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afrobeatsindacity · 11 months

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BURNA BOY: RISE OF THE AFRICAN GIANT

In many ways, Damini Ebunoluwa Ogulu was always made for greatness, but for the longest time he was one of only a few who believed it. As it happens with those with the strongest wills, this inner conviction of who he was meant to be would prove sufficient to propel him to his destination. With his journey to the top of Nigerian (and African) music now complete, and as he soars to achieve a similar dominance at the global level, it is important to remember that, though he has slid into his star status with all the ease of a natural, his pathway to the summit was not always a straightforward one.

After a spell spent studying in the United Kingdom, which infamously ended in an arrest, Burna Boy returned to Nigeria to pursue his dream endeavour—music. The year was 2011, and Afrobeats—the dance-ready, percussion-focused medley of indigenous sounds with foreign influences—had taken flight. It was a pivotal time in Nigerian music, as the stars who had ruled the last decade—like D’Banj and 2baba—began to wane in influence, while the acts who would take the baton for the next decade, like Wizkid, Davido and Olamide, were taking the first steps of their careers.

In this mix, too, was Burna, and with neither the support of a major label nor an external source of financing in its place, he would have to make things work by himself. As a result of this, his earliest musical efforts, however excellent they were sonically, could not make a commensurate commercial and cultural impact. But he was not entirely alone. He was aided by his manager and mother, Bose Ogulu, who had some ties to the music industry; her father, Benson Idonije, was a music journalist who had managed Fela Kuti. Together with Aristokrat Records and its in-house producer, LeriQ, Burna Boy and his small band of creatives and executives sought to make a dent in Nigeria’s music market.

His earliest forays came via mixtapes. Burn notice: The Mixtape was the first of them, released in April 2011 on the strength of a few singles like “Remember The Titans” and “Wombolombo Something” that were making local ripples at the time in the Port Harcourt scene. He followed up in November with “Burn Identity,” and for this sequel he recruited national stars like Davido and Sauce Kid. These mixtapes were part of an elaborate build up to his debut album—in place of the EP format that is the more common route today. But before its arrival, he needed a spark, a breakout single that would establish him beyond the confines of his Port Harcourt base.

That would come in 2012’s “Like To Party,” which was as true a reflection of Burna’s carefree spirit as could be accurately transcribed in music. Set to dancehall and raggae production that favoured a more tranquil side of afropop, Burna created the perfect beachside song, turning the rejection of his affections—”I been begging but you no wan gree/ Say you you know want me” into a genuine excuse to craft the memorable, wild party. Ingredients like these are never wasted in the hands of the right chef, and Burna was able to draw from his uniquely guttural-yet-soulful vocal range and create what many regard to be his proper breakout single.

Burna Boy would bring all of this to his next release, “Tonight,” this time soaking in some sultriness to set this song in sensual waters. “Said tonight will be your night/ Gotta be doing something right,” he sings, as his chorus loops a single nonsensical word until it becomes the soothing balm for a Friday night’s groove after a work-filled week. For his efforts in 2012, Burna tied for first at the Headies rookie competition, which rewarded underground stars with a chance to perform on the stage of Nigeria’s premier music awards.

His introductions now out of the way, it was time to unveil a much-awaited debut album. Succinctly titled Leaving an Impact For Eternity, it was supported by a quartet of pre-released singles, (“Like To Party”, “Run My Race”, “Tonight” and “Yawa Dey”) whose quality foreshadowed good tidings for the album—a bar that Burna and LeriQ had no problems crossing with its release. They were in complementary form, working in dancehall, hip hop, reggae and elements from Fuji into the 19 track LP (for its deluxe). LeriQ shone especially in his ability to craft pop songs without dipping into the explosive Ghanaian-tinged production that was all the rave back then, the cloth from which Wizkid fashioned the bulk of his Superstar album—ensuring Burna Boy could light up a party with every bit of his distinctiveness intact.

