#I like the idea that both instruments and vocal synths are alive and they love you

[citychicken-prod]

Little 5 minute doodle of a personal headcanon, I really like the idea that vocaloids can speak to other instruments, to them music is a conversation.

[soaptunes]

Soap’s 2020 AOTY Reviews: Moses Sumney - græ

People often speak of the voice as someone’s “instrument,” and usually that’s meant figuratively, but in the case of Moses Sumney, his voice really is the key instrument of græ.

That’s not to say it’s all he uses - actually, the instrumentation on this sprawling double-album is consistently gorgeous, tasteful, and keyed tightly into the dynamics of Sumney’s soaring vocals - but his compositions center his voice astoundingly well. Genre disappears - soul, R&B, ambient, classical, and experimental electronic meld into one then completely vanish. Despite the sumptuous backings he often sings over, there’s absolutely no question of what the main attraction is. This was true of Sumney’s equally but differently stunning debut record Aromanticism as well, but where that album was often spare, restrained, and icy, græ lays the emotion on heavy. Not overdramatic, mind you, but passionate, expressive, and usually impressively insightful. Sumney’s lyrical subject matter is at once impressively varied and strikingly unified. He repeatedly addresses themes of masculinity, sexuality, multiplicative identity, and emotional isolation, but approaches them from different attitudes on different songs.

 I don’t necessarily see much of a separation between the first and second discs; they progress nicely as individual experiences and together, but i wouldn’t be able to pinpoint a major shift in the sound of græ from one to the other. The themes are the same and so is the sound palette, the second half is just a continuation of what I was already enjoying in the first half. I should mention the release method of this, though - the first disc was released in February to streaming and the second in May with the physical releases, so I do feel that at least part of the division of the discs is simple marketing. (The other part would be to loosely tie into the album’s multiplicity theme, which I’ll talk about in a second.) Sumney opens the record with a recording of multinational author Taiye Selasi describing the etymology of the word “isolation,” a recording that appears again later in an interlude cut on disc 2. This has a unifying effect, as the clip’s larger context is revealed in the second appearance. Selasi discusses the feeling of being “islanded” away from one’s loved ones and culture as a transition from from the bitter, past-relationship-focused “Lucky Me” to the heavenly “Bless Me,” which looks back on a history of one-night stands. Both songs are about a variety of emotional isolation, but without Selasi’s words to bridge the gap and make the connection explicit, the link might be lost. For once, this is a record where the interludes not only assist the flow of the songs, but address and strengthen the album’s themes. 

Of those themes, the exploration of multiplicity is by far my favorite. The idea here is that evolving past labels and identifying in many boxes can effectively make you into more than one person, and it’s explored on several tracks. The intense, fiery “Virile” sees Sumney lyrically slipping in and out of a masculine state, the instrumentation changing from scattered harps and flutes to an almost militaristic snare beat, Sumney’s angelic vocals harmonizing on top. “Conveyor” rides a stuttering vocal sample and synth sparks to compare human society to an ant colony or factory of interconnected consciousnesses, the coda interlude “boxes” spelling out much of what “Conveyor” says more plainly. On disc 2, the plaintive “Keeps Me Alive” questions, “Finding it hard to differentiate/Are my proclivities of society, or innate?” The track is a solo number with just Moses’s voice and guitar, an area that always spellbinds whenever he tries it out, given the contrast with the glorious instrumentation everywhere else. The absolute peak of both the album’s simpler tracks and the multiplicative themes, though, is “Polly,” the closing track of the first disc. Sumney cleverly blurs lines between “Polly,” his love interest, and “poly,” his own desire to split into multiple parts and his partner’s desire to experiment with other people. This is an utterly gorgeous song, the guitar lines and elegant phrasing passing over you like wind. “If I split my body into two men, would you then love me better?” he says, weeping openly in the music video.

The unity of the project’s sound despite their variance is due mostly to Sumney’s voice tying them all together, but credit is due to the star-studded lineup of producers and instrumentalists too - Thundercat has multiple recognizable basslines across the album; production credits go to FKJ, John Congleton, Daniel Lopatin of Oneohtrix Point Never, and English experimental rock outfit Adult Jazz. The sound is clean and the mixing is immaculate, every element audible but never overwhelming.

Other highlights on the tracklist are “Cut Me” and “Me In 20 Years,” two self-destructive singles styled after old-school soul with technological, glitchy twists and full-bodied orchestration. Lopatin’s hand is totally audible in the plucky, echoey, synth-punctuated “Cut Me” accompaniment, while “Me In 20 Years” swells to a rattling, steamy climax, Sumney’s falsetto drifting on top of heavily reverbed 808s and choral vocals. “Two Dogs” is a bracing, monolithic standout, cold as ice, almost resembling some of the starker cuts off Aromanticism, industrial clanking matched with piercing flute, crashing in and blinking out in response to Moses’s vocal lines. Sumney is at his most direct here, discussing frankly the disturbing deaths of two of his childhood dogs, ending a verse with the chilling line “I learned in death, we are all unified in countenance,” before moving to the song’s haunting vocal hook.

If the album stumbles anywhere, it’s in length, as by the time it reaches its end it feels like Sumney may have exhausted his bag of tricks by a little. The songs at that point, specifically “Bless Me” and the closer “before you go,” aren’t really anything we haven’t heard by that point on the album already, though of course out of context on their own they’re still beautiful. The first disc’s “Gagarin” comes to a lovely, subtly creeping synth crescendo, but the buildup to it and the comedown from it just end up feeling like padding for time. That said, there’s a near-perfect album in here with some slight paring, and grae as-is is an easy contender for album of the year, and a shoe-in for prettiest.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “Cut Me,” “Conveyor,” “Polly,” “Two Dogs,” “Me In 20 Years”

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 6, Number 8

Angel Olsen

Now half a year in the pandemic, we’re starting to see the emergence of quarantine records, whether in the trove of reissues hastily assembled to stand in for new product or home recorded projects made with extremely close friends and family or albums that are conceived and written around the concept of isolation. Music isn’t real life, exactly, but it lives nearby. And in any case, it’s still music and can be good or bad whether it’s been unearthed from a forgotten box of tapes, recorded at home without collaboration or side people or technologically gerry-rigged so that distanced partners can work together. So, as long as you all are making music, we will continue to listen and find records that move us, as the world burns all around. This edition’s contributors included Patrick Masterson, Andrew Forell, Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake and Ray Garraty. Enjoy.

+ — #playboy (Deluxe Edition) (self-released)

#playboy (deluxe edition) by +

One of the most genuinely confounding records I’ve heard this year comes courtesy SEO-unfriendly artist + aka Plus Sign fka Emanuel James Vinson, a Chicago rapper, city planner and all-around community activist who spends his time helping with the city’s Let’s Build Garden City initiative when he’s not making music (which is frequent, by the way — take a look at the breadth of that Bandcamp discography). The concept with #playboy, originally released in April but deluxed in late May, is simple: Two kids find a music machine called #playboy in their basement and start tinkering with it. Its childlike whimsy is conveyed in the song titles (“Getting the Hang of It,” “Wake Up Jam (Waking Up)”) every bit as much as it is in the music, with occasionally grating indulgences, the odd earworm and a brief appearance by borderless internet hip-hop hero Lil B that makes perfect sense in context; the kindred spirit of that community-building cult auteur is strong here. You may wind up loving this record or you may wind up hating it, but I can promise you this: You’ll be thinking about it and the artist behind it long after it’s over.

Patrick Masterson

 Actress — Mad Voyage Mixtape (self-released)

I once suggested Darren Cunningham mucks about with his music because he can’t help himself. That was about six years ago on the occasion of his purported “final” album Untitled; with the benefit of hindsight, we can see he was (like so many others, to greater or lesser consequence) just pulling our leg with that PR. Hell, he’s released two albums worth of music in July alone: The first was the mid-month surprise LP 88, which follows in the vein of his acclaimed high period as an often brilliant, occasionally frustrating patchwork of submersible beats best played at high volume with a low end. The second came at the end of the month in an m4a file shared the old fashioned way on a forum via Mediafire link, nearly an hour and a half long, and per the man himself, “All SP-303, sketchbook beats, recorded this past week [the first week of July] straight to recorder or cassette.” It feels very much like a homespun Actress mixtape and is probably best thought of as livelier accompaniment to 88 but, even still, there’s no noticeable drop in quality — once Actress, always Actress. If headier lo-fi beat tapes are your beat, this will slot comfortably in line.

Patrick Masterson

  bdrmm - Bedroom (Sonic Cathedral)

Hull five-piece bdrmm play a satisfyingly crepuscular version of shoegaze on their debut album Bedroom. Ryan Smith, his brother Jordan on bass, guitarist Joe Vickers, Danny Hull on synths and drummer Luke Irvin combine the widescreen sound of Ride with a cloak of gothic post-punk. Like the late, lamented Girls Names, bdrmm find a sweet spot where atmosphere and dynamics either build to euphoric crescendos or bask in bleak funereal splendor. Bedroom seems deliberately sequenced from celebration to lament. “A Reason To Celebrate” evokes Ride at their most anthemic, the tripping staccato driven “Happy” summons the spirit of The Cure of Seventeen Seconds before the pace drops for the second half, the songs become quieter and darker as the band finds a more personal voice. “(The Silence)” is an ambient whispered wraith of a thing, “Forget The Credits” impressively mopey slowcore. bdrmm don’t always transcend their influences, but this debut is an atmospheric treat if your taste runs to the darker end of the musical buffet.

Andrew Forell  

 Circulatory System — Circulatory System (Elephant 6 Recording Co.)

Circulatory System by Circulatory System

Nearly 20 years after its initial release, the excellent eponymous debut album by Will Cullen Hart’s psychedelic chamber-pop band Circulatory System gets a long overdue vinyl reissue. While his previous project, the undeniably great Olivia Tremor Control, tended to lean more towards classic psych-pop’s traditional tropes — hard-panned drums, loads of disorientating tape effects, wonky harmonized vocals — Circulatory System taps into something utterly uncanny. Both Signal Morning (2009) and Mosaics Within Mosaics (2014) have their moments, but this is front-to-back brilliant, conjuring a sublime atmosphere of reflective estrangement. The music is a thick, grainy soup of shimmering instrumentation, from the eerie (“Joy,” “Now,” “Should a Cloud Replace a Compass?”) to the joyful (“Yesterday’s World,” “The Lovely Universe,” “Waves of Bark and Light”), but part of the album’s magic is the way everything flows into a seamless whole. As is vinyl’s tendency, the rhythm section really comes alive here, the fuzz bass and tom-heavy drum parts booming out, with plenty of vivid details in the mix swimming into view. A worthy reissue of an essential album.

Tim Clarke

 Cloud Factory — #1 (Howlin’ Banana)

Cloud Factory #1 by Cloud Factory

Cloud Factory, from Toulouse, France, overlays the serrated edges of garage pop with a serene dream-pop drift. It’s an appealing mix of hard and soft, like being pummeled to death by pillows or threatened gunpoint by a teddy bear. “Amnesia,” for instance, erupts in a vicious, sawed off, trouble-making bass line, then soars from there in untroubled female vocals. Later, “No Data,” punches hard with raw percussion, then lays on a liquid, lucid guitar line that encourages middle-distance staring. None of these songs really up the ante with memorable melodies, sharp words or that intangible R’NR energy that distinguishes great punk rock from the so so. Not loud, not soft, not great, not bad. Cloud Factory resides in the indeterminant middle.

Jennifer Kelly

 Entry — Detriment (Southern Lord)

Detriment by Entry

Nuthin fancy here, folks. Just eight songs — plus a flexing, fuzzing intro — of American hardcore punk. Entry has been grinding away for a few years now, and Detriment doesn’t advance much past the musical terrain the band marked off on the No Relief 7-inch (2016). That’s OK. The essential formula is time tested: d-beat rhythms, overdriven amps and Sara G.’s ferocious vocals delivering the necessary affect. That would be: pissed off, just this side of hopeless. Detriment sounds like what might happen if Poison Idea (c. 1988) stumbled into a seminar on Riot Grrrl; after everyone got tired of beating the living shit out of one another, they’d make some songs. “Selective Empathy” is pretty representative. Big riffs, a breakdown, and more than enough throaty yelling to let you know that you’re in some trouble. You might recognize the sound of Clayton Stevens’ guitar from his work with Touché Amoré — but maybe it’s better if you don’t. This isn’t music for mopery. Watch out for the spit, snot and blood, and flip the record.

Jonathan Shaw  

 Equiknoxx — VF Live: Equiknoxx (The Vinyl Factory)

There’s nothing like a little roots music to get you through the sweltering summer heat, and this early July mix by Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair (half of forward-thinking Kingston dancehall unit Equiknoxx) was a personal favorite of the past month for hitting that spot. The group tends to throw curveballs at the genres it tinkers with, and Blair’s mix highlights why they’re so good at it: The crates run deep. Spanning everything from legendary producer and DJ Prince Jazzbo to in-house music fresh out the box (e.g., “Did Not Make This For Jah_9” was released in late May), Blair sets the mood and educates you along the way. Like everything else these cats do (and that includes the NTS show — support your independent radio station!), it’s hard not to give the highest recommendation.

Patrick Masterson  

 Ezra Feinberg — Recumbent Speech (Related States)

Recumbent Speech by Ezra Feinberg

Knowing that Ezra Feinberg is a practicing psychoanalyst, it’s tempting to read meaning into the name of his second solo album. But be careful to think twice about the meaning you perceive and ask yourself, is it the product of Feinberg on the couch or your own projection? His choice to name one of the record’s six instrumentals (there are voices, but no words) “Letter To My Mind” certainly suggests that there’s an internal dialogue at work, but the music feels most like a layered deployment of good ideas than an exchange of intrapsychic forces. The synthesizers shimmer and cycle like something from a mid-1970s Cluster record, resting upon a pillow of vibraphone and electric piano tones, which in turn billow under the influence of undulating layers of drums. Feinberg’s guitar leads are bright and pithy, like something Pat Metheny might come up with if he knew he was going to have to pay a steep price for every note he played. Ah, but there I go, projecting an implication of adversary process where there may be none. Might it be that Feinberg, having spent a full work week immersed in the psychic conflicts of others, wants to lay back on the couch and exhale? If so, this album is an apt companion.

Bill Meyer  

 Honey Radar — Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years (Chunklet)

Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years by Honey Radar

Jason Henn of Honey Radar has a solid claim at being his generation’s Bob Pollard, a prolific, absurdist songwriter, who tosses off hooky melodies as if channeling them from the spirit world. His least polished material glints with melody hidden beneath banks of fuzz, whispery and fragile on records, but surprisingly muscular in his rocking live shows. This 28-song compilation assembles the singles, splits, EPs and bonus tracks Henn recorded for Chunklet between 2015 and the present; it would be a daunting amount of material except that it goes down like cotton candy, sweet, airy, colorful and gone before you know it. Like the Kinks, Henn has a way of making strident rock and roll hooks sound wistful and dreamy. In “Lilac Pharmacy,” guitar lines rip and buck and roar, but from a distance, hardly disrupting Henn’s placid murmur. “Medium Mary Todd” ratchets up the tension a bit, with a tangled snarl of lick and swagger, but the vocals edge towards quiet whimsy a la Sic Alps; a second version runs a bit hotter, rougher and more electric, while a third, recorded at WFMU, gives an inkling of the Honey Radar concert experience. A couple of fine covers — of the Fall’s early rant “Middle Class Revolt” and of the Monkees rarity “Wind-Up Man”— suggest the fine, loamy soil that Henn’s art grows out of, while alternate versions of half a dozen tracks hint at the various forms his ideas can take. It’s a wonderful overview of Honey Radar so far, though let’s hope it’s not a career retrospective. Henn has a bunch of records left to make yet if he wants to edge out Pollard.

Jennifer Kelly

 Iron Wigs — Your Birthday’s Cancelled (Mello Music Group)

Your Birthday's Cancelled by IRON WIGS

As an adjective, “goofy” had gotten a bad rep in hip hop. Anything that is unusual, inventive and not in line with “keeping it real” is immediately stigmatized as goofy, weird, nerdy and bad. Iron Wigs is goofy but hold the pejorative connotations. Chicago representatives Vic Spencer and Verbal Kent team up here with Sonnyjim from the UK to do some wild rhyming. They collaborated before, but Your Birthday’s Cancelled is a complete, fully fleshed project, masterfully executed from start to finish. Instead of the usual gun busting you get a fist in the ribs. Instead of drug slinging, a blunt to activate your rhymes. Each member of the group has a distinctive delivery which makes you to listen carefully for every verse, no skipping. It’s a relief to listen to rap artists who don’t pretend they’re out in the streets while they’re at home enjoying a favorite TV series. The standout track here is “Bally Animals & Rugbys” with Roc Marciano dropping by for a verse.

Ray Garraty  

 Levinson / Mahlmeister — Shores (Trouble In Mind)

Shores by levinson / mahlmeister

Jamie Levinson and Donny Mahlmeister’s Bandcamp page indicates that they’re based in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. This goes further towards explaining their association with Trouble in Mind Records, which is located in the same county, than their music, which brings to mind something much further north. The duo’s music is mostly electronic, with modular synthesizers setting the pulse and sweeping the pitch spectrum while lap steel guitar adds flourishes and a shruti box thickens the textures. The album is split into two, with each track — one is named “Ascend,” the other “Release” — taking up one side of a 50-minute cassette. The first side trundles steadily onwards, and the second seems to bask in a glow to that never totally fades. Since there’s no “Descend,” it’s easy to imagine this music sound tracking a drive into the Canadian north, the journey unspooling under a sky that never darkens, its progress towards Hudson Bay unhindered by other traffic or turns in the road. Perhaps that’s just one listener’s fantasy of easy social distancing and escape from the present’s grim digital glare into a retro-futurist, analog dream. But in dreams we’re free to fly without being seated next to some knucklehead with his mask over his eyes instead of his mouth, so dream on, dreamers. This tape is volume one of the Explorers Series, Trouble in Mind’s projected program of limited edition cassette releases.

