Contemporary Sound and Video
No Acid Regrets
Atlantic Sea Spray
Brooklyn Underwater
Where The Go! Team should have gone
Liger Beat
New Hypnosis
Do you like The Mary Onettes?
S3M TRACKIN’
Five (actually 6) songs I have been listening to for I don’t know how long. Each has at least one total standards-wrecking ass part in them, so I suppose that is the common thread here. I often think that if I pull out the songs with the melodies that really matter to me, I’ll be able to quantize a high-level view of my actual taste in music. Maybe that’s bullshit but:
These dudes are on some star-dense shit. Broadly, the songs below are Dubstep. They’re all built on those deep and fat wah-wah noises I love so much, which give each track its own anxiety-driven cadence. I often feel like the world is about to shatter and cascade down around me when I listen to this shit, which is rewarding because my life is still intact when the songs end, and in this way I can manufacture relief.
My understanding is that this stuff is not bass-weight-meditative in the way that really brainy Dubstep can be, but is instead made to be listened to aggressively and angrily, with drugs in your body and a headbutt-thickened skull if you’re a particularly hard sort of person (which I am not, but my limbic system knows what’s up).
Anyway here are the tracks. I hope they stress you the fuck out.
I think this sounds like the crisis of a football firm, fighting for fun.
I first heard these dudes on their Fabriclive 37 mix, which was mostly tracks by them, plus some hard-nosed hits from 2007 by Coki, D1, Distance, etc. It seems that serious fans of this stuff actually dislike the direction C&R are taking with this and their other recently released tracks. They think it’s fucking up Dubstep and ruining their lives but really they’re just being precious dicks. This genre is young! Let it mutate and diverge!
This is a track that is set to alienate from the start. It strips you of any melodic expectations you brought along, punches you in the face, and then drops you into a motherfucking SPACE JAIL full of subwoofers and broken pianos and the smell of engines.
When I was a kid I used to have a recurring dream every time I slept in front of this stone fireplace at my grandparents’ house. In this dream, I was small and grey and trapped in a huge windowless room, dwarfed by giant red and blue pistons that fired regularly, stamping from ceiling to floor, while faceless red and blue men patrolled the place. The pistons were powered by a steaming, organic energy — something familiar and dirty, like coal or oil — which made their threat more comprehensible and inevitable. It was the kind of dream that hollows you until you’re bottomed out, and it used to frighten me so completely that I would let the pistons crush me to death everytime I had it, knowing that dying in my dream would wake me up.
Something in “Down” helps me compartmentalize and own that sense of helplessness. It makes me feel powerful and determined and in control.
DZ is from Vancouver, which is pretty tight. I don’t know what the scene is like there but it’s a long way from the dirt of England where Dubstep is growing so violently. I ripped this from the end of the Jokers of the Scene NLLR mix that came out last year (which is excellent), so it includes an extra sample at the beginning, but I kind of like it that way.
Oh and:
I posted this one elsewhere a while ago, and these guys aren’t really known for making thick tracks like this lately, but I still feel like “Stinging Nettle” is an incredibly heavy monster. This song is more alarming than the others: it uses the wah-wah as a siren, and builds quickly towards a faster stepping, more dance-compelling beat. I sort of can’t believe these guys also made “Beeper”.
Got lit and played racquetball this morning with Rod. It was the highest quality gameplay I’d ever brought. I’m a touch player and I was fucking feeling it, and I got a couple of games on Rod, who is an excellent player.
Anyway Rod and I get to talking between a point and he mentions this dude Ed. I’d played doubles with this guy a week before, and he seemed like any older dude in his 60’s, except he was sort of extra-scraggly-looking, and he was wearing a weed t-shirt. The shirt had a big leaf on it and seemed common enough, but I noticed that the back had some text like, “Hereditary Genes – Highly Concentrated THC”. At the time I remember thinking, “I wonder if this guy is some hot shot pot grower.”
Rod told me that I was right. Ed is the “Guru of Ganja”, and has written dozens of books on the subject. I’m going to try to hang out with him I think. Or maybe I’ll just lay my mellow bones down with my contemporaries.
After playing, I wandered down to the locker room in that hazy daze of endorphins and other joy, and I started listening to Alborosie. I’m not a huge reggae head, but I love this guy’s steez. He was born in Sicily and moved to Kingston Town really young, and he’s a huge part of the modern Jamaican scene. This video is pretty informative.
Here’re two of his biggest jams.
This was the one that got me at first. It’s got the kind of pacing that makes you sit deeper in your seat and touch your chin to your chest.
I’ve seriously put this shit on at like 20 dinner parties and no one has called bullshit on me yet, because it’s a truly unfadeable hit.
