Please talk about: "Buffalo Stance" by Neneh Cherry

this is really great stuff - seems to carry on where neneh left off with the cherry thing

four tet coming into his own as producer for other people, huh

way more RN9 than four tet imo

Up for hearing this, the cherry thing was my favourite album of last year

Love it. Reminding me of subdued Breakbeat Era vibes.

https://soundcloud.com/smalltownsupersound/neneh-cherry-out-of-the-6

at least some of neneh cherry's comeback album is streaming on npr now.

I love this new album. One of the best records I've heard in a while.

impressed on one listen, def picking up where the cherry thing left off...

the joe goddard remix of "out of the black" is amazing too

impressed on one listen, def picking up where the cherry thing left off...

― lex pretend, Friday, February 21, 2014

yeah, there's a jazzy quality to it. mostly i notice that it's almost all percussion. it's a great sounding album, and the tunes seem very strong.

a stunning new album. her voice is as expressive as ever. given that she is soon turning 50, that is absolutely not self-evident. here is a great video of her performing the title song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LesJtqP-x0

Got this in the mail yesterday, and it's pretty good. I'm not hearing much jazz in this though, the sound is more "rock" to me, perhaps a bit too rock with all the distorted sounds. The percussion is cool, yeah, but I still wish she'd just done a pure electronic album with the Four Tet dude. The Cherry Thing was a really cool "live instruments" kind of album, but it was carried by the strength of the band, and I don't think the backing band here (whoever this Rocketnumbernine people are, I'm not familiar with them) have the same intensity. Neneh's vocals are the biggest strength; I think her range has always been a bit narrow, but she's found a way to unique expressiveness and intensity within that range - I can't think of anyone who'd sing like this.

"Out of the Black" impressed me; she can still project quietude over ominous beats.

weird that Rocketnumbernine isn't even mentioned in some of these reviews (like pfork)...obviously Four Tet is the famous one, but seems like he's more or less just overseeing things here.

kind of a similar situation to the Omar Souleyman album where people were like "oh yeah, love Four Tet's production" when his stated aim was to be as hands off as possible. Whatever gets these things the publicity I guess

the two jobs are not comparable imo. from what i've read his work on the souleyman album involved sending files to and fro while he was fysically working together with neneh & rn9 for about a week on her album.

fair enough, but from the interviews I've read with Neneh she said his job was more taking away things than adding them. It's definitely more of a collaboration but surely rocketnumbernine should be getting most of the credit for the music on the album

Four Tet ‏@FourTet 3m
anyone writing about my production on the Neneh LP that doesn't acknowledge RocketNumberNine is an amateur.

wait there are still professional music writers?

fair enough, but from the interviews I've read with Neneh she said his job was more taking away things than adding them. It's definitely more of a collaboration but surely rocketnumbernine should be getting most of the credit for the music on the album

Or maybe, instead of arguing whether this or that dude should get the "most" credit for the album, that credit should go to Neneh Cherry? The liner notes only say that Four Tet produced the album and Rocketnumbernine played the instruments, but since the actual instrumentation on it is really sparse, who knows who made the biggest contribution to it? The fact that it doesn't sound too dissimilar from Cherry's previous music should maybe give us a hint?

Sorry if I'm sounding a bit sour here, but I don't really like the phenomenon that when a woman releases a solo album, music writers are often trying to find the man who's the "real" genius behind it. The same thing happened with the Barbara Panther album, some people were praising Matthew Herbert as if he was the main visionary, even though it seems the songs on it had already been written and demoed by Panther before Herbert even joined the project.

is the bias really based on gender, or on the idea of pop-acts (as opposed to, say, rock acts) not really being the driving-force behind the music?

go read the Warpaint thread, where discussion of the new album turned into a celebration of Flood and Chris Cunningham

Cool your jets Tuomas, I was in no way trying to take credit away from Neneh. The point that was raised is that RocketNumberNine are not mentioned once in the Pitchfork review, which considering they played all the music is fairly stupid

go read the Warpaint thread, where discussion of the new album turned into a celebration of Flood and Chris Cunningham

― sent as gassed to onto rt dominance (DJP), Monday, February 24, 2014 1:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that's bullshit at least on my part i brought up flood because i was surprised the album worked IN SPITE of the high profile producers

idk who chris cunningham is.

no was was even saying that shit until k8 started in with her schtick...

this new neneh album is great

the thing album was great too!

here's the sum total of what was said abt cunningham for the record

i was reading the liner notes this morning and realized that one of them is married to chris cunningham, who took the photos used in the album art.

― call all destroyer, Wednesday, February 19, 2014 10:03 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Gonna listen to Savages for the next hour now just to spite you all!

i was reading the liner notes this morning and realized that one of them is married to chris cunningham, who took the photos used in the album art.
― call all destroyer, Wednesday, February 19, 2014 4:03 PM

WE DON'T TALK ABOUT THIS OR BB GET VERY VERY VERY UPSET.

― ~Autotelic Fabulousity~ (Branwell Bell), Wednesday, February 19, 2014 10:04 AM (6 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

*doesn't go read the warpaint thread*

*continues happily in that vein till death*

rip wins :(

BB's post there is a joke about her own obsession with Chris Cunningham, not anything more.

I don't think he was saying it was "anything more", I think he was just quoting it as one of the 2 posts in that thread about chris cunningham who apparently the thread "turned into" a discussion of

anyway, psyched to hear this, I adored the cherry thing & her in general

been playing this all day

This is a great album. It is amazing how she manages to convey so much frustration and charisma using only her voice, some percussion and one bass tone, and it's amazing how for such a minimal-sounding production it has so many hooks and earworms. It makes sense that she hasn't released anything for such a long time as this sounds like so much pent-up anger being expelled.

i love this record

The frenetic almost-rapping she does on the last track sounds amazing! Though it kinda makes me wish she'd do some proper rap too, but I guess those days are far behind (IIRC there wasn't any rapping on Man either).

this record right here

I was listening to this with a hangover and really not prepared for the rasping scraping cackling noise she does on the last track.

Enjoyed this on first listen but there's a kind of bluntness to some of her lyrics (and willingness to fall back on well-worn turns of phrase) that jarred with me slightly.

The first song is amazing.

It makes sense that she hasn't released anything for such a long time as this sounds like so much pent-up anger being expelled.

it's only two years since the cherry thing, which was good preparation for the new one in lots of ways - the scratchy expressiveness of her voice in particularly

"spit three times" is amazing

and tuomas otm about how perhaps neneh's contribution to her own album was more significant than the producer dudes, especially as she's now made two albums within two years with completely different collaborators and styles that both nonetheless share a definite aesthetic

Four Tet's bee quite vocal on twitter about how Rocketnumber9 need a lot of the credit people are ascribing to him.

Yeah I'd heard there'd been Twitter buzz about this album

surely Twitter buzz is an onomatopeoic oxymoron?

Four tet's bee is half bird

It's not uncommon

The Buzzing of Summer Tweets

can we talk about "Everything" and "Weightless"?

Let's talk about the god damn awesome synth 'bit' 2:50 into the track with Robyn. Fuck me. So cool.

I like that song a lot but I don't really like Robyn on it, or she doesn't really add much

Yeah, her voice is perhaps too much like diet-Neneh to add much.

If every vocal on here was pitch-shifted, too cool for school Knife fans would be going nuts over this album.

Weightless is incredible