Rancid's Tim Armstrong Still Loves Ska

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:43 PM, April 30, 2007

Good morning heartache, you're like a old friend

I wonder what Tim Armstrong thinks of Lily Allen. Armstrong's band, Rancid, blew up during the mid-90s ska boom, partly because they had mohawks and stuff and partly because they were great, but also partly because of "Time Bomb," a totally credible Farfisaed-out ska song and the band's biggest hit ever. Most of the ska bands who made it to the radio during those years sold themselves through a sort of Southern-California mall-punk primary-color brightness, a novelty appeal that revealed itself through cute matching costumes and intentionally goofy 80s-pop covers. But Rancid played ska as a sort of broken-down working-class urban folk music, building on the late-70s British 2-Tone ska revival's sad, ghostly blueprint, and they ended up with one of my favorite semi-forgotten radio nuggets of an era rich with them. But the ska bubble popped, soon becoming only slightly less unfashionable than zoot-suit swing-revival; a couple of years ago, members of the Killers and the Bravery were making fun of each other for having played in ska bands. The only band to muscle through the backlash and maintain pop success was No Doubt, and they did it by keeping all their bright bubblegum pep and by completely ditching all their ska signifiers, replacing them instead to nods toward dancehall and synth-pop and other more fashionable genres. Meanwhile, Rancid, who'd previously only toe-dipped into ska with "Time Bomb" and a couple of other songs, dove headlong into a sort of makeshift organic cosmopolitanism and recorded their masterpiece: 1998's Life Won't Wait, one of my favorite albums ever. On that album, the band recruited guest-appearances from Buju Banton and the Specials, and they toyed around with reggae and rap and soul and rockabilly, but their ska fixation was clearly the basis for all of it, and the band drove home the point further when they signed the Slackers and the Pietasters to their boutique label. I was hoping they'd continue reaching outward musically, but instead they viscerally yanked themselves back into lockstep bloody-knuckles gutter-punk shit. In 2000, they released a squalid knuckledragger of a self-titled album. When I saw them a year later, they didn't play a single ska song. Armstrong slowly eased himself back into musical experimentation in the years after that, delivering a relaxed and pretty breakup album with Rancid's Indestructible in 2003 and doing a couple of mixed-results punk-rap albums with his side project the Transplants. He also wrote some songs for Pink's best album, which nobody bought. With every successive project, Armstrong's one pop moment faded further into the past. And now he's gone and recorded a solo album, slowly releasing the first five songs over the past six months. At least thus far, it's a ska album, and Armstrong seems more comfortable than ever with his cultural obsolescence. It's a good look.

Armstrong recorded A Poet's Life with the LA band the Aggrolites, and it'll be coming out later in the month. Already, though, five of the ten songs have leaked, and all of them are a sort of warm low-stakes rocksteady that suits Armstrong's voice like an old sweater. After all, Operation Ivy, Armstrong's first band, was always the measuring stick by which every other ska-punk was judged; he has as much of a right to this music as virtually anyone alive. More importantly, though, Armstrong's garbled punch-drunk gurgle isn't all that distant from patois, and it communicates righteous fury and wounded pathos just as well as any of Armstrong's Jamaican idols. Virtually every one of these songs comes off as a resigned shrug; Armstrong sounds like he's singing to himself more than anyone else. Lyrically, "Inner City Violence" is just as strident and evocative as any of Rancid's vague political songs ("Violence sustained, civil liberties now destroyed / Constant intimidation brought on by force"), but Armstrong mumbles those lyrics so half-heartedly that "destroyed" and "force" actually sort of rhyme, and the rave-up sentiments of "Into Action" and "Take This City" feel heartbreakingly hollow. As always, to love Armstrong is to feel sorry for him; his marriage ended when he saw pictures of his wife kissing Josh Homme in Rolling Stone, and the Transplants broke up when the group's other two members accused Armstrong of being too unreliable to work with. (They went on to form another group with Paul Wall instead. Way to trade up, dudes.) And so these new songs feel like steps in the right direction: Armstrong shrugging his shoulders and immersing himself in the music he loves, popular taste be damned. But these songs aren't sad; "Into Action," improbably enough, features Canadian teenpop chick Skye Sweetnam, and "Hold On" is a broken-romantic me-and-you-against-the-world love song like Rancid's "Corazon de Oro." Armstrong doesn't sound bitter at the world passing him by; he sounds happy to still be alive. He turned 40 last year, and A Poet's Life is shaping up to be an aging lifer's joyous lament; those of us who spent our teenage years listening obsessively to Rancid knows that's not a contradiction in terms.

Lately, Armstrong has been pulling a Prodigy, quietly releasing cheap quickie videos for his songs on YouTube. Five of those videos have leaked out, the last two just last week, and they're all remarkably low-stakes affairs. All of them look exactly the same, using a sort of high-contrast grainy black-and-white videography that makes them look like the xeroxed photos that always end up on punk-show fliers. One has distressed stock war footage; another has shots of punk kids mugging for the camera. Most of them have punk-rock video-chicks fawning on Armstrong. All of them look like they were made for pocket change. And all of them are coated in a sort of hazy nostalgic glow, their old punk cliches invoked for the evocative rush that they bring rather than for whatever those cliches were originally supposed to say. Like the videos from Return of the Mac, they feel like an adjustment to a changing reality, a slowly-dawning comfort with the world as it is. With Return of the Mac, Prodigy went back to making the sort of music that I wish he would've never stopped doing. Thus far, A Poet's Life isn't quite like that; my favorite Rancid songs were never the ska songs. But it is a return to the sort of music that Armstrong himself has clearly always been most drawn to, and that's just as much of a victory. I could be wrong, but I honestly think that Armstrong had long hoped to become an actual pop star; it's why he worked with Pink and why he eventually signed to major labels with both Rancid and the Transplants after resisting for years. He knows that's not going to happen now, and he seems to be OK with it. It's a bit funny to see Armstrong making his capitulation statement just a little while after Lily Allen blew up with a record full of conversationally observational ska. I hope he doesn't mind too much. I can't imagine he does.

Deerhunter and the Klaxons Straddle the Noise-Pop Divide

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:44 PM, April 27, 2007

The instruments are crying out, where the sympathy at?

I didn't go see Deerhunter last night in Manhattan, and I'm not going to see them tonight in Brooklyn. I'm moving back to Park Slope this weekend, and that means I have to spend all my evenings putting my stuff into boxes. But I wish I could go see Deerhunter. I've been marinating Cryptograms, that band's newish album, for a few months, but it's only starting to reveal itself to me. I liked Cryptograms as soon as I heard it, but it didn't quite excite me. It sounded like a thoroughly professional pastiche of all the drugged-up bands that have been fashionable influences over the past few years: fuzzy ebb-and-crest guitar reveries from Sonic Youth, gentle motorik pulses from Stereolab, disaffected snarl-sneer vocals from Spacemen 3 via Lou Reed. And I didn't like that the album came loaded down with a bunch of ambient instrumental drones that pretty much sapped all the momentum away. I still don't like those drones, but it's slowly become apparent that those pieces are nearly as important to the band's sense of self as their actual songs are. For that matter, I'm guessing that so are their reportedly chaotic live shows, wherein alarmingly skinny frontman Bradford Cox dribbles fake blood all over himself and writhes around in a grandma dress. Deerhunter, it seems, are not a typical indie-pastiche band. Or more to the point, maybe they are a typical indie-pastiche band who desperately wants to be something more, which might actually be a more tragic and noble condition. At their most accessible, they're really not all that different from the Ponys or Interpol or any number of repackagers. That tendency is pretty evident on their new drone-free Fluorescent Grey EP, and I like them the best when they're hewing closest to older blueprints. But Deerhunter never quite resolve their songs the way those other bands do; they leave edges frayed and structures half-built. They plainly pull a whole lot of inspiration from the noise and drone undergrounds; the show they're playing tonight in Brooklyn is a Lightning Bolt afterparty, for God's sake. And their admiration for bands like LB shows through in what would otherwise be a really solid set of straight-up indie-rock songs. But they themselves are not a noise band; their pop-song instincts are just too strong. And so that struggle between noise and pop defines them and takes them to really interesting places. Now that I think about it, that struggle is a trait they share with Sonic Youth and Stereolab and Spacemen 3, all of whom were basically straight rock bands enamored of all sorts of messy non-rock stuff. It took a while, but I think maybe I'm starting to really like this band.

I'm maybe also really starting to like another band that engages in a similar sort of noise-pop struggle: the Klaxons. I saw that band when they were on their first American trip late last year, and I was a bit disappointed, mostly because they didn't sound anything like actual rave music even though their advance hype painted them as the leaders of some imagined nu-rave movement. It took a while for all the herky-jerk caterwauling of Myths of the Near Future, their debut album, to seep in, but it really got under my skin after a month or two. The Klaxons aren't fundamentally an indie-rock band; they're something fairly similar, a Britpop band in the mold of Blur circa Parklife. But they aren't satisfied with being just that, and that's why they cram their album full of half-realized literary allusions and guitar scrape-squeals and alarmist yelps. They might kick and thrash against the structures that most naturally fit them, but those structures remain intact anyway. That tension became sort of touchingly apparent on Pitchfork's Guest List feature yesterday. Asked to give his favorite songs of the past year, the Klaxons' Simon Taylor-Davis first named WZT Hearts' "1." WZT Hearts are an apocalyptically terrifying laptop-noise band from Baltimore, led by a Jason Urich, a friend of mine. WZT Hearts' early shows were total stomach-churning endurance-tests; I used to joke with Jason about how much I hated them. After a few years, they recruited a drummer and moved in a more rhythmic, tribal direction; weirdly enough, they're probably musically closer to early-90s acid-house than the Klaxons are. But "1" is still basically a near-impenetrable slab of gutwrench noise-decay, and it's pretty shocking to see an uber-hyped Britpop upstart bigging it up. Appropriately enough, Taylor-Davis also likes Deerhunter.

Here's the thing: if Deerhunter and the Klaxons played straight-up noise, I almost certainly wouldn't like them anywhere near as much as I do. A few years ago, I tried to go see Wolf Eyes at a Baltimore loft party but left hours before they started playing because opener Richard Chartier was giving me a splitting headache. And it's not like I've started feeling more forgiving about this stuff as I've gotten older; I tried listening to the new Burning Star Core album today, and I couldn't get past the nineteen-minute opening track. I really hate the vast majority of this stuff, but I like it when bands who might otherwise be playing some variation on frill-free rock pull inspiration from the structure-free lurch they hear in noise and drone music. See, there are too many rock bands releasing too much rock music; it gets really, really boring. And noise and drone musicians might be free to explore the outer edges of ugliness or whatever, but they're sort of too free, and most of the time they end up making unbearably pretentious art-wank. But when a rock band tries to play noise music, it can end up with something weirdly glorious, a damaged neon hybrid-style that digs deep into unkempt inarticulable angst without letting its scuzz get too unlistenably repulsive. TV on the Radio have long walked this line, spiking their monolithic prog with desiccated noise-blurts. The Black Dice remixes that DFA keeps releasing harness that Black Dice chaos and turn it into something you can dance to; those remixes always end up sounding better than the original tracks. And I'm anxiously waiting to hear how Bjork deploys one of her new hired hands, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, on Volta. This is fertile territory, the middle-ground between thrashed-out sound-vomit and structured trad-rock. Deerhunter and Klaxons are walking that line, and that line is taking them great places.

Idol Gives Back: A Running Diary

Posted by Tom Breihan at 1:58 PM, April 26, 2007

Chillin' in my Phantom listening to opera

I'm of two minds about last night's extraordinarily hyped-up Idol Gives Back special. On the one hand, it's certainly encouraging to see America's highest-rated TV show going out of its way to remind its millions upon millions of viewers that poverty exists and to raise money to help people who need it. The conditions that we saw in all of last night's video montages were pretty fucking horrible, and I'm happy to see the show's producers taking advantage of their massive cultural power to do some actual good. So I can't really call last night's two-hour special anything but a good thing. But I wish they could've done that sort of good without the disquieting patina of self-congratulation that was all over last night's show. The previous night, Ryan Seacrest had announced that NewsCorp would be donating ten cents for every one of the show's first fifty million votes to a number of different charities, and he drove the point home thusly: "It may be the most important call you ever make." (Bridget: "Give me a fucking break, Seacrest. It's ten cents.") And yeah, the show's corporate parent donated five million dollars to all these charities, and that's great, but doesn't Fox make about that much money off of one American Idol commercial break?

Idol did last night's results show telethon-style, interspersing montages of poverty and degradation with slickly inspirational performances from the likes of Josh Groban and Rascal Flatts. If showing footage of Randy Jackson hugging Hurricane Katrina survivors can actually raise money for those same survivors, then I guess the ends justify the means, but it doesn't exactly make all the sanctimony disappear in a puff of smoke. And it's also tough not to notice that Simon Cowell sounds exactly the same complaining about conditions of African AIDS shelters as he did complaining about the quality of Seattle's Idol auditions. At times, last night's show felt like an honest attempt to right some of the wrongs in the world. At times, it seemed like an excuse to cram as many celebrities as possible into a couple of hours of prime-time TV. I guess that's the line that a mass-culture phenomenon has to walk if it wants to draw attention to anything other than itself.

Also, Borat was originally supposed to be on this show, but he was mysteriously absent from last night's broadcast. So someone at Fox first thought it would be a good idea to book him for this one, and someone else panicked and kept it from happening. I would've loved to have been in the room for both of those meetings.

I'm not the first person to do a running diary on this thing, but fuck it, we're all ripping off Fluxblog anyway.

8:00: All the contestants are dressed in white and looking serious; I guess they're angels? Ryan Seacrest seriously flubs his opening lines; you'd think he'd be used to live TV by now.

8:02: Simon has seriously been rocking the unbuttoned shirts lately. He looks like a character from Match Point or something. It's not a good look.

8:04: Ellen DeGeneres, hosting the live simulcast of this show from some other theater, proves that she is totally willing to sing "Shoop" anytime she gets a chance. Earth, Wind & Fire, blindingly sparkly costumes and questionable hairstyles and all, would be a pretty weird choice to open this show if they weren't awesome. They run through a super-fast hits medley like wizened pros. Swooping disco-funk never gets old.

8:09: The night's first poverty montage concerns the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina. I already came off like enough of a heartless dick in those intro paragraphs; there's no way I'm going to write any jokes about these things.

8:11: Sanjaya Malakar is back in the crowd, looking serious. He didn't take too long to do the whole returning-contestant thing.

8:12: Quincy Jones gets some screen time, and I get the impression that this is all an attempt to make up for that episode earlier this season when Seacrest totally cut him off mid-sentence. He's produced a new group song for the remaining contestants to sing, and it's somewhere between Up With People and mid-80s Peter Gabriel. It also, no joke, includes the lyric "make it rain." The contestants display their palpable lack of chemistry, and Quincy dances awkwardly. This is some great TV right here.

8:16: Hey, it's Will from Will & Grace! Reminding us to call the donation hotline! And making a Sanjaya joke! Why?

8:19: Now it's Ross from Friends doing pretty much the same thing! Why?

8:20: Ben Stiller mentions Mystery Men. I really liked that movie. I should Netflix that shit. He also sings. This isn't too funny.

8:31: I guess this is still a results show. Earlier, Seacrest announced the most shocking result in Idol history, and I was hoping maybe it'd mean the end of the slickly professional and uber-boring Melinda Doolittle, but no, she's safe. Damn.

8:34: I've somehow managed to go up until now without hearing Simon's Eurotrash pop-opera discovery Il Divo, and they're pretty much exactly what I expected. I have to wonder if all pop would be this maudlin if Simon had his way. (Slightly drunk Bridget: "I like it! It's so happy!")

8:37: Now Dr. Phil wants us to call the donation hotline. They've really managed to cobble together a totally random celebrity-parade.

8:43: Jack Black, quite possibly coked to the gills, sings "Kiss From a Rose" as part of a random-audience-member bit. He says it's from Batman Returns, and none of the judges bothers to remind him that it's totally from Batman Forever. Seal, in a stunt-casting cameo, says he liked it. The jokes afterward were lame, but the performance itself was actually pretty great. All the Sanjaya jokes tonight are sort of fucked up considering that he's sitting right there.

8:46: Blake Lewis is safe. Fuck! Bridget predicts that they're not sending anyone home tonight.

8:54: Rascal Flatts plays. I liked Il Divo better. Gary LeVox looks sort of like Blake Lewis's fat uncle.

