I’ve been so into the apartment recently, I’ve been slacking off on keeping up with my music. I was going to put this “Weekly Album” series on a little hiatus, or until I found some really good music. I still think I’m planning on doing this; so it’ll be more “Great Albums” and less “Weekly.”
Well, just this morning, my great friend, Morgan, pointed me in the direction of Lykke Li and I have fallen head over heals for her in the past few hours I’ve been listening and researching. Beautiful words, beautiful voice and a beautiful face. …If nothing else her dancing, much like MIA, makes me happy through and through!
With so many surprises in the arrangements, you might overlook what a strength Li herself is, how well she unifies Youth Novels’ scattershot imagination. It’s easy to dismiss her style as overly cutesy– the babytalk chorus on first single “Little Bit”, for instance– and her fragility can seem annoyingly affected. But don’t be fooled– she’s in total command of the songs, and her breathy fuzziness fits the wireframe aesthetic better than a fuller voice would. There are also hints that Li would be as happy with a richer sound– on the beautiful “My” she’s rolled and washed by cymbal, string, and echo and lets them envelop her without erasing her.
Whoops, had this written and everything yesterday, but looks like I saved it instead of posting… This week features one of my favorite albums from 2007, Myth Takes by !!! (pronounced Chk Chk Chk).
Rating: 8.0
Any tentative or half-baked delivery is all but absent from Myth Takes, which rampages through the annals of kinetic music without letting genre tropes override or diffuse the songs’ impact. The cerebral always takes a backseat to the visceral, and the album, while varied, is united by relentless propulsion. The title track’s elastic bass and spaghetti-western guitar licks are a tense backdrop for Offer’s smarmy scatting– not to mention an effective foil to the ominous funk-laden following track, “All My Heroes Are Weirdoes”. Mobile bass and telegraphic synths dominate the sex-jam “Must Be the Moon”, a sort of pimp-strutting nursery rhyme for the 21+ set (”One drink, two drinks, three drinks, four!”). “A New Name” holds two contrasting modes in balance: earthy funk verses and a spacey soul-noir chorus that sloughs off tiny ice-chip tones, testifying to the importance of bassist and sound engineer Justin Vandervolgen’s subtle tweaks. No longer experimenting for experimentation’s sake, every beat-breaking decision on Myth Takes serves to reinforce the monumental rhythms.
I’m in a very Beatles mood right now, and there’s nothing much I can say about them that hasn’t already been said a thousand times. I just love ‘em!
Rating: 8.5
They’re certainly the best band I almost never listen to. I’m guessing I share this with a lot of music obsessives; the Beatles’ music has been so thoroughly absorbed into our consciousness that we can play the songs in our heads any time we like. Which is why the idea of someone doing something new with the catalog– mixing and matching different songs, blending the whole thing into an epic suite– is potentially exciting. Any attempt to fiddle with this music is like long-distance brain surgery, toying with our collective memory with the hope of creating something new.
This is a beautiful EP that is over way to soon. It could go on for hours and I still don’t think I’d be able to get enough. Zach Condon voice and his music are rustic, yet regal. To me, it sounds like a European adventure. Rolling green hills, clear skies and friendly natives.
Rating: 7.8
Moving from his solo, Jeremy Barnes-accented bedroom recordings, Condon’s now part of an eight-piece band. Smart move. Gulag showed promise and also limitations: In retrospect, the most intriguing sounds often amounted to ambient pastiche. Pretty but vacant. Now, a solid, pulsing group of players fleshing-out his songs, Condon opens to something less paint-by-numbers static– it’s more alive.
Both Jack and I have mad love for M.I.A. (as you can see in the side bar, right now) so it felt it time to post something by her. I don’t even remember how I came across her two albums, Kala and Arular, but I’m sure it had something to do with someone putting either one of those albums at the top of their “must-listen” list. Anyway, this here is just an EP, but a great EP, none-the-less. I could listen to DFA remix 100 times and not get tired of it!
You’ve heard it all by now: M.I.A. flies like paper, gets high like planes, samples Combat Rock and gets stuck in your, er, brains. “Paper Planes”, the Kala standout– and, when joined by Diplo, Bun B and Rich Boy, Pitchfork’s #4 track of 2007– has been ringing out from every Hummer and hot dog stand since its release last summer. Now, M.I.A. has collected five fine remixes of the gunslingin’, kid-singin’ track for the Homeland Security Remixes EP.
I keep slipping further and further back in time with these albums, but trust me, this one is truly worth it. My little brother went through a hug Pink Floyd phase and it was something I never really understood. I mean, I enjoyed “The Wall” and “Dark Side of the Moon” and the bits and pieces of other albums I would hear, but there was nothing to really grab me and keep me. Probably about a year and a half ago I was searching for new music to add to my ever-expanding collection and for some reason I was looking through Pink Floyd’s discography. I recognized most their albums, but had never remembered hearing anything about “Animals.” I decided this was the album I should look into, and boy am I glad I did!
Rating: 10.0
…It is the acute anthropomorphic fantasy, possessing a timeless quality that has thrust it into the category of “classic,” though it may remain forever in the shadow of its more commercially successful older brother, Dark Side Of The Moon. Consisting of three tracks each longer than ten minutes and two tracks under two minutes, Animals is not for the attention- span- deficient. However, within this impenetrable fortress of radio- unfriendly tracks, we hear Dave Gilmour’s guitars at their absolute best, get a full-on dose of Roger Waters’ powerful lyrical imagery, and are presented with the worst elements of our own humanity- packaged in the skins of “Sheep,” “Dogs” and “Pigs (Three Different Ones)”. For those weaned on The Wall and Dark Side, you’ll find Animals to be a whole new bag of feed. Where Floyd’s two most recognizable albums made their mark with operatic aggression and fear, Animals deals in dirt- under- the- fingernails reality, the common smallness that simultaneously binds and repels us all. “Dogs,” a 17-minute study in the commonest of all faults, lazily dispenses bite after venomous bite into the desires that drive us to seize the fast buck and screw anyone that gets in our way…
