Tag Archives: Hip-Hop

Jan 14 2013
Leave a comment
Music Reviews

A$AP ROCKY – LONG.LIVE.A$AP

This is a long one, folks, so let me summarize it for you here: if you work anywhere like I work, you know that A$AP’s a bit of an institution these days in popular hip-hop, and there’s a reason for that. The production work on his latest album is out of this world (frequently fairly literally), and makes up for any boredom you might get from his lyrical stylings, which are mostly par-for-the course. When it’s good, it’s Really Cool, and that’s a function of some masterful production work and A$AP Rocky’s frequently surprising ability to push that musical ambition to his rhythmic advantage. Read on, and see what the heck I mean! 

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. 

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
Feb 07 2012
1 Comment
Music Reviews

Die Antwoord – Ten$Ion

Ninja’s got a new tattoo: “TEN$ION” right across his stomach to celebrate their new album, matching the colossal “$0$” down his back and the crude lyrics scrawled all down his neck and arms. If it were anyone else I’d be dumbfounded and nonplussed – but I’ve reviewed Die Antwoord before. You can’t question Ninja’s audacity or confidence; this is the man that rapped about scoring a record deal “in the overseas” long before he had one, after all. As a matter of fact, that deal fell through: Interscope Records apparently couldn’t handle the South African duo’s (trio’s?) radical and offensive sense of humour, so Ninja did what any responsible recording artist would do: he dumped one of the largest recording companies on earth and founded his own Zef Recordz. What results is a natural sequel to their debut album, musically updated and gleefully unhinged as ever.

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.

Tagged , , , , , , , , ,
Jan 11 2012
Leave a comment
Music Reviews

T-Pain – RevolveR

Remember back when T-Pain was a big thing and journalists awarded him titles like ‘Autotune Wizard’ and ‘The Man That Brought Auto-Crooning To R&B’? Well gang, it’s time for another T-Pain evolution. It’s time for RevolveR. It’s time to bring autotune to… Steampunk? Alright, so it doesn’t take a music critic to point out that that’s a really bad idea, and it takes T-Pain about one track-name to abandon the concept entirely; despite the promisingly-titled “Bang Bang Pow Pow”, RevolveR takes a stylistic u-turn about five seconds in and never looks back. Do not be mistaken: this is not Steamboy, The Difference Engine, or Abney Park’s latest obsession. In fact, it isn’t much of anything at all – when an album abandons its conceptual pretensions before the first track hits, things never bode well, but once you notice that marketing failure is the least of RevolveR‘s issues.. well, it’s a slow, steam-less march to the grave. What starts as a fun, silly romp devolves into one of the most sloppy, repetitive and surface-of-Mars-barren albums I’ve napped through all year.

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. 

Tagged , , , , , ,
Dec 27 2011
Leave a comment
Music Reviews

Nujabes – Spiritual State

Jun Seba is dead. He’s been that way since a tragic traffic accident on February 26th of 2010, leaving an enormous legacy and a brief and highly concentrated discography in his wake. The man known as Nujabes was a legend in the ambient, jazz-infused hip-hop scene – consciously or not, many of us knew him as the force behind much of Samurai Champloo’s soundtrack, an OST so effective in its simplicity that years later, free of narrative context, it continues to stand happily on its own. That show’s artistic direction crystallized his signature style, a synthesis of hip-hop production and folk-y jazz, blended with dreamscape strings and floating piano lines – production whose artistic force often overshadowed whichever occasional guest-performer happened to drop by. Spiritual State is his first release since 2005’s Modal Soul – a six-year hiatus forcibly ended by his death – and his absence from the final stages of this album is palpable. Assembled by his musical companions from component parts found in his workshop, Spiritual State lacks the focus and polish of his finished material. A quiet, meditative work, it drifts from track to mostly-instrumental track, lingering for piano samples and five widely-spread and starry-eyed guest verses from Five Deez’s Pase Rock, longtime compatriot Cise Star and Hydeout Productions labelmate Substantial. Nujabes’ input is unfinished, but Spiritual State still stands: a calming and often beautiful work, it’s too concise to be a tribute album, too focused for a post-mortem compilation. In an inescapable way, Spiritual State is Nujabes’ eulogy, heavily steeped in his influence and haunted by his presence, but never quite an original or complete production.