8:57: It's Tom from MySpace! I guess he has to show up for stuff like this now that Rupert Murdoch is totally his boss.

9:00: Whoa, Paula Abdul is showing some serious cleavage. This is a live show! There's really a pretty high potential for a tragic wardrobe malfunction, and can you imagine the sort of PR shitstorm that would come of that?

9:05: The random celebrity-parade lip-syncs and mugs its way through "Stayin' Alive." Most of them didn't bother to learn the lyrics. Is Chris Kattan really still considered a celebrity? LeBron is pretty funny, anyway.

9:08: Phil Stacey is safe! Fuck you, America!

9:13: Josh Groban looks and sounds like an escaped former member of Il Divo. The African backup singer kid with the missing front teeth totally upstages him.

9:26: It's entirely possible that Kelly Clarkson has become pop music's finest belter of scenery-chomping power-ballads. She howls "Up to the Mountain," and it's pretty great. I don't know why Jeff Beck had to show up and blooz-noodle his way through the whole thing behind her, but whatever.

9:32: It's really not that funny when American Idol makes fun of itself, even if it does so in the form of a Simpsons parody.

9:33: LaKisha is safe, and they're really milking the suspense here. I'm gonna be pissed if Jordin gets voted off.

9:35: The spoilers were true! The producers of American Idol, in their infinite wisdom, have Forrest Gumped in some circa-1968 footage of Elvis, forcing him to duet with Celine Dion. Celine displays exactly the level of chemistry that you'd expect her to have with old-ass Elvis footage. Whose idea was this? Seriously, this is some really weird TV.

9:39: Madonna poses with a bunch of kids in Malawi, and I can't possibly make any joke that hasn't already been made.

9:46: Seacrest fumbles his way through some more technical difficulties. This is the closest I've ever seen him come to completely unraveling. If this trend continues, he's going to turn into the boom-goes-the-dynamite guy before long.

9:47: Annie Lennox, looking truly amped to be on TV again, gives a really powerful read of "Bridge Over Troubled Water," and, improbably enough, takes performance-of-the-night honors. That was just really good.

9:56: Seacrest teases a Jordin Sparks elimination before announcing that none of the contestants is going home this week. That's a real cop-out ending to a two-hour results show, but Bridget totally called it. Two contestants are going home next week, so that'll be interesting, anyway.

9:57: Bono, in a brand-new mental-patient haircut, makes his much-hyped appearance, which doesn't really amount to much. All the Idol contestants sing another big group song, and the show finally ends. Good causes and all, but I can't shake the impression that I would've had a much better time if I'd just spent two hours watching this over and over.

Gorillaz Break Up

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:27 PM, April 25, 2007

Ridin' with Bigfoot, Harry and the Hendersons

When Damon Albarn went on BBC2 last week and told an interviewer that he wouldn't be making another pop album with the Gorillaz, he only really proved one thing: Damon Albarn is a fucking idiot. I never particularly liked the Gorillaz' two albums, but I had to admire Albarn's unlikely coup. A lot of aging pop stars gradually grow deeply uncomfortable with the spotlight and look for ways to disappear from the attention that mass adulation brings. It's a cliche. But Albarn managed to figure out a way to disappear that somehow allowed him to sell more records than he had when he was an actual pop star. In the UK, Albarn had spent most of the 90s as a bona fide celebrity, feuding with Oasis and enduring a drawn-out tabloid-fueled breakup with Elastica's Justine Frischmann; he led the sort of life that could understandably make someone want to drop out of the pop-culture game for good. In America, though, Blur were culty imports who managed to go gold once on the strength of "Song 2," a fluke accidental jock-jam. So it's pretty amazing that Albarn's self-consciously goofy and deconstructionist pop-art project managed to go platinum in America with its self-titled debut album, and it's even more amazing that that Demon Days, the second Gorillaz album, managed to go double-plat here at a time when nobody was buying music. Albarn pulled off a rare trick: he took his pop-star alienation all the way to the bank. And now he's giving up on it. Maybe this guy doesn't know how good he has it.

It's a little implausible to talk about the breakup of an imaginary cartoon band, especially since Albarn is apparently the only actual full-time member of the Gorillaz and he can revive the name anytime he feels like it. Albarn worked with a completely different set of musical collaborators for the two Gorillaz albums, though both of those albums ended up functionally sounding pretty much the same. Tank Girl illustrator Jamie Hewlett, who draws the ugly-ass Gorillaz mascots, has been around for both records, but given that he doesn't seem to write or play any of the music I'm not going to call him a member of the group. Instead, Albarn has taken advantage of the project's general anonymity to scrounge his rolodex for wish-list collaborators: Del, Ibrahim Ferrer, Shaun Ryder, Ike Turner, Neneh Cherry. He hired Dan the Automator to produce the first album and Danger Mouse, the updated 2005 version of Automator, to produce the second. And he stayed off in the wings the entire time, never appearing in Gorillaz videos and only occasionally taking the stage with/for the group. Rather than actual humans, Gorillaz live shows had the band's cartoon likenesses playing on big movie screens while the real live musicians hid behind them and played their music in the dark. A while ago, there was some talk of a Gorillaz arena tour featuring holograms, and I can just imagine what a glorious mess that might've been. I saw the Gorillaz last year at the Apollo, and their big movie screen was busted, but Albarn still stayed hidden, singing his parts off on the wings of the stage and only allowing himself to be glimpsed during the final song of the evening.

Albarn did pretty much everything he could to deflect attention from himself, including inventing a long and tedious backstory for the cartoon band. It was a cheesy hook, certainly, but it snared a lot of record-buyers and resulted in some weird culture-clash moments, like the time the Gorillaz and De La Soul gave the opening performance at the Grammys last year, immediately disappearing when Madonna took the stage afterwards. Both Gorillaz albums are full of lazy, stoned, half-finished songs, each album only boasting a handful of decent hooks, so it seems pretty likely that the project's gimmicky image and backstory are what sold it those millions. Last year, Nick Sylvester called Gnarls Barkley "a fascinating instance where the publicists and publicity engines and all the mechanisms of the business of music are more artistic than the music itself," and it seems fair to say that Danger Mouse must've picked up a few tricks from his time as Albarn's hired gun.

And so now Albarn's sick of it, or maybe not; he never likes giving straight answers in interviews. But here's what he told BBC2: "There won't be another pop record." Instead, he's working on a film score for the full-length Gorillaz movie, which will apparently somehow involve noted loon Terry Gilliam. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to go see a full-length Gorillaz movie, but then Albarn has managed to make hard sells pay off before. In any case, he's beginning to sound like the Beastie Boys' Adam Yaunch around the time he discovered Buddha and decided he wanted to quit rapping. And after all, money isn't everything. Maybe Albarn is having too much fun with his new band, the Good, the Bad and the Queen, which wastes the fantastical rhythm section of Paul Siminon and Tony Allen on a depressive song-cycle of drizzly, beatless pub-rock chamber-hymns. Maybe he wants to get back to writing actual songs; I'm not convinced he's managed to finish one since Blur's "Tender." Or maybe he's just sick of the whole Gorillaz enterprise. He wouldn't be the only one.

Voice review: Jaime Lowe on the Gorillaz at the Apollo Theatre
Voice review: Mikael Wood on the Gorillaz at Virgin Megastore
Voice review: Christina Rees on the Gorillaz' Gorillaz

Bjork and Timbaland: Together at Last

Posted by Tom Breihan at 8:14 PM, April 24, 2007

I am just a Martian, get prepared for abduction

I've been to Iceland. Once. I was nine. My family had been living in England for a year, and we were moving home to Baltimore when we had a sudden, unexplained and unexpected 12-hour layover in Keflavik. The airport was tiny, and for some reason it had a Hard Rock Cafe that wasn't open. The cafeteria fed us this weird orange stuff that tasted pretty good. After a while, the airport staff decided that they should probably do something with this planeload full of extremely haggard-looking travelers, so they loaded all of us into a bus and drove us around the island for a couple of hours. It looked like the surface of the moon. I don't think I saw a single tree the entire time. Instead, there was this volcanic brown rock everywhere, piled into these craggy mounds. My brother and I were really impressed that this rock had actually been lava at some point, so we took a couple of tiny rocks home and kept them on top of our dressers for a few years. At one point, we drove past the Blue Lagoon, and there was so much steam rising off it that you couldn't actually see any liquid water. That two-hour bus-trip probably left a more vivid visual tattoo in my head than anything in the previous year in England; everything just looked so completely alien. After we finally got onto the Icelandair plane back to America, I actually remember reading an in-flight magazine article about the Sugarcubes and thinking they sounded pretty cool. But I'd probably associate Bjork's music with that layover in Iceland even if I hadn't seen that article. Bjork comes from the one place on Earth where she can seem otherworldly to virtually everyone on the planet, and that's an asset she's cannily played up again and again over the past twenty years or so.

Bjork might've once had some tertiary connection to pop music, but her past three albums have pretty much effectively squashed that. More recently, she's pushed goofy-ass album-concepts way beyond their logical conclusions, pulling collaborators from all around the world and using them to create immersive sonic worlds that feel like indigenous music from cultures that don't actually exist. On Medulla, her all-human-voice album, she managed to find more interesting uses for the voices of Rahzel and Mike Patton than Rahzel or Mike Patton had managed in years. I remember walking around Baltimore while constantly and impulsively listening to the album on my Discman in the weeks after its release, letting it add weird shadings and textures to everything around me. Volta, the Bjork album that'll be coming out in a couple of weeks, is apparently going to be her meditation or rhythm the same way that Medulla was her meditation on voice, and she's assembled the sort of cast of misfits we've long expected from her: Antony, Konono No. 1, the drummer from Lightning Bolt. Bjork usually does stuff like this: she finds people who are extremely good at doing one thing (polyrhythmic thrashouts in the case of the Lightning Bolt guy, uber-fey vocal histrionics in Antony's case), and she finds ways to make that one thing fit perfectly with what she does. What Bjork doesn't often do is find pop geniuses at or near her level, people as capable of she is of reshaping the world to fit their vision. But one of the collaborators Bjork chose for Volta is her equal in every way, and if you've been reading this blog for a while you're probably already sick of reading what I have to say about him: Timbaland. I don't want to repeat myself too much on this, but Timbaland has spent the past ten years taking pop figures and pushing them into weird, weird places, usually with brilliant results. Tim has long been a vocal admirer of Bjork, and now they're finally getting around to the Marvel Team-Up I've wanted to hear for a long time.

Those tracks began to leak a couple of weeks ago, and honestly, it's been hard just wrapping my brain around the fact that this is finally happening. Despite his long record of weirdifying singers, I'd actually been hoping that Tim would help Bjork scale back a few of her excesses. My favorite Bjork album has always been Debut, which took joyous Crystal Waters disco-house to some deeply fucked places. Nobody makes club music better than Tim, so it seemed at least vaguely possible that the two of them would do something slightly less otherworldly together. That's not what happened, though. Maybe those tracks started out pop, but that's not where they ended up. In this Pitchfork interview, Bjork says that she actually completed a few tracks with Tim more than a year ago, and since then she's been fucking around with the tracks, throwing all sorts of different things at them. I was a bit disappointed the first time I heard "Earth Intruders," the first single, mostly because my brain didn't immediately melt. But a few repeated listenings have teased its power out out a bit further. Bjork actually ties her voice down to the track's roiling African drums, but the descending synths and processed vocal whoops give it the same sort of ancient, druidic feel that most of Medulla had. And "Innocence," her other new Timbaland collaboration, has an eerie sort of spaced-out awkwardness, its rhythmic whump-noises and synth-stabs deliberately off-kilter and awkward. On Saturday Night Live this week, Bjork did "Earth Intruders" and "Wanderlust," another new song and one that I have no idea whether Timbaland produced. She looked as comfortable as anyone ever looks on that stage, and the songs sounded as strange and powerful as anything she's done since Homogenic. But honestly, Bjork hasn't been a singles artist for about a decade. Her albums always feel like passive experiences; I can't ever wrap my head around them, so I sort of have to let them wash over me. Volta won't be out for a couple of weeks, though god knows it'll probably leak any minute now, and I won't know until long after if it's the Bjork album I wanted. Right now, though, I'm happy in the knowledge that two utterly bizarre geniuses have managed to do utterly bizarre work together. That's enough.

Voice review: Laura Sinagra on Bjork's Medulla
Voice review: Ann Powers on Bjork's Live Box
Voice review: Emma Pearse on Bjork's Vespertine
Voice review: Scott Woods on Bjork's Selmasongs
Voice review: Vince Aletti on Bjork's Homogenic

Live: Hot Chip's Robo-Soul Delirium

Posted by Tom Breihan at 8:04 PM, April 23, 2007

I am a robot and this robot is on overload

Hot Chip
Webster Hall
April 20, 2007

The laws of irony clearly state that a band of mismatched uber-awkward dorks can't write lyrics about breaking your legs or being down with Prince without coming off like unendurable dipshits; the best they can hope for is Atom and His Package. And that's why I didn't initially give Hot Chip much of a chance, even after esteemed peers with high-functioning bullshit detectors (like this guy) fell all over them. But the laws of irony don't account for the icy melancholy and the fluid twerky bounce that these guys pull off beautifully. When I finally got around to seeing the band at Webster Hall late last year, they had a couple of extra weapons behind them: a drummer and a percussionist, both smart and locked-in enough to give dizzying force to the band's ecstatic techno buildups and Latin-disco breakdowns. I walked into Webster Hall that night looking for something to do to kill time before Todd P's anti-CMJ across-the-river throwdown, and I walked out utterly convinced. That one show was all it took. Immediately afterward, I started hearing The Warning for what it is, a compulsively listenable pileup of party-up earworm mantras and swooningly pretty teen-movie-closing-credits ballads. Alexis Taylor and Joe Goddard never let their cheesed-out jokes or their weedy voices get in the way of their songs' sweep; if anything, they've turned their liabilities into assets, building up their gleaming synth-swooshes with all-too-human wounded sadness. The band fits perfectly into the grand tradition of whiteboy computer-soul, a line that encompasses Tears for Fears and Depeche Mode and, for that matter, Justin Timberlake's FutureSex/LoveSounds. In fact, now that I think about it, Timblerlake may have learned a thing or two from the way their spazzy loverman R&B twitches even as it swoops. And, as Hot Chip's recent remix of "In the Morning" shows, they can do the Junior Boys' thing better than the Junior Boys themselves can, no mean feat. Ten or fifteen years from now, some crappy indie band is probably going to score a minor hit doing an acoustic cover of "Boy From School," and Hot Chip's place in that lineage will be official.

When the band came back to Webster Hall on Friday night, they didn't have any drummers with them. A pair of congas sat off on the wings, Taylor kept a mounted set of bongos next to his synth-panel, and a few other members occasionally brought out cowbells, but that was it. I missed most of Tussle's opening set, but when I walked into the club, I saw six bike messenger-looking dudes all smashing away at various percussion instruments, almost like Hot Chip were trying to make up for their lack of drums with their choice of openers. That lack of drums made a difference; Hot Chip sounded stiffer and more brittle than they had in November. But they made up for it by structuring their set like a DJ set, easing fluidly from song to song by finding sly little segues. As a structuring device, it worked beautifully; when Alexis Taylor sang a few bars of New Order's "Regret" as the band slid into the chorus of "No Fit State," his own song felt even more revelatory than it usually does. This was an all-synth show, with all five members parked behind huge banks of equipment and only occasionally pulling out guitars or cowbells; it looked sort of like five supporting characters from The 40-Year-Old Virgin had formed a Kraftwerk cover band. But Taylor, who looks like a white Steve Urkel, and Goddard, who looks like a friendly cartoon bear, both have a sort of gawky charisma that the stage setup couldn't diminish. And Hot Chip is that rare synthpop band that always sounds better live, stretching out their arrangements and allowing their songs to build incrementally from orderly, by-the-numbers synthpop to frantic, anthemic freakouts. This time, those freakouts came with laser-lights stabbing rhythmically through the air; Hot Chip doesn't need glammy accouterments like that, but they sure know how to use them when they come along.