Bill Meyer

 Klara Lewis — Ingrid (Editions Mego)

Klara Lewis’s latest recording shows a narrowing of focus. Previously she seemed to be trying ideas and methods on for size, investigating ambient electronics or hinting at pop melody without completely committing. Given the approach to music modeled by her father, Graham Lewis of Wire and Dome, she probably does not feel the need to do just one thing, and that’s a healthy angle if one wants to stay interested and flexible. But there’s also something to be said for really digging into an idea, and that’s what she has done here. Ingrid is a one-track, one-sided 12.” Burrowing further into one-ness, it is made from one looped cello phrase, which gets filtered and distorted on each pass. The effect suggests decay, but not so much the gradual transformation of a William Basinski piece as the pitiless abrasion of a woodworker going over a plank with sander. The combination of repetition and coarsening hits a spot closer to one that Tony Conrad might reach, and that’s an itch worth scratching.

Bill Meyer

Luis Lopes Humanization 4tet — Believe, Believe (Clean Feed)

The cruel economics of contemporary creative music-making favor an ensemble like Humanization 4tet. At a minimum, the filial Texan rhythm section of Stefan and Aaron Gonzalez (drums and bass respectively) and Lisbon-based duo of Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone) and Luís Lopes can each count on having the other half of a band on the other side of the Atlantic. But any project that’s on its fourth record in a dozen years has more going for it than the chance to save on plane tickets. For the Portuguese musicians, it’s an opportunity to feel an unabashedly high-energy force at their backs, as well as a chance to drink from a deep well of harmolodic blues. And for the Gonzalez brothers, it’s the reward of being the absolute right guys for the job; it has to be a gas to know that the heft they put into their swing is so deeply appreciated. While Lopes’ name remains up front, everyone contributes compositions, and everyone gives their all on every tune.

Bill Meyer  

 Joanna Mattrey — Veiled (Relative Pitch)

Veiled by Joanna Mattrey

This solo CD, which closely follows a collaborative cassette on Astral Spirits, is only the second recording with Joanna Mattrey’s name on the spine. But Mattrey is no newcomer. The New England Conservatory-trained violist has been playing straight and pop gigs for a while. If you caught Chance the Rapper on Saturday Night Live, Cuddle Magic with strings or a host of classical gigs around New York City, you’ve seen her. But if black dress and heels gigs pay her bills, improvised music nourishes her heart. And if sounds raw enough to scrape the roof of the world nourish yours, this album is new food. The premise of Veiled is finding veins of concealed beauty concealed, and that search impels Mattrey to tune her viola to sound like a horse-haired Tuvan fiddle, clamp objects to the strings and blast her signal through some satisfyingly filthy amplification. And whether it’s a slender tune or a complex texture, the reward is always there.

Bill Meyer

  Angel Olsen — “Whole New Mess” single (Jagjaguwar)

Everyone processes a breakup differently (though, to be fair, that’s probably less true now than ever). For Angel Olsen in 2018, it meant retreating to The Unknown, a century-old church in Anacortes, Washington, that Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum and producer Nicholas Wilbur made into a recording studio. What ultimately came from those sessions was All Mirrors, but Whole New Mess is a chance to revisit that album (fully nine of these 11 songs are ones you’ve heard before; only the title-track and “Waving, Smiling” are new) in a more intimate framework — just Angel, a guitar, a mic and her reverberant heartache. The most cynical view to be taken here is that it’s a stopgap capitalizing on people’s vulnerability amid a pandemic quarantine, but it could also be a corrective for the bloat of All Mirrors, a record I listened to once and haven’t thought about since. Late Björkian excess doesn’t suit her nearly as well as the light touch delivered herein, and your interest will similarly hinge on how much Whole New Mess sounds like the old one.

Patrick Masterson   

 Ono — Red Summer (American Dreams)

Red Summer by ONO

Ono, the long-running noise-punk-poetry-protest project headed by P Michael Grego and travis, tackles the Red Summer of 1919, evoking the brutal race riots that erupted as soldiers returned from World War I. During that summer, conflicts raged from Chicago to the deep south, as white supremacists rioted against newly empowered returning Black veterans and an increased number of Black factory workers employed in America’s northern factories. Ono captures the violence—and its links to contemporary race-based conflicts—in an abstract and visionary style, with travis declaiming against an agitated froth of avant garde sound. “A Dream of Sodomy” lurches and rolls in funk-punk bravado, as travis declaims all the nightmarish scenarios that haunt his nocturnal hours, while “Coon” natters rhythmically across a fever-lit foundation of hand-drums, mosquito buzz and flute. “26 June 1919” wanders through a blasted, rioting landscape, sounds buzzing and pinging and roaring around travis’ fractured poetry. “White men, red men, Manchester town, send ‘em home, Oklahoma, send ‘em home, in a Black man house, send ‘em home, send ‘em home,” he chants, ominously, vertiginously. The center isn’t holding, for sure. The disc closes with the uneasy truce of “Sycamore Trees,” where steam blasts of synthesizer sound rush up and around travis’ vibrating, basso verses about meeting under the sycamore trees, a metaphor like the blues and gospel and nearly all Black music is full of metaphor about reuniting in a better place. Powerful.

Jennifer Kelly

 Julian Taylor — The Ridge (Howling Turtle, Inc.)

Singer-songwriter Julian Taylor does the little things well. That's not to say that he doesn't do the obvious things well, too, on his latest release The Ridge. His easy voice fits his songs, letting autobiography come with comfortable phrasing. As a writer, he tends toward the straightforward, avoiding extended metaphors or oblique references. The title track considers a particular form of life, and Taylor sticks to the tangible, singing about the stable, “Shovel manure, clean their beds, and prepare the feed for the day.” Taylor's songs make sense of the immediate world and relationships around him, but they avoid woolgathering. The album feels a bit removed from the current climate, but that's no complaint when Taylor's developed a welcoming place to visit. It isn't always easy here, but it's always companionable.

But back to those little things. Each song has carefully detailed orchestration and production. The record goes down easy whether tending toward James Taylor, Cat Stevens or something closer to country, and much of that easiness comes from the precise placement of every note. Burke Carroll's pedal steel, for instance, never exists for its own sake, but to serve the lyric that Taylor sings. The album contains enough space to feel like a rural Canadian ridge, with details drawn into to support Taylor's direct stories. The Ridge could easily go unnoticed (unobtrusiveness not being a highly rewarded trait), but its subtlety and care make it worth taking your boots off and sitting down for a minute.

Justin Cober-Lake  

 Various Artists — For a Better Tomorrow (Garden Portal)

For A Better Tomorrow by Various Artists

Compilation albums loom large in the American Primitive Guitar realm. Takoma, Tompkins Square and Locust all had larger ambitions than merely offering a sampling of wares, and to them, Garden Portal says, “hold my beer. I’ve got some collecting and playing to do.” For A Better Tomorrow started out as a Bernie Sanders fundraising endeavor. But when Bernie bailed and COVID-19 came on the scene, Garden Portal pivoted to support Athens Mutual Aid Network, an umbrella organization that coordinates aid to the underserved in this trying time. But in addition to good works, there’s some good work going on here. Not all of it is guitar-centric, but even the tracks that aren’t are close enough to the strings and heart template of the aforementioned parties to merit consideration under the same rubric. Joseph Allred’s been ultra-productive recently, so it’s actually helpful to be reminded of the spirit that infuses his playing by listening to it one track at a time. Rob Noyes’ “Diminished” takes the listener on a deep dive into the construction of sentiment and sound. And Will Csorba’s Pelt-like blast of fiddle drone, “Requiem for Ociel Guadalupe Martinez,” will put your hair up high enough to make that self-inflicted quarantine do a bit easier to execute.

Bill Meyer

  Various Artists — The Storehouse Presents (The Storehouse)

The Storehouse Presents by The Storehouse

The coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on many things. You doubtless have your own list of loss, but for the proprietors of The Storehouse, the catalog of things kissed goodbye directly corresponds to their endeavor’s inventory of reasons to be. Over the past few years, the Storehouse has invited audiences out to a West Michigan farmhouse to enjoy a potluck meal and a concert played by some musicians of note. If there had been no lockdown, listeners could have enjoyed the Sun Ra Arkestra last April. Instead, no one’s playing, and no one’s getting paid, so the Storehouse has compiled this set of live and exclusive studio tracks to sell on Bandcamp in order to benefit the musicians and the Music Maker Relief Foundation. The cause, is good, but so are the tunes. Want to hear Steve Gunn and William Tyler in sympathetic orbit? Or Joan Shelley pledging her love? Or the first hints of Mind Over Mirrors’ new direction? Step right this way, preferably on one of 2020’s first Fridays.

Bill Meyer

 Z-Ro — Rohammad Ali (1 Deep Entertainment / Empire)

On one of his previous tracks, Z-Ro admitted that he’s basically just writing the same song over and over again (that’s how meta he is now, writing songs on writing songs). While he exaggerated a bit, he was not that far from the truth. In the last half dozen years he’s been writing the same three or four songs in various combinations, reconfigurations and forms. Rohammad Ali follows the same template: haters hate him, but he’s OK and is counting his money. Multiply this by 17, and here is the album. Despite this self-cannibalizing (lots of poets did that), Z-Ro with every new album sounds fresh and far from tired. The self-repeats just fuel him. Rohammad Ali has only one rap guest, and it’s Shaquille O’Neal whose rap career didn’t jump off in the 1990s. A lack of guests only proves that Z-Ro can self-sustain without support from the outside. The only thing from the outside he needs is hate.

Ray Garraty

[grimelords]

Hello I finished my July playlist a week ago but when I went to post it tumblr was down, and then I just plumb forgot! Anyway, here it is - properly sequenced this time for a very special listening experience that seamlessly delivers you from disco heaven to black metal hell and everything in between. Also I’m thinking of making these playlists a tinyletter that people can subscribe to that comes out on an actual schedule, rather than me posting them at a random time weeks after they’re finished. Is that something you’d be interested in? Who knows. Check back next month! Anyway, here goes:

listen here

Stay Away From Me - The Sylvers: You know when you’re listening to a song and the sample is super hot but the rest is just ok, so you think to yourself well why don’t I just listen to the original instead? That’s what happened to me with Final Form by Sampa The Great. That song is good but it’s also kind of not doing enough to convince me not to just listen to this super hit by The Sylvers instead. A fun thing with this song is to try to count how many instruments you can hear because it is surprisingly densely arranged for some reason. There’s a xylophone back there going off if you listen.

Sizzlin’ Hot - Paradise: The same thing happened with this song and Sizzlin’ by Daphni. I think they were going for an Armand Van Helden style distillation of the pure essence of the song, sampling the hookiest part and speeding it up and thickening up all the percussion and all that, which can work amazingly but for me it just made me want to hear the original and so I have been all month. What’s so good about being alive now is that in most cases it’s just as easy to access music from 2019 as it is to access music from 1981 where an original copy is apparently going for $1000 on discogs. Every day I thank god for inventing mp3s and putting them on the ark.

Manaos (Canzone) - Fabio Frizzi and Crossbow: I forget how I came across this, I was going through random Fabio Frizzi soundtracks for some reason. I just love the concept of a disco song about escaping from vicious assailants. Funkily singing ‘God help us, if they catch us we all are gonna die.’ as spears fly past you.

Holding On - Julio Bashmore: I think this is one of my favourite pieces of sampling ever. The way the vocals in the background are cut they don’t even sound like vocals. They just a strange contextless textural sound that works so well before eventually revealing itself as vocals in the run before the drop. It’s just so good.

Weight Watchers - Parallel Dance Ensemble: First of all I love this disgusting bass sound. It sounds like two different indistinct bass lines playing at the same time and they both drowned. I’m also mounting a change.org petition to bring back this kind of extremely naff Tone Loc flow, it rocks.

Dance - ESG: I found this incredible band while I was looking for the rapper ESG and I’m so glad I did. Their song UFO is one of those songs that’s been sampled so many times you think of it as more of a sound effect than a song, like it comes preloaded on a drum machine everyone has or something, but it’s also a good template for ESG’s sound. Every ESG song I’ve heard so far goes like this: a straightforward beat that doesn’t change for the whole song, a functional bassline that doesn’t change for the whole song, and good old fashioned simple lyrics about dancing and having a good time that sound more like schoolyard clapping games than anything. It doesn’t sound like much but over the course of an album it adds up to this incredible sort of hypnotic post-punk funk that I cannot get enough of. It sounds like kids who have 1 idea making a whole album out of it because that’s exactly what it is and it’s great!

Crave You - Flight Facilities: I love how elementally simple this song is. The vocals are hypnotising enough so everything else just quietly supports it. The only part that stands out is the thick bass synth halfway through which makes the short sax solo at the and all the sweeter, a tiny little cherry on top.

You - Delta 5: Get a load of this band bio: “Initially inspired by the success of local heroes The Mekons and Gang Of Four, Leeds, England’s Delta 5 later emerged as one of the key figures of the feminist new wave. Formed in 1979 by vocalist/guitarist Julz Sale, fretless bassist Ros Allen and bassist Bethan Peters.” Just going to gloss over them having TWO bass players before they even have a drummer?? Absolutely amazing. I love this song because it’s such a specific, targeted fury. Imagine being the loser at your girlfriend’s gig when she launched into this one for the first time. ‘who’s got homebrew with lots of sediment?’ oh fuck that’s me ‘who took me to the Windham for a big night out?’ oh fuck that’s me ‘I found out about you’ oh FUCK

Siren - Gong Gong Gong: I love the way the bass works in this, just looping and layering different variations of this noisy, stationary riff on top of itself - steadfastly staying in the exact same place the whole song and growing in power the whole time as it sits in its stubbornness.

Changes - Antonio Williams and Kerry McCoy: This came up on my Discover Weekly and I completely fell in love with it, then I realised it’s Antwan and Kerry McCoy from Deafheaven which is extremely intriguing collaboration and fell in love even more. The vocals are so good. The pure broken-hearted anguish, and the super blunt delivery that progresses to straight up yelling by the end of it combined with the Radio Dept type instrumentation is just so powerful. This feels like it’s a song that could really be a life-changing piece of catharsis for everyone in a 5k radius done live.

Fuck A War - Geto Boys: Absolutely in love with the conceit of this song: rapping a whole song down the line to the army drafter. The incredible part being of course that Bushwick Bill would be able to dodge any draft easily, being as he was both a dwarf and blind in one eye.

God Make Me Funky - The Headhunters: I found a lot of great songs going through the samples list for We Can’t Be Stopped by Geto Boys and this is one of them. I have so much love for any song that takes its time like this: nearly two minutes to set the scene and somehow taking deadly seriously the very funny lyrical idea of desperately praying to god to PLEASE make you funky.  The way this song escalates is also amazing, moving from a hot groove that sits in place to a full-on saxophone meltdown that feels like god placing his finger on your forehead and saying ‘so you want to be funky, do you?’ in a scary voice.

Use Me - Bill Withers: Fortunately and unfortunately, because of how this song was in Anchorman and because I’ve seen Anchorman one million times I can’t listen to it without hearing the noise Ron Burgundy makes when he sees Veronica in the first few seconds. Anyway, this song is so horny. The part where he has to explain to his bro how good this shit is? Doing all kinds of weird dom shit like ‘getting him in a crowd of high class people and then acting real rude to him?’ Weird. And the escalation into the claps at BABY! is amazing, he’s just going off powered by horniness and god bless him for it.

America! I’m For The Birds - Nicolas Jaar: Unbelievably, the deluxe edition of Sirens is possibly superior to the original. It’s a whole new tracklist, new songs interspersed throughout rather than the usual ‘three new songs at the end’ and it really gives it a whole new feel. This song is my favourite of the new ones and it’s a song I had in my head for a solid week. A perfect song to sing to yourself because the lyrics are so indistinct that you just end up mumbling pleasantly exactly like he is.

Cable Guy - Tierra Whack: I’m finally catching up on Tierra Whack and everyone’s right: she rocks. The sheer restraint in these songs is amazing, they just get in and out with only the good parts and no bullshit. It reminds me a lot of To The Innocent by Thingy which is one of my favourite albums for the same reason - the economy of the songwriting just serves to amplify the feeling of it. They both have this total irreverence in the lyricism where the songs are kind of about nothing but they’re so short and heartfelt that you dig for the feeling underneath it.

No Drug Like Me - Carly Rae Jepsen: I’ve previously written that what I love the most about the Carly Rae Jepsen is how horny it is and I’d like to double down on that sentiment here. I love how slow this song is, it’s the perfect tempo between danceable and ‘fucking’.

Con Calma (Remix) - Daddy Yankee, Katy Perry and Snow: I’ve been on a european holiday for most of this month and I would like to report that across Spain, Portugal, Czech Republic, France and Germany this is the absolute song of the summer. It is completely inescapable and personally I can’t get enough. Informer is one of the greatest and strangest one hit wonders of all time (it’s also canada’s highest selling reggae song of all time and Snow is thusly named because he’s white) and I’m psyched to hear it reworked by Daddy Yankee like this. Katy Perry being on the crossover attempt remix isn’t a good sign for her new album but she kills it so maybe that’s all that matters.