Spiritual State, as the album-art suggests, bursts with colour and life. Album bookends and standout-tracks “Spiritual State” and “Prayer” mirror one another in their striking, nostalgic beauty . The former is produced by collaborator Uyama Hiroto (see: Final Fantasy), and relies on looping piano flairs and an almost Flying Lotus brush-drum sample that bring substance to its six and a half minutes; when that standup bass and clarinet kick in, the impact is undeniable, and more than a little heart-wrenching. “Prayer” feels like its response – the most complete-feeling of the album’s artifacts – and as a piano and flute duet around which the DJ builds swelling drum loops and organ responses, it results in something like a thinner version of the audio-hypnotism that he and Fat Jon conjured up with “Aruarian Dance” those years ago. In between the album flutters, world-music drums and chorus-filled pianos filling every track. “Yes” sees Pace Rock contemplating and reminiscing while 4/4 bongos and double-thumping drums fill the space beneath (and the final couple minutes of the track). “Rainyway Back Home” is dusty and expansive with its synthesizers and acoustic guitar, “Far Fowls” is plucking strings over hip-hop drumming and culminates with the same folk-hip-hop vibe that brought Samurai Champloo its fame. “Fellows” is tailor-made for rainy days in the lounge with its plinking keys, trumpets and vocal samples. There are many more effective moments too (an hour’s worth), and while the tracks can blend together imperceptibly, Spiritual State is consistent, never straying from its introspective, jazz-infused quietude.

It’s a sonically beautiful album, and for those that love Nujabes’ signature style Spiritual State will likely prove and emotional and fulfilling listen. Nujabes made his name producing music for thought, beats that went as well with mid-summer walks as they did with quiet rainy days at home. In this respect, Spiritual State doesn’t disappoint, though it meanders: some tracks (“Fellows” and “Color of Autumn”) seem to cut too soon, the album itself can feel too long and ambient for concentrated listening, and it’s missing the punch that contributions like Fat Jon’s might have delivered. While the overall listening is thematically focused, the songwriting isn’t, which sometimes results in indistinguishable tracks that feel as much like outtakes or safe experiments as they do original productions. Simply put, it isn’t his greatest work, nor does it a necessarily complete one. Which, in all fairness, it isn’t.

What do we do with Spiritual State? The name is a clue: quiet, relaxing and introspective, Spiritual State feels like a tribute to its creator. Like Nujabes himself, it cuts short, leaving us wanting more. As a capstone to his career, it’s effective. It’s beautiful and earnest, and like so much of his work it’s sad and uplifting at once. It leaves room for more, it begs the listener to retroactively explore his discography. This is likely the last we’ll hear from Nujabes, and while it isn’t his best work, as a eulogy it functions brilliantly; in listening to Spiritual State, you too might miss his style and influence. There’s a metaphorical statement somewhere in there. As a musical work, Spiritual State is expansive and humble and incomplete – and that still puts Nujabes ahead of his peers.

8.0

Originally published right here, December 2011.

Tagged , , , , , ,
Dec 20 2011
Leave a comment
Music Reviews

Akira The Don – Saturnalia Superman: Akira The Don Salutes the Majesty of Christmas

Hey, Adam Narkiewicz came out with another LP today (okay, yesterday), less than three months after his last one! And he’s dropped it right in the middle of Saturnalia itself, how thematically appropriate! I don’t have to go through the walkthrough this time: if you love Akira’s stuff, and you have to be a special kind of person to do this, you will have a big silly grin on your face for much of Saturnalia Superman. It’s as simply as that: fans can’t not cackle at the Nutcracker Suite sample on “Jimmy Savile Swag”, they can’t not smile at the album’s opener “A Very Merry Ho Ho Ho” when he wishes his  mother and father “and their new respective partners” a very merry Christmas. He’s infectious and ineffably positive, and the cult of personality is in full effect – even when Saturnalia Superman takes some surprisingly thoughtful and unconventional twists towards the end.