Nearly half of Friday night's set was given over to new songs, and those new songs raised the tantalizing possibility that Hot Chip might still be getting better. The Warning, after all, was a huge leap past debut album Coming On Strong, and it only came out about a year afterward; this band is still honing its aggressively fey glossiness. One new song ("Time Delay"? "Tom DeLay"?) is totally robotic, pretty close to something like the Normal; another marries swishy, scratchy Nile Rogers guitars to icy Chemical Brothers synths. As twitchy as those new songs are, they still keep the band's overriding soul-pop earnestness intact. Hot Chip isn't a band on the verge of doing something great; they're a band that's already doing great things and still finding ways to push their pleasure-center sound forward. They deserve crowds as rapturous as the one last night, which went off the entire time and made me think that the balcony was about to crumble and fall when the band played synthpop club-jam "Over and Over," a song that sounds roughly one bajillion times better live than it does on record. Hot Chip might come from London, but their New York shows are starting to feel like homecomings. Al Dowling, after all, moonlights for LCD Soundsystem, and Friday night James Murphy was up in the VIP section; I saw a security guard telling him to stop standing on chairs. For a group of people so fundamentally awkward, they're scarily good at what they do. Very few bands could walk onstage to Curtis Mayfield's "(Don't Worry) If There's a Hell Below, We're All Gonna Go" without looking like complete herbs. Hot Chip already do look like complete herbs, but they make it not matter, which is somehow even more impressive.

Voice review: Mike Powell on Hot Chip's The Warning

Lil Wayne: Still Ridiculously Great

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:54 PM, April 20, 2007

Alas poor Khaled

After DJ Drama and Don Cannon got arrested for selling mixtapes earlier this year, mixtapes are probably never going to be the same again, and that might not ultimately be a bad thing. It used to be that every mixtape would be stamped "for promotional use only," a quick little disclaimer that meant exactly nothing since everyone didn't mind paying $20 for five of them. Actual physical mixtapes still exist, but they're trickling out slower, and the real action has been online, especially as far as single-artist tapes go. Now that the RIAA has basically criminalized the process, rappers actually have been using tapes as promotional items, offering them up for free download and never bothering to press up physical copies. As it turns out, the results have thus far been pretty good; online-only mixtapes from Talib Kweli and Chamillionaire have held up to repeat listenings a lot better than those guys' most recent retail albums. And something even weirder has been happening over the last couple of weeks. Lil Wayne and DJ Khaled have been working on Da Drought 3, a magnum-opus double-CD mixtape. But an early version of the first CD leaked last week, and the second one finally found its way onto the internet earlier this week. The very idea that a mixtape could leak is a bit hard to process; it's not like these things have traditional release dates or anything. In this case, though, the early leak will almost certainly turn out to be so completely superior to the actual finished version that nobody will ever bother listening to the real thing.

In this news item, DJ Khaled explains: "The real version is hosted by me and Birdman, so with the bootleg, it doesn’t even have the same feel." What Khaled means is that he hasn't yet have time to throw lots of distracting cuts and rewinds into the tracks, and he and Birdman haven't yet gotten the chance to yell their names all over everything and generally ruin the tape's flow. That's a shame for Khaled, but it's a best-case scenario for the rest of us. Without Khaled's additions, the version of Da Drought 3 that's all over the internet this week is a surprisingly clean set of discrete tracks with no transitions or interludes or drops. Wayne mumbles a quick outro to the first disc and a quick intro to the second, and he ends the tape by spending ten minutes shouting out random people over the instrumental to Robin Thicke's "Lost Without You," but that still amounts to less filler than you find on the average actual retail rap album. Even the extended-outro thing has been done, and Wayne's ten minutes of rambling have nothing on Kanye West's thirteen on The College Dropout or Lupe Fiasco's twelve on Food & Liquor, though I'll probably never listen to it a second time. In any case, Da Drought 3, as it exists now, basically sounds like a retail-ready rap album except that almost all of the beats come directly from other songs. It certainly sounds a whole lot better than most of the actual rap albums that have found their way onto shelves in recent years; I'd rank it a whole lot higher than Wayne and Birdman's Like Father Like Son. When Khaled gets done with it, it's not going to be anywhere near as good. Khaled has one of the most irritating mixtape-DJ voices this side of DJ Clue, and he doesn't have DJ Drama's innate sense of how to put his sonic stamp on a mixtape without derailing its flow. The Suffix, the mixtape Khaled did with Wayne late in 2005, was pretty much the one weak link in the insane string of great mixtapes Wayne's been releasing over the last two years. The leak of Da Drought 3 leak has effectively made Khaled obsolete.

As for the tape itself, it's so fucking good I almost can't talk about it. Wayne seems to hit a new plateau every couple of months, and he's completely disappeared off into his own world by now. On track after track here, he continues with the same rhyme-scheme over entire verses, pulling out random non-sequitor pop-culture references like he was the early-90s Beastie Boys if they could actually rap consistently. And he's funnier, too; every time he threatens to fall into a guns/girls/diamonds/drugs rut, he'll catch himself and twist everything sideways; gunshot threats become a lot more palatable when the bullets will supposedly "make you do the Macarena." On the first verse of "Sky's the Limit," he interrupts a standard and almost certainly made-up crack-dealing reminisce to offer this piece of information: "And when I was five, my favorite movie was the Gremlins / That ain't got shit to do with this, but I just thought that I should mention." He ends that song with some post-Katrina pathos: "They tryna make a brand new map without us / But the tourists come down and spend too many dollars / And no matter how you change it, it'll still be ours." It's a powerful line, and it hits a lot harder when it comes after so much irreverence. But there's no equivalent to "Georgia Bush" here. Wayne does three concept-songs: a mumbly love-rap over Ciara's "Promise," a flip of Young Jeezy's "I Luv It" that trumpet's Wayne's supposed Blood affiliations, and a Weird Al take on Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" wherein Wayne sings semi-credibly and tweaks the lyrics so it becomes a song about crack. Every one of those songs is fun, but it's more interesting to hear Wayne free-associating, which is mostly what he does here: "Yellow diamond ring look like a little Funyun / Stand on my toes, you could call me Paul Bunyan." And Wayne's also become more confident about using his voice; even on the fastest tracks here, he keeps talking from the back of his throat, which has the effect of making him sound like a deranged cartoon bully. A few guests show up: Juelz Santana one one track, various Young Money signings on a few others. But this is Wayne's show, and he doesn't seem to think anything of repurposing tracks he's already rapped on (DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over," Jibbs' "King Kong," Swizz Beatz' "It's Me, Bitches").

Wayne's sheer audacity throughout the tape is something to behold. Ever since the picture of him kissing Baby hit the internet last year, he's been at the center of the biggest gay panic in rap since I don't even know when. Until now, he's taken the high road, studiously refusing to address the controversy in his lyrics. When he finally gets around to it here, he's brashly unapologetic: "Damn right I kiss my daddy / I think they pissed at how rich my daddy is," "I walk it out like Stunna / I hope when we kiss we make you sick to your stomach." His freestyle over Beyonce's "Upgrade U" is notable for being Wayne's most direct lyrical shot at Jay-Z yet: "Young Carter, darlin' / Understand, I am Michael Jordan ballin' / Yes, I'm a dog, I'm a Hoya, homie / I'm a boss; your man's just an employer, mami." At this point, he's not biting his tongue for anyone. It's fucking inspiring.

Voice review: Jon Caramanica on Lil Wayne & DJ Drama's Dedication
Voice review: Keith Harris on Lil Wayne's 500 Degreez

Sanjaya Malakar: America's Long National Nightmare Finally Ends

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:02 PM, April 19, 2007

So it goes (pick jacked from Idolator)

The end of last night's padded-out hour-long American Idol result show was set up as a good-vs.-evil battle, at least from where I was sitting. Every week, Ryan Seacrest solemnly announces the bottom three contestants and then sends one of them back to safety. This week, the bottom three were the utterly detestable cheeseball improv-comic beatbox 311/Incubus fan Blake Lewis, the soaringly awesome raw-throated belter LaKisha Jones, and Sanjaya Malakar, the gawky teenager who's become the center of one of the weirdest and dumbest pop-cult hysteria-rampages in recent memory. When Seacrest announced the bottom three, before he told Blake that he was safe, the three judges pissed me off enormously by acting all shocked that Blake was up there, completely ignoring LaKisha even though she's consistently been one of the best contestants of the season. I'm certainly biased; LaKisha comes from Fort Meade, Maryland, an army town about a half-hour drive south of Baltimore, and I'd probably still rep for her on local-pride grounds even if she sucked. But she emphatically does not suck. Her souped-up roar might lean hard on old Southern-soul archetypes, but she knows when to turn it on and when to turn it off, and when she's done quieter and more nuanced songs like "Diamonds are Forever" or "God Bless the Child," she's been remarkably mature and polished. Other than maybe Jordin Sparks, she's also the only Idol candidate this year who could conceivably make an album worth hearing. Tuesday night was country theme night, and LaKisha sang Carrie Underwood's "Jesus Take the Wheel," a song I adore. And she did it well, giving it a straight soul-gospel reading and doing it justice; it might not have been her best performance, but she still owned most of the remaining contestants. The judges, for reasons I can't quite understand, shat all over her. She hasn't been pulling the fake-humble act that fellow soul powerhouse Melinda Doolittle has mastered, so she found herself staring down the barrel of elimination, right next to the contestant whose survival has famously confused everyone who's been watching the show this season. Consider, if you will, Sanjaya Malakar.

Sanjaya's gotten more press than virtually any other contestant in the show's history, mostly for two deceptively simple reasons: he does lots of goofy shit with his hair, and he can't sing that well. He's a 17-year-old kid from outside Seattle, and he squiggled his way onto the show's roster of finalists mostly by doing whispery renditions of old Stevie Wonder songs. As soon as the show got out of its endless run of audition shows, the judges savaged virtually every one of his performances, but the viewers persistently refused to vote him off. Still, he didn't immediately emerge as the worst singer on the show; that dubious honor went to the red-faced fratboy creep Sundance Head. But once Sundance was gone and the show whittled itself down to its final twelve contestants, things started getting weird. Sanjaya never really improved as a singer; if anything, he got worse. But he did begin to seize his moment in the spotlight, a process he signaled mostly by doing lots of crazy shit with his hair: crimped-up curls, a slicked-back Long Island mullet sort of thing, and the now-famous ponyhawk. He also got a whole lot less awkward and flinchy onstage, though none of that newfound confidence made him any less embarrassing to watch. And he began a weeks-long verbal sparring war with Simon Cowell, which didn't go too well for him. In a lot of ways, though the most interesting thing about Sanjaya's continued survival wasn't Sanjaya himself; it was the endless processions of conspiracy theories and of jokers who wanted to claim credit for it. There's been a vaguely racist hypothesis floating around that Sanjaya's been hanging in there because the people who work at Indian calling centers have been flooding Fox's switchboards with votes, but that rumor hasn't had anything on the smarmy jerks who continued to advocate for Sanjaya simply because he sucks. Howard Stern has been urging his listeners to vote for Sanjaya without really giving a reason, but there's presumably some irony at work there. And the guy who runs the Vote for the Worst website, who's also been running a vote-for-Sanjaya campaign and who came off like an attention-grabbing dipshit in this New York Times article, is definitely working through some muddled notions of ironic subversiveness. The idea behind Vote for the Worst is that American Idol will be a more entertaining show if some shadowy bloc of internet jokers keeps voting to keep shitty singers on the show and undermining its judges' authority. But the very idea of voting for a reality-show candidate who you don't like feels to me like about the worst waste of time I can possibly imagine. If irony consumes your life so completely that you can't do something as simple as watching a wildly popular talent-search TV show without being all winky and nudgey about it, I probably don't want to be your friend.

At least for me, the real entertainment-value of American Idol comes from seeing different peoples' concepts of what good singing is smash up against each other and struggle for dominance, post-grunge sludge-growlers and gospel-trained howlers and adult-contempo mewl-merchants and obnoxious Broadway-jazz types all thrashing around in the same pot. For his part, Simon Cowell has reacted to the whole Sanjaya episode with absolute horror and barely disguised contempt, even telling some tabloid that he'd quit the show if Sanjaya won. Over and over, Cowell reminds the competitors and the audience that American Idol is a singing competition, that it shouldn't matter how likable anyone is. Of course, Cowell probably knows just how full of shit that statement is. Pop stardom has a whole lot more to do with likability than technical vocal prowess. Most of this season's Idol guest-coaches (Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani, the Herman's Hermits guy) probably wouldn't make it past the first round of auditions, and most of the show's winners worked at least as hard on cultivating aw-shucks charm as they did on their vocals. So the whole spectacle of Cowell warring with the internet's irony-armies has been pretty grisly. When a self-righteous blowhard takes on a bunch of smirky fruitflies, I usually end up hoping nobody wins. I've been excited for Sanjaya to get voted off the show mostly so the whole standoff could end.

And now it's done, and it's pretty telling how that ended up happening. In reality, Sanjaya's main base of support probably didn't come from calling centers or unfunny jokers but from the preteen girls who like how Tiger Beat he is and who felt all protective whenever Cowell would hand him a verbal beatdown. Sanjaya's best performance came last week when he did "Besame Mucho" and directly engaged that audience, flirting with the camera as much as he could; even Cowell was guardedly impressed. This week, though, he tried to address his own omnipresence in a clumsy-ass way, singing a weak and tentative version of "Something to Talk About," which really isn't even a country song. For most preteen girls, that kind of self-awareness doesn't play, and so Sanjaya finally lost. He did so justifiably and gracefully, subbing out "how about love" with "other than hair" in his show-ending "Something to Talk About" encore. He seems like a nice kid, and now he can get back to being something other than a flashpoint for inane controversy. After all, he's not even the worst thing about this season, not as long as bald alien ghoul Phil Stacey is still around.

Jay-Z and Timbaland, Together Again

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:36 PM, April 17, 2007

See here

Once upon a time, it was a great creative partnership. Jay-Z and Timbaland were titans of their respective fields years before they met each other, but they still found ways to immediately elevate each other. "Paper Chase" and "Jigga What, Jigga Who," which I'm pretty sure were the first Jay/Tim collaborations, came out in the fall of 1998 on Jay's Hard Knock Life album, and at least one of those tracks sounded different from anything either of them had done up until then. Jay had spent most of his time rapping on glossy, cinematic Premier/Ski boom-bap, viciously thumping Swizz-type synth-rap, and uber-slick jiggy-era stuff. Tim was mostly a spacey R&B producer, doing otherworldly slow-jams for Aaliyah and Ginuwine and sonar-ping cartoon-funk for Missy Elliott and for himself and Magoo. "Paper Chase" is a fine track, with Jay and Foxy Brown authoritatively navigating the beat's awkward lurch, but it isn't ultimately all that different from the Trackmasters-type stuff Jay was already doing. But "Jigga What, Jigga Who" is total next-level shit, and it still stands as one of the finest moments for both Jay and Tim. Tim's beat was like an irregular heartbeat, alternating quick clusters of rapid-fire hi-hats with huge silent spaces and laying gorgeously airy strings over everything. And Jay's delivery hit another gear. He turned his voice into a percussion instrument in ways he hadn't ever done, finding connections between Southern bounce-rap and the quick-tongue Das-EFX stuff of his pre-Reasonable Doubt past. A few years ago, I heard Jason King give an EMP paper where he went into crazy depth about the song's use of space, comparing it to feng shui. His entire paper wasn't about just this one song, but it could've been.

After that, Jay did a number of tracks with Timbaland over the years; I count sixteen collaborations, though I could well be forgetting a couple. Not all of them were pure gold; Jay was a bit lazy on "Hola Hovito" and on his guest appearances for Missy and for Ms. Jade, and of those tracks, only "One Minute Man" really stands as one of Tim's most memorable. More often, though, they pushed each other in powerful and unique ways. Tim found in Jay a superstar client willing to indulge some of his weirdest tendencies, and Jay found a in Tim a producer able to sound simultaneously pop and hard, the tightrope line Jay spent years walking. Jay and Tim never overwhelmed each other the way they often overwhelmed their other collaborators. On Tim's beats, Jay sounded titanic and regal, and the two of them veered all over the stylistic map together: the North African cruise-ship exoticism of "Big Pimpin'," the off-kilter singsong vocoder burps of "Hey Papi," the fucking amazing monster bass-rumble of "Snoopy Track." Part of the reason Jay was able to dominate the last decade was his understanding and embrace of Southern rap (not too many other New York rappers were seeking out UGK guest appearances in 1999), and he may have picked some of that up from Tim. Suffice to say they were good for each other. But the two of them eventually grew away from each other, and the collaborations tapered off. Tim got tired of rap, largely pricing himself out of the genre so he could concentrate on making future-pop with Nelly Furtado and Justin Timberlake and Bjork. Jay retired and then unretired, coming back as an adult-contempo executive rapper who sadly shook his head at his younger counterparts. They were both moving away from the huge, audacious club-rap that had been their common ground. Jay was supposed to show up on Tim's Shock Value, but apparently he finished his song too late for it to make the album's deadline, and Tim told Entertainment Weekly that he was disappointed in Jay. It seemed like the drawn-out end of something great.