L.I.F.E. was a scripting of Burna Boy’s status as he simultaneously affirmed his new position as an uprising star whilst arguing that he should be so much greater. You see, this drive, nearly bordering on discontent, has been the force behind his career, and the reason why his newfound material comforts—the fame and money—in no way slowed his momentum. Worsening economic conditions in Nigeria have made a few prospective endeavours choice paths for those seeking an escape from a harsh upbringing into a much better future. Music is one of these, but Burna Boy’s hunger has always been for greater things.

This drive, like the flip side of a coin, is also his weakness. In 2014, a year after his debut album had established a place for him in the industry, cracks began to appear in his lean, mean team. The first of these would come in July, when he appeared to relieve his mother of her managerial duties via a now-deleted twitter post, in which he infamously announced it was time to "let my mother be my mother and let my manager be my manager". Bose Ogulu would come out a few days later and attempt to throw some clarity to this statement, but while that episode was still playing out, word came out that he had left Aristokrat Records, the imprint under which he had released all previous music. That turned out to have been a mutual separation following contract expiration and non-renewal, but it effectively meant he would have to record his album without his mother-manager, Aristokrat Records or LeriQ, its in-house producer.

The result was about as bad as could be expected. Burna Boy had a rough 2015, most of it self-inflicted, so that at the time of the release of On A Spaceship, he had managed to threaten the media, exchange words with fellow artists, and berate award shows, and for anyone who had missed any of his shenanigans, he made the baffling decision of taping an interview of a journalist outlining his flaws and making it his album intro. That, save for the brooding, Fela-inspired album closer, "Soke", was the most exciting point of the album, the rest of which placed somewhere between forgettable and unoriginal. In the end it was clear that On A Spaceship, and the decisions that led to it, was a big misstep for Burna.

He would then spend 2016 reversing the wrong decisions that had brought him here. He mended fences with Aristokrat Records and was once more back with LeriQ, and though he would still release future music under the self-owned Spaceship Records, he could receive A&R guidance from his former label. Less than a year after On A Spaceship, he released Redemption, an EP celebrating not just these healed rifts but his re-entry to the UK, 5 years after he had received a ban for illegal activity. Redemption was also the earliest attempt to ‘westernise’ his sound, as he and LeriQ slid even deeper into his low-tempo grooves, emerging with a grinding dancehall joint like album opener, "Pree Me".

Redemption was not the instant return to top form that he might have envisaged, as it struggled to both reaffirm his national position and establish a foreign one in only 7 songs, but he was clearly making steps in the right direction. It would take two more years of work and creativity, and a return to Bose Ogulu as manager, for them to pay off, and this happened with his next album, Outside. It was named for Burna’s desire to stretch his influence beyond Nigerian and African borders, but it excels for his abilities to tie these diasporan visions to an African identity, a hurdle that Wizkid’s Sounds From The Other Side, also sharing this world-conquering vision, could not clear. In many ways, Outside was the birth of the Burna Boy’s superstardom: it was the perfection of the self-styled Afrofusion, where samples of Fela Kuti’s “Sorrow Tears And Blood” on “Ye” sit beside EDM on the titular track which sits beside the patois-dripping, ragga-influenced “Sekkle Down” which sits beside the ethereal, chest-thumping “Heaven’s Gate.” Burna Boy, the conductor of this mix, not only makes it work, but achieves cohesion in a way only he can.

The album also housed the sleeper hit “Ye”, which, with a tinge of luck supplied by publicity brought by the homonymous Kanye West album, took off for what was his first global hit. Outside was also the first lap of a three-year, three-album spell in which he asserted himself incontrovertibly in global conversations. African Giant, which came next in 2019, was fueled by the same Afrofusion cocktail, and with the album (and the circumstances surrounding its name) he introduced the world to his grandiloquence and the talent that inspired it, before 2020’s Twice As Tall clinched for him a much-coveted Grammy and brought to a fine conclusion his intercontinental dominance arc.

With last year’s Love, Damini released in his new status as a bonafide global superstar, and then becoming his most-streamed project, Burna Boy has now all but completed what ambitions must have spurred his entry into music in the first place: A host of major awards in the bag, unforgettable performances at some of the most iconic locations in the world, a teeming fanbase more than ready to draw arms in defence of his (many) gaffes. Knowing Burna, you would still not expect him to be satisfied.

