It is supremely gutsy to release an album for free ahead of time and Know that people will still pay for it. And I will. and you will, too. Here’s a track-by-track.

1. Daft Punk lands with a splash on the latest – there’s no 4 minutes of waiting and building. There’s no half-album-wait for The Vocals Track. All that hits from the get-go. “Give Life Back To Music” they sing, and there we are: live instrumentation. It’s straight funk, with what would otherwise be electronica breakdowns articulated with live instrumentations – porn-groove guitars, walking basslines, sparkling bells synths and flutes(?). Gorgeous production, of course. Same structures and loops as their House roots (you can feel them), but they just come to life with live instrumentation. Some Rick F. James up in here.

It is disco. More than Homework or Discovery – much more obviously. This time instead of Electronica with soul and funk inside the machine/helmet, it’s Disco and Funk that just also happens to be electronica in 2013. House gets back to its roots – physically, instrumentally. 

2. Moody, floaty, orbiting synths open track 2. Guitars remind me of The Eagles, it has a Hotel California groove. And then it’s straight night-time groove-music. It can be hard to believe the robots are behind something so.. smooth. This is RnB. Nice keyboard arpeggios, guys. “This is a game of love/and it was you/the one that would be breaking my heart/when you decided to walk away/when i wanted you to stay” *sings in robot voice wordlessly and gradually becomes a keyboard*. Gorgeous fusion of their robot/human philosophy going on. There’s a whole synth solo, smooth rhodes, built right out of his vocal solo. How cool.

With any luck this will be their most explicitly ‘musical’ album yet. And so far this is the case. This time Daft Punk is out to make, well, dance-music.  But not explicitly club music. These are songs, with lyrics, and instrumentation that is live and vocals that are sung (whenever they aren’t delivered via beautiful keyboard lines or sparkling synths or raindrop guitars).  

Man, that electric bass. 

3. Oh my god this is 9:04 long and opens with an interview with Giovanni Giorgio. The funk drops under the interview, or rather the disco. “I wanted to do an album of the 50s the 60s the 70s – and then of the future. I thought to myself, why not use the synthesizer … it is the sound of the future!” And so Daft Punk runs with it, and it sounds like a Homework extension. They’re ahead of their time again. Again. Keyboard solo runs wild after an extended noodling intro. Jazz drumming, latin influence even. Bass solo. It can be difficult to even locate Daft Punk in the mix, the robots themselves, with all the guest instrumentation going on. And that’s fantastic. They’re the superstructure outside of the music itself. *STRING BREAKDOWN SO COOL* “there was no preconception about what to do” *and it drops* A very neat sacramental trick, burying that notion in the music itself. And then the electronic stuff drops right on top of the string section. Goosebump-inducing symphonic/dance/disco fusion going on here. They’re masters, and you’re going to remember why. Trading twos on drum solos. Comes to a head, fades out on a slowdown 808 loop.

Remember: Daft Punk was never a pop band. That isn’t their gig and never has been – whatever their reputation (and cameo in Tron) might tell you. They don’t write pop songs, they write sprawling and slowly-building disco-infused French House music, and they do it very well. And here they go again, kicking our collective ass without using pop. I don’t even care if Get Lucky comes on. It’s gorgeous, and i love this. Keyboardist wet-dream.

Daft Punk was already this sort of music – go back and listen to Discovery again. The connection is simply much more explicit now. 

4. Within has a piano solo opener. Like an etude, real pretty, extended too. Then drop the synths, moody and soft. Think that one track off Discovery – ‘Crescendolls’. And then robot singing again. Tremolo like a Theremin. This is slow-rock from the future-past, and he sings in an impossible cadence. Octave shifts are nothing to a man with an electronic throat.

Again, Daft Punk (perhaps a bit proudly) demonstrates they’re capable of writing a pop-song (as Elton John might envision one) without the aid of a collaborator. Possibly a pre-emptive response to the massive success of ‘Get Lucky’, and the obvious pop breakthrough of their Kanye collaboration from years back.

5. Julian Casablancas sings on.. a rhythm reminiscent of ‘I’ll Be Watching You’. Well that was unexpected. That said, he’s processed – lightly, nothing obviously smacking of autotune, just soft pitch-shifts between notes. Again, Daft Punk is up to melding acapella performance with their patron machines, and it sounds Neat. Walking bassline, synths drop hard into the chorus. It’s neat, though the low-key production (blunted synths, tempo) keeps things from being too energizing… yet. Julian’s singing harmony with himself and it’s pretty, though hardly my thing – this is an honest-to-god soft-rock tune, and so I sort of hate it on premise. That said, it’s gorgeously produced, and the robot-rock-esque guitar solo just feels Good. Low-notes grind into synthesizer distortion, sound great. Grooves without brooding, smooth without boring, it’s growing on me. Which is good. Because it runs 5:37.

Where an 8-minute track on a  previous Daft Punk album might denote a slow build (to my impatient, 13-year-old ears, agonizingly slow at times) here the switches are much more dynamic. There are bridges, choruses, breakdowns, and gear-shifting transitions within songs (most notably, so far, on ‘Giorgio’). They work Great. Daft Punk has matured without losing their trademark structures – I’d call this their most accessible yet, by Far. My mom would like this. So would the cat. So does my inner Lazer Raver.) 

6. Alright here we go – track 1 of 2 featuring Pharrell, whom I famously sort-of-don’t-like-at-all. Slap bass and disco strumming are going a long way to convince me of otherwise. The beat stomps Homework-style in the background. Pharrell is on his Prince shit, and it’s pretty alright – he isn’t running the show, he’s hosting a disco dance-party, much as he does on that single we’ve all heard. Soul claps! Stomping drums and bassline that grow and evolve – nice. Sure he’s repeating himself, but it’s Daft Punk of course there’s repetition. “Here take my shirt and just wipe up all the.. SWEAT SWEAT SWEAT”. Okay that’s a little unintentionally hilarious, as are the orbiting robot-head “Come on’s” – awesome as they are. Arpeggiated backup singing from the vocoder are great, indiscernible as the lyrics might be. Who cares, this is a vocal track sequenced like oldschool Daft Punk – it just keeps growing and evolving and mutating and expanding, but with live instrumentation with Prince-style vocals and vocoders layering over and over on top. And like Daft Punk, they know when to drop the track back to zero and start layering again. Very Cool.

A track like ‘Lose Yourself to Dance’ would be dull if it weren’t sequenced like House music, and that’s the trick, isn’t it? Daft Punk can extend a vocal mix like this into eternity (see: Human After All) without losing the audience because they’ve got such a damn knack for track layering.     

7. Intro soundin’ like Close Encounters with more beeps. Solar wind, synth noodling open ‘Touch’, which gives us friggin’ Paul Williams. ‘Rainbow Connection’ Paul Williams, because I’ll take any opportunity to bring that song up. Spacey, echoing bizarro intro tells us we’re orbiting away from earth again. Spooky vocals, a whole lot of…. “touching”. This would have been a great intro to a Ziggy Stardust song. …And then it all silences into a vacuum as Williams takes a vocal solo. I won’t ruin how cool this vocal performance is, frankly. He’s great. He kills it. Daft Punk does not make songs like this, and that’s what makes it so exciting. Yes, it’s disco again, but it’s clearly taking influence from bizarro 70′s acts and their obsession with Space, and that’s what’s so exciting. It’s synesthetic; there’s a growth of colour as the symphony swells. Ragtime piano, trumpets and trombones and the bassline all drop in at once, it’s a cornucopia of wordless sound. It’s one of the coolest music turns I’ve heard in a long while. Tempo shift takes us to space again – there’s those Bowie-esque synthesizers warping in and out, and we’re singing in robot-voices again. There’s a choir and a swelling of the symphony in the background again. It’s an agonizingly slow build… that drops out and… builds… and turns into an arpeggiated synth line straight out of winning a race in Mario Kart! Well, okay. That was unexpected. And the chorus continues again and grows… until Daft Punk drops us into another Paul Williams vacuum! What a deeply strange song.

Random Access Memories is an album of unexpected turns and sudden shifts – sonically, in terms of tempo, vocally, though never stylistically. ‘Touch’ music for a broadway stage musical in its grandeur, you can see the credits dropping in the background, it’s the sort of song many of us never imagined Daft Punk would come around to write – and I can still scarcely believe they have. And it’s playing Right Now for the first time.  

8. ‘Get Lucky’ is ‘Get Lucky’. What more can I say to you, go listen to it. But in terms of the album it functions as a breather after the grandeur and bizarrity of ‘Touch’ – and it’s perfectly sequenced. ‘Get Lucky’ then works as not only a killer sample/single track, but works together with the other fairly innocuous Pharrell track to encapsulate track 7 (that is, ‘Touch’) in its 8:18 long eccentricity (a possible centrepiece to an album full of them). And that is a very, very clever move. Neat. Also can I again stress how cool that final vocoder loop is? It’s great. It makes me miss looping ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’ as a teen, and I’m sure it’s supposed to.