And that's what makes "Laff At Em," the new Timbaland/Jay/Timberlake song that leaked yesterday, so exciting. "Laff At Em" isn't a particularly good song. It's billed as a remix to "Give It to Me," but it has none of that song's casual snarl. Tim piles on the calliope bloops and obnoxious whistle noises with none of his usual sense for space, and his rapping gets more irritating all the time. Tim's verses used to be clumsy but relatively quick and effective. He knew that he wasn't much of a rapper, so he'd bury his mutter in the mix, feeding it through so many filters that it sounded like he was rapping over a bad phone connection. He was content to generally deflect most of the attention onto whoever else was on the song. But Shock Value, which is only a couple of weeks old but which sounds shittier every time I hear it, was probably the moment where Tim decided that he was good enough to be a real rapper, which isn't what I'd call a step in the right direction. It's sort of like how Pharrell's falsetto coo was a lot of fun back when it was totally gleefully amateurish, cracking all the time and valiantly failing to hit high notes; he was like a shower-singer who somehow found himself on actual pop songs. But that voice got totally unbearable circa "Frontin'" when Pharrell started taking voice lessons or whatever and decided he was Usher. Tim's verse on "Laff At Em" has that same sort of unearned arrogance; he says a lot of absolute nonsense and sounds way too confident doing it. And Tim's also starting to use Timberlake as a hood-ornament and nothing more. As on two of Timberlake's three Shock Value appearances, Tim doesn't even leave him the space to actually sing; he's just there for star-power and nothing more. "Laff At Em" isn't even as good as a lot of what made it onto Shock Value, but it does come alive when Jay's voice is there, and I'm pretty fucking amped about that.

A huge part of my problem with Kingdom Come was Jay's delivery. His beats were slow and frilly, and so he let himself mostly ignore them, muttering slowly and never letting his voice take on the hard musical snap it used to have. Jay doesn't say a whole lot on "Laff At Em," and none of his lyrics are really worth quoting. But purely in terms of the actual vocal, it's his best performance since the "Diamonds of Sierra Leone Remix" or maybe the "Drop It Like It's Hot" remix. He pushes his voice into the track's spaces and eddies, filling the empty spaces with a sort of sly swagger. For the first time in a while, he's clearly enjoying the actual process of making music. He spent all of Kingdom Come addressing his own mythic persona and figuring out where he belonged in rap's landscape, but hardly anything he did really worked outside the context of that persona. His verse on "Laff At Em" would sound pretty incredible even if I'd never heard him before, and that's exciting. Maybe someone should lock Jay and Tim in a studio for a little while; maybe they'll start bringing the best out of each other again.

Unrelated: I won't be writing a new Status entry tomorrow. I'm going to a funeral. You'll manage.

Music Videos Get Small

Posted by Tom Breihan at 6:58 PM, April 16, 2007

It doesn't hurt that she looks a lot like Jane Birkin

I'll probably have a lot more to say about Saul Austerlitz's new book Money for Nothing, an exhaustively researched and totally absorbing history of music videos that I finally just finished reading this weekend. But one thing in particular I really liked about Austerlitz's book is how it doesn't actually bother too much with history as it's usually understood. There's a quick chapter about the pre-MTV history of music videos and all their Beatles/Bowie/Queen/Suicide great leaps forward, but Austerlitz never really digs too deeply into the different forms of impact that videos have had on musicians' careers or the financial forces at work behind them. Instead, he spends most of the book analyzing music videos themselves, getting into all the artistic impulses and mini-trends that run through the form's history. Austerlitz also includes his list of the top 100 videos ever. I certainly don't agree with everything on the list: No rap videos until #40, and then it's "Hey Ya"? No rap videos with actual rapping until #53, and then it's "The Message"? But the list has sent me on a few nostalgic YouTube benders over the last couple of weeks, rewatching all these videos that I remember being really big deals when they came out. Plenty of random tiny revelations in there, like Sawyer from Lost, with a bowl cut, stealing Alicia Silverstone's purse in the "Cryin'" video. But the overwhelming impression I get from watching these videos is that the form itself has sort of given up on itself in recent years. When recent videos do show up on the list, they're either boringly smeared with prestige-ambition, like Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends," or small and concept-driven, like Basement Jaxx's "Cish Cash." Cable channels' wholesale elimination of actual videos from their scheduling blocks and nosediving album sales have really done a number on the music video itself. Big-budget videos are still coming out, but it's tough to imagine a video turning a smaller artist into a bigger one or revealing a new stage of a major artist's evolving persona (at least outside occasional flukes like My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade").

So, in a lot of ways, Money for Nothing feels like something of an epitaph for an art form. An interesting little wrinkle in the book, though, is that Austerlitz wrote most of it before the emergence of YouTube, which has made the entire history of the music video available for casual perusal. Still, even before YouTube, you could find most of the videos Austerlitz writes about on the internet somewhere if you looked hard enough. In his Afterword, Austerlitz compares the ongoing project of music videos' online archival to the impact that VCRs had on old movies: suddenly everything old was accessible again. He also talks about how smaller, younger bands have been able to get their low-budget videos seen on sites like YouTube. A perfect example, and one I've already written a ton about, didn't actually come from a younger artist at all. Instead, it was an older artist, one who realized that he could reconnect with everything that once made him great if he scaled back budgets and readjusted commercial expectations. Prodigy's "Mac 10 Handle" video is the one that got me really excited about the prospect of YouTube-only videos; it made an aesthetic virtue out of a shoestring budget by honing a hard, claustrophobic B-movie sensibility. In the past few months, plenty of smaller artists have been finding wildly different ways to do similar ways. Feist and DJ Mehdi and Dizzee Rascal are all either major-label artists or indie artists with major distribution, so they aren't exactly guerrilla mavericks, and all of their videos seem to have bigger budgets than Prodigy's. But all of them seem to have made their videos with YouTube in mind, since I can't imagine any of them are getting heavy TV play even in their home countries. They're all doing exciting things, things that make it worthwhile to trawl YouTube.

Feist is a sort of textbook example of an artist who perfectly understands the power of a good video. By itself, her indie-Starbucks-pop feels a little pale and bloodless to me; she's like a slightly less schmaltzy Norah Jones. But she's built a creative partnership with Patrick Daughters, one of the best young directors working, and made three videos that make her songs sound a lot better. "Mushaboom," the first video she made with Daughters, was a sort of meditation on the transformative power of music; it had the same basic concept as Bjork's "It's Oh So Quiet" and, for that matter, pretty much every musical ever made. Feist gets out of bed, sings one of her songs to herself while she makes herself breakfast, and then suddenly floats (literally) off into a dreamland where the entire world dances to her song with her. The two new videos she's done with Daughters are variations on the same theme. "My Moon, My Man," which hit YouTube this weekend, has Feist walking down a moving airport sidewalk and dropping her suitcase so she can gawkily dance to the song. When the chorus comes in, everyone in the airport is more or less doing the same thing, interrupting their own personal drudgery to join in and become parts of an ecstatic whole. It's fun, but it's not really anywhere near as great as the video for "1 2 3 4," another collaboration between Feist and daughters, which came out on Friday. The video is all one long, graceful unbroken camera shot. Feist, singing her song and wearing a ridiculous spangly pantsuit thing, is walking out on a big airplane-hangar soundstage when a group of backup dancers in bright colors emerge out of nowhere and join into a huge dance routine with her. The camera swoops up and around them, elegantly and lazily hitting all the old Busby Berkeley marks and making sure to take in all the euphoric movement without getting in its own way. At the end of the song, the dancers vanish as quickly and unexpectedly as they appeared, almost like they were figments of Feist's imagination. When I was in high school, I knew this raver chick who would always walk around between classes listening to her Walkman (she usually listened to Deee-Lite's "Groove Is in the Heart" over and over). She once told me how she'd imagine that everyone in the school could her the song, that everyone would stop what they were doing and just dance to it, that the whole oppressively boring veneer of the school would drop away and reveal something beautiful. That image, which I always liked, is pretty much the same idea that Feist and Daughters explore in all three videos. They also manage the impressive feat of making me enjoy Feist's songs, which is basically what videos are supposed to do. They're home runs. (I'd probably like all three better if they were actually set to "Groove Is in the Heart," but never mind.)

The video for the Thomas Bangalter edit of DJ Mehdi's "Signatune" accomplishes similar things in very different ways. Like the Feist videos, it has fun with the different ways that music can make boring everyday life feel epic and vital. Unlike the Feist videos, it doesn't much concern itself with creating or developing a persona for its artist. Mehdi is a Parisian producer and a part of the whole Ed Banger blog-house mafia, but that's pretty much all I know about him, and the video doesn't offer anything more than that. As far as I know, he's completely absent from the video itself, although he could pull one of those Fatboy Slim Hitchcockian cameos and I wouldn't have any idea. In any case, the video's not about Mehdi. Instead, it follows the day of a young working-class French dude, making us endure some unsightly shots of his body-hair before slowly building up to its central story, which is a rousing Rocky narrative that I don't want to spoil for anyone who hasn't seen it. The video tells its story and makes us care, all without the benefit of dialogue, and it does it with the song rumbling underneath the entire time. The track becomes the pulse of the story, and its rhythm provides the framework for every cut. It's a whole lot of fun, and its immaculate craftsmanship impresses me more every time I watch it.

But my favorite video of the year thus far doesn't have anything to do with the transformative power of music. In fact, it's almost a rebuke to that idea; it's about futility and frustration rather than triumph. Dizzee Rascal's video for "Sirens" explicitly links Britain's recent demonization of its young black urban population with an older British tradition: foxhunting. It's a scary spectacle: Dizzee running through an empty blue-and-gray nighttime streetscape, pursued by a group of white people on horseback in traditional foxhunting garb chase him. The even-more-disturbing ending also gets into some serious psychosexual fetishization shit. In its own way, the "Sirens" video is just as thrilling as the megabudget clip for DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over," and the song, which uses some serious mid-80s Run-DMC supercharged guitar samples, is absolutely fierce. (I seriously can't wait for the next Dizzee album.) But the video also taps into something dark and raw and topical, bringing a symbolic rage more explicit than anything I've seen in a music video in a long time. Too bad we'll probably never get to see this thing on an actual TV.

Kathy Diamond's Psychedelic Space-Disco

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:28 PM, April 13, 2007

Diamonds on my damn chain

Last month, I wrote an entry about a few new mini-genre trends that I saw emerging, all of which took little bits and pieces of electronic dance music and ran with them. My favorite of the three by far was swirly percussive post-noise, not really a catchy name but whatever. The only two real examples I had were Soft Circle's Full Bloom and Gang Gang Dance's live shows, but I definitely liked the idea that all these postpunk types were simultaneously discovering the pleasures of hazy dancing-on-clouds psychedelia and full-bore endless-repeat club music. I really liked the Soft Circle album, which approached that fusion firmly from the experimental-psychedelic side of things, finding room for rippling echoed drum-thumps in its seas of reverbed-out guitar-noodles and wordless chants. But lately I've been even more taken with another album, one that combines the same sounds but filters them through a different set of prisms, taking dance toward psych instead of taking psych toward dance. That album is Kathy Diamond's Miss Diamond to You, a disco record that pushes its sound outward toward its retro-futuristic logical conclusions.

I downloaded Miss Diamond to You a few weeks ago after reading a few recommendations, and it remains a vague and mysterious piece of work even on the twentieth listen. The album won't be commercially released until May, and even then it'll be a British import. So in a way, the album just emerged suddenly out of a void, stamped with a name and little else. I haven't been able to find any interviews with Diamond anywhere online, and half the Google results for her are actually for someone named Kathy Diamond Davis, apparently a woman from Oklahoma City who wrote a book about dog therapy, definitely not the same person. Also not a lot of help is Diamond's MySpace page, which only tells us that she's from Sheffield, that she lives in London now, and that she once self-released a single called "Miracles Just Might." She's as shadowy a presence on her own album as she is on the internet. All of the songs on Miss Diamond to You are long but not too long, hovering in the six-minute range, lazily stretching their sounds out but never letting them get tedious. Like every other element in the mix, Diamond's voice usually comes coated in layer upon layer of reverb, and it goes silent for long stretches, letting the bongo-ripples and Seinfeld bass-popping do the heavy lifting as often as not. In a lot of ways, Miss Diamond to You is pretty similar to another piece of mysterious European retro-Italo fluff that I absolutely loved, Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance. But the naive, wounded character of Shapiro's voice was the primary driving force behind Disco Romance, and Diamond's voice has virtually no character whatsoever; it's a soft, breathy blank, another effect in a mix full of them. Her lyrics immediately dissipate as soon as they hit the ear, and her coo never strains to reach any big notes. In her own way, she's every bit as unlikely a disco diva as Shapiro. Her vocals certainly don't convey passion or conviction or furor; if they evoke any emotion at all, it's a sort of warm contentedness. One "Until the Sun Goes Down," one of the album's best songs, Diamond herself doesn't even show up in the mix for the first four minutes. Instead, we hear a riot of multilayered percussion and whistle-blasts that eventually give way to a dizzily undulating organ-echo and then, finally, a vocal. There's a lot going on in that extended intro, but it never feels spazzy or anarchic. Even at its most fevered, the track muffles and smooshes all its pieces together into a blanketing goo. It's tough to imagine dancing to this stuff, but it sure makes for great rainy-afternoon music.

All of the album's production comes from Maurice Fulton, a house producer originally from Baltimore who I mostly know as the instrumental half of the noisy electro duo Mu. Plenty of critics loved Mu's two albums, but I couldn't find much to like in them beyond a few isolated tracks. I always thought that most of their tracks would make pretty good dance songs if left unmolested, but instead they sabotaged themselves by injecting spazzy little glitches and horrible screeches wherever possible. On Miss Diamond to You, Fulton stops trying to derail his own beats and does the opposite, surrounding those pulses and twitches with clouds of sound that only serve to enhance the hypnotic zone-out effect. Earlier today, Nick Sylvester wrote something about how the album reminded him of Crystal Waters, and today I learned from this bio that Fulton actually apprenticed with the Basement Boys, the Baltimore house duo who produced her biggest hits, even doing some programming work for Waters. I went back today and revisited "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)" and "100% Pure Love," something I totally recommend doing right now. And I can hear the parallel; the Waters tracks are sharper and harder, but they have the same lush, airy sheen. On Miss Diamond to You, Fulton takes those sounds and gives them a certain meditative sadness, slowing them down and spacing them out. I love the idea that Fulton has had these sounds bouncing around in his head for a couple of decades now and that he's still finding new things to do with them, and I'm tempted to say that Miss Diamond to You belongs to Fulton at least as much as it does to Diamond. But then again, assigning credit is a really dicey thing to do with an album like this one. As much as I like it, I don't really know a damn thing about it.

Live: Lily Allen Doesn't Give a Fuck

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:05 PM, April 12, 2007

Rove if you want to, Rove around the world

Lily Allen
Irving Plaza
April 11, 2007

Lily Allen doesn't make club music. And she definitely doesn't make the sort of music that works in clubs where people are all jammed in, trying to get a glimpse of some Next Big Thing. Last night's Irving Plaza (or Fillmore, whatever) show was Allen's third New York show. Most critics had already seen her, and so they stayed away, but a full third of the crowd still had those VIP stickers on; the entire bigass upstairs balcony was now labeled a VIP section. As her blog-hype buzz trickles down, most of the crowd seems to consist of bored yuppies with leather jackets who chatter obliviously all through her performance and eyefuck me for being tall even when I'm standing in the back, definitely one of the least tolerable crowds I've yet experienced. An artist like Allen, one who's generated a whole lot of excitement and made a lot of people curious, needs to be able to step on a stage in front of these people and get on some real Klaxons-esque zeitgeist shit, personifying and justifying all that excitement, and that's not the kind of artist that Lily Allen is. She doesn't make jarring, immediate music; she makes wispy, frothy barbecue music, lazy sunbaked loping ska-pop that derives its charm from its casual ease and from Allen's own likable forthrightness. It's summer-afternoon walk-in-the-park music, not packed-nightclub music, even if she herself is a club-friendly demi-celebrity. Last night, she walked onstage after a really shitty 80s-pop DJ with no sense of flow (turns out it was Aaron LaCrate; good to know firsthand and conclusively that that guy sucks) smashed a bunch of high-impact dance-tracks together, and it's a bit ridiculous to expect Allen to do anything with that sort of hackneyed party-up intensity, even if that's what last night's show set her up to do.

