The Bronx are a Hardcore Punk band out of Los Angeles. Their latest album, The Bronx, comes on the tail of three previous LPs, all named The Bronx. They also run a (surprisingly great) Mariachi side-project called, well, Mariachi El Bronx, whose releases number Mariachi el Bronx and Mariachi el Bronx, respectively. Bronx Bronx Bronx. Now while we wait for semantic overload to sink in and ruin that word forever, I’ll say straight-up that their latest The Bronx came as a pleasant surprise to me. There’s a problem endemic to reviewing this sort of Punk music, and the oddly non-New-York-based Bronx’s obsession with their own name sort of digs at it: yes there’s the pride, the absolute working-class DIY love of the thing, but there’s also the major caveat that every Punk band sooner or later has to face: the looming threat of repetition. The vastness of the genre, the shadow of the thousands of bands that have come before, very much in the same vein, very much in love with the craft and the raw simplicity that is so often Punk. It’s enough to give a man expectations, and it’s the sort of thing that makes hardcore Punk divisive: it’s either going to fit you like an old, holed glove, or you’re going to reject every part of it like the smelly old sock it basically is. Now that’s not to say that Punk hasn’t exploded creatively over the years – and of course it has, it started creatively – but not every record needs to be David Comes to Life. We can’t dine on genre-pushers like Jane Doe and Chimerical Bombination every day of the week and we don’t have to: there’s always going to be a place for that raw energy, that simplicity. Portraits of working-class pride, desperation, giving in to temptation, empowering oneself through sheer, independent force of will – there’s always going to be a place in Punk for that sort of thing, fueled by a few guys with guitars and drums and one or two that happen to yell a lot. That’s what The Bronx is here to do, and they get that feel right. If reviews of Hardcore Punk are by necessity a little more passion-based, a little less wordy and technical than (my) other reviews can get, well that’s just fine: I liked it.
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.
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.
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 thesame 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.
The Bronx are a Hardcore Punk band out of Los Angeles. Their latest album, The Bronx, comes on the tail of three previous LPs, all named The Bronx. They also run a (surprisingly great) Mariachi side-project called, well, Mariachi El Bronx, whose releases number Mariachi el Bronx and Mariachi el Bronx, respectively. Bronx Bronx Bronx. Now while we wait for semantic overload to sink in and ruin that word forever, I’ll say straight-up that their latest The Bronx came as a pleasant surprise to me. There’s a problem endemic to reviewing this sort of Punk music, and the oddly non-New-York-based Bronx’s obsession with their own name sort of digs at it: yes there’s the pride, the absolute working-class DIY love of the thing, but there’s also the major caveat that every Punk band sooner or later has to face: the looming threat of repetition. The vastness of the genre, the shadow of the thousands of bands that have come before, very much in the same vein, very much in love with the craft and the raw simplicity that is so often Punk. It’s enough to give a man expectations, and it’s the sort of thing that makes hardcore Punk divisive: it’s either going to fit you like an old, holed glove, or you’re going to reject every part of it like the smelly old sock it basically is. Now that’s not to say that Punk hasn’t exploded creatively over the years – and of course it has, it started creatively – but not every record needs to be David Comes to Life. We can’t dine on genre-pushers like Jane Doe and Chimerical Bombination every day of the week and we don’t have to: there’s always going to be a place for that raw energy, that simplicity. Portraits of working-class pride, desperation, giving in to temptation, empowering oneself through sheer, independent force of will – there’s always going to be a place in Punk for that sort of thing, fueled by a few guys with guitars and drums and one or two that happen to yell a lot. That’s what The Bronx is here to do, and they get that feel right. If reviews of Hardcore Punk are by necessity a little more passion-based, a little less wordy and technical than (my) other reviews can get, well that’s just fine: I liked it.
“Let’s just accept reality.” 
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! 
Transylvanilla 