(Jaime xx)
Jamie xx, at Richard Russell’s request, remixed Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here, the 2010 critical darling and Scott-Heron’s first in over a decade. Maybe it’s just where my head’s at but I responded more positively and viscerally to the remix album, We’re New Here. Slant let me write about my favorite cut: click clack.
RS
(Gil Scott-Heron)
To read my show review, skip over to Slant’s Features section: click clack.
RS
(Common Era’s album artwork)
Belong’s new LP Common Era drops next month. Here’s my Slant review of the first leaked track: click clack, please.
A preview of coming attractions: an essay trying to explain Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All to myself. If you don’t know what that string of words means, watch this!
RS
A new year, a new city, a new venue: in December I moved to Brooklyn but embarrassingly this is the first show I’ve attended since arriving. Beer and macaroni and cheese waylaid my journey to the show meaning I missed No Joy and Wavves. I think the bartender had just finished pouring my Goose Island when Wavves crashed to a close. My thought: these guys have hair that small rodents could reasonably live in. Also, cool guitar sounds, dudes! The trio sounded hazy, what you’d expect from a group playing from an album called King of the Beach, an album featuring cover artwork complete with cartoon cat toking thick joint. Wayy far out.
Behind a large painted backdrop of a cat puking DayGlo green and yellow at the end of boardwalk lined by equally green aliens, Ms. Bethany Cosentino on rhythm guitar, Bob Brunno on lead guitar and Ali Koehler on drums. The air was thicker with fog machine fog than weed smoke, the first surprise of the night. Cosentino’s arm moved like a metronome across the strings, chording like all of surf rock depended on it. Black heels, black leg warmers, black tights gone to sheer at the ups of her thighs, black pleather shorts, black leotard—she’d taken a page from The-Dream’s songbook and gone all that color everything. A necklace hung down to where the curving upper lip of her guitar met the bottom of her left breast.
My shock at the palpable lack of her multi-tracked vocals convincing the listener of the Ronettes slowly gave way to actual Ronette’s nostalgia with each pristine tambourine jingle early in the set. With the vocal smoke and mirrors absent, the listener can better appreciate the three-piece minimalism. The results are textbook pop, sweet and endearing. Cosentino’s teengirl diary lyrics still grate—I’m begging her to stop rhyming “lazy” with “crazy”—but the melodies carry the songs home. The strut of “I Want To’s” opening riff breaking into full pop-punk sprint at the close succeeds always. The song is also one of the rare occasions where her simple, candid lyrics work. Essentially a SoCal via Phil Spector variation on the Beatles’ “I Want You,” “I Want To” earns my love despite forcing my fingers to type that obnoxious nickname for Hollistercountry. There’s a nickname that should stick.
But so of course the beer wears off and the short set, padded with covers though it was, ends and the listener has to wonder what comes next. I sat waiting for the F train, thinking on my friend’s remark that “I don’t think their second album can be this endearing.” The first time is often nicest. But the continued success of Best Coast will be a matter of infection. Can Best Coast strangle enough juice from this shtick to bring the jaded listener back for another roll in the sand? As long as they multi-track her vocals and the melodies chirp and ache, I don’t think the listener will have a choice. Good pop music is oppressive like that.
RS
Sometimes you wake up sick, your head from upper lip to scalp feeling rock solid with congestion and the blanket twistthreaded through thighs, knees, calves and ankles. Your foot dangles cold off the mattress. You’re sweating. Your saliva feels hot with infection. Sometimes you wake up sick. Only this particular morning you discover that Fleet Foxes have released the first single from their forthcoming record and your head cold grows small, almost manageable.
My first listen to “Helplessness Blues” from the album of the same name, I was struck by Robin Pecknold’s lyrics. I’ve listened to Fleet Foxes and the Sun Giant EP many, many times but I’m hardpressed to recall even a handful of the lyrics. The Fleet Foxes of 2008 foregrounded voice, not words—”Helplessness Blues” does both, perhaps an indication of the band’s direction three years later. “If I had an orchard, I’d work till I’m raw,” Pecknold sings after the song sprouts wings and flies away right around the three-minute mark. Dynamic song structures are nothing new from these fellas, but that doesn’t make their transitions any less powerful. I have goosebumps and it has nothing to do with my cold, probably. No—certainly I’m swooning because of the layered vocals carrying this song almost as high as my expectations for their slumpless sophomore album.
RS
More for Slant: I review the latest Ducktails full-length, his first proper LP since 09′s Landscapes. Remember “LandRunner” from Landscapes? Remember how it was the best? This new record has no “LandRunner.” Click, please: Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics.
RS
So a funny thing happened: I gave two stars to an album from an artist I respect to the utmost, an artist I know is capable of great things. But that two star nags. To keep that from discouraging any readers interested in the great Madlib, here are five examples of classic material.
Five Madlib-Produced Songs to Restore Faith:
“One Inna” – Aloe Blacc
(Aloe Blacc)
One of the finest R&B cuts of the last decade. And this is coming from someone who treats The-Dream like a god among men.
“Ain’t Right” – Diverse
(Diverse)
Grounding a track with a vocal sample is something Madlib does better than most. Here’s evidence.
“The Official” – Jaylib
(Madlib, left; J Dilla, right)
Near the beginning of The Carter III, Lil Wayne says: “I feel big, like not big in the sense of weight, you know I mean, like gaining weight or nothing like that…[but] colossal.” Madlib takes a song called “Diana in the Autumn Wind,” prosaic poesy for sure, and turns it into a vibrate-the-whip-to-pieces, bass-knocking monster. Or colossus, if you prefer.
