Summer is here! To celebrate, I've created a Summer Every Day mix. I previously popularized the "Every Day" mix series with such acclaimed mixes as "Party Every Day," "Road Trip Every Day," and "Ornithology Every Day." Look for the next installment coming soon to an internet near you!
Impress your friends on the beach blanket, in the Hamptons, or in the parks this season with this failsafe summertime playlist. With a strong backbone of everything cool to be listening to and a limbic system of strategically placed throwbacks & obscurities, you'll be the champion of the iPod sound dock in no time.
Download below -- oh, and the track sequence is essential, so if you have half an iota of respect for mood and flow, don't go switching it up or hitting shuffle or anything like that.
1) Happy Birthday "Subliminal Message" 2) Cocteau Twins "Fotzepolitic" 3) David Bowie "Win" 4) The Pains of Being Pure At Heart "Stay Alive" 5) The Fresh & Onlys "I'm Gonna Be Your Elevator" 6) Vampire Weekend "Taxi Cab" 7) The Avalanches "Two Hearts in 3/4 Time" 8) The Chameleons "Up the Down Escalator" 9) Deerhunter "Vox Celeste" 10) Feeder "High" 11) Best Coast "This Is Real" 12) Oasis "Fade Away" 13) Neil Young "After the Gold Rush" 14) Pavement "Major Leagues" 15) Red Hot Chili Peppers "Walkabout" 16) Washed Out "Belong" 17) Animal Collective "Taste" 18) The Cranberries "Linger"
And the winner is....Sleigh Bells! Winner of what? They're the artist in my Acts To Watch: 2010 list who are first to hit the market with a full-length album. Treats was released May 11 and my speaker system, inner ear, and the retired cop downstairs who knows me only as "the a-hole who plays electric bass at 3 AM" have regretted it ever since. The songs make like some misproduced diabolical incarnation of bitch-girl pop-rap. Remember those first-generation headphone jack speakers you used to connect to your discman to create a ghetto-ass portable stereo? Imagine turning the volume up on those as high as possible -- so they're all crackly and shit -- and pressing them against your ears. "Just turn the volume down, moron," you might say. It doesn't quite work like that. Believe me, I tried -- this music just demands to be played at full volume, and if you try to turn it down, well, you can't.
So here's a question you might ask: is it any good? Yeah, it's pretty good. But there's too much going on here to get caught up in that debate just yet. You might turn your nose up at my association of Sleigh Bells with "bitch-girl pop-rap" -- like, who needs more Ke$ha? It's hard to describe what I'm talking about until you hear it. In hindsight it seems like an obvious maneuver, but the Brooklyn-based duo seem to have one day woken up with the idea of combining trendy off-kilter production and indie ethics with bum-rush, beat-based dance jams. Except that description's an understatement. These songs will elicit bodily movements more carnal and voracious than harmless dance (insert "that's what she said" joke here), and the production completely flips the bird to any conventions of respectful input mixing. The songs are usually formed around some over-gained synth or guitar lick, underscored with syncopating clappy sounds and other bass-heavy percussive thumping, topped off with the rich multitracked vocals of babe-and-a-half leadwoman Alexis Krauss -- and then punched into three dimensions with a crank to 11 of every knob on the soundboard.
it's not just youtube, it actually sounds like that.
Now back to whether it's actually good. I, and most other sources, believe that, yes, Treats is good. However, I (1) think I find the concept of the music more intriguing than the music itself, and (b) find it, by the end of the album, quite honestly a tad annoying. Maybe I'm just not "ready" for it. But, I don’t know, I just can’t picture myself ever being unwaveringly appreciative of hearing Alexis recite in monotone “Got my A-machines on the table, got my B-machines in the drawer” thirty-four times over alternating patterns of screeching static in “A/B Machines”. Elsewhere, brief blurts of noise like “Rachel” and “Straight A’s” seem superfluous besides to reinforce the testy demeanor of the album. In general, the music seems less concerned with being good than with offending; more intent on existing than being listened to.
But isn’t that what rock and roll is all about? I keep thinking of Run-DMC: though acknowledged as pioneers of rap, the music they made was, all at once, rock and roll, just a new approach. Maybe that's what Sleigh Bells are -- a new approach to rock and roll. Nevermind whether it's good. It pushes boundaries, insists on itself, and promises to offend parents everywhere – sounds like rock to me. Like so many before them, the duo find new ways of fashioning chaos and destruction into a coherent concept of music. Whether that concept is something beautiful and something worthwhile to listen to is up to the listener to decide. But it I can tell you this much: it is certainly something, something to behold and something to ponder, and, in the case of me, something to blast incessantly at max volume until the dude downstairs is pounding his ceiling with a broomstick like that time when I was playing my electric bass at 3 AM, my bad. I suspect I'm not alone.
A few months ago, after years of well-publicized internal feuds, sibling rivalry, and cocaine abuse, the 90s alt-rock colossus of Oasis finally -- officially -- disbanded. The dissolution of their relevance preceded that of the actual group by about a decade, but I think the latter will help to facilitate some important developments in music trends over the coming twenty-four months or so. You see, don't mean to patronize, but trends move in cycles. With the swathe of "nu-gaze" that's cropped up over the past few years, the winding path of Retro has found its way to the Nineties. Who knows whether early 90s Shoegazer music was actually good; what matters is that it wasn't very cool during its "heyday," for lack of a better term, and thus serves as a perfect emblem of coolness now. So everybody and their mother jumped all over it. But as it did sixteen or seventeen years ago, this new generation of Shoegaze will inevitably give way to what will end up being labeled as the reincarnation of Mid-90s Alt-Rock, and possibly even -- dare I say it -- Britpop.
