It might be a huge overstatement to say that this is the best year of music I've ever experienced. But isn't that what having a blog is all about?
What strikes me so much about this year's output of popular music is not just the sheer volume of good releases, but the fact that every genre of music imaginable has seen some incredible releases. It's not just a great year for indie rock or hip-hop or electronic music. It's a great year for music, almost as if everyone is starting to figure out how to make consistent releases.
It's hard to deny the internet's place in this creative excellence. With so many downloadable tracks, blogs/web zines, and myspaces pages available at the click of a mouse, it's not hard to see how it easy it was for the bar to be raised. If a band is just starting to get going in Normal, USA, they can easily surf the Internet and find their influences from every corner of the globe. Sounds are hard to pin down to one area of the world anymore, because as soon as something good hits the internet, it goes viral in a matter of hours.
Protesters outside of last week's G-20 summit can complain about globalization all they want, but it's done nothing but help us music lovers.
So I'll say what so many indie rock acts have been recently keen to sing about: just keep surfin'.
This is the debut release from the LA-based band, released in the UK last year and hitting our shores in February. In many ways, this is a total summation of everything in the indie-rock zeitgeist in the past few years, from the harmonies of the Fleet Foxes and Sufjan Steves ('Shape Shifter') to the over-active drum and percussion parts that have dominated rock drumming lately (the excellent album opener 'Wide Eyes'). Like most good records, this one really comes down to the songs, which take their cues from not only folk and Grizzly Bear-ish ('Sun Hands') influences but also from 70s soul and funk (check out the awesome 'Airplanes'). The Chemical Brothers- Further
The Chemical Brothers are legends. Pioneers of popular big-beat/house music, they have nothing to prove to anyone. This new album, released just a few weeks ago, sounds fresh and takes their sound in a new direction. Opening with the unexpectedly beat-less track 'Snow', it's obvious they were going for something different. The track has a simple but lovely vocal melody sample that slowly works its way into a reverbed out transition into the monster 'Escape Velocity', which places you right onto the club's dance floor. It's as good of a one/two punch as I've heard on a record all year. The rest of the album continues this progression, from the guitar-driven intro of 'Dissolve' to the new-wave influence on 'K+D+B'. Good work, Bros.
The Chemical Brothers are legends. Pioneers of popular big-beat/house music, they have nothing to prove to anyone. This new album, released just a few weeks ago, sounds fresh and takes their sound in a new direction. Opening with the unexpectedly beat-less track 'Snow', it's obvious they were going for something different. The track has a simple but lovely vocal melody sample that slowly works its way into a reverbed out transition into the monster 'Escape Velocity', which places you right onto the club's dance floor. It's as good of a one/two punch as I've heard on a record all year. The rest of the album continues this progression, from the guitar-driven intro of 'Dissolve' to the new-wave influence on 'K+D+B'. Good work, Bros. The Roots just kill it. They've always killed it. And as Jimmy Fallon's nightly house band, they kill it even more. I was a bit nervous to see them take a steady gig like that, as the potential for them to get complacent and stop making new music was absolutely there. However, nothing seems to stop these guys. In fact, being on a talk show where so many different acts stop by has only helped to improve their sound. Case in point is the opening track 'A Piece of Light', a great intro that features the female back-up from the Dirty Projectors. Yeah, they opened their record with a slow back-up track featuring the same chicks who back up the whitest frontman in show business. As if that wasn't enough, they even have a track with Joanna Newsome. And it totally works.
Two tracks later comes the Monsters of Folk re-interp 'Dear God 2.0', which throws out everyone but Jim James and features some of Black Thought's best verses in years. In fact, Black Though is on point for the entire set, and the rest of the band has never felt so on it's game. So the moral of the story is that if you want to get as good as you possibly can as a band, find a talk show and sit in with as many of the acts as you can.
Whoa. Released just last week , Wolf Parade's latest LP is a big step forward. The collective list of projects that the 4 gents in Wolf Parade have individually been a part of is easily a few pages long, and this new record is proof positive that experience pays off in spades. Not only are the tunes good, but this contains some of the coolest arrangements imaginable, from the Modest Mouse kind of thing on 'What Did My Lover Say? (it always had to go this way)' to the tripped-out middle of 'In the Direction of the Moon' and the bombastic rock-out of closer 'Cave- O-Sapien'. Like rock? This one's for you.
This is just plain cool right here. Ratatat are two NYC-based producers that make most of what you heard on a laptop in their apartment. What makes this so striking is that it's hard to pigeonhole the sound as just 'dance' music, because there's certainly much more going on then this that. All instrumental, they use string and guitar samples just as easily as synthesizers and drum loops, which creates a sonic experience that never really gets old.
This is an extension of the above review. As good as Ratatat and their new album is, Flying Lotus has taken electronic music in a completely new direction. This was shown to me by contributor Matt Rothstein, and I think he might have a review coming, so I'll go easy on talking about the actual music itself.
What I do want to comment on is how Flying Lotus has shown us what 'laptop' music can be. A true visionary, Fly Lo has created here a completely unique sonic world for us to live in. It's such a cohesive effort that guest vocals from heavyweight Thom Yorke just kind of blend in with the rest of it; the pace is really that good, with songs seemingly blending together. Contained on this album is the best of IDM, jazz, and hip hop, just to start. The combination of sounds was no doubt a painstaking process to undertake, but Steve Ellison has shown us exactly what can be done by one man with some basic gear.
I'll admit that this took me awhile to 'get' this. At first, I really couldn't understand all the noise or appreciate just exactly what was going on here. But after about the 3rd or 4th time, it clicked and I realized that Cosmogramma is, if nothing else, a benchmark for where music is. As I've said before on this blog, the best music being made today is not merely just one thing. What's so exciting about being a music lover these days is the amount of cross-over that exists in so many of today's acts. And I think that Flying Lotus is the ultimate mix. It's hard to process at first, but if you're willing to go with it, it'll pay off big time.