“Fancy Clown” – Madvillain
(MF DOOM, in the mask; Madlib, in the doorag)
The broken vocals, the jabbing piano chords, and the meta-quality to DOOM’s verse, using his Viktor Vaughn persona to insult the MF DOOM character – everything is brilliant, everything is right.
“Please Set Me at Ease (Hip Hop Mix feat. MED)” – Madlib
(Shades of Blue album artwork)
Great title, something about the earnestness of the request. I love this song in earnest. And once I played it for someone who didn’t like rap and even he liked it!
RS
Here’s the first in what is hopefully a long stretch of work with a terrific online magazine, Slant. My first assignment? The latest from Madlib, maybe the finest producer working in hip-hop today. Click, please: Low Budget High Fi Music.
RS
(The-Dream)
The first time I heard The-Dream was in a smallish bar in North Oakland, not too far from the University of Pittsburgh’s main campus. My last few years in college were marked by a lack of hip-hop and R&B, the two genres I dedicated myself to exclusively before going away to school in the fall of 2005. Growing up on old school soul, my progression into hip-hop always struck me as obvious, natural. I was never able to make plain this chain to my father though he’s responsible for introducing me to the records that would be sampled by my favorite producers for my favorite emcees to rhyme over. College coaxed me into trying more things and so I wandered far from my roots. At Logan’s Pub that night I almost flitted back. I certainly knew I’d heard something good.
The song was “Rockin’ That Shit,” and it remains my favorite from Terius Nash, a man who correctly calls himself The-Dream. Of course, it wasn’t the first time I’d heard his work; no one could avoid “Umbrella” or “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” songs he wrote and produced with his partner Christopher “Tricky” Stewart. Those are incredible songs, and I could wax ecstatic about how important it is to me that he’s done some of his greatest work for female singers, but specifically I want to talk about his solo work, about a lyrical motif I’ve noticed.
The-Dream’s first single, the first track from his first LP, is “Shawty Is Da Shit!” If you’ve never heard it, click that link. Then listen to “Rockin’ That Shit” from Love vs. Money, his second release. You’ll notice they’re thematically similar, caught on the idea that the desired woman is so stupefyingly wonderful, textbook dumbfine, that The-Dream either does not have the language to express himself or feels it unnecessary. In “Shawty Is Da Shit!” he sings that he “don’t need no hook for this shit.” I first heard the song on headphones and thoroughly irritated the sleeping bus passengers around me by laughing at the gutsy pronouncement. What’s so dumbsmart about the song is that The-Dream singing about how unnecessary a hook would be in convincing us of the greatness of this woman is the hook of the song. “Shawty is da shit” he sings, dragging out “shit” almost to the point of irritation while the background vocals poke the listener with one his favorite sounds: “AY! AY! AY!” The-Dream’s music is full of sung syllables from anonymous vocalists, male voices that aren’t The-Dream singing bites of sound. Some may say I’ve got this backwards, but in my heart I truly believe that the biggest fan of The-Dream (after me) must be Dirty Projector’s mastermind Dave Longstreth. Just like The-Dream swells his songs with cries of “AY!,” Longstreth uses the voices of Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle as points of sounds, wordless outbursts to flex Longstreth’s formalism. In his own way, The-Dream is just as much a formalist, especially within the context of his genre. But I digress.
(D. Longstreth)
“Shawty Is Da Shit!” is cocky, hilarious and infectious. It’s smart and knows it. “Rockin’ That Shit” is a bit more serious. The synths that sound like they’re dreaming of being trumpets announce that. The-Dream’s dramatic use of a pause before the heavy percussion busts things open announce that. “Shawty Is Da Shit!” uses a list of playground crushes for lyrics at one point: Kisha, Sonya, Tanya, Monique; in “Rockin’ That Shit,” the only mention of names is in relation to the beloved becoming “Mrs. Nash.” Mr. Nash is not playing around. This is fat cherubs and polished bands of gold music, “that engagin shit.” At the moment of crisis, the hook, The-Dream sings “there’s nothing I can say / she’s just rockin that shit like” and then stops. “Shawty Is Da Shit!” is too cute and clever, too playground braid-pulling and cat-calling to commit to the complete loss of language. “Rockin’ That Shit” is that song’s older sibling and it knows when to shut the hell up to knock the lover from her feet. Those wannabe trumpet synths and The-Dream’s careful vocalizing achieve something like glory in the moment of wordlessness.
2010’s masterful Love King doesn’t try to recapture that particular magic, but those Dream completists have hopefully by now noticed Basic Instinct, the new Ciara record, which features seven songs written and produced by The-Dream and Tricky; “Speechless,” if it isn’t already obvious from the title, revisits the motif. “Trick we did it again,” The-Dream declares before the song proper begins; he will never be modest. He even provides the vocalization that follows Ciara’s admission that her boy’s love leaves her speechless. But he’s low in the mix, not stealing the thunder from a vocalist I’d previously neglected (despite Lil Wayne recording an ode to her). With The-Dream and Trick behind her, Ciara finally finds the perfect outlet. I would urge anyone who loves The-Dream to at least listen to the songs he wrote on Basic Instinct. In particular, “I Run It” is a smoldering masterpiece, another example of Nash doing some of his finest work for women.
(Ciara)
On the remix to “Sex Intelligent” The-Dream announces his next album will drop June 7 and will be called Love Affair. I’ll be listening, dumbstruck.
RS