With great talent sometimes comes an outsized desire to make it known to as many people as possible, and an ever-throbbing impulse that tells you you can do even more. Burna crams all of this triumphant euphoria into his latest single, “Sittin’ On Top Of The World," and while it marks some deviation from his patented Afrofusion, we can rest assured that Burna’s plans for his next album and era will embody every bit of the excellence he has exuded at every stage of his storied career thus far.

This article was written by Afrobeats City Contributor Ezema Patrick - @ezemapatrick (Twitter)

Afrobeats City doesn’t own the right to the images - image source: Instagram - @Burnaboygram

#Afrobeats #Afrobeats City #Burna Boy #African Giant #Sittin on top of the world #Last Last #Ye #Africa #African music #Nigeria #Nigerian music #Afrofusion #Afropop #Afrobeats article #Brandy #New Music #Music #Spotify

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0613magazine · 1 year

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200522 Billboard

BTS’s SUGA Reflects on Triumphant Return of Agust D on ‘D-2’ Mixtape

BTS's SUGA dons his Agust D persona once again for the release of his new D-2 mixtape, and spoke with Billboard about what it means to him.

In August 2016, BTS’s SUGA released his first mixtape, Agust D. On it, the rapper-songwriter rawly reflected on his career and life, taking on the identity of Agust D and frankly sharing his musical identity as an individual with the world just as his band was at the precipice of its career. The following years found BTS make history with one record-breaking release after another. Now, he’s back four years later with the surprise release on Friday (May 22) of his D-2 mixtape.

Fronted by “Daechwita,” the collection crowns SUGA as a king triumphant who has gone from nothing to the top of the global music game. Accompanied by a video that fittingly sees SUGA ascend to the highest heights as a king of Korea, the 10-song mixtape spends its length sharing the artist’s viewpoint on his current place and perception of the world.

Throughout D-2, from the very start with the reflective, jocular, “Moonlight” to the wistful closing power ballad “Dear my friend” with Nell’s Kim Jong Wan, SUGA’s second Agust D mixtape serves as a sonic reliquary for his present state of thoughts and emotions. Whether it’s posing the bellicose query of “What do you think?” at haters as he shrugs at the way others might try to see or use him, pondering the state of the world alongside fellow BTS rapper RM in “Strange” or ruminating on moving on from past regrets alongside MAX on “Burn It,” each song offers up a fresh take on what it means to be SUGA in 2020.

Ahead of the release of D-2, Suga spoke with Billboard about the impending arrival of the mixtape and what it means for him and his identity as an artist.

It’s your first time reviving your Agust D persona for a solo release since your first mixtape in 2016. How does it feel to revisit this side to yourself and share new music with the world in 2020?

It’s fun. I hope everyone enjoys the documentation of myself from 2016 onwards.

You’ve mentioned this mixtape’s release in the past, why is now the right time to release D-2?

I found time to work on my music since self-quarantine and I was able to compile 10 full tracks for the mixtape.

Do you feel you’ve grown as an artist since the release of Agust D and your return with D-2?

I think that’s up to listeners to decide. I’ve tried a lot of things, and hope they’ll enjoy it.

How, if at all, has your approach to song creation changed since your prior mixtape?

It’s all more relaxed. I was a bit intense back in 2016. Everything was at full force, full strength. I actually listened to my previous mixtape again while working on the new one, and if I were asked to do it again, I can say I wouldn’t be able to. I’m very glad that it’s documented as it is. My previous mixtape focused more on being better at rap, better at making music, sound, mix, master and so forth. I’ve worked on a lot more projects since then and didn’t really try to become perfect. Perfection is an elusive term. I simply just did my best.

Is there a meaning behind the album’s title D-2 beyond it being the second Agust D release? It almost feels like a countdown, which is how it was promoted on social media.

I like surprises, so I came up with the release promotion myself. I didn’t want to release it on D-DAY, and also wasn’t satisfied with just Agust D 2. So I wanted to release it on D-2 to surprise the people who were waiting for it to drop on D-DAY.

From start to finish D-2 is an intensely emotional experience that shares both your thoughts about yourself and your thoughts on the world. What do you hope listeners take away from the overall experience of the mixtape?

