#we need more contemporary stories with choruses

[shijiujun]

“you know you’re singing to your headphones out loud, right” au for moshang plz sqh singing modern songs that mbj doesn't know and being hella confused 🥺

Featuring karaoke-loving Shang Qinghua who gets a bit too drunk at a Cang Qiong mountain gathering, and he goes all out. 

Or when Mobei Jun wonders why Shang Qinghua is singing about another man called Liang Shan Bo.

---

Sometimes, he thinks about his old life before he ever had the misfortune of landing in a world of his own creation, with an annoying gaming AI system of sorts hounding his every move (in the beginning) or turning up at the most inopportune times just when he thinks it’s finally gone and left him alone (more recently). 

Shang Qinghua remembers not having many friends when he was still Shang Qinghua, when ‘向天打飞机 Airplane Shooting Towards the Sky’ was still merely his writing Weibo account moniker and when he had millions of people looking up to him for his crucial contributions in writing this amazing story about his son Luo Binghe and the way he overcame all odds to become a success with a harem of gorgeous women at his feet (damn you, Peerless Cucumber bro!).

Back in those days, he lived off cup noodles and instant coffee. If he didn’t have to leave the house, Shang Qinghua would simply curl up in front of his laptop, either writing for his novel or watching shows (clears his throat) - actual shows! Chinese period dramas were his favourite, where a skilled and intelligent consort in the harem would outwit all the other women to be with her one true love, the Emperor, who falls irrevocably in love with her.

And when he got bored, he switched from the laptop to his television to engage in his second most favourite hobby - Chinese karaoke. Going out to a karaoke bar would require some level of socializing, and also a few friends so he gets more bang out of his buck from what he pays for the room, but at home? 

With advanced technology and a tiny ass microphone in either shining gold or silver, Shang Qinghua’s home entertainment system was his very own personal karaoke room, His tiny mic even had that echo-y effect on.

Shang Qinghua has a thing for classic Chinese songs - ‘The New Butterfly Dream’, ‘Liang Shan Bo and Juliet’, The Moon Represents My Heart‘ - and contemporary karaoke must-haves, like Wang Fei. For an embarrassing few days, the Chinese version of Baby Shark was a veritable earworm as well.

After transmigrating into his own story set in ancient times, where he lives without technology, Shang Qinghua would be lying if he said he didn’t miss the Internet. Laptops would be incredibly handy, and so would switches for lights, definitely indoor plumbing for toilets, and induction stoves. Phones too, that would be nice, rather than having to ‘send word’ with letters. 

Of course, there is no karaoke bar or machine for him.

Not all is bad though. At least he transmigrated to Shang Qinghua in this world as a baby, so it’s not as if he was surviving on Internet and technology one day and left to do everything manually the next day since someone was always taking care of him. Peerless Cucumber bro, of course, wasn’t as lucky, but the man has definitely taken to this world (and his son!!) like a fish to water.

And as for himself, Shang Qinghua does not need to envy Shen Qingqiu and Luo Binghe either, because somehow, he has gotten the man of his dreams too, even if said man was a little cruel and rude to him in the beginning.

He has the love of his life (coughs coughs) and they’re stuck in this world for the rest of his life. What more is there to want? Not to mention how his cup of instant noodles betrayed him at the last moment, resulting in his death! It is slightly safer, ironically, to be in this world instead.

All is good except... well...

===

Shen Qingqiu marvels at the sight before him, torn between wanting to step in to stop Shang Qinghua, or watch this farce unfold. 

He sometimes forgets where he, or where Shang Qinghua, who has been in this world longer than he, came from. They don’t always talk about the past when they meet, and aside from the occasional meetups, Shen Yuan is a part of him that doesn’t surface, not when he is with Luo Binghe. 

Shang Qinghua, on the other hand, grew up here, and aside from referring to Shen Qingqiu by his Weibo account name, he seems otherwise well-adjusted, no hint of modern online writer Shang Qinghua in sight. It doesn’t feel as if he misses their original world either.

This evening, however, memories of modern times slap him in the face, quite literally.

“Shizun!” Luo Binghe calls, frantic, tugging him back into his embrace out of Shang Qinghua’s way. Once Shen Qingqiu is safe in his arms, his eyes narrow at the bumbling, drunk idiot causing a scene in the dinner hall, “Shang Qinghua...”

Shang Qinghua stops where he is, and then before any one can stop him, he picks up a pair of chopsticks, brings it to his mouth, and begins bellowing his way through-

-Jay Chou’s Hair Like Snow.

“Shizun, are you alright?” Luo Binghe fusses, his hands coming up to cup Shen Qingqiu’s face when his Shizun doesn’t so much as respond to him. “Were you hurt? Did he hurt you? How’re you feeling? We’ll go back home now-”

“What is he singing?” Qi Qingqi frowns in disgust.

They all wince when Shang Qinghua attempts to hit a high note, but fails miserably.

Fuck me, Shen Qingqiu thinks, his eyes impossibly wide, who knew Airplane bro was such a karaoke fanatic?

“... maybe he is possessed by a malevolent spirit? Or perhaps this is an unidentified curse?” asks Ming Fan. 

“Or is this some new form of cultivation?” asks Ning Yingying, curious.

Yue Qingyuan, seated at the front of the dining hall, cannot help but be concerned for him as well. “Shall we call Mu-shidi to take a look at him-”

They’ve gathered for their annual meeting - a condition that Yue Qingyuan has set in place a few years ago after Luo Binghe ‘stole’ (married!) him away from Cang Qiong Peak - and although Shang Qinghua said he didn’t mind that Mobei Jun was unable to accompany him today, he spent most of the dinner drinking alcohol while in a melancholic state instead.

Who knew that Shang Qinghua was a singing drunk?!

Hence their current predicament.

At the Sect Master’s words, Shang Qinghua suddenly turns around and looks at Shen Qingqiu. HIccuping twice, he then beams, “Cucumber-”

Shen Qingqiu has never moved that fast in his life. Within a fraction of a second, he has his hand pressed over Shang Qinghua’s mouth, holding onto him from the back.

“Cucumber?” everyone choruses in confusion.

“I believe your Shang-shishu has had a little too much to drink,” Shen Qingqiu clears his throat, nodding at everyone else. “We should... send him back to Mobei. Isn’t that right, Binghe?”

His disciple, his husband, still has on an affronted, murderous look for how Shang Qinghua almost brained Shen Qingqiu with his flailing arms in his drunken fit. The moment Shen Qingqiu asks, however, his expression morphs into something so soft and full of love that everyone who sees it chokes.

“Of course,” Luo Binghe smiles, devotion apparent in his eyes. “Anything Shizun wants.”

===

The words that are tumbling out of Shang Qinghua’s mouth are entirely incomprehensible, and so are the tunes he’s humming into his ear.

Mobei Jun thought he had gotten used to Shang Qinghua’s eccentric mannerisms, and also thought he knew everything about his husband, so many years later. Shang Qinghua is mumbling Chinese alright, but none of the characters put together make any sense.

Who is Liang Shan Bo? And who the hell is Juliet?!

His mood taking a turn for the worse, Mobei Jun hoists Shang Qinghua up further on his back.

After getting so drunk, the idiot had the gall to demand for a piggy-back from the throne room to their bedroom. Mobei Jun has never once suffered such indignity in his years of living. A bridal carry? Of course, anytime. A piggy-back? As if he was some beast to be tamed? 

Well this definitely has to be a first.

While he was stewing in his thoughts, Shang Qinghua switches from that song to another one, and a stream of ‘du du du lu du lu�� emerges from his lips... AND something about... a sha yu? What the hell is that?!

Shang Qinghua lazily lifts his right hand as they approach their room, balls it into a fist and puts it to his mouth, as if he’s holding something, and whatever monstrosity Shang Qinghua is singing, his voice gets even louder.

Mobei Jun tosses Shang Qinghua off his back unceremoniously and onto the soft bed. Interrupted, Shang Qinghua blinks, his vision blurry, and is about to catch his breath and start singing again when his husband climbs in after him. Trapping Shang Qinghua with his entire weight, Mobei Jun seals his lips with a kiss.

“... My king...” Shang Qinghua murmurs in a daze, when Mobei Jun pulls back a few minutes later, his breaths coming out as short, harsh pants. “My king...”

“That’s right,” he says with a glower. “I’m your Da Wang, your husband.”

Mobei Jun doesn’t know who Liang Shan Bo is, but he’s going to make sure no other man’s name ever leaves Shang Qinghua’s lips again when they’re together.

And when his husband finally sobers up, he’s going to have a lot to answer for.

---

Songs Mentioned (YouTube Links in Comments):

The New Butterfly Dream 新鸳鸯蝴蝶梦 － A Chinese classic, sung by Huang An but done beautifully by legendary god of singing Fei Yu Qing and singing partner for the song A Yun Ga

Liang Shan Bo and Juliet 梁山伯与朱丽叶 － A Taiwanese contemporary classic of sorts by Genie Zhuo, most Chinese millennials would definitely have sang this at a karaoke once in their lives - Song is inspired by Liang Shan Bo and Zhu Ying Tai, the Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet to some extent - They both die in the end and become butterflies, so they’re also called the Butterfly Lovers.

The Moon Represents My Heart 月亮代表我的心 － ANOTHER CLASSIC CLASSIC!!!

Baby Shark (Chi. Ver) － ˆThe baby shark hype did move to China, and it’s pretty hilarious LMAO and in Chinese, shark is 鲨鱼 (sha yu) but I’m assuming that in this world, there isn’t a shark kind of animal of sorts? So Mobei Jun and everyone else except SQQ wouldn’t know what a shark is or looks like?!

Hair Like Snow 发如雪 － By Jay Chou, another classic that all Chinese millennials would have sang in a karaoke bar 

Wang Fei 王妃 － Jam Hsiao’s version is known best, and it’s pretty epic, not that anyone can reach any of the high notes in the chorus, but does that stop us from trying?!! Hell no!!!

---

Notes: My first Moshang?!! That didn’t really have a lot of Moshang time?! But thanks anon, hope this sort of works?!

[thekillerssluts]

The Story Behind Every Song On Will Butler’s New Album Generations

Will Butler has a lot on his mind. It has, after all, been five years since his solo debut, Policy. A lot can happen in half a decade, and a lot has happened in this past half-decade — much of it quite dire. Butler was in his early 30s when Policy came out, and now he’s closing in on 40. He’s a husband and father. And he’s shaken by the state of the world, the idea of being an artist and a soon-to-be middle-aged man striving to guide his family through the chaos.

At least, that’s how it comes across through much of Generations, his sophomore outing that arrives today. Generations is a big, sprawling title by nature, and the album in turn grapples with all kinds of big picture anxieties. Mass shootings, the overarching darkness and anxiety of our time, trying to reckon with our surroundings but the system overload that occurs all too easily in the wake of it. Then there are more intimate songs, too, tales drawn from personal lives as people plug along just trying to navigate a tumultuous era.

Butler is, of course, no stranger to crafting music that seeks to parse the cultural moment and how it impacts in our daily lives. Ever since Arcade Fire ascended to true arena-rock status on The Suburbs 10 years ago, they have embarked on projects that explicitly try to make sense of our surroundings. (Not that their earlier work was bereft of heavy concepts — far from it — but Reflektor and Everything Now turned more of a specific eye towards contemporary ills and trials.) But as one voice amongst many in Arcade Fire, there is a cinematic scope to whatever Butler’s playing into there.

On Generations, he engages with a lot of similar concerns but all in his own voice — often yelping, desperate, frustrated then just trying to catch a breath. Butler leans on his trusty Korg MS-20 throughout Generations, often giving the album a synth-y indie backdrop that allows him to try on a few different selves. There are a handful of surging choruses, “la-la” refrains batting back against the darkness, slinking grooves maybe allowing someone the idea of brief physical release amidst ongoing strife.

Ahead of Generations’ arrival, Butler sent us some thoughts on the album, running from inspiration between the individual tracks to little details about the arrangement and composition of different songs. Now that you can hear the album for yourself, check it out and read along with Butler’s comments below.

1. “Outta Here”

I think this is the simplest song on the record. Just, like, get me out of here. Get me fucking out of here. I’m so tired of being here. No, I don’t have another answer, and I don’t expect anything to be better anywhere else. But, please, I would like to leave here.

I can play plenty of instruments, and can make interesting sounds on them, but kinda the only instrument I’m good at is a synth called the Korg MS-20. That’s the first sound on the record. It makes most of the bass you hear on the record. It’s a very aggressive, loud, versatile machine, and I wanted to start the record with it cause I’m good at playing it and it makes me happy.

2. “Bethlehem”

This song partly springs from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats:​ “What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Like a lot of folks, I woke up after the election in 2016 mad and sad and scared and exhausted. This song is born of that emotion.

My bandmates Jenny Shore, Julie Shore, and Sara Dobbs sing the bridge, and it’s a corrective to my (appropriate?) freaking out — this isn’t the apocalypse. You’re misquoting Yeats. Get your fucking head on straight. History has not ruptured — this shit we’re in is contiguous with the shit we’ve been dealing with for a long, long time. But still, we sometimes do need an apocalyptic vision to make change. Even if it’s technically wrong. I dunno. It’s an ongoing conversation.

There’s a lot of interplay with backing vocals on this record — sometimes the narrator is the asshole, sometimes the backing vocals are the asshole. Sometimes they’re just trying their best to figure out the world. This song starts that conversation.

3. “Close My Eyes”

I tried to make these lyrics a straightforward and honest description of an emotion I feel often: “I’m tired of waiting for a better day. But I’m scared and I’m lazy and nothing’s gonna change.” Kind of a sad song. Trying to tap into some Smokey Robinson/Motown feeling — “I’ve got to dance to keep from crying.”

There’s a lot of Mellotron on this record, and a lot of MS-20. This song has a bunch of Mellotron strings/choirs processed through the MS-20. It’s a trick I started doing on the Arcade Fire song “Sprawl II,” and I love how it sounds and I try to do it on every song if I can.

4. “I Don’t Know What I Don’t Know”

This makes a pair with “Close My Eyes” — shit is obviously fucked, but “I don’t know what I don’t know what I don’t know what I can do.” I’m not a proponent of the attitude! Just trying to describe it, as I often feel it. In my head, I know some things that I can do — my wife Jenny, for instance, works really hard to get state legislatures out of Republican control. Cause it’s all these weirdo state legislative chambers that have enormous power over law enforcement, and civil rights, and Medicaid, and everything.

The image in the last verse was drawn from the protests in Ferguson in 2015: “Watch the bullets and the beaters as they move through the streets — grab your sister’s kids — hide next to the fire station…” It’s been horrifically disheartening to see the police riot across America as their power has been challenged. I’ve got a little seed of hope that we might change things, but, man, dark times.

More MS-20 bass on this one, chained to the drum machine. This one is supposed to be insanely bass heavy — if it comes on in a car, the windows should be rattling, and you should be asking, “What the heck is going on here?” Trying for a contemporary hip-hop bass sound but in a way less spare context. First song with woodwinds — rhythmic stuff and freaky squeals by Stuart Bogie and Matt Bauder.

5. “Surrender”

This song is masquerading as a love song, but it’s more about friendship. About the confusion that comes as people change: Didn’t you use to have a different ideal? Didn’t we have the same ideal at some point? Which of us changed? How did the world change? Relationships that we sometimes wish we could let go of, but that are stuck within us forever.