Chase The Devil - Max Romeo and The Upsetters: Here’s the other half of my short lived dub phase from the end of last month. This is a good example also of how completely beguiling lyrics can still be so effective. I have no idea what he means by putting on an iron shirt but it rhymes and he’s saying it with conviction so I’m nodding!

Glass - Bat For Lashes: The new Bat For Lashes songs have got me revisiting Two Suns which is an all time great five star album and this is my favourite song from it. Maybe the most powerful opening track of all time, it does as much worldbuilding as most fantasy novels do in 1000 pages. In fact almost every line in this is a viable fantasy novel title. A Thousand Crystal Towers. The Hand Of The Watchmen. A Knight In Crystal Armour. A Cape Of Rainbow. The way she sings ‘to be made of glass’ is.. incredible. I love Natasha Khan and I cannot wait to see what she does next.

Unsquare Dance - Paddy Milner: In searching spotify for other interpretations of Unsquare Dance after getting obsessed with it last month I came across this absolutely bonkers version. It’s maniacal, it feels like you would be physically and mentally drained by the end playing it because I am just listening to it. Need a little lie down.

Gimme Some Skin, My Friend - The Andrews Sisters: My girlfriend has turned me onto The Andrews Sisters lesser known hits recently and this is the best one: a song from when high fives were a novelty that those wacky blacks over in Harlem town were inventing. Extremely odd but an undeniable banger. The thing about The Andrews Sisters is one of them was an absolute force of nature as a performer and the other two were complete wet blankets and it’s kind of funny they were together as a group for their whole career because anyone with eyes can see where the real star is. The way she sings ‘baby’ at 1:25, and that whole run really, is absolutely amazing and so much better than this extremely dumb song deserves.

Kids On The Run - The Tallest Man On Earth: The piano sound alone in this is just so beautiful. This song could be about anything at all and it would still make me cry, and luckily for me: it basically is!

King Of Spain - The Tallest Man On Earth: Good song I had in my head the whole time I was in Spain. It’s incredible that his voice is so good. It feels like if it was even the tiniest bit different, slightly rougher or tinnier he would be completely hilariously unlistenable but instead he’s amazing. Plus the fact that he leans into it with the purposefully lo-fi trebly production is just so confident you can’t help but love it.

Romeo And Juliet - The Indigo Girls: A great cover I wasn’t aware of before that I heard in this great documentary Wildwood I was watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOWxnh012J0. The way she absolutely flies off the handle and nearly tears the song down around her near the last chorus is pure power and I love people who can do that in an acoustic song without it feeling overblown, just getting totally swept up in it and taking everyone along with you.

On The Bus Mall - The Decemberists: Definitely the number one song about gay teenage prostitutes who love each other and are optimistic against the odds.  

White Fire - Angel Olsen: This song feels like a piece of dark magic. It feels like a 4am moment of clarity, speaking everything true in a five minute monotone and then instantly falling back to sleep with only a dim memory in the morning.  

Glass Eyes -JW Ridley: JW Ridley is a genius and I cannot wait to see what he does with an album. Every song he puts out seems to be better than his last. The central melody in this is just beautiful, and the whole thing has so much space in it it feels so much longer than 3 minutes. It’s like a song you can live in.

Nullarbor - Floodlights: I love how rough this song is, and driving across australia because you’ve got nothing else going on and want to rattle your own cage is a Huge mood.

Made Too Pretty (Audiotree Live Version) - As Cities Burn: I’m so glad As Cities Burn are back, because it means they get to do good shit like this Audiotree session where they absolutely killed it.

Dirty Hearts - Dallas Crane: I think I’ve put this on a playlist before for exactly the same reason: it’s a song I wake up with in my head fairly often for some reason and it’s a very fun slice of pub rock that doesn’t overstay it’s welcome.

Ruin This Smile - The Number 12 Looks Like You: Did you know The Number 12 Looks Like You have reformed after 10 years away and haven’t missed a step at all?? I’m salivating. This song is as good as anything they’ve put out before, and feels like it fits somewhere between Mongrel and Worse Than Alone which is fantastic news for me who always loved those a lot more than their earlier more explicitly grindcore stuff.

Nutrient Painting - Yellow Eyes: A special thanks to my friend and yours Powerburial for linking this song on his twitter. There’s something about the guitars in this song, in almost every riff, where it sounds like they’re playing backwards somehow. Like the structure of the melodies is backwards. It doesn’t make sense but that’s what it sounds like to me and it’s very disconcerting.

Jejune Stars - Bright Eyes: I think this an underrated Conor Oberst era, when he became a sort of buddhist for a while and wasn’t sad anymore but just observed earth from outer space instead. I also love the instrumentation of this song, Bright Eyes and blast beats a match made in heaven. Also the strange sample about pom’granite at the end is one of my favourite things ever. A very strange album to retire the Bright Eyes name on but a very good one too.

At The Bar - Dirty Three: When I was overseas I was thinking about cultural music, and Australia’s place in the world and things like that. I ended up thinking about Dirty Three who I think along with The Drones make the most distinctly Australian sounding music to me. Just the vastness they manage to conjure from such straightforward barebones instrumentation is incredible.

listen here

[stratamuzak]

Interview with Voltagehawk

STRATA: What artists in particular you are drawn to (alive or deceased) that you listen to for particular moods? Such as happy/sad/contemplative/etc… Explain why you might listen to one artist for a particular mood.

CHASE AROCHA When I want to feel inspired I listen to a lot of the different projects of Mike Patton. Be it Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Peeping Tom, or Tomahawk, the range of styles of music is so diverse that I’ve been listening for like 15 years and I haven’t gotten bored yet, haha. When I want to relax or chill, I love BadBadNotGood, an amazing jazz artist doing incredible arrangements all in a hip-hop context. It’s great! Or Ray Lynch, I really love his writing and use of counterpoint melody. Then if I’m getting hyped I put on something like Dying Fetus or Vitriol, or Maximum the Hormone. And any other time I’m blaring Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper and Sturgill Simpson.

DAN FENTON I think a lot of the time music finds my mood. Sort of more a spiritual or cosmic connection. When I was a kid my mom would make us watch musicals if we stayed home sick from school. Jokes was on her because I hated school but I loved learning musical scores and how to write dynamic parts and movements. The fact that people like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brand were also amazing actors only added to that unlikely education. I learned how to really feel music between that and the intense very bloody hymns we had to sing in church. I understand the sentiment but that shit is harder than a lot of black metal. “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb”. Hard core shit. Sorry, I digress. During the making of our most recent record which is called Electric Thunder and set for release later this year or early next (hard to navigate releases with all this pandemic shit) I listened exclusively to film scores, classical music and radio evangelists. I am not religious but I grew up in a preacher’s home and when I needed to get my creative push and anger at its peak, I listened to preachers who were clearly greed driven and motivated by the lust for power. It made my adrenaline rush in anger and it came out in the recording for sure. I am a huge fan of Hans Zimmer and Vangelis. Each of these artists move me in powerful ways. The juxtaposition of darkness and light both in traditional instrumentation and experimental synth based work. Just musical giants. When I am feeling frustrated about the social issues I see everyday in my East Nashville neighborhood I listen to KRS-One, Kamasi Washington, Outkast. A lot of protest music. I am in love with band IDLES from the UK. Such powerful lyrics tackling issues like the need for male vulnerability, equality for all and the  seemingly ironic brutal beat down of toxic masculinity. That band is great if you’re happy, mad, sad, whatever.

STRATA: Do you have a process you go through prior to writing, playing, and even performing?

CHASE AROCHA I do a lot of breathing exercises like the Wim Hof techniques. I have generalized anxiety disorder and I used to get horrible debilitating panic attacks, it helped me get into breathing and meditation. Anxiety will never go away but you learn ways to live with it and push through your panic. I think about how much this means to me and how long I’ve spent doing it, I try to see that I value myself as a person and then from that thinking I can just let go and play music. Only approaching it with love and not worrying about mistakes because that’s how we learn.

DAN FENTON The entire thing is one process. Like a heros journey of sorts. I listen and meditate everyday, I believe in a cosmic river of inspiration that flows from an energy that is and has always been. I believe if you listen hard enough and give yourself to the music the muse will send your mind transmissions that may only be a section of a song, or perhaps they are an entire album, but everyday I show up. A few years ago I read this book called The War Of Art, by Steven Pressfield. In this book he describes the invisible force he calls the Resistance. The Resistance may be things both “good or bad”, but they are anything that keeps you from showing up for your art. So I show up everyday, you can ask the dudes in the band, they receive a work tape maybe twice a week with new shit to try out. If I don’t feel that muse working I don’t force it, but I instead wait on further transmissions from the cosmic womb. All sounds crazy, but my story is crazy, so crazy makes the most sense. In the studio I have many processes. I found while recording vocals I perform better in complete darkness, I have realized how much I live inside my head and how active my imagination is and equally ADD my eyes are. So when I can’t see it brings to life the imagery and the passion of the song. I can see all those people I write about, all the landscapes, the love, lust, joy and pain. I also do some method stuff, keep things in my pockets pertaining to a character I may be portraying in a song. Wanna be Daniel Day Lewis shit.

STRATA: Your own current project, discuss the process your music went through as you built each layer. From beginning to the end of it. 

CHASE AROCHA This all started with our drummer Jarrad having a vision and going through trials and errors of finding the right people to execute that. Along the way Dan, Tyler, and I all came into the picture and that vision morphed into something we all felt was not even from us. Like we were an antenna receiving a signal and these riffs and lyrics quickly meshed into something I haven’t heard before. Part hard rock, part jazz, part punk and hardcore. All with this message of love and truth being the reason for living. To end the ones controlling our thoughts and dividing us or tribalism and greed. I feel like we made something worth listening to and that’s all I feel like you can really hope for.

DAN FENTON The self titled record that we have available now on all streaming platforms was two different profound stages in my life all in the making of one record. When we began, Jarrad and I partied a fuck ton, and I was descending into some serious personal shit with alcohol. It was bad, I couldn’t get through a day without way too high of a blood alcohol level. Before we finished vocals on the record, I stayed up one night working and drinking, perhaps I had never stopped from how many nights before, who fucking knows. Anyhow, I died for 9 minutes on the side porch of my house. Fully shut down, fucking dead. Mind you, I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t know how to lay off the bottle. Woke up in the ICU surrounded by my band, my wife and what few friends I had left. At that moment Voltagehawk became a complete family to me. I spent a stint in rehab (Jarrad drove me) and that was several years ago now. When I got out I went back to finish the record, make some amends and chase this thing out for real. So that was some info on the first record. The new Album which is a 13 song space odyssey named Electric Thunder, after our beloved Electric Thunder Studio owned and operated by our resident space wizard producer Geoff Piller, was not so dramatic. After I got my shit together and my mind cleared up I began to write everyday like a mad man. Song after song after song came like never before. I think we cut 15 songs out before we settled on the final 13. Our process as a band is often for myself or one of the other dudes to present a bare bones or often finished idea to the band and we run it through the Hawk Filter. The Hawk Filter is just the decomposition and reconstruction of every rough idea till it fits us. Which is silly to say because if we like, it we do it, not a matter of genre worship. Shit’s good, do it. Always do what’s best for the song.

STRATA: Can your music personally be an open door to breath and bend in the world of artistic exploration? In Other Words… how comfortable are you as an artist exploring other types of music and creating projects that might be totally  different than what you are creating now?

CHASE AROCHA There is so much great music in the world in so many styles, why shouldn’t we try to explore them all! I’m always trying something I haven’t done before, not always as a challenge, but I would hope it’s natural for people to do in art. We shouldn’t be the same people we were 2 years ago, let alone 10. I love jazz, Death Metal, and country music. If you can find a really fun and genuine way to blend those then that’s absolutely what you should do! Don’t be tied down to what kind of music you’re making and just make music.

DAN FENTON That’s all we do all day. Everything on this planet, and above it, and in it’s majestic seas and mountains, all these people of all the cultures of all the world and their energy and their culture all influence and musical inspiration is welcome. Our philosophy is never say no, and jump off the cliff, and pull yourself back up. Meaning: try all the musical options then settle on the one we believe is the most amazing. So much of our influence is from cinema and books, video games, you name it. I’ll pluck a support cable on every bridge I see ‘til I am dead just to see if it speaks to me. Sonically there are no fucking rules, and if you impose rules, fuck your rules. We love to create, to talk about creating and then to birth something new is beyond amazing.

STRATA: Are you open to change your style, genre even, and approach to how and what you create every time you enter a studio? Or do you find once you have a formula in place do you find it best to stay with what you know? Many times artists will change how they approach their songwriting and even their recording staff/producers.

CHASE AROCHA

Like I said before, I believe that you should just make music and with that should come constant experimentation. When we record we find sounds from all over the place. From children’s toy instruments, to skateboard wheels spinning to imitate rain. Our writing is kind of always evolving and changing. Dan is an amazing writer who literally has lyrics and melodies pouring out of his hands and face. Everyday he has new ideas and records and sends them to everyone. Jarrad is great at taking those riffs and making suggestions on how the structure could be of a song along with feel. I am obsessed with adding layers of guitars however I can, but I also write a lot and send tracks as well. Tyler is a tone junkie on the bass, filling in the bottom end and has such a great approach to being independent from the guitars with his lines. We send tracks back and forth to each other then we get in a room and flesh them out. The whole time in the process the songs are constantly changing and evolving into the sound we have. We are always open to change and never believe in the word No when discussing music and art. You try every idea and see what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes when one member has a vision of how a song should go and is trying to communicate that,  you should respect his idea and see it through. If it doesn’t work that’s okay, we tried!

DAN FENTON Voltagehawk is ever evolving. As it stands, we spend way too much time trying to pigeon hole what people will refer to our sound as. I don’t care what you call it as long as it moves you. I listen to everything from John Coltrane and Tom Waits to Napalm Death and Motorhead, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi to Kamasi Washington. IDLES and Bad Brains. If you refuse to evolve as an artist, experimenting, growing, trying new methods, all these elements then you cannot grow as a human being. Too many people are happy where they are, just okay, making the same music that their dads made and trying to cosplay some kind of yesteryear. We don’t do that shit, we’re us, that’s it. We grow, when you hear the Electric Thunder for the first time you will understand everything. If you burn some sage next to a photo of Carl Sagan while you listen to Electric Thunder, you will see the cosmic river in your minds eye. The world is full of people with a blockage in their brain. They cannot see that this bullshit we call a life is just a series of labor for hire gigs that leave us rapidly in the middle. We’re trying to break away from it all and follow our feathers, our truth, our search for enlightenment on our hero’s journey. I’ll leave you with this. Know Thyself.

[thesinglesjukebox]

JAMILA WOODS - BALDWIN

[8.20]

Her legacy is secure on our sidebar, but she clearly has more lofty ambitions...

