KING

wow the morbs seal of approval

It's official.

i'm seeing them tonight :)

Reviewed on P4K today

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21469-we-are-king/

TOO LOW

combination of that review + that score comes off as kinda patronising

not a badly written review

last sentence of it is like a high-school term paper wrap-up, flailing for something to say that sounds substantial

"The influence of (topic) will surely be felt for years to come."

the high school (and college freshman) paper would replace "surely" for "definitely."

yes, well tweaked. teamwork!

Digging this! Some sophisticated stuff going on. Was thinking how much I would hate it exactly as is but with some indie waif singing, so thank goodness it's not. Love the trend of people making music that echoes stuff I used to love on the radio when I was in the single digits. Waving a wand to put them on tour with HAIM and give both a huge budget and a time machine (Time machine?) to work with 1986 Jam/Lewis

I've been assigned a longer review and am uncharacteristically nervous

You should relax to some KING.

heyyyyyyy
u
are

This is a great album. Is this their actual first album? I remember hearing The Story EP years ago and was confused when I saw it on this one... I guess it's really a compilation.

it's their first album but all the songs they've released to date except for the Fela cover they did for a Red+Hot comp are on here

Crowd loves them

it was exactly the same as the show i saw 1.5 years ago but the place felt packed and everyone was going nuts, it was amazing

Did they play with a band or was the music pre-recorded?

ok, the chord progressions are insane. who's the melodic genius behind their sound? i feel like i haven't listened to an album that rich in ages, lots of stevie obv but also nods to fagen and jobim in the harmonic dept. i'm impressed.

they write and produce their own shit

ughhhhh i was tied up in astoria and couldn't get to the show tonight :(

"hey" was pretty incredible live

yeah i love how it was reduced entirely to keyboards

it sounded so nice when the crowd caught the refrain

The official release finally came out, so I've listened to this on a proper system, and I have to say it's not as perfect as I first thought. I still love the arrangements and the songwriting and the synths, but it feels they could've done more work with the vocals, or maybe they just have an aesthetic to their singing that I don't quite understand?

First of all, they do this breathy, cooing vocal style on almost every song, throughout the album, and it makes it feel a bit flat, like there's no ups and downs. I didn't mind it on the singles I heard before, because it works on individual tunes, but IMO a full album requires a bit more variety of expression, it shouldn't all sound the same. And I don't mean they should've gone into hyperdramatic melismas and other R&B tricks of making music more "expressive", but some, more subtle changes in style would've still been nice.

Secondly, and this is tied to my first point, a lot of the times it feels like I'm listening to the backing vocals, but the front vocalist is missing. Maybe it's a part of KING's collective ethos to use this kind of group harmonizing so much, but it also contributes to the feel that's it's all an uniform mass. When listened as a whole the individual tunes are kinda lacking in character because the narrative voice never changes.

I still like the album and everything else besides the vocals is great, but I don't think in the long run it'll shoot into my personal soul/R&B top 10. But like I said, maybe their vocal aesthetics are a deliberate choice, and I just don't get it?

ok, the chord progressions are insane

They are *incredible* at the heart-melting chord change - last two songs especially.

who's the melodic genius behind their sound?

the members of the band? paris writes most of the music

"Native Land" is my favorite album closer in recent memory.

one of the things i'm really appreciating about hearing that as an album is that the cumulative effect of all of these songs at once is something i've been really craving - previously i've only been able to hear their songs alongside each other, they're not suited to multi-artist playlists at all

this album is amazing and all i am listening to

"Native Land" is my favorite album closer in recent memory.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, February 8, 2016 8:31 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's their version of D'angelo's "Africa".

not quite as good imo right here and now but I feel like this album will take a long time to sink in completely, so maybe!

the way "The Story" sets it up tho!

(sorry, I will be using lots of exclamation points when I talking about this album)

imo the dreamy breathy everything-is-backing-vocal style is a necessary aesthetic choice to perfectly attain the subtle narcotic development of each song on the album. have never heard a record before where every song creeps up on me, adding layers to the mix until the whole thing is floating in space

still think Love Song is my marginal favourite but this back end is so strong, have been listening to it this morning

yeah, I agree with Tuomas that the vocals could be more present but it feels more like a feature than a fault

Guys I think it's safe to say that an album calling itself WE ARE KING is not overly concerned with the primacy of individual voices.

This alone makes it both pretty unusual and interesting in the context of contemporary R&B which has for the last decade or so tended to emphasise individual stars, or groups where there's either one dominant force, or everyone gets a star turn.

Actually listening to this again, individual vocal lines are not the point of it all, if you isolate the vocal melodies they are in and of themselves not that interesting, but the harmonies (both vocal and instrumental) are sublime. It's like a beautiful cloud.

This alone makes it both pretty unusual and interesting in the context of contemporary R&B which has for the last decade or so tended to emphasise individual stars, or groups where there's either one dominant force, or everyone gets a star turn.

this is a really good point

Yeah, I can understand the anti-individualist aesthetic on a theoretical level, but on a practical level the combination of that and every tune being sung in the same vocals style makes all the songs on the album sound like each other, with no unique character to each. And I don't think that's a good thing, because this is still a pop record, not ambient music or anything.

Also, while Matt is right that the "star turn" approach to R&B group vocals has been dominant for the last 15 years or so, if you go behind that you can find examples where individual voices and variety of singing styles can work within a more collective ethos: En Vogue, The Jones Girls, The Three Degrees, etc. Though of course KING might not be interested in that kind of approach either... But it means that, to me, this album will not rise to level En Vogue at its best, for example.

The way the three work as a collective instead of letting a singer shine extends to the mix too. I couldn't figure out why "Oh, Please" baffled me, and it's due to how the voices and instruments are mixed as if recorded on the same track. Maybe they are.

Yeah, the mix tends to put the vocals on the same level as the backing track instead of putting them on the front, like you normally do in pop music. This also adds to why they feel so nondescript and samey, because they blend in with the other instruments. Again, this is an approach that can work in other genres, but to me it just sound good on an r&b album.

"it just doesn't sound good"

i would argue that it sounds extremely good, especially on an r&b album that is particularly focused on harmonic collisions, and creating a kind of soft inhabitable space which the emphasis of a singular voice would undermine, and that r&b is not some monolith where this is struggling against the technical achievements of en vogue, of all things

Honestly I love the mix, vox are mixed way too high nowadays imo

i mean i get that you are articulating why the vocal approach doesn't work for you specifically but it seems a weird thing to get stuck on, for me, as it's not like this record would be enhanced by a more isolated and elastic vocal (the closest the album gets is "hey" which i think is fitting bc it is where the record gets sort of reduced to its essence). the design of the vocals within each song makes them even more captivating harmonic vortexes. and i hate to make a like "this record is all and no genre, man" argument but your distinction between pop and ambient feels particularly meaningless here

Brad otm
I feel like it would be SO much worse with a more lead singer/backing vox situation

the album's already kind of a singular achievement to me in that it manages to build an enormous environment that feels like an almost unconscious form of r&b, one captured through layers of dreaming, while also remaining groovy as hell

yep

brad otm, this record creates its own self-contained, immersive world better than anything i've heard since nicolas jaar's early material - you feel like you're in it, and the vocal harmonies & production are very much key to that. i also think that the songwriting, the melodies and the sheer richness of the arrangements preclude it ever feeling samey, even if a lot of those things come into focus only after a few listens. (the moment when that bassline comes in on the extended version of "supernatural", the way that the horns only come in after the 5 min mark, this record gives so much so gradually)