April 2017 Review

It's finally happened. I listened to a stone-cold, balls-to-the-wall classic album this month, and was able to give it my first non-retrospective A* rating. You know that feeling when you listen to an album on release, and you just know it's a god-tier release from the first listen? That happened this month. Take a bow, King Kenny. No one came anywhere near you in April.


The Rest:


Alvarez Kings - Somewhere Between - D

Czarface - First Weapon Drawn - B

J Dilla - Motor City - C

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Killing Tingle Lifted Retreats - B

Omar Rodriguez-Lopez - Solid State Mercenaries - C

OR-L's long list of releases on the Ipecac label is coming to a close, with only a few albums left to go. I'm gonna have to be honest, even as a big Omar/Mars Volta fan, I'm quite happy about that. I really don't think it's been worth it, on the whole. As a fan and a completist, I like listening to everything he puts out, even with this hugely prolific period. But aside from a clutch of genuinely great albums (Sworn Virgins, Arañas en la Sombra, A Lovejoy, Cell Phone Bikini) the series has been fairly average. There's only so many songs with him mumbling unintelligible lyrics that I can hear without it getting samey.

You know how your favourite artists often say they have a vault full of ideas, sketches and unreleased projects? Those off the cuff comments under their breath in interviews that leave tantalising images of albums not yet realised? You think about the great possibilities of what lies waiting to be discovered - What if it's the best thing they've ever done, what if it's like OK Computer or SGT Peppers, just sitting there, ready to be found. Yeah, well there's a reason why they don't get released. Omar seems to be fully clearing out his garage, and we get to watch the whole yard sale. Solid State Mercenaries is another formless, dull record from the box at the back of the room. Apart from Lightning Round. That's a nice song.


The King Blues - The Gospel Truth - D


The Best:

 
01: Kendrick Lamar - DAMN - A* 


This is something very special. Kendrick Lamar has been one of the biggest stars of this current generation of bright prospects in the rap game, his 2015 release To Pimp A Butterfly was an ambitious, sprawling project that stormed the charts and topped many end-of-year lists. Following up on such a roaring success would usually be beyond most artists, but with DAMN, Lamar has surpassed the high water mark from any of his previous work. This is his best album yet.

Lamar's narrative string on DAMN is the best it's ever been. He weaves a highly detailed lyrical soundscape that takes in references from the bible, politics, music, racial tension and his own experience, forming an hour-long statement using a loose theme of the end of days to describe the socio-political turmoil in the USA. DAMN has those harsh vocal hooks and long, winding verses that Lamar has built his brand on. It's got the prophetic edge he touched on in earlier releases, but now it's right at the forefront. It's a dark, direct album that takes no prisoners.

There are catchy singles like Humble, Element and Loyalty that will be counted as huge hits from 2017 mixing with more progressive pieces like Yah, Lust and Fear. While there are several forms of music and style on the album, DAMN is different to Butterfly in that it's concentrated. Lamar has trimmed off the fat on his style to make a leaner, more effective record. I always thought that was a sticking point with Butterfly - Far too many ideas that didn't work. DAMN is different to that. It's short with no filler. It's far too consistent from front to back for me to begin listing any highlights, but the peak moments on DAMN are hair-tinglingly intense. It's a snapshot of a great artist at his zenith.

Lamar's style is hard to pin down, he's not strictly a mainstream Hip-hop artist other than by virtue of his success, but it would also be wrong to call him simply cult or cerebral. He has that righteousness and pomp that assists the finest rappers in delivering their message. His ability to mould pop-rap hooks with minutes-long introspective verses is the key to his ascendancy. His style evokes images of some of  the greatest names in rap history - That direct, urgent flow you hear from rappers like Tupac, Kanye West, RZA and Nas.

DAMN will be remembered for years to come as the point Kendrick Lamar officially elevated from Crown Prince to the undisputed king of Hip-hop. DAMN will be ranked alongside the great classics of the genre, alongside the platinum standard releases from the legends Kendrick will have spent his childhood lip-syncing to in the mirror. More mature that Good Kid..., More accessible than Butterfly, More polished than untitled unmastered, and more angry, more vital and more relevant than any other rap record you'll hear for a long time. This is album of the year. We might as well pack up and go home, because it doesn't get any better than this.

02: Animal Collective - Meeting Of The Waters - B


Animal Collective is a fluid ensemble, with members interchanging and evolving with each release. It's a lottery of artistic vision - You'll never know what they're going to come up with from one release to the next. I was quietly disappointed with last year's mushy Painting With, and while I skipped its companion release The Painters, I was still well up for giving Meeting Of The Waters a few spins.

Animal Collective released Meeting for Record Store Day, after recording it live in a rainforest, of course. That's a canny summation of the album's sound. You can hear rain showers and wind rustling through the trees. The album is peaceful and calm on the surface, underpinned with an isolated psychological edge. Meeting is a solitary walk into the forest, it's about being totally alone and trapped with your thoughts. Merely 2 members of the collective are credited on this album, which underlines the disparate feel throughout.