There’s something about Alborosie that makes his stuff way more compelling to me than most other reggae. I’ve been getting the Reggae One Drop Anthem comps for the last few years and there’s some great stuff there too, but a lot of it pales. Give this shit a shot, as nastily sober as you wanna be. And while you’re at it fuck a badman bloodclot.
I don’t know, man. These guys are pretty fucking cool.
Years ago I found one of their one-inch buttons at a garage sale. It was black and white, and I think I thought they were on some 2 tone ska shit, but I bought the button because it was cool looking and I knew Bronski Beat meant a lot to a lot of people.
A little while later I saw the video for “Smalltown Boy” and was blown away by the pathos of the damned thing. It’s a song with a strong message that’s not super played up for drama. I think that’s what makes it such an enabling piece of pop history. “Smalltown Boy” — and Bronski Beat themselves — helped embolden a generation of young homosexual men to go to where they’d be understood.
I started really listening to Bronski Beat’s first album, The Age of Consent (1984), a couple of months ago. There are some slow songs, but also a few incredible stand-outs. “Smalltown Boy” and “Why?” were the singles, and I guess “Ain’t Necessarily So” was a big deal too because it was a Gershwin classic.
But my favorite song on the album is “Junk”, and it doesn’t get much mention when people talk about the album. I think that’s because the song doesn’t fit as neatly into the themes of the album (fighting stereotypes, resisting homophobes, carving out space in the world, etc), but I think it succeeds because it’s the darkest song in the mix. They never made a video for it, either, so I decided to do so. It’s short and rough because it was made as an accompaniment to a performance at a party, and wasn’t really meant to stand alone.
I think it turned out nicely, though.
Fun Fact: BB didn’t clear the Kibbles ‘n Bits sample in this song (because sampling wasn’t a big deal in ‘84, really), and were approached first not by the dog food people, but by the annoying voice actor who did the commercial. Once that dude sued the band, the Kibbles people came to town too, and some loot got handed out.
I’ve got more to learn about these guys yet (still haven’t even heard Truthdare Doubledare), but I’ve got time. And anyway I sort of like keeping the guys frozen in my brain, at their beginning, when their presence as synthpop stars mattered so much to a community that deserved far more respect and acknowledgment than it got.
A friend said he didn’t like Grime very much. It’s understandable. I think it’s one of those glutty genres where you start scratching the surface of the scene and you discover that there’s just a massive amount of material coming out, and it’s all really micro-divided by geography and slight-seeming alterations of style, and that can be hard to get into. It seems to me that this is because it’s such a young thing, and it’s moving unpredictably and creatively, like a lava flow, whereas older genres are so established that things change more tectonically.
In case you haven’t looked into this stuff much, here’s some background:
Grime’s been around for I don’t know how long, but was introduced to the world at large in like 2003, by Dizzee Rascal. He was a part of a small, thriving scene, with dudes like Wiley and Kano, and they were rapping over a totally different kind of beat than western hip-hop is usually set to. This was great, because a lot of European hip-hop is plain and boring American aping. Grime (or Eski, which Wiley has always called it, because it can be so cold and icy and desolate, like some Eskimo / Igloo rap shit) had its roots in the British 2-Step / Garage sound, which has a slower, more jungly beat structure. Not all Grime has vocals, and a lot of guys are making and releasing straight Grimey beats, some of which get rapped over and some that fall to the side. Wiley put out “Ice Rink” and like 100 dudes spit over it. It’s a crazy example of a riddim that is pure propulsion, with no drops and a pretty much limitless vocal platform. The stuff that is more focused on the beats themselves, usually with no vocals at all, is Dubstep. That shit is amazing, and is on some New Scientist tip, with DJs crafting these crazy cadences and bass feedbacks to build out some incredibly looming and dark clouds of music. Worth its own post for sure, and I probably listen to more Dubstep than Grime these days anyway.
So there’s a lot of good stuff out there and a lot of middling stuff. I’m no great authority here; I listen to what gets talked about, and follow the crews I liked during my early exploration. Occasionally I’ll download some random shit that has a heavy-sounding name. Here we go:
The Roll Deep crew is what sold me on Grime, and that is some real shit. Rules and Regulations has 0 bad tracks. It’s an outstanding, free-standing primer to the modern Grime scene. This track was made by my favorite producer out there, Danny Weed. Non-stop gash.
Mentioned this above. Not my favorite of the Ice Rink works, but All in One is solid so he gets a pass. Just check out the beat and pull what you can out of the muddled vocals.
The first real banger that hit me, way back in 2004, off the Run the Road comp. The fucking beat is built from a gun cock! This track is so massive!