Still and all, she's pretty good onstage, more comfortable and natural and charismatic than alarmist early reports threatened. When she made her NY debut last fall, she'd probably only done a handful of live shows, but she's been touring for a while now, and she's figuring out how to hold a stage. She's only got one album, and it's like forty minutes long, but she knows how to stretch that out into an hour-plus-encores show: doing three covers and two non-album tracks, letting all the guys in her horn section play solos, drunkenly rambling between songs. Not all of that patter worked; when she said that she didn't understand who put the men in cheap suits in Washington in charge and accused them of melting the planet, it amounted to some of the least trenchant political commentary I've heard in a minute. More often, though, her onstage presence wasn't far from her on-record persona; at times, she was quite funny. Reacting with charming disbelief to a crying fan in the front row: "Crazy crying fan! Love that! Everybody cry!" Introducing her acoustic Kooks cover: "It's actually quite rubbish, but I make it sound quite good." She made it sound OK. Allen's songs only have a few occasional big notes, and last night they sounded nasal and tinny, something she attributed to her voice being completely fucked from the previous weeks of touring. But, as American Idol judges might say, they aren't singers' songs, and she sold her great observational lyrics with conversational ease. She doesn't exactly need to invest a whole lot of emotional energy into these songs, since they were never all that emotionally involved to begin with. That's not how they work.

Probably the dumbest mini-controversy about Allen is that she's a quote-unquote Mockney, an upper-class Brit who self-consciously adjusts her accent to sound like an Oliver Twist orphan or whatever. That's exactly the sort of thing that only British people care about, and I'm guessing most of them don't really give much of a fuck either. But her recording career thus far has been an interesting experiment in what happens when you put privileged kids onstage. Allen, as I wrote last year and as everyone who reads music blogs already knows, is the daughter of some famous British comedian I've never heard of. She doesn't need pop stardom. It's not an escape from grim economic realities or a fulfillment of long-held fantasies; it's more of a hobby. Last night, she didn't hide behind her mic stand the way she did on Top of the Pops last year, but there's more than a twinge of irony in her galumphing stage-moves. (My brother Jim: "She dances like Karl Rove.") There was some sort of baby synthesizer at the center of the stage, and she'd sometimes walk over and idly peck buttons on it. She sang Blondie's "Heart of Glass" as something approaching a polka. The whole experience seems to be something of a goof to her, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Not every pop song, after all, has to be a three-minute emotional apocalypse, and we need songs about text-messages and asshole bouncers just as much as we need songs about heartbreak. The one Alright, Still track Allen didn't play last night was "Take What You Take," a big Natasha Bedingfield-esque stomper she's already admitted to hating. From where I'm sitting, it's one of her best songs, but I can see why she'd be embarrassed by its you-can-be-anything bluster. She doesn't know whether you can be anything, and she doesn't particularly care, which is sort of refreshing.

Voice review: Frank Kogan on Lily Allen's "LDN"

Live: Blonde Redhead Vs. Machines

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:47 PM, April 11, 2007

It's gotta be the shoes

Blonde Redhead
Soho Apple Store
April 10, 2007

Plenty of good reasons exist for indie-rock bands to play in-store sets at the Apple Store, especially the one in Soho. Apple is, after all, pretty much the most important music store in the world these days, and if a stunt like that can get them iTunes front-page placement, it's worth a hundred Virgin Megastore acoustic sets. And the Soho Apple Store is actually a surprisingly functional venue: an actual stage, a whole lot of seats, a crystal-clear sound mix, relatively clear sightlines, and enough second-floor space to fit in at least a couple of hundred onlookers. And it's free, which is probably the reason why the line outside the venue last night wrapped around the block and why some of the people who got in must've been waiting for hours; everyone loves free stuff. But there's still something deeply wrong about seeing a downtown underground-rock institution like Blonde Redhead in such an antiseptic spot. For one thing, the building's sharp lines and minimalist geometric design clash blatantly with the band's elegantly rumpled art-deco messthetic. For another, the very concept of the record-store set, with all the casual access it implies, doesn't really mesh with a band as elegantly aloof as this one, whose members tend to play with their backs to the audience and who barely even make eye contact with each other, let alone us. Most glaringly, though, the Apple Store is a temple to technology, and Blonde Redhead seem to hate machines. That's not to say they're Luddites; onstage last night, they used vintage synths and electronic drum-pads and sequencers along with the usual guitar-bass-drums, and on one song, Kazu Makino sang along with backing-tape vocodered guide-vocals that meshed beautifully with her own. Even with all that accompaniment, though, Blonde Redhead base their sound around the three members' ability to rely on each other and sink perfectly into their organic locked-in sprawl. And last night, they seemed to hate their equipment, apologizing constantly about mics that sounded just fine to me. After three songs, Amedeo Pace addressed the audience for the first time: "It's a little strange playing here."

A couple of months ago, I wrote a review of the new Kristin Hersh album for Pitchfork, and I noted that her previous solo albums had all been released on the 4AD label and that this one, which Yep Roc released in the US, seemed to be missing the label's goth-pop aesthetic, which had bled a little bit into all of those previous albums. Some guy wrote me a huffy email to tell me that 4AD wasn't a goth label and that it never really was. So maybe some clarification was in order: I was using a weird and nebulous sort of personal definition of goth. I didn't mean that every band in 4AD history imitates Jim Morrison and wears black eyeliner and waves candelabras at the camera in their videos. What I meant is that those bands tended to prize a sort of soft-focus dread-infused mystery over sharp, concrete specifics and tangible melodies. Instruments smear into each other, vocals come loaded down with echo, lyrics rarely name names. Using that definition, pretty much the only 4AD band I can name that isn't at least a little bit goth is Belly; even the Pixies sort of qualify. As for 4AD's more recent signings, TV on the Radio's towering drone-pop and Celebration's damaged cabaret and even the muffled full-band production on the last four Mountain Goats albums could all fit under the umbrella, but no band makes a better case for the label's continuing gothness than Blonde Redhead. The band might've started out as Sonic Youth disciples, but their spiky guitar-noise gradually mutated into something way more elusive and cosmopolitan and seductive. Makino is Japanese, and the Pace twins are Italian, so all the lyrics come from people who speak English as their second language, which lends them a beguiling opacity. Simone Pace's drums fall into infinite-repeat grooves, but they leave holes in the rhythm, and the guitars and keyboards fill them up with spidery, intertwining rushes. As dark and tangled as their songs can be, though, they still have a underlying Velocity Girl sort of sweet romanticism to them. It's real opium-den music, comforting in its vagueness, and so 4AD is a perfect home for them.

But 23, their new album, actually suffers a bit for its toe-dips into oceanic shoegazer whirl. The band's last few albums had Fugazi's Guy Piccioto behind the boards, and nobody does intimate out-music like that dude. But the band recruited My Bloody Valentine/Nine Inch Nails producer Alan Moulder to shape 23, and as Shawn Bosler writes on Pitchfork this morning, the results obscure the still-quite-pretty songs behind a few too many layers of big effects-pedal trickery. That sort of thing can work for a band like Nine Inch Nails, one whose sound is built for arenas. But Blonde Redhead's music is small and private, and they need analog nuance to sound their best. Those songs sounded better last night without all those layers of whoosh. At one point, I went to the bathroom, and the extra wall muffling everything made it all sound better still. They've got some bald guy playing bass for them onstage, and he builds up their bottom-end without compromising their slink, walking a tight line. Still, the bassist probably wasn't entirely necessary; when he watched them play their drawn-out final note from the side of the stage, nobody really missed him. Onstage as on record, the band depends on the assured interplay of Makino and the Pace twins; they find relaxed but tricky grooves and then stretch them out, never rushing toward their climaxes. They only played six songs last night, but all those songs unfolded according to their own logic and only ended when they were good and ready, spiraling outward into slow concentric circles. This band hit its apex seven years ago on Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, the album where they found their ideal groove. They've only released two albums since then, but it's almost a shame to hear them pushing themselves when they can do that stoned-pulse thing for days. If they knew how good they sounded last night, they wouldn't have apologized about their mics.

Voice review: Hilary Chute on Blonde Redhead's Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons

Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero: First Impressions

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:28 PM, April 10, 2007

"Noisy new songs"? Dude, come on

Pretty Hate Machine is probably always going to be my favorite Nine Inch Nails album because it's the least fully-formed. In a lot of ways, it's a Human League album, except with punchier guitars and vocals from the Bright Eyes tortured Midwestern sincerity school, which is pretty much the exact opposite of Phil Oakey's arch British sneer. Trent Reznor may have been trying with all his might to rip off the Chicago Wax Trax industrial scene, but everything came smeared in a huge, resonant pop sensibility that gave all his woe-is-me theatrics their power. Bits and pieces of metal and industrial peeked their head out from time to time, but the pathos came straight from Depeche Mode and New Order and the Cure. For me, Reznor has always worked best when he's been at his most confused and confounded about the enormous instinctive power of his songwriting gift. Or maybe that's just a projection; Reznor is certainly a skilled craftsman, and maybe he spends so much time between Nine Inch Nails albums because he's working out all his arena-sized hooks, not finding ways to elegantly distress them. Still, I like the idea of Reznor as the conflicted intuitive pop genius, the guy who tries to make difficult art but who always manages to churn out transcendent tantrum-rock in the process. That conflict is all over Year Zero, the Nine Inch Nails album that leaked to the internet late last week. Reznor's been building up to the album's release by preying on his fans' obsessiveness in totally ingenious ways, leaving USB drives with new songs in the bathrooms of his concerts and hiding clues to the album's various meanings and subtexts all over the internet. It's a smart move; Reznor clearly understands the nature of high-school fan-devotion, and he's flatting his online cult by letting its members play Da Vinci Code detectives. Year Zero is ostensibly a concept album about life in a near-future totalitarian dystopia, and naturally there's already a few bazillion message-board posts' worth of fans trying to decode its messages. But my first impression of Year Zero isn't that it's a Radiohead-style hall of mirrors, and I feel pretty confident that more listens won't reveal some overriding buried truths. But there's stuff going on in there that's a lot more interesting, to me at least, than Trent's big grand-guignol opus ambitions. What I like about the albums is its constant warring impulses; it's like the album can't decide whether it's a rarified cult object or a mass-market arena-goth album, so it splits the difference between the two.

Reznor's always had a soft spot of deep-immersion genre-fucking iconoclast types, playing patron to guys like Aphex Twin and Meat Beat Manifesto at various points in the past. Lately, he's been messing around with those guys' spiritual descendants, showing up for some guest-bleating on El-P's new album and bringing TV on the Radio on tour, even singing with them on some nights. And Year Zero pulls inspiration from both artists at various points, taking some of El-P's spacey, discordant synth-burp counter-rhythms and TVOTR's heaving forests of amelodic guitar-fuzz. I'm guessing that Reznor considers himself a kindred spirit to these guys, and on some level he is, but he also writes these enormous mall-metal hooks that jut through the songs even when he tries to hide them behind huge noise-squalls. In fact, Year Zero might be a more musically accessible album than 2005's With Teeth, even though Reznor actually goes out of his way to make it more difficult. The problem with With Teeth was that it was boring; Reznor hadn't released an album in six years, so With Teeth was a mostly tension-free reintroduction, not an attempt to create a fucked-up masterpiece. But Reznor's pop hooks don't come out full-force when he isn't trying to make fucked-up masterpieces, so that album came off inert and underfed. In recent interviews, Reznor's been talking up the Bomb Squad, saying that their urgent layers of noise were an inspiration. And sonic chaos is a big theme on Year Zero. On most tracks, Reznor establishes a central groove, sometimes using big honking Gary Glitter drums, and then he throws all manner of static interference and squealing skronk-fuzz pyrotechnics at it, doing his best to dislodge it. Those layers of noise don't just work against the grooves; a lot of the time, they work against each other. Those tension-buildups don't always come to a moment of release, but when they do, that release always comes in the form of a huge, stomping stadium-singalong chorus, and I'm never going to get sick of those. My favorite moments are the ones where Reznor doesn't try too hard to unseat the central groove and still lets the big redemptive moments come. "The Good Stranger," for instance, has a warm, slow digital pulse, sort of like one of the prettier songs that the Chemical Brother usually bury on the second halves of their albums, and Reznor lets that pulse continue unmolested. Rather than his usual noise-blurts, he offsets it with huge, glacial ambient synths, which goes a long way toward driving home his fatalistic future-war lyrics.

Actually, the lyrics are probably the least interesting thing about Year Zero. I can see what he's going for, of course: the idea that totalitarian regimes bring chaos rather than order because they push everyone toward untenable extremes, sort of how the rebels in Children of Men (vague spoiler alert) end up being nearly as unsympathetic as the tyrannical regime they fight against because they lose sight of the importance of human life in the exact same way (vague spoiler over). On "God Given," I'm pretty sure Trent's playing a seductive but morally suspect rebel leader, calling himself the chosen one and whispering evilly. The album's fixation on surveillance and control extends to the video for "Survivalism," a neat little exercise in big-brother paranoia. The problem, of course, is that Trent's whole new-world-order thing has been done to death. "Capital G" has trent singing in a ridiculously goofy dumb-guy voice and not-too-obliquely referring to the current administration: "I pushed a button and elected him to office / And he pushed a button and dropped a bomb." And "Vessel" is a completely tired authority-as-invasive-sex metaphor. (Trent: "Same thing we've heard a hundred times before." Exactly!) Maybe the album's biggest problem is that Trent never quite plays the tortured, confused outsider, always his best role. Rather than sitting next to us and giving his own emotional reaction the the devastation he foresees, he tries to embody that violence in his own vocals. But Trent's bigger when he tries to be smaller. In the grandly dubious pantheon of dystopian concept albums, Year Zero is incalculably better than stuff like Deltron 3030 or Billy Idol's Cyberpunk, even if that's not really saying much of anything, and its success comes mostly by sheer virtue of its titanic hooks. But its most affecting moments are its most quiet and resigned. "Zero-Sum," the closing song, is a sort of gospel-tinged lament where Trent admits that he's as guilty as the rest of us, that it's impossible to blame the fucked-upedness of the world on shadowy authority figures. His voice wells up in a multitracked chorus: "Shame on us for what we have done." For once, he's one of us.

Voice review: J. Edward Keyes on Nine Inch Nails' With Teeth
Voice review: Scott Seward on Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile

DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over": A Scientific Assessment

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:38 PM, April 9, 2007

This guy again

Last week, the video for the DJ Khaled all-star posse cut "We Takin' Over" leaked to the internet and got a whole bunch of people all excited, mostly because it's awesome. The instant internet buzz for "We Takin' Over" was pretty surprising, though, when you consider that it's the second awesome all-star DJ Khaled posse cut in a year and that the last one, "Holla At Me," never got anything like this level of notice even though it was one of my favorite songs of the year and I wrote an entry about it and everything. I was talking to a few friends about it last week, and they all attributed this phenomenon to the videos; "Holla At Me" was a no-budget piece of shit, and "We Takin' Over" is the sort of virtuosically glossy blast of blockbuster nonsense that gets people excited about the song even if they didn't like it that much to start with. That explanation makes sense, but it doesn't make "Holla At Me" any less unappreciated. It's a slow day, so I figured I'd use infallibly accurate scientific techniques to figure out which song is better. That's actually a pretty easy proposition, considering that both of them follow pretty much the exact same blueprint: propulsive, synthed-out electro bangers with five rappers (three of whom appear on both songs) and no real point beyond the general celebration of those rappers' collective hegemony. It should also be noted that DJ Khaled himself apparently has little to do with the quality of either of these songs; he didn't produce either one, and his participation seems to be limited to annoying hypeman shouts on both, though I guess we should give him credit for convincing so many rappers to show up on the same tracks together. Khaled remains a shitty mixtape DJ, fairly good producer, and constant remix-video presence who somehow managed to put together a pretty good official album on Koch last year and who seems to be on track to put out another one this year. Let's not talk about him anymore.