Alfred Soto: Absorbing James Baldwin's incantatory power into musical history that encompasses soul horns and a unforced communitarian spirit, Jamila Woods remains skeptical of his legacy anyway. She understands how an influence is a menace too. [8]

Nellie Gayle: How do you live a legacy, honor a history, that's equally heartbreaking and triumphant? Jamila Woods brings brightness and joy to her reflections on African American history in the United States, without ignoring the trauma implicit in its story. "Your crown has been bought and paid for. All you have to do is put in on your head" the video quotes from Baldwin. Much like the author she named the track after, Woods will not gloss over the daily suffering and indignities of white supremacy in the US. But also like Baldwin, she's an optimist who derives happiness and hardwon joy from a history of resistance. So long as there is a vibrant culture and community whose stories deserve to be celebrated (not just told), Woods will literally sing its praises with melodies reminiscent of Bill Withers - upbeat, sunny, and heartfelt. Another Baldwin quote for Woods, one that deserves to be framed & hung up on bedroom walls in times like these: "To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I'm forced to be an optimist. I'm forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive." [9]

Nortey Dowuona: A warm, dreamlike roll of piano chords swirl with the wind as a loping bass limps alongside dribbling drums as warm bursts of horns drift past Jamila, who gently stirs the cauldron, which bubbles warmly as the kids gather around in cautious excitement. [9]

Kylo Nocom: "BALDWIN" is a perfect explanation of how the idea of (argh!) optimistic and loving resistance can (often justifiably) feel like a pointless endeavour, especially when applied to the struggles of black Americans. Poetic descriptions of gentrification, police brutality, and non-black inaction are painfully outlined, betraying a central exhaustion that lies in Jamila's doubts of her friends' and icons' messages of hope. Jamila's croon also reads as tired, perhaps unintentionally, but with the help of some tasteful vocal accompaniment the sincerity beneath her uneasiness is allowed to flourish. Despite the underlying hesitance, "BALDWIN" is ultimately inspired by a real desire to see love as a means towards building community. As for Nico Segal, it seems he was just invited to aim at my weakness towards percussive horn blasts, punctuating the lines that seem to resonate the most powerfully: "we don't go out, can't wish us away." [9]

Joshua Lu: Utterly sublime and warm, like the aural equivalent of a hazy summertime sunset, which is startling for a song with this subject matter. "BALDWIN" touches on the different ways racism manifests, bringing up not just images of black fathers dead on the streets and white women clutching their purses, but also referencing the "casual violence" in white speech and white silence. It's subtly damning, and Jamila sounds too weary to accept the solution she's been offered, to extend love to the people who will never reciprocate it. The song ends uncertainly, hanging on a cryptic line and an unsatisfying melody, as if daring the listener to provide their own resolution. [8]

Joshua Copperman: "BALDWIN" struggles with its namesake's theory that "you must accept them with love" - 'them' referring to white people - "for these innocent people have no other hope." How is love even possible, even in Woods' definition of love, with the aggressions both macro (police brutality) and micro (purse-clutching) addressed in the lyrics? Obviously, there aren't easy answers, but Woods' educated guess on surviving is not just resilience, but community. That chorus starts with "all my friends" for a reason. It's not quite as anarchic as "You can tell your deity I'm alright/Wake up in the bed, call me Jesus Christ," but it's the same eventual conclusion. Instead of defying religion, Woods defies the expectation of being respectable. That's the interesting thing about this beat too, from Slot-A, mixing more traditional R&B instrumentation like Rhodes piano and canned synth pads with trap snares and horn stabs. He takes advantage of Woods' thin voice, not only contrasting it with those heavier textures but also giving it space to breathe. Another hook of this song - there are several - is "You don't know a thing about our story/you tell it wrong all the time," suggesting that if love alone won't overcome, telling your own tale will be more than sufficient. [9]

Will Adams: So many (usually white) musicians handle the topic of racism as deftly as if it were a hot potato slathered in grease. Jamila Woods cuts to the core in a single verse, addressing police brutality, gentrification and purse-clutching casual racism. The arc of the song is balancing that anger with weariness of those who preach civility in the face of hate. If that all sounds a bit too down, Nico Segal's punctuation in the form of bright horn stabs are there to keep the message alive and resonant. [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not the most transcendent piece on LEGACY! LEGACY! (see "BASQUIAT"), but a close competitor. The jazzy production sets the groove well, and the stabs of Nico Segal's horns and Gospel-adjacent choirs fill the space beautifully. But it's Jamila herself who takes "Baldwin" from something pleasant to something glorious. She bridges romance, protest, and memory like no one else can, melding them with her sweet, pointed voice into the album's best demonstration of its thesis. [9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: "BALDWIN" is a song that finds Jamila Woods detailing the outright, inescapable racism that occurs against Blacks every day. In referencing James Baldwin, she makes clear how such fear and hatred-fueled actions have persisted to the present day. But what makes this so fascinating a song is that Woods muddies the waters; she spends a bit of time wrestling with the positivity that Baldwin espoused throughout his lifetime, finding herself conflicted by the effectiveness of such praxis. In a way, listening to this feels like a legitimate Sermon on the Mount moment, where "lov[ing] your enemy and pray[ing] for those who persecute you" comes as a shocking command instead of a spoonfed Sunday School lesson. Miraculously, "BALDWIN" doesn't end up feeling knotty and tense, but overwhelmingly triumphant. You can sense it in the gospel choir and Nico Segal's horns, but it's Woods's own silk-smooth vocals and circuitous melodies that announce her impossible serenity. Has she found truth in such ostensible cognitive dissonance, or is she too elated to be bothered by this disagreement? That internal struggle finds no conclusion here, but Woods transcends it all by being an inspiration herself. She embodies something that Baldwin had written to his nephew in 1962--a specific instruction that feels ever necessary today: "You don't be afraid." [7]

Iris Xie: With such a clear, gentle series of asks here, you would have to have an adherence to bigotry, or at least avoiding the discomfort of examining your own internalized anti-Black biases, in order to avoid considering what Woods is saying here. I think about this a lot as a queer Asian American, what my responsibility is to the project of helping not contribute and help demolish the project of anti-Blackness as enacted by white supremacist institutions and those who are complicit and facilitate them, especially when I see the amount of pain in both the news and what my friends experience. The line of "All my friends / Been readin' the books / readin' the books you ain't read" cuts deep for me especially, because I have an Bachelor's degree in Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, which is an enormous amount of privilege in itself to receive and is due to countless activist histories that made that possible. It also made me think of the sheer amount of books about queer Black feminism that I genuinely feel I've barely scratched the surface of understanding, but am always in awe of the brilliance exuding forth. All of it is already written here for anyone to read, with new scholarship and articles and media produced all the time to help digest and made accessible for the rest of us. The loveliness of this song is that in its quiet neo-soul tempos, with the subtle snares, synths, and horns, results in a vibe she is secure in itself and asks the listener to move towards Woods. Black activists have put together the work and articulated these for decades, for any of us to read. The least we can do is listen and pay attention, as a complete bare minimum. [7]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[happymetalgirl]

Bring Me the Horizon - amo

For better and for worse, this one has been a long time coming. If Sempiternal was the irritated throat fans brushed off as nothing, then That's the Spirit was their first terrifying handful of blood coughed up after ignoring diagnostics, and amo is the progression of the untreated pop infection in Bring Me the Horizon's lungs that has progressed beyond treatment. For fans uneasy about the band's trajectory in 2015, this album is no easy pill to swallow.

I've been rather critical of a lot of bands aping Bring Me the Horizon's more try-hard anthemic metalcore style since the success of 2013's Sempiternal, but for Bring Me the Horizon themselves, I've actually had at least a little bit of appreciation for the boldness and ambition with which they have seemed to try to push their brand of metalcore since their 2010 album There Is a Hell, Believe Me I've Seen It. There Is a Heaven, Let's Keep It a Secret. But with that appreciation of what they are trying to do to bolster their sound has also come with a lot of frustration when it comes to the execution, whether it be the repetitive formula on Sempiternal yielding some seriously irritating tunes whose energy only magnified their obnoxiousness, or the horrendous watering down that neutered any idea of ambition on That's the Spirit.

It has been about four years since the band's aggravating previous album, and for myself, the metal community outside the band's fanbase, and even within, those four years have been spent nervously gritting teeth in anticipation of what the band would progress toward next. And now it's here. Given the sour turn the band took with That's the Spirit, my hopes for amo were not high at all. In fact after a series of lackluster maimstream-ish releases so far this year, I was ready for the cherry to top the shit sundae with this album. That being said, amo is definitely bolder and a much more thoughtful continuation of Bring Me the Horizon's quest for pop glory, and one that is at least more determined and more comprehensive than That's the Spirit. The band finally commit to the sound they clearly wanted to make their way to, and in some ways it's good that they're not trying to cover their bases as thinly as possible like they were with their previous album. Indeed, there are a few tracks on here I enjoy quite a lot.

The band fully commit to the sounds and writing styles of Top 40 pop these days, and this album would definitely blend right in with the likes of Ed Sheeran and Shawn Mendes. I feel like I have to address my distaste for Top 40 music in general and clarify that it's not based in a simplistic, tribalistic feud I see lots of metalheads take part in, where it's the principle of pop vs. rock or mainstream music vs. outsider music that's being fought over. No, I definitely enjoy me some thoughtfully done pop music and even some indulgently tasty pop as well. What I don't like is the sterility of the music from the likes of Halsey, Macklemore, Camila Cabello, or whoever made that shit song "The Middle" selected to be the goal for pop artists to strive for to reach radio/playlist success. And then there's the despised Imagine Dragons, the only pop rock band in existence apparently, based on how much time they suck up on the radio. I know this is a sidetrack and I know that radio is not the prime outlet it used to be, but it still represents a lot of what pop trends towards these days, and it continues to set a precedent for vapid, lazy songwriting, and corporately calculated pandering. That being said, there's the occasional song I'm surprised, not so much by my enjoyment of, but of the presence of something enjoyable coming from a mainstream pop outlet, and that's what amo seems to be going for.

I gave this album quite a few listens, both to really get to know it as per usual, and because this kind of pop isn't my usual forte, and it was interesting to see how the album transformed in my eyes with each successive listen. My first time hearing it, I knew I was going into a straight-up pop album, and with the ilk of Top 40 stations as my barometer, I was actually pretty relieved and pleasantly surprised to not be slamming my head against the nearest wall for the 51 minutes it lasts. But then I remembered, "wait a minute, this is a pop album, it loves to ride a good first impression, see how it is after 4, 5, 6 listens." And sure enough, it waned on me the more I listened.

The parts that I really enjoy did rise to the top as the rest sank, but with a better understanding of this album's content and what it's trying to achieve, I end up with a lot of the same frustrations I had with the band on Sempiternal and its predecessor, just in a less heavy format/context this time. Like the band's first metalcore-departing albums, amo has some good stylistic ideas and it works well with them, but the band's inconsistent results with the repetitive formulas they emply continues to be the limiting factor for them. On the vocal front, Oli Sykes clearly channels Minutes to Midnight-era Chester Bennington all over the project, from the raspy borderline shouted melodies and overwhelmingly polished cleans, while also making a very pop-influenced use of his falsettos as well, and as much as it often teems over with blatant imitation, at least I can't complain about his execution; he's on point pretty much the entire time, which could be thanks to some production crutches, but Sykes' performances sound watertight nonetheless. The rest of the band are much more present than I thought they would be, not as drowned out in gaudy pop production (which does still become a bit too much at some points, but for the most part it's pretty tasteful and balanced throughout the album).

Songs like "nihilist blues" do well to set futuristically melancholic moods through modern electro pop instrumentals, while on songs like "MANTRA" and "sugar honey ice & tea" (a cheesy roundabout way to title the song "shit"), the band try to keep the guitar-driven energy high while blending more pop-oriented elements and performance/production techniques, and the blend is at least a refreshingly alive spin on the egg-shell-treading stlyes of this era of pop music. But the band still don't really manage to make what sounds good on paper actually sound as good as it should through speakers, churning out some annoying melodies through the overly repetitive structures that take bad pop songs from displeasing to disgusting. And these songs have some potential and some parts of them that I wish weren't wrecked by overproduction or cheesy choruses, "sugar honey ice & tea" especially has some invigorating building rock instrumentation in its verses, but the band don't really follow through on the hollow, high-pitched electro vocal-laden chorus. But then there are the songs that (I think) don't really have any redeeming qualities.

The songs where Bring Me the Horizon really just lean all the way into this new role as a prospective pop act are the ones where they of course fall into the styles' predictable pitfalls. Straightforward pop numbers like "mother tongue" and "medicine" channel kiddish lyrics about love and embodying vindictiveness respectively through bland, unimaginative instrumentation. Another track, "in the dark", runs in kind of the same vein of unadultered pop with Oli Sykes doing his best Shawn Mendes impersonation, but is at least a little bit more soulful and less robotic.

Back in the gray area is the song "heavy metal", which takes aim at the attitudes of discontented fans being mad at the band for continuing to shift styles. I understand that there are definitely a lot of stubborn people willing to let that be sufficient justification for their reasons for lampooning the band's change in style, but there are plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about this new direction that lots of other people are articulating that the band could have addressed instead of minimizing the criticism surrounding them to the reductive basement-dweller strawman. Instrumentally though, it is one of the heavier songs on the album, ending with the album's only screamed breakdown, as short as it is.

As far as highlights go, the song "why you gotta kick me when i'm down?" is a convincing electronic banger that finds low-register synths mimicking the crunch of the guitar the band usually uses, and doing so well. Lyrically it oozes of the same kind of inability to accept criticism as "heavy metal", but at least this song's fierce potency makes a good case for the band's being above the type of simplistic criticism they lament. The song "wonderful life" is by far the best song on the album with its gritty electro-nu metal guitar groove and its anthemic vocal melody in the chorus raising a defeatist toast to growing old and burning out. The pop influences are still easily palpable, but taking a support role rather than the lead, with the band driving the song with the down-tuned metal riffage they do well that made Suicide Season and the best parts of Sempiternal.

For what could have been the definitive nail in the coffin for a lot of people like me who hated That's the Spirit, amo is definitely a mixed bag in classic Bring Me the Horizon fashion, but that sure is a lot better than the torturous train wreck I was expecting (especially after hearing "mother tongue" and "medicine" as preliminary singles), and it at least shows that this band does indeed have the potential to do well in this metal-flavored pop niche they're trying to carve out, and by all means I would love for them to do well with it. I think it is important for metal to continue to make good entry-level material for the new generations, and entry-level material that immersed fans can bond with new fans over as well and for younger generations to be able to look back at fondly after diving deep into the wonderful world of metal music. I definitely don't think amo is quite that album, but it is a gateway, and it does suggest that somewhere in Bring Me the Horizon's collective creative potential exists that album, which only tenacity and further perfection of this style they've arrived at can uncover.

better than Halsey/10

[major-music-project]

Major Music Project Description

For my final major music project, I will be creating a full length album in the genre of Synthwave. Synthwave is a genre that I have a lot of love for and also a lot of experience in when it comes to listening, writing, and producing music. I will aim for around ten songs on the album, with the album length being around half an hour to forty five minutes. All of the instruments I will be using will be electronic synths and drum machines, with the exception of human vocals and potentially some guitar work in the form of guitar solos. Everything will be recorded, mixed, and mastered by myself without the help of anyone else.

Below is my work in progress folder. Here I store all of the ideas I have for songs, whether it is full demos of just random hooks and riffs. It isn’t the most organised folder but it helps a lot when I feel like I’m stuck in the writing progress of a song as I have a backlog of random ideas I had that I can look through and get inspiration from. Some of these ideas have also been the starting points of full songs I have produced.

Below is what a typical project session will look like when working on it using the DAW Reaper. I have a template setup that I like to use when creating synthwave music as it already has all of my instruments setup with the correct effects and plugins, such as EQ, reverb, compression, flangers, etc. This allows me to quickly get into the writing and recording process without having to worry about setting everything up first, and allows for consistency of sound between different songs. Of course, I’m always adding new instruments and settings to my songs as my ideas and sound change and evolve, but this template is always a good starting point and a massive help in the songwriting process.

The TyrellN6 synthesiser is the main synthesiser I use when creating synthwave. It has a lot of really useful presets with lots of different sounds and instruments programmed into it, but it still allows me to fine tune everything on the synthesiser itself to really get the sound that I want for my music. 

I also use a variety of different plugins to get the exact sound I’m looking for. This includes using EQ, compression, reverb, flangers, and delays, some of which you can see below.

In terms of my inspiration, I take a lot of inspiration from retro futurism themes as well as the past in general, mainly the 1980s. Classic films such as Blade Runner and its soundtrack composed by Vangelis, as well as a lot of John Carpenter movies and soundtracks such as The Thing and Halloween, all played a pivotal part in fuelling me with inspiration when it comes to the atmosphere I want my music to give off.

The Synthwave artists Xennon and Gunship also give me a lot of inspiration for the way I want my music to sound, especially the sounds of the instruments. These two artists are at the forefront of Synthwave music and create incredible music that transports you to a different time and space entirely and I take a lot of inspiration from that.

When creating my music, it is very important for me to have a clear target audience in mind as I want my music to be able to reach a certain niche of listeners that I know will appreciate the sort of music I am producing.

The obvious target audience for my music is of course Synthwave and electronic music fans, as my music can be classed as Synthwave and is very electronic based. However, I also want to target fans of classic 80s Sci-Fi and Horror movies such as Aliens, The Thing, Halloween, Friday the 13th, etc. as well as retro video game enthusiast. I would class myself as both a retro video game and classic 80s movies fan and want to create a type of music that I myself would enjoy listening to; the type of music that has the ability to transport you back in time and space to a different place altogether and make you feel nostalgic for a time that you might not have even been alive to experience yourself. Music is an incredible tool that allows the listener to transport themselves away from their current surroundings and that’s what I aim to do with my music.

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 24/10/2020 (Digga D, Justin Bieber, benny blanco)

Internet Money’s “Lemonade” featuring Don Toliver, NAV and Gunna finally hit #1 on the UK Singles Chart, and that’s today’s #1. Anyone else find it funny that NAV has a #1 hit in, well, any country? Anyway, welcome to REVIEWING THE CHARTS.

Dropouts & Returning Entries

A lot of our new arrivals from yesterday are gone entirely, including “Parlez-Vous Anglais” by Headie One featuring Aitch, mostly because only the three highest-performing songs from an artist can be in the chart at one time, so “Only You Freestyle” with Drake returned at #44. As well as that, other notable drop-outs from the UK Top 75 are “Mr. Right Now” by 21 Savage and Metro Boomin featuring Drake, “5AM” by M Huncho and Nafe Smallz exiting pretty prematurely, “Over Now” by Calvin Harris and the Weeknd, “Wishing Well” by the late Juice WRLD lasting longer than I expected, and “Heaven on My Mind” by Becky Hill and Segala. The biggest fall for the week is “Laugh Now Cry Later” by Drake and Lil Durk getting hit with the streaming cut down from #18 and #42 and the biggest is for last week’s debut “i miss u” by Jax Jones and Au/Ra up from #53 to #39. The only other returning entry we have is that garbage “Papi Chulo” song by Octavian and Skepta back for seemingly no reason. That doesn’t mean we don’t have 11 new arrivals, though, so let’s get started.