9. Drops with strings! Something like the opening to a film, was the immediate mental image, and the sensation only grows as the timpanis drop in. Yes Timpanis on a Daft Punk release. What band is this this sounds like music for Ni No Kuni. And of course the pretension slinks out of the way just in time for vocoded vocals and porno-level guitar playing again. ‘Beyond’ is slinky without being trashy, relaxing without ever ceasing movement. I think there might be an actual theremin going on in the background, unless that’s a slide-guitar (come on theremin). It’s a come-down track after ‘Get Lucky’, polluted by ‘Touch’s grandiosity. It’s also the first track to explicitly remind the listener that there are two vocoded robot-men in Daft Punk, and they have distinct voices (definitely a slide-guitar). Cowboy Bebop would have words for a track like this, I think.

It’s important to note that Daft Punk might be the first group in history to permanently vocode themselves, yet never manage to be a pain in the neck while doing so. It doesn’t get annoying, it’s stylistically consistent with the musical styling, and the musical philosophy. It takes a subtle touch to make vocal production like this work. Daft Punk’s vocals come off less like lyrical communications and more like speaking synthesizers, and it can’t be stressed enough how effective their distinction between the two has rendered their musical performance. It’s Very Cool to hear a man’s voice gradually degrade or ascend into a synth-line, organically melding with the track it supports. 

10. Tom-toms, synthesized raindrops and symphony, percussive keyboard beats kick off ‘Motherboard’, which has much more of a classically electronic feel to it.. until the piano solo in the background kicks in. The live drumming on this album is lively as hell, just exciting enough to temper the acoustic guitar noodling that slowly descends into this beautiful, apparently instrumental track. Above and beyond dance music, this is simply beautiful and wordless… music. It defies easy classification, I’d call it music for a film, but Daft Punk’s film music is demonstrably worse than this. There are flutes, apparently a bassoon, and all the while a driving jazz drum beat. Simply gorgeous. If you don’t care for vocals, at all, this may well be your single off of Random Access Memories. And just when you’ve got yourself comfortable, it switches, slows, degrades, turns sinister. Murky and crackling, driving something like a slowed DnB beat. And from that darkness, classic Daft Punk synthesizers reminiscent of their good work on the Tron soundtrack drop on top of more jazz drumming. Perhaps the first track on the album to not be disco.

11. With Todd Edwards, something of another danceable slow-groove slow-dance. His voice suits the track, and yes it is again disco. Disco somehow incorporating blips and bleeps, oscillating synthesizers and, again, the slide-guitar. The synthesizers flicker in and out, lending the chorus something of a strobing breakbeat feel – the rest of the track is smooth as butter disco, and the juxtaposition is striking. Is it worth noting at this point that I’m not a disco fan, and I’m very much enjoying a disco album? Slide-guitar solo. I hate you, slide-guitar, though not here. We’ve made our peace here. And then a guitar solo! Which is actually the processed voice of one of our two hosts! Because of course it is. I love these guys. 

12. Striking vocal production featuring Panda Bear of Animal Collective! Looped robot vocals under a slow-building, booming bass beat, which of course blossoms outwards in Daft Punk’s signature style. ‘Around the World’ is the appropriate touchstone here, and I’m sure someone’s already counted the instances of the repeated phrase. Vocals as instruments, again, with Panda Bear yelping over top. I don’t know if I’ll ever buy into his voice, but the sonic chemistry works – like so many of the other tracks here, there isn’t so much of a lyrical progression as an aural one. Daft Punk doesn’t, necessarily, care about lyrics – and they’re one of the few groups that will earn a pass from me for that. They know how to manipulate the sound of human voices (or manipulated human voices) to create instruments out of communication. And that’s something that the vast majority of dance music does absolutely, embarrassingly poorly. Certainly this whole track runs on a loop, and not a long one, but again it’s the resurgence of that classic Daft Punk appeal – building beats, with a bedrock of vocal loops. A steady groove and another slow-dance with a bass reminiscent of ‘Pheonix’. Pretty.

13. I’d been warned about ‘Contact’. An equation of the observation of the earth from space (via audio sample) with, to this listener, a description of a disco ball. CHURCH ORGANS. Thriller synth-drop into an arpeggiated loop. This song isn’t a slow-jam. Wow does it ever move, full jazz percussion fills, soloing over than synth line. Someone is going nuts on drums, and it’s worth our time to find out whom. And so it is – traded segments of organ clarity and arpeggio catharsis with improvised jazz drumming – and then a deeply distorted guitar-breakdown. ‘Contact’ is a cyclone, whirling to completion, and what a fun listen. Hearing them mix this into live sets will be a stunner.

And then, of course, it all distorts into eternity. Liftoff.

[Endnote]

This is, for my money, a very early Album Of The Year contender. So way to go, robots. So there they are, my collected initial notes for Random Access Memories. An actual review will follow, or possibly not, because my thoughts on the album can be gleaned from the above. It’s a fascinating album, a bizarre one, and a proper review would focus on its faults as well – though those will certainly be easier to locate on a non-streamed version cut into tracks, and not available for free on the internet (yes I have a pre-order). Yes, it’s absolutely worth a listen. Random Access Memories is worth my time and money, and hopefully yours. As an additional note, be sure to look up the personnel list, because it is ridiculously impressive. As is much of the rest of this album. Thanks for reading.

*No Score Given*

Published right here about a week before its release, May 15th, 2013.

The Bronx is a straightforward album, and that’d be more of a weakness if they weren’t talented songwriters. The album opens on “The Unholy Hand” and the energy is undeniable; the band’s on fire, there’s a great sense of motion we’ll encounter later on the supremely awakening “Youth Wasted”. “Are you the Antichrist or the Holy Ghost?/Do you wanna die or just come real close?” vocalist Matt Caughthran screams over the chugging riffs below. “The Unholy Hand” drops like a bombshell, and the production is as full and lush as we can ask for this sort of thing – without ever threatening that critical raw charge we love so much in Punk. Turn it up. We’ll hear that razor’s-edge energy again on “Under the Rabbit” where Caughthran gives up the simple and sharp “This is the best life my money can buy!” He’s got a workmanlike dedication to that yell and you’ll become real familiar with it over the following 40 minutes, in all its yelps and strains.  Thankfully he’s got the chops and variety to make it work – “Youth Wasted” and “Too Many Devils” have downright sing-along-friendly choruses, and The Bronx is frequently more melodically savvy than I’d come in expecting, even if the lyrics aren’t likely to surprise you. Is it party music? It sure is – whichever songs aren’t about standing up for yourself are about getting through the tough times in between (or failing to), and the album only slows twice: for “Torches” (a vaguely surreal take on the inspirational number, and surprisingly poetic) and “Life Less Ordinary” (the album’s obvious misstep and token slow song, a clean-sung number about feeling weird being the center of attention at a party. Or a rockstar.)

All in all The Bronx a party record, with flashes of sobriety and depression enough to stay relatable in the way so much blue-collar Punk aspires to be. I said it about Monotonix and I’ll say it here: this is music to spill beers and kiss girls to, with a touch more reflection that usual. No moulds are broken; it isn’t complicated and it doesn’t want to be. The argument can be made that there isn’t a ton of depth (a charge we can level at a lot of Hardcore Punk), and I suppose there isn’t, though the flashes of lucidity do much to lift The Bronx above amateur status and there’s an earnestness to their delivery that is, at its best, ruggedly inspiring. They’ve been doing this a while – The Bronx (x4) and Mariachi el Bronx (x2) can all attest to that – and this latest The Bronx certainly fits the canon. Don’t dig too deep, don’t expect a musical magnum opus, but you’ll have fun: The Bronx are a pleasant surprise and a boot in the ass. I bet their shows are a blast. 

7.5

Reviewed right here the day of its release: February 5th, 2013. 

This album is new enough not to actually have any videos. And so enjoy Mariachi El Bronx there in the second slot.

“Let’s just accept reality.”