“This is how I’ve lived since August 16th, 2016.” If the previous mixtape focused on telling the past, the new one is about the present.

Where did you find inspiration musically for this album?

The answer to this question is always the same: every moment and every incident. It’s a habit of mine to record and take notes, so sometimes, I get a pleasant surprise when I dig through and rediscover lyrics. Some of the lyrics I scribble without thought have, at times, become real precious.

Do you feel there’s a difference between SUGA and Agust D, and also these two with Min Yoon Gi?

You could say there is and there isn’t [a difference]. “Me” and “Me” and “Me.” They are different and the same.

The lead track on this mixtape is “Daechwita,” during which you incorporate traditional Korean military instrumentals along with pansori into modern hip-hop sounds, and describe yourself as a tiger, the historic representative creature of Korea. These are themes that many BTS songs have also incorporated re traditional Korean music elements and references to Korea’s identity and your identity as Korean. Why do you keep returning to this narrative in your songwriting, and what about daechwita made you want to incorporate it into this song and album?

It all started with the ceremonial walk of the King. Daechwita is played during the military march and I was inspired to sample its beat, and since the track includes a lot of traditional Korean musical elements, it made sense to also shoot the music video on Korean historical filming sites. It wasn’t necessarily my intention to purposefully include Korean aspects. It was more a natural process that had interesting ideas spring up along the way.

You worked with several artists on this album, namely RM, NiiHWA, MAX, and Nell’s King Jong Wan. What was the overall experience like?

It was a fun experience. I actually wanted to collaborate with a lot more artists but some were unavailable due to personal circumstances. Hopefully, I’ll be able to work with them next time. One of the artists I did get to collaborate with was Kim Jong Wan of Nell, who let me know he enjoyed my mixtape from 2016. I appreciated it a lot since he was my idol when I was young.

What is a line or thought you share on D-2 you want listeners to be left thinking about?

“So what, if we live like that, so what My distinction is your ordinary My ordinary is your distinction” – “People”

Source: Billboard

#2020 #bts #suga #billboard

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for-yoongi0309 · 4 years

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BTS's Suga Reflects on Triumphant Return of Agust D on 'D-2' Mixtape

In August 2016, BTS’s Suga released his first mixtape, Agust D. On it, the rapper-songwriter rawly reflected on his career and life, taking on the identity of Agust D and frankly sharing his musical identity as an individual with the world just as his band was at the precipice of its career. The following years found BTS make history with one record-breaking release after another. Now, he’s back four years later with the surprise release on Friday (May 22) of his D-2 mixtape. Fronted by “Daechwita,” the collection crowns Suga as a king triumphant who has gone from nothing to the top of the global music game. Accompanied by a video that fittingly sees Suga ascend to the highest heights as a king of Korea, the 10-song mixtape spends its length sharing the artist's viewpoint on his current place and perception of the world. Throughout D-2, from the very start with the reflective, jocular, "Moonlight" to the wistful closing power ballad "Dear my friend" with Nell's Kim Jong Wan, Suga's second Agust D mixtape serves as a sonic reliquary for his present state of thoughts and emotions. Whether it's posing the bellicose query of "What do you think?" at haters as he shrugs at the way others might try to see or use him, pondering the state of the world alongside fellow BTS rapper RM in "Strange" or ruminating on moving on from past regrets alongside MAX on "Burn It," each song offers up a fresh take on what it means to be Suga in 2020. Ahead of the release of D-2, Suga spoke with Billboard about the impending arrival of the mixtape and what it means for him and his identity as an artist.