NEW ARRIVALS

#69 – “Train Wreck” – James Arthur

Produced by Adam Argyle

X Factor winner and insecure homophone who somehow pissed Frankie Boyle off on Twitter in 2012 James Arthur is back with his latest single since his first comeback album which was surprisingly successful, even stateside, mostly because of soppy, unlistenable ballad “Say You Won’t Let Go”. So, what’s to be expected out of this frog-voiced adult contemporary lad today? Well, apparently this is actually not his latest single choice for that lead off of the fourth album and rather just a deep cut from his 2016 album Back from the Edge. It’s the sixth track on the album, it’s four years old and never had a single push so I can only assume... TikTok? I don’t know, I think everyone’s feeling like this year’s been a bit of a train wreck so is the song good? I don’t know, I think his belting is impressive but pretty aggravating with only the soft piano backing and it does sound like he’s straining himself a bit here. The pouring out of his emotions during the dark place he was in between 2013 and 2016 is pretty effective and admittedly I feel kind of bad for the guy but, man, you can tell this is the first song he wrote for the album as it feels pretty underwritten, with a lot of reliance on that chorus, which is powerful but not nearly enough as he wants it to be. He explores a religious angle in the first verse that goes absolutely nowhere. Looking at the comments on the Genius page and ignoring the ones saying “This is epic” or “Anyone here from Harry Potter TikToks?”, I can tell it’s helping people and if this really is impactful to his audience then all fairness to him, it does its job. I’m just not a fan.

#68 – “Heat Waves” – Glass Animals

Produced by Dave Bayley

I swear “trainwreck” and “heatwave” are usually one word. Huh. Glass Animals are an indie-pop project fronted by Dave Bayley and I’ve never felt the need to look into them, and whilst I always assumed they were big – especially this recent third album which did big numbers to mixed reception – I didn’t think they were “chart in the top 100” big, especially not too months after the album release when another single is clearly being pushed. It has got a couple remixes though, particularly a Diplo one, so I guess this is a good time to first check Bayley and co out. Maybe my definition of “psychedelic pop” is different to Pitchfork’s (who didn’t even like this album) but I didn’t expect pitch-shifted vocals put against trap instrumentals and 808s that drown out all of the musicality that goes into the watery synths and guitar picking under the pretty rough vocals here, saved by some cool melodic ideas and multi-tracking that sounds pretty good in the verses. That chorus is lazy and quickly loses its lustre though, and it is not nearly climactic enough for that point in the bridge where its cuts out and returns to work or have any impact at all. The lyrics are pretty fluffy and non-descript, apart from the refrain of “Road shimmer wigglin’ the vision”... okay, I understand why you pitch-shifted that one. Yeah, this is pretty garbage, as are these remixes, although admittedly I kind of enjoy Diplo’s future bass rendition. You can’t do much to make a badly-written song sound interesting as an EDM remixer. I listened to that “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” song out of curiosity and... just because your “ayys” sound more like “ehs” doesn’t mean your trap-rap is suddenly art pop. Also:

“Space Ghost Coast To Coast” combines bits and pieces of millennial childhood nostalgia with musings on school shootings.

Joy. Next.

#67 – “PMW” – M Huncho and Nafe Smallz

Produced by Quincy Tellem

The drill MF DOOM (in aesthetic, not ability) and some nasal-voiced idiot who is not selling himself well with that stage name make a collaborative album produced by Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em. Here’s their ode to Profit Margins and Wages. Okay, it’s just them trading bars over an actually pretty damn good trap beat, with a killer choral vocal sample and some skittering hi-hats with a high enough pace that it makes Nafe Smallz seem mildly engaged. M Huncho sounds fine here, but the chorus here is pretty rough for both of them, and it just sounds really awkward. I do like Nafe’s second verse here, the flows he uses are pretty catchy and he sounds alive for once. What do you expect me to say about this though? They don’t rap anything interesting, the trap beat is good but not particularly interesting and the performances are mildly entertaining at best. It’s not nearly as amusing as the last single I liked from Huncho, “Pee Pee”. I’m not surprised this didn’t debut very high, and I guess it’ll drop off next week like nothing ever happened.

#65 – “One More Time” – Not3s featuring AJ Tracey

Produced by Eyes Adoasi and Remedee

Well, this duo have worked together a bunch of times before, and are undeniably preferable to M Huncho and Nafe Smallz, even if I’m not necessarily a big fan of either artist. This seems to be a lead-off single for Not3s’ third record as well as an interpolation of Britney Spears’ “...Baby One More Time” with a pretty cute pitch-shifted female vocal acting as the main melody for the track... and, yeah, this is what I expect from AJ Tracey. There’s an obvious UK garage flavour to the track – it does feel like a modernised throwback – and AJ’s spitting pretty competently, even if his flow is pretty basic and at times janky. Not3s is even more janky in the pre-chorus but the harmonising on the chorus and flow on the second verse is pretty damn impressive and dare I say charming. If he wants to go into this smooth R&B-rap direction on this type of UK garage beat I approve fully and I would be excited for that upcoming album. It kind of reminds me of Jeremih, to be completely honest, and I’m not sure exactly where I get that comparison but he sounds great. The beat does feel like it stagnates, especially during AJ’s verse actually – it might be the weak link stopping this from becoming great – but it doesn’t overstay its welcome and the 8-bit sound effects during AJ’s verse do stop this from being boring, though I still prefer a fair few of AJ’s other singles, like “Kiss and Tell” with Skepta which the song immediately reminded me of. It could have actually done with no guest verse but I know Not3s needs that promo so I’m not complaining about this. I hope to see it in the top 40 soon.

#62 – “Perkosex” – D-Block Europe

Produced by Gwiz and Roki

“Perkosex”. Wow, and I thought these guys couldn’t get dumber. We have a third DBE album cut this week and I’m already impressed by the awful pun in the title and the fact that this is literally taken from a YouTube producer’s (FREE) Calboy/Polo G type beat. Classy. This is a more downbeat song for the duo, with two verses, kind of. In fact, there’s no chorus, just one verse from Dirtbike LB who actually starts off the song with some spoken word and pathetic “Ski” ad-libs – leave that to Young Adz, who fragments his verse with a pointless and awkward bridge, as if his verse didn’t fill up that quota anyway. We have an acoustic guitar, pitched-up vocal sample that comes in to waste time every so often, and actually cuts Adz’s verse in two. Both LB and Adz croon and mumble, barely staying on the beat, with Adz mumbling so much on his first part of the verse that I initially thought this was just an outro to a song that lasted one and a half minutes, but, no, there’s an extra minute to go and Adz adz nothing to the track that needed that second half of the verse. Neither of the rappers are any funny here, but at least LB compares his friends to terrorists and says he’s got shots in his mouth like a peppermint... I mean, he sounds more mentally stable than he usually does on these songs, I guess. The second half of that Adz verse starts off with either him barely staying on-topic or just a complete plot twist.

You signed up for a drug dealer, not a drug user

And the next line:

And one of my toxic traits is that I love too much

Again, classy. This is crap even by their standards and just straight boring. It won’t go anywhere, but knowing my luck it might be the Christmas #1. Next.

#60 – “Someone to You” – BANNERS

Produced by KOZ

More “indie pop” debuting on the charts, although this one is directly off of the success of Love, Victor, a Hulu original series based on the film Love, SImon that used it in its soundtrack and hence it’s here on the chart. This song has been on three of this guy’s EPs and is actually all the way back from 2017 so, yeah, we have some old cuts here. I have absolutely nothing to say about the song though. Sure, I appreciate the vocal harmonies in the post-chorus and the organic drumming but the vaguely folkish guitar sounds pretty trite, as do the hand-claps and the incredibly generic mish-mash of love song clichés in all of the lyrics here. I’m reminded of a lighter Biffy Clyro that happens to be from Liverpool instead of Scotland and, you know, have no grit or interesting songwriting to back the enthusiastic vocal delivery and repetitive, exhausting chorus. I’m not into this at all, it just reeks of a lack of effort or unique character to it. And I’m safe to assume that about this next song...

#59 – “You’re Mines Still” – Yung Bleu

Produced by Nate Rhoads

This song got big because of Drake on the remix and thank God for that because this Juice WRLD rip-off could never stand on his two feet anyway. The fake attempt at a half-hearted British accent drenched in Auto-Tune is an immediate turn-off – the dude’s from Alabama and sounds like he’s vaguely imitating an Afroswing singer – but so is this incredibly low-effort trap beat with barely anything other than a Sting sample from the exact song “Lucid Dreams” sampled, and it’s not like this is an uncommon flip, coincidence or even a sample that hasn’t been used in a bunch of rap tracks before. Watch out, Yung Bleu, or else Sting will try and sue your ass on BS counts of “plagiarism” until you tragically die young or get a Drake stimulus package big enough for you to pay off royalties and fines for copyright infringement. In fact, I’m convinced that’s the only reason Drake hopped onto the remix so he and his massive bank account can settle the incoming lawsuit and pay the legal fees for this guy, because he doesn’t contribute anything worthwhile to this trash either. Jesus, this is bad.

#58 – “Happiness” – Little Mix

Produced by TMS

We don’t have that album yet, but we have another low-charting promotional single, I guess, now that the last one dropped off from the chart entirely... last week. Little Mix are now noticing that maybe they really cannot perform that well without Syco so I guess they’re just throwing as many bricks as D-Block Europe claim to be selling and hoping one of them fits into the wall. I don’t mind the song for all it’s worth, to be honest, I mean it’s more of a fast-paced dance-pop song about love I can appreciate with some pretty great vocal performances from the girls here, especially who I think are Leigh-Anne and Jade. The chorus hits pretty hard and the fusion of 808s and trap skitters on the verses with a killer UK garage-inspired drum loop on the chorus... yeah, I can actually endorse this, albeit with some hesitation, especially since the bridge is literally just like 10 seconds of vocal riffing, which makes the song feel somewhat underwritten even if that final chorus, especially the lead-up to it, is pretty amazing and genuinely surprised me on my first listen. This is good, and honestly a lot better than I expected from Little Mix, so check it out if you’re interested, although sadly I doubt this’ll stick.  

#29 – “Hold” – Chunkz and Yung Filly

Produced by Ransom Beatz

I can say the same about this, now that we’re in the top 40 here (first for both artists), mostly because Chunkz is pretty much a YouTube comedian and looking at these lyrics, there are now jokes. There is some ugly Auto-Tuned crooning over a pretty flat Afroswing beat and Chunkz’s delivery is similarly flat and it’s obvious he’s a comedian. You can just tell when rappers are also comedians and this guy definitely makes that obvious in his half-hearted “upbeat” delivery that sounds like a satire, but the problem is again that there are NO JOKES. Is the “airplane mode” line a joke? The use of the word “investments”? The egregious Spanish in the second verse? This weak-sauce instrumental? If any of these are jokes or an attempt at comedy, please let me stand corrected because I don’t know if Chunkz was chuckling to himself writing but none of this is funny or even entertaining. It’s pretty telling that the Genius page gave up on trying to distinguish the two rappers as well. Next.

#19 – “Lonely” – Justin Bieber and benny blanco

Produced by benny blanco and FINNEAS

Why is benny blanco credited as a lead artist while FINNEAS isn’t? Huh. Well, Justin’s back and leaving whatever the hell Changes was earlier this year right behind him, focusing on more introspective and personal tracks like... “Holy”, I guess. Well, for what it’s worth, this is better than “Holy” by quite a bit. It’s a pretty minimal ballad with some nice work on the keys from benny and egregious profanity from Bieber in the chorus. I do like the content though, and how he delves into Bieber’s regrets in his past, especially in the second verse although I feel like he misses the point here or at least doesn’t go in-depth enough for me to fully comprehend his view on the situation. They criticised things you did as an idiot kid because they were insensitive, immoral and at some times illegal, not because you were a child. Sure, the media and the press can be antagonistic, especially to easy targets – hell, it’s worse here than in the US or Canada – but it’s not entirely clear in the short verse here that he’s not just deflecting blame onto the “haters”. I do like how he talks about the downs that come with having so much wealth and fame at a young age and no idea on what to do with it other than reckless leisure activities and raking in the fandom’s love whilst he continues to drink-drive and lose his pet monkey, which he shouldn’t have had in the first place. He also talks about how the paparazzi and Internet comment trolls viewed his pictures of him with Lyme disease and immediately assumed he was doing drugs, which can be similarly said for Chadwick Boseman, who died earlier this year due to complications related to colon cancer at age 43. Yeah, this one digs pretty deep but I still feel like it could have used a third verse, especially since while Bieber claims to cite his wife Hailey Baldwin as his “saviour” this is his third or fourth time painting himself as the “comeback” of Bieber but now a more mature man, and none of those attempts have really succeeded so this seems kind of desperate on his behalf. Sigh, the song’s fine and honestly I appreciate it for what it tries to do but it falls short here and lacks the real dagger in the heart moment personally revealing songs about fame like this should have, although I’d admit it gets close. Now for our final entry, which has considerably less to talk about...

#18 – “Chingy (It’s Whatever)” – Digga D

Produced by ItchyDaProducer

Chingy? As in “Right Thurr”, “Holidae Inn” Chingy? Huh. From one look at the chorus, it just seems to be another threat but hey, Digga D’s back. I’m not sure if anyone wanted him back but here he is. He released an album last year. This wasn’t on it. I can’t actually remember this guy at all; I assumed this was DigDat so I expected some quality – I mean, no drill lyric can beat “white like Peter, brown like Cleveland” – but no, it’s Digga D, who made a song with Russ Splash last year that got in the top 40. I remember reviewing it, I remember not thinking much of it at the time. I don’t think much of this one either although I do have to admit I really like that eerie vocal sample, even if it is completely drowned out by the drill beat and the inconsistently-censored sliding on the beat from Digga D. He uses a pretty standard drill flow here though, and the verses are little more than oddly specific gunplay and flexing. He does actually interpolate “Right Thurr” by Chingy in this pretty good and catchy chorus – which I imagine is the only reason this is in the top 20 – as well as in the second verse, where he interpolates his other biggest song which already interpolated a Vine. Sure, I guess.

Conclusion

Not as good of a week as the last, although there’s still a LOT of British hip hop here, mostly sectioned between some indie-pop clunkers. In fact, I’m going to give Glass Animals the Dishonourable Mention for “Heat Waves” while Worst of the Week goes to “You’re Mines Still” by Yung Bleu and Drake on the remix for just being a horrible song all around. Best of the Week surprises me but it’s going to Little Mix for “Happiness” because, well, at least it has some damn energy to it unlike the rest of these songs. I guess the Honourable Mention can go to “One More Time” by Not3s and AJ Tracey but even that would be stretching it. Let’s hope for some good stuff next time, maybe some of that new Gorillaz album... pretty please? Here’s the top 10 for this week:

Big gains for “What You Know Bout Love” there, which is interesting. Follow me on @cactusinthebank for Tory scum baiting and I’ll see you next week.

[johnkorosi]

Nothingness and a whole lot of empty ... (ALL OF THIS FILTH)

                                                                                    (Creative Process)

For this music assignment, I decided to choose the fourth option … I believe this choice allowed me to exercise all the things I have learnt over the semester successfully, whilst giving me the creative freedom to execute my ideas in a passionate way.

The concept came into being when I decided that I wanted to meld my love of philosophical literature with my love of music. Throughout COVID-19, existential crises have become quite common I feel … and after reading Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre and being absolutely enthralled by his existential ideas, I thought that I would take a crack at trying to capture the bleak feeling of ‘nothingness,’ that is so prevalent throughout the novel. 

At many points in my life, I have undergone a complete loss of reason and meaning in the everyday, and witnessed things that once seemed so complete and normal in form, vanish into nothing but anamorphic objects. I wanted my listener to realise how superfluous and gratuitous their existence can seem, but to also realise that there is so much freedom in their own interpretation of the universe around them. We are all ‘set free to find a new illusion,’ as Lou Reed puts it in I’m Set Free (quite a philosophical number by The Velvet Underground that you have to check out if you haven’t).

So in this piece, I attempted to encapsulate the Cartesian atmosphere, the intricate prose, the anxious voice and some of the compelling ideas and transform them into something musical. I used a standard song form with verses and choruses, but challenged myself by using electronic instruments. This process was different from my regular, as I usually write more for the folk and rock genre. For easy referencing and to be specific, I chose a particular passage from the book to write the lyrics and achieve the vibe.

INTRO

I began composing this piece on an old blue piano that I found in the share house I just moved into. The piano’s subtle complexities put me in a trance and allowed me to freely improvise a few different chord progressions. I didn’t even start with a key or by using any musical theory methods; I just played what I felt was right at the time. In retrospect, I was using dissonance at the core of my ideas, by playing a C major chord on a lower register and a B minor chord on the octave above. This gave the song a distinctive Lydian sound (a mode I’ve always been drawn to for a subconscious reason unknown to me). After I found the idea, I moved it to Logic Pro X and put the progression in using my midi keyboard.

I then edited the sound using the EXS24 setting; I did this by tweaking the envelope, cutoff, resonance and the first LFO to achieve a compelling synth sound.

Now that I had a rhythm part for my intro, I needed a catchy main riff that would repeat throughout the song and serve as a link between sections … something odd, pensive and slightly dissonant to represent the chaotic nature of existentialism and nihilism. I began with a piano sound and wrote the melody over the chords. At that moment I had been listening to a lot of repetitive music that had the same chord progressions occur over and over again; but  captivated their listeners eardrums by using unusual third dimensional tone colours and Layer Cake Orchestration. Some of these tunes included I Am The Changer By Cotton Jones or The Magician by Andy Shauf; where the listener is pulled in not by the repetition itself, but by the trance inside the repetition. This evolves from a distant ambience that reflects the blackness of space …

I made the melody slightly repetitive, but used a variety of colours and instruments to make it interesting. I accomplished this by importing the previous piano sound from my cataplexy assignment (as I was satisfied with how that had turned out), and then layered it with a mellotron boy’s choir and cello to form a ‘super-instrument.’ I modified all of these by once again altering the envelope, EQ and LFO settings. I added a drone with a synth, samples of the wind (which I automated the pitch of) and a record player to create more complexity within the space. It would have been preferable to have a string section with a lot of staccato moments, but unfortunately I did not have the time or the players. If I were to work on this some more, this would be an option.