The above statement is one of the key ironic refrains of Satoshi Kon’s Paranoia Agent, his penultimate work before his death, and like the show itself it defies straightforward explanation. This is Satoshi Kon after all, the man that brought us Millennium Actress, Paprika, and an episode of the notoriously, uh, bizarre JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise – the potential for general weirdness here is set pretty high. That said, the extent to which Paranoia Agent can draw in the viewer, immersing them in seemingly-realistic detective drama one moment and surreal psychological innerscape the next is riveting. In terms of sheer cinematic quality, combining subtle philosophical inquiry (unlike, say, Deathnote’s blatant exposition) with every artistic flourish from repeat extended metaphors to stinging social satire and parody, Paranoia Agent is stands as one of the finest animated examples I’ve yet seen – and all this while remaining accessible on a surface level and maintaining surreal imaginative exploration that makes Twin Peaks feel like a particularly daring episode of, well, the crappy second half of Twin Peaks. It gradually gets that weird without ever becoming convoluted or inaccessible to one-off viewers – and it’s glorious. Just look at that intro:

Speaking of Twin Peaks – half of which is also glorious – to give away much of Paranoia Agent’s structure beyond the initial setup is to do the viewer an immense disservice, and so any reading up on the plot is generally discouraged. Suffice to say that each episode focuses, roughly, on the life of a particular character, all of whom are intimately connected in some sense. All of whom are somehow also connected to a string of apparently random violent assaults throughout the back-alleys and hideaways of Tokyo – assaults perpetrated by a young man with a crooked baseball bat named Shonen Bat (or, in lame english dub, the less symbolic Lil’ Slugger). Each episode digs deep into a particular character’s inner psychology, frequently exploring their dreams, the mundane details of their lives, their psychological complexes, and the ways in which modern society seems to isolate them from their peers – one of Paranoia Agent’s major, overarching themes. Things get very bizarre very quickly, and to say any more is to ruin many of the show’s most rewarding surprises, however viewers with an appetite (stomach?) for psychological drama, horror, surrealism, metaphor-heavy dialogue and strange, black comedy will, as I did, likely find themselves blown away by the extent to which each character’s subjective reality is explored and interrogated. Paranoia Agent demands patience, certainly, and a certain comfort with meandering and dialogue-heavy storytelling whose various vignettes won’t always yield a central conflict, and almost never an easy resolution.

Yet for those viewers willing to prioritize thematic content over visceral action, I can hardly think of an anime series more easily recommended. There’s an extent to which Paranoia Agent, especially in its masterful and quietly life-affirming eighth installment, is an extended discussion of suicide – discouraging not the act, but the antecedent factors and isolation that can lead to its seeming inevitability. That episode, I must stress, is absolutely incredible, and made all the more so by an exploration of Japan’s long and unique social relationship to suicide, as well as cataclysm as a central cultural theme in many Japanese narratives. That Paranoia Agent can play into these discussions, and in as simultaneously impassioned, didactic and passive ways as it does – all while remaining an anime complete with anime tropes (many of which are heavily critiqued) – only stresses its importance as an artistic work. This is an anime that eventually comes around to aggressively attack the culture of escapism, sardonically attacking itself in the process. That there’s a story to be had, however loose it will come to seem, is a bonus. That the quality of the animation is high, and that the direction fully embraces cinematic aspirations, is a bonus as well. Paranoia Agent radically alters visually from time to time, and always with great effect. It’s a show that often manages slapstick comedy, psychological horror and interpersonal drama within the same 20-minute time frame, often with several swaps in visual style. Satoshi Kon’s legacy may lay in his films, but the writing in Paranoia Agent, at its best, stands among the most interesting series I’ve seen.

While this wasn’t specifically meant to be a review – the show’s 9 years old, I imagine The People have more or less spoken by now – I can’t get by without mentioning Paranoia Agent‘s flaws. It can be slow. We’re talking really slow. On at least one occasion an episode makes its central point within the first five minutes, and then proceeds to flog a dead horse for fifteen more. Mercifully, there’s only one particularly egregious example of this, and the show itself is a mere 13 episodes long, doable in three sittings (as this reviewer did). Problematic as well is the storyline itself, which while metaphorically rich can just as easily be read as preposterous nonsense if the signals are ignored. A warning from the get-go: if you aren’t prepared to watch carefully for symbolic devices and the other sorts of things they taught you way back in arts-school, Paranoia Agent probably isn’t going to do it for you. It’s probably going to seem like pretentious nonsense to you, and that’s pretty much okay: this sort of show occupies a niche interest for people that love to read extremely far into their media. Thankfully, this happens to be me, and Paranoia Agent’s discursive payoff happens to be enormous.

As weird as it is frequently confusing, sometimes slow and on several occasion utterly horrifying, I really can’t recommend Paranoia Agent enough. I got into it on a whim recommendation from Akira The Don, himself apparently late to the Paranoia Agent party, from his post on Satoshi Kon’s deathbed note which is gorgeous and you must read (original here). As Akira put it, “I have never seen anything that made me feel the way this thing does.” For better and sometimes worse, I agree. Paranoia Agent has kept me happily occupied these last three nights, and I happily rank it amongst the best anime I’ve yet seen – and easily the most meditative in its pacing. Go watch those intro and outro videos again; they’re as spoiler-free an advertisement as I can give. Trust me, this one’s worth your time.

Oh right, also the music is gorgeous. And gorgeously creepy.

9.5

(because this is apparently a review now.) 

Posted right here, January 2013. 

To the uninitiated (and really, are there any of us left?), A$AP Rocky’s appeal can be difficult to articulate. “Is he a great rapper?” is inevitably the first question we want answered and, well, no. Not specifically; he talks liking his clothes, his women, his ‘A$AP killers’, and on very rare occasion a couple of other things – albeit with a great sense of rhythm. “Is he a fascinating man? Is he one of rap’s new weirdos?” we ask as well, because of course sheer weirdness can be redemptive. Again, uh, nope, at least not lyrically. On an album that also features Kendrick Lamar (hyperventilating), Danny Brown (doing his best Muppet-on-Adderall) and Action Bronson (…“my shawty gallop in the morning on the beach like a Chilean horse”), Rocky’s hardly the strangest or most intriguing figure, and we have to hope he knows it: he features those three on the same damn track. At least on a vocal and lyrical level – and this is before we confront Clams Casino and Spaceghost Purrp, the elephants in the room – Rocky can come off as more of a tour guide than a rapper. And while he did co-executive-produce the album, and he is a talented curator, Professional Sideliner isn’t a promising statement for his actual rap career. So let’s ask Rocky why he’s cool:

“I said it must be cause a n– got dough/Extraordinary swag an’ a mouth full of gold” – “Goldies”

A-ha! Mystery solved! He’s rich! …And of course there’s much more to it than that, but that’s where any discussion of Rocky is doomed to start, if not end. A$AP Rocky (keeping in mind that this is par for the course in breakout hip-hop) is a rapper whose fame and hyper precede him to an absurd extent. To an early-career-defining extent. Come on, if you know hip-hop you have an opinion on the 24 year-old named Rakim Meyers: either you think he’s a ridiculous, overhyped combination of Tyler the Creator’s production palette (and pitch-tuned growls) and Kanye’s obsession with fashion, or you think he’s the harbinger of a new and brave sort of hip-hop, as quirkily fashion-conscious as it is concerned with repping the hood with minimalist beats. Listening through Long.Live.A$AP, and its predecessor for that matter, it’s difficult not to be drawn to extremes: the initial listen is inevitably a polarizing one. Which is one way of saying that I Hated It At First, or rather maybe I hated Rocky, or perhaps his hype machine. And so the truth of the matter and the man behind the 3-million dollar mixtape – which remains an irredeemably heavy-handed marketing ploy – lies, as it always does, in an an open-minded absorption of his album. So let’s drop the paper-bag-princess high-fashion and the worldwide sold-out shows and the hyperbolic interviews for now. This is marketing nonsense. Beyond A$AP Rocky’s name-calling and fashion-repping, what’s Long.Live.A$AP actually sound like?

