20-11
KURT VILE Walkin On a Pretty Daze - Was underwhelmed by the opening track earlier, so I'm starting with track 3, which is much better. MUCH better in fact, and considering that the album is 2 weeks long, perhaps he could have had this as the opener and just ditched the first two? Oh gosh this song has a REALLY GORGEOUS coda, dreamy where the opening track plodded! Clearly I gotta listen on. I mean, it's a simple trick, this sorta jammy dreamy dickery, and it won't blow my mind, but it's quite enjoyable in a backgroundy way. This is the laziest way to try and achieve transcendence, but it's presumably an album by for and about lazy people. Track 4 even lovelier, even lazier. :D I can get with this! I mean, there's so much else to listen to, but this has an elegant langour, like a sorta poppier Space Needle (anyone?) - the spirit of 90's indie that hasn't been put through a hip electro update. *time passes* Nothing's gotten me involved like tracks 3 and 4 and I'm through 7 now. This album is simply far, far too long. Like that Space Needle album, you could say, but that record's wilder, weirder and got more of a pop touch into the bargain. Hear it! It's great. Uh it's called The Moray Eels Eat The Space Needle. Track it doooown.
CHVRCHES The Bones of What You Believe - I heard about 4 or 5 songs from this earlier while preparing to leave the house. I hate all of you.
JANELLE MONÁE The Electric Lady - YES, at last, something's grabbed me by the gut. *straps self in for the ride* OH MY GOD YES!! Song was incredible enough BEFORE Prince busted out that solo. Janelle's the real star, though - her songwriting even more than her voice. She's a fucking gem and it seems she's getting better and better. No idea why I didn't listen to this earlier. Q.U.E.E.N. is a blazing arrow to the heart of the charts, we all knew this. *freaks* This is all great - Primetime brings the heavy cosmic bliss. We Were Rock And Roll was enormous. Haha, this is basically hit after hit! Dance Apocalyptic is such a goddamned thrillride. I also really love how this album's structured - 19 tracks, but so many stylistic change-ups and interludes that it stays fresh and never feels like a chore. OMG It's Code -> Ghetto Woman might be the highlight of the whole damn album so far. Still enjoying this so much as an album experience - the penultimate track is even harking back to the Tightrope bassline - Monae's crafted a funky, arresting and extremely well thought-out piece here.
CHARLI XCX True Romance - There's a massive disconnect between how much the instrumental is annoying me (not at all - it's quite edgy and gripping) and how much the vocal is (a lot). Some of the most irritating possibly vocal affectations ever devised in this opening track. Pattern implausibly continuing into the second track! I love the sampled vocal hook but her lead vox are just not rubbing me up the right way. Track 3, the music is really quite catchy indeed - those frantic tickytocky synths, that rolling low-end - and fortunately Charli herself is a bit more tolerable now. Was this the song on the traxpoll? If it was, I'm enjoying it much more now. Can imagine a stellar dream-disco remix. Track 4 even better - this album is getting more and more acceptable the longer I hear it for! Gorgeous chord-change into the chorus here. Track 5 is also really nicely-produced. However - I get the feeling that there's something just slightly...perfunctory about the production before - something stale. A bit of Googling tells me that this is a Rechtshaid production, which perhaps confirms the sentiment, seeing as he seems to have a finger in every other pie. The other relevant comparison - Marina and the Diamonds - makes perfect sense insofar as they're friends and both writing similar electropop, but I would STRONGLY argue that the first M&TD album has stronger songs and more distinctive sounds than this. And now, I tire of this music, after 7 songs...I really don't want to force myself through this any more. It turns to gloop; there's not enough variation. But a couple of the songs are kinda lovely.