Now it was missing two core ingredients, bass and drums. I started building the drums using the Liverpool drum kit on Logic and then took to the keyboard to write the part. When I listened to Andy Shauf’s Magician, I really liked the simplicity of the four-to-floor beat. It showed me how much attention a beat can give to a melody. So I made my beat very simple and added an 808 snare to the snare hits, for some extra lustre. I EQ’d the drums and compressed them, until they were up to my standard … 

With the bass, I simply followed the bass drum hits, so they were glued to the beat. In regards to tone, I chose a bass from the string category in Logic and altered its EQ by putting on a low pass filter. After being told by my teacher to reduce the bass frequencies and make them clash less, I also brought down the volume and the low frequencies by one decibel.

The rhythm synth that plays the chords in the lead up to the main riff needed a strong crescendo to accompany it (so it could build tension for the moment it came in). To do this I added some strings and played around with the EQ to make them sound less like midi strings. Then I increased the attack on the envelope, so the sound would automatically build. I doubled these tracks and panned them to both sides. As they grew in volume, I automated the panning on both sides to come into the centre.

VERSE 1, 2 & 3

Next I had to think about the vocal melody for the verse chords, so I played through the chord progression and improvised some melodies until I found something that worked. The lyrics spawned relatively easy out of this. I went through the passage and used words and phrases that caught my attention and based the lyrics around these. Some lines that shaped the song were...

 “I got up and went out of the park. Once at the gate, I turned around. Then the garden smiled at me. I leaned against and watched for a long time. The smile of the trees, the clump of laurel meant something: that was the real secret of existence.”

“Time had stopped: a small black pool at my feet; it was impossible for something to come after this moment.”

“Everything is gratuitous, this park, this city, and myself. When you realise this, your heart turns over and everything begins to float....”

and this biggy ...

“Had I dreamed this enormous presence? It was there, deposited on the garden, tumbling down in the trees, all soft, sticky, soiling everything, all thick, a jelly. And I, was I inside, with the garden? I was frightened, furious, I thought it was so stupid, so out of place. I hated this ignoble messiness. Piling up to the sky, spilling over, filling everything with its gelatinous slither, and I could see depths upon depths of it reaching far beyond the limits of the garden, the houses, and Bouville, as far as the eye could reach. I was no longer in Bouville; I was nowhere, I was floating. I was not surprised, I knew it was the World, the naked World revealing itself all at once, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being. You couldn't even ask where all this came from, or how it was that a world existed, rather than nothingness. It didn't have any meaning, the world was present everywhere, before, behind. There had been nothing before it. Nothing. There had never been a moment in which it could not have existed. That was what bothered me; of course there was no reason for its existing, this flowing larva. But it was not possible for it not to exist. It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my head, an existing idea floating in this immensity; this nothingness had not come before existence, it was an existence like any other and appeared after many others. I shouted, What filth, what filth! And I shook myself to get rid of this sticky filth, but it held and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless. I suffocated at the bottom of this immense weariness. And then, all at once, the park emptied as through a great hole. The world disappeared as it had come, or else I woke up — anyway I saw no more of it; nothing was left but the yellow earth around me, out of which dead branches rose upward.”

Throughout the semester, I have been experimenting a lot with my vocals by using doubling, panning and auto tune. So I recorded a vocal track, doubled it, panned one to the left and one to the right and auto-tuned the one on the left, so that there would be a tension between the auto-tuned and the natural track. Then I added harmonies where I felt the melody needed it and doubled and panned these as well. The auto tune I used is displayed below …

I used a moderate amount of compression and EQ on all the vocals, which can be seen on my plug-in strip. I also bussed all the vocals to an auxiliary channel with EQ and compression so they sounded more together 

Here are my plug-ins along with the Eq and compression settings...

Throughout the three verses, I introduced a mellotron string and flute part to avoid repetition and made it call and respond to the vocals from the second verse. For this section, I looked to Bowie’s Quicksand, using Mick Ronson’s wreathing string parts as inspiration. I love how the ascending runs can really send the song into another dimension. I then put more harmonies in as the part progressed. After this, the song grows into the chorus…

Chorus 1

I needed a key change for the chorus, so I went back to my piano sound and dropped the key down a tone (Stevie Wonder style). ‘All of this filth,’ derived from one of the lines I had read in the passage. Once I had the vocal melody down I needed a countermelody, so I designed one on the mellotron string and flute part. I also introduced a new synth and automated the cut-off (using retro synth on Logic), so the sound would grow in the vocal breaks, acting as an antiphony to the vocals. 

With the drums, I changed the high hats to the ride cymbal to create more space. I added fills where apt and a conga loop from Logic’s library for more oomph. In the build up to the link, the piece changes key again and after the lines ... ‘the moments we have,’ I paired a reverse gong with the original string rising part to build it more. I also automated the pitch of the gong, so it rose with the strings. With the vocals I had to automate the key of the pitch shifter in order to align the vocals to the right key.

Link 1

For the link (the main riff), I needed it to be slightly different to when the melody first appeared at the beginning. So I added some mellotron brass, playing intervals in a drone-like way and once again modified the sound. I also made it half the length, so it would flow better into the second verse.

Verse 4 & 5

To create variety in these sections, I wrote new lyrics and I added some harmonies to the call and responses on the strings. I also added an ultrabeat sample from logic, to enrich the beat and a new high hat rhythm doing quavers to fasten the pace. Here is a picture of the ultrabeat synth I used.

Chorus 2

For the second chorus I wanted more layers and climax, so I harmonised the vocals and made the mellotron parts more ... well ... climactic. I accomplished this by making the melodies higher and building triads out of them in the second half. I automated the volume on the build at the end to make it sound bigger than the first too.

Link 3

This is the same length as the first main riff. But is bigger in sound, because of the layering …

Instrumental

The instrumental is the same as the chorus without vocals, and has the same mellotron part. I chose to use the same part, as I wanted the attention on the mellotron part this time, instead of the vocal. The only difference was that I automated the mellotron’s EQ, bringing out higher frequencies and lower frequencies to contribute to the psychedelic feel.

Outro

The song ends with the main riff playing twice. Except the second time the layers strip back revealing the sound of the riff without drums, which I thought was an effective contrast.

Here is my piece with all the tracks and automation shown ... I mixed the levels as I went to get a consistent mix and mastered in a separate project (adjusting the levels with EQ, compression to get it tighter and a limiter and an exciter for more colour).

My mastering channel strip...

Overall I was happy with how my piece turned out, although I would love to see it done with a real kit and string section, as I think this would definitely make it more impactful. I hope this piece challenges people to find meaning within nothing ... and on that note ...

By John Korosi aka Jordan Kenny

[doomedandstoned]

Void Realm Surface From The Shadows With Atmospheric ‘Psyche’s Omen’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

By Billy Goate

We're long overdue for a sequel to our last Doomed & Stoned in Portland compilation. Seems like no sooner do I blink than some intriguing new band has popped up beneath in the penumbra of Mount Hood. It's not like these bands are carbon copies of one another, either. Often they are highly individual, incorporating multifaceted talents and ideas from each member. The four-piece outfit VOID REALM bear all the marks of the Northwest music scene's eccentricty, describing their art as "an amalgam of dark, shattering instrumentation woven with searing, hypnotic vocals."

After capturing our attention with an arresting demo in 2018, the band's been hard at work hammering out more "heretic hymns from a primordial abyss," with seven new enchantments conjured for the forthcoming LP, 'Psyche's Omen' (2020). Void Realm dwell somewhere in the stylistic neighborhood of SubRosa, Sabbath Assembly, Mansion, and Worm Ouroboros, featuring Erin Aquarian (vox), Marios Kerpen (bass), Caitlin Love (drums, synth), and WeskeJohnChap (guitar)

Photographs by Triangles Around Us

Weaving "a powerful spell of primordial, matriarchal rage from beyond linear time," Void Realm emerge from the abyssal depths of doubt, pain, and fear, bringing a powerful -- and empowering -- sound that is dark with atmosphere, yet warmly accessible. Next to the effectiveness of their compositions, this inviting ambience is achieved through spacious production work with a sound engineer known only to locals as Fester, who has recorded a great many records over the years with regional bands and collaborated with Void Realm for this one at Start/Stop Studios.

Mixing followed, helmed by Brandon Eggleston at Pet Cemetery, with mastering by Ed Brooks of Resonant Mastering, both of whom offered painstaking attention to nuance and detail. The result is an album that effectively balances the sheer enormity of Void Realm's heavy instrumentation, gear, and amps with the subtle artistry of each musician, with Erin's majestic vocalizations and harmonies ushered front and center.

The lyrical component really brings each song alive, too, as the words are fastidiously chosen and expressed with great feeling and a tendency toward dramatic arc.

At the end is a start The bound world burns to the ground Undo the curses Our hands turn the time And what was forgotten Comes back to mind Unbind these cursed ropes of death Free the life that is left And lay the past to rest To rest in peace

In these times of "multidimensional warfare," Void Realm's mission is to bring listeners "back from psychic death with cathartic spells of heavy resonance" that will "revive the ravaged soul of humanity and manifest a liberated reality." Don't know about you, but I can definitely get down with that. Look for Void Realm's Psyche's Omen this weekend (available at at this location). In the meanwhile, Doomed & Stoned is delighted to bring the album to you in its entirety.

Give ear...

Psyche's Omen by Void Realm

Follow The Band

Get Their Music

[sinceileftyoublog]

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Interview: Electric Awe

Photo by Chantal Anderson

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Like many writers, I’m guilty of (twice) calling Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith a “synth wizard” in past articles. With her upcoming album The Mosaic of Transformation, out tomorrow on Ghostly International, she shows that her skills and ideas are increasingly firmly rooted in the terrestrial realm, the spaces within us as much as the spaces surrounding us. 2016′s Ears was the soundtrack to “driving a spaceship through futuristic jungles,” whereas 2017′s The Kid (one of our favorite albums of that year) was “a concept album about four stages of life.” But her releases and endeavors since then invoke much more corporeal life. After releasing The Kid, she founded Touchtheplants, part record label, part publishing house from which she’s released the first volumes in her Electronic Series and books on listening as well as modular synth work recorded back in 2013 (Tides: Music for Meditation and Yoga). All of this informs The Mosaic of Transformation, an album centered around her awe for electricity and how it exists within the body.

The music on The Mosaic of Transformation, simply put, feels alive, looking to burst from the seams. The appropriately titled opener “Unbraiding Boundless Energy Within Boundaries” begins with a tropical beat that dances into ascension. “The Spine Is Quiet In The Center” hovers like buzzing bees waiting to pollinate a flower. “Understanding Body Messages” is burbling and buoyant. At the same time, Smith captures life when the songs retreat into minimalism, like with the weepy strings and layered vocals of “Remembering” and dropped beat of the previously sprightly organ waltz of “The Steady Heart”. Elsewhere, tracks like “Overflowing” and “Deepening The Flow Of” are less than 30 seconds of pause between more major pieces, including 10.5-minute opus “Expanding Electricity” that closes the album.

I spoke to Smith over the phone last month about the record. The release of it wasn’t delayed due to COVID-19, but her tour with Caribou was postponed (and has since been rescheduled, including a stop in October at the Riviera). In the meantime, she’s used streamed performances on her Twitch channel as a way to reveal bits and pieces of the album. And of course, she’s been going on walks, trying to stay safely distanced from others but closer to nature.

Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: As you’ve said, a lot of The Mosaic of Transformation centers around your exploration of dance and the body and is contextualized in the music you’ve done for yoga and Touchtheplants. What else is some key inspiration or context for looking at the record?

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith: A lot of it for me stems from my heart’s response to experiences I’ve had with electricity, feeling such a state of appreciation for all the many facets and capabilities of electricity. It’s my musical response to that admiration.

SILY: Are you talking about electricity from a scientific perspective or more metaphorically?

KAS: I guess there’s always elements of both. It’s such a potent part of all aspects of life, and our body’s made of electricity. I’ve been studying the nervous system a lot the last few years, and that really deepened my appreciation for learning about an internal experience of electricity, and I make music with electricity, so I have this external and internal experience. It’s been fascinating.

SILY: Where have you been studying the nervous system?

KAS: I’ve been learning about it from a lot of different teachers and readings. It’s kind of a self-study. I’ve done different online programs about electricity in the body.

SILY: When you think about the word “electricity,” people usually think of a light bulb or light switch. But like you mention, there’s a lot of electricity found in the natural world and in our bodies. To what extent are you trying to explore something natural with this record as opposed to electric objects?

KAS: To me, it’s the same thing, just in a different capsule. That’s where my admiration really started to expand. Having all these different experiences with electricity. It takes different shapes and can do different things depending upon the container that it’s in. It’s just a really interesting medium. It’s such a foundation for what animates life and objects.

You know when you feel so overwhelmed with awe at something? To me, that’s what inspiration is. You think, “I have to communicate this in a different way. I have to find an outlet for it.”

SILY: There are different ways to musically manifest electricity or what it sounds like, but to me, you seemed to skirt the cliche of buzzing or zooming noises. A lot of the time, your music is more fluttery. Was that a conscious decision?

KAS: It’s interesting you say the word “flutter,” because that was one of the first words I wrote down, because before I start a project, usually the moment I feel inspiration flooding in, I start compiling the words and images coming through, and they don’t all connect yet. “Flutter” was a really prominent word in that process. It was neat, because at that time, I was doing this residency with these wooden pipe organs and was recording a lot of stuff on those. That’s what gives it that fluttering sound.

SILY: I could definitely hear the organ on “The Steady Heart”, but I love records where the instrument that makes the sound is not the one you thought it did.

KAS: Me too. I had that experience with On The Other Ocean by David Behrman and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians.

SILY: One thing that stood out to me about the new record is it’s about half short-form tracks, whereas other songs, like the closing track “Expanding Electricity”, are almost their own suites. How do you make the decisions behind when a track ends and begins?

KAS: I never feel like I’m really making the decisions. It’s kind of just what is coming through. It’s what the inspiration feels like. I remember when I was first writing down the words, one of the ideas was to make an opera, where it had reoccurring themes and felt like you were going through set changes. After set changes, there were these moments where characters were expressing themselves and communicating like opera. It turned into that structure.

SILY: You don’t sing as much on this one, either.

KAS: I sing probably half on it. I feel like most of my albums tend to be like that. The Kid was the exception. It’s just that my voice isn’t my primary instrument. It depends on what that piece is asking for. Sometimes, the thing that wants to be communicated just isn’t through the voice.

SILY: I definitely think of your voice as one being used as an instrument rather than a communicator of words, like on “Remembering”, where you layer your voice and it’s hard to decipher what you’re saying. At the same time, how do you come up with your lyrics?

KAS: It’s mostly what I hear. I don’t have a formula for the actual creation of pieces, but the way that I go about composing is always the same: I first get a really strong feeling of inspiration, and there’s an urgency that has to get communicated, and I can’t say it in English words. Then, I sit and listen with closed ears and don’t play anything. I usually get the full scope of what the sound is in an inner listening experience. During that process is usually when I hear the words. Then, I’ll write them down, and try to actualize what I heard internally.

SILY: I really like your use of space on the album, and you use it in different ways. On “The Steady Heart”, where the beat comes in, it’s fitting, and you realize what the track was previously lacking. On the flip side, on “Deepening The Flow Of”, the song momentarily empties out. How do you go about trying to inject a sense of space into your compositions?

KAS: It’s a hard question, because sometimes I honestly feel like I’m along for the ride creatively most of the time. It doesn’t feel like I’m making decisions. That process is happening, but I mostly am doing that matching process where I hear something internally and actualize what I heard. So it’s less of a conscious process of methodical decisions, “That part will communicate this and this.” It’s more, “I heard that inside, how do I match what I heard?”

SILY: What’s the story behind the album art?

KAS: It’s kind of a long story, but it’s a really big process of the album. When I first got the inspiration for the album, the full sonic listening experience of it, while I was having that experience, I kept getting these visuals of making these symmetrical shapes. I decided to give myself a physical symbol of me working through a transformation and through my body’s electricity while I wrote the album. The whole process of the album, each day, I would show up to working on the music, and usually, what would happen is I would experience a lot of challenges, frustration, and emotion matching what I heard inside, so my process to clear that out was to do the physical practice. They became this double practice that helped each other. I just kept track of my progress, and shapes were the end product of my physical transformation of being able to make these shapes with my body I couldn’t make before. The sonic version was to create what I heard inside. It went through a lot of different versions. I probably rewrote it 12 times.

SILY: What has been your approach to adapting these pieces to a performance?

KAS: The idea was to always make each performance different. It was always going to involve a more performance art vibe by having visuals and some sort of dance element to it. The live streams have been doing makeshift versions of that, but there are still a lot more elements that are going to be coming out as the album comes out. I’m performing using some Buchla gear, and I had written out parts for an orchestra with the hopes there would be some orchestral performances.

SILY: Why did you decide to release this record on Ghostly International instead of Western Vinyl?

KAS: That’s a really hard question to answer. Nobody’s ever asked me that question before, and it’s complicated. It’s like asking someone, “You were collaborating with this person, why are you collaborating with that person?” It’s not really a “this or that” as much as a “this and that.” You keep on growing. It’s not like one replaces the other. It expands.

SILY: How did the Ghostly relationship start?

KAS: We had been friends for a while, and it kind of just happened naturally. I shared the album with them.

