Just now, Flying Lotus dropped a second preview track for next month’s long anticipated album, You’re Dead! The song is titled Coronus, The Terminator, and you can listen right here:
swagger
Shabazz Palaces – Live on KEXP
I must begin with a heartfelt thank-you to Kevin for sharing this with me. Thanks, Kevin!
Shabazz Palaces crafted possibly the best hiphop album of the new millennium with Black Up, something I’ve documented here and here. Aside its status as a masterpiece of songwriting and innovative production, engaging places of the heart and mind which hiphop rarely acknowledges, the album serves as the blueprint for increasingly thoughtful and fun live appearances. This particular video is the most professional and high fidelity recording I’ve seen, so despite its brevity there’s no better place to start expanding your view of the group. Familiarity with the songs is not required for enjoyment – they’re evocative, head-nodding creations in any format – yet the pleasures multiply when contrasting the live interpretations of such meticulously sculpted album cuts. The hiphop I’ve seen in person tends toward one end or another: preformed backing tracks to emulate the recorded experience, or stripped down live-band approaches. The latter are often more fun yet distance the performers from what we hear at home. Shabazz Palaces seem to cut not a middle ground, but a third path to live nirvana, mixing the laptop histrionics and physical instrumentation with an experimental eye toward carving the feeling into something as disorienting and psychedelic as the album itself.
If you haven’t heard the album you owe it to yourself to check out my writeup and listen to the full stream here.
Kendrick Lamar – Real
I’m real, I’m real, I’m really really real.
I’d heard a single or two from Kendrick Lamar over the past year, and knew I liked his voice and style but never bothered to grab his Section.80 mixtape. So anyone else who’s heard his official debut good kid, m.A.A.d. City can imagine how completely my hair was blown back in surprise: his bravura storytelling prowess, easy-like-falling cadence, all-star lineup of peripheral talent behind the mic and mixing boards; most of all, the entire album comes together in a cohesive narrative which completely justifies the subtitle of “A short film by Kendrick Lamar.” The spoken interludes are not only enjoyable but essential to wrapping the entire package up. Presented as a series of voicemail tape recordings from Lamar’s mother while he’s out on the town in her borrowed minivan, the final episode unfolds within this song, flipping aspiration to inspiration and leaving a lump in my throat.
Whether it’s the Erykah Badu-like hook and bouncing beat or the way “love” acts as a prism through which several verses are refracted, something about this track in particular allowed it to burrow under my skin and seal the wound from inside. Since Lamar is such a gifted storyteller this almost feels like a spoiler to share a song near the end… but it’s too good to keep to myself. If you haven’t heard the album yet, do yourself a favor and try possibly the best major label release I’ve heard in years.
There he is, eating cereal and sporting what looks like the exact haircut I had in 1991.
You can grab the album on Amazon, but I’m waiting for a vinyl copy.
Until The Quiet Comes Comes
Just because.
This has been out over a week and the leak for half that, but tonight, alone, listening to the proper stream on NPR, my excitement is reborn. There are details, sharp edges and vocal snapshots bursting out at me, entire stretches brimming with instrumentation I haven’t noticed. I listened to the leak ten times and haven’t heard the album like this. My thought confirmed: the vinyl leak is muffled, distant and compressed sounding. Everything’s in there, buried then rendered in high fidelity. I kept wanting to lean inward and focus on the elements I knew were inside. It’s a treat to know that what I’ll be receiving in a couple weeks is even better than what fans have been going nuts over.
Stream the entire album here:
Flying Lotus – Until The Quiet Comes
[NPR stream]
Thanks, NPR. Also a question: why can’t your player embed?
Also here is the video for first single Putty Boy Strut. Regardless of how you feel about this song, remember that with this man’s work, it’s all about context.
[Pre-order the album from Bleep, especially if you want the ridiculous collectors edition like I do.]
Colin Stetson – A Closer Look At ‘How’
I already shared about this man and his beyond brilliant ability to unleash a maelstrom of sound with one instrument and his lungs, but felt I could go deeper into showing how he does it.
This is a simple close up view of his process, without explanation. Seeing is believing…
…and because the man himself can elaborate simply and articulately about his process, breaking it down while he works, I’ll share this too.
As you can see, knowing how this feat is accomplished is a far lesser thing than the act itself. Just look at that monstrous horn!
Read my original post about his pair of astounding 2011 releases here.
Shabazz Palaces – Black Up
In this first post of 2012 I proudly present my unabashedly belated yet wholeheartedly enthusiastic response to a slice of sound that has not only dominated my listening time for months but brightened my outlook for an important piece of the future of music.
Black Up is one of the best hiphop albums I’ve heard all year (the year being 2011 but it doesn’t matter), possibly longer. I slept on this at first, honestly, because the name just seemed too hipster, too pitchfork, too much. I pictured a thousand chillwave and witch house bands lined up behind triangles and crosses, a sea of stoned faces, limpid whitewashed guitar and anonymous lazy beats. I pictured nothing interesting or worthy of my time, much less my money. I did not picture something this fucking good.
When most people think of a hiphop artist the vocals come first: style, cadence, and timbre to subject matter and storytelling. The sheer blunt force of the words themselves, inseparable from voice, embodies a delivery system of surface and substance. Crushing the underground binary of either transcending or subverting this natural order, Shabazz Palaces blow hair back with pointillistic dexterity and canny substance while folding the vocals into the dreamlike puzzle box instrumentation itself. Beatific slides like “It’s a feeling, it’s a feeling!” and “Clear some space out, so we can space out” are amplified by the very way they emerge through cloudbusting moments of clarity in the mix. The production is the most intricate and interesting I’ve heard in an impossible stretch of time. Huge and futuristic and swarming like Cannibal Ox (one of my all time favorites) but delicate and minimal in places, sometimes in the same song. Relentlessly kaleidoscopic on a track-to-track basis like Madvillain and equally playful. Taking each second as an opportunity for left turns, trap doors, and extraterrestrial launches like the best Flying Lotus material. I’m uncomfortable reducing this experience to references but they help paint a picture. Thrilling, gorgeous, head nodding and hypnotizing, worthy on its own as pure sound yet never subsuming the oft-poignant vocals, the meaning of Black Up is delivered fresh and phonetic, kinetic, poetic. I sink deeper, hearing more each time. Romantic, political, angry, meditative, militant, optimistic, futuristic, this blurs free-association and laser focus in the same moment, words and sounds in the same experience.
The duo of Ishmael Butler, of classic conscious/jazz-hop group Digable Planets (listen if you possess even a passing interest in A Tribe Called Quest, The Pharcyde, or Del La Soul; they’re probably better) and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire (of whom I’ll be honest: I have no idea where he came from), is an alchemy I’ll forever thank Sub Pop (of all labels) for bringing to my ears.
My first favorite track.
Possibly the most direct distillation of the group’s ethos, with an outright nod to the original Digable Planets album in its ascendant coda.
The full album streaming free with visuals on youtube. Nice.
I should be so bold as to say that this is the equivalent of Disco Inferno (a longtime favorite of Optimistic Underground) for the hiphop galaxy. I don’t state this lightly. I also do not often insist so fully on a vinyl purchase but in this case I must spread the word on its inner beauty: the package does not resemble the semi-anonymous visual you’ve seen floating around the internet and the top of this post.
[pick this up via Sub Pop or Amazon or Insound or Undergrounghiphop and thank me later for helping you find one of the least recognized masterpieces of the past year or so]
Albums I Missed: 2010, part 2
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.
Optimistic Underground 