Q: It’s your first time reviving your Agust D persona for a solo release since your first mixtape in 2016. How does it feel to revisit this side to yourself and share new music with the world in 2020? A: It’s fun. I hope everyone enjoys the documentation of myself from 2016 onwards. Q: You’ve mentioned this mixtape’s release in the past, why is now the right time to release D-2? A: I found time to work on my music since self quarantine and I was able to compile 10 full tracks for the mixtape. Q: Do you feel you’ve grown as an artist since the release of Agust D and your return with D-2? A: I think that’s up to listeners to decide. I’ve tried a lot of things, and hope they’ll enjoy it. Q: How, if at all, has your approach to song creation changed since your prior mixtape? A: It’s all more relaxed. I was a bit intense back in 2016. Everything was at full force, full strength. I actually listened to my previous mixtape again while working on the new one, and if I were asked to do it again, I can say I wouldn’t be able to. I’m very glad that it’s documented as it is. My previous mixtape focused more on being better at rap, better at making music, sound, mix, master and so forth. I’ve worked on a lot more projects since then and didn’t really try to become perfect. Perfection is an elusive term. I simply just did my best. Q: Is there a meaning behind the album’s title D-2 beyond it being the second Agust D release? It almost feels like a countdown, which is how it was promoted on social media. A: I like surprises, so I came up with the release promotion myself. I didn’t want to release it on D-DAY, and also wasn’t satisfied with just Agust D 2. So I wanted to release it on D-2 to surprise the people who were waiting for it to drop on D-DAY. Q: From start to finish D-2 is an intensely emotional experience that shares both your thoughts about yourself and your thoughts on the world. What do you hope listeners take away from the overall experience of the mixtape? A: “This is how I’ve lived since August 16th, 2016.” If the previous mixtape focused on telling the past, the new one is about the present. Q: Where did you find inspiration musically for this album? A: The answer to this question is always the same: every moment and every incident. It’s a habit of mine to record and take notes, so sometimes, I get a pleasant surprise when I dig through and rediscover lyrics. Some of the lyrics I scribble without thought have, at times, become real precious. Q: Do you feel there’s a difference between Suga and Agust D, and also these two with Min Yoon Gi? A: You could say there is and there isn’t [a difference]. “Me” and “Me” and “Me.” They are different and the same. Q: The lead track on this mixtape is “Daechwita,” during which you incorporate traditional Korean military instrumentals along with pansori into modern hip-hop sounds, and describe yourself as a tiger, the historic representative creature of Korea. These are themes that many BTS songs have also incorporated re traditional Korean music elements and references to Korea’s identity and your identity as Korean. Why do you keep returning to this narrative in your songwriting, and what about daechwita made you want to incorporate it into this song and album? A: It all started with the ceremonial walk of the King. Daechwita is played during the military march and I was inspired to sample its beat, and since the track includes a lot of traditional Korean musical elements, it made sense to also shoot the music video on Korean historical filming sites. It wasn’t necessarily my intention to purposefully include Korean aspects. It was more a natural process that had interesting ideas spring up along the way. Q: You worked with several artists on this album, namely RM, NiiHWA, MAX, and Nell’s King Jong Wan. What was the overall experience like? A: It was a fun experience. I actually wanted to collaborate with a lot more artists but some were unavailable due to personal circumstances. Hopefully, I’ll be able to work with them next time. One of the artists I did get to collaborate with was Kim Jong Wan of Nell, who let me know he enjoyed my mixtape from 2016. I appreciated it a lot since he was my idol when I was young. Q: What is a line or thought you share on D-2 you want listeners to be left thinking about? A: “So what, if we live like that, so what My distinction is your ordinary My ordinary is your distinction” - “People”

#min yoongi #yoongi #bts #bangtan #agustd #D-2 #i. interviews #billboards

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dustedmagazine · 4 years

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Dust Volume 6, Number 8

Angel Olsen

Now half a year in the pandemic, we’re starting to see the emergence of quarantine records, whether in the trove of reissues hastily assembled to stand in for new product or home recorded projects made with extremely close friends and family or albums that are conceived and written around the concept of isolation. Music isn’t real life, exactly, but it lives nearby. And in any case, it’s still music and can be good or bad whether it’s been unearthed from a forgotten box of tapes, recorded at home without collaboration or side people or technologically gerry-rigged so that distanced partners can work together. So, as long as you all are making music, we will continue to listen and find records that move us, as the world burns all around. This edition’s contributors included Patrick Masterson, Andrew Forell, Tim Clarke, Jennifer Kelly, Bill Meyer, Jonathan Shaw, Justin Cober-Lake and Ray Garraty. Enjoy.

