The purpose built next generation interstellar Dawn Richard thread

yeah, I'd always heard that as "in the blood" and still do

"classic" has connotations of standing the test of time, "masterpiece" is a more subjective thing

xp "the proof is in my blood"

lyrics - http://www.slideshare.net/Dawn_Richard/dawn-richard-goldenheart-lyrics

the beginning of the video says "chapter one: the proof was in the flood" though

oh weird so do those official lyrics - the lyric docs the PR sent me say "in the blood"

WHO KNOWS

her lip-syncing looks like "flood" to me. kind of.

abiguity!! 10/10 classic!!

haha

you mean Masterpiece

I always thought she was talking about katrina and the resulting flooding.

yeah that makes sense, with the line about hurricanes coming before it. duhhh @ me

I’ve been searching
Trying to find my way back
My way back to the throne
And I know If I could
climb, crawl, fall
Break these walls
Then maybe I’ll get home
I’m building it up
To break it back down
We’re building it up
To burn it down
We can’t wait
To burn it to the ground

Listening again and the Riot - Gleaux - Pretty Wicked Things section is a real drag, which is weird given they're the bangers, but they've got the sort of dead-eyed detachment you expect from lesser artists/complete hacks.

From 86 to the end is unfuckable with though.

86 heart heart heart

probably the song I'll direct Dawn newcomers to from now on

just the song, not the video

haha yeah

The intro to "Gleaux" is gorgeous.

hahah, there are so many landmines to tip toe when trying to sell Dawn. "no, no, I swear, it doesn't sound like Danity Kane." "Yeah, but that Dirty Money was actually really good though, for real." "Just ignore the Xena warrior princess shit."

She doesn't make it easy.

why would anyone think there's anything wrong with danity kane, dirty money or xena warrior princess?

you already KNOW that most of the people listening to her solo records never checked for Danity Kane, what's with the act

i mean i get they're not the ~trendy~ buzzwords du jour and if she was all 80s reverb triangles self-pitying melancholy seapunk chillwave hanging out with grizzly bear you could sell her way easier but why would you want that?

did danity kane even have a big enough profile to put anyone off?

on a more substantive note, it's "the proof was in the flood"??

― goole, Tuesday, January 15, 2013 11:11 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the f is actually an old-timey s, she's singing the proof was in the slood, like you know how a slood is... wait

Danity Kane weren't unavoidably huge but i mean two #1 albums ain't bad as public profiles go

I don't think Danity Kane was very good. But the bigger problem with that reference point is that Danity Kane was the quintessential manufactured band—literally pieced together on television. Dawn's solo albums, though, are defined by her autonomy.

I'm not assigning values to either approach or saying one is better than the other, but it makes the Danity Kane reference point doubly misleading

Ahem anyway going back to talking about the album - I think the fact that exactly the same vocal treatment is used on every single track goes some way towards explaining accusations of samey-ness. I'm not really that keen on the autotune that's all over this, she's evidently got a great voice and it just flattens everything out, especially the high notes and melisma when she should be sounding her most expressive. It gets kind of frustrating after an hour. I mean she used the same trick over most of Armor On so maybe I wouldn't care if the songs were better but I can't help but feel a lack of joie de vivre here.

http://youtu.be/JqQ-vL2AinQ

OK, I'll bite the bullet and admit I don't know how to embed YouTube videos on this site anymore. What am I doing wrong?

Don't do the short version of the address. Do the full version.

the URL (without spaces) should look like:

http:// www.youtube.com/ watch?v=[videoID]

URLs that start with that pattern will autoembed. Don't use the shortened share URL and don't use secured (https) URLs

Thanks! OK, lemme try this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqQ-vL2AinQ&feature=youtu.be

Terrible. Sorry everybody.

Dope

Wow I really like this whole album.