With Oasis officially out of the picture, they're now fair game -- nay, ideal candidates -- to be repurposed as kitschy retro-novelty. That's right -- bust out the t-shirts. Personally, I'm going to promptly go dig through my old CDs and rip all the Oasis I can find onto my iTunes in preparation for heavy rotation. You might be laughing now; just wait until you're the unassuming butt end of any conversation you'll be having with someone cooler than you circa mid-2011. "Oh, what's that you've got there? A Jesus and Mary Chain tee? Listening to some Slowdive? That's pretty sweet. Me? Oh nothing, just listening to my Parklife cassette...and wearing my Suede '93 tour shirt" Burned.
To celebrate the pending trend shift, I've featured some non-album Oasis songs that many of us stateside may not have been exposed to. These are nothing short of straight fire:
"Cloudburst" from the 1994 "Live Forever" single:
"Whatever" from the eponymous 1994 single; also a prime example of Oasis' frequent, err, "misfortune" of getting into hot water for lifting lyrics and/or other musical elements from existing songs:
"Your budget on my neck," brags Cam'Ron on the latest installment of an increasingly diverse and promising line of output from producer Alex Kresovich. The project is Gold N' Fly: 007, which uses the music from Goldeneye 64 -- arguably the best video game ever -- to remix hip-hop acts that are probably more popular than they deserve to be. Cam's line is funny considering the budget for the project was probably not much higher than $0, but as such its presence here is a bold statement, even if unintentional, on the ever growing accessibility of the music industry and the blurring line between amateur and professional (and which is also starting to become a recurring theme of this blog).
And thank G to the D, or else we'd never have gems like Gold N' Fly knocking at our front door. With this collection of innovative tracks, Alex reaffirms his breadth of skill as a sample-based producer and his penchant for tackling challenges of thematic creativity. I guess the ultimate litmus test for any kind of narrow-focus concept art is, does the audience actually enjoy it? In this case, it's hardly a question. Even if you've never heard of Goldeneye 64, Nintendo, or James Bond, you'll be hard pressed not to get a kick of head-bobbing pleasure out of the stuff here. For those of us who've spent countless hours of our youth (and, uh, in times more recently than we'd like to admit) huddled in basements with friends in front of the namesake video game, the music will assume a dimension of nostalgia, and remind us that those were hours well spent.
Some listeners might find it to be too much to digest all at once. A few of the tracks err on the side of drawn-out or repetitive, but die-hards will appreciate the proof that the hip-hop epic is still alive, somewhere. That being said, nobody will disagree that the 22-track, 70-plus-minute album could have stood to have some of the fat trimmed. Luckily, though the whole may not outweigh the sum of the parts, the parts themselves will assuredly shine in countless other contexts; e.g., I see deep and rich fodder for "best-of-my-fave-rapper" playlists for years to come. There are miles of trunk-thumping jams for cruising around town with your brahs next Friday, and plenty of partytime essentials. Though Alex's multi-angle stylistic assault can be overload for newcomers, after a few listens you'll start to appreciate the colorful patchwork; it warrants repeating that, at the very least, there will be something for everyone here.
Once you get down with the producer's modus operandi, you'll have trouble denying or resisting his musical allure. Alex has always had an uncanny grasp on tone and flow, particularly as it relates to aligning that of a given rapper's with that of his beats, and the tracks here evidence definite growth in this vein. Lil Wayne's "Fireman" is handled particularly deftly, the beat accentuating and augmenting the dramatic slowburn of the original track. Obie Trice's "Cry Now" channels raw energy, and Cam'Ron's "Get 'Em Girls" finds a brooding, subterranean beat that rivals the original. I can't pick out a clear standout track -- but I can say that the album's first lyrical track (its second actual track; Alex's albums necessarily have "intros" and "outros," a drama-heightening gimmick that will most likely summon the skip button, but which I suppose is standard in hip-hop), Tech-N9ne's "Everybody Move", might be the most memorable. It blows the door down with its singeing, relentless jabs of snare-y percussion and guitar distortion, while the rapper's tongue-twisting lyrical onslaught sets the stage for the rest of the album.
To dip back into the theoretical, Gold N' Fly really ends up as both an homage to each of the gun-toting, rim-riding, drug-hustling, money-flaunting, woman-disrespecting mainstream rappers who made the cut and a play on them. For all of their countless boasts of cash, cars, and other tokens of wealth, they're humbled by a bedroom producer fucking with some video game samples. Fucking with video game samples to create songs on par with their originals, might I add. Thankfully, we're no longer living in a society that would have punished such abandon for class disparity with gruesome execution, but instead in one where communicative and electronic advances have enabled such indulgences and facilitated their widespread distribution. So download Gold N' Fly: 007, and support the advances the last 7000 or so years of human civilization have brought us!
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new."
-Anton Ego, from Disney's Ratatouille (2007)