+ — #playboy (Deluxe Edition) (self-released)

#playboy (deluxe edition) by +

One of the most genuinely confounding records I’ve heard this year comes courtesy SEO-unfriendly artist + aka Plus Sign fka Emanuel James Vinson, a Chicago rapper, city planner and all-around community activist who spends his time helping with the city’s Let’s Build Garden City initiative when he’s not making music (which is frequent, by the way — take a look at the breadth of that Bandcamp discography). The concept with #playboy, originally released in April but deluxed in late May, is simple: Two kids find a music machine called #playboy in their basement and start tinkering with it. Its childlike whimsy is conveyed in the song titles (“Getting the Hang of It,” “Wake Up Jam (Waking Up)”) every bit as much as it is in the music, with occasionally grating indulgences, the odd earworm and a brief appearance by borderless internet hip-hop hero Lil B that makes perfect sense in context; the kindred spirit of that community-building cult auteur is strong here. You may wind up loving this record or you may wind up hating it, but I can promise you this: You’ll be thinking about it and the artist behind it long after it’s over.

Patrick Masterson

Actress — Mad Voyage Mixtape (self-released)

I once suggested Darren Cunningham mucks about with his music because he can’t help himself. That was about six years ago on the occasion of his purported “final” album Untitled; with the benefit of hindsight, we can see he was (like so many others, to greater or lesser consequence) just pulling our leg with that PR. Hell, he’s released two albums worth of music in July alone: The first was the mid-month surprise LP 88, which follows in the vein of his acclaimed high period as an often brilliant, occasionally frustrating patchwork of submersible beats best played at high volume with a low end. The second came at the end of the month in an m4a file shared the old fashioned way on a forum via Mediafire link, nearly an hour and a half long, and per the man himself, “All SP-303, sketchbook beats, recorded this past week [the first week of July] straight to recorder or cassette.” It feels very much like a homespun Actress mixtape and is probably best thought of as livelier accompaniment to 88 but, even still, there’s no noticeable drop in quality — once Actress, always Actress. If headier lo-fi beat tapes are your beat, this will slot comfortably in line.

Patrick Masterson

bdrmm - Bedroom (Sonic Cathedral)

youtube

Hull five-piece bdrmm play a satisfyingly crepuscular version of shoegaze on their debut album Bedroom. Ryan Smith, his brother Jordan on bass, guitarist Joe Vickers, Danny Hull on synths and drummer Luke Irvin combine the widescreen sound of Ride with a cloak of gothic post-punk. Like the late, lamented Girls Names, bdrmm find a sweet spot where atmosphere and dynamics either build to euphoric crescendos or bask in bleak funereal splendor. Bedroom seems deliberately sequenced from celebration to lament. “A Reason To Celebrate” evokes Ride at their most anthemic, the tripping staccato driven “Happy” summons the spirit of The Cure of Seventeen Seconds before the pace drops for the second half, the songs become quieter and darker as the band finds a more personal voice. “(The Silence)” is an ambient whispered wraith of a thing, “Forget The Credits” impressively mopey slowcore. bdrmm don’t always transcend their influences, but this debut is an atmospheric treat if your taste runs to the darker end of the musical buffet.

Andrew Forell

Circulatory System — Circulatory System (Elephant 6 Recording Co.)

Circulatory System by Circulatory System

Nearly 20 years after its initial release, the excellent eponymous debut album by Will Cullen Hart’s psychedelic chamber-pop band Circulatory System gets a long overdue vinyl reissue. While his previous project, the undeniably great Olivia Tremor Control, tended to lean more towards classic psych-pop’s traditional tropes — hard-panned drums, loads of disorientating tape effects, wonky harmonized vocals — Circulatory System taps into something utterly uncanny. Both Signal Morning (2009) and Mosaics Within Mosaics (2014) have their moments, but this is front-to-back brilliant, conjuring a sublime atmosphere of reflective estrangement. The music is a thick, grainy soup of shimmering instrumentation, from the eerie (“Joy,” “Now,” “Should a Cloud Replace a Compass?”) to the joyful (“Yesterday’s World,” “The Lovely Universe,” “Waves of Bark and Light”), but part of the album’s magic is the way everything flows into a seamless whole. As is vinyl’s tendency, the rhythm section really comes alive here, the fuzz bass and tom-heavy drum parts booming out, with plenty of vivid details in the mix swimming into view. A worthy reissue of an essential album.