I will contribute this which I feel has some sonic similarities to Goldenheart (mostly the hand claps).

confused as to how there somehow isn't a pop track to rally around. like, actually mystified. how is "Riot" not blatantly, completely that? does it need to cram in *more* radio trends (house beat, 4/4 handclaps, squelchy synth, vocal stutters, the MELODY FROM MOVES LIKE JAGGER EVEN)? (n.b. I really like "Riot" but ffs) "Pretty Wicked Things" has a fucking dubstep drop! I mean, sure, this probably is not going to go anywhere near radio, any format, but those are marketing factors, not anything in the music. (and I've love to be proven wrong)

oh, and I really, really like this album, a lot more than _Armor On_. which I did hear and wasn't as impressed as others. "Frequency" probably most slept on track.

Love this album.

"'86" is the single, makes sense to me as the most accessible song on the album even if i don't see it helping her odds of ever getting on the radio.

Not sure if 86 is especially the most accessible - it is one of my favorites - but my only complaint about this album is that there's a lot to take in And that I could have probably done without the title track...

Agreed re title track. As a general rule Dawn is better when the music is honed in on rhythms so it stands to reason that a piano ballad would be a stretch.

Mind you I've only gotten this in the last few hours and listened to it once. What did strike me though is that in some ways this reminds me more of #A Tell-Tale Heart than Armor On - that sense of consistency of vibe and the flow from track to track being more important than the individual songwriting.

"Frequency" hit me hardest on the first run through.

'accessible' is kind of subjective, i guess, i just meant a slow jam like "'86" has a little more mainstream potential than most of the stuff on the album. she's good at those kinds of songs but hasn't done them much since A Tell-Tale Heart xp

"86" does sound amazing on this though, it just feels so relaxed and open.

for it, I have lifted my embargo on 21st century records named after years from the 20th century

i love "86" (so, so much) but actually for me it makes less of an impact surrounded by the rest of the album than it did as a standalone single

This album reminds me a lot of Kylie Minogue's 'Impossible Princess' (sans the latter's rock tracks), oddly. It would have been tremendously important to me at fifteen I suspect.

Cumulatively it's wearing, hence not as effective as Armor On; at times her vocal melodies are barely there.

Keepers so far: 86, Return of a Queen, Frequency, In Your Eyes, Pretty Wicked Things.

for it, I have lifted my embargo on 21st century records named after years from the 20th century

Wiki: "86","86'd", "86ed", or eighty-sixed when used as a verb in American English, is a slang term for refusing service or getting rid of something.

i just meant a slow jam like "'86" has a little more mainstream potential than most of the stuff on the album

i'm still used to thinking of the bangers as potential crossover tracks - "riot" and "in your eyes" are the most obviously mainstream-friendly but they kinda play the function that "faith" did on armor on, ie they sound amazing because they come at those junctures and nothing surrounding them sounds like them. in terms of slow jams, "86" took a while to grow on me as a single (maybe because even though dawn hasn't exactly hidden her imogen heap influences, the vocal treatment brings home the similarity maybe a bit too much?) but in album context really opens up. "frequency" seems like the stand-out slow jam - just completely gorgeous and silky, and hearing her natural head voice amidst all the vocal treatment elsewhere makes it stand out even more.

the melodies are there, they just take a while to grow on you - i didn't find this immediately hooky. but not hearing them on first/second listens isn't a reason for dismissal.

I don't actually like "Pretty Wicked Things" all that much, I've decided. It's definitely the most heavyhanded song on the album.

"Frequency" is amazing though, agree that it's the vocal naturalism that really makes it, she should have done a few more tunes like that i reckon.

I don't feel like I'm gonna be as attached to this as I was to Armor On (or indeed #A Tell-Tale Heart, which remains underrated), but it's not about melody which mostly seems quite striking to me. Maybe it is the heavyhandedness, maybe I just want more obvious sensuality (i.e. maybe i'm just being unadventurous in what I want from dawn).

Only four listens in though, so who knows.

Never noticed the title actually being in the lyrics before, I admit. I suspect the title is meant to be ambiguous and/or have multiple meanings, though -- the apostrophe in front of '86 in the title certainly makes it look like an abbreviation for 1986, it sounds more '80s than anything else on the album, and directly precedes a cover of a song first released in 1986.