It’s also about trying to break from the first-person view of the world. “What can I do? What difference can I make?” It’s not about some singular effort — you have to give yourself over to another power. Give over to people who have gone before who’ve already built something — you don’t have to build something new! The world doesn’t always need a new idea, it doesn’t always need a new personality. What can you do with whatever power and money you’ve got? Surrender it over to something that’s already made. And then the song ends with an apology: I’m sorry I’ve been talking all night. Just talk talk talking, all night. Shut up, Will.

Going for “wall of sound” on this one — bass guitar and bass synth and double tracked piano bass plus another piano plus Mellotron piano. The “orchestra” is about a dozen different synth and Mellotron tracks individually detuned. And then run through additional processing.

6. “Hide It Away”

This song is about secrets. Both on an intimate, heartbreaking level — friends’ miscarriages, friends’ immigration status, shitty affairs coming to light — and on a grand, horrible level: New York lifting the statute of limitations on child abuse prosecutions, all the #MeToo reporting. There’s nothing you can do when your secret is revealed. Like, what can you do? You just have to let the response wash over you. If you’ve done something horrible, god-willing, you’ll have to pay for it in some way. If it’s something not horrible, but people will hate you anyway, goddammit, I wish there were some way to protect you.

This song has the least poetic line on the record, a real clunker: “It’s just money and power, money and power might set them free.” But it’s a clunky, shitty concept — the most surefire protection is being rich and knowing powerful people. But even then, shit just might come out. Even after you’re long dead.

Came from a 30-second guitar sample I recorded while messing around at the end of trying to track a different song. I liked the chords, looped them to make a demo. And the song was born from there. This is the one song I play drums on. Snare is chained to the MS-20, trying to play every frequency the ear can hear at the same time on some of those big hits.

7. “Hard Times”

[Laughs] I sat down and tried to write a Spotify charting electro-hit, and this is what came out: “Kill the rich, salt the earth.” Oh well. Written way before COVID-19, but my 8-year-old son turned to me this spring and asked, “Did you write the song ‘Hard Times’ about now, because we’re living through hard times?” No, I didn’t.

In Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, the narrator is a real son-of-a-bitch—contrarian, useless. Mad at the strong confident people who think they’ve got it figured out. And they don’t! And neither does the narrator — but he knows he doesn’t, and he at times yearns for some higher answer, and he’s funny, and too clever, but still knows he’s a piece of shit. I read Notes From Underground in high school and kinda forgot how it shaped my worldview until I sat down with it a couple years ago. The bridge on this song is basically smushed up quotes from Notes From Underground.

I was asking Shiftee, who mixed the record, if there are any vocal plug-ins I should be playing around with. He pointed me toward Little AlterBoy, which is basically a digital recreation of the kind of pedal the Knife use, for instance, on their vocal sound. It can shift the timbre/character of a voice without changing the pitch. Or change pitch without changing character. Very fun! Very much all over this track. Tried to make the bridge sound like a Sylvester song.

8. “Promised”

Another friend song masquerading as a love song. I’ve met a handful of extraordinary people in my life, who stopped doing extraordinary work because life is hard and it sucks. People who — I mean, it’s a lottery and random and who cares — could be great writers or artists, who kind of just disappeared. And it’s heartbreaking and frustrating. I don’t blame them. Maybe they weren’t made for this world. Maybe it’s just random. Maybe they’ll do amazing work in their 60s!

We tracked this song before it was written. Julie and Miles came over and we made up a structure and did a bunch of takes, found a groove. Which I then hacked up into what it is now! The bed tracks are lovely and loose. Maybe I’ll put out a jammier version of this song at some point. The other big synth on this record is the Oberheim OB-8, and that’s the bass on this one (triple tracked along with some MS-20).

9. “Not Gonna Die”

This song is about terrorism, and the response to terrorism. I wrote it a couple weeks after the Bataclan shooting in Paris in 2015. For some reason, a couple weeks after the shooting, I was in midtown Manhattan. I must have been Christmas shopping. I had to pop into the Sephora on 5th Avenue to pick up something specific — I think for my wife or her sister. I don’t remember. But I remember walking in, and the store was really crowded, and for just a split second I got really scared about what would happen if someone brought out a gun and started shooting up the crowd. And then I got so fucking mad at the people that made me feel that emotion. Like, I’m not gonna fucking die in the midtown Sephora, you fucking pieces of shit. Thanks for putting that thought in my head.

BUT ALSO, fuck all the fucking pieces of shit who are like, “We can’t accept refugees — what if they’re terrorists?” FUCK OFF. Some fucking terrified family driven from their home by a war isn’t going to kill me. Or anyone. Fuck off. Some woman from Central America fleeing from her husband who threatened to kill her isn’t going to fucking bomb Times Square. You fucking pieces of shit.

In November/December 2015, the Republican primary had already started — Trump had announced in June. And every single one of those pieces of shit running for president were talking about securing our borders, and keeping poor people out, and trying to justify it by security talk. FUCK OFF. You pieces of shit. Fuck right off. Anyway. Sorry for cursing.

I kind of think of the outro of this song as an angry “Everyday People.” Everyday people aren’t going to kill me. Lots of great saxes on this track from Matt Bauder and Stuart Bogie.

The intro of the song we recorded loud, full band, which I then ran through the MS-20 and filtered down till it was just a bass heart-pulse, and re-recorded solo piano and voice over that.

10. “Fine”

I kind of think that “Outta Here” to “Not Gonna Die” comprise the record, and “Fine” operates as the afterword and the prologue rolled into one. An author’s note, maybe. It was kind of inspired by high-period Kanye: I wanted to talk about something important in a profane, sometimes horribly stupid way, but have it be honest and ultimately transcendent.

In the song, I talk semi-accurately about where I come from. My mom’s dad was a guitar player who led bands throughout the ’30s and ’40s. In post-war LA, he had a band with Charles Mingus as the bass player. Charles Mingus! One of the greatest geniuses in all of American history. But this was the ’40s, and in order to travel with the band, to go in the same entrances, to eat dinner at the same table, he had to wear a Hawaiian shirt and everybody had to pretend he was Hawaiian. Because nobody was sure how racist they were supposed to be against Hawaiians.

Part of the reason I’m a musician is that my great-grandfather was a musician, and his kids were musicians, and their kids were musicians, and their kids are musicians. Part of the reason is vast generations of people working to make their kids’ lives better, down to my life. Part of the reason is that neither government nor mob has decided to destroy my family’s lives, wealth, and property for the last couple hundred years. I tried to write a song about that?

Generations is out now via Merge. Purchase it here.

https://www.stereogum.com/2098946/will-butler-generations-song-meanings/franchises/interview/footnotes-interview/

[randomvarious]

Orbital - “The Saint” Sprite CD Plné Hudby 1997 Breakbeat

Orbital are one of the most important groups in the history of electronic music, bar none. Hailing from Sevenoaks in Kent, England, brothers Phil and Paul Hartnoll originally lit the UK clubs on fire between the late 80s and early 90s with an unbeatable string of techno rave anthems. But by the mid-90s, the pair found themselves easing out of the 12-inch game and into the more daunting, less trekked path of making fully-fledged electronic albums. More than just compiling a series of pumping dance tracks, Orbital’s albums reflected a more complex and thoughtful approach; one that showed that they could be much more than just maestros of dance music and that they could make electronic stuff that was both accessible and challenging. Their evolution would catch the attention of the mainstream, more rock-oriented music press, who then showered Orbital with unduly praise as a group that was pretty much unlike anything else that was out at the time. The boys were also known for their incredible live sets, too, which were marked by their improvisation, and after a legendary showing at Glastonbury in 1994, the festival would open its doors wide for more and more electronic acts in subsequent years.

In 1997, a critically middling, but nonetheless moneymaking film called The Saint, starring Val Kilmer, was released. It was loosely based on the character Simon Templar, who was the focus of a long-running series of novels that were written by Leslie Charteris. A TV series based on the character, which starred Roger Moore, ran throughout the 60s on British television, too. 

The accompanying film soundtrack for The Saint features a who’s who of contemporary and popular electronic acts. It includes Sneaker Pimps, Moby, Fluke, The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Daft Punk, Everything But The Girl, and of course, Orbital. David Bowie and Duran Duran are on it, too.

As it turns out, Orbital offered up one of the soundtrack’s most successful songs, simply titled “The Saint,” which managed to reach #3 on the UK singles chart and #4 on the US Bubbling Under 100 chart, too. It was actually a complete re-work of the theme song from the British TV series, which was originally composed by Edwin Astley. Very much of its time, the original theme is a waltz and features an orchestra that dramatically plays those little clue-hunting, espionage-committing melodies and rhythms that we tend to naturally associate with spy and mystery thrillers alike. Here: 

Orbital then basically took the 60s theme and updated it for the late 90s. No longer a serious and loud waltz with some patches of empty space, it was now a fun, much more dynamic, bouncy, orchestral breakbeat tune with a much richer and fuller sound. The Hartnoll brothers recreated the melodies, but made them sound a little bit lighter, starting with the lead, overarching woodwinds, and then proceeded to introduce horns and strings, which were then followed by some xylophone for the final leg. To contrast the lightening of those melodies though, and to also give the tune a bit of much-needed punchiness, Orbital intensified the song’s backdrop, overlaying the drum-break-driven backbeat with a dark, bounding, synthesized timpani, while also putting a layer of acidic, zappy fuzz-buzz in the middle, too. And at the points when all these little bits play concurrently and crescendo together to meet the leading melodies for the choruses, this song reveals itself to be a real thing of spy-thriller-themed beauty. 

The music video for “The Saint” is a bit of fun, too. It’s stilly and light, it tells a story, and it also involves some, I guess, spycraft, in which the Hartnoll brothers spend the bulk of the video with their heads in bags as they’re toted around an airport:

It’s not Orbital’s most remarkable song, but it’s one of their most successful for sure, and in a later re-release of their critically acclaimed 1996 album, In Sides, “The Saint” was appended as a bonus track, which probably helped the album sell even more copies.

Real fun re-work/update type of tune from this indispensable electronic pair.

[ifthepuppetmakesyousmile]

my masters thesis on how to determine the horny level of a bee gees song or, how to tell if you need to throw a bee gee in horny jail.

horny bee gees songs come in a couple of flavors. for the most part, when the bee gees sing about love, they’re really singing about love. but sometimes when they sing about love, they are really singing about Fuck, and Fuck and love are different. in order to properly evaluate a bee gees song for its horny factor, we must consider both the lyrics and the complete musical presentation. what does the song SOUND like? what do the instruments do? how fast, how slow, what tone of voice are they singing in? all of these things affect how horny any given song is. first, we examine the lyrics, looking at the meaning of the text. is it to be taken at face value, is it metaphorical, is it autobiographical, is it fictional. then, we examine the sonic presentation. how do the rhythm, instrumentation, and vocal delivery affect the text? where does the primary horny energy in the song lie? i might not be able to analyze every single bee gees song for its horny value, but we can extrapolate and use these criteria as a guide to determine the horniness of any bee gees song.

for instance, “how deep is your love” is very much really about love in general. Fuck may be part of that love, but it is not the primary focus of the song. with a gentle delivery, soft instrumentation, and lyrics that show a deep connection between the singer and their partner, “how deep is your love” is very decidedly about affection and emotional love rather than physical sexual intimacy.  “love you inside and out” is lyrically mostly about love, but it’s also very much about Fuck. it is sneaky. it is musically, especially rhythmically, an extremely humpy song. from the opening bass line, the vibe is set. barry’s delivery is more urgent here. we hear him pretty much parked in his falsetto for the entire song, singing with an urgency we simply do not hear in the album’s other big hit, “too much heaven.” lyrically, we hear the emotional toll of a relationship that lacks equal commitment--she just doesn’t feel what he feels, and it devastates him, but it also sounds like he is crying about this while poundin’ that pussy. through these two examples, we can glean a lot about how to determine the horniness of any bee gees song.

in direct juxtaposition to “love you inside and out,” we find a later bee gees song off of the remarkably horny 1997 album “still waters” called “alone.”  “alone” is musically a pretty gentle song. it’s upbeat, with bagpipes (notoriously unsexy in nature), accoustic guitar, and snare drum as the main instrumentation. lyrically, the overall message of the song is “i have done a lot of fuck, but i maybe should have done a little more love, because now i am alone, which is something i dislike.” though a cautionary tale about the importance of finding the right fuck/love balance, the opening lyrics are perhaps the most explicitly about a sexual act of any bee gees song. “I was a midnight rider on a cloud of smoke, i could make a woman hang on every single stroke” announces a 51 year old barry gibb, terrorizing me. in the following lyrics, he notes how his partner’s body began to tremble. though the text eases up on the direct references to sex, these opening lines have left their horny mark. vocally, this is not one of barry’s strongest performances. delivered in a hushed falsetto on the verses with occasional supporting harmony from his brothers, he just manages to sell the introspection, but the choruses by robin deliver a large amount of the emotional weight of the song. this sets the tone for the rest of the album, however, as even the songs on this album that are primarily about love seem to be about a very sensual, sexual love and above an emotional interpersonal romantic love. following a rejected acoustic cover album, the brothers appear to have focused on writing more mature music that they felt would feel fresh and contemporary in the late 1990s. they’d also undergone an image makeover, as 1997 was to be a very big year for them. a very big, very horny year, with their induction into the rock and roll hall of fame and the 20th anniversary of saturday night fever relaunching them into the public consciousness in north america. it was time for the bee gees to be adults, and they opted to do so by wearing black and singin’ about fuckin’.

the third variety of horny bee gees song is a song that is horny both in text and in musical presentation. songs of this nature pair sexual lyrics with sexual musical delivery. i think as humans we all instinctively know what music sounds horny--we all respond to it differently, but we can all identify that a smooth bass line, cool, relaxed beats and instrumentation, and a slow but deliberate tempo indicate a certain amount of intended sexiness. this may attract or repel us, but at the very least, we notice it. this is the kind of song of which brother maurice is most typically guilty--”dimensions,” “closer than close,” and “house of shame” all fall under this category, easily diagnosed as horny in both meaning and sound. lyrically, mo is the most explicit about his own body and sexual desires in song (the mo penis forecast for today is rock hard with a chance of drip), and his delivery is probably the sexiest and most masculine, lending even non-horny songs a bit of a sexy vibe. his solo performances were rare for the group; some albums would go by without a single mo-lead song. the relative scarcity of his songs makes their unique horniness and sexuality more noticeable. barry has hundreds of songs. if some of them are devastatingly horny, it hardly matters compared to the plethora of story songs, love songs, and songs about the invention of the lightbulb with which he has provided us. a horny barry lead is a drop in the bucket--a horny mo lead is 1/6 of his catalog. robin has very few truly horny songs, as most of his leads are a bit more introspective, melancholy, and full of longing. his voice was very well suited for conveying complex emotion. there’s a reason “lamplight” was the hill he was wiling to die on and not, say, “sensuality,” a horny disaster cut from the 2001 album “this is where i came in”. sensuality is perhaps the best...worst...strongest example of a song that is horny in both text and composition. it’s the kind of song you’re afraid of your parents catching you listening to. it’s the kind of song that i personally have to actively endure. the lyrics are deeply sensual, as could be inferred from the title, but even with the warning of the title, perhaps one is never really ready to hear robin gibb say “body worship.” recorded in 1998, this was hot off the heels of the uber-horny “still waters” and the structure of “this is where i came in had not yet been determined. i don’t know how this song eventually found its way to the public--i assume it just slithered out on its own, determined to be heard. the musical backing brings all of the horniest sounds a late 90s pop track can bring--creamy vocal harmonies straight out of a backstreet boys track, a hip-hop styled breakbeat, and sexy key-change at 4:30, all delivered with the confidence of a horny 48 year old who has seen a fuck or two in his lifetime in one convenient slow-jam. lyrically, it discusses thirsting and hungering for your partner's body, body worship, finding the “center of your universe” which i assume is code for “the clit”, mentions being a slave under an evil spell, compares sex and love with their partner to religion, and then says in no uncertain terms that god is on his side giving him the power to Fuck Good (very well, even.) it is clear to see that both musically and lyrically, this song is about fuck with a side of love, rather than love with a side of fuck.  this song is horny.

with these categories and criteria in mind, we are now free to consider the horny weight of any bee gees song. “country lanes?” not real horny. “all this making love?” incredibly horny. “one?” hornier than you’d guess on first listen but barry says he’ll be your slave. “wish you were here” is definitely hornier than a song i’d write about my baby brother but because it was styled to be more relatable and so posed as a more general love and loss song, we can consider it very low on the horniness spectrum. “esp?” that’s psychic horny. do with this cursed information what you will. i literally can’t think about this any more today or i will rip my own eyes out. the bee gees can be horny if they want and boy do they want.