SILY: Is anything else next for you?

KAS: A lot of things. I usually don’t have that long of a break before finishing something. I usually go right into making new music. I’m working on a lot of Touchtheplants projects right now. I’m writing the 2nd of 12 planned books on listening. Those are the main things I’m focusing on.

SILY: Do you have a favorite plant?

KAS: Ooh! Not of all time, but I have different plants I highlight at different times. Right now, I’m working a lot with rosemary and fennel. I like to put rosemary in all my water I drink. It’s anti-viral, and it’s got this lecithin that protects the fat around your cells, so it’s a really nice one to work with. But for all plants, like if you’re taking medicine, do your research! And fennel propagates really easily.

SILY: When you go to different cities, do you visit their arboretums? 

KAS: Usually on tour, I try to find where’s the closest park or garden.

SILY: Pre- or during lockdown, is there anything you’ve been watching, reading, or listening to that’s inspired you, comforted you, or caught your attention?

KAS: I go mbira.org a lot and listen to mbira music from that website. I like to support the musicians on that website because the money goes straight to them in Zimbabwe, and American money to them is a lot of money. They don’t have a streaming thing, and you have to buy it from them. You can’t find it online or anywhere else. I’ve mostly been reading about the nervous system, but I just got this book I haven’t read yet called Surrendering. I’ve read a few pages of it and I’m really excited to read that. It’s not comforting, but I’ve been watching the Tiger King. It’s the opposite of comforting. It definitely caught my attention. I watch a lot of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. That, in a weird way, has been comforting. In a weird way, it’s helped me process everything that’s going on by learning about what’s going on. Whenever I go a day or two without staying updated, I start to feel a little bit weird. I like learning from The Daily Show because it’s delivered in a humorous way.

[weshallneverrevolt]

Porter Robinson - Worlds (2014)

I like EDM. There, I said it.

I think it’s a fun genre, music made for feeling alive and happy and young. Yes, it is a genre of clichés, rehashed ideas, and fans that tread the line between endearing and grating. But the sheer output of its artists results in a sort of centrifuge of ideas that, when it finally spits a new one out, is brilliance.

It’s also a very millennial genre. EDM is arguably the first genre of music we can claim as our own. Sure, electronic music has been around for years, but the especially melodic, loud, fist-pumping festival anthems of “EDM” are something new. They’re ours.

So much as records like Illmatic and The White Album pushed their genres and subgenres forward, there have been some definite trailblazers in EDM. My state’s very own Porter Robinson is one of those guys, and his album Worlds might do the same for our genre. Only time will tell if it holds up with those records above, but it’s still pretty damn good.

To explain why I think Worlds deserves more attention, I’m going to take a little detour into a very different genre of music.

I love Billy Joel. His album The Nylon Curtain (released 1982) has stirring songs about America reconciling itself with a world after Vietnam, a world where globalism was fast eclipsing the American dream. “Goodnight Saigon” tracks soldiers from training through the jungles of Asia; “Allentown” looks back home at blue collar workers.

But it stands out because the wounds were still fresh. Some had aged a bit – America left Vietnam in 1973 – and some were still ongoing, like the decline of Detroit and steel plant closures of the early 80s. It blended emotional immediacy with wisdom, expressing the fear of times still coming and gratitude for times long gone. Responsible nostalgia, if you will.

The Nylon Curtain’s songs are very authentic in that way, which is why they still resonate. Parts of “Allentown” sound like something Bernie Sanders would say:

“Every child has a pretty good shot To get at least as far as their old man got But something happened on the way to that place They threw an American flag in our place.”

As I mentioned in my entry about Kesha’s Rainbow, authenticity is extremely important for great music. Kanye put it best: when you try hard, that’s when you die hard. It’s why we cringe now at emo bands: the whole struggle feels a bit like a ruse.

I promised this would somehow connect to an EDM album from 2014. Worlds works because of who made it and the time he grew up in. Porter’s lyrics are escapist rather than introspective, and I doubt his synths will age as well as Billy Joel’s piano. But his album’s sound is one that evokes a very specific aesthetic, one that only someone from his time could represent accurately.

Above: Visuals from the “Worlds” tour by the Invisible Light Network.

Wordsworth said that poetry is a “spontaneous overflow of emotion, recollected in tranquility.” Worlds is a spontaneous overflow of 90s-00s geek nostalgia, reflected in tranquility. With bangers.

If you’re reading this, you likely had a similar childhood to Porter Robinson. He grew up in the 1990s, surrounded by video games, anime, and a world whose technology outpaced its maturity. It was an exciting and overwhelming time to be a kid.

Worlds is an album that owes a great debt to those influences, and that sensation of wonder.

The music is the most obvious part, marrying 16-bit video game synths with the brighter, clearer ones of modern dance music. Much of the album sounds like the soundtrack of a video game that never got made. ”Flicker” is a funky groove that would fit in a Final Fantasy item shop, complete with a cute Japanese counter girl. The thick textures of “Hear the Bells” would fit perfectly in a full-motion video ending, where a spiky haired hero watches an airship soar into the distance.

Despite that, this is not a chiptune album, very much adopting the modern principles of EDM: chopped and screwed samples, sing-a-long choruses, and lyrics that evoke togetherness and the power of the moment. Though the driving melody of “Years of War” soars above a pixelated skyline, its lyrics evoke burning it down. That mix of rage and youthful energy is echoed in the festival-friendly chorus of “Lionhearted.” Even “Sad Machine” would work at a festival despite its sci-fi tropes, with its hymn-like chorus of “she depends on you.”

Porter’s nostalgic sounds do distance him from his contemporaries, as do his lyrics. Take “Polygon Dust” for instance. Many an EDM banger has mentioned the importance of “tonight,” but this song also seems to mourn something, maybe tonights that weren’t so carefully guarded. “Sad Machine” is also a very lonely song, where the only characters are a protagonist and a mysterious robot girl they’ve just awakened.

That balance places the nostalgia of this album in the same category as The Nylon Curtain. It’s not idealized: it’s wistful. It wishes nostalgia was more powerful than it actually was. There’s a longing in these scenes, from the adolescent male fantasy of “Sad Machine” to the long-distance friendship in “Fresh Static Snow.”

A lot of period pieces feel fake because their creators never experienced their subjects. Worlds feels so authentic because, like Billy Joel, Porter lived through his influences. He escaped into those worlds just like we did.

But despite all that retro navel-gazing, Worlds is an album made today. And the world today sucks.

It’s easy to see why the predictable heroism of 90s RPGs, the bright futures of science fiction, the colors and whimsical stories of anime, the decisive victories of superheroes all comfort us as adults. They’re a tattered blanket, fragments of the world outside our windows before adulthood peeled back the curtains. They’re what we spend our nights at home doing when we’re tired of Facebook and the news and each other.

Nostalgia is the purest form of escapism because it involves a world we once knew. It’s one that requires no influence other than living, and one that lets us pretend more than any costume. Worlds, the EDM musicians it learned from and the culture that inspired it are all about pretending, about being somewhere else.

More than escapism in and of itself, Worlds is an ode to escapism. It’s a memorial for all the places that both never existed and have always existed inside of us. Perhaps that’s why Porter moved away from his first EP’s heavy dubstep influences: he missed those places.

Those places, more than any of Porter’s Worlds, are what he pines for in this lyric from “Fellow Feeling:”

“I cried, for I did not think it could be true; That you and I might have always known one another And that we could not only evoke, but conjure a place of our own That everywhere - that has ever existed Was all in service of our dream.”

Further Listening

“Sad Machine” Cover by Didrick and Ember Island – a beautiful rock version of Worlds’ most popular song with non-vocaloid vocals and real instruments.

“Shelter” – a collaboration with Madeon, another great EDM producer who shares Porter’s influences. The video is an anime short made with Japanese studio A-1 Pictures.

“Goodnight Saigon” – a hella dope EDM banger! Just kidding, it’s a piano rock ballad from The Nylon Curtain.

“Language” - a song from Porter Robinson’s pre-Worlds career that showcases the origins of some of the sounds on his debut album.

[ihfsttinuf]

(Significantly More Than) Ten Songs Which Have Moved Me

@progamuffin tagged me with this and I like doing these so I thought I’d get right to it. I might even post some explanations! In no particular order:

1. Benjamin Britten, “Elegy” (fourth movement, Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings [Op. 31], 1943)—A gorgeous and chilling setting of William Blake’s enigmatic poem “The Sick Rose”. Knowing more about Britten’s life and his struggles with how he saw himself as a person add an extra veneer of eeriness and pathos to this one.

2. St. Vincent, “Black Rainbow” (Actor, 4AD, 2009)—This one is sort of tied with “Laughing With a Mouth of Blood”, as both wonderfully capture a very particular set of experiences and emotions which resonate with me personally, both lyrically and in the superficially upbeat, lush music. I’m giving “Black Rainbow” a slight edge, though, as a splendid depiction of the claustrophobia and frustration which chronic depression brings.

3. Wire, “Map Ref. 41ºN 93ºW” (154, EMI, 1979)—The perfect power-pop song, perfectly encapsulating the wonderment of realising how truly vast and beautiful the landscape is, dashed with cheeky yet ecstatic turns and wrapped in immaculate synth and guitar arrangements. Known to make me cry tears of joy, literally. Fantastic.

4. Have a Nice Life, “Earthmover” (Deathconsciousness, Enemies List Home Recordings, 2008)—The first four songs on this album, as a bloc, are incredibly compelling, but I’m giving it to the grand finale here for its sheer apocalyptic power and strange mixture of holy joy and abyssal melancholy. “We wish we were dead,” indeed.

5. Prurient, “Myth of Love” (Black Vase, Load Records, 2005)—One of the scariest experiences that I have ever had with music was listening to this for the first time alone in my room one night with all of the lights off. The manipulations of the vocals made it sound as if the very static hiss of the amplifiers were speaking, as if this were a recording without human intervention, a self-recorded exorcism of something that had never been alive.

6. Dälek, “Ever Somber” (Absence, Ipecac, 2005)—The culmination of an album and a thesis which builds by degrees. An instrumental which swoops down like a formation of black swans, into which weave erudite lyrics at once quietly delivered and charged with righteous anger. A way forward for political music which I had not considered prior to my exposure to this group.

7. Ruth Crawford Seeger, String Quartet (1931)—Hard to explain this one, except that there is something immensely satisfying about a work of high modernist composition with so much humour, verve, spookiness and outright melody. Foreshadows total serialism and drone music alike.

8. Jute Gyte, “I Am in Athens and Pericles is Young” (Perdurance, Jeshimoth, 2016)—Not difficult at all to explain this one, insofar as it speaks for itself. Any song from this album could go here, but the sheer extremity of the ideas and revelry in abstraction make this one a fine exemplar. Easily the most exciting “band” in black metal today.

9. Swans “The Glowing Man” (The Glowing Man, Young God, 2016)—Pure undeniable minimal-meets-maximal transcendence. Simply astonishing for every minute of its significant runtime, challenged only by the perfection of the album closer “Finally, Peace”.

10. Coil, “Where Are You?” (Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 2, Chalice, 2000)—The pure terror inspired by “Strange Birds” and “Ether” from this spectral duo count for a great deal, as do the exquisite requiems which close each album, and the synth odysseys of “Red Birds...” and “Tiny Golden Books”. These albums are, not to put a finer point on it, stone cold classics. But for a taste of pure outer sphere mystery filtered through a haze of attic dust, “Where Are You?” cannot be beat. It is aching nostalgia for a place beyond birth and death.

11. Sonic Youth, “Hoarfrost” (A Thousand Leaves, DGC, 1998)—Skeins of guitar like wood-smoke and frozen branches zigzagged over a snowy landscape, winding in and out of one another, glistening at times and curling dark and quiet at others over the patter of toms and warm yet distant vocals, like something hiding in the very heart of the woods.

12. Angels of Light, “Praise Your Name” (New Mother, Young God, 1999)—Another Gira song? Really? Yes, really. A love song to the righteous hatred of a broken person, in luminous tones full of sacral awe.

13. Current 93, “The Bloodbells Chime” (How I Devoured Apocalypse Balloon, Durtro, 2005)—An utterly heartbreaking song in any version, but I wanted to highlight this slower, wearier arrangement from a rather obscure live recording, which absolutely aches with sorrow in the final verse: “Tommy Catkins still sends his regards...” One more reason to cry, this time with no joy whatsoever.

14. Dome, “Keep It” (Dome 2, Dome, 1980)—Another exercise in obscure and paralysing nocturnal terror, here triggered by the realisation that I had no idea what I was hearing or what any of it meant. Like “Ever Somber” and “Earthmover”, this is less a singular sensation than a cumulative one, although like “Where Are You?” or “I Am in Athens...” it more or less stands for the album experience as a whole.

15. Sutcliffe Jügend, “The Death of Pornography” (Blue Rabbit, Crucial Blas, 2012)—As above, so below; from Kafka to Bataille. While the dread of this LP is less subtle than Dome’s approach, it is a similarly restrained effort on an instrumental level, and while it was the title track which made me put this one down for months, it was the closer which made it both a classic and something which I feel uneasy recommending.

16. Bügsküll, “Flowers Smile” (Distracted Snowflake Volume One, Pop Secret, 1997)—A pop song which is also not anything resembling popular music, simple and sweet and unaffected yet deeply strange and intimate. Such a thoroughly underrated musician.

17. The Velvet Underground, “Candy Says” (The Velvet Underground, MGM, 1969)—What is there to even say?

There are certainly more than this but I should probably stop now.

@nyathescurial, if you haven’t done this yet, you’re it. Also @section42l, @allelesonwheels, @sfsorrow, @kitswulf, @carrionade if any of y’all are interested.

[stevecanmakeanythingnerdy]

Battle #24

Vinnie Vincent Invasion: S/T ( Side B )

Vs.

Epoxies: Stop The Future ( Side 2 )

Vinnie Vincent Invasion: S/T ( Side B )

This story is a crazy one, so sit back and let me set the scene. There are so many ties that come in and out of this band for 80s rock that it’s not even funny. Forming the band in the mid-1980s, and after his departure from KISS, Vinnie Vincent recruited bassist Dana Strum, who had served as a talent scout in L.A. Strum recruited band members for the likes of Ozzy Osbourne. Strum had found both Jake E. Lee and the late Randy Rhoads for Ozzy Osbourne, so when Paul Stanley had contacted Osbourne to inquire about where he found the guitarists, he was given Strum's name. Unable to find anyone KISS considered to be on Vincent's level, Strum decided to find Vincent himself in hopes of working together. Bobby Rock came on board as the drummer. With the nucleus of the band completed, the band searched for a lead vocalist. That would end up being former Journey singer Robert Fleischman. He provided vocals on Vinnie Vincent Invasion's self-titled debut album. The record is largely glam metal, with much of it being re-worked versions of demos Vincent recorded in 1982 with former New England members Hirsch Gardner, Gary Shea, and Jimmy Waldo under the band name Warrior. Hopefully you’re still following along because those are some pretty impressive names and we’re not done yet. Warrior achieved some success with Vincent essentially replacing John Fannon as guitarist and vocalist of New England, Warrior disbanded once Vincent was selected to be a member of KISS. After the release of this self titled debut, Fleischman exited and was replaced with new vocalist Mark Slaughter. With Slaughter now on board, the band released their second album, All Systems Go in May 1988. The album featured one of the group's best-known hits, "Ashes to Ashes," and "Love Kills," which appeared on the A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master soundtrack.

Later in 1988, the band was released from their contract with Chrysalis Records. Having grown annoyed with what they perceived to be Vincent's domination of the project, Slaughter and Strum left to form the band Slaughter, which would go on to have success. Whew! Got all that? Some big wigs of 80s rock for sure. The next question is then, who is this Vinnie Vincent anyway? Born Vincent John Cusano he is an American guitarist and songwriter. He is a former member of the rock band Kiss, brought in to replace Ace Frehley. He was a member from 1982 until mid-1984 during the band's transition out of their makeup period. Sidebar: Vincent was the last member to wear a unique makeup/costume configuration, as the character of The Ankh Warrior. The Vinnie Vincent Invasion was his next logical incarnation post KISS. So what does this invasion sound like anyway? Well, “Do You Wanna Make Love” starts it off with a very Kiss like riff. High pitched and wailing. Reminds me of Winger. The more mellow and somber ballad type song follows with “Back On The Streets”. It’s still quite solid with power chord chunks and screaming metal leads. Possibly one of the better tunes on Side B. Now, the next cut, “I Wanna Be Your Victim” totally borrows from the KISS tune “Heavens on Fire”. The riff is eerily similar. Not sure who is truly credited first, but....that’s a debate for someone else. The lyrical content may have been at fault for no radio support on this one. I can hear the hit bleeding through though. It’s a fairly decent tune. “Baby-O” is next. This one has more accessible portions that lean towards pop metal. The bleeting vocals are a little off putting but the tones are all OK, but nothing punches through the STRAT-o-sphere (#seewhatididthere). Actually I have no idea if he plays a strat, it just sounded like a good pun. The (angelic noises) title track (end noises) “Invasion” is next. It’s definitely the most produced and beefy and really different. Hmm what kind of invasion is going on here? Alien? Privacy? Seems to be a love invasion! And it seems like there would be a video for this one. One thing is for sure, it seems like Vinnie was out to prove something with this album. I think he was successful.