I'm a total sucker for noise and drone on albums. When it's piqued by small islands of song structure, it's all the better. After the 13+ minute journey of the opening track, Meeting turns a corner into Man Of Oil, an acidy acoustic piece, and it's like you've wandered through the forest and stumbled across someone sat playing guitar. Meeting has a subtle playability, It's such a compact record, barely breaching past 30 minutes, but it feels long and involved. It's trippy, broody, dark and reflective. Its weirdness and bohemian sensuality define the sound of a band that repeatedly refuse to conform to categorisation.

The Collective don't have any kind of official video on Youtube for this release, but it's only 30 minutes long, so listen to the whole thing, why dontcha.


03: Feist - Pleasure - B

04: Gorillaz - Humanz - B

One of the bigger anticipated releases for 2017, Humanz was dropped as the usual art-and-music double whammy from Gorillaz, one of the finest and most unique pop bands of the last 25 years. With Blur being on recording hiatus for most of the last decade, Gorillaz is arguably Damon Albarn's most important project - Certainly the most popular, and since the post-Britpop era was heralded with one of it's biggest stars forming a virtual Pop/Hip-hop/Electronica/etc, group, we've enjoyed a swathe of high quality albums, with image, art and animation just as important as the galaxy of guest stars that feature on each one. Their self-titled 2001 debut was verging on revolutionary in terms of execution and ambition, and they've steadily improved since.

Humanz is a bit of a damp squib for me, though. It's too disjointed to stand up to the better Gorillaz albums like Demon Days and Plastic Beach. It's a collection of songs which all sound fairly good together, but they could be played in any order and still achieve the same effect. Most of the guest appearances don't uplift the album, and there's no real direction or point to any of it. There's an identity to Gorillaz that fails to come out properly on Humanz. They concede too much creative licence to their guest stars, rendering the album devoid of a cohesive theme. However while this is nowhere near their finest moment, Humanz is worth a few spins and the inevitable world tour that will follow. Gorillaz is a project that still has plenty of mileage left, and if one of their lesser releases is this good, that just goes to show how special Gorillaz is.

05: Talib Kweli - The Seven - B

February 2016 Review

February's music made for interesting listening to me, mainly because I hardly  had anything I was looking forward to. This made me listen to some stuff I wouldn't usually consider, and some of it was a pleasant surprise. Other bits, not so good. Once again, I'm really happy with my top 3, as all of them were artists I had never heard of or had thought would not be to my taste. That's the beauty of this practice; forcing yourself  to listen opens you up to music you'd not usually consider. This one's a little late, and for that I apologise. Had a bit of real world stuff (drinking and job searching, mainly) to go through.



The Rest:

Anchor And Braille - Songs For The Late Night Drive Home - C

Pop/Electronic


Animal Collective - Painting With - C

Electronic/Experimental

This is one I was surprised by, mainly because I expected so much more. Animal Collective have a solid reputation for musical irreverence amongst the Indie/Experimental/We Like Weird Shit community, and I was all ready to give this one an A and a big pat on the back. Then I listened to it.

The issue I have with Painting With is that it's constant noise. There's very little let-up in terms of sonic dynamics, and it all sounds the same. Once you've heard the first 2 minutes of Floridada, the loop is complete and there is no more ground left to cover.

This is hard to listen to, not because it's odd music or because it's complex. It's because it all moulds into one lump of goo. Sparkly, interesting goo. But goo nonetheless. I had put the far superior Panda Bear record from last year in my top 20. He's on this record, as with all the Collective's output. That's a better example of the sound Animal Collective are going for here.


DIIV - Is The Is Are - C

Alternative Rock/Shoegaze/Garage Rock


The Best

01: The 1975 - I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It - A

Pop/Electronic/Funk/Ambient

This is hands down the winner of the Most Pretentious Album Title 2K16 and it's only February. That's the only criticism I can push on this album. It's exceptional.

It's difficult to put so many different styles, forms and moods on a record without stretching it out too much and making it incomplete, but with When You Sleep, The 1975 have achieved the impossible. The breadth of this album is monumental, tracks like Please Be Naked are virtually at the level of ambient field recordings, while on the other end of the scale, Love Me, She's American and UGH! bring a mix of quirky, lucid Pop/Funk that will be ringing out across the street from countless student house parties across the UK this summer.

I usually hate anything that's over an hour, or anything with more than 12 tracks. When You Sleep gleefully surpasses both of these thresholds and never gets boring. There's an overall youthful optimistic feel from the bulk of radio-friendly hits on here, punctuated by musical curveballs that push out the longevity of the album, and it never gets cynical or jaded. Shoegaze, Acoustic, Ambient, Pop, Funk, Rock. It's all here, and it's all straight from the heart. This will sit comfortably in many end-of-year top lists, and rightfully so.