[cxhnow]

Chloe x Halle Talk Police Brutality and Postponing Their Album

“The way our music has evolved is exactly how we're evolving as young women.”

Four days before the release of their sophomore album, Ungodly Hour, Chloe x Halle addressed their fans to let them know they’re postponing it. In a video posted across their social channels, sisters Chloe, 21, and Halle Bailey, 20, sat shoulder to shoulder at their home in Los Angeles, surrounded by hovering green trees, and tried to sum up their range of emotions after witnessing a global uprising against police brutality.“In honor of all of the lives lost in police brutality, we felt like it was right to postpone, and fully shine our attention and our work on them,” Chloe said, with both a shake and clarity in her voice, in the video to the duo's 2.7 million followers. Halle added, “Music has been used for a long time to bring us joy and healing in difficult times like this.” Just weeks before, George Perry Floyd, a Black man living in Minneapolis, died in police custody while a white officer’s knee was pressed on his neck. As video of his killing spread, and after the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, protests sparked around the world demanding accountability and allyship with the Black Lives Matter movement. On the day Chloe, Halle, and I spoke by phone, Tony McDade, a Black trans man in Tallahassee, Florida, was fatally shot by an officer. In Los Angeles, where the sisters live, protesters strung their bodies together to temporarily shut down the 101 freeway. In Atlanta, where they were born, six police officers were charged after being accused of using excessive force on two Black college students who were tased and pulled out of their cars days earlier.During a time when fans are more critical of how celebrities engage in civil rights activism, Grammy-nominated musicians and actors Chloe and Halle Bailey don’t tiptoe. They urge fans to sign petitions, donate, vote, and recognize Black life, early and often. They celebrate Black joy year-round. This is what their followers have grown to expect from them. Chloe and Halle have always had something to say, and it just so happens to be an important time to speak up.

It’s hard to wrap your head around the unbreakable confidence it takes to be a female pop artist if you aren’t one. Thankfully, Chloe and Halle have each other. For decades, the bond among members of Black singing girl groups has given audiences soulful and fun music. In the '90s, groups like SWV, En Vogue, and Zhané made upbeat R&B music that made you want to dance with your homegirls. Now, contemporary duos like KING, Van Jess, and Ibeyi stand out for their rapturous vocals enveloped in dramatic production. Chloe x Halle add to this legacy by singing, writing, and producing ethereal music that resonates with the girl next door.Yet there are distinct differences in the duo’s vocal style; they don’t try to match each other’s voices to create some sort of uniformity. Rather, they play off of rhythm and song pacing to meld their voices. When they do sing choruses and bridges together, their voices, albeit distinct, create layered, otherworldly melodies.The duo’s sound is often described as angelic, giving leeway for some to describe them as two women without sin. Chloe and Halle want to shatter this idea because it’s not realistic. “For Ungodly Hour we were so excited to just flip the narrative of being the perfect angel and show the other side[s] of us.…," says Halle. "The dark side, the naughty side, the things that happen that you don't see behind the scenes.” 

The majority of the 13 songs on the album are about navigating messy situations — sometimes ones that you have caused. In the midst of trying to be a better friend or romantic partner, you know that you’ll always be imperfect, and decide to love yourself anyway.“I've always been a jazz head," Halle says. “I don't know why, but there's something about the pain and the love and the heartbreak that you can truly feel through the essence of those songs that are sung by Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald.” As of late, Chloe’s “really, really been inspired by '90s music and early 2000s production,” a vibe you can hear and see in “Do It,” the second single off of Ungodly Hour.“We wanted to show our sensual side because we are growing as young women, but we still kept it classy and cute,” Chloe says. “It was just really fun for us to do that. We also wanted to start dancing this era, and just something really simple. And it makes us so happy to see everyone doing that dance on TikTok.”Chloe expands on how the name of the album and title track came about after working with the U.K. duo Disclosure: “We wrote this song [the title track “Ungodly Hour”] with Disclosure, and we had the best time,” she recalls. “I forgot what I was watching, but I heard the phrase ‘ungodly hour’ and wrote it in my notes. [It] kind of stuck out to all of us, and we were like, ‘What can you say with this?’ We all came up with this sentence: ‘Love me at the ungodly hour,’ which means love me when I'm at my worst; love me when I'm not all dolled up and made up. Love me when all my insecurities are out on the table.”’

“We started writing about when you're in a situationship with a guy and the chemistry is there, and you know the love is there and your connection is so deep, but he's not going all in," she continues. "For some reason he doesn't want to commit. He's entertaining other options, and it's just saying, ‘You know what? I love myself enough to walk away and put the brakes on this and to pause this. So when you decide you like yourself, when you decide you need someone, when you don't have to think about it — love me at the ungodly hour.’”Other emotionally complex tracks on the album include “Forgive Me,” a haunting song inspired by Chloe’s own life, after she discovered a guy she was involved with was going back and forth between her and another young woman. “I Wonder What She Thinks of Me” is a song that tells the story of the new love, the one a man gets with after he’s broken up with his ex.The vocalists are eager to make music that grows with them and becomes more layered as they do. “The way our music has evolved is exactly how we're evolving as young women,” Chloe says. The chromelike wings they turn around and show on their album cover, worn with black, latex dresses, are symbolic of their strength and power.When I ask what they hope for in the future, the Bailey sisters seem at ease. Chloe would love to work with BTS: “They're performing — it's top-notch. I'll sit at my computer and watch all of their music videos and all of their performances.”“Awards would be nice," she adds. "Being at the top of these Hot 100 lists would be beautiful and amazing, but as long as I'm growing and I'm a better version of myself tomorrow than I was today, I am content.”

The duo is used to releasing music during times of political duress. Two years ago, when Chloe x Halle were part of our music issue for the release of their debut album The Kids Are Alright, the world was grappling with an immigration travel ban enacted by President Donald Trump, the #MeToo movement, and pressing climate change legislation. That album was an intonation from the sisters to young activists approaching human rights issues head-on: “Do it while you young. Don't let them turn you numb. Don't let them get you strung. Ooh, let me put you on,” they sing on their first album's title song.“I was 15 through 17, and Chloe was 17 through 19 during the making of the album,” Halle says of their debut project. “We were still very young. We were still trying to figure out what we wanted, and I think that showed in the music.”As artists, the singers say their first album was about proving they could play an active, hands-on role in the production of their own music in an industry dominated by men. As two teenage women, it was about showing the world that, although they didn't have all the answers and weren’t sure what was lurking around every corner, they had the guts to find out. At that point in their careers they had been signed to Beyoncé’s Parkwood for five years and had released one other project, the Sugar Symphony EP, in 2016. But aside from opening tour performances and high-profile appearances, they hadn't become household names.

Now, amid a health pandemic and a country in unrest because of its history of white supremacy, Chloe and Halle are navigating being famous and also having a distinct voice. While finding ways to take care of themselves, the sisters are also promoting an album from their home, in the rooms where they first honed their craft as writers, instrumentalists, and producers. “We've kind of gotten back to our roots and started doing what originally got us started," Halle says, "which is doing YouTube covers, interacting on social media, and connecting with our beautiful fans through there.” A lot has changed in their personal lives as well. They're private about the details, but say they’re learning more about guys and finding themselves in relationships and situationships. They’re experiencing more love, heartbreak, and the misguided antics of boys. "We have to take our power back as women and not allow ourselves to be played,” Chloe riffs.In January, the third season of their Freeform show, grown-ish, dropped. In the college-centered comedy, led by Yara Shahidi, Chloe plays Jazz and Halle plays Sky, ambitious twin sisters who attend the fictional state school Cal U. Jazz is balancing being in love with her boyfriend Doug (played by Diggy Simmons) and schoolwork; Sky is focused on being a track star while navigating her interracial relationship. Like the sisters in real life, their characters are witty, impeccably stylish, and proud of their Blackness. But unlike Chloe and Halle, they’re far more overt about their love lives — often kissing in hallways and openly discussing their sex lives — and unfiltered opinions.Before stay-at-home orders went into place, Chloe and Halle had been expanding farther into Hollywood, and pursuing separate film projects.In July 2019, it was announced that Halle is set to play Ariel in the live-action The Little Mermaid. Many saw Halle’s breakout feature-film role as a huge win for inclusion, but, like clockwork, people on social media found an issue with the revamped iteration of Ariel being played by a Black woman. Halle spoke out on the discourse, telling Variety at the time, “I feel like I’m dreaming, and I’m just grateful. I don’t pay attention to the negativity. I just feel like this role is something bigger than me. It’s going to be beautiful.”

Halle remains grateful, but says of the negative criticism, “We've always learned to just keep our heads up no matter the situation. No matter what anybody has to say about you...just keep pushing.”

Like Halle, Chloe is also expanding her acting chops in feature projects. In December, Chloe wrapped filming for her role in the horror film The Georgetown Project, starring Russell Crowe and Ryan Simpkins. “I'm really protective of my energy, I'm very spiritual, and I love God,” she says about the thriller. “So I was constantly praying when I was on set. But surprisingly, the energy on set was so positive. And I learned so much by being around all of these Oscar-winning actors.”

Humility is a running trait between the sisters. They don’t hide their confidence, but are also God-fearing and incredibly gracious. They’re media-trained and polite, but also find a way to be frank. They say this album is a “whole different world” for them as they reveal more of their personalities, while exploring what it means to be grown women.

“We are learning to embrace who we truly are,” Chloe says about their music evolution. “Our insecurities, our sexuality, owning our power. I'm grateful that we are given a space where we can do that comfortably. And I'm grateful for our parents, because they instilled in us that we need to be strong and independent young women.”

[fuckheadwitha]

Listening to Rolling Stone's Top 500 Albums of All Time

Rolling Stone released an updated list of their top 500 albums of all time and being trapped in the purgatory of covid quarantine this seems like the perfect moment to tackle what an almost completely irrelevant former counter-culture institution has to say about music (we can’t actually blame Rolling Stone for this list, a huge number of musicians and critics voted to make it). I am going to listen to every single one of these, all the way through, with a level of attention that's not super intense but I'm definitely not having them on in the background as simple aural wallpaper. Two caveats though: I can make an executive decision to skip any album if I feel the experience is sufficiently miserable, and I'm also going to be skipping the compilation albums that I feel aren't really worth slots (best ofs, etc.). In addition, I will be ordering them as I go, creating a top 500 of the top 500 (it will be less than 500 since we've already established I'm skipping some of these).

Here are 500-490:

#500 Arcade Fire - Funeral

I can already tell I'm going to be at odds with this list if one of the most important albums of my high school years is at the bottom. That being said, I haven't actually given this whole thing a listen since probably the early 2010s, before Arcade Fire fatigue set in and the hipsterati appointed band of a generation just kinda seemed to fade from popular consciousness. I actually dreaded re-experiencing it, since the synthesis of anthemic rock and quirky folk instrumentation which Arcade Fire brought mainstream has now become the common shorthand of insufferable spotify friendly folk pop. Blessedly, the first half of the album easily holds up, largely propelled by dirty fast rhythm guitar, orchestration that's tuneful rather than obnoxious, and lyrics which come off as earnest rather than pretentious. The middle gets a little sappy and “Crown of Love”, a song I definitely used to like, really starts the grate. And then we get to “Wake Up”, whose cultural saturation spawned thousands of dorky indie rock outfits that confused layered strings and horns with power and meaning. This song definitely hasn't survived the film trailers and commercials which it so ubiquitously overlayed, but the line about "a million little gods causing rainstorms, turning every good thing to rust" still attacks the part of my brain capable of sincere emotion. This album is probably going to hold the top spot for a while, because although so many elements of Funeral that made it feel so meaningful, that made it stand out so much in 2004, have been seamlessly assimilated into an intellectually and emotionally bankrupt indie pop industrial complex, the album itself still has a genuine vulnerability and bangers that still manage to rip.

#499

Rufus, Chaka Khan - Ask Rufus

Before she became a name in her own right, Chaka Khan was the voice of the band Rufus, and it’s definitely her voice that shines amongst some spritely vibey funk. That’s not to say that these aren’t some jams on their own. “At Midnight” is a banging opener with a sprint to the finish, and although the explicitly named but kinda boring “Slow Screw Against the Wall” feels weak, this wasn’t really supposed to be an album of barn burners. This was something people put on their vinyl record players while they chilled on vinyl furniture after a night of doing cocaine. “Everlasting Love” is a bop with a bassline like a Sega Genesis game, and the twinkling piano on “Hollywood” adds a playful levity to lyrics that are supposed to be both tackily optimistic about making it big out in LA and subtly realistic about the kind of nightmare world showbiz can be. “Better Days” is another track that manages to be a bittersweet jam with a catchy sour saxophone and playful synths under Chaka Khan’s vamping. This album definitely belongs on a ‘chill funk to study and relax to’ playlist.

#498

Suicide - Suicide

We’ve hit the first album that could be rightly called a progenitor for multiple genres that followed it. Someone could say there’s a self-serving element of this being on a Rolling Stone list (the band was one of the first to adopt the label ‘Punk’ after seeing it in a Lester Bangs article) but the album’s legacy is basically indisputable. EBM, industrial, punk, post-punk, new wave, new whatever all have a genealogy that connects to Suicide, and it’s easy to hear the band in everything that followed. But what the band actually is is two guys, one with an electric organ and one with a spooky voice, doing spooky simple riffs and saying spooky simple things. Simplicity is definitely not a dis here. The opener “Ghost Rider” makes a banger out of four notes and one instrument, and the refrain ‘America America is killing its youth’ is really all the lyrical complexity you need to fucking get it. “Cheree” and “Girl” have almost identical lyrics (‘oh baby’ vs ‘oh girl’) but “Cheree” is more like a fairy tale and “Girl” is more like a sonic handjob. “Frankie Teardrop” has the audacity to tell a ten minute story with its lyrics, but of course there is intermittent, actually way too loud screaming breaking up the narrative of a guy who loses everything then kills his family and himself. The song is basically a novelty, and I think you can probably say the whole album is a novelty between its brevity and character. But for a bite sized snack this album casts a huge shadow.