Truth of the matter is, provided you’re the one person that slept on Live.Love.A$AP, it sounds like nothing you’ve quite heard before. While Rocky’s actual lyricism is your standard fashion-rapper excess (“PMW” not meaning Professional Motorsport World, apparently), the production here is absolutely out of this world. Openers “Long.Live.A$AP” and “Goldies” cleave close to Live.Love.A$AP’s comfort zone, delivering hazy and disorienting beats that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on Live.Love.A$AP (or Goblin for that matter), but the album absolutely explodes from there. “Lvl” and “Hell” reunite listeners with Clams Casino, the minimalist-savant producer recently hailed by Brian Eno, with back-to-back production the likes of which almost seem ill-suited to rap music to begin with – and certainly mainstream rap music, which is of course Rocky’s sphere. That said, aside from “PMW”, which cleaves a little too close to lounge-commercial music, the effect is completely impressive. The beat on “Lvl” washes over like rolling waves of white static, with clipped vocal samples dropping between phasing synths and a dead-slow snare hit. To his credit – and the slow realization of this reviewer – Rocky drops in single and double-time verses, halting his flow and reversing it into seemingly every vocal cadence he can, turning what could easily have been a funeral dirge of a purple-drank track into a hazily engaging stunner of a single. This all occurs before Clams closes the track with an apparently wordless and utterly haunting choral sample that is both eery, surprising and utterly appropriate. It’s a fascinating beat, and unlike anything you’ve likely heard before. With Spaceghost Purrp out of the picture the extent to which the other producers complement – and occasionally ape – Clams Casino’s bizarre production style is Long.Live.A$AP’s greatest virtue, and man do they do it well. “Hell” gives us Santigold delivering “Me I want everything, it won’t take me long” with a sort of detached confidence that comes off more eerily prophetic than boastful over Clams’ second beat. There’s a frankness to her delivery thats powerful, as there is in Rocky’s when he delivers the surprisingly able “N-’s call me prophecy/swaggin’ in philosophy/white on white waggin’ call that mothafucka Socrates”.  The beat marches trenchantly forward: again it’s dead slow and dusty, echoing and intentionally granular. It works beautifully. So much of the album functions this way that the hazy, detached two-step quickly becomes its M.O.: “Pain” is a slow-motion nova of synths, pulsing and swelling. The Hector Delgado, Friendzone and LORD FLACKO-produced “Fashion Killa” is absolutely gorgeous and rests two-step, snapping snares over a sunny, looping vocal sample that would do Clams Casino proud. It’s likely the coolest beat I’ve yet heard in 2013’s 14 days, and it’s followed by Danger Mouse’s utterly sobering “Phoenix”, Long.Live.A$AP’s major comedown (on an album filled with, arguably, nothing but comedowns). “Phoenix” drops uncut piano and drum samples onto Rocky’s now-signature vocal echoes, concisely bringing the album back to earth in time for “Suddenly”’s last-minute centerpiece. Describing in-depth any more of the production tricks feels like a spoiler alert: if you’re a fan of ‘producers’ albums’, you can stop reading here and just buy it. Long.Live.A$AP is, for two-thirds of its running time, a masterpiece of spooky, nearly-ambient hip-hop minimalism, and a much more concise one than its predecessor. Under a good set of headphones, tracks like “Phoenix” are staggeringly cool and make a compelling argument all their own for Long.Live.A$AP’s lasting contribution to pop-rap production.

That said, if you’re reading along with the track listing in mind, you know I’ve skipped the middle third of the album, as well as Rocky’s lyricism. There was a reason for that. Through all the blurriness of Long.Live.A$AP’s first fix tracks, the listener is meant to sink deep into the cuts. It’s relaxing and empowering all at once – that’d be the effect of dropping what’s effectively a swag-rapper over such cushioned, airy beats. Track seven, “Fuckin’ Problems”, produced by Hit-Boy and C. Papi (Drake, weirdly, because they all need aliases), aims to change all that. In fact, for that track and the two that follow it, Long.Live.A$AP changes completely into a very weird party album. This is a tad jarring. “Fuckin‘ Problems” gives us 2 Chainz yelling about two sentences on repeat, Drake rapping in his surprisingly capable autotune-timbre and Kendrick Lamar warming up for “1Train” by rapping about his dick a lot. The subject matter is par for the album, but Drake, Kendrick and 2 Chainz’s delivery isn’t – like the astounding and preposterous “Wild For The Night” and “1Train” that follow, this is your wakeup call, and all three artists sound fully energized. If you’re a hip-hop traditionalist or looking to party, these are the three tracks that could be safely hauled out and called and EP or a particularly potent workout mix. They’ve opted for a strange sort of pacing, but nowhere near as strange as hearing Rocky go toe-to-toe with Skrillex on “Wild For The Night”… and having it work. There’s something to be said for Rocky’s consistency, or at least his dead-set determination as a rapper: he might not have a whole lot going on creatively in his lyrics (and he doesn’t), but I’ll be damned if anyone else can keep up quite as well with Skrillex’s now hilariously-familiar laser assaults. As he does with every other beat on the album, Rocky keeps Skrillex under his thumb, and this is impressive – it’s easy to take for granted the way his delivery sinks into the production here, and it’s easy to forget that no one else is making popular, non-underground hip-hop quite this out-there in terms of production. It’s somewhat of a system-shock, then, when he brings in every other weirdo for what amounts to a drug-soaked free-for-all on the jaw-dropping “1Train”. Featuring Rocky himself, Kendrick Lamar, Joey Bada$$, Yelawolf, Danny Brown, Action Bronson and Big K.R.I.T. over a string-quartet beat opulent enough that you feel Rick Ross might drop through a wall at any moment, it’s astounding and astoundingly out of place in an album otherwise so locked into its spiritual center of floaty synths and ghostly snare hits. And, just as surprisingly as Rocky’s safely-ignored lyricism interlocks perfectly with his delivery and the beats he chooses for himself, so does “1Train” carve out a queer niche for itself on what is definitely a deeply strange album. Not everyone could deliver words as cheap as “A$AP, get like me/never met a mothafucka fresh like me” and have them sink so deep, and so this is both Rakim’s blessing and curse.

At the end of your listen, like me you’ll probably note that you can’t quote many of A$AP Rocky’s actual lyrics, and that’s fair, but the sonic presentation of the album is transfixing. Long.Live.A$AP is a very pretty thing lacking in lyrical depth, and that’s perfectly alright – so long as its intentional, or at least self-aware. There’s reason to believe this is the case. Throughout the album, up until “Phoenix”, Rocky is flagrantly hedonistic, even approaching nihilism in the name of materialism. It’s an aesthetic we’ve experienced before, but never over beats so isolating and eery. This isn’t music to feel good to, necessarily – it’s music that can evoke bleariness, disorientation and intense isolation. At times it can seem that Rocky exists in a closed universe, parallel to our own, where this sort of rampant, hollow materialism is recognized for what it is. Only production of a high calibre can draw this sort of gut reaction out of lyricism as straightforward as Rocky’s – and thankfully, he has it. And only a wink and nod from the man himself can lock this sort of presentation into place – and thankfully he has that too, on the final two tracks: the strange and show-stopping “Pheonix”, and the successfully autobiographical “Suddenly”, which ranks both technically and lyrically as his finest track yet. Quoting the tracks here won’t prove anything – go listen and see. Long.Live.A$AP’s odd, personal third act begins very, very late, but there’s no denying that it arrives.

So is A$AP Rocky more than that a tour guide and an event planner? Well, yes and no. The man with the 3 million dollar dreads still isn’t an amazing rapper, at least not on an album scale, and his subject matter isn’t going to surprise you. What will impress, and what surprised me, was the care with which Long.Live.A$AP’s architecture has been constructed. Unlike Live.Love.A$AP, this one’s an album, and the stakes have been raised accordingly. By turns fresh, surprising, sleepy and even hilarious, repeated listens turn Long.Live.A$AP into a pleasant surprise for 2013, and an extremely strong start for hip-hop’s most mainstream angle. Too repetitive to be perfect, and lyrically non-stimulating enough to avoid becoming a classic, A$AP Rocky has nevertheless dropped a second impressive album worthy of his hype, and that’s much more than can be said of many of his predecessors.

8.5

Published right here, January 2013. It’s good to be back. 

First, a tangential history lesson: I once called Die Antwoord the worst rap-thing I’d ever heard, and there’s a part of me that won’t back away from that assessment. The price of entry to the Zef Side is high as ever, and an exposure to – and lyrical exploration of - $0$ is a must if you’re hoping to find Ten$Ion anything more than goofy, self-indulgent nonsense. Die Antwoord is very very weird (and fun!), yes, but there’s a lot more to it than that. Watkin Tudor Jones has premised his career on radical self-invention (go look up MaxNormal.TV, who once proclaimed himself “Die fokken antwoord”), and his cohort/wife Yo-Landi Vi$$er is no small accessory to his success. Their dedication is nothing to scoff at – name another rapper whose alter-ego is tatted as heavily as Ninja – and the artistic result is a group whose laugh-track is buried just deeply enough to mystify first-time listeners. Die Antwoord’s tri-lingual gangster rap never breaks character, keeping a straight face even when Ninja’s measure of success is being “all up on the interwebs… WORLDWIDE” (and Yo-Landi’s “Rich Bitch” certification is her ability to choose when and when not to answer her phone). In an interior sense they’re completely absurd, and outwardly dead serious – crystallizing their Zef aesthetic into a buffoonish South African kaleidoscope of Western rap imagery, ghetto-fabulous with zero interest in reflecting on how often their machismo ‘accidentally’ undercuts itself. There’s nothing like it out there.

