#desmond dekker & the aces | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

gerogerigaogaigar · 1 year ago

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Alright so here is another set of reviews. This time it's my brother who is very much into fun and goofy music so enjoy this selection from my brother Jason!

The Aquabats - Fury Of The Aquabats!

The Aquabats are living cartoons. Concentrated essence of childhood fun. They are a child friendly ska punk Gwar. Even though this album is from long before their purely kid oriented Yo Gabba Gabba! days there is still a distinct family friendly atmosphere to The Fury Of The Aquabats! It has a similar energy to Homestar Runner or The Muppet Show where it is kid friendly media made for adults. And, like those examples, it works because they are having so much goddamn fun with it. It is deliberately and pointedly stupid. Magic Chicken is a song about chicken. I'm laughing because it's funny. The Cat With Two Heads has the line "I was in my laboratory creating what i thought would be we something great for the world, a two headed cat. You can pet one kitty's head and pet the other kitty's head, but little did i know the power of atomic energy would create a

two headed man eating monster!"

So have I convinced you to listen to a 90s ska album yet? Because this is a very pure example of the genre musically. It has the pop punk pacing and fast paced ska rhythm and the horn section and everything. It does admittedly have some, uh, genre diversions I guess I'll call them. Attacked By Snakes is a tango song and Lobster Bucket is a zydeco type thing sometimes. The MC Bat Commander is a perfect vocalist for this kind of music. He's so goofy, but you never really get the impression that he isn't taking it seriously. Or at least he is meeting the music and lyrics on their own terms. It is very endearing. Plus this album has a little bonus that other Aquabats albums lack. Do the drums sound like really competent to you? Like way too much for a pop punk band? Yeah that's Travis Barker of Blink-182 fame. He's probably the most talented punk drummer and he lends a fantastic energy to these songs.

Deee-Lite - World Clique

If you know Deee-Lite already then you probably know them as the one hit wonder who did Grooves Is In The Heart. Well this album deserves more recognition than just having produced a hit single. Deee-Lite channel the 60s flower child throwback aesthetic harder than any other artist of the 90s and they bring that energy to house music. Now I feel like a lot of electronic music fans start to dismiss an artist the minute they hear pop vocals, but this is totally unfair. Dee-Lite use vocals the way they would use any other instrument on a house track. The repetitive vocal lines mesh with the piano samples, drum loops, and funky bass.

Speaking of funky bass, this album has a few performers with a pedigree. Three former Parliament-Funkadelic members feature on this album, trombonist Fred Wesley, saxophonist Maceo Parker, and bass legend Boots Collins. Plus A Tribe Called Quest member Q-Tip gets a verse on Grooves Is In The Heart. That element of P-Funk goofiness is apparent in their peace and love lyricism and overt cheesiness. And while a lot of memorable tracks like Try Me On and Groove Is In The Heart are more hip house to pop oriented the rest is populated by songs like What Is Love that show off a more traditional house style. The album has enough variety and good enough pacing that you don't need to throw these songs into a DJ mix when you can just throw on this whole album and get the same experience.

Shonen Knife - Brand New Knife

I can't pretend this is my absolute favorite Shonen Knife album, I'm more of a Burning Farm or Pretty Little Baka Guy kinda girl. But Shonen Knife doesn't exactly disappoint here either. There's a simplicity to their lyricism and playing that leaves little room to actually fuck it up. The punk rock meets 60s girl group sound feels like it should be influenced by cuddlecore musicians except for the fact that Shonen Knife's sound predates that movement by a decade. This album is smack dab in the middle of the height of that scene though (low heights admittedly) and there is definitely a bit of a cleaner sound than on previous Shonen Knife records that reflects the styles of the time and the rising success of the band. I don't personally believe that higher production quality does much for them, but as long as they are still singing about food and other things that make them happy Shonen Knife will always be a treat to listen to.

Bitch Ass Darius - Follow The Sound

This is the greatest DJ mix ever. Booty bass or ghetto house or ghettotech or whatever you want to call it is a chatic style of house that adopted a lot of hip hop tendencies and then ramped things up to eleven by using the most sexually explicit lyrics possible. Follow The Sound is the most ridiculous example of this already ridiculous genre.