#497

Various Artists - The Indestructible Beat of Soweto

The fact that this particular compilation always ends up in the canon has a lot to do with the cultural context it existed in, being America’s first encounter with South African contemporary music during the decline of apartheid (it wouldn’t end until a decade later in 1994 with the country’s first multi-racial elections). Music journos often bring up the fact Ladysmith Black Mambazo, the all male choir singing on the album ender “Nansi Imali”, sang on Paul Simon’s Graceland like their virtue is they helped Paul Simon get over his depression and not, like, the actual music. But also like, how is the actual music? Jams. Ubiquitous, hooky guitars propel the songs along with bright choruses over low lead vocals, but I didn’t expect the synthesizer on the bop “Qhude Manikiniki”, nor the discordant hoedown violin on “Sobabamba”. “Holotelani” is a groove to walk into the sunset to.

#496

Shakira - Donde Estan los Ladrones

So this is the first head scratcher on the list. It’s not like it sucks. And I think I prefer this 90s guitar pop driven spanish language Shakira to modern superstar Shakira. But I mean, it’s an album of late nineties latin pop minivan music, with a thick syrupy middle that doesn’t do anything for me. The opener and closer stand out though.  ‘Ciega, Sordomuda’, one of the biggest pop songs of the 90s (it was #1 on the charts of literally every country in Latin America), has a galloping acoustic guitar and horn hits with Shakira’s vocals at their most percussive.

#495

Boyz II Men - II

So, if you were alive in the 90s you know Boyz II Men were fucking huge, and the worst song on the album is the second track “All Around the World”, basically a love song to their own success, and also the women they’ve banged. You can tell it was written specifically so that the crowd could go fucking wild when they heard their state/city/country mentioned in the song, and I’m not gonna double check but I’m sure they hit all fifty states. Once you’re over that hump though you basically have an hour of songs to fuck to. “U Know” keeps it catchy with propulsive midi guitar and synth horns, “Jezzebel” starts with a skit and ends with a richly layered jazz tune about falling in love on a train, and “On Bended Knee” has a Ragnarok Online type beat. Honestly this album can drag, but you’re not supposed to be listening to it alone in a state of analysis, you’re supposed to have it on during a date that’s going really, really well.

#494

The Ronettes - Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes

A singles compilation of the Ronettes, the only ones I immediately recognized were ‘Be My Baby’ and ‘Going to the Chapel of Love’, the latter of which I didn’t know existed since the version of the song I knew was by the Dixie Cups, which was apparently a source of drama since the Ronettes did it first but producer Phil Spector refused to release it. I feel like as a retro trip to sixties girl groups it’s full of enough songs about breaking up (for example “Breaking Up”) getting back together (for example “Breaking Up”) and wanting to get married but you can’t, because you’re a teenager (“So Young”).

#493

Marvin Gaye - Here, My Dear

This album only exists because Marvin was required by his divorce settlement to make it and provide all of the royalties to his ex-wife and motown executive Anna Gordy Gaye. It’s absolutely bizarre, phoned in mid tempo funk whose lyrics range from the passive aggressive (“This is what you wanted right?”) to the petulant (“Why do I have to pay attorney’s fees?”). There is a seething realness here that crosses well past the border of uncomfortable. I don’t think it’s an amazing album to listen to, but it’s an amazing album to exist: Marvin Gaye is legally obligated to throw his own divorce pity party, and everyone's invited.

#492

Bonnie Raitt - Nick of Time

I have never heard of Bonnie Raitt before but apparently this album won several grammys including album of the year in 1989 and sold 5 million copies, which I guess goes to show that no award provides less long term relevance than the grammys. The story around the album is pretty heartwarming, it was her first massive hit after a career of whiffs, and Bonnie Raitt herself is apparently a social activist and neat human being. I say all this because this sort of 80s country blues rock doesn't really connect with me, but the artist obviously deserves more than that. I unequivocally like the title track though, a hand-clap backed winding electric piano groove about literally finding love before your eggs dry up.

#491

Harry Styles - Fine Line

I do not think I have ever heard a one direction song because I am an adult who only listens to public radio. I’m totally open to pop bands or boy bands or boy band refugee solo artists, but I don’t like anything here. It’s like a mixtape of the worst pop trends of the decade, from glam rock that sounds like it belongs in a car commercial to folky bullshit that sounds like it belongs in a more family focused car commercial. This gets my first DNP (Does Not Place).

#490

Linda Ronstadt - Heart Like a Wheel

Another soft-rock blues and country album which just doesn’t land with me. But the opener “You’re No Good” is like a soul/country hybrid which still goes hard and the title track hits with the lyrics “And it's only love and it's only love / That can wreck a human being and turn him inside out”.

Current Ranking, which is weirdly almost like an inverse of the rolling stones list so far;

[nuclearblastuk]

The Bards’ Tales: A Blind Guardian Chronicle

Blind Guardian are one of those bands which you will not have gotten far into heavy metal without coming to know. You will have seen their records in shops. You will have seen their logo on the fronts of t-shirts, on the backs of hoodies, or proudly stitched into a denim vest. You might have heard their music played in rock and metal bars. You may even have caught a glimpse of them performing live from far across a festival-ground somewhere. To many the music and imagery of Blind Guardian epitomises the power metal style, and while it is fair to say that Rainbow and Iron Maiden are the real progenerators of the power metal aesthetic, Blind Guardian certainly codified many of the elements which you might hear in contemporary power metal titans and label-mates Battle Beast, Beast In Black, Rhapsody of Fire and Sabaton – high-register wails, fast and technical musicianship, symphonic layering and a conceptual approach to album arrangement and composition. To fans they need no introduction of course, but in celebration of their thirty-fifth year of making music and the remixed and remastered reissue series now available on Nuclear Blast, it seems only right to tell the chronicle of the Bards’ tales.

To see the full remixed and remastered reissue series:  nuclearblast.com/blindguardian-reissues All Blind Guardian albums are also available on picture-disc vinyl and on CD.

Our story begins in Krefeld, Germany (1985) where four young bards – Hansi Kursch, Andre Olbrich, Marcus Dork and Thomen Stauch - have just completed their first work under the name of Lucifer’s Heritage. As though caught under the spell of a premonition, that work was entitled Symphonies of Doom, foreshadowing a grand masterwork to be completed some three decades later by Hansi and Andre - the Blind Guardian Twilight Orchestra’s Legacy of the Dark Lands. The opening song ‘Halloween’ would, in time, become ‘Wizard’s Crown’ and feature on the debut album Battalions of Fear. Marcus and Thomen would before long part company with Hansi and Andre - though Thomen would, of course, be soon to return. 

A second demo under the name of Lucifer’s Heritage would be put to tape a year later in 1986 - also called Battalions of Fear - in which Hansi and Andre were joined by Christoph Theissen and Hans-Peter Frey. All the songs on the second demo, with the sole exception of Gandalf’s Rebirth (which is now available on the remixed and remastered version), would in due course find their way onto the Bard’s debut album in a rerecorded form. These demos are notable for their musical acuity, in spite of the limited production facilities available to them; listeners today will recognise them as falling within the bounds of a fairly straightforward speed/thrash metal style, quite unlike the elaborate arrangements the Bards are known for today - though there is some indication of things to come amongst several of the high-fantasy themed tracks. Before long, of course, Lucifer’s Heritage would be no more. The Bards, unwilling to succumb to the beckoning evil of Black Metal record sales, cast off their Satanic moniker and – under the inspiration of another wandering troupe of bards, Fate’s Warning, took up the name Blind Guardian instead.

Battalions of Fear  (1988)

Battalions of Fear is the first album to bear the Blind Guardian name, and while for the most part it retains the speed and thrash metal techniques of the Lucifer’s Heritage demo tapes, it remains a distinctly Blind Guardian artefact - for it is in this second chapter of the Bard’s story that the Blind Guardian aesthetic is first established; the lustrous gold logo and hooded figures adorning the cover, the unapologetically grand narrative approach to storytelling through lyrics, and the utterly diverse selection of sources from which stories are told – from the enduring inspiration of Tolkein and Stephen King, to the passion of Christ and the Strategic Defense Initiative of the Reagan administration. Thomen Stauch returns to the fold on drums, while Marcus Siepen takes up rhythm guitar duties: this line-up would remain unchanged until 2006’s A Twist in the Myth, beyond what many would consider the ‘classic’ Blind Guardian period. There is much for latecomers to the Blind Guardian story to take from the Bard’s debut: it remains the purest expression of the speed and thrash metal influences which run at the core of the power metal sound which Blind Guardian were the first to forge, opens with fan-favourite and long running live-staple ‘Majesty’ and, for the adventurous, the current remixed and remastered version is appended with the Symphonies of Doom demo, featuring the Bard’s early tribute to Monty Python’s Life of Brian.

Follow The Blind  (1989)

Just as Battalions of Fear now concludes with a direct reference to Monty Python, the 1989 sophomore album Follow the Blind opens with one: Inquisition samples the monk’s chant from Monty Python and The Holy Grail (“Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem”) This sets the tone appropriately, for Follow The Blind sees the Bards shifting towards an even more heavily themed and thrash-orientated sound than on Battalions of Fear, apparently brought about by their exposure to U.S. thrash metal royalty, Testament, at the 1987 Dynamo festival. While the Bards’ consider this to be their weakest album as a result of the emphasis falling on musical intensity, fans who also share an affection for this heavier sound are unlikely to depart from Follow the Blind with any disappointment, especially from live staple Banish From Sanctuary and anthemic live sing-along Valhalla, whose studio-take features the stylings of Kai Hansen, of Helloween and Gamma Ray fame. Hansen would lend his talents to the next two Blind Guardian albums too, featuring on the songs ‘Lost in the Twilight Hall’, ‘The Last Candle’ and then‘The Quest for Tanelorn’. Curiously, at the time the Bards were reluctant to include Valhalla on the album, now a fixture and highlight of their live performances; much like Black Sabbath’s hit-single Paranoid, it was written towards the end of the studio session, and was only included to make up the running-time for the album. Revisiting Follow The Blind, dedicated Blind Guardian fans will find the Bard’s first references to fantasy writer Michael Moorcock (“Dammed for All Time” and “Fast To Madness” are based on characters from the Eternal Champion series) and another Stephen King inclusion (title-track “Follow The Blind” is based on the authors collaboration with Peter Straub, The Talisman.) However, listeners of all persuasions will find joy in the closing number, a medley of The Regent’s Barbara Ann and Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally; the very embodiment of the performer’s maxim, “Always leave them laughing.”

Tales from the Twilight World (1990)

While Battalions of Fear and Follow The Blind certainly laid the foundations for what would become Blind Guardian's signature sound, Tales From The Twilight Hall builds upon this groundwork substantially. Any pretentions the Bards might have had towards being just another speed/thrash metal band, with some classical and high-fantasy themes, are abandoned. This album is the start of what many would consider to be Blind Guardian’s golden-era, and with it perhaps even the genesis of the power metal style. The album’s cover art marks the beginning of a fruitful working relationship with Andreas Marschall, who would create the iconic cover art for the next three studio albums too. In order to record this seminal album, the Bards constructed their own studio to spend more time working on it, and this time was indeed well spent: we can hear them, for the first time, embracing singalong choruses and rich storytelling verses from track-to-track and incorporating acoustic guitars and synthesized instruments in order to reify their world-building efforts. This album is not yet, however, a full-blown concept album - such as we will see later in the Bard’s tale. Rather, the album's diverse themes treat of Moorcockian characters, Gandalf's death at the hands of the Balrog, and subsequent reincarnation, and - supposedly - E.T. ("Goodbye my friend, goodbye!") The lighter-brandishing melodies of fourth track, Lord of the Rings, stand testament to the maturity of song writing which generally permeates this album. Had the Bards ended their journey at Follow The Blind, one might speculate that Blind Guardian would have been no more than a footnote in the grand heavy metal story: Tales From The Twilight Hall places them at the genesis of true fist-pumping dragon-riding power metal.

Somewhere Far Beyond (1992)

Succeeding the success of Tales From The Twilight Hall  is Somewhere Far Beyond, which largely reaffirms the originality and spirit of that breakthrough release. The cover art depicts a circle of time-travelling Bards - which would, in time, earn the band their nickname - assembled around a gyroscopic timepiece, establishing the tone perfectly for the distinctly modern stories which the Bard’s recount on this album: the science-fiction of the Replicant’s story in Blade Runner, a journey through the haunting, surreal world of Frost & Lynch’s Twin Peaks, in addition to the now familiar Tolkein, Moorcock and King inspirations. The album also features several bonus tracks: a cover of Queen’s Spread Your Wings, an escapist’s manifesto, Satan’s Trial By Fire, which tells the story of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bomb attacks as well as an alternative mix of Theatre of Pain from the album itself. This album is particularly notable for its widespread and international critical acclaim, reaching #1 in the Japanese charts. This chart-topping success in the East would beget the Tokyo Tales live album the following year.

Imaginations from the Other Side (1995)

Imaginations From The Other Side reiterates on the quasi-conceptual character of the two previous studio releases and, perhaps, ups the ante somewhat: the titular opening piece abstracts from particular imaginative stories and instead tells a story about imagination itself, referencing the childhood escapist-fantasies of The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland and Chronicles of Narnia. The album proceeds to tell the story of a child’s escape through a mirror to an Arthurian world of swords, dragons and crusades before being brought back to reality. This story is picked up again twenty years later on the Beyond the Red Mirror album, which tells the story of how the ‘other side’ has fallen into darkness, and the quest to find a way back. Imaginations From The Other Side is the last album to feature Hansi on bass, who would thenceforth give himself over entirely to vocal and lyric-writing duties. Two singles were released from the album, ‘A Past and Future Secret’ and ‘Bright Eyes’ which would secure the Bard’s a wider listenership, introducing the music of Blind Guardian to the heavy metal world at large.

Nightfall in Middle-Earth (1998)

Blind Guardian’s conceptual inclinations reach an apex on Nightfall in Middle-Earth; a thoroughbred concept album from start to finish, telling a portion of the tale of Tolkein’s Silmarillion – middle-earth’s descent into the dark-age, preceding the events of The Hobbit. It is worthwhile to mention that the album antedates the Peter Jackson film-series by three whole years – the Bards were not riding in the wake of the Tolkein-wave of the early 2000s, but instead had helped to create it. Indeed, in a 1999 interview, Hansi intimated that – owing largely to the praise which Nightfall in Middle-Earth had received within the wider Tolkein fandom – there was some serious deliberation as to whether Blind Guardian might be involved in soundtracking the films. While this project would not - alas! - come to pass, Nightfall in Middle-Earth perhaps stands alone as a heavy metal concept-album adaption of Tolkein worthy of attention. The instrumentation, and arrangement around a core of scene-setting spoken samples, make this Blind Guardian’s most ambitious venture yet – both musically and thematically. This is the first album to be recorded entirely at Blind Guardian’s own studio, aptly dubbed the Twilight Hall Studios. It would not be remiss to say that Nightfall in Middle-Earth is an essential, if not the essential, Blind Guardian album.

