The purpose built next generation interstellar Dawn Richard thread

yep

presumably the people who like the second half better credit "warfaire" for ushering it in?

warfaire' isnt so terrible on its own but it badly derails momentum and the sense of meandering that subsequently arises is dawn's great enemy

― r|t|c, Tuesday, 22 January 2013 11:01 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah this exactly.

I don't think anything on the album is actively bad.

i credit 'frequency' for that xp

It doesn't help that "Warfaire" might be the worst case of Linkin Park Lyrics Syndrome on the album

a syndrome that exists to no one except you

Yeah, that's fair. But any song written exclusively in accusations and declarations of defiance sets off that alarm for me. It's such a black/white worldview: I am strong but you failed me; you let me down and you weren't there for me, etc, etc, etc. Any song that positions the songwriter as the hero and an unspecified "you" as a scourge just isn't that interesting to me. Real relationships are more complicated than that.

hahaha i like "warfaire" y'all. one of the few hooks that immediately grabbed me.

album is finally opening up to me but it is a long sleepy thing

xp srs question what did you think of "soldier of love"?

it's called "warfaire," how subtle precisely do you expect it to be

(fwiw I think it's one of the weaker tracks, but I also massively prefer the first half of the album, so what do I know)

"warfaire" and "goliath" were intended as interludes, too (see the original track listing)

yeah but i always basically thought of "Intro (Call To Hearts)" and "Outro (The Battle)" as full-on songs too

It's such a black/white worldview: I am strong but you failed me; you let me down and you weren't there for me, etc, etc, etc. Any song that positions the songwriter as the hero and an unspecified "you" as a scourge just isn't that interesting to me. Real relationships are more complicated than that.

― Evan R, Tuesday, 22 January 2013 23:50 (Yesterday) Bookmark

you have much to learn young grasshopper

i can only repeat what i said about 'pwt' and 'goldenheart' being the key tho, their very acknowledgement of fantasy itself (in an implied thwarting world of reality) frames the entire album and imbues these seeming platitudes with huge self-critical pathos

and all the pretty little things that held
us together now are fallen tales
turned to wicked little things that can't
seem to find the beauty in the bad

all love's lies, and which is the cruellest but that of the redeemer and his/her and your enjoined destiny? the song realises not only a specific sorrow but a greater one where all life's hero narratives become known to be as inescapable as they are ultimately invidious

"passion is the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason", the girl done quotes it herself

but what do love's lies have to say about meh vocal melodies?

xp srs question what did you think of "soldier of love"?

I really liked it. I guess there's a similar lyrical motif there, but Sade doesn't finger-point in that song. Anyway, I think Dawn can sell that kind of imagery pretty well sometimes, too, but I feel like she really exhausts it on this one

since when is finger-pointing a flaw?

http://instagram.com/p/U3_ECjLvLB/

Top 10 R&B albums on Billboard

Does Goldenheart even exist in a physical format?

it apparently does

yes but only at FYE with two bonus tracks

and FYE doesn't exist in Canada.

:(

one of the bonus trax is "wild n young" which we all have already, the other is apparently a remix of "northern lights" called "nlx" - haven't heard it though, don't think it's emerged online yet

she had just been talking about NLX hadnt she? in some interview...?

xp
I got this on CD from Amazon (US)--fwiw, it sounds pretty fucking great on bigger speakers. I'm not sure what I would have thought if I'd listened to it on headphones first.

http://www.allmusic.com/album/goldenheart-mw0002449362

nice work kellz :)

seconded!