So they’re a satire, and a very dedicated one. That shock value carried their first album to surprising success, and like any shock-group they’ve got to one-up themselves now that we’re used to their antics. Incredibly, they’re up to the task. DJ Hi-Tek might not exist, but his production has sure as heck improved. $0$ was rave-influenced hip-hop, with more than a touch of house (and even rock) – Tens$Ion drops straight into the club, with Ninja smashing through opener “Never Le Nkemise 1” over a dubstep/rave beat (ravestep?), that in turn drops right out of what sounds like a folk choir. He’s completely comfortable as Ninja now, and you can hear it: he shouts and whines, he mimes EMF and name-drops Neill Blomkamp, he’s “gangster #1” and can afford a gun now (or claims to). As a group that subsists entirely on musical energy, it’s their ideal opener; if nothing else, dubstep whips up a crowd real nicely (and is just played out enough to merit Die Antwoord’s attention). It’s more or less rave beats from there on, and Die Antwoord profits greatly from the narrowed musical direction. For those worried that fan-favourite Yo-Landi would be downplayed, she dominates single “I Fink U Freeky” with a rap style that’s enormously improved in the two years since $0$: like Ninja, she’s noticeably more confident, alternately shouting and cooing and meowing(?) her way through the track – whenever she isn’t deadpanning the chorus. Rest assured, she’s still got a voice like a demented care-bear or a clubbing chipmunk (yes it’s real, and she owns “Fatty Boom Boom”), and it’s still the perfect accompaniment to Ninja’s nasal, staccato flow. Yo-landi’s successfully gone from seeming like an accessory on $0$ to co-conspirator on Ten$Ion, and it couldn’t be a more entertaining effort for it. They’re both still rapping in a head-spinning combo of English, Afrikaans and Xhosa, and they still sound like nothing you’ve heard before – only now the effort’s more balanced. Remarkably, Die Antwoord’s matured.

That said, we know Die Antwoord by now, and any band driven by the cult of personality needs to develop those personalities in order to succeed. Their trademark humour is still in check (check their videos), though downplayed from the days of Ninja bragging about (failing at) scoring with girls and “Beat Boy”’s 8-minute odyssey into supremely hallucinogenic, hermaphroditic sex (lyrics here). Lyrically, Ten$Ion’s more focused, and only suffers slightly for it; a lot of this album actually is gangster rap, inevitably tempered by Die Antwoord’s general absurdity (which never fails to disarm their imagery). New for Ten$Ion is an increased interest in pop-culture references that really sets it apart from its predecessor: everyone from Ludacris to Mike Tyson to Die Hard’s John McClane gets a chance at the wheel here, and it’s hilarious to hear Ninja and Yo-Landi turn western rap culture on its head, time after time. Of course they’re playing around when Ninja says he only likes girls that “let [him] stick [his] penis in their bum” or his wife Yo-Landi Vi$$er tells you she’s “so famous that the cops won’t touch [her]” – though he’s totally not lying when he tells of getting caught watching porn on his phone (by his mom). Even the three straightforward hype-tracks manage to keep things interesting with “Hey Sexys”’s brief political angle and heavy percussive beat, “Baby’s On Fire”’s references to Mr. T and Apocalypse Now, and “U Make A Ninja Wanna Fuck”’s general sarcasm (and thematic response to “She Makes Me A Killer”). Sure, at least one of the two skits is intensely annoying and DJ Hi-Tek’s solo track is violently homophobic (and constructed entirely out of Mike Tyson quotations), but when you hit “So What?” and hear Die Antwoord rap about their collective kid, Sixteen Jones, it’s hard not to feel a little emotional twinge – and that’s an impressive feat for the band that once taunted you with “Jou ma se poes in a fishpaste jar” (you don’t want to know).

So what can we make of sophomore Die Antwoord? Ten$Ion’s a lot more straightforward than its predecessor, the humour is less overt, and at 38 minutes it flirts with over-brevity. That said, it’s more focused musically: the production is as tight as their manic aesthetic will allow, Ninja and Yo-Landi have noticeably progressed as rappers (and actors), and they’ve finally come to the realization that no one wants two 8-minute Zef ballads in a row. For all that, they’ve retained their utterly unique stage presence, and channelled their newfound artistic independence into capping the album with the aggressive “Fok Julle Naaiers” and the absurdly offensive “DJ Hi-Tek Rulez”. Is this a sign that Die Antwoord’s going to stretch their weirdness to an even darker, tenuously-acceptable extent on their next album? I sure hope so. For now we have the thoroughly comfortable and technically improved sugar-rush of Ten$Ion to tide us over.

Waddy Jones and Yolandi Visser are committed to this project, and that takes an incredible amount of nerve. I don’t know if they’ve pushed Die Antwoord as far as it can go, but I can’t help but root for their queer, underdog sort of success. This stuff is as novel as they come, so as they say on “Fatty Boom Boom”:

“If you haven’t got it by now…” “Then you nevah gonna get it”

8.0

Published right here, January 2012

A moment with Transylvanilla:

That video up there, ‘Fok Julle Naaiers’, has some pretty nasty language in it. It’s got some pretty homophobic, rape-culture proliferating language in it. DJ Hi-Tek’s shocking monologue at the end of that video (isolated on Ten$Ion as the eminently skippable “DJ Hi-Tek Rulez”) is taken, almost verbatim, from a very famous Mike Tyson outburst you can view here. Absolutely there’s an artistic statement being made, likely there is also a comedic statement being made regarding masculinity; I’m not here to critique or resolve those artistic issues – I’m here to tell you how I think the album sounds. Die Antwoord, artistically, has every right to make these sorts of statements, and I’m not under the impression that they’re in malicious bad taste (actively promoting bigotry). I’m also not under the impression that Hi-Tek actually exists. But that’s neither here nor there.

The point is, Transylvanilla (that is, Me) unequivocally supports Gay Rights, Women’s Rights, and other generally Common Sense Good Things. The art I inspect here won’t always support those same aims, and I’ll try to let you know when I catch a particularly egregious example (thankfully, bigotry has a way of dragging quality down with it). That said, I won’t stop looking into it, or anything else – that’s what I’m here for.

Just thought you should know.

Resolution isn’t a concept work, it isn’t Lamb of God’s exciting new progressive album, and it certainly isn’t paying Christian Metal any accidental homage when it exclaims “I’ve held the hand of God and I’ve sung the Devil’s song” (“To The End”). It’s mostly unpretentious, mildly political, and generally misanthropic towards those people it feels to be disingenuous or socially parasitic; in other words, it’s a Lamb Of God album. “Straight For The Sun” kicks the album off with a pair of vocal cannon-volleys courtesy of Randy Blythe while sludging guitars meander underneath, and stomps slower than anything to follow (save intermission/breathing break “Barabarosa” halfway through). “Shoot me straight for the sun/I wanna be the only one left/Misdiagnosed condition/Burnt beyond recognition”  Blythe screams in a voice like a white-noise battering ram, and Resolution holds the fort, stylistically and sonically, from there. “Desolation” follows and doubles the opener’s tempo, lashing out at double-speak when it screeches “Spoken sideways and indirect/Without a single word left unchecked” – it’s hard not to get caught up in the energy when they roar “All that for nothing what a fucking waste of time” (the first of many punky chants that pass for choruses on Resolution). “Ghost Walking” has a really neat acoustic opener, and then crushing technical drumming and riffage (and a wild music video). “Guilty” is structured like a hardcore punk track (as is “Cheated”) with added crushing technical drumming and riffage. “The Number Six” actually has a sung chorus, which ought to remind you of Mastodon, but can’t help feeling a bit cheap after all the brutality of the other tracks (especially when “Terminally Unique”, which also has a chorus, bounces bass-guitar off the walls so nicely)… however, of course, it too features crushing technical drumming and riffage, rescuing the track.

So, yes, it all sounds pretty similar – thankfully, that doesn’t result in sheer repetition, which is what Resolution could very easily have done had it not insisted upon subtle stylistic oscillation between tracks. “Ghost Walking”’s acoustic opener works, it’s a 5-second oasis from all the double-kicks. “The Number Six”’s sung chorus isn’t doing it for me, but the spoken-word sections that mute the rest of the band work really well. Even the album’s progressive(!), bizarre, and self-attacking closer “King Me” proves a brief foil to the rest of the album, incorporating everything from female choral vocals (!!) to, apparently, a string orchestra (?!). Amazingly, those all work, though it gets a tad self-indulgent during the spoken word sections – which is exactly why Lamb of God has the good sense to cut them short, stomping the monologue out with a surprise riff-drop. It works and it’s surprising, and of course it doesn’t hurt that their collective metal virtuosity is always going to trump whatever stylistic decisions don’t quite stick.

Resolution is clearly designed for a particular listener in mind, and that listener likely already owns Lamb of God albums. Resolution sprawls, and non-metal listeners will most definitely have issues picking out each track’s eccentricities; it feels overlong and could stand to lose a couple of those back seven tracks. “King Me”’s general oddness could have been expanded to great effect (at the expense of Resolution’s focus), and the ‘big three’ stylistic tracks that form the album’s core (“Guilty”, “The Undertow” and “The Number Six”) may not necessarily stick for you – I know they didn’t overly impress me (which is why “Ghost Walking” and “Terminally Unique” exist). That said, “Invictus” has a hell of a guitar solo, Lamb of God know exactly what their fans want, and they’ve delivered a cleanly-produced, punishing product, no frills attached. Do you like crushing American metal with a heavy groove and shout/mosh-along choruses? You’re in good hands.