The videos: R. Malcolm Jones vs. Gil Green. This category actually matters, since these are both basically event-songs and event-songs need to have splashy videos to make maximum impact. As previously noted, "We Takin' Over" wins this category in a walk. R. Malcolm Jones' "Holla At Me" video is murky quick-cut camcorder videography, DMX cameos, and Fat Joe debuting his new ass-ugly grill with the Puerto Rican flag made out of colored diamonds. Gil Green's "We Takin' Over," in contrast, has a plot and a budget and a backwards car-chase and a gloriously fake newscaster intro. Insanely bombastic statements like this one are the reason God invented rap videos, and I have no idea how Koch was able to justify paying so much for it. Winner: "We Takin' Over." ("HAM": 0, "WTO": 1)

The beats: Cool & Dre vs. Danjahandz. Danja's beat for "We Takin' Over" might be the best thing he's done yet without Timbaland: swollen choral organs, decaying synth-bleeps, simplistic drum-rattles. It keeps the track moving along at a brisk pace, and it gets better-than-usual performances out of ponderous slugs like Rick Ross and Fat Joe. But it doesn't have quite the same impact as Cool & Dre's track for "Holla At Me," which swipes the humming, oscillating beeps of Afrika Bambaataa's "Looking for the Perfect Beat," making it one of those tracks that's pretty much guaranteed to give me an instant rush of joy whenever I hear it. The tracks slows those beeps down a little, but it doesn't really tamper with them much, and it's always fun to hear producers grabbing something from rap's distant past and conclusively proving that it hasn't aged at all. Winner: "Holla At Me." ("HAM": 1, "WTO": 1)

The hooks: Paul Wall vs. Akon. Not much of a contest, unfortunately. Paul Wall just mumbles some shit on "Holla At Me"; it's serviceable enough, but it's not exactly genius. On "We Takin' Over," Akon turns in one of those airy, autotuned earworms that triumphantly refuses to leave my head. There's a reason why this guy's dominating pretty much every radio format in existence. Winner: "We Takin' Over." ("HAM": 1, "WTO": 2)

The first verse: Lil Wayne vs. T.I. This should be a more exciting battle, considering that it's the only part of both songs that allows me to put two A-list rappers head-to-head. But Wayne so completely sleeps through his "Holla At Me" opening verse that he effectively keeps the contest from getting too interesting. His one half-memorable punchline involves calling his girl "Miss Stevie Wonder" because she ain't looking at y'all, and his delivery is lazy and indolent enough that someone probably told him Paul Wall was coming after him and he probably didn't need to work that hard to upstage anyone. Considering how many great verses Wayne recorded for throwaway mixtape tracks last year, it's tough to see why he'd fall asleep so completely on an actual single, albeit one that wasn't his. T.I. doesn't exactly bring his A-game either, but he's all crisp efficiency, rattling off the names of regions and staying in the beat's pockets with effortless calm. Wayne is consistently a better rapper than T.I., but he doesn't quite have T.I.'s natural charisma, and he can't get away with punching the clock the same way T.I. can. Winner: "We Takin' Over." ("HAM": 1, "WTO": 3)

The second verse: Paul Wall vs. Rick Ross. Paul's "Holla At Me" verse is total Southern-rap boilerplate, notable mostly for a weird line where he talks about the I.N.S. chasing him. He manages not to compare himself to a mailbox for once, but he erases that goodwill with one real disgusting line: "leave a bitch back all nutted like Almond Joy," not an image I need to have this guy putting in my head. Paul is generally a better rapper than Ross, but Ross always does better than usual on fast, buoyant beats, since he doesn't get the time to narcotically repeat the same words over and over; Trina's "Told Y'all" is probably still his finest moment. He sounds OK on "We Takin' Over," and I like that he says "black flag on the left" even though he's talking about gang shit instead of seminal hardcore bands, so he wins a tight race between generically middling rappers. Winner: "We Takin' Over." ("HAM": 1, "WTO": 4)

The third verse: Fat Joe vs. Fat Joe. I can't believe I'm about to compare a fucking Fat Joe verse to another fucking Fat Joe verse, but Khaled has some vague connection to Terror Squad, so Joe is going to keep showing up on these tracks even though he's definitely the worst thing about both songs. On "Holla At Me," he barely manages to stay on top of the beat, and he has one unintentionally funny line about "she a motherfucking sex machine." He's a little more animated on "We Takin' Over," and he doesn't have any lines quite as laughably dumb. He says nothing both times, but he's just slightly more assured on "We Takin' Over," so that verse wins and locks up the victory for its song. Winner: "We Takin' Over." ("HAM": 1, "WTO": 5)

The fourth verse: Rick Ross vs. Baby. Ross's "Holla At Me" verse is fast and tolerable in the exact same ways that his "We Takin' Over" verse is; when this guy keeps his profile low and just stays on top of the beat, he's a lot easier to take. The worst thing about the otherwise-great new trend of all-star remixes is that Baby apparently needs to show up on every single one of them despite the fact that he can't rap and never could. At the very least, "We Takin' Over" limits Baby's involvement to a couple of bars and turns his verse into an intro to Lil Wayne's scene-stealer. Still, improbably enough, Ross wins on both of his verses. Winner: "Holla At Me." ("HAM": 2, "WTO": 4)

The fifth verse: Pitbull vs. Lil Wayne. This is actually closer than you'd think. Pitbull's nowhere near Wayne as a rapper, but he still turns in a great cleanup verse, probably the best moment on "Holla At Me." He shouts out Luther Campbell and does that there where he gets all excited and yells his last couple of lines in Spanish, which I totally love. But he's not quite up to the challenge of defeating Wayne's monumental closing verse, the best one on "We Takin' Over." Listening to "We Takin' Over" after "Holla At Me," it's amazing how much better Wayne's gotten in the past year; even his bullshit guest-verses feel like events. Here, he skips all over the beat, pulling out his dandyish Slick Rick talking-to-kids delivery and rhyming "Visa speak" with "Easter pink." It really shouldn't sound so easy. Final winner: "We Takin' Over." ("HAM": 2, "WTO": 6) Wow, that wasn't even close. "Holla At Me" came first, and it's still my sentimental favorite, but I can't argue with those results.

Let's Never Mention the Three 6 Mafia Reality Show Again

Posted by Tom Breihan at 7:28 PM, April 6, 2007

Throw em in the mosh pit, stomp em in the mosh pit, swing your motherfucking fist and beat em in the mosh pit

I guess everyone has to have a moment like this, a real soul-destroying glimpse at a favorite artist losing the plot and making terrible decisions for even worse reasons. I guess it's a rite of passage. The thing that kills me isn't just that I should've seen it coming; it's that I sort of did. Look: it's not like Three 6 Mafia are this unimpeachable artistic powerhouse or that they've spent a career resisting their most commercial urges before finally throwing their hands up and jumping in with everyone else. It's not like I have a lot of illusions about this group. They've always had their own aesthetic, but that aesthetic probably owes its existence as much to circumstance as to the artistic visions of DJ Paul and Juicy J. They're not maverick geniuses who formed in a cultural vacuum. Their monstrous, monolithic horrorcrunk style has precedents in Memphis get-buck music and in the thumping bombast of the No Limit house producers, as well as probably a few dozen out-of-the-trunk Southern rappers and producers who I've never heard and who I'll probably never hear. They're the products of a scene as much as they are the pioneers of one. And it's not like they never tried to become popular. They've been part of the major-label machine for a decade, and they've knowingly crafted novelty hits, even showing up to the 2000 Source Awards brandishing baby-bottles full of cough syrup. They've made unwatchable straight-to-video action movies with absolutely no artistic value beyond their soundtrack albums. They're also cold, calculating businessmen; Memphis is full of rappers they've used and discarded, and they're down to two members now because they've fired or alienated virtually everyone ever included in their once-teeming ranks. Since their shocking Oscar win last year, they've grabbed every crass mass-exposure opportunity that's come their way, popping up on My Super Sweet 16 and Studio 60 and every other TV show that would have them. But it's still tough for me to describe just how much despair and humiliation I felt watching last night's premiere episode of Adventures in Hollyhood, their new MTV reality-sitcom. If you've ever admired anything about this group, do yourself a favor and forget that it exists.

The premise of Adventures in Hollyhood is thin and bankrupt even by reality-TV standards: after winning their Oscar, DJ Paul and Juicy J move to Hollywood and do whatever they can to capitalize on their sudden and unexpected mainstream fame. They borrow a rented suburban house from their manager, who constantly lectures them not to cause too much ruckus or the landlord will kick them out. They take meetings with Hollywood bottom-feeders. They introduce themselves to their uptight white neighbors. Their assistant pisses on Jennifer Love Hewitt's lawn. Hilarity ensues. Watching the show, you get the impression that these guys are dumb, bewildered nobodies with a freak success on their hands. There's no indication that they built a regional independent music empire from nothing, that they've perfected a sound and worked with some of rap's biggest names, that they're artists and craftsmen rather than stupid, lucky yokels. Even Being Bobby Brown treated its subject with more respect and dignity. We get quick and deeply unsatisfying little glimpses of them at work. Asked to record a song for the Jackass Number Two soundtrack (a particularly shameless bit of MTV cross-promotion), they tell each other, "OK, we gotta make this crazy." (They also use the exact same uber-clean guitar-laced beat they already used on "Crazy," the last track on protege Lil Wyte's Phinally Phamous.) Mostly though, we just see them mugging for the cameras and doing puerile, over-the-top shit: hanging out their car windows to catcall joggers, forcing the one neighbor who shoes up to their barbecue to listen to "Slob on My Knob," stuff like that. The show itself treats them with a deeply problematic casual condescension; as they drive from Memphis to California, an Indiana Jones-style cartoon map traces a crooked line, and their car leaves a trail of diamonds behind it. The DJ Paul and Juicy J we see on Adventures in Hollyhood are extensions of the DJ Paul and Juicy J who show up on the closing skits of every Hypnotize Camp Posse album, acting out and frantically hyping all their upcoming projects. As for the DJ Paul and Juicy J who actually make the albums that come before those skits, they're totally absent thus far.

The weirdest thing about all this is that, as far as I can tell, Paul and Juicy are totally complicit in all this buffoonery; it's not like they've been manipulated by scheming MTV execs. The logo of their production company shows up at the end of the episode, and pretty much every single scene is painfully, obviously staged, somehow even less genuine and spontaneous than a random scene from Choices. So maybe I should be happy that one of my favorite rap groups is getting money and exposure, that Project Pat and Lil Wyte are suddenly getting face-time on MTV when late-night BET would barely touch them a couple of years ago. After all, the goofy-ass celebrity personas they've been creating for themselves haven't had a huge effect on the music they've been making. Project Pat's Crook By Da Book was a respectable if low-key entry in their catalog, and they also had a hand in maybe the best new rap song to emerge this year; they sampled Willie Hutch's "I Choose You" to make the transcendently light beat for UGK and OutKast's "International Players Anthem." (As Noz points out here, they're reusing that beat too, since they already used it for Project Pat's "Choose U," but that's one of their best tracks, so never mind.) But it's still almost unbearable to watch the people responsible for so much eerie, cathartic, immersive music debasing themselves to play tone-deaf modern-day Beverly Hillbillies. They're better than that.

Status Ain't Hood's Quarterly Report: The Year's Best Singles

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:57 PM, April 5, 2007

His heart bleeded, girl

This year has yielded a whole lot of great mp3-blog material, songs that fly in from the margins but go straight for immediate-gratification stimulus-rush. I didn't really list any of those songs, though, since none of them have really become singles, at least not in the way I define the term. For me to list a song here, I have to feel that it's made its way into the air, that I'm as likely to hear it coming out of a passing car as I am to hear it coming out of my laptop speakers. Some of that has to do with the weird little cultural bubble I live in; LCD Soundsystem's "North American Scum" definitely isn't a hit single by any definition, but it's tunneled its way into a lot of conversations that I've had lately, so it counts. DJ Jazzy Jeff and Peedi Crack's "Brand New Funk 2K7," Glass Candy's "I Always Say Yes," Dizzee Rascal's "Pussyhole," and Kavinsky's "Testarossa Autodrive" are all songs I really like, but I don't feel like any of them has quite made their impact yet. The only time I've encountered any of them anywhere unexpected was when Diplo played "Pussyhole" last weekend, which sort of doesn't count. You should definitely Hypemachine all of them right now, though. Also, the video for DJ Khaled's "We Takin' Over" came out a couple of days too late for the song to qualify, but fucking fuck.

1. Justin Timberlake: "What Goes Around.../...Comes Around." It's been around for months now, and the video is straight dogshit, but I still haven't gotten over the song. As soft and soothing as the song itself may be, it's tough to overstate how brave and fully realized a move it was: a boy-band R&B guy and a Southern rap and R&B producer doing a swollen six-and-a-half-minute emo-heartbreak anthem, beating Lite-FM content-providers like Coldplay and Snow Patrol at their own game, keeping their chokehold on pop radio in the process. "Cry Me a River" was certainly a precedent, but Timbaland and Timberlake stayed in their own lane there, turning R&B and teenpop inside-out and finding endless room for play within those genres' borders but never really moving outside them. "What Goes Around..." is a startlingly successful leap into unmapped territory. Musically, "What Goes Around..." takes all the elements of first-rate waiting-room music and reorganizes and builds on them. It keeps all the original strengths of that stuff: the subdued and melancholy strings, the lightly cresting waves of guitar, the vulnerable-but-huge falsetto chorus. But it also adds its own sonic flourishes: the big bass hum, the swarming snares, the airy violins that dart in and out of the mix. And Justin's performance is, as Zach Baron wrote here, "some real can't-let-go shit," an unapologetic wallow in transcendent personal misery all the more satisfying and resonant for its pettiness. The story about this song is that it's really about Justin's friend getting dumped by the girl who played Kim on 24, but that's just a cover and everyone knows it; you don't get this destroyed when you're talking about someone else's problems. The best Coldplay song since "Clocks."

Voice review: Rob Harvilla on Justin Timberlake at Madison Square Garden

2. Bloc Party: "I Still Remember." Best Coldplay song since "What Goes Around..."; too bad the video is almost as bad. A lot of people aren't too thrilled that Bloc Party has moved away from the nervy, angular jitter-punk of its debut album toward a grander, darker, presumably more commercial Echo & the Bunnymen-type steez, but from where I'm sitting, A Weekend in the City is a powerful example of a band willing itself to break past its limitations and make something bigger than they'd ever allowed themselves to think possible. Other than maybe ?uestlove, Matt Tong is apparently the only drummer left alive who will allow a little bit of jungle influence to creep into his rhythms, and that off-kilter burnt-concrete paranoia just drips off almost every song on the album. But "I Still Remember" is the moment where the clouds break and a delirious warmth comes flooding in. It's also the moment where Kele Okereke's mostly-terrible lyrics suddenly congeal into into something tangible and real. Instead of going for big voice-of-a-generation pronouncements, he scales everything back, remembering a long-passed afternoon with someone he wishes was still in his life. The fact that that person was a boy is almost incidental, but it only serves to make the song's longing that much more poignant; it's hard not to sympathize with this guy who wouldn't allow himself to talk about his sexuality even as he was becoming a pop star remembering himself as a bottled-up kid afraid to let anything slip. The little disconnected images of gestures and facial expressions add up to a lot more than the melodramatic "North London is a vampire" shit he kicks on the rest of the album; the specificity is what makes them stick. When the liquid guitars soar outward and the wordless backing vocals flare up on the chorus, the pathos becomes damn near unbearable. Also, I heard this song in the Gap a couple of weeks ago and it made me want to buy a backpack or something, which is always a good sign.

3. Young Buck: "Get Buck." Not a Coldplay song at all. The beat for "Get Buck" is probably my favorite thing that Polow da Don had done yet, which is saying something. For the first eighteen seconds, it's epic spaceship-funk: terrified choral gasps, woozy guitar-plunks, a wibbly synth that phases back and forth between channels. And then that world-destroying tuba-thump comes in and pulls everything closer to the ground, making it bigger and harder and more devastating. There's an itchy bongo drum in the background; you can barely hear it underneath all that stomp, but it lends everything else this sort of nervous immediacy. And Polow keeps layering on new bits of music throughout the track, which I love; he doesn't just make a beat and let it keep playing unchanged throughout the song. When the song gets closer to the chorus, everything gets faster and more frantic, like fast-food employees scurrying around to clean up their restaurant before the chain's CEO walks in. Instruments drop in once and then disappear for the rest of the song, like the quick little trumpet-stab after Buck says "and body-rocking," which never comes back. The enormous trombone-riff that fills the last twenty seconds could anchor a track by itself, but here it's just another piece of the behemoth. Buck doesn't say much of anything, but he sounds exhilarated and overjoyed, like he's been waiting his entire life for a beat like this to come along. Most rappers wouldn't know what to do with something this huge and this cluttered, but Buck does: he uses his voice like a club, swinging and smashing and pushing it, fighting his way to the top of the mix and barking wildly just so he can stay there. Judging by what 50 Cent said on Hot 97 a couple of days ago, Buck could be on his way out of G-Unit, and that's good; Buck doesn't need 50's help to make bangers like this one.