Epoxies: Stop The Future ( Side 2 )

Words can really not express how much love this band. When I say love, I mean this is the band I aspire to be in. It’s synth, pop, punk, rock ... all of it. If

two of my favorite bands, Devo and The Ramones had a love child, this would be it, 100%. They formed in Portland, Oregon in the year 2000 (sounds super sciencey doesn’t it?) and was heavily influenced by new wave. The group's music is a novel synthesis (#seewhatididthere) of punk rock and new wave but their lyrics are strictly focused on science fiction themes, Atomic Age futurism, alienation and consumerism. Robots, androids, clones and nuclear weapons all figure prominently in the Epoxies' lyrics. They were first known as the Adhesives before discovering that another group with that name existed, so they did the punk rock workaround. My time in music has been largely centralized around the underground and punk rock in general. I have always loved new wave and the 80s. By large punk rock has helped shape my beliefs and values and so when a band came along that fused all of these things, I was on board. Perfect timing too, as the punk scene was becoming stagnant for me. Almost Single-handedly this band kept my interest in the genre as I considered moving on (I mean there were my pals The Copyrights and The Ergs, too). Their purposefully “outdated” and “uncool” sound (that what the band says they were going for at the time) were fresh sounding relief to my longing ears. The band (perhaps accidentally) really stumbled on to something too, as soon after a LOT of mainstream acts were sounding like them. It’s jus5 retro enough, but still futuristic too. It’s difficult to explain the originality in sameness to anyone unfamiliar with the variables. Sadly the band called it quits around 2007. Stop The Future is their second and last studio album, but it’s a real gem, so hold on to your Energy Domes, spuds! Here we go! “Stop The Future” is the title track and a blistering, space rock, surfy instrumental. Not much else to say (#seewhatididthere) except it’s pretty tight and leads perfectly into “Struggle Like No Other”. With the Punky nuggets and four on the floor Blitz, this is a punk rock show case showdown. Quick, no frills, and deadly precision. The only flashpoint is that it does appear to come across as filler. “No Interest” has a good mid-tempo groove and really highlights the harmonies that Roxy and the band can accomplish together. I suppose that is one underrated element of the band that’s hard to translate. The band conveys unity through the music. Just the sense that they are all friends and having fun together. That’s hard to do, and honestly I could just be inferring this. Anyway, the sci-fi themes and range are what grabs your attention. “You Kill Me” is next, and one of the main tunes I think of when I think about this band. It has an almost swing beat, and really might as well contain a swinging bat too, because they hit it out of the park here! One of my favorites. “At The Seams” is another quick one to remind us that they are first and foremost punk rock and held together by stitches. The last two tunes are “It’s You” (a more straight ahead pop punk number) and “Toys”. On the latter, the 80s come alive! Nice sound FX and a pretty good, locked in groove. Diversity for the band with beautiful moments of keyboard serenity. Yes, for sure...THIS is the band I desperately long to form. It’s a perfect blend of DEVO and A Flock Of Seagulls meets Mr. T Experience and Green Day. I mean, they even use the checkbook font (#fontnerd) so...how could I NOT like them?!.

Today Vinnie Vincent Invasion did just that. Invade RRW’s battlefield and give us a show. The guy just looks like he knows he’s that good. They burned 165 calories over 5 songs and 23 minutes. That is 33.0 calories burned per song and 7.17 calories burned per minute. VVI earned 10 out of 15 possible stars. The Epoxies tried to stop the future because they are radically stuck in the past, but it’s OK because they are great at it! They burned 145 calories over 19 minutes and 7 songs. The averages are 20.71 calories burned per song and 7.63 calories burned per minute. The Epoxies earned 17 out of 21 possible stars. Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars Vinnie, because The Epoxies went over the top and walk away today’s champs!

The Epoxies : “You Kill Me”. Well, that’s the track I wanted to play, but nothing exists so here’s the whole dang album! Enjoy :)

https://youtu.be/YGwVTofvAQ8

#Randomrecordworkoutseasonsix

#Randomrecordworkout

[thesinglesjukebox]

TAYLOR SWIFT - NEW YEAR'S DAY [7.44] And we wrap up 2017 with the woman that we always have such high hopes for...

Isabel Cole: Swift's famously concrete scene-setting details have only in recent years begun sounding less like lines culled from a predictive text generator trained on CW scripts and more like human moments caught by someone with a thoughtful ear. Here, they function not as specificity for its own sake but to sketch out both a series of spaces and a state of mind: the exhaustion of girls with heels in hand, the backseat flirtation that whispers possibility, the shock of finding that after an end comes a beginning, maybe, after all. In fact this song has all of her repeating motifs, as well as she's ever done them--her preoccupation with narrativizing her own life (don't read the last page), her fucked up relationship to time as something that takes and takes and yet slips by too fast, her tangled conception of memories as both something precious to be cherished and an unrelenting force from which there is no escape: hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you, she sings, echoing a phrase that bookended her most idiosyncratic album. But New Year's Day is not a retreat into familiar territory tacked onto the end of a record of unsuccessful experimentation. Muted instrumentation complements an uncharacteristically hushed vocal performance that captures, even more than the gentle loveliness of Begin Again, the tentative tenderness of new love for someone who has felt love die not in fire but in ice; please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize everywhere tells a story that creates a person who understands now that love in fact is not a victory march, and heartbreak is no aria. For all her infamy as the girl who will write songs about the boys who dump her, Swift has also woven into her work a version of herself as someone who leaves things that shouldn't be left; what makes her wish for gathering party detritus more believable than her previous playacting at domesticity is what she tells us about why it lasts: but I stay. I stay when I'm scared, I stay when it's hard; I stay, which is something I have learned to do. Locating the power of a love not in someone else's repeated decision to choose you but in your own capacity for remaining present in the face of uncertainty, revering not the luck it takes to be loved but the strength you find in yourself to keep loving, is--well. It's very grown-up. Making this feel like the first song Taylor Swift has truly written as an adult, and more than that: like the song she has spent her entire career learning to write. [10]

Stephen Eisermann: My birthday is on New Year's Eve, so the New Year holiday has always been a very bittersweet one for me. Most people party their night away with the idea that they will wake up as more improved versions of themselves, based only on the resolutions they made a week prior and will forget a week after. It's ritual, but it's a devastating one, really, to want to change so badly that you are willing to drop and forget everything from one year to the next just because you feel like you need to be better. In a quest to better ourselves, we too easily toss aside the experiences, good and bad, that molded us and would rather crumple the paper with our notes for a fresh piece, than bring the key points on to the next paper because maybe we got those key points from something painful... I'm rambling, but there's a point. This past year saw me struggle a lot -- with work, with life, with our country's moral compass -- but I can undoubtedly say that I have never been happier. This, in large part, is due to my boyfriend, who has taught me that you can't let go of unhappiness or darkness, just learn to work with and around it. That piece of advice, however general sounding it seems, has carried me through difficulties this year and I think, with this song, Taylor is saying the same thing. She had a rough couple of years in the media between her album cycles, but some people stuck around for the aftermath -- the cleanup -- and she's eternally grateful and willing to do the rest for her lover and her friends. It's a beautiful feeling, and the lines "hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you" as well as "please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere" are particularly devastating, simply because too many people abandon others they deem unfit solely because they have demons they can't take ownership of, so they'd rather pass the blame to those they love; and that's heartbreaking, especially when accompanied by a sparse, melancholy piano production. [10]

Alfred Soto: Now the party's over, and she's so tired -- even the piano sounds hungover. Taylor Swift, whose contract doesn't allow for hangovers, sounds alert, as if she's been keeping an eye on the condition of the floors all evening. After an album of sometimes compulsive ebullience, "New Year's Day" is supposed to remind listeners of the early Taylor Swift. [6]

Will Adams: A limp olive branch to those who might have been alienated by the EDM production on the preceding Reputation tracklist, "New Year's Day" strips Taylor back to a piano, some guitar, and pretty organ flourishes. Never mind that Regina Spektor wrote this song ten times better a year ago, why leave a ballad at its barest when there's no reason to? [5]

Katherine St Asaph: Taylor Swift makes an album of shamelessly, undeniably pop songs: often missteps, but also big and seething and vital and alive in the way her past glurge never was. Everyone hates it, except on the one song where she regresses back to beige acoustic sap. Rockism lives! "New Year's Day" has the slight edge over the past 20 outings because Swift sounds on occasion like Lisa Loeb. But it's the only thing here that could be called "edge" at all. [3]

Nortey Dowuona: Soft, pulsing piano, barely visible guitar, wailing synths in the corner, dece backing vocals. Tay simply hums without straining. [6]

Thomas Inskeep: Liked Swift out of the box, more with each (country) album, as her songwriting got stronger. Hated her initial pop makeover (wub wub wub). Surprisingly loved 1989. Am indifferent-to-cold on Reputation. And even though "New Year's Day" isn't, necessarily, explicitly country, it's a reminder that she can return to the format whenever she wants. (And her CMA Song of the Year, Little Big Town's "Better Man," is a sterling reminder that her pen has lost none of its punch, even if I find her current popcraft largely lacking.) I think we all know that in an album or two she's likely to make a full-throated return to the format which made her, and we'll be better for it. "New Year's Day" helps smooth that transition, and is nicely underproduced to boot.  [6]

Ashley John: The tender intimacy of stability hides the questions beneath the surface, and in "New Year's Day" Taylor is begging to leave it be. Like Lorde recalling buying groceries in "Hard Feelings/Loveless," Taylor clings to the boring moments shared only between two. The classic Swift specificity is what made Red so good, and we watch her here smartly paying a bit into that savings account each month waiting to cash out on the inevitable full blown country return. But that doesn't matter, now. "New Year's Day" is a treasure I want to keep warm against my chest and share with no one else for fear of them tarnishing it. It is Swift making a moment glimmer with potential and hope by bending time and memory. "Don't read the last page," she asks, and I don't want to. I would rather live in this disillusion before the world wakes up, pretending that we're the only people who've ever been in love like this.  [8]

Alex Clifton: There's so much in "New Year's Day" that made me cry the first time I heard it. The lyric about Polaroids, a clear reference to the 1989 era; the lyrical parallels between "please don't be in love with someone else" from "Enchanted" to "please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I would recognize anywhere"; the lightly waltzing piano in the background, simple but somehow devastating when compared with the overproduced mess that crowds most of Reputation. There's nothing inherently romantic about New Year's Day itself as a holiday; so much stock is put into the night before, all the parties and festivities and anticipation for a new beginning that the day of usually feels like a bleak, empty page. Yet as she always does in her best form, Taylor turns something unromantic like a hangover day into something to pine for. "I'll be cleaning up bottles with you" is so intimate that it almost hurts, like overhearing a snitch of a conversation you weren't meant to hear. It's a far cry from the earnest romanticism shown on former tracks like "Stay Stay Stay," where domestic life was twinkly, cute and fun, backed by toy pianos instead of the real thing. This is the Taylor I've longed for, away from the feuds and self-pity and bad rapping: reveling in the small quiet moments she has always been so good at observing. [9]

Sonia Yang: So many songs about holidays focus on the joy of the moment, that explosive rush of living in the moment; it's what sells. New Year's Day, however, is the subdued reality in the aftermath of such escapist fantasies - "I want your midnights / But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day" - it's unglamorous, hesitant, and more vulnerable than it lets on. Not everybody greets the new year with bombast and resolutions they plan to keep; it's more likely to quietly clean up the mess and go on with life as usual, with all of the same hopes and fears as you carried before the clock struck midnight. The most painful line is "Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere", that aching dissonance between familiarity and isolation that Swift does oh so well. A relationship immortalized in glitter-covered Polaroids can end sooner than one realizes, as if to show that no matter how brightly something shines, nothing gold can stay. It's fragility at its most cutting; the most powerful words are whispered rather than shouted. [10]

Danilo Bortoli: In a way, Taylor Swift has encapsuled 2017. Reputation has been met with some divisive, if not lukewarm, reception, proving to be the album we didn't want, yet managed to admit and love its flaws anyway. In a year devoted to uncovering the world's true colors, her narrative, just like her castle, came crashing down. And also in a year where simply coping seems enough, her happiness has even been seen by some as a luxury - or perhaps a felony. "New Year's Day" might suffer from this same fate, as some may listen to it as a forced reconciliation with her inner self "a la Miley", a retreat back from the reckless journey that fits most of Reputation. Yet, it comes off as the truest moment of this era for Taylor: here's to Old Taylor and the embarrassingly long yet remarkable mantras ("Please don't ever become a stranger whose laugh I could recognize anywhere"). As it often happens with her best songs, this one paints a vivid picture, constructing an entire narrative, this time measuring words with a stripped down piano, all suggesting, finally, some closure. It's candid. It's simple. It's heartbreaking. It's all about character, as she has learnt too late.  [10]

Edward Okulicz: The old Taylor is dead, said the new Taylor, but whoever sequenced the album sure was nice to put this throwback to thoughtful, generous, storytelling Taylor as the last thing you hear. The domestic scene she paints is lived-in, cosy, relatable once more. Her optimism comes through, mercifully, without any smugness and it's easily the best set of lyrics she put out this year. Thanks, Taylor(s). [8]

Maxwell Cavaseno: On a certain level, "New Year's Day" is brilliant because it's a sham of a record; nothing here is organic; it's a sea of strums, piano pawings, and musings to sound intimate and sentimental in the way of a singer-songwriter record, and what deep down we somehow understand Swift to be and keep forcing analogies to. It actually is sequenced really badly because, as always, Antonoff is often too clever for his own good and is deliberately making something unnerving and ambitious rather than functional (yet again the bland ambition of Nate Ruess was truly the foil he deserved, a man who could smother his tics to death in brazen tapioca). Swift, who's clearly not giving a shit on this record vocally or in trying to reign him in, is utterly adrift and her talk of glitter and memory just rings as hollow as the other asemblikit elements of the song. This record could easily be more than it is, but its sense of orphaning is pained and senseless.  [3]

Anthony Easton: Listening to the Harry Styles record this year, I was wondering (and hoping) that Taylor had reached the end of her experiment with taste, and would make something resembling a Laurel Canyon record. Hearing most of Reputation, this was obviously not the case. It was interesting, because it seemed like both Lorde and Saint Vincent made albums which took the sonic experimentation of 1989 in new and difficult directions, trusting Jack Antonoff to take care of their aesthetics, pushing and deconstructing this kind of electronic thicket that marks populist taste right now. (See Craig Jenkins essay in Vulture.) I think that I overrated this single because it provided something new, not quite a rapprochement to old Taylor (if Old Taylor was dead, then who is singing this lovely, old fashioned ballad--a ghost, a zombie, something more technologically advanced) but also not something quite new. I always worry about misogyny when I say these things, that liking the pretty song is not liking the angry song (false dichotomy I know) or liking the ballad and not liking the more abrasive songs, but the ballad is so beautiful, lush, self aware and exquisitely sung, even more exquisitely produced This might be the most conservative thing she has produced, the most republican thing--in the moneyed, tightly private idea of pleasure, but also in the idea that those kind of pleasures are well guarded---thinking of the sexual harassment law suit, thinking of the failure of her kind of me-first feminism, that this is a kind of weaponized good taste, explicitly against the vulgarity of current pop, or current discourse, after an hour of trying to be as vulgar as more interesting pop stars, keeps prodding that Laurel Canyon vibe. It's slippery and fascinating, and probably less good than I want it to be.  [7]

Andy Hutchins: The story of "New Year's Day," in part, is that it was Taylor finding a use for the line "Please ... don't / Ever become a stranger / Whose laugh ... I / Could recognize anywhere" -- a strong bit of writing from someone whose fantastic songwriting chops have been wasted on too many attempts to veer away from being the evolutionary Carole King she could be with nearly no exertion. But even though I know too many strangers whose laughs I could recognize anywhere to not tear up at that line, the one that makes my breath catch is "I want your midnights / But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day." Swift is at her absolute best when she nails the ordinary details it does not beggar belief to think she actually desires -- and when she sings that she wants someone for after the afterparty, it sounds honest and yearning in the way truth and optimism can be. Would that she could focus on that, because I give more damns about it than her reputation. [8]

Jonathan Bradley: Taylor Swift alone somewhere at a piano, playing soft clumsy chords, only half-attentive, barely a melody. "New Year's Day" concludes and recasts Reputation in retrospect; as the unguarded obverse, it accounts for that album's garishness and noxiousness. "New Year's Day" is a song of little details and emotional import, which is another way of saying it is what we have come to recognize as a Taylor Swift song. In this one, she finds in the miniatures of her morning-after tableau -- glitter, candle wax, "girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby" -- a gentle grandeur, and then in that, earnest sentiment. "Don't read the last page," she tells her companion, casting them into a storybook before resolving back into the prosaic: housework and hardships. There are not many songs that do this on Reputation, and, as with "Better Man," casually gifted to Little Big Town, "New Year's Day" is a demonstration that Swift can still do this, that her current work is not a failure to create vividly detailed pop but a conscious rejection of it. Reputation is an album about privacy and turning away from the public; it asserts again and again that there are things in Swift's life that she can refuse to make known. The music and sentiment matches this: it is at times ugly, at others glib, often repellent or anti-social, dangling details before obscuring them in ellipsis or melodrama. "New Year's Day" demonstrates that none of that happened by accident. The old Taylor is dead, but she be summoned at any time: this song casts ordinary life as legend like on "Long Live," voices hopes and fears in the form of mantra as on "Enchanted," and concludes a tumultuous record with a new start like on "Begin Again." It's tender and familiar. It's one of the best songs Taylor Swift has ever recorded. [10]

[Read and comment on The Singles Jukebox ]