppressed individuals. It’s only natural that it get to his head.
I refuse to believe blackness bred that narcissism. It’s incredible how history has repeated itself in that respect, artists who rise to unbelievable heights of fame and take a long, loud drop back through the stratosphere. James Brown became James Brown because America demanded as much. In the opening section of The Payback cut “Mind Power,” Mr. Brown wails with conviction, “These are crucial and critical time.” This record, the only certified gold full-length of his career, was released in 1973, when America needed the bewildering and divine entity that is James Brown to ground all the sprawling, psychosomatic madness. It’s my favorite album and not just because it taps in the mystic, supernatural force of organized sound that even Mr. Brown cannot make sense of with words (see “Time is Running Out Fast”). The Payback is the record I hold most dear because it represents a time when James Brown was a prophet, a bastion of Black idolatry, before America failed James Brown.
This year, the scintillating James Brown Hollywood biopic Get On Up was released by Universal Pictures. Produced by Mick Jagger, among others, the film’s production often strayed from historically accurate accounts of his life, veering to a more sensationalist and scandalizing portrayal of the late great Mr. Brown. Get On Up’s opening scene, in the words of one of our nation’s premiere film critics, “plays like a bad Dave Chappelle skit.” It has Chadwick Boseman depicting an early 80s James Brown, clad in a vomit-green track suit, wielding a shotgun through an office building he owns. He’s mad--mad because someone took a shit in the bathroom of his building.
“How would you like it if you came home and found James Brown takin’ a shit in yo’ toilet?” he screeches before accidentally firing off a round into the ceiling. This continues for 138 minutes.
Get On Up is a sad attempt at re-assembling the complex and convoluted past of James Brown, despite the $30 million pumped frivolously into this endeavor. Thankfully, HBO released the documentary Mr. Dynamite: The Rise of James Brown just a few months after Get On Up. This historically reconstructive doc is probably the most informative and groundbreaking portrayal of Mr. Brown, revealing previously unearthed live footage from international performances throughout the 70s. For a thoroughly enlightening education of Mr. James Brown, watch Mr. Dynamite and feel good.
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Brooklyn's native neo-soul wunderkind Nick Hakim premiered a new track from his forthcoming self-released EP Where Will We Go Pt. 2 yesterday: It's beautiful. "Lift Me Up," (originally released with Hakim as a featured vocalist on Gizmo's 2012 LP Red Balloon) strips back most of the instrumental and sonic affectations from his previous release, instead reveling in the stark sensibility of piano and a few exalting bass notes. The track boasts a definitive low fidelity--Hakim's voice, coupled with subaquatic minor chords, hangs heavy in the air as if the song was recorded outdoors in a park somewhere or underneath a highway overpass--and it only works to further assert his undeniable talents. As his voice fractures into a handful of sonorous, crystalline harmonies, just past the two-minute mark, "Lift Me Up" gains pace and power only to dissipate in seconds.
“I wrote this song about four years ago,” he told Vogue. “I was thinking a lot about a friend who had passed away the previous year. And that same year, my older brother lost two of his closest friends.” That unwavering sense of forlorn melancholy is unmistakable here, but the sadness doesn't feel quite so absolute. No, it feels like sadness on the brink of hopefulness. Where Will We Go Pt. 2 is due for release on September 16 via Nick Hakim's own label Earseed Records.
Paul White is the newest addition to the left-leaning electronic label R&S Records--noted for audacious debuts from Vondelpark, Teengirl Fantasy and James Blake (the 2010 EP featuring "CMYK")--and the lead single off his forthcoming R&S breakthrough Shaker Notes is bleak, foreboding and quite possibly the label's sexiest release of the year. The introductory guitar notes on "Honey Cats" are intrepid and leery, a slow, deliberate downward spiral into a delirious abyss of croaky saxophone flourishes and harrowing drum lines.
When the reedy voice of Paul White finally reveals itself, more than a minute into the track, it feels like a kind of life preserver resurfacing you from the depths of an unfathomable ocean. It's gruff but sensual; hypnotic and alluring, so much so that it took several listens to realize White only sings a few variations of one simple line. The whole affair seems to be pulled straight from some turbid and mind-scrabbling, David Lynchian soundtrack, like the swarthy melodies composed by Angelo Badalamenti in the 1990 TV series Twin Peaks, or, more accurately, "sounds like: 60s chick on opium lying in a room full of cushions" according to White's description of the song on YouTube. Shaker Notes is set to release September 29 and is poised to be Paul White's "most personal and sample free" collection of material yet, likely engaging with the same dark, enveloping emotions found here.