Bitch Ass Darius is an anomaly to me. I can't find out who they are or if they made any more mixes under a different alias. A friend showed me this mix once and I don't know where he found it. The experience of listening to the mix is kind of similar. In between recognizable samples will be snippets of things that you couldn't place the origin of in a million years. And even if you could they probably fly by so fast you don't have time to parse what he just sampled before the world's foulest lyrics start repeating some shit like "he's not my baby daddy he's just a sperm donor" or "I wanna fuck your mouth". A lot of typical booty bass samples are present which means nothing if you aren't a freak like me, but if You've ever heard that memetic snippet that goes "ass n titties, ass n titties, ass ass ass ass ass n titties" that was DJ Assault who is a staple of the genre and that exact sample is in this mix. But the typical hyper crude samples are interspersed with something way weirder. Random seconds long snippets of literally anything else. I can't explain the experience adequately because everything is always happening so fast. My favorite example that I have managed to catch is that he rapid fire samples Michael Jackson (pitched and sped up naturally) saying "beat it, beat it!" And then without missing a beat counterpointing it with the Weird Al parody lyrics "eat it, eat it!" This happens in maybe one and a half seconds. The contrast of samples is a great vehicle for delivering the comedy inherent in the genre while also delivering a good example of the music. Despite feeling like it's poking fun it still remains respectful of the chaos of booty bass music. The album dwells on nothing. It doesn't care if you heard that because listen to this! Follow The Sound is the purest and most perfect sonic overload. If you have problems with auditory overstimulation then seriously consider skipping this album. But if you have ADHD like me then you are about to find your new favorite thing.

Accept - Balls To The Wall

This album is gay af. It was noted at the time and the band acknowledged it. To quote drummer Stefan Kaufmann "It's a phenomenon that should be taken into consideration. Because it exists on a wide scale and should be demystified. In fact, this is a phenomenon of society that needs to be taken as such. For a long time gay people have been considered as sick or insane. And yet, it's time to respect these people, open our minds which are often closed."

This is the kind of music that I think most people are thinking of when they say "heavy metal". It is riff driven heavy music with corny lyrics about tough guy stuff. Like having sex with men. Accept is like if AC/DC was self aware. And thankfully the only ballad in the album is actually good too. It's hard to review this style of metal without sounding dismissive. The camp is obviously deliberate here so I don't feel as bad poking a little fun because I think I'm laughing with them a bit. But really this is a simple and effective album with no weak tracks and themes that it plays straight. Which doesn't seem like much but in the world of late 70s early 80s heavy metal its really raising the bar for future acts.

Desmond Dekker & The Aces - 007 Shanty Town

Before ska was associated with middle school boys with frosted tips and cargo pants, before the days of London teens in ill fitting suits and checkerboard patterns, before dub and reggae there was Desmond Dekker. One of the 60s original ska artists. With a sound that blended Jamaican mento music with a solid helping of jazz and R&B to create a unique blend of Jamaican pop music.

The unique beat that we all know and love (you love it right?!) is created by muted guitar downstrokes on the one and three beats and loud staccato upstrokes on the two and four. Add in some horns, walking bass, and vocal harmonies and you've got the blueprint for basically all ska. And this combination, the crisp staccato guitar and horns especially, grant a uniquely sunny disposition to basically the entire genre so that even when Desmond Dekker is singing about poverty or crime there is an underlying love for his home in every song. Plus a lot of the gangster aesthetic is pure kitsch and is strangely one of the major aspects of the genre to have maintained throughout the years. Ska artists all wanna be in Oceans Eleven even in back in 1967.

Mastodon - Leviathan

If 17 year old me knew that in the year 2023 I was still going off about how much I love this album I think she would call me a slur and have a weird feeling about being called 'she'. I've liked this album for a while and the more metal I listen to the more I appreciate Mastodon. They are somewhere between being sludge, progressive, and death metal and they navigate that in-between with skill. The chugging skudginess can easily erupt into speedy solos and there is an abundance of complexities in the musical arrangements.

Leviathan is the second in a tetralogy that incorporated their first four albums each being themed after a classical element. Leviathan is a concept album about Moby Dick and therefore is obviously water. If their more aggressive debut is fire and the sludgier Blood Mountain is earth then Leviathan's status as water follows. The riffing crashes like waves and there are a lot more melodic flowing sequences that also suggest water. Although the album is more strictly focused on its Moby Dick themeing. Leviathan crashes forward with an intensity that is honestly too much to just call sludge metal but it never hits the level of screaming that you expect from death metal. In retrospect Mastodon have always been a very progressive metal act and I think this album in particular does the best at blending all of their different styles into one package. That said all four of their original albums, Remission, Leviathan, Blood Mountain, and Crack The Skye are worth a listen.