DISCLOSURE Settle - I've listened to 6 tracks and over 20 minutes of this album and have literally nothing to say about it
THESE NEW PURITANS Field of Reeds - Mighty fucken brilliance abounds within, my number 12. Not every track is perfect - some of it runs the risk of being slightly drippy (if still atmospheric and interesting) nu-orchestral blether - but when it fires, holy shit, it's some of the best and most finely-realised modern 'indie' or 'avant-rock' I've heard in my life. I'm talking about the 17 minutes of V (Island Song) and Nothing Else, which combined make for a truly incredible trip, and one I'm not shirking right now despite the fact I've listened to those songs so often before. It's the middle of the night, and this shit is perfect. A dark, purposeful interpretation of some lambent darkness, whether of nation, soul or both, which is far more likely to cut you than at first seems, far more vicious and gnostically crazed than its placid horn and string drenched exterior. Dive in and fight for your life.
M.I.A. Matangi - This is not a five in the morning album. I've sat through and kinda enjoyed four and a bit songs of this but I feel a fresh start tomorrow will allow me to judge it better (starting from where I left off - let's summarise the first four songs as 'hectic' and 'fun'). OMG this fifth track just went bendymental bleurgh yay! O this is my favourite track so far, it bangs far too hard for my addled ol' brain in this state. 'Come Walk With Me' - super li'l song. Next one is kinda awesome too. Gosh, I'm getting into this. I'd better go to bed before it keeps me up! all! night! *goes to bed* *wakes* *resumes* Hahaha starting again halfway through aTENTion is so disorientating :D silence hath yielded to chaos, peace to atonality. MIA's pretty goddamn punk - there's an attitude of opposition integral to this music that endears it to me even before I can consider its 'craft' or its 'narrative'. Bad Girls is kinda huge, isn't it. I really didn't like Paper Planes but these songs are much more interesting. The tracks in the latter half of this are just as strong as the earlier ones.Ending a bit mellow for the rest of the album I feel, and I'm not completely won-over - little has made me go WOW (other than CWWM and aTENTion), but this is fine music and a necessarily oppositional voice.
ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER R Plus Seven - Starts strong. Massy, doomish dark-ambient organ yielding to syncopated Bladerunner arpeggios - this is good. It'll need to do more than this to really win me over - please don't let this bliss be cheaply-won and powderdust under inspection - and so I await for matters to develop further. Think I prefer the massy organ, so I'm happy it's returned. Second track...I'm enjoying this much more than first time around, a few weeks ago - it has a dreamy, frazzled modernist vibe to it, comes off like how they'd have imagined the music of 2050 would be in 1930. Doesn't appear to have much narrative logic beyond panic and disorientation - perhaps this is the painstaking construction of a new, brutalist language, at least within techno. Not that I'm fully conversant as yet - this is a bit jarring, elusive and cryptic - Zukofsky at his most obscurantist, perhaps, rather than gnomic and cohesive in Oppenish newness. The moments of this music trample together rather than cooperate and synthesise - perhaps we are dealing more with a postmodernist, deconstructionist take on modernism - each skyscraper is viewed through a thousand rapid-fire reflections before disappearing underground. Track 5, Zebra, the longest track, begins now. O I like this HEAPS. Much more synthesised, more of a narrative I can flow alongside - or am I simply getting accustomed to OPN's cycles? Think this track is more straight-modernist, more Autechre, if you will - it is an intelligible edifice, whose diversions and interruptions come in pleasing rather than confusing unpredictability - I'm minded of a collusion between machines which don't entirely suit one another's purposes, and end up retiring into the noise of the world, represented here by a stuttering, yet insistent sweet-sax groove. Great fucking song! Also, have I got my Pseuds' Corner nomination yet? You say no? I shall continue, then. Really, I was expecting more ambient dribble but this is way more than that - well, it isn't really ambient at all - the Modernist poetry comparisons were made in sincerity. Along is also really great. I think the *one* danger with this music is that I (horrible cliche alert) might admire it (in some academic sense) more than love it at this stage, but it's definitely going to get repeated in future, and I don't think it'll take much to get me to really fucking adore this stuff. And saying that, here comes Problem Areas to burn this album into my skull - infectious, catchy synth patterns once more yielding to that organ! Oh my! And this time, playing some really gorgeous chords. Followed by more goofy synth-bass jerking. :D OK, yeah, this is really great. It's getting better as it goes along, even! Epic musical conversion UNDER WAY. O GOD, Still Life is ENORMOUS, breathy synthpop recalibrated as Modernist epiphany I REALLY LOVE THIS MUSIC. Yep, final track is incredible too. This'd make my ballot EASILY - feels like an important & thrilling musical statement.