I often lay awake at night thinking the impossible: Like what if Mount Kimbie remixed a Lauryn Hilltrack, or if the legendary UK producer SBTRKT produced music for R&B soul crooner D’Angelo? In many ways this new release by my favorite Elliot City artist-producer duo Abhi // Dijon feels like the product of one of these fantastical imaginings. “Let You Know” is body moving music, the kind that takes over your senses like black magic voodoo. Mixed once again by Foxes in Fiction‘s Warren Hildebrand the tracks treads over face-melting bass flourishes and hyper-syncopated, cybertronic melodies. The only fault here lies in the track’s teasing duration, despite the fact that Abhi // Dijon‘s two previous releases were of the exact same length. This salacious groove is undercut, a mere sample or snippet of what must be the glorious imagined whole. The verses are looped as the volume wavers away from the foreground, “I just got to let you know/ Wherever you need me that’s where I’ll be,” a thirty-second comedown from a three-minute high of dizzying proportions.
The southwest England-based Art Is Hard Records consecutively release an impressive array of local garage rock acts, but the forthcoming EP from Denton, Texas’ groggy surf rock group Blessin’ will be the first American release by the DIY label. The fivesome (Alex and Austin and John and Matt and Tommy as told by social media) settle upon a blissful, dredged-up kind of slacker rock on this five-track EP Do You. Opening number “Inside Out,” the most effortlessly engaging melody on the release, begins precariously with a vacant-sounding “Uhh..” The track collects descending, blue-toned chords and watery guitar licks against the steady pulse of washboards swooshing. The lush “Inside Out” induces all sorts of starry-eyed daydreams and elevated modes of consciousness, like the tender moments preceding a calm, hypnagogic state of pre-sleep. But the song concludes with a cognizant flare: a volley of Steve Reich handclaps and an up-ended guitar line.
Do You comes off laggard and limp, a thin sheet of lo-fi obscurity veiling hollow vocals, while guitar riffs and percussion swell and mutate in form. A closer listen of this Blessin’ EP, though, warrants the discovery of strange, psychotropic sonic signatures, startling easter eggs in an otherwise consistent vat of muddled freshwater. “Green Song” showcases erratic guitar flourishes that parry the lead guitar’s listless enthusiasm with a spark of lucidity, but they sound inconspicuous and almost missable in the tune. “Splat!” features a garbled and distorted array of voices buried deep among layers of florid, carefree hooks; midway through “Velocity,” the singer discards conventional lyrics for the senseless mantra of “Choo choo choo.” EP closer “Mono,” melds bottom-heavy basslines and a frenetic inhabitance of warbled electronic distortion, a current of noisy feedback taking over on the last few notes. It’s these moments of simultaneous creative restraint and electronic adornment that make the group’s second release a significant step forward. The Do You EP will be released on cassette March 24. Listen below.
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Life can make you feel a little helpless sometimes, like the threat of some daunting, inevitable task is poised in front of you. Mocking you. For me, that task was moving out of my apartment. It eventually got done; it only took four days, six people and an unseemly amount of beer to move the vast and miniature contents of my two-year residence. I had a lot of shit. But as I unpacked said shit, sifting through my SoundCloud stream, I found this.
It might not be helplessness rendered in these disparaging minor chords and forlorn howls, but it’s something like it. Something that places you right at the center of a very specific, very real kind of melancholy. It’s what makes this rough demo “Forever Young” by Maidstone, Britain’s H I G H first release of 2014 so instantly engaging. At least for me in my peculiar-feeling state. Eventually that iridescent, lo-fi mood expounds on itself: The drums tease out the volume and tempo until they reach a calamitous plateau, colliding against the force of a brash, upward-reaching guitar riff. The names attached to the track are Conor Rowlan and Ruaidhri Fuller, who might be the sole members of H I G H. The duo’s bare-skinned production and jam-session form make for an absolutely dope listen. So get on it.