"Tug Of War" sounded great to me while doing the housework (housework is a good pairing for Dawn, I attacked the vacuum cleaning with an unusual amount of all or nothing vigour), it helped to think of it as part of a darkness-into-light trilogy with the next two tracks rather than the part two of "Warfaire".

seriously like why is "warfaire" there? "tug of war" makes so much sense following straight from "frequency" - both sex jams that feel like dawn's fucking somewhere in the middle of space amongst the stars

I DON'T GIVE A FUCK NOW
I'M GONE BE ON TOP NOW

dunno if this happens to everyone else, but when "Riot" starts I think Ne-Yo and Pitbull's "Give Me Everything."

congrats dayo, you're a "message board wag"

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/behold-dungeons-dragons-rb/272535/

this reminds me that I was going to offer cash to any of you pros who could get all of the following words into a review: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, charisma.

lmao!! xp

haha that is excellent

lol probs to this editor on a completely disingenuous subhead

Diddy ex-affiliate Dawn Richard's fantastic full-length debut, Goldenheart, follows in the unheralded tradition of black musicians drawing emotional power from Tolkien tropes.

props*

just gonna post that here for posterity

http://i.imgur.com/vKaczXd.png

dunno if this happens to everyone else, but when "Riot" starts I think Ne-Yo and Pitbull's "Give Me Everything."

― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 28 January 2013 14:31 (4 hours ago) Bookmark

katherine upthread nailed it with 'moves like jagger' (and in truth i really wish she hadn't)

Dawn incites a riot like it's a tedious but necessary admin task that she might as well get out of the way before concentrating on something more interesting.

I've not been particularly motivated to go back to this over the last week or so although I do actually prefer Warfaire to Frequency. That middle section leading up to 86 doesn't really leave an impression on me at all though.

idk it's not really focused on working on eurodance banger terms though, it's an r&b album track (not a single) that appropriates dance signifiers and interprets them through dawn's worldview

for me they're a welcome and necessary expansion of the frame dawn explores the themes of this album in - opening out from the internal personal/private by showing how the same often platitudinous emotional constructs power life outside (LET'S riot, WE gleux), or more specifically clubland with the semiology of club redemption (djs saving lives) dressing for battle, warlike build and release, and the subsequent legends told to inspire the future and rewrite the past

i'd probably agree this sort of thing worked better on armor on but then that was a much more upfront record in personal terms than this is, which gave it a degree more specificity and oomph

(they're = the "banger" cuts)

Previous post feels otm to me.

I think albums with such heavy-handed (which i think it is fairly undeniably - which is not to say that that is a weakness or failure or anything), super-personalised aesthetics (in an overall sense - the shimmery electro-dance r&b plus the glossy denatured vocals plus the sci-fi/fantasy/historical tropes - speaking of which I like to think "northern lights" is a phillip pullman ref and if it was that would support r|t|c's interpretative angle for this more than just about anything else possibly could) often have this sense of either being compelling or off-putting, but more than that, they switch from one to the other between listens, or you can feel both reactions simultaneously, like you can be really enjoying a tune and then suddenly it's like the sun disappears behind the clouds as you reframe what you're listening to in a less attractive interpretative light (or vice versa).

So I think on the one hand it's (too) easy for boosters to glibly dismiss criticisms with "you haven't listened to this enough" but on the other hand I think this is an album for which snap judgements are particularly ill-suited and likely to be unfair - because in accounting (word chosen deliberately) for that sense of discomfort and (literally) "mixed feelings" we will punish this album over something less impressive and interesting but more unambiguous in hitting the smaller targets it aims for.

see if you'd just said "this alb has its weaknesses but will always be miles ahead of some basic bitch album by [insert wholemeal artist]" we coulda had some hearty squabbling going, have u learned nothing from rolling goon

Tim plainly didn't take the chorus of "Riot" to heart.

"this alb has its weaknesses but will always be miles ahead of some basic bitch album by [insert wholemeal artist]"

this too

does anyone else kinda hear 'northern lights'/'frequency' as a heavily abstracted molly suite

i'm gonna have to defend the basic bitch canon here

yeah I don't really mean that in general but OTOH has there been a better basic bitch album in the past twelve months? There have been good ones but not better ones I think.

xxp well ok not that heavily i guess