8.0

Published right here, January 2012

There are a few natural advantages that come with waiting several years to release your first LP: Aoki’s audience is already out there, he’s already won DJ awards, and he’s gone and made a whole pack of celebrity friends in the process. Many of those friends make appearances on Wonderland, sometimes providing the personality and dramatic flair that Aoki’s productions deserve (and subsist upon), and sometimes just appearing. Wonderland is, mostly, an electro-house album with a penchant for pop hooks – I’ve already mentioned that this sort of music has a time and a place – and so far as it hopes to get people all excited and sock-hopping after a few drinks, it succeeds. That being said, at 100% guest-act capacity, Wonderland isn’t really about Aoki anyways: it’s about his colleagues, and the degree to which his production can support, supersede, or salvage their performances. Ultimately, a great deal of your enjoyment here is going to be in direct correlation with your appreciation for tightly-produced dance anthems and your corresponding ability to ignore shaky lyricism, the odd generic performance, and Rivers Cuomo’s attempts to drop a rhyme over rave beats. Yeah.

That said, let’s dig in: Wonderland has the inglorious honour of opening to Rivers Cuomo rapping. Rivers Cuomo of Weezer is going to bless you with the whitest rap verse of all time (finally), and yes it’s groan-worthy. Thankfully, Aoki has the good sense to back Rivers up with some dirty rave synths, disco strings and a thumping house bass, the combined might of which save “Earthquakey People” from b-side status (though oddly not from a late-album sequel). Pay attention to that last bit, because it’s going to come up later: Aoki saves the track. As in, Rivers Cuomo is committed to eye-rolling verses like “Earthquakey people, ready to shake with the power of sound” (though his voice fits the tune), and somewhere Aoki thought to himself “Oh geez, I’d better drop stomping synths under this, or people are going to laugh” – and so he did, and as we’ll see, this more or less becomes Wonderland’s guiding philosophy. “Ladi Dadi” follows and recalls Doug E. Fresh in name, but results in more of a watered-down “LaLa” – complete with a voice like Ashlee Simpson’s – over sparkling dubstep-light that occasionally breaks into house. It’s passable and generic and it’s going to go over well in clubs because it’s fun and fast and features a dubstep drop, but there’s nothing ambitious going on when Wynter squeals “A little smokie-smoke/don’t mean a dirty joke”. “Dangerous” stumbles into third, featuring an unusually swear-y Will.i.am – sorry, that’s Zuper Blahq – dropping the lyrical gem, “I’m a bad motherfucker/I smash up the party like a bad motherfucker” over flaring organs straight out of “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff”. Again the production is infectious (vocals and all), but the lyricism is distractingly stupid, and for some might entirely break the track (should we just expect this from B.E.P. alumni now?), and Aoki again finds himself playing lifeguard, buoying a dull performance with ten years of solid DJ experience. The rest is largely the same: “Come With Me” is Polina playing the generic club-anthem card over heady bouncing synths that work well enough (and happily reminded me of Sonic when I first heard them). Again, its lyrics are very much your standard ‘oh look it is night be with me I want you’ fare, and are the sort of thing that’s utterly inoffensive in a club, but make a difficult case for home ownership beyond the odd late-night spin. Lil’ Jon and Chiddy Bang then show up to remind us that women are hot over some heavy percussion that (again) dips into house – but never anything overly engaging – and effectively crystallize Wonderland’s key weakness: despite his clearly valiant work to the contrary, Aoki’s celebrity guests are left to define Wonderland, and they aren’t an altogether safe bet.

Despite all the Blaqstarr and Angger Dimas and The Exploited (!!!) cameos going on, Wonderland passes by in a blur, albeit one that would definitely improve with the application of alcohol. It’s a thirteen track album, and you aren’t going to be able to recall (or name) every track by the end, but that isn’t to say there aren’t hills and valleys: when Wonderland hits, it hits very nicely. “Livin’ My Love”, complete with perfectly idiosyncratic verses by LMFAO and NERVO, excels with its turbo-charged pop bounce and the sheer energy of its participants (and is likely Aoki’s finest production here). “Cudi the Kid” sneaks up like a Cudi track ought to (but rarely do on his own albums), drifting through Aoki’s house-synth haze and Cudi’s immaculately autotuned drawl, with Travis Barker doing his damndest to imitate a drum-machine in the background. Sure there’s a weird little dubstep-style drop (of which there are many on Wonderland), and the lyrics are nothing groundbreaking, but again it’s the sound of three people doing what they like best, and working in concert to pull it off with heart. Heck, despite all of my heckling I even have a favourite track from Wonderland, and one I’ll be preserving for later: “Ooh” featuring Jacksonville newcomer Rob Roy. Swaggering out the gate with his best André 3000 impression in tow, he sells “Ooh” on charisma alone. He’s also the only artist here that manages to push Aoki into a background role, which he happily inhabits with dubstep wubs and electric, accenting strings. It’s a strange track, sold largely on the timbre of Roy’s voice, but he fits so nicely between the now-requisite dubstep-ery that’s it’s hard to complain. Unlike so many of the all-stars on Wonderland, Rob Roy’s a (relative) newbie and seems genuinely excited to be on deck; if Wonderland gets a single, this better be it. His enthusiasm is catching, and points out exactly what Wonderland needed: more energetic artists riding the crest of their exposure (like Aoki himself).

Wonderland’s a difficult one to assess. On the one hand, these tracks are perfectly handy for the club, and given the right pair of headphones (or monitors) they’ll all thump pretty well (aside from astounding punk-oddity “The Kids Will Have Their Say”). They’re fun tracks and Steve Aoki knows what he’s doing on the production end of things, despite a bit of over-reliance on the quickly-drying ‘brostep’ effects. On the other hand, Aoki spends so much of Wonderland apparently floating his guest-artists’ dime-a-dozen performances that it’s difficult not to be distracted by the lack of surprises, especially as a home-listener that doesn’t review dance albums en scène (that is, drunk/dancing at a club). Wonderland is always capable, occasionally quite fun, and generally hampered by its lack of lyrical and musical knockouts. I have faith in Steve Aoki’s production abilities, I really do – we might just want to tell a few of Kid Millionaire’s millionaire friends to stay home next time.

6.5

Reviewed right here, January 2012

Straight out of Bagnols-sur-Cèze, Alcest’s music is certainly in French, but their aesthetic goes deeper than that. Les Voyages de l’Âme is pastoral and imaginative, it explores a longing for a lost childhood world of wonder and magic – and so it comes as no surprise that its name means “The Voyages of the Spirit”, or that track titles vary from “Makers of Worlds” to “We Are The Emerald” and “There, Where New Colours Are Born”. There’s an entrenched sense of non-religious spirituality here, born of a fascination with nature and the yearning of band-leader Neige’s sense of childhood peace amongst “Ses prairies eternelles”. Alcest is one man’s vision of the imagined reality he explored as a child, realized through the expansive and often heavy-handed imagery of his lyricism which, although it will be lost on the majority of North American listeners, intentionally recalls Baudelaire as it meanders from “the call of another universe” to “harbors unknown; linking sky and earth”. Les Voyages de l’Âme is frequently beautiful as it undulates from comforting clouds of noise to Niege’s odd, muffled screams on “Faiseurs de Mondes” (which really recalls Enslaved and Isis). It’s going to prove too self-indulgent or outright silly for some, but if you’re in the dreamy mind-state that Alcest demands, Les Voyages de l’Âme is a strange and rewarding listen, owing far more to Shoegaze than the Black Metal touches it occasionally displays. It’s poetic, and Alcest makes the most of their limited armory (no synthesizers here!), melding acoustic and electric instrumentation into a distinctly dream-like listening experience.

I’ve really enjoyed this one: from its anger-less yearning of its screams to the universality of its subject matter, Les Voyages de l’Âme is easy to recommend. Yes there’s a language barrier, but it’s minimal – if you know the album’s title, you know the content of the lyrics, and can safely let the intonation and earnestness of Neige’s frequently-clean vocals take you from there. Knowledge of the French language isn’t an asset here; appreciation of French artistic aesthetics, magical realism and a strong sense of imagination absolutely are. Les Voyages de l’Âme has been on heavy rotation here at the Transylvanilla Office/Coffeehouse lately, and for good reason: Alcest is working hard and making some really good autumnal music. It isn’t going to blow you away with its track-variety, or the ambition of its instrumentalism, or the depth of its metaphysical analysis, but Alcest doesn’t give the impression that they’re aiming for that anyways – they’re intentionally sleepy and dreamy and, yes, self-indulgent. Les Voyages de l’Âme is melancholy and artistic stuff, and if you dig your Black Metal hazy with some thought behind it, there’s no reason this won’t capably last you until our annual slush-storm wears off sometime around August. Or until the next Agalloch release drops.