I saw the frenetic, walloping art-rockers Ava Luna for the first time on a more or less uneventful Valentine’s Day night at a Bushwick venue called The Ho_se, which was more or less a house. The bands performed in the corner of a gutted living room on the ground floor; the ceilings so low that one patron (a more or less typical hipster with the exception of his five-inch stiletto heels) was unable to stand upright. The night presented a litany of noise-pop and garage-rock, acts blurring into one another with each successive jack and coke. Then headliners Ava Luna began their set and I proceeded to lose my mind.
The Brooklyn-based five-piece have written and performed records since 2007, but their Western Vinyl released fourth studio album Electric Balloon is a revelatory statement, an extant and progressive innovation of guitar music. The album refines Ava Luna‘s already compelling elements of soul-tinged doo-wop, avant-garde jazztronica, and noise-pop; here they appear less intentional and rudimentary, a faint sense of counter-intuition instigating each roundabout decision made by Columbia composition student Carlos Hernandez. His is the pinched and polished-to-perfection male voice that coats this record, an impressive range of pitch that takes on multiple expressions and personae. It was Hernandez who provided the main creative outline of the group’s past material, but on this release he relinquishes leadership for a more collaborative creative process. ”I grew closer to my bandmates, began to see the roles of a family playing out. Ethan cooks dinner for all of us, we make lewd jokes, and then ‘after-dinner storytelling’ takes the form of playing music.” True to its synergistic conception, Electric Balloon feels like the brainchild of several pronounced souls.
Ava Luna have a tenacious propensity, especially within a live setting, for evoking the antagonistic influence of abrasive, punk-as-funk aesthetics. Any avid Talking Heads fan would find it difficult to divorce associations with Electric Balloon and the disbanded group’s anxious prog rock days at CBGB and the Mud Club. But their cited influences delve even deeper into New York City’s bountiful history of forward-thinking, genre-defying musicians. In the late 1970s vocalist-saxophonist James Chancecollaborated with Brian Eno (producer of three pivotal Talking Heads‘ albums), cultivating the foundation for his aggravated and nihilistic experimentalism. Shortly after that the South Bronx sister-clan ESG would debut their no wave, hip-hop-inspired dance music at punk clubs like the Mechanical Hall. Hernandez is closer related to the former, likely motivating the sputtering guffaw of rampant clarinets and saxophones on “Genesee,” his voice mimicking the splintering, yet tender, melodic noises of the woodwinds. Vocalist-guitarist Becca Kaufman and vocalist-keyboardist Felicia Douglass, though, are often confused as two indistinguishable facets of a swirling, sensuous whole. Their alternating ebony-ivory chirp-like hooks are aggressive and expressive like the swag-savvy ladies ofESG, but they often deviate from form as an astonishing new entity.The most obvious example is “PRPL,” a melancholy, slacker rock ballad where the female lead vocals are crisp and convincing, cascading lethargy in a wispy falsetto.
Electric Balloon acquaints the listener with an erosive, albeit expertly arranged, album opener, “Daydream” is indecisive in its laboring efforts to establish a sustaining groove. When it’s finally secured the rhythm responds with frenzied and exuberant squawks and squeals; whether the trio of vocalists are enamored or enraged by its schizoid misgivings, though, is unclear. Probably both. Ava Luna are forceful in their attempts to put you off, but in the same fell swoop they’re turning you on. Less than three songs in and you might be convinced: This is a new kind of art rock. It ain’t the shit that’s mounted on walls or suffocated in shiny glass casings, and it’s certainly not accompanied with any neat, well packaged descriptors. This is art rock you can touch and smell and, most importantly, listen to without feeling completely alienated. The kind of art rock that might fall apart in your hands if it’s handled without care. It makes the record all the more invaluable, a glaring articulation of musical and extramusical otherness.
The self-titled album by Annie Clark’s awe-inspired brainchild St. Vincent stuttered into my purview early this winter. I was unprepared for singles “Birth in Reverse” and “Digital Witness,” which trickled through my newsfeed as barrel bombs of hallucinatory shrapnel. Still lingering on her 2012 collaborative album with David Byrne Love This Giant, and its 2013 follow-up the Brass Tactics EP, I was consciously incapable of wrapping my head around this music.
It didn’t make any sense. On the surface, albeit smeared and smudged oily partial fingerprints, was tenacious and visceral pop-cum-guitar music. Beyond the glass window, though, was a scene too bright to behold. My eyes needed dilating. My senses needed stopping.