A Night at the Opera (2002)

After the heavy-themes and grand-concept stylings of the four previous studio albums, the Bards change tack in an altogether dramatic fashion on A Night At The Opera, so called after the Queen album of the same name, itself named after a Marx brothers production. Just as Blind Guardian fans were beginning to know what to expect from the Bards, it’s as though they said - in true Monty Python fashion - “ ... and now for something completely different.” The result is an album which arguably owes more to the British variety-rock act than to U.S. speed and thrash metal. On this album we hear Blind Guardian at their most musically expansive, and correspondingly, the album marks a return to their earlier approach in which they broach an assortment of stories and themes, most notably: two tracks dealing with Cassandra and the Trojan war, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the Nazi propaganda machine and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s descent into a paranoid vision in which he is judged by saints. The galloping track ‘Battlefield’ has since earned the dubious honour of soundtracking the Heavy Metal edition of Adult Swim’s game Robot Unicorn Attack. The last of what most would consider to be the classic Blind Guardian period is marked by Live – a double-album comprised of recordings taken from their world tour, and the last before the departure of Thomen Stauch and their subsequent signing to Nuclear Blast Records.

Blind Guardian would go on to release three studio albums via Nuclear Blast, A Twist in the Myth (2006), At the Edge of Time (2010), Beyond the Red Mirror (2015) with their most ambitious project to date Blind Guardian’s Twilight Orchestra: Legacy of the Dark Lands due out on the 8th of November this year. The album is a direct sequel to - and not the soundtrack of -  fantasy author Markus Heitz’s bestselling novel Die dunklen Lande (’The Dark Lands’) and will be a Blind Guardian first insofar as it features no electric guitars! You can pre-order the Nuclear Blast mail-order exclusive edition via this link: https://www.nuclearblast.de/en/products/tontraeger/vinyl/vinyl-boxset/blind-guardian-s-twilight-orchestra-legacy-of-the-dark-lands-mailorder-edition.html

 - written by Jack Moar (jack.moar@gmail.com)

[downthelinebooking-blog]

Gillian Welch, Bob Dylan, and creating your own folk process

I was asked recently by a songwriting teacher to find a quote I’d mentioned about Gillian Welch employing a self-styed ‘folk process’ to the lyrics from her most recent album, The Harrow & The Harvest. I located two interviews in which she mentioned this. In a discussion with the A.V. Club, interviewer Sam Adams remarked, “There’s a free-associative, impressionistic vein in the lyrics to something like ‘The Way It Goes’ that wasn’t present in your writing before. It’s a story, or at least fragments of one, but it’s not a tidy, self-contained narrative like ‘Caleb Meyer.’” Welch’s response:

I think I know, I understand exactly what you’re talking about, and it’s a quality that I think is new for us in this record. We never really worked this way before, but for a bunch of songs on this record, like “[The Way It] Goes” and “[The Way The Whole Thing] Ends,” we overwrote like crazy. “Goes” had 12 or 18 verses. “Ends” had 30. Okay? Then we employed our own accelerated folk process, and I like that you used the word “impressionistic,” because it was a very impressionistic process. We kind of destroyed the linear narrative, like a folk song where you can only remember your favorite verses, and you sing them in the order you like best, maybe not the one that is correct. That’s how we worked, and we whittled down the song down to the verses we liked the best, even if they weren’t the most narrative. So it is kind of an impressionistic thing. I see it as having kinship with some of the stuff on The Basement Tapes.

Welch offered a similar response in an interview with Derek Richardson for Acoustic Guitar Magazine:

A bunch of the songs on this record were that way—we overwrote, and had four or five times too many verses. “Goes”—same thing, we just whittled them down the way 40 or 50 decades will sort out a folk song. It gives them an interesting quality, don’t you think? They’re almost like some of those songs on [Bob Dylan’s] The Basement Tapes. Maybe you don’t know exactly what the factual part of the story is, but you get the gist of it. I’ve always liked songs like that. I never want it to be spelled out.

The comparison in both quotes to The Basement Tapes is an interesting one. There’s no doubt that the songs Dylan wrote and recorded during the Basement era share an impressionistic, folk song-like feel. As Richard Manuel famously said of “Tears Of Rage,” in a 1985 interview with The Woodstock Times:

(Dylan) came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper - and it was typed out - in line form - and he just said “Have you got any music for this?” I had a couple of musical movements that fit, that seemed to fit, so I just elaborated a little bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, “What’s this mean Bob? Now the heart is filled with gold as if it was a purse.”

That said, there’s no evidence that Dylan used the method that Welch describes of overwriting then removing verses to create a finished product with less narrative coherence but with the desired feel. There is evidence, however, that Dylan has used this method more recently. In an interview with On The Tracks magazine, famed pianist Jim Dickinson described his experience of recording the song “Highlands” from Dylan’s 1997 album Time Out Of Mind.

After we got through with it the manager came out and he said — it was 17 minutes long, right? — and he said, “Well Bob, you got a short version on that one?” And Bob said, “That was the short version. I got a lot of verses for that one.”

The 2008 box set Tell Tale Signs offers further evidence in the form of outtakes from that and other albums from the same period of Dylan’s career. From the Time Out Of Mind sessions, early versions of the song “Can’t Wait” and the previously unreleased “Dreamin’ Of You” and “Marchin’ To The City” provide a picture of this method in action: songs develop and morph into other songs; some verses are dropped; some verses are added; and some verses start in one song and end up in another song (and in some cases, another album) entirely.

Despite referencing The Basement Tapes when discussing “The Way The Whole Thing Ends,” the song quotes the refrain of Time Out Of Mind’s “Standing In The Doorway” in one of its own choruses:

You left me standing in the doorway crying (”Standing In The Doorway”)

Standing in the doorway crying/Now you're gonna need a friend (”The Way The Whole Things Ends”)

Of course, like verses disappearing over time, incorporating lines and lyrics from other sources is also part of the folk process. Dylan demonstrates this throughout Time Out Of Mind:

I’ve been riding the midnight train (”Standing In The Doorway”)

I’ll eat when I’m hungry, drink when I’m dry (”Standing In The Doorway”)

I need your love so bad, turn your lamp down low (”Million Miles”)

I’ve been walking that lonesome valley (”Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”)

I’m just going down the road feeling bad (”Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”)

I been all around the world, boys (”Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”)

I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down (”Tryin’ To Get To Heaven”)

The whiskey’s in the jar and the money’s in the bank (”Cold Irons Bound”)

And Welch does the same across The Harrow & The Harvest:

And I feel the wind through the pine (”Dark Turn Of Mind”)

It's beefsteak when I'm working and whiskey when I'm dry (”Tennessee”)

The gold and the grey, we'd sing "look away" (”Down Along The Dixie Line”)

Some bright morning, what will you see? (”Six White Horses”)

There was a Camptown man (”Hard Times”)

Hard times ain't gonna rule my mind no more (”Hard Times”)

With that silver dagger in his hand (”Silver Dagger”)

Dylan’s discography is littered with such references, and perhaps no contemporary songwriter is so steeped in the folk process or the history of American folk music. A generation below but not far behind him, though, is a songwriter so enveloped in folk that she seamlessly incorporated her own newly written verse into the now commonly sung version of the nearly century-old hymn “I’ll Fly Away.” And, appropriately enough for someone so familiar with Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind, her verse describes the happiness of escaping this life’s cold irons.

[boobdolan]

a review of melodrama (2017) by lorde

hey what’s up it’s your boy b-dawg. the b is for boobs as in breasts. this post is a track-by-track review of melodrama, the grammy-nominated sophomore studio album by ella yelich-o’ connor (aka lorde), a new zealand singer-songwriter who likes to dance funny and eat onions. her first album was pure heroine which was pretty big bc i think people (angsty teens) related to her songs about being an angsty teen.

i’m gonna keep it real with you chief. when i first heard green light (the lead single from the album) i thought it was pretty ass. but you know what. i’m an ass man despite my username. so eventually by some karmic circumstance i was reintroduced to the album and i realised: “hey! this is pretty dope! 😎” and then i ended up writing a 4000-word extended essay on it for the IB. but that’s another story.

green light is also the first track on the album, and it’s a hella effective one. with its intro bringing listeners acapella ella™️ over sparse piano chords, it kicks open the door to the sound of melodrama and immediately subverts any expectations for a pure heroine 2.0. as the song progresses we get additional elements of new and old - the boom-bap drums recall the hip-hop influences that permeated pure heroine, while her high-pitched backing vocals in the chorus introduce listeners to new vocal stylings from a singer who was previously known for being a Cool Bean who was Too Cool for all that stuff.

as the maximalist bop green light ends, listeners are thrown even further away from the sound of pure heroine with sober. personal note: sober was the song i most liked on the album upon first listen. and I can see why. it’s because i’ve got good taste! from the spacey uber-processed backing vocals to the bongo beat to the horns in the chorus, the song’s really unlike much else in the pop scene today. i especially like the “night, midnight, lose my mind” intro because when i first heard it i was like “wtf???? cool 🤠” anyway, point is, ella and her bf did well on this track.

at this point one might think, “this girl has a thing for acapella intros to her songs”. and she does! homemade dynamite starts, like an action movie, in situ, with its musings about top gun and the house party that the album is conceptually based around. one thing i love about the song is its synths. the 80s inspiration is obvious, with the synth pad emulating the iconic Fairlight sound on kate bush’s running up that hill. however, the moodiness of the synth pad is contrasted with a sprightly riff that comes in every now and then, emphasising that Potent Teenage Mix of Emotions™️ that the album is focused around. lorde also uses contrast in her lyrics, pairing wordy, literary, stream-of-consciousness style verses with almost childish phrases like “know I think you’re awesome, right???” it’s things like this that really encapsulate the state of being teenaged to me - that uncertain transitional period between adolescence and adulthood.

the following song starts with a very indie-sounding guitar, which is an unconventional sound for a lorde song. but the louvre is so typically lordey in that it shows off one of her greatest skills - the ability to create memorable, quotable lines with unique phrasing. who else would think of stammering the line “i overthink your punctuation use”?? who else would think of using a spoken “broadcast the boom boom boom boom and make ‘em all dance to it” as a hook??? another thing of note in this song is its extended U2-esque instrumental outro, courtesy of jack antonoff. sometimes when i listen to it, i understand why ella is banging him.

jack then mumbles the intro to the next song and starts playing the piano. after a few bars, ella joins him and her voice basically has sex with his tinkling on the ivories. liability is objectively great. lyrically, she reaches mind-bending extremes that many of her contemporaries can only dream of achieving. there’s a verse where she goes “home, into the arms of the girl that [she] loves” which is very interestingly constructed - it hits listeners with the initial shock of “oh wait is ella coming out” and just Leaves It for a few lines. and theN BOOM!!!! she’s actually talking about herself. that’s pretty cool. one other thing is her rhyme scheme in the line “the truth is, i am a toy that people enjoy ‘til all of their tricks don’t work anymore” which has a devastating effect that always gets me, even though it greatly takes advantage of her bananies voice.

now the listener is halfway through the album, and at this point they’re likely as hard as the feelings in the title of the next song. hard feelings/loveless brings us back into the world of electronic drums and synths after the minimalism of liability, and it does so excellently, providing an ambient atmosphere with its muffled beat and echoey distorted guitar. this song used to be one of my least favourites on the album because I thought the L O V E L E S S chant in the second part sounded kinda dumb and edgy. but then i watched lorde’s performance of the song for VEVO and ?????? WtF????? it really shines with a small choir and a boombox. fantastic. i also appreciate the little paul simon sample that bridges the two parts together - it’s a rare example of lorde wearing her influences on her sleeve for this album. also paul simon is one cool mf. i pop my pussy to graceland 24/7. 😎👌

taking a note from jack antonoff’s albums, the next song is a reprise, which have been used by many artists after the beatles to say “hey look my album is cohesive!” even though the only reason why it’s cohesive is because it’s cohesively shit. that’s not the case with sober II (melodrama), which functions as a response to the first sober. the parent song’s repeated calls of “can you feel it?” are immediately countered in sober II’s first line: “you asked if i was feeling it, i’m psycho high”. that’s cool because it reinforces the house party concept of the album. however, while i think the strings and trap drums combo sounds cool on paper, this production choice is the album’s first misstep because it sounds like jack put together 2 apple loops on garageband that didn’t quite fit.

luckily, before lorde turns into one of the migos, we’re treated with another piano song - writer in the dark. a word about lorde’s vocal performance in this song: WOW!!!!!!!!!! 😃😃😃 good stuff! in the verses, her raspy, imperfect voice highlights the intimacy and personal nature of the lyrics. in the chorus, she double tracks her voice and sings with a more round tone, which gives the eerie effect of sounding a bit like kate bush. it’s ok. i’m a bush man too. jack does a little production trick in the outro where ella sings the hook progressively louder as he fades out her vocal and lets the song be overtaken by strings. while it’s cool, i feel like he quite obviously snagged it from the outro of david bowie’s “heroes”, where a similar trick was achieved by the production god brian eno. jack then did it again on the song slow disco by st. vincent later in the year. side note: i’m still kinda pissed about what he did to st. vincent’s masseduction. more on that another time.

the next song, which should’ve been a single, features the metaphor of a supercut. i’m not sure how i feel about that because, on one hand, the term feels very millennial, like a better-written version of katy perry’s save as draft. you know what i mean? like those songs that aged fast - crazy in love with its pager reference, and payphone with its..... payphone reference. on the other hand, a supercut is pretty timeless, as montages have been used in cinema since the french first figured out how to make moving pictures. and the word sounds cool, so it’s ok i guess. but that’s beside the point. the song’s really nice, with some very interesting moments. one notable instance is lorde’s phrasing and the instrumentation in the prechorus - “in your car, the radio on”. the instrumentation just stops for a beat after ella sings the line, in a genius move that makes the song Even More Boppable!!. another moment is how the beat changes during the final choruses - from mellow, with her voice sounding like it’s coming out of a cassette player, to full, regaining all the instrumentation of the original choruses. then the song ends with a weird echoey vocal outro that’s a fantastic moment for me, especially after the intensity of the final choruses. boner time!!!!! 😃 one last cool thing about the song is that i feel the line “so I fall into continents and cars” is an Excessively paul simon thing to say. it’s one of those abstract things that just sounds GREAT, like “fat charlie the archangel sloped into the room” from his song crazy love, part II.

speaking of part twos, the end of supercut transitions into the bassy, atmospheric synths of liability (reprise). unfortunately, i still haven’t gotten round to fully appreciating this song. to me, it’s the biggest misstep on melodrama. don’t get me wrong - it’s a nice enough song, it’s really chill, but it feels slight because of its association to the majestic, melodic liability. apart from their lyrics, there’s not much that links the two. i feel that liability needed no reprise; it’s a work that stands on its own. i felt the same way about yandhi when kanye west announced it. yeezus doesn’t need another album associated to it! it’s perfection by itself. also, someone pointed out that the drums on liability (reprise) are the same as those on taylor swift’s call it what you want, and the last time taylor and jack screwed up a great indie artist’s work was fast slow disco, which we don’t talk about in this house.

finally, we come to the end of lorde’s house party with perfect places. and what a brilliant ending it is. there’s something so stirring about the drum beat, with its crunchy, decisive snare. there’s something equally moving about the synths and chord progression in the chorus, which give me chills like loud organs echoing in a church. when put together, they sound industrial, menacing, as if they move into your soul and alienate you from your own body. but at the same time, they’re an emotional release, a source of comfort like bruce springsteen’s cathartic 70s and 80s albums. another cathartic element - the use of the word “fuck” in the chorus. i could write a whole essay on it tbh. to me, it represents an intensely freeing release of the bad vibes and negativity in one’s life - for lorde, perhaps, her failed relationship and the state of the world in 2016. you know how studies have shown that when you shout “FUCK!!!!😡😡” after hitting your toe on furniture, it helps ease the pain? it’s like that. so while saying something taboo on the record is such an edgy angsty teenage thing to do, but also reflects lorde’s release from her pain. or maybe i’m reading too much into it.

the album ends as it begins, with ella’s bare vocals, reminding us that she is once again the Queen of Indie Pop. overall, melodrama gets a

9/10

for being really cool. peace out bitches. 🤠

[soft-slow-blue]

Thoughts on BtoB's pre-release track, "The Feeling"

First thought: the cover art is actually really apt in this case. The whole song gives me vibes of lying on the beach after a long day spent with your lover, your hands intertwined as you both stare up at the cloudless night sky and the countless stars wheeling above you. It's the sensation of feeling incredibly small amidst the infinite expanse of the universe, and yet so present and anchored by the simple touch of a loved one's hand. When you turn your head to meet their gaze, they smile. There's no need to say anything; they already understand all of the emotions swirling inside you like newly born galaxies.