8.0

Originally published right here, January 2012. 

Like so many readers that day, my jaw dropped a bit when I read up on OFWGKTA’s lyrical rap sheet: extensive rape imagery, homophobia, necrophilia, racism, alcohol and drug abuse, violence and more! How delightful! On principle, I was completely disgusted – however, seafaring as I was, I had no opportunity at all to actually hear the group. So, I naturally reserved judgment while turning my nose skyward at the whole affair. Now, as anyone staring up at the sky will tell you, turning up your nose has a way of causing you to miss things and kick pets and trip down slight inclines – all of which I did in short order. OFWGKTA had already blown up, leaving me to play catchup in the critical aftermath of the whole thing. Fast-forward several months and Tyler’s gone and won Best New Artist at the MTV Music Video Awards, Odd Future’s opened a clothing store in L.A., crooner Frank Ocean gets featured on a Kanye and Jay-Z album, and I’m giving Tyler, the Creator’s Goblin album-of-the-year certification. So what the hell happened?

Let’s go back to the part of this article that stopped you in your tracks: the lyrical content. Defending and describing the whole of OF is outside the scope of this review – and others have done it better – but rest assured, all of that awful stuff loses none of its potency in translation to a Tyler solo LP (“Oh good”, you reply). Tyler and now-M.I.A. cohort Earl Sweatshirt were the locus of the group’s controversy, and left to his own devices Tyler’s morbid fascinations only intensify, quickly reaching their logical, stomach-churning conclusions (try sitting through “Transylvania”). In and of themselves, the sorts of imagery Tyler brings into play are despicable and indefensible; that much is painfully obvious. Nobody gets away with “F-ck a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome” (“Tron Cat”) without raising some eyebrows and losing more than a few fans (and fans’ lunches) in the process. Drawing out all the relevant quotations to fully flesh out Tyler’s descriptive (and offensive) faculties would take pages upon pages; in short, Tyler is going to horrify and bully you. He’ll shock and antagonize every moral value you’ve got. He’s going to disgust anyone unwitting enough to get caught in the audio-crossfire. Your mom is going to find your copy of Goblin, snap it in half, and be more or less justified in doing so. And that’s just the way he wants it.

It’s an understatement to say that it’s going to take a certain type of listener to enjoy what Tyler does, but that isn’t to say the point of entry is particularly small – it’s just going to take a bit of footwork to reach it. Anyone that caught Tyler’s debut LP Bastard is already in on the act, so to speak: all of Tyler’s novelty and lyrical ammunition would be for nought if there weren’t substance hidden somewhere underneath, and on this front he delivers in spades. As much as Bastard was an hour-long showcase for the Odd Future crew to show off their “swag” and make as many ugly “jokes” as their teenage minds could come up with (and establish themselves stylistically), it was an opportunity for Tyler to exorcise his demons and lay plain on tracks like “Bastard” and “Inglorious” how intensely his life has been affected by the absence of his father, and the mixture of sadness and hatred that absence has bred within him. On those same tracks (and others like them), we find that he loves and respects his mother, that he doesn’t understand girls at all, that he feels isolated in the company of friends, and that he has apparently constant and intense suicidal urges. All of these themes feed upwards into Goblin: Tyler doesn’t hate women (“She”), he hates that he can’t communicate with them, and doesn’t understand how to relate. He doesn’t hate his mother, he hates that he can’t explain what it is he does for a living, having dropped out of college and used her money to record a pair of albums (“Nightmare”). He doesn’t hate you or girls or Asians or the rest of Wolf Gang; he doesn’t even drink or smoke pot – but he isn’t about to tell you that. He’s going to rape, pillage, murder, insult and graphically murder his friends on-track until you either “pull your panties down and start to piss off”, somehow embrace the imagery (Yikes.), or realize his entire musical persona is an intricately maintained work of performance art. On track, Tyler hates critics because they close-read his stuff and defuse him by drawing these messages out – but of course, which raging punk wouldn’t be upset that you’ve gone and lain bare his emotional side?

He doesn’t explicitly avoid this sort of analysis, but he’d rather it stay intuitive, an open secret amongst the fans that “understand” him – which isn’t particularly difficult. At his most confessional his music begs this interpretation, but he sees it as his artistic responsibility to guard it closely (which it is). As he rambles on “Goblin”:

“..But that’s bull of the sheet, they want to critique

Everything that we, Wolf Gang, has every released

But they don’t get it cause it’s not made for them

That nigga that’s in the mirror rapping, it’s made for him

But they do not have the mindset that’s same as him

I’m not weird, you’re just a faggot, shame on him”

Even at his most expositional Tyler can’t help but be abrasive and hurtful (and insincerely, antagonistically homophobic); Goblin isn’t for you, it’s for him (which means it’s for you). Effectively, Tyler wants you to bugger off and get it, and it’s this constant push and pull between audience and artist that makes his material so engaging. Listening closely to Goblin you’ll pick up on themes as diverse as his imbedded guilt over his own success, his affection and respect for his single mother, his complete and total awareness of his hurtfulness (“They claim the shit I say is just wrong/Like nobody has those really dark thoughts when alone/I’m just a teenager, who admits he’s suicide prone/My life is doing pretty good, so that date is postponed”) – but of course initially you’re going to get hung up on the violence and the hatred and bigotry, and that’s exactly the facade that lends his artistic presence so much force.

Lyrically, Goblin is a puzzle I’ve yet to wholly crack, which is why it’s lasted me since May. Musically, it’s spacious and strange; eerily bouncing pianos and synths skitter across “Yonkers”, “Goblin” is slow and echoing with lush strings that seem to drop at random, at odds with the off-kilter percussion and the mumbling pitch-shifted speech of Dr. T.C., Tyler’s self-voiced therapist and conceptual MacGuffin. “Radicals” has its Punk tongue thoroughly in cheek when it chants “Burn shit kill people fuck school” over crackling microphones and that same monotone synth that haunts every corner of the Odd Future catalogue. The deeper message of the song is, as Tyler dubiously states, to express oneself honestly, and its menacing thematic ambiguity only feeds further into his self-battling morality. “She” is as creepy as it is beautiful, with warm synths and a Frank Ocean chorus that’s either about loving devotion or stalking (though likely both). Musically Goblin is consistent to the point of mid-album repetition, which makes sense: Tyler makes all his own beats alongside production by Odd Future member Left Brain. He also designs his own clothes, directs his own music videos, creates his own album-art, very openly loves Pharrell, has one of the strangest and deepest vocal deliveries in contemporary hip-hop, and turns 21 this year. Yikes.

It’s been a curious year for music, the sort of year that allows for an album like Goblin to win top honours. This article has been difficult to write because, emphatically, Goblin isn’t the most consistent, dense, or technically proficient album of the year (you’ll find those below). It stretches long and some tracks feel completely unnecessary: “Boppin’ Bitch” is offensively stupid, Tyler kills his friends in “Window” – which is thematically important – but the eight-minute song itself is intensely long and repetitive. “Fish” is, frankly, quite dull. “Au79” is a great instrumental track, but begs more of itself and suggests Tyler could do subtlety, if he had half a mind to. If you don’t fall for Tyler’s artistic eccentricities almost immediately you’re simply going to be very offended, and that’s that. If you don’t like his echoey, rough voice and production, it isn’t likely to grow on you. If you think the rest of OFWGKTA is untalented, well, I don’t know what to tell you; much of OF’s appeal is charismatic and personality-based – meaning that in the case of some members (Dolphin, Taco), talent is a non-issue. They’re simply there, and they can’t rap, and that’s just how OF is. Actually coming to enjoy Tyler, the Creator after being a former detractor is a difficult thing, I’d know, and it involves a great deal of swallowing one’s pride and good taste.

Tyler, the Creator’s Goblin is a very, very strange album. It’s layered, incessantly bleak, adolescent, and gut-wrenching. It’s certainly underground Hip-Hop, likely Punk, and definitely Shock-Rock of some caliber; Tyler’s furious and he’s articulating his rage and confusion and embarrassment the way he feels most comfortable – by lashing out against everything within reach. That he’s intelligent enough to know this and then subvert his own messages (positive and negative) within nearly every track, at his age, is an astounding achievement. Goblin isn’t the album of the year because it’s the most technical, or the most consistent, or even the most easily listenable. Goblin is the album of the year because it is impressive and, like all great art, thoroughly uncomfortable. After several months with Bastard and Goblin I’m still finding ways to re-interpret tracks, to sketch personal details and thematic reflections out of some of the most utterly offensive lyrics I’ve ever heard. For my money, Tyler, the Creator has released 2011’s most impressive work of musical art – offensive flaws and all – without conceding to almost anyone. Now that’s an accomplishment.