When St. Vincent was officially released this weekend, I took the record with me places. At the Laundromat, I followed orbicular color trails that made fancy shapes and lucid patterns; “Prince Johnny” pivoting and percolating against a curt, triplet hi-hat pattern. While the clothes finished drying I sat cross-legged on a padlocked, basement steel door and looked at people. Crown Heights was intimidating and hypertensive on this dappled Sunday, and Annie Clark’s schizoid falsetto seemed to empathize, “No one around so I take off my clothes/ Am I the only one in the only world?” At Super Foodtown, blood-shot and deer-eyed, I navigate the color-coordinated aisles with the angelic hooks of “Huey Newton” inundating through my skull —her oddness disproportionate but nonetheless communicable.
Before any kind of cerebral connections could be made, my body seemed to comprehend what I was hearing. I found myself dancing to this album, or rather, lurching, twitching and faltering awkwardly to it. St. Vincent is an unpredictable assault, full of self-righteous missteps and glorious ambivalence. “I’m entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones,” sings Clark, an atmosphere of binary-effected spontaneity. It’s the Wikipedia game. Pick two unrelated nouns. Start at one, end at the other—first one wins. You play through the vehicle of hyperlinks, virtual wormholes of metadata that commiserate all the things we don’t understand with the reality that we no longer need to understand anything, not really. “Feelings” lead to “flashcards” lead to “fake knife” to “real ketchup” to “cardboard cutthroats” and “cowboys of information.” Where are we now? Pigeonholed in our subconscious to a Ryan Gosling meme or another “hilarious” YouTube clip.
St. Vincent is vital for the same reasons Fear of Music and Remain in Light are paramount Talking Heads records. The album finds Annie Clark directly confronting her paranoia, reveling in the stark, unquantifiable madness that plagues our digital age minds. It’s stylistically audacious: sci-fi savvy, hip hop sensible, blues-soppy, P-Funk abiding aural collage work. And, despite Clark’s gracious media presence, the music on this album speaks entirely for itself. “People turn the TV on/ It looks just like a window,” Annie Clark lulls on “Digital Witness.” Open your eyes to listen closer. Sufficiently experiencing these songs for the first, or twelfth, time is like marijuana to your psychedelics, Molotov to your cocktail, an unsuspecting mouthful of uncooked garlic. The consequence is dynamic, maybe a little troubling, but well worth it.
In support of their tenacious debut album, Manhattan, just out this week, emerging garage rock combo SKATERS hosted their record release party at Bowery Ballroom on Monday night. The evening’s opening set came from the Brooklyn alt-punk band the So So Glos, who hyped up the crowd with an uproarious Wu Tang Clan cover upon their entrance. They followed that up with roughly forty minutes of sweaty, clobbering madness featuring lead singer Alex Levine occasionally singling out the few cross-armed, texting spectators by mimicking their disinterested actions. They were hard not to love.
SKATERS emerged from backstage to the tune of the Ghostbusters theme song in homage to the late Harold Ramis, who passed away that morning. The drum kit was mounted on an elevated platform while lead, rhythm and bass guitar thrashed exuberantly along with singer Michael Cummings. Their set ranged from boisterous, pop-leaning noise rock to downtempo, reggae-influenced post-punk, replicating the diverse fullness of their debut album. At the tail end of their set, Cummings dedicated a song to a familiar face in the crowd before erupting into a buoyant rendition of the Smiths’ This Charming Man. It came as a surprise, but it made sense that the self-acclaimed “plasma punk” group would gravitate to the popcorn riffs of that electrifying classic, given the Smiths-cum-Strokes nods in their sound. After two encore songs, one of which being the salaciously lethargic Bandbreaker, SKATERS thanked the crowd and Cummings wished his mother (seated in the balcony) a happy birthday. Also hard not to love.
For the better part of 2013, the seditiously enigmatic producer and singer-songwriter duo Rhye riveted music fans with their salacious and sophisticated debut, Woman. In support of the album, Rhye performed last Friday at Webster Hall to an engrossed crowd of motionless, enthralled onlookers.
