Monday, February 21, 2011

Music : Wavves - "Horse Shoes"




Wavves' Nathan Williams just posted this new song on his blog.

Check it out.

Friday, February 11, 2011

Reviews : James Blake : James Blake





James Blake
James Blake
[A&M/ Atlas; 2011]
8.9/10.0









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London producer and songwriter James Blake gathered immense acclaim during 2010 through the release of his three excellent EPs: The Bells Sketch, CMYK, and Klavierwerke. On these releases, the electronic prodigy displayed his creativity and talent for composing unconventional pop music. The material on the EPs rarely resembles any other contemporary music, though it has been coerced under the genre of dubstep because of Blake’s use of signature sounds of the movement: vocal samples that have been altered past the point of recognition, funky synths, and syncopated, hip-hop-based rhythms. Instead of creating a follow-up to his collection of EPs, Blake’s new self-entitled record refocuses his attention and experiments with his own vocal melodies and arrangements to produce an album that truly showcases why Blake is one of the most distinct and promising electronic acts today.
The album opens with “Unluck,” a minimal track that builds over itself, gradually adding layers of electronic organs over an erratic beat in-step to Blake’s heavily auto-tuned vocals. Here, we get the first of Blake’s vocal style in which he samples and manipulates his vocals. They sound fragmented, haunted, and fittingly off-beat with the music, reminiscent of Burial’s groundbreaking dub release, Untrue. And yet, the London producer manages to deliver them drenched with a sense of soulfulness and melancholy. This is an amazing feat considering the fact that there is typically very little room for raw emotion within the pristine world of digital music, but with his surprisingly organic production throughout the record, Blake proves that even electronic music can convey soul amongst the cold, stark superficiality of computer age production.
After the turbulence of the opening track, the record continues with a more vocally straightforward song, “The Wilhelm Scream,” displaying Blake’s precision and restraint in production and composition.  Often, Blake’s inherent lyrical minimalism causes his repeated words to become maxims, allowing certain phrases to act as an endless chorus throughout the entirety of a song. On “Wilhelm Scream,” he repeatedly sings,” I don’t know about my dreams/ I don’t know about my dreaming anymore/ all that I know is I’m falling, falling, falling.” His words eventually becoming meaningless as the song progresses becoming warped under a haze of white-noise distortion and pounding bass. Blake produces similar effects on “I Never Learnt to Share,” as he establishes the track with empty space and vocal harmonies continually crying, “My brother and my sisters don’t speak to me/But I don’t blame them.” Gradually, over the midst of vocal repetition, the song crescendos into a wobbly, funked-out banger, covering an immense amount of ground in under just five minutes.
The LP’s finest moment arrives when Blake reworks his own version of Feist’s “Limit to Your Love.” The cover is the most immediate and traditional track on the album, though it represents the essence of Blake’s minimal songwriting. On the track, James sets his vocals as the centerpiece next to only a simple piano melody, a beat, and a rattling sub bass. His use of silence after each verse creates a sense tension, forcing the listener to crave the next sound to come. Through Blake’s routine production, he turns Feist’s upbeat song into something far more tense and austere.
Coming off an incredibly successful collection of acclaimed EPs, James Blake further evaluates the use of space and silence to establish mood, creating a hauntingly soulful record that invites the listener in leaving them craving more and more as James Blake progresses. As Blake puts out more new material, is evident that he is at the top of his game and no on else is making music quite like him. And if this record is any indication, it is safe to say that the young London musician is going to have quite the year in 2011.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Music : Tyler, the Creator Remixes Lykke Li


NME recently posted this unexpected remix of Lykke Li's "I Follow Rivers" by Odd Future mastermind Tyler, The Creator. Check it out below.


Also, revisit the original
 



Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Music : The Go! Team - "Apollo Throwdown (Star Slinger Remix)"


There's no questioning UK producer Darren Williams, aka Star Slinger, and his staggering ability to handle and reshape a sample, especially the noisy, horn-bumping new track by the Brighton-based sextet, The Go! Team. He transforms the party-pop playfulness of original into a downtempo bobber that displays Williams' expansive understanding of cadence and how sounds should fall after one another, a quality most producers and remixers typically take for granted.

MP3: The Go! Team: "Apollo Throwdown (Star Slinger Remix)"

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Video : Toro y Moi - "New Beat"



Here’s the OFFICIAL video for Toro y Moi’s “New Beat,” directed by Scott Ross. Stream Chad's sophomore album Underneath the Pine in its entirety here.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Reviews : Tanlines : Volume On

 

 Tanlines
 Volume On 
  [self released; 2010]
  7.8/10.0 
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It’s a funny thing when artists form new a group; often, a musician who forms new band tends to fall back on previous work, though this is not the case with production team Tanlines. The Brooklyn-based duo, Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen, emerge from their rock band origins to create Balearic synth-pop predominately influenced by over-produced dance music from the 1980’s and 90’s and pop music from cultures around the world.

Like a number of contemporary independent artists, Tanlines straddles the line between pop and dance music, yet they lean towards the former to create their own sound with melodies backed by synthesizers, airy guitars, and African-inspired percussion. Their latest release, Volume Up, is a compilation that contains all of the tracks from their EP, Settings, released earlier this year. It also has several remixes and a few unreleased gems as well.

The album contains two disks. The first is divided equally between instrumental tracks and tracks in which Emm attempts vocals. Emm is not a trained vocalist, and it clearly shows on this record, but his no-frills harmonies are trying to capture a mood, rather than attain the centerpiece of the music. On the dance party-ready “Real Life,” Emm repeats the chorus, “It was a past life thing, It wasn’t anything at all,” revealing that not everything can last, a facet of, well, real life. Midway through the first disk, True Panther label mate Glasser accompanies the bubbly “Z” to provide even more buoyancy on a song whose new-wave guitars and drum-machine rhythms would not seem out of place on a Talking Heads record.

While every recording on Volume Up is distinct, “Policy of Trust” and “S.A.W.” are the evident highlights of the compilation. On these tracks, Emm and Cohen most channel their love for early 90’s dance music and transcend their influence into something remarkable. Though among these standouts, the second disk of the album, comprised of entirely of remixes, tends to lose me, particularly on “Iced Coffee (club mix)”and the acoustic version of “Real Life,” which does not translate as well opposed to when composed through computers.

On Volume Up, Tanlines produce a seemingly perfect end-of-the-year compilation that further reinforces why they are a rising band to watch for in the coming year. And while the majority of readers might feel apprehensive about approaching an artist that has never appeared on the radio, I urge you all to go out and purchase this record because, honestly, I can't think of a more appropriate album to compliment your travels to whatever tropical destination you might be headed to over the coming winter break.