The Psychic Paramount – II

/ David James / 9 Comments

So I know I’ve been sluggish this year with Optimistic Underground.  I relish being able to share the music enriching my life with you.  I hope to rectify this laziness starting now, with The Psychic Paramount and their (hopeful) breakthrough album II.

I had this whole through-line about jet engines and surgical instruments and LSD and This Heat and Les Rallizes Dénudés and Miles Davis and cathartic volume levels…  but I got caught up, slack-jawed and blasting this album again.  It’s almost like a psychedelic brillo pad, carving clear my thought channels and surrendering my body to oblivion.  A therapeutic breakdown of cogent narrative, this thing blasts away the outside world and disconnects me, sets me free in a way only the most blissed out Lovesliescrushing or hard droning Boris album can.  It strikes an unknown sweet spot, defying gravity while splaying my brain with crushing heft.  Crucial to this power is the flawless production, zooming in on every microscopic detail yet capturing the panoramic magnitude these songs inhabit.  A dizzying high wire act of wide-eyed clarity, this album satisfied me in places only a fellow Swans or John Coltrane or Fennesz fan would recognize.

Second track DDB, opening with one of the more gentle passages on II, grows like marshmallows in the microwave, devouring 9 minutes in a wild-fire.

While I’m dropping names, I should mention that if you like Boredoms, Eternal Tapestry, Lightning Bolt, Fushitsusha, or anything within orbit of those bands, you will find yourself punch drunk and melting to this album.

[Released by No Quarter, the album is available at the label’s page for only $11 on cd or vinyl.  So get it there.  Listen to the free stream while you wait.]

Tuck In With… The Natural Yogurt Band

/ David James / Leave a comment

Tuck In With... Natural Yogurt Band

Living within minutes of the most exquisite record shop around – the fabled aQuarius Records – lends a handful of advantages to my evergreen quest for new music. Each time I step inside, I hear something infectious on the PA; more often than not it is truly new to me. Last time, The Natural Yogurt Band set the stage for intrigue.

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Destroyer – Kaputt

/ David James / 10 Comments

Before 2011, I had heard one Destroyer album, Your Blues.  I recalled a very baroque yet earnest ballad named The Music Lovers, and nothing else.  I thought of Dan Bejar (the sole permanent member) as part of an indie pop milieu I haven’t found interesting in years.  Thankfully, Destroyer changed and I was wrong.  Kaputt is a utopian vision of space-age late night electronic jazz pop.

 

First I’ll mention the atmosphere: as lush as a Ferrari made of diamonds, parked near a waterfall…  bathed in the neon glow of some not-too-distant future.  Every reverb-laden trumpet blast and bright synth line feels magnified, submerged in the liquid cool of Kaputt’s immaculate production.  Some have mentioned the album conjuring memories of the 80s and I can’t disagree;  I think it’s more to do with the painstaking detail of the recording than any genre the band nods toward.   It was a time, after all, when ambitious pop albums were a slightly more common sighting.

If you’re familiar with Miles Davis‘ monumental Bitches Brew, you’ll have some idea of the tone and color the omnipresent trumpet takes on as it darts through the album from beginning to end.  Muted and echoed at godlike levels, it’s an apparition as much as a driving force.  Accenting and elevating the songs, highlighting the utopian feel, it’s a major aspect in cementing this sound in memory.  Another is Bejar’s voice.  With a deliver both earnest  and cool, his affecting lyrics take impressionistic flights spiked with lump-in-throat moments which remind us: he’s not just our tour guide on this  twilit adventure, he’s sharing the story of how we got here.

This chilled out, slickly psychedelic album is polished pop of the highest order.  Crackling with an energy and intricacy unheard of in Bejar’s (former) circles, it unapologetically stands out with a crystaline picture of a time we’re not living in.  For me, it’s the future.  I’m sure this has something to do with my upbringing in the aforementioned decade; this is how the future was supposed to sound then!  You may hear the past.  Either is a fantasy wholly worth inhabiting.

If you’re like me, you may need more assurance that this isn’t the tired indie pop you may expect (or fear) it to be.  So try this:

On second thought, everyone watch that.  One of the most original, thrilling, and straight up funny music videos I’ve seen in a long time.  80’s girls with wet hair, desert mirages, and flying whales!  Wow.  That just made me like this even more.  Anyway…

[you can get this straight from label merge, or even at amazon]

Odd Future: Tyler The Creator and Hodgy Beats on Fallon

/ David James / 6 Comments

Since I actually sought this out on tv and stayed up to watch it, AND it turned out to be more than worth the time and effort, sharing seemed to be on order.  It’s Tyler, The Creator and Hodgy Beats of OFWGKTA.

So check this out and enjoy it as I have.  Several times already.  A few highlights:  Their insane energy and enthusiasm.  Tyler getting away with wearing the upside-down cross ski mask.  The song itself, fucking great even when edited.  The J-horror girl standing there doing nothing.  The gnome.  Felicia Day warily shouting “WOLF!” And of course the perma-grin final few seconds in which Jimmy Fallon carries Tyler piggyback, and a (possibly inebriated?) Mos Def shouts “SWAG, SWAG, SWAG!”