Tim Clarke

Cloud Factory — #1 (Howlin’ Banana)

Cloud Factory #1 by Cloud Factory

Cloud Factory, from Toulouse, France, overlays the serrated edges of garage pop with a serene dream-pop drift. It’s an appealing mix of hard and soft, like being pummeled to death by pillows or threatened gunpoint by a teddy bear. “Amnesia,” for instance, erupts in a vicious, sawed off, trouble-making bass line, then soars from there in untroubled female vocals. Later, “No Data,” punches hard with raw percussion, then lays on a liquid, lucid guitar line that encourages middle-distance staring. None of these songs really up the ante with memorable melodies, sharp words or that intangible R’NR energy that distinguishes great punk rock from the so so. Not loud, not soft, not great, not bad. Cloud Factory resides in the indeterminant middle.

Jennifer Kelly

Entry — Detriment (Southern Lord)

Detriment by Entry

Nuthin fancy here, folks. Just eight songs — plus a flexing, fuzzing intro — of American hardcore punk. Entry has been grinding away for a few years now, and Detriment doesn’t advance much past the musical terrain the band marked off on the No Relief 7-inch (2016). That’s OK. The essential formula is time tested: d-beat rhythms, overdriven amps and Sara G.’s ferocious vocals delivering the necessary affect. That would be: pissed off, just this side of hopeless. Detriment sounds like what might happen if Poison Idea (c. 1988) stumbled into a seminar on Riot Grrrl; after everyone got tired of beating the living shit out of one another, they’d make some songs. “Selective Empathy” is pretty representative. Big riffs, a breakdown, and more than enough throaty yelling to let you know that you’re in some trouble. You might recognize the sound of Clayton Stevens’ guitar from his work with Touché Amoré — but maybe it’s better if you don’t. This isn’t music for mopery. Watch out for the spit, snot and blood, and flip the record.

Jonathan Shaw

Equiknoxx — VF Live: Equiknoxx (The Vinyl Factory)

youtube

There’s nothing like a little roots music to get you through the sweltering summer heat, and this early July mix by Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair (half of forward-thinking Kingston dancehall unit Equiknoxx) was a personal favorite of the past month for hitting that spot. The group tends to throw curveballs at the genres it tinkers with, and Blair’s mix highlights why they’re so good at it: The crates run deep. Spanning everything from legendary producer and DJ Prince Jazzbo to in-house music fresh out the box (e.g., “Did Not Make This For Jah_9” was released in late May), Blair sets the mood and educates you along the way. Like everything else these cats do (and that includes the NTS show — support your independent radio station!), it’s hard not to give the highest recommendation.

Patrick Masterson

Ezra Feinberg — Recumbent Speech (Related States)

Recumbent Speech by Ezra Feinberg

Knowing that Ezra Feinberg is a practicing psychoanalyst, it’s tempting to read meaning into the name of his second solo album. But be careful to think twice about the meaning you perceive and ask yourself, is it the product of Feinberg on the couch or your own projection? His choice to name one of the record’s six instrumentals (there are voices, but no words) “Letter To My Mind” certainly suggests that there’s an internal dialogue at work, but the music feels most like a layered deployment of good ideas than an exchange of intrapsychic forces. The synthesizers shimmer and cycle like something from a mid-1970s Cluster record, resting upon a pillow of vibraphone and electric piano tones, which in turn billow under the influence of undulating layers of drums. Feinberg’s guitar leads are bright and pithy, like something Pat Metheny might come up with if he knew he was going to have to pay a steep price for every note he played. Ah, but there I go, projecting an implication of adversary process where there may be none. Might it be that Feinberg, having spent a full work week immersed in the psychic conflicts of others, wants to lay back on the couch and exhale? If so, this album is an apt companion.