Musically, Akira’s in control on this one: he covers a good 90% of the verses this time around, flipping between the feel-good hollering of “A Very Merry Ho Ho Ho” and his trademark political flows on “Ha Satan” with ease (on what might be his most politically-charged track since “Thanks for All the AIDS“). “Jimmy Savile Swag” (Westerners, go wiki who that is) rides that hard-leaning two-step beat everyone loves these days, and Akira’s infatuation with autotune continues make an appearance. Its presence is most obviously  felt on the eyebrow-raising Envy feature “Sexmas”, which is entertaining and meandering and ends with Envy reminding us she’s “going to heat it up like a Mincemeat pie” amongst other bizarre Christmas-related sex-threats (“wrap you up with Fairy Lights, it’s gonna be good”). As on ATD 26, while autotune rears its blocky head every couple of tracks, it’s very clearly a stylistic decision: Akira’s (and Envy’s) voice flutters, it bounces around, and unlike so much autotuning it’s no attempt to fake anyone’s way into opera-level virtuosity. It’s a level of honesty and earnestness that Akira brings to all his work these days, and as on his other albums it goes hard at work, grounding Saturnalia Superman and providing a great deal of his appeal.

Clanging bells and other Christmas jolliness pervade this album (“A Christmas Movie”), but it isn’t without its surprises: most of Akira’s version of “Bleak Midwinter” is a surprisingly heartfelt vocal duet by Akira’s Cornish Welsh in-laws, proceeding a cappella before the piano, flute and strings kick in and set off what eventually builds into the album’s most beautiful track. “Bleak Midwinter” falls mid-album, and precedes another nine-and-a-half minute surprise: “17 Year Old Blonde Girl And A Bottle of Acid”, featuring a man named Issue, who really cannot sing (thankfully, he seems to know this). Like its title might suggest, it’s a trip: what begins as an odd bit of hood-meandering by Issue quickly breaks down into a heartbreaking ode to a forgotten female trip-mate, delivered by Akira himself. The album’s greatest and most sobering moment, it’s a strange and thought-provoking piece, sprawling its narrative across several harrowing minutes and telling a story that isn’t always easy to hear. When Akira tells us that he’s opening Christmas presents with his mum and little brother and the “wrapping paper seem[s] to crawl up [his] arm like tentacles” the psychedelic imagery combines with our notions of Christmas’s assumed innocence to shock and disorient the listener. It’s extremely effective stuff, and lends heavy dosage of reality to the typical Christmas Album format.  In a sense, all of Saturnalia Superman follows this model: simultaneously celebrating the holiday season (and life!) while offering thoughtful reminders of its reality – murder, drugs, rampant commercialism and Akira’s trademark resolution to carry on (closer “In The Morning”) all make appearances here.

Of course, Saturnalia Superman wouldn’t manage to be an ATD LP if it didn’t somehow pull off being a party, even in its bleakest moments. It isn’t his most consistent album – much of his merry band of thieves is missing (can we imagine Christmas Big Narstie? Let’s.) – but Saturnalia Superman can’t help being an enjoyable time, even in its more experimental and meandering moments. Another solid entry in the ATD catalogue (though not strictly ATD 27), Saturnalia Superman is supremely topical during the season, and offers several tracks destined to prove their staying power in the Akira catalogue. It goes by quickly, a widely various series of Christmas-themed sketches in the life of one more dude trying to get by. It’s an Xmas album for people that live in the real world, who’ve had experiences, that aren’t much for major commercialism and don’t know what to think about God but know they like hip-hop and spending time with their folks. How much more can we ask for for Christmas than that?

7.5

Bonus Level:

Saturnalia Superman As a Christmas Album is a grand triumph, intelligent, heartfelt and earnest. As a simultaneous lover and critic of the Christmas season, this sort of thing really does it for me. I do love it, but in the above review I had to acknowledge its faults. As a big Akira fan and a big Christmas fan, though, I have to say this is definitely going to be spinning all holiday season. Much more interesting, dense and listenable than any Christmas album I’ve heard in years. Highly recommended. 

Based solely as a Yuletide experience, Saturnalia Superman gets a  coveted 4.5/5 baubles. Do with that as you will.  

Akira the Don provides many of his services over the internet: his website is here, and he would love it very much if you’d cop a free listen off the stream, and then buy yourself some copies. 

Originally published right here, December 2011. 

Tagged , , , ,
← Older posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.