Second thought: this would be an excellent song for driving down a long stretch of sunny highway on your own, windows rolled down so that you can feel the wind on your face.

From the beginning, Changsub's soft falsetto sets the mood in such a lovely way, floating above the more driving percussive beat. We got a taste of Peniel's rap-singing in earlier releases, but it's featured so prominently this time (he gets TWO verses, omg). The autotuning and lack of percussion highlight how sweet Peniel's more gentle and soft vocal tone can be.

Regarding the rappers: can I just emphasize once again how diverse BtoB's rap line is? While Peniel's first verse is more ethereal and dreamy with its minimal instrumentation, Ilhoon's verse feels as grounded and steady as a heartbeat, an effect reinforced by the driving drum beat lub-dubbing underneath his voice. Minhyuk's verse, meanwhile, takes full advantage of his lower register - the percussion from Ilhoon's verse completely drops away, along with any real instrumentation, giving the sense of a lover's whisper in the dark (which, knowing Minhyuk, was probably intentional lol). But he doesn't stay there long. The verse spools out in long waves, riding a strict beat that eventually builds to the next chorus.

It's amazing that all three rappers' verses are so different, and so specific to each of their strengths. BtoB is widely recognized for their excellent vocal line (and rightly so), but I think their rap line really deserves a lot of credit for melding so seamlessly into a group that's so vocal- and ballad-focused, without losing any of their distinct vocal qualities.

Vocal line shines gorgeously during the choruses as usual, and the bridge, with its stripped-down instrumentation that eventually builds back up to the chorus, puts me in mind of "Missing You" and how that got the entire audience participating. I almost expected the same half-step key change we got with "Missing You," but nope! We stayed in the same key, which I think is what gives that feeling of intimacy amidst a generally sweeping song. When Sungjae (Sungjae!!) sings the last line, it feels like arriving back to something familiar. It's coming back home after a long journey through the stars.

One thing I really love about Ilhoon's composing is that every song is so different. He doesn't stick to a specific genre or sound, and he both plays to the members' strengths and challenges the listener's expectations of them. At first listen, "The Feeling" doesn't stick out in any particular way - I feel like "Movie" felt more experimental and different - but the more I listen to it, the more I realize that it really could only be performed by BtoB. It's a truly excellent combination of contemporary electronica and old-school boy band ballads, and I keep finding little pieces here and there that delight me. I feel the story in the song, the tale of two lovers and all the emotions they feel for one another, from dreamy comfort to soaring passion. The fact that this is just the pre-release track just makes me even more excited for the album release. Bravo, BtoB, and bravo, Ilhoon. 💙💙

[scrabopower]

For All Wreaths Of Empire Meet Upon His Brow

Thinking about this weekend’s remembrance services, it strikes me that we (the church) are stuck in a creative rut when it comes to appropriately accompanying times of national commemoration with songs of worship that are mindful of context and Kingdom.

In recent decades there has been a deluge of songs birthed in the church that emphasise how much we personally are loved by God and how much we can overcome because of this. I have no doubt these words and melodies have been transformative in power for many seeking to strengthen their faith but may be too narrow in scope at times of national significance.

At a time when the nationalistic pomp of ‘I Vow To Thee my Country’ or of course ‘God Save the Queen’ proffer little hope of the scope of God’s Kingdom, we as a church need to offer more constructive pointers to this wider story. This can be done through spoken liturgy but there is often a greater power and emotional depth carried by communal singing.

While largely trading on familiar lyrical ground, a limiting criticism that could be levelled at some of the biggest “hits” of today’s praise and worship scene is that they are actually tone deaf when it comes to wider contemporary concerns.

Take “No Longer Slaves,” birthed in a mega church in California, which emphasises personal freedom through the use of slavery-related language. The modern day estimate for the number of children forced into slavery worldwide exceeds 40 million..far more than the 12 million during the plantations of the Americas.

Then there’s our love of water/ocean-based imagery while we have a refugee crisis at sea. This is not problematic hand-wringing from a snowflake.

When oceans rise their souls are not resting.

I’m not advocating for the crass integration of references to Trump or Brexit into worship choruses, this is a call for more nuanced songs that reflect on and engage with the times we’re in rather than plotting an escape.

At a “Beer and Hymns” event in Belfast last week during the CS Lewis Festival we sang ‘At The Name Of Jesus’ by Caroline Noel. Alongside a stirring tune, its lyrics are epic and scope but intimate in their application. The hymn closes with these stunning lines:

For all wreaths of empire

Meet upon his brow,

And our hearts confess him

King of glory now.

Is the hymn writer condoning or condemning worldly empires? Personally I think it’s the latter, but nonetheless it gives the reader/singer significant food for thought at the end.

More contemporary examples exist. Graham Kendrick penned the sadly overlooked ‘No Scenes of Stately Majesty’ drawing parallels with the national outpouring of grief following the death of Princess Diana. Here are the first and last verses::

No scenes of stately majesty for the King of kings

No nights aglow with candle flame for the King of love

No flags of empire hung in shame for Calvary

No flowers perfumed the lonely way that led him to

A borrowed tomb for Easter Day.

I long for scenes of majesty for the risen King

Or nights aglow with candle flame for the King of love

A nation hushed upon it's knees at Calvary

Where all our sins and griefs were nailed

And hope was born of everlasting Easter Day

A few years ago Andy Flannagan from Christians in Politics penned, with others, new words to the tune of ‘Abide With Me’ called ‘We Seek Your Kingdom.’

We seek your kingdom throughout every sphere

We long for heaven’s demonstration here

Jesus, your light shine bright for all to see

Transform, revive and heal society

Before all things, in him all things were made

Inspiring culture, media and trade

May all our work serve your economy 

Transform, revive and heal society

Peace, truth and justice reigning everywhere

With us be present in our public square

Fill all who lead with your integrity 

Transform, revive and heal society

Forgive us Lord, when we have not engaged

Failing to scribe your heart on history’s page

Make us again what we were made to be

Transform, revive and heal society

Faithful to govern ever may we be

Selfless in service, loving constantly

In everything may your authority

Transform, revive and heal society

As we move into a new set of increasingly contested centenaries and commemorations for Northern Ireland and the wider world I pray we as a church can offer comfort, challenge and hope through creativity.

[adevotedappraisal]

DNA. By Kendrick Lamar from DAMN.

What is that there, lying in the heart of man?  What is there composing the shifting totality of a person?  Is it that rushing ambition to conquer? To eliminate? Is the heart of man to assimilate this environment around it in order to live with it?  Or is it to be a library of emotions, compiling sights, sounds and snippets of experiences that make up the whole of a person?  Or is it yet the limitations, the things outside of one’s reach that define the person?  You see I think this Compton, California rapper ruminated on questions similar to this and, like the great poet Walt Whitman, concluded that the soul can never be greater than the body and that the body cannot be greater than the soul, and he tried to coincide this with the pursuit of making an album that reaches out to try to be everything to everyone, and I think this approach reveals Kendrick Lamar letting go parts of himself to the hearth of the past in order to become the great American rap artist he needs to be.

What if your life doesn’t flash before your eyes when you die?  What if your life plays before your ears, in uncompressed audio?  Hey what if, like, you died and instead of Saint Peter there was Kid Capri rocking your book of life? Wouldn’t that be unexpected yet ill? And what if you replayed this book-of-life album in the reverse order and it flowed well and you could still tease out some meaning, or imagined meaning from the whole thing? Well some of this is what is going with Kendrick Lamar’s latest album DAMN., an album more open-ended and undefined than his previous releases, even as the songs explore his issues in this bold, concise and direct way.

And what is this talk about this album being ‘everything to everyone’? And what is this ‘direct way’ I speak of? What are these euphemisms in service of? Well, a buncha shiny, well-produced sellout songs to be curt. But hold on now, we gotta unpack that a bit because this is Kendrick we’re talking about, not some genre artist tossing up a hail mary of Pop fluff to prevent being dropped from their label.  This is Kendrick Lamar, who achieved his breakthrough year behind his most experimental and dense album, 2015s To Pimp a Butterfly.(review) It’s like if Stevie Wonder gained a strong following on Songs in the Key of Life but blew up internationally after releasing his obscure, mostly instrumental album Journey into the Secret Life of Plants.  The point being that any foray into contemporary sounds here is not an act of gasping desperation, but a considered and meaningful exploration, because let’s be honest here, after the positive reception from his leftovers EP untitled unmastered, ( he could have launched into his Miles Davis-esque electric period for a couple years and no one would’ve batted an eye.  

So these songs that take a nod to the radio (there go the euphemisms again, look make no mistake, these radio songs condescend heavily to modern sounds, in a near cynical display) must be judged on the ultimate efficacy of the end result.  At the end of the day, does Kung Fu Kenny sound good doing this shuffle? For the most part, yes he does.  It comes off more like the Nile Rodgers produced Let’s Dance album by David Bowie, as opposed to, say, any Mick Jagger solo album, or Hammer’s 2 Legit 2 Quit or something. In fact, you know how every now and then Fat Joe sometimes gets on some modern production of the moment and turns it into a Bronx anthem? Kendrick is like that at times here, like with “ELEMENT.,” a sparse head-nodder with Lamar rhyming, not too complex and rapid fire, but in a nonchalant and playful style, reminiscent of If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late-era Drake, warning “we ain’t going back to broke families selling dope” at one moment and doing a spot on Juvenile “Ha” impression the next, or with “GOD.,” a splendid slice of rap-pop of braggadocio with reverberating shimmering synths, synth bass and understated drums, Kendrick stretching out lines in the ear candy chorus with joyful relish.  He sounds comfortable here, experimenting with his words, slowing the cadence, singing a line here, doing a Quavo-esque ad lib there, making his presence in the radio and streaming playlists of people the way the Rakims and Daddy Kanes had to do in decades of yore.  

You see the great MCs, I mean the ones in peoples top ten, weren’t aloof, reclusive emperors tossing down sprawling, screeds without choruses from the castle tower. Nah, they were politicians, trying their best to get on the dancefloor of the club, shaking hands, kissing babies, prodding you to sing the chorus for them on the count of four.  His grip on this enterprise though becomes shaky on first single “HUMBLE.,” where he’s lumbering in an awkward gait on a Mike Will Made It beat which kinda sounds like a drunk, spastic Thelonious Monk banging keys in a strip club, and he’s the same on “LOYALTY.” with Rhianna.  Over a clean, cosmopolitan groove, with waxy, reversed voices floating by, the two remind us that loyalty and trust are central to any relationship, a prerequisite for love in fact.  Rhianna is fine here, intriguing even with her cool realisations and raps, but Kendrick is near anonymous on the song, reduced to a wallflower mumble on the summer cookout-ready banger.

While some songs are set up to accompany a cool, night at a trendy scene or as perfect driving music, some other songs have a density to them, made ornate and true with the person inside them.  “DNA.” is like this, with Kendrick in full command on a pair of Mike Will Made It beats, telling us all about this things wrought and proud within him.  As confident as he is on the sitar slinking around the cool stroll of the 808 drums, by the second beat he’s barely contained, belittling and dismissing unnamed rivals over a booming beat frenzied with a hectic vocal sample.  The song captures your attention and doesn’t let go.  It’s easily the best opener of any album of his.

“XXX.” with U2 is one of the emotional centers of the album, with the first verse –over some Ice Cube Bomb Squad era beat– showing an incensed Kendrick telling a man seeking advice for a dead relative that he would seek revenge by gun violence if it were him, offering no solace to the inquisitor, only blunt street invective.  The second verse, with Bono crooning about America with a knowing reflection that recalls the slower songs on the Side B of his Joshua Tree album, show Kendrick proposing that the violence in him and around this country are one and the same, existing in him with the same barely constrained ferocity that exists in U.S. domestic and foreign policy sometimes. I always like this conceptual side to Lamar, and we see it again with “FEAR.,” although its middle verse features a too-subdued Kendrick talking about all the things he thought he could die by when he was a late teen.  It’s too elementary, not only in comparison to the fiery and self-reflective first and third verses but to the nature of this beat.   This Alchemist beat would be the darling heart to any number of East Coast MCs winter albums.  With its ruminating bassline, flints of funk guitar, snatches of organ fills and samples of soul vocal lines, runs and hums, the beat was made for blunt wrappers, freestyle sessions and those thick studio monitor  headphones that so often look like halos. Black Thought would’ve kicked the teeth in this beat.  Royce could murder this for four, five verses easy.  It’s in this context that Kendrick falters, the sober nature of his fears blunted by the warm fog of this beat.  

He fares better with “DUCKWORTH,” yet another soul voice and harmony sample chop, this time by 9th Wonder adroitly stitching three different beats together to match temporal and mood changes.  Over this now Kendrick is commanding, telling a story of an up and coming gangster who meets with a wily fast food drive-thru worker, shading in the two characters with tales of hood agility and cross country wanderlust. The ending of the song talks about a choice not taken, and the choice that could’ve been taken and the resultant death that would’ve occurred to our not-so-faithful narrator.  

I mean this album is obsessed with violence, is moody and is suspicious of people when it’s not celebrating the trappings of being the most talked about rapper around.  It’s all over the place thematically but self-assured musically in the way that a lot of self-titled albums were made once upon a time.  You know I think that’s what this is in a sense, Kendrick Lamar’s Kendrick Lamar album, a self-portrait of the artist as young man, all dressed up in a life-flashes-before-your-eyes concept album framework, but there it is, a glimpse of the changing man and his vulpine ambitions, what he gained and what he’s let go of, a launching pad from which he could go in any direction next go around, no doubt engendering questions again. Because he, like us, as the Brooklyn poet Whitman reminds, contradicts himself, for he is large, and he does contain multitudes.

[thesinglesjukebox]

POST MALONE X SWAE LEE - SUNFLOWER

[5.56]

With great Swae Lee comes great Post Malone?