A big theme in the last two years of the Grime scene has been the predatory practices of the big labels in London. When Grime blew up in 2003, they started courting the young stars and signing them to exclusive contracts. Guys thought they had it made. But then their albums got locked up in development for seriously like 4 years or more, and the artists came to realize that they’d been squatted on by their label. Executives were more interested in preventing other labels from cornering this new market than in actually helping and promoting these artists. Lots more self-released stuff coming out now, and reactionary songs like this one. Also, Durrty Goodz dominates.
Crazyee Bandit turns in an example of the weird epic-triumph vein that flows through a lot of Grime. There’s this element that pops up a lot, where a track is like a non-stop movie climax, with MCs yelling like gladiators and it’s all pretty life-or-death. Jammer’s delivery is unorthodox, which is something I prize.
As far as I can tell, Wretch 32 is a less active / popular MC from North London. Not much press on this guy, and this track is a few years old, but I’ve always enjoyed it. It sort of switches itself up in the middle, and I appreciate that kind of free-wheeling.
And two more, mostly instrumental tracks, because they’re great and if you don’t care for the delivery of the MCs in the stuff above, maybe you’ll enjoy the beats standing alone.
I don’t know what it is about this beat. There is such trememdous room inside it. It’s like some long-legged juggernaut, rolling and echoing through a drainage pipe. Been playing this one for anyone who’ll listen over the past three years or so.
It happens a fair bit that you’ll get a female vocal dropped in as an instrument for the beat, rather than as a primary voice. Skepta’s received a lot of accolades lately, for his production and his mic work. Dude deserves it.
That’s that. For a bit more, you might check out this post I made back in 2005, while living in Argentina. It’s got a couple of older tracks that are still great.
I’ve been listening to these during the past month or two.
In response to this thread on oaklog.
In alphabetical order.
Heavy, bleak, and patient. I just want the paper.
It’s crazy how a horn can sound like it knows you.
Give it up for electro youth and post-banger songwriting.
A real driver. Purposeful and complex, pushing towards something ugly and necessary.
I’ve been falling into the deep end of House lately.
Made in 2001 but sounds like 1995 to me.
Techno like this makes me think of human unity.
This is like my fucking Obama song.
You just have to decide to let it sweep you out.
A new classic I will return to.
I think it’s her voice against the crazy dark purple and black of this beat.
This is the sound of my home, where the racing of the outside world disappears, and we revel in the comfort of our lives together.
This is the kind of music American Idol stars should sing over after they win. Contemporary, populist, and triumphant.
An arrogant, lyrically uninteresting, and convincing R&B genius.
A tightening and quickening of the amazing original.
Please give this song until the 5:00 mark. It shrinks, and then it changes and grows, and they shape her voice into something sharper, and they hold that part of her up as long as they can. Then they drop that voice into the world they’ve constructed for her, from her, over the course of the song. It’s like an Italo Disco Klein bottle.
There’s a weariness and dirtiness to her voice that makes her seem invulnerable. Also happens to be the 13th song on their new album.
See you later.
The latest album by Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours, came out a few weeks ago. I think it’s outstanding, and is about to expose these guys to a huge new audience. I wanted to take a minute to backtrack through the last three years or so, in which I found out about the band, and got seriously into them.
I can’t even remember where I first heard them, which is a crap start to this. It would have been in the middle of 2005, and it had to have been:
Shinichi Osawa turns 41 today. Happy birthday, guy.
Osawa has had a long and varied career, and started recording as Mondo Grosso in 1991, making what I think is particularly Japanese-sounding Acid Jazz and Deep House. Like this:
In the last three years or so, though, he’s been doing a lot of remixes and producing more tracks under his own name, most of which have a cleaner and more refined feel than much of the Blog House being made now. Yeah, it’s pretty much still rocky electro-house, which clearly there’s plenty of out there, but the difference is that this dude has a studio and real chops, versus a bedroom and laser fashion. There’re the stutter cuts and the fuzzed low-ends, but somehow a lot of the tunes come off really populist feeling, I think, and the response to his music in Japan is fucking huge. He fills massive clubs and is well known, and that’s not accidental. People love this shit.
Continue reading: Shinichi Osawa
It’s fucking crazy how hard it is to have a favorite band anymore. I find it’s really easy to get caught up in the constant bustle of new bands coming out. Music moves so much faster now, but it still takes roughly the same amount of time before you know you mean it when you call something “great”, and tell your friends, “See, this shit is what I am talking about”.
But a month or so ago I admitted to myself that Hot Chip is my favorite band, and I couldn’t be happier about that. Here’s some of what I know and love about them:
Continue reading: Hot Chip