4. Timbaland feat. Nelly Furtado & Justin Timberlake: "Give It to Me." I've barely been living with the thing for a week, but Shock Value's weaknesses are already starting to outweigh its charms. "Give It to Me," though, still sticks the way it first did when it leaked out late last year. Part of the charm is the whole low-key family-affair aspect of the thing. The starpower involved is ridiculous, and everyone involved other than maybe Furtado really lives for making these huge great-leap-forward statements, but that's not what they're doing here. Instead, it seems like this group of friends who just happen to be extremely talented and famous all getting together again to mess around and talk shit, sort of like Timbaland's version of Ocean's Twelve or a group blog or something. Timbaland disses Scott Storch, of course, but he doesn't do it in some big throwing-the-gauntlet publicity-stunt gesture; he's just issuing a quick warning in the middle of a verse about how great he is. Justin's target is a little more mysterious; depending on who you listen to, it's Janet Jackson or Kevin Federline or Prince or someone else. I sort of hope it's not Prince, but then could you imagine how funny that feud might get? Whoever he's talking about, it's fun to hear him put on that ill-fitting tough-talk rap voice, and his boasts have the same casual, tossed-off quality that Timbaland's do. As for Furtado, she has no target, and she can barely finish a sentence on-beat, but Tim warps and chops up her vocals into a weird dubby echo-effect to make up for it. The beat itself is, of course, the big draw here, and it's the sort of effortlessly elegant thing that could've been moldering on one of Tim's hard-drives for years, but that doesn't diminish the insistent brilliance of its mocking, otherworldly synth line or its ascending layers of drums. Part of the problem with Shock Value is that Tim tries too hard, thrashing around so he can incorporate as many ill-advised pop genres as possible. "Give It to Me" works because it throws all those tendencies out the window, giving us a chance to hear a master doing what he does best. That sort of thing never gets old.

5. UGK: "The Game Belongs to Me." If this and "International Players Anthem" and "Next Up" are any indication, I really shouldn't be worrying about the new UGK album. On those other two tracks, Pimp and Bun manage to pull their guests into their world rather than awkwardly attempting to adjust their styles to fit their guests. And that UGK style is one of the most enduring in rap, a humanely downcast combination of sweet, organic Southern soul and dense, banging old-school drum-programming. They might be outsourcing some of their production, but they're finding people whose strengths complement theirs. Still, neither of those tracks has quite the eternal warmth of "The Game Belongs to Me," where Bun and Pimp sink determinedly back into their comfort zones and do away with any outside help. Pimp's track is a thing of beauty: fluttering guitars piled into undulating layers and wrapped around slow Ant Banks drum-ticks. Pimp's nasal singsong honk sounds like a natural outgrowth of the track; he knows exactly how to use one of rap's thickest accents. Bun's gravelly boom is just as intuitive, but his syllables come in quicker clumps, pushing and poking the track around rather than just rising out of it. They know what they're doing. Now if Jive will just go ahead and release the fucking album, we'll be set.

6-10. 8Ball & MJG feat. Project Pat: "Relax and Take Notes"; LCD Soundsystem: "North American Scum"; Joss Stone: "Tell Me 'Bout It"; Beyonce feat. Shakira: "Beautiful Liar"; Silversun Pickups: "Lazy Eye."

Status Ain't Hood's Quarterly Report: The Year's Best Albums

Posted by Tom Breihan at 4:15 PM, April 4, 2007

So I bust rights and lefts, lefts and rights

I don't know if the past three months have been great for albums, but they've definitely been very good. I've only heard two albums that I love without reservation, but I've heard a whole lot of albums that I like a lot. I couldn't find room on this list for a whole mess of worthy albums: Arcade Fire, Jesu, Gui Boratto, Dalek, Deerhunter, Sean Price, Crime Mob, Patrick Wolf. I also didn't include Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance, even though I totally love that album, since it's only out on Norway or something and I have no idea when it might've been released; it would've been #3 on this list. So here's what made the cut.

1. Prodigy: Return of the Mac. Most everyone seems to feel the same way about this one as I do, but the one overriding criticism has been that P has completely deteriorated as a technical rapper in the past few years. That's true, but he actually makes that deterioration work for him on this album. There's a cold, angry weariness in his voice here; he's like the sneering nihilist kid of The Infamous after more than a decade of trials and disappointments and pain have weighed him down and dampened his pride. There's a lot of "New York made me this way" talk, which brings with it the implicit recognition that "this way" isn't a great way to be. And the ground-out weariness of his voice works perfectly with the humid, crackling warmth of Alchemist's production. Al samples the hell out of a very particular era of soul music, a time when lush orchestration and psych-rock guitars crept into the music and film companies were tapping geniuses like James Brown and Curtis Mayfield and Al Green and Isaac Hayes to do the soundtracks to cheap quickie action movies. Alchemist, of course, grew up white and privileged in Beverly Hills, and so he probably picked up his image of New York from afar, watching movies like Taxi Driver and Escape from New York and Across 110th Street, but his idea of the city meshes beautifully with the dangerous dystopia that Prodigy has long depicted. Neither one of them seems to have a lot at stake with this album, seeing as how they originally intended it to be a mixtape, and so there's no half-realized commercial-radio pandering, just two extremely gifted artists taking pride in their craft and figuring out what they loved about music in the first place. It's over in less than 45 minutes. I'd love to see other rappers take note of what they've done here, but I'm not holding my breath. I've got a larger review of the album coming out in a couple of weeks, so I don't want to go on too much, but Return of the Mac really is an unqualified triumph on every level except maybe the commercial one.

2. LCD Soundsystem: Sound of Silver. Last night, I was getting a hometown-nostalgia fix watching an old episode of Homicide on DVD, and the episode in question included a couple of montages set to Soul Coughing's "Super Bon Bon." A couple of things occurred to me. First: I used to love Soul Coughing, even if I haven't spent five minutes thinking about them in the past five years. Second: Wow, LCD Soundsystem really sounds a lot like Soul Coughing. The more I thought about it, the more similarities I found: both bands share roots in New York's downtown nightclub culture, both had musicians who pursued and achieved their own ticcy-but-muscular grooves, both bands' frontmen usually went for a sort of sardonic nasal sing-speak thing. (It's not a particularly original point; after my LCD Soundsystem interview ran, someone sent me an e-mail saying that one of the things he likes about LCD is how much they sound like Cake.) But the big difference between Soul Coughing and LCD Soundsystem is in the disparate ways they approached their similar ideas. Soul Coughing foregrounded their nonsensical free-associative lyrics; they were a self-consciously weird rock band who incorporated a few tricks from dance music without ever plunging headlong into it. Even LCD Soundsystem's best lyrics, which are pretty great, are basically just an afterthought; the band has a lot more to do with dance than with rock. I loved the first LCD album, but Sound of Silver is an improvement in every way, mostly because the band sounds less like Soul Coughing than it ever did. The grooves are harder and more focused, the reaching-for-prettiness moments are woozy and diffuse but also fully realized, and James Murphy's vocals have almost altogether given up on arch sarcasm and moved ever closer to dizzy joy. That last point is why those new songs all registered as towering anthems on Friday night. All of a sudden, this band is on our side, not taking sidelong shots at us. Euphoria always beats irony. "New York I Love You" is the glaring exception to that new approach, and I'm happy to ignore it, but even that song has a fond sweetness and an earned wisdom to it. I may have completely forgotten about Soul Coughing in the years since they broke up, but I don't think I'm going to do the same thing with LCD Soundsystem.

Voice feature: Tom Breihan on LCD Soundsystem

3. !!!: Myth Takes. Rumors of dance-punk's death have been greatly exaggerated. Or maybe not. Bands like the Rapture and LCD Soundsystem and !!!, all veterans of the circa-2002 tsunami of dance-punk hype, are releasing great albums, but they're doing it by getting further and further away from the sonic values of circa-2002 indie-rock and post-hardcore. I interviewed John Pugh from !!! a couple of months ago for D.I.W., and he told me how his band had been lumped in with that whole wave but that they'd never been particularly interested in Gang of Four. Instead, they were trying to evoke Chic and Funkadelic and Off the Wall, knowing full-well that their awkwardly spazzy art-school tendencies would bleed through. !!! had released a handful of great singles before Myth Takes, but they'd never released a great album, mostly because their punk roots kept sabotaging them. The muffled and tinny production, the scratchy guitars, and the cartoonish, grandstanding vocals kept working against the grooves they were trying to work up. That nervousness is still audible on Myth Takes, but for once they're not foregrounding it; they're just letting it leak out as it will. And so nothing really gets in the way of the lush, intricate push of the percussion or the psychedelic sweep of the guitars. Out Hud, !!!'s sister band, broke up last year, and that band was always more assured in their single-minded techno-funk; I have a theory that the three former Out Hud members still in !!! applied some of their old band's rippling smoothness to this album. Pugh couldn't really say if that's what was going on, but either way, this is the album I'd always hoped !!! had in them.

Voice review: Mikael Wood on !!!'s Myth Takes

4. Ponys: Turn Out the Lights. Near the beginning of every year, an album comes along and grabs me by executing used-up rock tropes with a sort of unearthly grace powerful enough to make me forget who they're ripping off in the first place. Last year, it was Band of Horses' Everything All the Time. The year before, it was the self-titled Black Mountain album. These records can be easy to ignore because they so steadfastly refuse to reinvent the wheel, but they sneak up on you if you let them. Turn Out the Lights may not be quite the work of glorious pastiche that the Band of Horses and Black Mountain records were, but its warm, glowing fuzz and its anthemic soar are powerfully satisfying in the exact same ways. A lot of people who loved the first two Ponys albums don't have a whole lot nice to say about this one, apparently because the band has swapped out its herky-jerk garage rock for mellower, more reverbed-out Velvet Underground stuff. But they pull off that ebb-and-flow with such expert panache that I keep thinking of the Dandy Warhols 13 Tales of Urban Bohemia, an album I really, really loved. As we get deeper into spring, Turn Out the Lights album is only going to get more burn from me; on a nice day, there's nothing I'd rather hear than a perfectly subdued wah-wah pedal freakout.

Voice review: Lindsey Thomas on the Ponys' Turn Out the Lights

5. Young Buck: Buck the World. So it's not the succession of dark, stormy bangers, the Straight Outta Cashville Part 2 I wanted. It's still an hour-plus of one of my favorite voices in rap, that grizzled sandpaper bark that sounds equally comfortable mourning fallen family members and issuing grim death-threats. And Buck is a very smart rapper in a lot of ways. Pretty much everyone else in G-Unit, including Mobb Deep on Blood Money, shoots for this sort of lazy, unearned arrogance, a tactic that can only work when there's enough actual confidence underneath to lend credence to the swagger. But that kind of thing can lead to backlash really quickly, since it's hard to root for that arrogance when the arrogant guy is already winning. Buck is as confident as anyone else in his crew, but he swaps out that arrogance for a wounded, paranoid bluster, and so he registers as a righteous underdog even on top of these million-dollar beats. Buck the World is full of sophomore-album missteps, and I drift off for long portions of the album; Buck really shouldn't be dicking around with Chester Bennington or doing soft, wispy Hip Hop is Dead filler-track material like "U Ain't Going Nowhere." But when the album does get around to the sort of epic, punchy bangers Buck was doing more consistently on Straight Outta Cashville, the resulting charge is more than enough to carry it through its sleepier sections. When someone can emerge from rap's least likable crew sounding like an actual human being, you know he's doing something right.

6-10. The Field: From Here We Go Sublime; Devin the Dude: Waitin' to Inhale; Rich Boy: Rich Boy; Bloc Party: A Weekend in the City; Soft Circle: Full Bloom.

Status Ain't Hood Interviews Diplo

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:02 PM, April 3, 2007

Remember back when he had goofy-ass hair?

This interview has been in the works for a long time, and I finally got to do it on Saturday afternoon, when I dragged my hungover carcass over to the Tribeca Grand Hotel. Diplo was waiting in the lobby for a ride to pick him up and take him back to Philly. The previous night, Diplo had DJed at Studio B in Brooklyn at a showcase for his new label, Mad Decent. The two acts on Mad Decent, the baile funk trio Bonde do Role and the Baltimore club producer Blaqstarr, had performed earlier in the night. I'd been at the LCD Soundsystem show, so I missed all of Blaqstarr and most of Bonde do Role. But I did get there in time for about my billionth Diplo DJ set, which was as much fun as all the other ones I've witnessed, which is to say very. I've written critical things about Diplo and about the scene surrounding him in the past, including this somewhat ill-considered piece, which had led Diplo and a lot of his supporters to think that I had some sort of overriding vendetta against them. I'm not entirely sure how this happened, though; I've always considered myself something of a booster of Diplo and of the entire Hollertronix scene, and I've probably had three positives to say for every negative. A few of those negatives, though, came from something pretty ridiculous. I'd been a bit suspicious of what I saw as attempts to co-opt and exploit Baltimore club music, the mutant dance subgenre that comes from my hometown. After thinking on it for a while, though, I've decided that my position was pretty untenable. Club music isn't really mine to protect, and even if it was, I get suspicious when anyone evokes the authenticity trope in something as by-definition inauthentic and hybridized as pop music. And anyway, Spank Rock might make club-influenced music, but they don't make club music, and their stuff became a whole lot easier for me to enjoy once I started letting all that go. Diplo emailed me a while after I wrote that piece, and we've been trying to set up a face-to-face conversation since then. This interview was, among other things, a chance to clear the air with Diplo and to talk about all the ways in which internet shitstorms develop. The interview is a bit chaotic; Diplo was sitting with Blaqstarr and the 16-year-old rapper/singer Rye Rye, and he was also fielding calls on two different cell phones, so the conversation gets a bit disjointed at times, but we still got to get into some interesting territory.

So you've read my stuff before, right?

Yeah. You hate me.

No, I don't. I really don't. I like you. Why do you think I hate you?

I didn't really know your stuff. Have you always been writing for the Village Voice?

No.

You've been writing for Pitchfork as well?

Yeah, I write for Pitchfork too.

Did you review Bonde do Role's 12" back then?

I might've done a single review. [Edit: turns out I did.]

Someone said it was bad Portuguese or something. Maybe it was you. So you gave that a bad review, and then you did the Low Budget thing.

Yeah, I did that.

Which was cool, but we're all family, so everybody was really mad at you, and I was like, "Well, I'm mad, too." And it was a thing about me, but you put Low Budget in there, and that's our family, me and Naeem and all them guys. We were all mad.

Honestly, when I wrote that Friends of Diplo thing, I was in a really bad mood, and I was thinking about the whole Gutta Music thing and why it bothered me.

Yeah, but you know how distanced we all are from that now, right? Like, you understand that? I don't want to do an expose about the whole thing, but nobody was into that. I had nothing to do with that mixtape; even Low Budget didn't say [Aaron LaCrate] could use the Hollertronix name.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot, and I approached the whole thing in a really bad way to start out with, so I apologize for that. And I still haven't heard the fucking Gutta Music mixtape, but I've heard a bunch of LaCrate's shit since then. I was thinking that I didn't like it because it was fake Baltimore club. And now I think I just don't like it because it sounds like ass; I don't really care about the whole fake club thing. There's a ton of people out on the internet saying that I shouldn't be writing about rap, I don't know shit about it, I don't have credentials and all. And me getting mad at Spank Rock like that...