The evening began with a brief opening set by the emerging, blusterous synth-pop act Ricky Eat Acid, fronted by Sam Ray and accompanied by a second supplementary musician. The material from Ricky Eat Acid’s debut, Three Love Songs, is a disheveled conglomeration of eerie dysphoria, large snippets of spoken word recordings, sparsely immersed with more languid, dance-oriented rhythms. The performance abated from this conglomerated approach. Instead, their set was decidedly singular, reflecting similar sentiments of turbulent melancholy.
Tracks like “I Can Hear The Heart Breaking as One” and “In Rural Virginia; Watching Glowing Lights Crawl From The Dark,” showcased extended, seemingly improvisational breakdowns, looped and distorted tapes of ambient noise and disturbingly inundating waves of calamitous guitar feedback. Halfway through their set, Ray reaches behind his table of programming equipment and cassette players, wielding a square-shaped object that distorts the reverberating melodies. Syncopated with the song’s close, Ray clicks off the small bedroom lamp that faintly lights up the stage. Whether this is a reverent nod to the 1984 Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense, or just another subtle affection of this band’s inherent oddity remains to be seen. Nevertheless, it works. When the bedroom light is doused, the music takes on a more articulated sense of urgency. Static-induced ambiance roils and swells to incredulous volumes. In its delirious penchant for vacuous, emotionally addled white noise, though, Ricky Eat Acid’s performance was spiritually reifying.
Rhye appeared promptly at 9pm, silent and austere. Obvious complications arise when replicating the dense, full-figured sound embodied throughout Woman by producer Robin Hannibal. The instrumentation varies from disembodied steel drums, poignant clarinet descants, and provocative harp arrangements. The congruent six-piece ensemble, however, was more than capable of evoking opaque soul-pop constructions with a limited but still impressive range of voices: electric violin, bass guitar, upright piano, drum set, trombone, violin, and a spare snare drum for singer-songwriter-bandleader Mike Milosh to intermittently embellish the rhythmic flow on songs like “Hunger” and “Last Dance.”
Rhye is notorious for assuming a low-profile visual presence in the media (to include his debut TV performance on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where a single, intensely luminous spotlight shielded his appearance as a hazy silhouette), so it was no surprise that the night’s show strictly prohibited photography and excessive talking. The initially bothersome restriction was quickly disregarded in lieu of the enthralling spectacle. Save for the intermittent flash bulbs directed from the balcony, most of the audience corresponded with the artist’s request. Milosh did not appear particularly shy or introverted. The stage lights remained dimmed a liquid hue of blue, enough to vaguely illuminate the faces of the impeccable band and its intrinsic vocal fulcrum. Front-and-center, Milosh seemed tentative to assume the role of lead vocalist. The majority of his efforts were directed towards conducting the band, expertly trained to their movements and languidly conducting their sonic progressions. As a classically trained cellist, it seemed all Milosh could do to refrain from delving into an instrument and abandoning his mic stand. He was most comfortable assuming the role during a performance of “The City,” a track written by Milosh eight years prior for his sophomore solo album Meme. Despite this aversion to eminence, he was no less amicable and endearing than his voice lends fans to believe, especially after forgetting the lyrics and vocally improving to one of his more widely received songs “Open.”
This Webster Hall performance interpreted Woman as a sparse, extended conception of distraught romanticism. The more ostentatiously syncopated grooves, like “Last Stand,” lacked the bombastic flare of brass instrumentation. To remedy this dysfunction, the song was lagged, triggered with an intoxicating sensation of soulful latency, while still retaining a prevailing air of funk. Certain ostensible liberties were taken with this performance, arrangements modified, diminished, mutated. The sole female member of Rhye’s touring band delivered a bewitching trombone solo on the latter half of “Hunger,” the irrefutable apotheosis of their bombastic set that sent the crowd into a unanimous uproar.
There were moments when Rhye’s performance felt inexplicably tender and exposed, more so to the observers than the players. Amidst amorous strings, alternating major-minor piano chords and submerging, groove-savvy basslines, the music would confront substantially vacuous moments of silent brevity— the dissenting eye of the storm. It was this feeling Milosh hoped to matriculate during the last of a dauntingly stunted set list, to include no encores. He ushered the crowd to an enraptured kind of communal silence for his closing song, as cathartic as it was surreal.
