It's patently absurd that Daft Punk et al are, in their words, "up all night to get lucky." With basslines this slinky and leads this hiccupy, this simply is not a matter of luck. Basically, it's a question of just how many honeys they can beat away with a stick. Backed by Nile Rodgers' instantly recognizable sleek disco and fronted by Pharrell's silky come-ons, the lead single to Daft Punk's forthcoming Random Access Memories finds the Gallic duo doing exactly what they've always done best: fashion genuinely fun dance music without an agenda. This isn't a commentary on the [...]
In their excellent year end review , Tiny Mix Tapes made quite a bit of hay about something or another called vaporwave. After chillwave and minimal wave and cold wave and dark wave and ethereal wave and plain old new wave, the -wave suffix likely produces more shudders than it does nods of recognition. And it certainly didn't help that vaporwave was alternatively know webwave or doswave. I mean, good grief! But behind this brainless designation was a statement about junk culture that was weirdly profound and undeniably catchy. You could easily find yourself listening to Mediafired's " Pixies [...]
"Let's talk about gender, baby." The Knife have digitally twisted Karin Dreijer's cooly affectless voice before, pumping it up with ProTools testosterone until it flexes and hulks like a demon. But on the nine minute freakout that is "Full of Fire," Dreijer's voice goes through a full sex change before ultimately becoming gloriously transhuman. So, yes, let's talk about gender. The Swedish brother-sister duo have always played with musical gender idioms before, but the primal sonic violence of "Full of Force" crushes them together into something that burns like a post-feminist supernova. And the video —replete with cross-dressing grannies [...]
Earlier this month, Colin Stetson quietly released a collaborative album with Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustaffson. Stones wasn't just difficult and demanding; its bellicosity practically seethed in the atonal blats and stabbing squeaks that defined the album's sound. Though they shared their names on the record sleeve, this was primarily Gustaffson's affair. Free of the tonally angry free verse of Gustaffson, Stetson, alone, wired like a madman with microphones, sounds much more mannered. The fluttery arpeggios of his best work only sound like a chaotic whirlwind of notes. Even at his most turbulent, Stetson's steady hand guides the composition through the [...]
Teith 's "Friends of Italian Opera" is life-affirming in the same way that a near-death experience is life-affirming. Call it salvation through brutality. Only by having your leg crushed by a run-away boulder can you truly appreciate a lazy stroll through the park. Likewise, those yawning synths and ascendant basslines only sound uplifting because of the deathly stomp that couches them in the mix. The quartet hides a lot of prettiness amid the squealing feedback and grinding rhythm section, beauty that doesn't circumvent the ugliness so much as rise above it. But by the time that the triumphant bass solo melds [...]
Musical collectives are a watery mirage shimmering in the desert of pop culture: they usually promise a lot more than they can deliver. Some collectives function more or less like actual bands (Animal Collective, Black Mountain, Parliament-Funkadelic), while too many others are only occasionally operational (Wu-Tang Clan, Broken Social Scene, Amon Düül I/II). And then there are some collectives that transcend the petty business of actually recording music as a unit and unite their discographies under a single aesthetic banner (Elephant 6 Collective, Dungeon Family, OFWGKTA, Native Tongues). Like any of these collectives, the Soulquarians ' discography burned supernova [...]
The future, it turns out, sounds a like velvety R&B swank from the 70s. Seven years (!) after his top-to-bottom masterpiece FutureSex/LoveSounds , it seemed as if Justin Timberlake would, again for the millionth time, recalibrate pop music by casting familiar tropes so far into the future that they seemed entirely new. Maybe that was wishful thinking from someone who listened to " My Love " and " Until the End of Time " an obsessive number of times. But it's not all that surprising that Timberlake's latest move would be another reclamation project, is it? His self-confidence with [...]
Calling it a remix is pretty generous. I might even hear arguments that it's out-and-out misleading because this is still the wobbly and anemic "Pink Matter" that started to close out Channel Orange . Just, you know, a verse by Big Boi has been surgically appended to the track. Which isn't a bad thing at all because we get weirdly inspired couplets like "Make her ass spread like the back of a cobra's/Down there in her titties like a soldier." And to even begin to suggest that this represents in any way, shape, or form an OutKast reunion [...]
In 1975, David Bowie asked, " Who can I be now? " It was an important question for the man in the mid-70s: he had burned through his alien rock star alter ego and he was shopping around for a new identity, starting to the plastic soul of his Thin White Duke persona. But the question isn't just who should Bowie become, it's who would you like Bowie to become now, after Ziggy Stardust, after Aladdin Sane, after Halloween Jack. Now , that edgy adverb, suggests that he's trying to balance audience expectations with internal truths. It's a young [...]
