Archive for category RECORDS.
A$AP Mob | Trillmatic
The eternal question of modern pop music but especially Hip-hop: do guest artists belong in the title of the song? I think there’s some kind of music publishing rule. Same with special symbols and such. But let’s not worry about that. We just need to know what we’re talking about. It’s Trillmatic by A$AP Mob. It’s a single, with no b-side. And of course it features Method Man, which is what got my attention. Altho it may not be in the title of the song, it is in the youtube description and how else are you going to find out about download only singles.
Personally, I like the collective credit. I refuse to consider Wu Tang Clan ‘old school’, but let’s call it ‘Classic Hip-Hop’. It gives it that feel. And it makes it seem like all these other dudes in the video had something to do with the song when it’s almost entirely a solo for A$AP Nast. (Altho one of those dudes must be the producer of the song, Ty Beats.) The whole One Guy Against The Whole Damn World thing never appealed to me too much and that pretty much dominates now. This group (or their management) seems keenly aware of this and has taken the Wu Tang route in reverse, introducing solo rappers A$AP Rocky and Ferg first (which I’ve been vaguely aware of) and now you’re getting more of the whole group. And altho I haven’t heard any of that stuff which has this explicitly retro-sounding backdrop, the rapping itself is the classic East Coast skill-based wordplay that is supposedly dead. Just makes me dumb I guess. Or lazy, really. I’ve gotten like old dudes who won’t stop talking about the Stones and Zeppelin like there’s not any good rock bands like that anymore and there are, they just don’t play stadiums anymore and there’s not a billboard for them on every corner. You’ve got to look.
The song borrows its hook from Nice & Smooth’s Hip Hop Junkies. Which is interesting; it’s self-consciously referencing the 90s overall and through the magic of passage of time, stuff with a Bobby Brown-type chorus occupies the same mental space as the grimyness of years-later Wu Tang simply because it was the same decade. It’s just interesting how that happens.
So I guess they got me is what I’m saying. I’m going to have to pay attention to this stuff again.
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V/A | Something From Nothing: The Art of Rap
In the 60s and 70s, Lou Reed was legit down with the streets. But by the 80s he was punning about the dangers of strange candy. (Which makes him perhaps an innovator of proto-Modern J-pop. But focus.) Crack had just hit the streets. Social programs were being cut. Thousands were dying of AIDS. Lou had lost touch.
Luckily non-white people were also rapping.
Hold on. This is only about what it is. That’s the beauty of Ice-T’s documentary:
It’s also beautifully photographed. And it’s even better than this trailer if that’s not selling you. I don’t think it sold that many people went it came out but it’s there forever so you should check it out. I haven’t been into Hip-hop much in the last few years but I’ll always respect it as an artform. This even makes me take some people seriously I didn’t before, like Kanye. No Jay-Z in this thing, but they got Kanye. Even his best lines used to seem like throwaway jokes to me, but he can pull off a convincing acapella (if not freestyle). And it was funny hearing different stories contradict each other, I always like to hear KRS-One’s version of things.
I should probably get the DVD. I just watched it on Netflix and got the soundtrack. You can enjoy the soundtrack itself as a good mixtape album with some exclusive freestyles, but I wouldn’t recommend it as an intro to or overview of Rap like I would recommend the movie. I feel like the movie is really made for people who do not take Rap or Hip-hop culture seriously, but there’s so many movies about “Hip-hop culture” that really gloss over the Rap part. The doc proves it’s point pretty thoroughly but this soundtrack is a little random. There’s no chronology at all and of course they are limited by rights issues and I assume it’s Ice-T personal taste here, but it doesn’t include all of the freestyles in the movie, I would say the best ones are left out. (Wiki has a complete list of all the songs.)
My personal favorite inclusions are It Takes Two which was so huge when I was a kid but people forget that one outside of the East Coast I think and it doesn’t sound like anything else so it doesn’t fit into most history retellings. And P.S.K. by Schoolly D. Ice-T’s early stuff ripped off Schoolly pretty hard I thought, but he stayed underground so most people don’t even know that. That was cool of him to include.
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Velvet Underground | VU
RIP, Lou Reed.
“It just feels so insincere and like a cop-out. To me, ‘RIP’ is the microwave dinner of posthumous honours” ~ Lou Reed
Well…fuck you then, Lou Reed. I mean…jeez.
I originally was going to end the post like that. I got complicated feelings about Lou Reed but it’s a little much to make it into a punchline. And it’s not really fair to make a Velvet Underground review only about him. But this is the format I have chosen to talk about my bullshit. The man’s dead and this is the only physical release I own with his music on it. (If John Cale just died I would be forced to reach for the same record. Yes, this would be a serious gaping hole if I was a serious collector of serious music.)
There’s a practical reason this is my only Velvets record, it was cheapest. (Altho it is currently somewhat pricey on Amazon.) Might have even got it for free. Had a few neighbors at one point in the 90s who just dumped boxes of vinyl on the curb as they replaced their collection with CDs. It was not a more enlightened time. The sleeve is in decent enough shape, but I like the record itself. I like that they were on Verve. It’s like, wow, legit!
Songs off the first album with Nico, and Transformer are really my favorites. But those songs are just always kinda around. Never felt the need to own those records. And you usually never see them for less than full-price.
Altho I like the record a lot, I rarely flip it over. B-side does not win this time, those songs really do sound like leftovers. This is a basically comp of outtakes; every song on the 1st side however, seem like classics it’s hard to believe they didn’t use. (Reed re-recorded all of them solo. I prefer these versions by a long mile.) I used to have the CD reissue of Loaded (sold it); the second disc has different versions of I’m Sticking With You and Ocean. I’m Sticking With You is a cute song that Mo sings but it’s kind of a goof. Ocean—it’s just perfect on this record. The cliche in my head I’m trying to avoid is “understated masterpiece”. I think ‘masterpiece’ is overselling it, but other versions are a little too overthought or overworked. I believe all my feelings about Lou Reed can summed up by listening to the VU and solo versions of Ocean back to back. At least until recently. Going thorough some of of his stuff I never listened to and posts about details of his life I kinda feel bad for him now.