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Wednesday night, in support of their new album Love Letters, UK dance-rock fusion band Metronymy headlined a show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. Opening up the night was solo artist-producer James Hinton (of The Range), who teased a out a spunky, moderate-tempo set of progressive, glitchy drum and bass. Dim lighting had The Range spasming in the shadows to the tune of his own beats, filtered with a strange array of unintelligible vocal samples and cyberspace sequencers.
Metronymy entered the stage gallantly, god-like, in matching, pristine American Bandstand-era garbs. White plaster structures shield their electronic equipment from the audience, speaking to the band's stark duality of sonic landscapes. Expanding their four-piece outfit with a fifth, fresh-faced member, Metronymy expands their already infectious electro-clash sound as something hyper-technical, uniform, almost alien in its precision for perfection. Metronymy showcased their multi-instrumental inclinations, incorporating each individual voice (literal and metaphorical) as a harmonic convergence of listless melody. Even faulty piano chords on crowd-favorite "The Bay," garners little admonition, their mishaps translated as unintentional euphonic expression. The band played several songs from their forthcoming record like the minimalist, retro-tinged "I'm Aquarius" or the bombastic "Love Letters." Band leader Joseph Mount solidified the group's cogent musicality, despite leaving briefly to tend to a nosebleed and having his fly unzipped for a large duration of the show.
(In response to Everett True's piece on Collapse Board titled "Why. Music. Criticism. Still. Matters. (So. Go. Fuck. Yourselves. Spin Magazine.)")
I can remember the exact moment I realized I wanted to write about music. I was sixteen years old, about four years ago, haunched cross-legged in the upstairs bedroom of a hollow, unfurnished house, thinking, What the fuck should I do with my life? I had just moved from Iwakuni, Japan to San Antonio, Texas which was a caustic shift to say the least. Strange enough, I don't even think I was listening to music. I was definitely watching John Hillcoat's The Road, all that pallid, desolate empathy instilling within me a vivid sense of focus.
It just made sense. I had something to say. I had these warbling and expansive thoughts about sound and emotion and life, all festering madly away in the dark crevices of my addled mind. They had to be transcribed; if not, surely I would implode.
There are moments, however, when I experience a sudden pitfall of doubt, when writing about music feels like nothing more than a failed attempt to replicate the mysticism of sound. The arc of music journalism has exacerbated the capitalistic efforts of mainstream media, public relations attempts, the insatiable urge to top the charts. Most professional outlets of music journalism, in one form or another, relinquish themselves to this vicious circle of perpetual commerce. Ads. Partnerships. Song posts as fragmented, underdeveloped prose. Interviews as promotional tools. It's easy to find yourself disenchanted with all this devilish, convoluted hullabaloo.
To reclaim a sense of authority in music writing, aspiring critics as I must divorce ourselves from previous constructions of traditional "rock criticism," overemphasis on lyricism, hyper-reliance on the personality or ego of an artist, the hopeless desire to illuminate an underlying narrative. All these things are formative in the arc of music journalism, but- as the composite nature of music mutates and delineates beyond recognition with the advancement of technology- these things become superfluous, ineffective, trite.
I had the honor of hearing Lenny Kaye (music writer, record producer, guitarist of Patti Smith Group) speak during my Talking Heads class just a few moments ago. He said two things that resonated profoundly for me. 1) My generation has come to intellectual fruition learning to think like a machine, our analytical and logical processes of thinking mirroring the likeness of a computer. 2) Great art aspires to rupture definitive authority or aesthetic definition.
I admit to previously dis-servicing my craft. I've discovered a band, listened to an album or song, and had no way of transcribing my thoughts on the music other than to isolate a sense of stylistic familiarity. Frame it. Wrap it in newspaper. Stick it in box. Tie on a big red bow. This gift is without substance, sound, smell, feeling. Virtually useless.
Music is experience. Music is memory. Music only exists within the space between your ears, for as long as the vibration subsists. The same aural phenomenon developing in my mind could be at serious conflict with another's, but it in no way devalues it. Music writing should be an extension of the writer's consciousness, attempting to make sense, in written words, the singular perspective that is birthed by sonic experience. In short, I no longer want to write for other people. I write for myself.
Music criticism, even now in this confusing, helplessly anxious age of digital landscapes and imagined frontiers, serves a crucial role. The role, however, has shifted from that of a commanding, all-assuming voice (say, Rolling Stone or Spin), to that of the specialized, functional voices reverberated via the Internet. Niche. Hyper-specific. Personal.