K.d. Lang And The Reclines - Absolute Torch And Twang

Oh so my son of a bitch brother is gonna be a bigger lesbian than I am by giving me a k.d. Lang album I've never listened to huh? Before she transitioned to a more lounge / jazz style k.d. Lang was a full on country western musician with her band The Reclines. Country music had been in severe decline for over a decade but somehow Lang avoids any of the pitfalls of her contemporaries. Instead she mines decades worth of country music blending rock influenced outlaw styles, singing cowboy western styles, and 60s Nashville sound into a monolithic style that celebrates the history of the genre without just being a period piece. And her voice is just astounding. She can sing tender love ballads and rollicking honky tonk numbers with equal ferocity. Her mezzo-soprano is maybe the richest I've ever heard.

Luie Luie - Touchy

Luie Luie is here to tell you about a new dance called the Touchy. This is going to be a bitch to explain. Luie Luie was an outsider musician from the 70s and understanding that he was almost certainly on the autism spectrum goes a long way towards understanding what's going on here. You see Luie Luie was a nightclub manager who thought that people didn't touch enough while dancing anymore so he tried to make a new dance called The Touchy that would encourage touching but with clear rules for how you were allowed to touch you dance partner. It's strange but all very well meaning. He managed to finance the creation of an album and so Touchy was born.

So after Luie Luie tells you that he's invented a new dance and that he plays all the instruments on the album and that every touchy starts with a "wild horn intro" we get a wild horn intro and holy shit he's actually a really good musician. The touchy is basically a mix of mariachi, funk, soul, and lounge music. The slightly offbeat sound and cheap production are wildly endearing especially when you understand this as a passion project that is composed, performed, and recorded all by one man. Luie Luie is a fairly talented multi instrumentalist and where his technical skills falter he covers with incredible ear for complex arrangement. Some songs like El Touchy make for fairly danceable music, although I would rather sit and listen than dance and touch if I'm being honest. Although special mention should be given to the track Touch Of Light for it's intense layering of up to fourteen trumpet parts creating an elaborate tone poem that recalls the works of Ligeti. I'm eternally baffled and grateful for the Touchy it is the rare piece of outsider music that is actually as listenable as it is intriguing.

Kumi Tanioka - Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles OST

Crystal Chronicles is such a weird mess of a game. It has an intriguing narrative structure, but the repetitive gameplay loop makes finding the plot tedious. Plus it isn't really fun to play at all unless you have at least three people with game boy advances and gba link cables. I beat it single player when I was a kid because I'm neurodivergent.

Soundtracks are difficult to review. Should you review it as a stand alone album, pretend the source material doesn't exist? You would be missing crucial context and anyway a soundtrack that does stand alone as an album probably didn't work that well as a soundtrack then. Well the answer for me is to realize everything has context. Nothing exists in a void. If you saw an album with blood and gore on the cover and the title in a death metal font and then the album contained folk rock your opinion of the music would be colored by that experience even though the cover has no effect on theusic. So let your understanding of this music be colored by the fact that it is the soundtrack to a GameCube game.

Kumi Tanioka is mainly just the Crystal Chronicles composer and that's a shame because she is extremely good. Final Fantasy games have a long history of using their music to heavily influence the game's mood, but that is partially because of the efforts of long time composer Nobuo Uematsu. Tanioka manages to outdo even Uematsu when it comes to heavily themeing the soundtrack. The Crystal Chronicles OST features music heavily influenced by a mix of medieval folk styles. Music that plays in towns and in roads will have aspects of Byzantine music while your hometown festival is very Celtic. Some tracks like Twilight In Dreamland show some influence from South American music too. The idea of a world music soundtrack to a game about trying to travel ever farther into an unfamiliar world is quite brilliant.

The music is also melodically beautiful. And catchy. There are tracks that you are severe risk of getting stuck in your head especially Annual Festival or the opening vocal track Sound Of Wind. A lot of games have a vocal pop track tacked somewhere in there and sometimes it does work (I dunno how FFXV pulled off a Florence Welch cover of Stand By Me but goddamn it worked) but usually it's just an out of genre pop song that doesn't mesh with the game at all. Sound Of The Wind is a great song that works as a pop song units own right but also sticks to the medieval themeing of the rest of the soundtrack.

You might not appreciate listening to this as much if you haven't played the game. And honestly I can't in good faith recommend Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, it's not a very good game. But this soundtrack is one of the ones I put on just to listen to and it is probably my second favorite Final Fantasy OST after FFIX.

#the aquabats #Deee-Lite #shonen knife #bitch ass darius #accept #desmond dekker & the aces #mastodon #k.d. lang and the reclines #luie luie #kumi tanioka #500 album gaiden

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