Transylvanilla’s Album of the Year 2011

In No Particular Order, The Runners Up: 

Opeth – Heritage

The Roots – undun

Battles – Gloss Drop

Wolves in the Throne Room – Celestial Lineage

The Devin Townsend Project – Deconstruction

The Honourable Mentions:

I’m Gay – Lil’ B

Amebix – Sonic Mass

The Throne – Watch The Throne

Fucked Up – David Comes To Life

Akira The Don – Manga Music

Everything here reflects my more-subjective end of the year tallies, which means these rankings Do Not represent these albums’ individual scores. Goblin is not a 10.0, I’m Gay is not a 7.0. These rankings are based on enjoyability, combined with their impact on myself, personally, as a result of their longevity and my extended opportunity for reflection. I have weird taste; weird things win. Onwards, to 2012! 

Originally published right here, January 2012. Swag. 

Every time I write a review, I quickly jot down some listening notes. They always end up longer than the review itself, and it’s a useful way for me to catalogue an album’s more memorable moments. T-Pain’s no exception. However, with RevolveR, I found my little notepad slowly filling with a collection of T-Pain’s most wretched lyrical SNAFUs, to the point that that’s all I’ve got. Think I’m overreacting? Let’s break format and list some of his lyrical gems:

Warning: this is the tip of the stupidity iceberg.

- “Everybody tappin’ on the bottom of my bottle” (“Bottlez”)

- “She this, she that, her ass so fat” (“It’s Not You (It’s Me)”)

- “Baby it’s not you, it’s me.. it’s the dog in me” (Pitbull, on “It’s Not You (It’s Me)”)

- “Girl plane tickets too high for me to pay” (“Default Picture”, contradicting every other line)

- “Somethin must be wrong wit ma iPhone5…” (“Default Picture”)

- “Girl you makin’ me spend my time, checkin’ your timeline” (“Default Picture”)

- “When you climb on top of me I hit rock bottom” (“Rock Bottom”)

- “Let me get this rubber out this Gucci bag, We gon do something to make your daddy mad” (“Rock Bottom”, RevolveR’s aptly-named halfway-point)

- “Wobble wobble-dy wobble-dy” (the chorus of “Look At Her Go”)

- “My trunk rattlin’ like I got a bunch of New Boyz inside” (“Regular Girl”, sounds like “newborns”, Not the last time this occurs.)

- “Puttin’ creases in my t-shirt with ya ass, baby that’s your theme song put it on tha glass” (“Center of the Stage”, DM me if you know what this means, please)

Okay, so T-Pain has no idea what a metaphor is, and it’s often hilarious – that alone won’t kill a club track. Maybe its necessary that I reiterate that I don’t hate club music. Club music is obligated to do one thing and one thing only: make people dance. I understand that. The key difference with T-Pain is that his lyricism on RevolveR is distractingly bad. Those above quotations aren’t cherry-picking, they’re the lyrical highlights; the only memorable moments of those respective songs when T-Pain isn’t reiterating the same random lines about having sex or meeting a woman or being rich or whatever. And that’s not to say that songs about those things are necessarily bad either, it’s that R&B artists are swimming upstream lyrically – either their lyrics or their delivery has to be compelling enough to counteract the fact that much of their genre (contemporarily) is flooded with repetitive nonsense. Here, T-Pain has neither; go relisten to “Slow Jamz”, go purchase anything Janelle Monae has released – see what I mean (heck, Frank Ocean). T-Pain is on a whole other level, and if you’re still unconvinced, let’s take a listen to the nigh-hilarious, unintentional racism of “Mix’d Girl”. “You tellin’ me you Japanese – I’m tellin’ you.. maybe?”, T-Pain auto-croons to his beloved, “Are you listening? Do you even speak English?”. He then suggests she might not be able to tell him what races her parents are. Do I have to push this any further? This is some of the most entertainingly, unintentionally racist songwriting I’ve ever heard, and even if I were in a club, and “Mix’d Girl” somehow came on, we wouldn’t dance. We’d sit on the floor and laugh and wonder how South Park didn’t get to these lyrics first.

The parade of unintentional hilarity doesn’t stop with “Mix’d Girl”. RevolveR’s potential conceptual success, “Default Picture”, is a heartfelt and sincere ballad about his only-mildly-creepy Twitter-crush on a female abroad, I’ll give him that. “I got this feelin’ in my bones that I can’t get rid of – but that’s probably the bass” is an effective line, and those don’t come cheap on RevolveR (though it does sound like he’s saying ‘balls’). With that set down, he proceeds to really milk the Twitter metaphor: “you don’t ever show up in my mentions, girl, just search my name” “Am I botherin’ you? Should I be unfollowin’ you?”. By the time “Default Picture” wraps up, it isn’t a stretch of the imagination to imagine some errant 4-Chan denizen somehow snuck in and ghostwrote a T-Pain song. The lyrics read like a somber Weird Al tune about online stalking, and on repeat listens only proves itself increasingly self-parodic (sorry Weird Al!). “5 O’Clock” follows and has even deeper issues, incorporating a criminally good Lily Allen sample… which T-Pain subsequently ignores to the extent that her half of the song is sad and touching, and his half still manages to stay drunk and laid and ignorant. The dichotomy is so great it ends up functioning as a metaphor for the entire album: T-Pain is just doing to do his thing, dammit, no matter what you might have to say to the contrary. Perhaps nap time really is the best idea, Lily.

Rarely does an album come along with so many egregious thematic and lyrical issues that I can riff on every single track. “Drowning Again” is feels like the umpteenth slow jam and features lyricism that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Korn track… superimposed over surprisingly pretty pianos that only draw out the already thick melodrama. “I Don’t Give A Fuc” sees T-Pain disappointed in his 4-Loko-chugging girlfriend as he clutches his bottle of ‘Rozay, and features a track-title that ought to have the audience nodding in disappointed agreement (though its Backstreet-Boy-esque harmonies work, and should have been further integrated). By the time “Turn All The Lights On” successfully bangs into place as the album’s proper closer – pairing up with the album “Bang Bang Pow Pow” promised (and failed to deliver) an hour previously – the audience has been fast asleep for twenty minutes and its title has become grimly appropriate.

T-Pain can’t write lyrics and he isn’t entirely sure what to do with a metaphor – ideally, this is why Lil Wayne, Lily Allen, Pitbull, Wiz Khalifa, Chris Brown (x2), One Chance and Ne-Yo show up to lend a hand. In a perfect world, this is how a T-Pain track works. It’s an incredible frustration, then, to watch Lil Wayne be generally lazy (“I go so hard they call me go-so-hard”), Ne-Yo and Chris Brown and One Chance autotune themselves to indiscrimination, Lily Allen get underplayed, and Pitbull be, well, Pitbull. Aside from Wiz Khalifa generally holding his own on his guest verse in “5 O’Clock”, it’s only when E-40 shows up on bonus track #3 that anyone brings any energy… and even then he devotes all his enthusiasm to the sorts of grimy sex-description that don’t feel out of place on an E-40 album, but completely overbalance T-Pain’s milder fare.

I’d go into a discussion of the musicality of RevolveR but, dangit, there aren’t any surprises there either. “Bang Bang Pow Pow” and “Turn All The Lights On” hint at the sort of excitement a proper fun-loving Steampunk T-Pain could have given us, but somewhere along the development process RevolveR morphed into an hour of slow-jams, lazily pot-shotted in the general direction of the strip club. When the beats hit they hit soft, coated in soft strings, pianos, and that omnipresent T-Pain ‘snap. It’s boring because it isn’t inventive, and even when it speeds up to throw in some heavier percussion (“Look At Her Go”) there’s a weird, emphatic lack of energy. When RevolveR doesn’t get you amped, it completely exhausts you.

I wish I had something positive to add here, but RevolveR makes it exceedingly difficult to praise anything at all. Are there singles here? Well, yes, and that’s the marketing philosophy under which this album was released; you’re likely to hear a cut or two off RevolveR at the (strip) club, which is where they belong. Is it T-Pain, will it feed your autotune addiction? Well yeah, it will – but there are others out there doing it better. Sure it’s unintentionally hilarious, but that isn’t the sort of album we go and spend money on, is it? What the heck happened, T-Pain? Fun-loving is one thing, RevolveR is just exhausting and shoddily constructed. Don’t even get me started on the Beatles’ Revolver/RevolveR distinction, or T-Pain’s ongoing autotune obsession, or what the heck musical genre this is. I’m still mad about the lack of Steampunkery. RevolveR fails in its most basic of objectives: it isn’t even amusing.

Tl;dr Bah Humbug.

3.0

Originally published right here, January 2012. Much to my chagrin.