Get Based with Lil B

/ David James / Leave a comment

My last post about Lil B (Age of Information video!) ended with promise of a mix.  Well here it is. For you, your friends, even your mother: this is not only designed to get the uninitiated based in 45 minutes or less, but to properly rebuke those who think this man is all hype and no substance. Play it for them. Especially your mom.

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Albums I Missed: 2010, part 2

/ David James / 2 Comments

Here’s another set of essential 2010 albums unfortunately left by the wayside.  Witness their excellence.

  • Mark Van Hoen – Where Is The Truth

Beauty.  Just, pure fragile beauty.  Floating like a spiderweb made of static, hung with fragments of shattered dreampop.  Van Hoen, who started out in Seefeel and ferried the shoegaze & idm Locust through the next decade, knows a thing or two about prismatic blissouts.  Being unfamiliar with his past solo work, I won’t remark on how this is a more personal statement or not; I will simply say that, as a *huge* fan of Seefeel, a longtime admirer of Locust (especially Truth Is Born of Arguments – an essential document), and an eternal seeker of alluring disintegration, this album hits the spot.

  • Solar Bears – She Was Coloured In

Being taken in by the line that their name is inspired by a certain Tarkovsky film and the fact that they employed old school synths in a more pop-friendly framework than Oneohtrix Point Never or Emeralds, I nevertheless held this one at arm’s length upon first listen.  The tones grabbed me, the melodies held me, the sheer variety kept my attention from wandering, but I was stopping short of truly absorbing it.  Second go-round, I realized it’s not made to dissect the individual tracks or feel around for a signature invention, something groundbreaking to hang its hat on.  This album is one to sit back (or walk or ride or whatever) and take in all at once.  Much like Teebs’ utopian fever dream Ardour, this 50 minute excursion is built carefully out of vignettes highlighting different facets of the sound until a wholly rounded picture is formed by the end.  I can hear Blade Runner and The Neverending Story and even the Terminator at times, but I can also sense the instructive warmth of Boards of Canada, fellow Scots with a penchant for playfully distracted, unpretentious psych explorations.  Where else would we find songs titled Head Supernova,  Primary Colours at the Back of my Mind, and Neon Colony?

  • Girls – Broken Dreams Club EP

Well this one snuck up on me.  I was never a fan of the debut LP, which swam in a torrent of praise in 2009.  Some songs caught my ear but the band simply didn’t hit those pleasure centers I need to truly enjoy an album.  Playing this lengthy EP on a blizzard bound morning while making pancakes turned out to be a shining revelation, and an arresting listen.  Moving beyond their Velvet Underground, jangly garage sound into the realm of earnest, intelligent, well written pop infused with more than a little  grit and gravitas, the band has officially released one of a literal handful of rock albums which I can admire, adore, and really sink my teeth into.  Biggest highlights are the title track, a stoned lament for the fractured state of our world today, and Caroline – a tune which steps out of any boundaries the band previously ruled, into pure psychedelic wanderlust.  It reveals itself slowly (at first echoing The Smashing Pumpkins‘ deep album cut Porcelina of the Vast Oceans), unwinding like a scarf caught on a fence, until it’s stretched to the point of abstraction and hanging in the air around you.  A cloud of a hazy rock dream, tugging upward.  A great way to end an album and point to an even brighter future for this duo.

Lil B – The Age of Information

/ David James / 6 Comments

Here is the Based God with some truth.

Lil B started truly blowing up in 2010, releasing literally hundreds of youtube tracks and more than a handful of more-excellent-than-not mixtapes, each full of absolute gems which cannot be missed.  Unfortunately the deluge of material tends to intimdate the uninitiated, especially if they play a random track or two and find themselves baffled or recoiling at what they perceive.  I myself finally caved sometime in the summer and was taken in by the surreal wordplay and exquisite, twisted beats (or ambient soundscapes) his words are married to.  I was intrigued and drawn in, but always with more curiosity than love – until The Age of Information changed my mind.

This one combined some of his most prescient and observant lyrics with a laid back, psychedelic compression worthy of any spaced out Boards of Canada acolyte, orbiting a classic piano line dropping anchor for the heavily drifting wordplay.  Speaking of our generational disconnect with each other, with history, with the wider culture itself, he’s sharing thoughts imbued with far more earnest grace than originality; it’s the heartfelt truth of a young mind grappling with the very internet culture which has enabled his meteoric rise.

About that rise:  watch out for a lot more from this prolific and talented artist in the coming year – full length Angels Exodus just dropped at Amalgam Digital, and its (supposedly) massive follow up Glass Face is soon to follow.  I’m also putting together a mix, soon to appear on this very blog.  Keep your eyes peeled.  And check out Lil B at last.fm for the latest discussion and links and all that.