The last time we caught up with Phaseone about two years ago, he was dropping the trunk-rattling “ All to Herself ." As I wrote at the time, the song culminates in a tumbling fountain of an arpeggiator that sounded like a torrent of cartoon hearts gushing from someone's chest, spilling all over the dance floor, pilling up in the sticky puddles of spilled cocktails. Whatever club-inspired romance Phaseone had envisioned didn't seem to last because here we are with " It's Not Forever ," the (probably unintentional) brokenhearted sequel-of-sorts to "All to Herself." The song is balances a [...]
From the press release accompanying Grouper's new (lost) album: When I was a teenager the wreckage of a sailboat washed up on the shore of Agate Beach. The remains of the vessel weren't removed for several days. I walked down with my father to peer inside the boat cabin. Maps, coffee cups and clothing were strewn around inside. I remember looking only briefly, wilted by the feeling that I was violating some remnant of this man's presence by witnessing the evidence of its failure. Later I read a story about him [...]
With beats cut with lasers and basslines carved out of pure midnight, Nosaj Thing sits right in that sweet spot between Schlohmo's melancholy and Flying Lotus' glitchy electrojazz. Though Jason Chung certainly shares certain affinities with the Brainfeeder crowd (subtle bass manipulation, off-kilter beatcraft), his refined palate for crisply understated production makes him an different beast altogether. Though I could easily imagine throwing on some Schlohmo remixes while someone passed around the bowl, Nosaj Thing's new album, Home , seems better suited to quietly unspooling a line of thought to yourself. Chung was only 24 when Drift [...]
So says the man himself: "Django was ill without it ." Tarantino tactfully declined to use the song in Django Unchained , citing respect for Ocean's ambitious intentions behind the song. And after a quick scan of the lyric sheet, it's hard not to see that the troubadour's nuanced take on masculinity was perhaps a little too subtle for Tarantino's gory slave revenge fable. Not that Django was a ham-fisted exploration the evil that men visit upon one another; it's just that Ocean is interested in what happens to men once they become dehumanized from slavery, while Tarantino is ultimately [...]
The rich thud of the kick drum is the dead giveaway. Whatever microphone ultimately captured that magnificent thump was obviously placed there by James Murphy. And what better producer could have kindled the disco inferno burning within Pulp's five minute comeback special than the man behind DFA? The song is a decade old demo that was initially written for We Love Life , but you can sort of see why it never made it on the album. On the surface, the clipped bassline and the urgent rush of the cymbals of "After You" would have seemed glaringly out [...]
"If someone believed me, they would be as in love with you as I am." Love requires credulity. Think about it as a basic belief that a lover's words and actions correspond to some kind of abstract but nonetheless tangible reality in the most ineffable parts of a person. It's a leap of faith, really. And communicating that reality is often presented as a kind of negation (e.g. "I would die without you."). So it's interesting that Romy Croft's declaration of love is a negation of this credulity: if I was able to explain to anyone else just [...]
Telephoned's luxurious cover of Fity and Nate Dogg's " 21 Questions " is so gimmicky that it obviously suffers from no shortage of genius. Especially when you realize that Midi Mafia's Dre-biting beat has been replaced by Clams Casino's based ethereality "I'm God." And this would all be too strange to take seriously if Maggie Horn's weary vocals didn't find the aching pathos in Nate Dogg's argument-baiting refrain.
I don't know about where you live, but there's still enough of a chill in the air in Boston to justify throwing on The-Dream's smooth new love jam, "Kill the Lights," and curling up next to a warm body. While the song's production is stellar (as always), its secret weapon is Casha, a relative newcomer with an enticingly breathy voice. And when they coo, "Let me set fire to the darkness," you kind of hope that spring never bothers showing up because you're plenty warm enough.
"So you should pump this shit, like they do in the future." It's a brag line that seems particularly suited to El-P in his unique role as fabulator of futuristic hyperlyrical boom-bap. Since even before Def Jux funcrushed independent hip-hop into entirely new shapes over a decade ago, El-P has served as a production wizard whose alchemical black magic remains both spooky and beguiling. Even with the slow roll out of his own solo material (the upcoming Cancer for Cure is only his third album in the past ten years), El-P is still a story in a [...]
I woke up this morning with a plan: I was going to drink some coffee, read a substantial amount of Nicholson Baker's joyously filthy new novel House of Holes , then I was going to do some laundry and work on my own writing for a while. Those plans unraveled quickly when I noticed that Beach House had released a new song, "Myth," from their supposedly forthcoming new album, Bloom . See, Beach House has entered that pantheon of bands for whom I will stop everything. I never get around to listening to Beach House at this [...]
A song called " Climax " by Usher (and produced by Diplo!) should be the horniest jam of the year. It should be studded with colorful dots of candle wax or stained with the sweat of an overworked synthline. At any rate, it should not sound anything like "Climax" actually does. Which is exactly what makes this song so weirdly remarkable. The titular, um, conclusion is not product of a romantic evening with Usher Raymond IV; it's the stalled ending of a relationship replete with a clutching sense of desperation. Not that Usher has ever been a master at the [...]
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Album Review: Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
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[News] Kanye West to Release New Album 'Yeezus' on June 18th