DAWN RICHARD Goldenheart - OK, this insane swirling organ on Return Of The Queen is MY SORTA JAM. This has begun brilliantly. Yeah, a few songs in now and this feels like contemporary chartpop R&B thrown into a mincer and given a seriously brutal remodelling. It's engaged, uncomplacent, determined to carve its own path. Pretty Wicked Things is one of the best 'suddenly, dubstep!' moments I've yet heard - really thrilling. Northern Lights is even better - appears to be folding in on itself throughout its running-time. Transition from Warfaire -> Tug Of War is magical. Really tensely-wound production, attention-grabbing, disorientating. My *one* concern is that Richard herself is somewhat of a subordinate presence in this (imo) and plays second fiddle to the instrumentals. But it barely matters - either way, this is her vision, and frankly if she wants be submerged in warring synths and harsh electronic percussion that's cool. Too much clarity can sacrifice the sort of ambiguity that induces alternative mindstates, and the likes of 86 and ESPECIALLY In Your Eyes are the sort of thrilling electropop that removes lyrical cares from one's consciousness. The autotune is also helping to 'reduce' Richard's voice to 'just another instrument' levels - again, not a bad thing, although typical of a lot of pop R&B. The likes of Larrieux and Monae have far, far more personality in their voices and performances than Richard, and I'd argue slightly better music, although this is still really, really engaging and its brilliance is especially located in its flow (as with Monae, I suppose) and sequencing; it works well as a piece. Its very musical mood is also very intense and liminal - it feels on the edge of violence or collapse, which is where it diverges from Monae's virtuoso mastery - it's a vulnerable, volatile mood, a rupture in purpose, a potential repurposing of pop-R&B into ambitious and expansive gestures. I think I prefer the Monae, MARGINALLY, with the cosmic Zen of Larrieux still in clear first-place, but this is superb. Although - the best track of all was still Return Of The Queen - Richard clearly knows that if you start strong, they will listen on...(oh my god what the fuck is with this British Airways advert music closer. I don't even care who composed it originally. Whyyyyyyyy Dawn why O I'm gonna have to pretend this album ended 1 song earlier aren't I)
CHANCE THE RAPPER Acid Rap - Here we go. This had better be funner than a fucking mile-high slide, it had better splat me to pieces better than reaching the end of that slide, or I'll be mad atcha, ILX. OMG what's going on?! :D Not liking Pusha Man so much, gonna persist tho. Hey, this song's cool. *checks* OMG this is STILL Pusha Man :D holy hell ok, clearly there's a lot more to Chance than I thought - this song's undergone all sorts of crazy mutations, gone to some dark places...legit much more interested now. As if to corroborate this, Cocoa Butter Kisses is fucking awesome, powering through into the hole of expectation the first two songs opened up. Love the modulation of his spoken rapping tone to heighten tension. Unless that was one of the guest spots, lol. Not such a fan of Juice, see if he gets it back. Yeesh, nah, starting to not get this - 'Acid Rap'? This is someone else's trip. To draw a parallel, Lil B's stuff is way more whacked-out and genuinely psychedelic in its conveyance. This comes off as hedonism-rap given a slight skew. But I'll keep giving it chances. Hey, the interlude is cool. Now it's cheeeesyyyyy. NaNa is better. I dig that bassline and the atonal vocal hook is heaps of fun. Especially when it falls apart at the end :D Processed horns on Smoke again str8 offensive, wonder if that's part of the game though. Acid Rain was much better, can get with that groove. Outro good too, dig the footwork beats. Not really for me, get why it was an event for others though - it's a pretty vividly-realised record.