02: Trixie Whitely - Porta Bohemica - A

Alternative Rock/Pop/Blues/Soul

03: Textures - Phenotype - B

Metal/Progressive Metal

04: Kanye West - The Life Of Pablo - B

Hip Hop/Soul/Pop/Electronic

Kanye's one of those artists you absolutely have to listen to. Not because he's that great or innovative, but because he's so ubiquitous. Kanye West is a global brand. In that way, he transcends musical artistry and becomes a form of culture in his own right. That's what gives him his persona, his cult following and what makes a million balding dads tut and shake their heads at him headlining Glastonbury. It's worth listening to his music based entirely on his super-celebrity status. 

Pablo is a puzzling work. Read the list of contributors and producers, and it's exhaustive. It promises a grand, sprawling epic, but in reality, Pablo is an intimate portrait. It sounds like Kanye did it over a rainy weekend in his front room, just him, a mic and some Protools. Inevitably, this leaves the sound lacking.

There are a few choice cuts on here, but all come with a caveat. No More Parties In L.A is far and away the best track on Pablo, though the guest spot from Kendrick Lamar is washed away by the 6 minutes of West's musical dalliances. Even the rare and tender 30 Hours gets soiled by 2 minutes of messing around that passes for an outro, a section West himself describes on a staged phone call near the finish, as an "ad-lib track." So it stands for the rest of the album. Pablo is frustrating to listen to, because there's a real person trying to get out underneath all the braggadocio, but they're lost to the winds of pop culture personification and a need to satisfy the media strawman.

Kanye leads the way in terms of how popular Hip Hop sounds. Everyone in the mainstream follows him, and he should get unlimited props for that. He is the pied piper, a Roman prince, followed by an adoring public. But when you strip away all of the bullshit, all of the "I made that bitch famous," all of the rambling nonsense, you get left with an average collection of songs. History will remember the legend, and not the music.

(Here's where I'd usually drop in a Youtube vid with the lead single but Kanye has been very "Kanye" about this album and has scorched the entirety of Youtube of any traces of The Life Of Pablo. Listen to No More Parties In L.A, it's a good tune.)


05: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis - This Unruly Mess I've Made - B

Hip Hop/Pop 

Macklemore projects an image of a loutish frat boy that used to drink too much and cheat on his girlfriend, then suddenly woke up one day and thought - "Woah. Wait a second. I'm an asshole!" All of a sudden, he's attending Black Lives Matter rallies and holding his still-loutish frat bros to account for their homophobic micro aggressions on Facebook. "That's not cool brah! You can't say that, brah." And so on. While you can't really criticise the guy for wanting to project sincere feelings about the world, Macklemore can be gratingly twee at times.

There are a few songs on This Unruly Mess that are genuinely great, Downtown is the obvious single choice for the album, while the intro track Light Tunnels is a gripping epic opening story about winning a Grammy, which is a hard thing to write about without sounding smug or boastful, but Macklemore pulls it off in a nicely humble fashion. Buckshot, another highlight has an enviable turn from Hip Hop god KRS-One.

At the very least, This Unruly Mess's words and songs are genuinely heartfelt. A lot of the time it's corny, at one point Macklemore offers a song about how much he loves to eat unhealthy food and how that runs against his fitness regime, ("My girl's shaped like a bottle of Coke/And I'm shaped like a bottle of nope!") but every once in a while, a song crops up on This Unruly Mess that you cannot be cynical about. Even Growing Up, a letter to his young child, a song with Hallmark lyrics, a song that has Ed Sheeran singing on it, is too real and emotionally honest to criticise. There's some delightful piano riffs and musical ideas that make This Unruly Mess a nice, laid back listen. The overall feel is sincere, inclusive warmth, and who can say fairer than that?

The Dud

Wolfmother - Victorious - D

Rock/Alternative Rock

Wolfmother somehow broke the overpopulated guitar scene of the mid 00's, in spite of the fact they sounded like a rough mix of a poor Led Zeppelin covers band and At The Drive-In on a hangover. That was over a decade ago, and nothing has changed about their style. Victorious is their current attempt at defining banality.

One thing that sticks out so readily to me about this band is that although they have absolutely nothing new to say or to add to the pantheon of Rock music, they push every single note of their songs with the triumphant grandiosity usually reserved for the greatest talents of the genre. The immense amount of energy they put into being the soft play area of guitar music is exasperating.

Victorious contains every Rock cliché you can think of, and disappointingly adds no new ones. You have the hard intro track, the cut 'n paste single, the big anthemic ballad, and of course, the quiet acoustic one they play 3 songs from the end of the set at the main stage of Leeds Festival to 30,000 people. Arms in the air, girls sat on boyfriend's shoulders, mobile phones aloft.

All this would be fine, but - They have nothing to say. There is no statement on Victorious, aside from making the statement itself. To use a tired, old phrase, (but certainly relevant in the context) this is all style, no substance. There is no new music on this record. It's all been done before. Wolfmother are in an infantile 1970's cultural vacuum. Let's leave them right where they are.


So that's February. If you only listen to one thing out of this lot, give Porta Bohemica a chance. Trixie Whitely is hardly known out of her own fan base but is a very talented songwriter, and deserves more exposure. Tell me what you think anyway. Catch you laters!