I think you're too involved in it because we actually know each other. You're from Baltimore. The connection's not just from music journalism; it's a little bit too close to home now. A lot of rock journalists that do hip-hop get criticized. It's all the same thing. It's all white guilt or whatever. I get it times a hundred since I started doing this stuff. I did an interview with Philadelphia Weekly with my friend Joe, who does the What's Up section of Philadelphia Weekly, and we talked about this and I said it clear. I'll send you the link to it because I don't want to repeat the stuff I said in there. I always want to have a discussion. Since we first came out with Hollertronix, I always wanted to keep it out on the table. I know exactly what I'm doing. I know exactly what it affects. I'm involved in the music industry now; I make a living. I make music and release music now. I take full responsibility for everything that I do; I just think that it's important. As long as someone realizes what they're doing and has a conscience... it's difficult, man. It goes really deep. [Blaqstarr comes over to show Diplo something on his laptop.] This is Blaqstarr. He played last night, and it was a really good show. You missed it, though, man. He does shows all the time. He plays for this new kind of crowd in Baltimore. It's totally a whole different scene, what he does there. On the EPK, you can kind of see it. The music he makes is really weird. It's pretty uncommercial stuff. Those kids all wear All-Stars and listen to Nirvana and stuff. It's real grassroots. I really like what's happening there. There's kids like him who work really hard at creating this image of being rock stars and having this pride in what they do, being really proud and really arrogant and at the same time making something really progressive. Like, this dude has the craziest falsetto voice, and I think he's a real prodigy, but he works hard. They're not into promoting how gutter they are and how ghetto and drug-oriented Baltimore is. They're really proud of who they are as musicians, and I think it shows. I think there's a lot of emotion because it is kind of weird that this kind of music has become popular so instantly and no one knows where the credit is due. People feel that they're getting taken advantage of.

But it's still not really popular.

It's not. But we have the internet, and we have this false sense of what's happening. [Diplo fields a phone call.] Yeah, it was kind of messy last night. I was real drunk, but it was a really cool show. I was super-excited. It was the first jumpoff for everything, the label and stuff. [Blaqstarr] performed, and people kind of got it, but it was maybe too much for people. People didn't know how to take it. But Rye Rye was sick, and "Superstar," people knew the lyrics, and it hit hard. I was just super-excited to see it come together. We went all night long; it was cool. I'm surprised at how well Bonde do Role has been accepted, too; they've made their mark as well. It's kind of crazy; I work with them, and they get hated on, too.

I just don't like baile funk that much.

Yeah, I think it's an acquired taste. But for what it is, what I took out of the scene from the beginning -- kids screaming, weird samples, heavy distorted bass -- they're just that. They sampled Alice in Chains. They're exactly what I liked about it in the first place, and I think they represent that. They don't make any lies about where they're from or what they do either, and I think they do a good show and that they're fun. They have their own culture around them, too. They had a really great show in Philly. They're doing like 400 kids in cities like Jacksonville. But yeah, no hard feelings about any of that. I just feel like the internet gives a false sense about what's really happening.

That's part of the reason I wanted to talk to you. I actually really like your stuff, but I also feel that some of your fans and friends, some of them do not take any criticism well at all if anyone has anything bad to say.

Nobody likes criticism. Amanda Blank, who I really like and I'd like to help her develop her style, she's not making so much music because I think she's afraid to fail. It's hard, man. It breaks my heart every time I read a bad review of what I do. People say what I do is either false or taking advantage of people. It breaks my heart because nobody wants to hear that. I make music; it's my life. I make music, and I'm an artist. It's sensitive. I'm putting my heart on my shoulder when I make music, and I'm really giving people everything. People that don't make music that are on the internet criticizing what I do, I do get mad because they don't understand what it is to be an artist and to put stuff out. Just to be a DJ is one thing, but to actually produce music and put out your product is another thing.

Well, I think there's a difference between message-board chatter and music criticism.

Yeah, but you also walk a thin line with that because your Village Voice blog is also kind of like a message board.

I don't like to think it is.

But it is kind of call-and-response. It's a discourse, at least. But when kids don't really come with it seriously and take into account what's going on, it's stupid. Having white kids talk about race in the internet is the dumbest thing in the world. It's the most overdone use of energy you could have.

It's funny, though, because indie-rap people get mad at me. They get really mad.

What do you mean by indie-rap?

Oh, you know, like Roots fans and stuff, El-P fans. They get really mad at me, but none of them ever publicly threaten to bank me. Your guys do. I know they're not going to, and I'm not nervous about it, but they do it.

That's funny. That's pretty cool, though. I think it's just a family. We all came up together, and we all got a certain sense of hate together. It's a lot of animosity in the whole crew, too, even between me and all the other DJs from the beginning, like, "Why does Diplo think he can make a record and leave Philly and shit?" By this point, they've all reached a level where they're making music and they're artists and we all understand, we all feel like we have something special in Philadelphia. In retrospect, man, we really did. When I travel, I can be in Finland and see Plastic Little 45s. We're not making the same music, but we all came from the same group of people, the same space. We all have the same beginnings. We have a scene that started from that whole urban thing manipulated. [Rye-Rye comes over to say something.]

So is there a scene that you're involved in?

Well currently, me and Mike don't throw parties no more, but there's White T's and White Belts, there's Monster. What we did, there's like five kids doing the same kind of thing. I'm not mad at those kids; they'll say they came up through Hollertronix. But we don't have to do the party, Hollertronix, anymore specifically. Everybody knows that that's where it all came from.

Well, there's a trend now in clubs generally. I remember when Never Scared came out, and for one thing it was the first time I heard anyone from outside Baltimore playing club music.

You were mad at that, too?

No, I was psyched.

We always had club music on the radio in Philly since the first time I arrived there. It was drive-time, and it was DJ Ran, and he'd totally be playing hardcore club stuff, like Scottie B stuff. I heard it in Philly, and I didn't know it was from Baltimore; it was just called party music in Philly. It was a younger kids' thing. When I was teaching school, it was an elementary school up at Logan and Broad, and those were the kids that would always be on baltimoreclubtracks.com, Technics' site, like all day. When we had internet class, it was that or porno sites. And so I was like, "What the fuck is this?" I was fascinated with it. Doing the music I was doing, that I was interested in, I thought it was the most revolutionary thing.

Never Scared was, like, club music and Southern rap and synthpop, which were the only three kinds of music I really wanted to listen to when that came out. And that kind of mixing, that jumping between those things, do you think you guys were the first ones doing it?

Oh, definitely. What we did, there's a few people like 2ManyDJs, I guess, that were doing something similar. But at the time we made Hollertronix, there was a girl named Lily, who was my girlfriend back in the day. And she had this party called Hi-Score. She was doing the 80s party, which was the jumpoff in Philly at a little small club. And I was a hip-hop DJ. Me and Mike were just DJing at black clubs. He DJed at, um, it changed its name like six times, but it's on South and Broad; I forget what it was called. But clubs like Transit, the Palmer. We were hip-hop DJs, but we wanted to stray away from what we were doing. We loved hip-hop, but we hated being club DJs. And I loved her party. I loved the music, and I loved everything that was going on. I was like, "We can mix these records, and we can make money like they're making money." And we had our own party; we kind of started Hollertronix up that way. We kind of crossed over, and I think Philly was the only city where we could really bring out a crowd that wasn't sponsored by an alcohol company or a magazine. We just put out fliers on little pieces of paper, and we had kids come out. That was like 2001, 2002. Our first party outside Philly was here at the Tribeca Grand, and that was right after the blackout in 2004. It was in the basement here, and we had this crazy line of kids that were coming, and people were excited. It was my first taste of leaving Philly to do a party. And like five years later, it's nothing new. You go to a club, and it's not like what I did last night at Studio B is any different than what other kids are doing except that I'm playing some music that I made. So I can't be mad at it, but I think it didn't enter the East Coast until we were doing that kind of stuff. It was just your cocaine rock parties, and then it was your black clubs, and there wasn't much in between. There maybe were some small ones, but we took it to a bigger level, and we kind of created a style with it.

A lot of people are doing it now.

You're going to hear club music. Every DJ in New York City has a fucking Baltimore club track and probably a baile funk track at this point. It's not mysterious music anymore, and the kids know where to get it. And there's a whole ethics, I think, of cross-cultural stuff. I also think it lends to black radio getting a little bit weird in the past five years. You know, you can hear a rock track in a black club, and you have groups like OutKast making one of the best rock tracks of the past twenty years. And look at Gwen Stefani. She's a white girl who used to be in No Doubt, and she can get play on black radio, have one of the biggest urban hits two years ago.

So you think you had something to do with...

I had nothing to do with that, but I think it helped open the gates for us to do this kind of music. I don't think we found a secret key. Music just changed in general. The underground wasn't as exciting as what was going on on commercial radio; everyone can agree with that. But we did it from an underground style, a club style. We did it in extremes. But music culture has changed in the past five years.

Not everyone does this style well.

A lot of people do it terribly. But in retrospect, I'm glad Hollertronix came up. It had an influence. Like Spank Rock: Naeem will tell you that he definitely couldn't have done what he did if it wasn't for Hollertronix. He was on the dancefloor every night, and something happened. You can lend it all to what me and Mike did there. But me, I branched off to what I'm doing now with Mad Decent, trying to do something that's not just bootlegs.

Do you have a specific intent for the label?

No. The first time Bonde do Role happened to be an idea; I felt like this could be a project I could take on. And it helped generate some money to do some other projects. We got a couple of bands. We got Blaqstarr. He's a proper artist, and I feel like if we could find a face of club, this is the prodigy, the first artist.

I was having this conversation a few years ago, that club music needed a Lil Jon figure, someone who could make it tangible.

If you had actually seen his performance, you would've known. He's got star quality, and he's definitely that edge that you need. He's a Brian Wilson of club music or something. He has his own ideas and his own techniques to what he does, and club music needed someone to push it out there. But he's doing stuff that labels don't want to touch. I'm lucky because I am a DJ so I get an idea of what can work. Because he played for a bunch of white kids last night. It wasn't an all-white crowd, but it was a hell of a lot different than what it's like at the Paradox. So I'm trying to figure out what's the best way to communicate this kind of music to maybe not a larger audience but more than what he's used to. Hollertronix used to be me and Mike; anybody can play those records in a weird back-and-forth, but we tried putting them into context so it's not so weird. It felt like the mixtape moved well. If you looked at the track listing, it was like, "What the fuck is this?" Same thing with the baile funk stuff. I'm not trying to be weird and scare people, but to mix stuff at the right time, to drop the right song in; it's what a DJ is supposed to be good at anyway. I guess I'm just trying to do that with the label. Last night, Rye Rye had to go out in front of all these white kids, and it was probably the biggest crowd she had rapped in front of, but she killed it. It wasn't difficult for her.

It was jammed in there when we came in. I left at like four, and it thinned out a lot around then.

I should've left at four. I was like, "I'm in New York! 'Method Man'!" I was playing Pete Rock and CL Smooth and, like, "Tennessee."

Yeah, you did the middle-school dance segment. You did "Jump Around" and stuff.

But that's after I did like two hours of straight madness, and I was like, "All right, I'm drunk." No one left, so I was like, "Yeah, time to drop 'Gangsta's Paradise.'" Someone definitely should've told me to get off the turntables then. But it was really cool to see everybody come out and turn the show out. I'm just trying to make sense of it. A major label wouldn't come to Baltimore and pick an artist like Blaqstarr; it's just off the radar. But a middle-ground kid like me that's already reaching people in clubs; that's something realistic for me to do.

Are you trying to sign other people as well?

Yeah, I got South Rakkas Crew; I'm doing their next release. And it's cool helping them. They obviously don't fit in Jamaica. They might have a ceiling. They're capable of getting a song on the Chinkuzi riddim, and that was getting played in Jamaica on the radio, but I think I'm helping to deliver them to an audience that reaches them, so I'm doing an EP with them. There's a rock band I can't speak about that I'm working with. I can't speak about it, but it's really amazing shit. Here and there I might do twelve-inches, like maybe a Blaqstarr and Diplo thing.

Are you going to do albums as well as twelve-inches?

Yeah, Bonde do Role has an album, but it's going to be licensed to Majesty and Domino. Blaqstarr, I don't know if he's going to presentable in album form. The songs are minimal, and I think they contain on EPs. If we do three EPs, we might put them out on an album.

Live: LCD Soundsystem is Really That Good

Posted by Tom Breihan at 5:33 PM, April 2, 2007

The Tito Ortiz of dance-punk

LCD Soundsystem
Bowery Ballroom
March 30, 2007

Before Friday night, I'd never seen LCD Soundsystem live. That means that I sat on a couch next to James Murphy with my tape recorder in my lap and listened to him rant for about 45 minutes about how music would be better if bands took their live shows as seriously as he did and how his band's live show has no serious competition now, and I did this before I ever got a chance to figure out firsthand whether his grandiose claims even had any connection to reality. It also means that I spent something like four years reading gushing live reviews of LCD Soundsystem shows. That's a big buildup, a buildup so big that I was expecting something apocalyptically awesome. I was also expecting James Murphy to be a monster frontman, which isn't quite what I got. When I interviewed him, Murphy talked about James Brown and David Yow as inspirations and bragged of killing himself onstage and mentioned that he's spent eighteen months doing extensive jiujitsu training. But when he's up there, he doesn't do anything all that physical. He shout-sings his words passionately, he futzes around with a stand-up drumkit or an electronic gizmo, and he sort of bangs his head; he's not exactly a force of nature. And he still put together one of the fiercest, most exciting live shows I've seen since arriving in New York. And he did it with groove, not with theatrics, an even more difficult proposition.

Murphy's touring band isn't especially big; it's just five people, including the rumpled-suit guy from Hot Chip. The supporting players trade instruments and scurry around in the background while Murphy parks his heavy frame up front, leading the attack. And it really is an attack. The band concentrates on the harder, more rhythmic LCD tracks; "Someone Great," Sound of Silver's deliriously pretty peak, was notably absent from the set-list. And those songs that sounded dense and insistent are exponentially more so live. Most of the time, only maybe two members of the band are actually playing drums or percussion, but everyone plays with a sort of laserlike rhythmic focus, treating their guitars and basses and electronic gizmos as if they were drums. Even Murphy's vocals have a sort of staccato insistence, just one more layer in a rich, detailed metrical bedrock. Those beats manage to somehow simultaneously achieve hypnotically visceral insistence and a twitchy, neurotic humanity; they don't split the difference between the mechanical and the organic so much as seamlessly fuse the two. The melodies themselves submit themselves completely to the beat; "All My Friends" picks up a propulsive edge that the recorded version only hints at. Most LCD songs are already pretty long, but the band stretches them out even longer onstage, letting the tracks sink into themselves and develop according to their own logic, building and ebbing and cresting until they're these breathlessly frantic epics. The band pushes those tracks to the breaking point before just letting them end suddenly, giving the crowd a quick second to catch its collective breath and then launching into the next one. The band played for about an hour and a half on Friday night, but they seemed like they were just getting going as they left the stage.

About a third of the way through the set, I had to run to the bathroom. I was already pretty close to the back of the room, but I had to spend a while squeezing through the packed-in crowd to make it out and then in again, and I noticed that even at the back of the room, people were completely into it, singing along loud, pumping fists, doing all sorts of big-rock-show shit, pretty impressive considering that the back of the room is usually schmooze-territory at New York shows and that LCD Soundsystem is a particularly schooze-friendly band. That experience reminded me of the one day I spent at the Reading Festival in 1997. My friend Nat and I were in England for a couple of weeks, and we spent one day of it standing in a field and watching vast throngs of people singing along to songs we didn't know. That night's headliners were the Manic Street Preachers, but the group with second billing was the Orb; I remember being blown away that such a frilly, arty, faceless techno group could hold the attention of something like 75,000 concertgoers in this weirdass little country. The Orb themselves were a bit boring: two head-nodding silhouettes cranking out slow, wispy beats in a big metal pyramid surrounded by trippy Lawnmower Man projections. And so we decided to check out the Eels or whoever on the second stage, but that meant navigating our way backwards through this enormous crowd. Even hundreds yards from the stage, though, people were still staring rapt and stoned at that metal pyramid, and, as the crowd started to thin, a lot of those people were dancing around little bonfires they'd made by lighting piles of garbage aflame. The group might not have been much of a spectacle, and neither was the music, but the people certainly were. The Bowery Ballroom isn't much bigger than my last apartment in Baltimore; it's certainly only about a bazillionth the size of that field in Reading. But there's still something undeniably powerful about seeing a band that can create that kind of fervor even in the people leaning against the back wall, especially when I do know those songs, especially when music is already a spectacle unto itself. This might've just been an early stop on a yearlong tour for the band, one of four planned New York appearances, but that didn't stop this room full of people from treating them like returning heroes. It's one thing when a band can turn great songs into anthems onstage, and it's another when everyone in the room treats those anthems as anthems. So yeah, this show fulfilled my expectations and then some. LCD Soundsystem is something to see.

Voice feature: Tom Breihan on LCD Soundsystem
Voice review: Mike Powell on LCD Soundsystem's 45:33
Voice review: Michaelangelo Matos on LCD Soundsystem's LCD Soundsystem
Voice review: Rob Tannenbaum on LCD Soundsystem at the Bowery Ballroom