Joshua Copperman: First off, can we just acknowledge how good Into The Spider-Verse looks? Not just in the literal sense, but in the way it looks to incorporate Phil Lord and Chris Miller's meta tendencies into a genuinely compelling story. I hope it doesn't turn out like Post Malone's music, where the lushness gives otherwise banal sentiments the illusion of grandeur. An ideal soundtrack for Spider-Verse should be as colorful as the movie looks, and even the lyric video deserves a better, more relevant soundtrack. Considering what's happened to the live-action Peter Parker, even "Ashes" would be more appropriate. But that lyric video is effective, doing its best to lend weight to an unremarkable, weirdly arrogant song ("you'd be left in the dust unless I stuck by you"). The movie's likely going to be great on the visuals alone, but concerning the soundtrack, for now I don't feel so good. [5]

Juan F. Carruyo: It's a soundtrack song, so it's appropriately cinematic. Cavernous boom-boom clap drums follow deep synth bass tones and an air of menace. Though it's Post Malone who's ostensibly bringing them sweet sweet monetized clicks; in practice, his gravely voice emoting corny lyrics about being a sunflower is just very off-putting. So, it's a minute and a half of pleasing melodies sang by Swae Lee before it crumbles down. [5]

John Seroff: Live long enough and you'll hear all the radio stars of your youth gently rinsed and recycled into audio pablum echoing down the grocery store aisles. For a generation that may not have longevity as an option, this Post/Swae collabo helpfully offers prewashed pop, elevator-friendly out of the wrapper. [5]

Iris Xie: Both Post Malone and Swae Lee's delivery takes sweet lyrics and makes them sound labored and tired. What gives? I understand they're trying to do a floaty, sweet summer vibe, but I just get the feeling of two men who are trying to woo another girl for the hundredth time, without really self-reflecting on what they are doing. It makes such nice platitudes sound generic, and leaves me cold. [1]

Jonathan Bradley: I'm reminded of a certain mode of 1990s alternative rock, a style that had expanded its stylistic outlook so far beyond the rudiments of guitar music that its connection to generic tradition was its mulish white masculinity rather than its sound. "Sunflower" made me think of the spacey anomie of Filter's "Take a Picture," but it fits into the late-rock pluralism of everything from Crazy Town to OPM to 311 to Primitive Radio Gods. "You mightn't like Post Malone," an old friend told me when we were catching up for the first time in a few years and comparing notes on contemporary sounds, "but you remember his choruses." Then he hummed a couple hooks from Beerbongs & Bentleys, an album I've heard once, and I realized how right he was. [6]

Julian Axelrod: I've finally figured it out: If we want to make Post Malone tolerable, we just need to slowly inch him as far away from rap as possible. This is the most engaging and sincere Post has sounded in a while, and it's on a song that's closer to Drive-era synth pop than rap. Swae Lee's presence helps a lot; he's a similarly feelings-first wailer who twists every bar into a hook, and he's innately charming enough to sell "She wanna ride me like a cruise" as a Hallmark sentiment. But their combined charisma is a bright new coat of paint on the conflicted devotion that pervades most love songs in rap today. It's an asshole aria, it's the dirtbag blues, it's "Islands in the Stream" for guys who sell whippits at house parties. And it's way better than the phrase "Post Malone and Swae Lee present a song from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" has any right to be. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Post Malone and Swae Lee use this Spider-Man soundtrack opportunity to take on the superhero role in a relationship. Is this codependency or men just being snotty? Either way, things seem awry, so the two deliver sweet melodies to keep things at bay. In the moment this is soothing, if fleeting; keep it on repeat and you'll be convinced to stay. [6]

Alfred Soto: Swae's bray (brae?) increases in volume as his swinish admissions get more pronounced ("Or you'll be left in the dust, unless I stuck by ya"), while Post Malone puts his gravel to empathetic use. They don't cancel each out so much as act as amiable mirrors -- they could easily have switched places and no one would've noticed. [6]

Taylor Alatorre: You can always count on the lead single from a Spider-Man movie soundtrack to provide a quick-and-dirty snapshot of the musical landscape. In 2002 we got post-9/11 post-grunge; in 2004 it was post-Unplugged Dashboard; in 2007, post-Coldplay melodrama; and in 2014 it was an unholy amalgam of misapplied talent and wasted money, just like the film it was made for. Now it's 2018 and Sony/Columbia have enlisted Post Malone and Swae Lee, two of-the-moment sing-rappers with whom Miles Morales would undoubtedly be familiar. The track is clearly inspired by emo rap, but in Dashboard terms, it's more "Hands Down" than "Screaming Infidelities"; the hazy atmosphere and ornamental guitar plucking are no much for the earnestly romantic, if lyrically ambivalent chorus. It's for this reason that Post Malone, despite his "Rockstar" pedigree, is outshone almost completely by Swae Lee, whose melodic tendencies are more suited for earnest romance. Aware of his own limitations, Swae uses his singing voice with strategic aplomb, strictly regimenting his phrases so they pierce like beacons through the fog. It helps that he still sounds much younger than his 24 years, which results in the typical rap lyric "she wanna ride me like a cruise" being transformed into a singular projection of both innocence and precocity. This frank mention of sex makes his decision to self-censor by saying "bad bad" even less explicable, and thus more charming. More than anything else, "Sunflower" sounds like adolescence, an achievement that largely exonerates its underdeveloped view of women on grounds of verisimilitude. Teenage boys are perpetually unsure of themselves and act tough or spiteful in order to mask their vulnerabilities: nothing new under the sun. What songs like "Sunflower" offer them is a recognition of shared suffering and a chance to embrace their vulnerabilities -- a permission slip to feel unguarded feelings for a few minutes. As long as there are boys and girls in America having sad times together, there will be a need for these songs. [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[kuciradio]

KUCI’s Top 10 Albums of 2017

As the year comes to an end, we asked our fellow DJ’s of KUCI to name their top 10 albums of 2017. After sorting through over fifty nominations, here is our list of our favorite albums that were released this year, with a some words from our community explaining why. We’ve also threw in some honorable mentions at the end! 2017 was definitely a great year for music, and we can’t wait to discover more in 2018. Happy New Year everyone! 

10. Citizen - As You Please - (Run For Cover)

“Citizen was a band that I had always known about, but had never quite caught my ear enough to dive into their music. That changed, however, with As You Please. The opening track, “Jet”, is reminiscent of their past work with emotional lyrics and a driving yet somber punk instrumental feel. The following track titled “In the Middle of It All” provides a completely new and evolutionary soundscape for the band, while staying close to their usual deep lyrical content. The album as a whole is easy to listen to for both intent and absent minded purposes. Personal favorite tracks are “Ugly Luck” and “Medicine”.” - Jeremy Bibeau

"After I heard that they had a new record coming out, I just assumed that they were going to continue to develop the sound they decided to go with for Everybody Is Going To Heaven, which is why I decided to pass on As You Please at first. However, after caving in to all of the hype surrounding the album’s lead single entitled “Jet,” I was pleasantly surprised to hear that Citizen had not only made a return to their old sound, but that they had refined their sound to appeal to more of a diverse audience. This is the case for all of the songs on As You Please, not just “Jet,” which made As You Please quite a pleasant surprise upon listening to it for the first time. Much like some of their contemporaries’ latest work, As You Please is by far Citizen’s best and most complete album to date. By combining the best qualities of Citizen’s old sound (i.e. catchy yet intricate guitar riffs, powerful/explosive choruses, and angst fill vocals) with a new found sense of confidence, wisdom, and maturity, as well as more elaborate song structures and piano interludes, you get what in my opinion is the best version of Citizen that has ever existed." - Tommy DeSilva

9. (Sandy) Alex G - Rocket - (Domino Recording Company)

"The songs, while simple, sound absolutely timeless to me. “Proud” sounds like a drive out on the open countryside. “Big Fish” sounds like a quiet confession of strength to a father. “Powerful Man” sounds like a tear jerking show of emotional maturity to a skeptical family. While Alex has always been lauded for his songwriting chops (even earning a Frank Ocean co-write in the process), this is the first record that feels like it has emotional heft to it. " - Stephan Masnyj

"Rocket is revelatory, each song sampling and combining various genres (and creating new, nameless genres in the process) in a completely Alex G fashion. The melancholia, yearning, and dreaminess that pervades this album will tug at your soul in the best ways possible." - Sophie Prettyman-Beauchamp

8. Sampha - Process - (Young Turks)

"Sampha is not one to hold back the heart on his sleeve. While having worked with Sbtrkt and being it's other half, he has finally seem to come out of his shell and give his voice, well, a voice. "No One Knows Me (like the piano)" tells of his past childhood and struggles trying to figure himself out while making the living room his confessional. 'Incomplete Kisses' speaks of unrequited love with amazing lines and utter softness of ones heartbreak. Sampha has shown us his true colors while barely breaking the ice. I can not wait for more albums to come from such an amazing voice in R&B." - T.J. Bingamon

7. Thundercat - Drunk - (Brainfeeder)

"Very solid (and lengthy) release from Thundercat this year with Drunk. Each track on this album is dripping with funky jazzy vibes that make it really difficult to get sick of." - Alex Morrow

"A Personal favorite that could easily go unnoticed from the amount of music set out this year. Thundercat's Drunk is unprecedented in the ability to make emotion through his work with bass. A great album to listen to for long rides in the car alone." - Christopher Santiago

6. King Krule - The Ooz - (True Panther Sounds XL)

"I think The Ooz is one of those albums you really need to listen to a few times before it grows on you. I think it's an amazing follow up to his last album, and I feel like on The Ooz we get a better sense of his Archy Marshall music and sound. The imagery he uses is also interesting and creative!" - Katrina Vergara

"King Krule’s inventive garage punk-jazz fusion and mumbling, growling voice are always worth waiting for. The Ooz oozes creative frustration ingeniously overcame. The esteemed wunderkind who is Archy Marshall really did that." - Sophie Prettyman-Beauchamp

5. Lorde - Melodrama - (Lava / Republic)

"Lorde’s comeback that I didn’t know I needed, putting into words all the themes of finding oneself, looking for love, and just growing up from being a teen." - Caroline Nguyen

"The main narrative surrounding Lorde’s rise to prominence has been her authority for her age (as of now, she is 21), and that has never been more apparent than her clear-eyed analysis of teenage years on this record. “Homemade Dynamite” dissects the social dynamics and self destructive tendencies people often have during a party with surgical precision, while “Supercut” takes a relationship in retrospect and understand that memories of a lost lover usually have a rose-colored tint to them. The most stunning cut on the record is “Writer in the Dark,” a song that embodies the hate, regret, and mourning that often comes directly after the end of the relationship. The way Lorde is able to thread the needle between all the separate emotions throughout the verses and chorus is nothing short of stunning, and her vocal delivery delivers an emotional depth Adele would kill to have." - Stephan Masnyj

4. Alvvays - Antisocialites - (Polyvinyl Record Co.)

"Alvvays are such an awesome band, and in my opinion, Antisocialites is nothing short of a masterpiece. Characterized by jangly guitars, dreamy synth parts, poppy vocal melodies, and lead vocalist Molly Rankin’s soothing voice, the songs on this record sound as though they were taken straight from Indie Rock/Dream Pop heaven. While listening to this album, one can easily lose themselves in the dreamy nature of some of these songs. That’s not to say by any means that this record “drags on.” In fact, no two songs sound alike on this album, which definitely showcases the versatility of Alvvays’ musicianship as well as their ability to keep listeners on their toes." - Tommy DeSilva

“I was over the moon when I found out Alvvays was coming out with another album. Their self-titled is one of my favorites, so I was eager to know what they had in store for their sophomore album. When I first heard "Dreams Tonite" I knew the rest of the album would be just as great. This album is your indie pop dream, with a different feel on each track.” - Caitlin Ison

3. Kendrick Lamar - DAMN - (Top Dawg / Aftermath / Interscope)

"Releases by Kendrick Lamar never go unnoticed and DAMN certainly did not when it dropped. By far a definition of modern classic and experimental." - Christopher Santiago

"Kendrick Lamar's DAMN is an insightful look into the rapper's past life and future. While K. Dot relays the album to be the story of his father coming into a close call of having an alternative life ending, but while still relating to his current life woes. Thru tracks like 'Yah' revealing the grittiness of Compton blue-collar work, to 'Love' a record boasting of vulnerability and questions, Kendrick delivers yet another piece of his life's work and puzzle." - T.J. Bingamon

“From my perspective, it’s weird to think of Kendrick at the top of the pop charts; I always saw him as a supremely talented artist who’s ambitions ran deeper than pop radio. However, it turns out Kendrick can release pop hits while still maintaining the endless depth his raps often do. “Humble” is both a boast and a self-aggrandizement in the form of a three minute pop song. “DNA” is a firestorm of a rap that examines the good, bad, and ugly that exist within all of us.” - Stephan Masnyj

2. Tyler, the Creator - Flower Boy - (Columbia)

“Flower Boy is Tyler, the Creator’s fourth album, and encaptures his wittiness and internal conflict through a softer side with the use of neo-soul and the sounds of early 90’s hip-hop. He delves deep into his emotions in a mere 47 minutes, making this one of his most intimate and sincere yet shortest album. It focuses on isolation, the falling-out of friendships, and the pain of unrequited love, themes many listeners can find relatable. The whole feel of the album holds such a significant difference from Tyler’s older albums, which really goes to show his growth, not only in his music, but as a person.” - Raenna Caguioa

"Whenever Tyler, the Creator would release a record following his breakthrough “Goblin” in 2011, the question always remained the same: When will he finally grow up? His talent was always palpable, the dizzying raps in “Yonkers” and the emotional story in “48” showed his talents as a writer, and his growing production credits on “Wolf” and “Cherry Bomb” showed that he had a distinct style within his musical repertoire. Yet he always fell back on his worst tendencies; frequently using homophobic slurs or creating worthless posse cuts that did nothing but ruin the flow of his records. All of that changed with Flower Boy, easily his most cohesive and mature record to date. Much has been said about his alleged coming out in the record (a subject that Tyler has remained mum on since the album’s release), but it isn’t stated enough just how wonderful this record sounds. The strings and horns that dot highlight “See You Again” are stunning, and the queasy synths that Tyler has used in the past take on a new urgency on “I Ain’t Got Time.” Every single rap, beat, and instrument inform each other throughout the record, and not a single thing sounds out of place throughout. “Tell these black kids they can be who they are,” raps Tyler on the highlight “Where the Flower Blooms.” For the first time in his career, Tyler sounds like he’s living those words to the fullest." - Stephan Masnyj

1. SZA - Ctrl - (Top Dawg / RCA)

"I felt like this album came out at the right time in my life. The deeply personal lyrics on every song made it weirdly relatable for me. SZA really refined her sound since her last album titled Z.  I love the concept and every song on this album. " - Yasmin Moradi

"An album that needs no explaining, SZA's Ctrl ups the ante with her debut studio album, most well known for her features prior to this, she makes a name for herself with this anecdotal release." - Christopher Santiago

"It's no wonder SZA is probably one of the biggest artists to emerge out of 2017. I hadn't listen to her prior, but there was so much talk after Ctrl was released, I knew I had to see what the fuss was about. To say the least, I was not disappointed. Of course there are the standouts of the album, "The Weekend" and "Love Galore," but there are also some underrated tracks like "Drew Barrymore" and "Prom." Personally, I think an artist's biggest success is when they can make a listener feel their emotions, regardless of if they can relate to the song or not. I felt SZA's emotions in every single track, and I don't think I've really ever been in any of those situations. I thought that was really beautiful. Also, it's hard not to fall in love her incredible buttery voice." - Caitlin Ison

"I love this album because all the songs are bangers but they also make me cry. One publication called Ctrl an album about side-hoe anthems but that's so far from the truth! SZA sings about insecurity, adjusting to adulthood, and bad relationships with such honesty. Anyone can relate to her struggles of going through your twenties feeling vulnerable, whether you're a side hoe or the main." - Katrina Vergara

