Maxinquaye is one of the three pillars of trip-hop, along with Blue Lines and Dummy. What’s striking about all three records, besides them all being great, is kind of how dissimilar they all end up feeling. There’s a murky darkness at the core of them all, but they take different paths to get there. Tricky is probably the most hip-hop of the three, although the swirling noise is still pretty distinctly foreign to the hip-hop of the time.
[Read More]These pieces, which come up occasionally, really don’t make a lot of sense in isolation. Shuffle is good at some things - surprises, shaking up your routine, serendipity - but is bad at an album like this.
Rejuvenation is my favorite album from the second Meters phase of life. The grittier, mostly- or all-instrumental Meters of the first few albums had changed into a brighter sound, with vocals and more bounce. Still incredibly funky, of course, but a different feel. Generally, I lean towards the earlier sound, but this album is undeniable.
[Read More]Had I encountered this when I was 17, I’m sure I would have adored it. As it is, I like it just fine, but I’m also far more likely to listen to the punk that I encountered when I actually was 17. It’s nothing personal, we just make emotional connections with this kind of thing when we’re young.
squints Jazz fusion? Elaborate post-rock? Post-math-rock? Math jazz?
[Read More]I’ve kind of run down Lungfish often enough here to make it clear that I’m not a big fan, so I won’t rehash it. I do wonder occasionally (usually whenever they come up here) if I’m missing something by not going for their later albums and seeing if my opinion would change.
And then I realize that I do have a couple later albums, and had just forgotten that they existed. Whoops! I already answered this for myself.
[Read More]Floor Kids is the game soundtrack that Kid Koala did, because it’s not enough for him to be a musican, composer, and artist, it was time to work on a game also. It’s a fun rhythm game around breakdancing, and I recommend it, and of course the soundtrack is a good time.
A cover of the song by Cock Sparrer, in case you couldn’t make out the intro. Uh, not a whole lot else to say here.
[Read More]Yeah, not the best choice here for a band where the delightful vocal performances are such an important part of their sound.
A thing about Madvillain which is always impressive is that a lot of these tracks are pretty short, often under two minutes, but they feel fully realized and don’t at all feel skimpy. They’re just so packed with ideas that even a brief track is satisfying.
[Read More]Chopping up the Beatles is really playing with fire, copyright-wise. It’s powerful source material, of course, so I’m glad he went for it. But you know, there’s a reason this stuff was so hard to find for a while.
An Elephant Six band, the Minders were very much, uh, an Elephant Six band. I mean, you can hear them. They were pretty good at it, but it’s kind of…I guess I’d rather just listen to the Kinks instead?
[Read More]I dunno, the vocals on this track are really amusing me tonight. Something about the cadence here is extra ridiculous.
Negativland, in their roles as cultural and social critics, were usually on their strongest footing when they took aim at consumerism. They would always have such rich vocal samples to draw from, and their pointed sarcasm always landed well. And it’s not like it’s super easy to nail this target. Yes, consumer culture in America is a giant blimp, but criticism can come across a smug or facile here because it is such a easy path. Negativland succeed because they mix the absurd in, and they also let our consumer culture speak for itself. The most powerful criticism can be just a simple mirror.
[Read More]This is from Beat Konducta, Volume 1 & 2: Movie Scenes, a record intended as a soundtrack to a non-existant movie as well as a companion piece to J Dilla’s revered Donuts. The thing that makes it a little different from Madlib’s usual work is that there are a lot of vocal samples, helping give it a little more of that cinematic feel. Among Madlib’s instrumental work, it’s not my favorite, but everything he does is interesting.
[Read More]An outlier on the one and only Germs LP, (GI), this is a live track that is triple the length of anything else on the record. A loose wander of a song, it’s all sneer and skronk, without a whole lot of direction. But the Germs were never really about having a point, so it fits in just fine.
It’s impossible to not nod your head along here. I tried, I’ve done the science.
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