I Can’t Stand It is one of the great Rock ‘n’ Roll songs of all time. It makes the song Rock ‘n’ Roll (from Loaded) corny by comparison. I dunno, some of his schtick I don’t really buy. Especially the later stuff. He just went off in a direction I don’t care about at all. The atmosphere of some of these Velvets songs is so great, you really have to credit the rest of the group. The way way Ocean ends, this version…that’s just one the best things ever recorded. It just hits a perfect unnameable emotion every time. The words don’t tell a story or nothing. No idea what it really means. Perfect.
I also really do love Metal Machine Music too, but I got it off Soulseek. %
Orthrelm/Behold... The Arctopus | S/T Split
I thought this was the first official recording released by Behold… The Arctopus. It is not, but it is in fact the shortest, and cheapest, which is the real reason I got it. I’ve been meaning to get some records from those guys for a while since I started following them on Myspace if you can believe that.
Orthrelm I first got into through Kill Rock Stars when they were giving out a lot of free downloads. Seems odd now, because they seem so Metal; at least, they fit in perfectly into the current Weirdo Metal scene. But guitar hero Mick Barr started out in the KRS stable playing bass for Quix*O*Tic. And this side project fit right along with the spazz-math/noise rock of labelmates Hella and Nervous Cop. So KRS was featuring a couple Orthrelm tracks even tho the first record came out on Toletta.
Interesting? Dubious? Why even mention it. Why even spend time thinking about this footnote of a release? It’s referred to as an EP but it’s merely a split single, a song a piece, neither over 5 1/2 minutes. And not the most memorable tunes. It would be hard to tell which band was which if you didn’t know what to listen for. It’s two solid blocks of blistering instrumental intricacy-core. Speed Metal at 78, the record broken and randomly glued back together. The thing I’m into here is that these two bands that sound so similar got there in opposite ways.
BTA is inspired solely by extreme Technical Death Metal bands and Modern Classical composers. Every note of their songs is written on paper and then played back as precisely as possible. (It should be mentioned many bands write this way but do not have the chops or will to put in the practice hours to really perform their own music.)
Orthrelm rely more on improv techniques coming from a Jazz influence. This interview with Mick Barr explains how this works within his style of Metal. Knowing this, it’s much easier to hear the difference between the compositions. Orthrelm does not have the kind of doubled stop/start parts of BTA. (Which actually reminds me of bebop, but apparently that’s a coincidence.)
This record may be of interest to fans of Krallice, as it is the first meeting on record of main members Mick Barr and Colin Marston, as far as I tell. Altho they are on separate songs. And the music has zero to do with Black Metal. Some people might say Krallice is not really Black Metal, well, this record is really, really not Black Metal. It’s all relative. But check it out. There’s not much to risk only losing about 9 minutes of your time, that’s shorter than most individual Krallice songs. I think I’ve listened to this more than I would an LP of either band, it’s pretty enjoyable once you get into it. But I’m going to get those LPs still. In time.
TRIVIA: Orthrelm’s song Pithot 1 may not be an invented adjective for a situation as hot as a pit, but a French word for male goose [the word is from “Jersey French”] Seven years later, they have yet to follow up with the implied sequel. Maybe there’s a pun I’m missing. BTA’s song Paincave is just about a cave of pain, I think. But who knows.
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Daniel Menche | Hover
As far as I know Daniel Menche started out in the Noise scene of the 90s as one of those guys that would be on a comp with Merzbow and I’m not saying they were all doing the same thing but it was hard to tell any of it apart the first few hundred listens. He eventually evolved into a more unique manipulator of sound, working with layers of field recordings and different types of sounds, not just shrieking feedback of overdriven amps. (Altho I believe he still does something like that live, because, why not, it’s fun. Haven’t got the chance yet myself to see it but he used to blog a lot which is how I got back into him.)
Here he applies his layering edit technique to a choir of school children instructed to sing nonsense syllables at various pitches. The two tracks are the actual piece, which sounds like a something between chanting and a vast swarm of insects, and the raw recording of the kids. After an initial listen where it acts almost as a punchline or just a behind the scenes bonus track, I recommend listening to the second track first. Then it’s like a setup of this thing that seems very simple and a little silly into an insane trance-inducing fever dream of ego-ingulfing chaos. You’re going to want to try this on some good speakers you can crank up; I haven’t really messed with it too much, but I tried just having this on the ipod for walking around music and that is not such a good idea. I mean it’s a cool effect on headphones, maybe if you’ve got a beanbag chair or something try that out. But it’s a little disorienting is what I’m saying. Unlike some Noise records, it’s not going to blow up your stereo or melt your eardrums, but still, use with caution.
This is a download only release. I think his only one. You can get all his stuff on his personal bandcamp now but every other record has been put on vinyl or CD on various labels. I used to think of Noise records as conceptual art objects, like if you only downloaded them you weren’t even really “getting” it. I think it’s more true of some than others now. Like it was a statement, man. I only got $10 in my pocket, I can buy the new Pavement (used, of course) or some random Metal band no one cares about because it’s the mid 90s or I can buy this…thing that doesn’t even have anything like a song on it. I don’t think it’s really the same feeling you get from torrenting the Merzbox, making that choice. But maybe that’s just me. Certainly the Menche records you can get into the sound alone. This is probably a good one to start with.
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