"Where do I start? SZA’s vocals are gorgeous and lush, earnest and biting, confident even when expressing pain and insecurity. It’s a versatile album you can both cry to and dance to, mixing elements of R&B and lo-fi indie rock. It’s a reminder of female strength and independence, and even has an ode to the vagina that simultaneously disses ungrateful, trash dudes. SZA is a normal girl with the same wishes and fears as the women who listen to her music, her lyrics resonate with those of us who are still finding our way and learning how to love and respect ourselves. It’s like sitting down with a good friend who laughs with you, cries with you, and always knows the right thing to say, helping you regain your own power. Ctrl is what it feels like to be a woman." - Sophie Prettyman-Beauchamp

Honorable Mentions

The XX - "I See You" (XL Recordings)

"A perfect balance between pop and melancholy, with songs like "Dangerous" and "On Hold" upbeat despite lyrics suggesting doomed relationships.  Meanwhile, "Say Something Loving" and "A Violent Noise" are filled with the emotional angst that has made the XX so popular." - Jarrett Lovell

The Drums - Abysmal Thoughts - (Anti-)

"You can always count on The Drums to deliver a fantastic surf-pop inspired album, and they do it once again with Abysmal Thoughts, the title appropriate for 2017 indeed. The album does have its fair share of these, as Jonny Pierce, blessed with an airily angelic voice, grapples with heartbreak and feelings of nothingness on “If All We Share (Means Nothing)” and chastises the upper class with “Rich Kids.” Nevertheless, The Drums remain beachy goodness with the beloved simple riffs and chords that bounce along, tambourines, cooing backing vocals, and 80s-esque synths that are sure to leave you dancing through your tears." - Sophie Pettyman-Beauchamp

Tigers Jaw - spin - (Black Cement Records)

"This record felt like it took forever to come out seeing that many of us Tigers Jaw fans had been talking about it ever since their last record Charmer came out in 2014 along with the announcement that Tigers Jaw would from now on be a two-piece band solely featuring founding members Ben Walsh and Brianna Collins. Would they be able to make a record by themselves? Would it sound as good as the original lineup? Two questions that had lingered for quite some time amongst the Tigers Jaw fan base. After making us anxiously wait for over three years (which producer Will Yip made even more dreadful by dropping little hints about the album here and there for like six months), Tigers Jaw finally released spin earlier this Spring, and as you would expect, it was definitely worth the wait. Tigers Jaw have always been an awesome band who have consistently put out great records from front to back, so for me to say that spin is their best album would be kind of stretch, but it’s pretty damn good and should be in that conversation. While staying true to the sound that the original five piece version of Tigers Jaw developed, Ben and Brianna were still able to add their own personal touches to the songs on this record, especially since they were both in charge of songwriting duties for the first time (spin is the first Tigers Jaw album that Brianna has contributed songs to). The thing that I like the most about spin is that you can really tell that Ben and Brianna spent a lot of time on these songs and put their best effort forward to make them the best that they could be in every way. Every song on this album is well crafted both musically and lyrically. No two songs sound the same and everything sounds perfect down to the smallest detail. I really appreciate great musicianship like that, and I look forward to hearing what Ben and Brianna have in store for us next as they continue to keep Tigers Jaw not only alive, but alive and thriving." - Tommy DeSilva

HAIM - Something to Tell You - (Columbia)

"By far, my favorite record that was released this year. I've been a huge fan of HAIM since their first album, which was released when I was in high school, and I had that sh*t on repeat for days. I remember finding out that the three sisters were working on new material, and I was literally counting down the days to hear their new single, "Right Now." The video of them singing the track live in a studio was so raw and filled with emotion, it left me speechless. I knew this album was going to be packed with tears and heartbreak. I love this album because while it dwells on the hurt and pain one can experience in a romance that could've been, the music contrasts it with its upbeat, dancey tones. This album really has got that Stevie Nicks / Shania Twain vibe (which is fitting because they chose to cover "That Don't Impress Me Much" for their tour), and mixing that with their HAIM sound really makes it a memorable record. One of my favorite characteristics of this band is their bad ass attitude, and although it's a record about heartbreak, you can still feel that energy throughout." - Caitlin Ison

BROCKHAMPTON - Saturation II - (QUESTION EVERYTHING, INC. / EMPIRE)

“Arguably Brockhampton’s best album. Nearly every song is one I can jam to (or if it’s the last song- one I can cry to). I love Brockhampton’s unconventional rap lyrics and I think it makes them stand out from up-and-coming artists. They really are the best boy band since One Direction.” - Yasmin Moradi

"BROCKHAMPTON came out with 2 other albums just this year but I would say this was the most iconic one. With this album they really established a signature sound and the members were able to find their voice within the boy band. Even though Pitchfork didn't give this album a good score, I would give this album a 10/10 if not only for cultural impact but for how good SWEET is."  - Katrina Vergara

Hot Flash Heat Wave - Soaked - (OIM)

“HFHW’s sophomore album is what I like to call a true sound of the (indie rock) times. Soaked is a big step in a new direction, after Neapolitan delivered hard hints of garage rock and sunshine pop; this album rides a chiller, more ambitious wave, reflecting contemporary rock genres like Slacker Rock and Jangle Pop [The Smiths, The Beatles, Mac Demarco, Homeshake], while still giving into sunny roots of Surf and Garage rock [The Beach Boys, The Strokes]. The record clocks in at just under 40 minutes, while delivering two more tracks than its preceding album. One play-through will not be enough, especially on that cozy summer day.” - Spartacus Avina

[sinceileftyoublog]

Hyro the Hero Interview: Pits Where There Shouldn’t Be

Photo by Mark Adriane

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Let’s get it out of the way: in the critical sphere, rap rock has a bad connotation. Rarely, if ever, do artists tastefully combine the two genres, or even produce something that touches the spirit of both. Enter Houston’s Hyron Fenton, who goes by Hyro the Hero. Following a series of mixtapes, his 2011 debut album Birth, School, Work, Death was a revelation, blending punk and post-hardcore with rap, featuring contributions from some of Fenton’s biggest influences, namely At The Drive-In/The Mars Volta’s Paul Hijonos. Last year, he finally followed up his debut with the more rap-oriented Flagged Channel. His mixture of styles lands him on tours with bands like P.O.D. and festivals like the Rockstar Energy Drink Disrupt Festival, which comes to Tinely Park’s Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre on Friday, and the Vans Warped Tour. But his loyalty to black music and culture nabbed him a spot on this year’s Afropunk lineup, too. 

Last month, over the phone, Fenton (who now lives in L.A.) spoke to being the outlier at many shows and festivals and how the history of his across-the-board influences helped him navigate the terrain. He also shared some wisdom about the contemporary music landscape and its increasingly blending notions of genre. Read below, edited for length and clarity.

Since I Left You: It’s been a year since Flagged Channel came out. How has your relationship with the album changed over then?

Hyron Fenton: It’s more of a live feel with the album now because now I’m performing it. I feel it on a different level. I get to push the energy a little bit more. When I’m in the studio, I try to capture that vibe, but it’s nothing like being on the stage.

SILY: It was a few years between that and your debut.

HF: Yeah, it was a whole learning process. I was just trying to get myself together, learn my craft a little more. I got into rap a little bit more, learned structure, different choruses.

SILY: Is your background more in rap or rock?

HF: I come from a hip hop background. Growing up, I was listening to Tupac, 50 Cent, Cam’ron, Eminem--one of my favorite rappers ever. I was the guy who flipped the channel. I started listening to Nickelback and shit like that, and thought, “Okay, this is rock.” And then there’s deeper than that. I got into At The Drive-In, Rancid, and Bad Brains. A little bit more punk rock. I was learning my roots: The Judgement Night soundtrack.

SILY: Were you influenced a lot by the Houston rap scene?

HF: Oh yeah, man, the Houston rap scene is what got me. My sister used to rap with DJ Screw, who was the man in Houston. He died. She knew him before he blew up. To see him start a movement and turn into a whole thing. In Houston, we were kind of snobby about our music--all we would listen to was Houston music. But I decided to venture out a little bit. I started rappin’, and when I rapped I would scream all the time because I would listen to Tupac and try to imitate him. He wasn’t really screaming, but I thought it was so I would scream. I think that’s what helped me out in rock.

SILY: When was the point where you realized you wanted to combine rap and rock?

HF: It was when my ex-girlfriend in high school left me and I got real mad. So I wanted to make a song about it. I didn’t want to rap, because I couldn’t get the emotion out of it, so I took a rock song and I sampled it. I was screaming on that, and it took off from there. I put it up on Myspace.

SILY: Is it still up, or did it get lost when Myspace lost a bunch of data?

HF: I can’t find it! I think I deleted it. I put that one up and a song called “Punk Rock” where I sampled a Soulja Boy beat and sped it up. I was saying, “I’d rather be a punk rocker than a hip hopper, ‘cause y’all just doin’ the ringtone shit.” I was dissing a lot of people back then. [laughs]

SILY: Were you ever into other bands that combined rap and rock, like the Beastie Boys or Rage Against the Machine?

HF: Oh yeah, man. Limp Bizkit. Especially when it came out when they had a song with Method Man, and Eminem had a song with Kid Rock. I saw it becoming cool in a sense. I saw how much respect rock had for rap, but I didn’t see it the other way around so much. Rap was kind of scared of guitars, so it was cool how they blended it.

SILY: I’ve talked to friends who only listened to rap and then the Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashup came out, which turned them on to rock.

HF: They did it right! Jay-Z has such a cool voice, so they really nailed the chill hip hop vibe with it. The music with Linkin Park is so good and respectable. It blended it perfectly.

SILY: Do you feel like you’ve established your own sound beyond your influences?

HF: Yeah, I think I’ve got my own sound going. I’m always compared to Rage no matter what, but the way I rap is a little different. I put in more words. The way Zack [de la Rocha] did it, with little small sentences that were so powerful. That’s a hard thing to do. I got a lot of stuff to say, which is why I rap a little fast and make my words poetic. What they did was so special, though, so it’s cool to get compared to them.

SILY: Looking at the types of shows you’re playing, you’re with a lot of pure rock bands.

HF: The cool thing about me is I can do rap, I can do metal, I can do punk. They can put me in anything. My music blends all categories.

SILY: When you go to the Disrupt Festival versus something like Afropunk, do you cater to what the crowd is gonna want to hear?

HF: I used to do that, but I felt like that didn’t work for me. Now I just do my own thing. I’ve turned some places into pits that shouldn’t have pits. Especially Afropunk--I can’t wait to bring my vibe there. Same energy I bring everywhere.

SILY: Have you gained a lot of new fans at festivals where you’re the genre outlier?

HF: Oh yeah, man, especially in this day and age. Back then, it was a little different. People were a little bit wary of it. Now, everybody is into everything. If you look at rap shows, they’re trying to be like punk rockers with mosh pits. It’s really no different.

SILY: Trap has mosh pits, but then there’s also emo rock rap like Lil Peep.

HF: XXX[Tentacion], Lil Uzi [Vert], and all them. They’re doing stuff I was doing when I was young. [laughs] I was just a little ahead of my time.

SILY: The rise of the Internet really allowed that to happen.

HF: It’s a gift and a curse. It’s open for everybody, so everybody thinks they’re a rapper and they can do music. The special feel of it has gone. Truly talented people don’t get heard. It’s just if someone makes an ear candy song. At the same time, people are able to express themselves and it makes everybody work harder to get heard.

SILY: And people who previously didn’t have an in or money can get heard.

HF: I was like, “Damn, man, I didn’t have these opportunities when I was young.” I had a crew, but I didn’t have YouTube or Instagram. It’s a gift right now. 

SILY: Do you feel like you have to anticipate trends or what people are going to be doing so you can stand out?

HF: I just do my own thing. I don’t pay attention too much. I listen to music, and it inspires me, but as far as the waves go, I’m a little too old to know what’s up. By the time I hear a song, I’m like, “Oh, it’s a big song?” People got dances to it and everything, and I’m already late on it. [laughs]

SILY: How do you listen to music these days?

HF: Spotify playlists. I love YouTube. I like looking at old live shows. If you look at my Instagram stories, I call it homework. Looking at live shows from Queen, Bob Marley.

SILY: Have you heard anything lately that’s blown your mind?

HF: Lately, I’ve been into this band from Flint, Michigan, King 810. The song “Alpha & Omega”. It’s real dark and heavy. I don’t know if it’s old, but I jam that album. [Editor’s note: It’s from 2016.]

SILY: Are you a big metal fan?

HF: Oh yeah, I’m into metal. More punk rock, but I fall into metal because I love the metal sound. But I couldn’t tell you any new metal bands. I’m into old school metal. If you look at lineups, the old school cats still headlining.

SILY: I saw the Slayer farewell tour at the venue you’re playing here.

HF: Oh man. For throwback Thursday, I was gonna post a picture I had with Kerry King. It’s from back in 2012.

SILY: Sounds like I need to follow you on Instagram!

HF: I have tons of cool stuff there, especially with the lyrics I spit. I’m not political--I leave that up to everyone else. Everybody’s super political online and “woke”--I just like to be fun. [laughs]

SILY: Changing gears--does Houston still feel like home?

HF: Oh yeah, I was just there with some homies for 4-5 days. Went out to the club, partied hip hop style with bottles and stuff--shit I don’t normally do, but it was fun--I ain’t gon’ lie.

SILY: My girlfriend has family near Houston in Humble, and we go to the rodeo every year.

HF: The rodeo is fun, man! I haven’t been to it in a while. I remember when Destiny’s Child did shows there before they were super famous.

SILY: Increasingly, they’re booking a lot besides country. This past year, Cardi B broke the attendance record, before first Los Tigres del Norte and then George Strait broke it again.

HF: That’s crazy! They’ve been booking all kinds of acts now. And even if you look at country--look at Lil Nas X. Hip hop goin’ country. There’s another song going viral right now, a young black kid doing country with a trap kind of vibe.

SILY: Do you like “Old Town Road”?

HF: I love it. I hope he got another one, because it’s so good. It’s kind of hard to top it. [Editors note: Yes, it is.]

SILY: I loved Billy Ray Cyrus’s post-Billboard charts “Is this country enough for you now?” flex?

HF: [laughs] I get it. They probably looked at it and thought, “You’re making a parody of country.” But he’s really sticking with it.

Country already had some hip hop aspects to it, like Florida Georgia Line. I’m from Texas, so I know a little bit about old country, like “Mama Tried”. It’s cool to see the hip hop aspect of it.

SILY: Why did you change your name from Hyro Da Hero to Hyro The Hero?

HF: “D-A” was a little too hard--I always had to spell it out. People just said “The” anyway. So I thought I’d change it. Maybe some Mandela Effect type of way. But I didn’t realize I had so much stuff that said “Da,” so it messed up my merchandise. [laughs]

SILY: It’s probably really valuable!

HF: Yeah, and I have a lot of it.

SILY: Do you have any new music you’re thinking about or recording?

HF: I’ve been working on some dope stuff. I can’t really speak on it, but when people say it’s kind of hard to do the next album--this one might give Flagged Channel a run for its money. Some of these songs, I’m just so excited to do live.

SILY: Are you going to do any of them on upcoming shows?

HF: No, we haven’t learned them yet. A lot of them I don’t even know if they’ll make the album. I have a few for sure with some really cool people. Artists like me--I’m a rapper slash rocker, so I can move around with different bands and musicians and have an all-star cast.

SILY: And introduce people who haven’t met or worked with each other.

HF: Exactly. That’s what’s so dope about it.