Bill Meyer

Honey Radar — Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years (Chunklet)

Sing the Snow Away: The Chunklet Years by Honey Radar

Jason Henn of Honey Radar has a solid claim at being his generation’s Bob Pollard, a prolific, absurdist songwriter, who tosses off hooky melodies as if channeling them from the spirit world. His least polished material glints with melody hidden beneath banks of fuzz, whispery and fragile on records, but surprisingly muscular in his rocking live shows. This 28-song compilation assembles the singles, splits, EPs and bonus tracks Henn recorded for Chunklet between 2015 and the present; it would be a daunting amount of material except that it goes down like cotton candy, sweet, airy, colorful and gone before you know it. Like the Kinks, Henn has a way of making strident rock and roll hooks sound wistful and dreamy. In “Lilac Pharmacy,” guitar lines rip and buck and roar, but from a distance, hardly disrupting Henn’s placid murmur. “Medium Mary Todd” ratchets up the tension a bit, with a tangled snarl of lick and swagger, but the vocals edge towards quiet whimsy a la Sic Alps; a second version runs a bit hotter, rougher and more electric, while a third, recorded at WFMU, gives an inkling of the Honey Radar concert experience. A couple of fine covers — of the Fall’s early rant “Middle Class Revolt” and of the Monkees rarity “Wind-Up Man”— suggest the fine, loamy soil that Henn’s art grows out of, while alternate versions of half a dozen tracks hint at the various forms his ideas can take. It’s a wonderful overview of Honey Radar so far, though let’s hope it’s not a career retrospective. Henn has a bunch of records left to make yet if he wants to edge out Pollard.

Jennifer Kelly

Iron Wigs — Your Birthday’s Cancelled (Mello Music Group)

Your Birthday's Cancelled by IRON WIGS

As an adjective, “goofy” had gotten a bad rep in hip hop. Anything that is unusual, inventive and not in line with “keeping it real” is immediately stigmatized as goofy, weird, nerdy and bad. Iron Wigs is goofy but hold the pejorative connotations. Chicago representatives Vic Spencer and Verbal Kent team up here with Sonnyjim from the UK to do some wild rhyming. They collaborated before, but Your Birthday’s Cancelled is a complete, fully fleshed project, masterfully executed from start to finish. Instead of the usual gun busting you get a fist in the ribs. Instead of drug slinging, a blunt to activate your rhymes. Each member of the group has a distinctive delivery which makes you to listen carefully for every verse, no skipping. It’s a relief to listen to rap artists who don’t pretend they’re out in the streets while they’re at home enjoying a favorite TV series. The standout track here is “Bally Animals & Rugbys” with Roc Marciano dropping by for a verse.

Ray Garraty

Levinson / Mahlmeister — Shores (Trouble In Mind)

Shores by levinson / mahlmeister

Jamie Levinson and Donny Mahlmeister’s Bandcamp page indicates that they’re based in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago. This goes further towards explaining their association with Trouble in Mind Records, which is located in the same county, than their music, which brings to mind something much further north. The duo’s music is mostly electronic, with modular synthesizers setting the pulse and sweeping the pitch spectrum while lap steel guitar adds flourishes and a shruti box thickens the textures. The album is split into two, with each track — one is named “Ascend,” the other “Release” — taking up one side of a 50-minute cassette. The first side trundles steadily onwards, and the second seems to bask in a glow to that never totally fades. Since there’s no “Descend,” it’s easy to imagine this music sound tracking a drive into the Canadian north, the journey unspooling under a sky that never darkens, its progress towards Hudson Bay unhindered by other traffic or turns in the road. Perhaps that’s just one listener’s fantasy of easy social distancing and escape from the present’s grim digital glare into a retro-futurist, analog dream. But in dreams we’re free to fly without being seated next to some knucklehead with his mask over his eyes instead of his mouth, so dream on, dreamers. This tape is volume one of the Explorers Series, Trouble in Mind’s projected program of limited edition cassette releases.

Bill Meyer

Klara Lewis — Ingrid (Editions Mego)

Klara Lewis’s latest recording shows a narrowing of focus. Previously she seemed to be trying ideas and methods on for size, investigating ambient electronics or hinting at pop melody without completely committing. Given the approach to music modeled by her father, Graham Lewis of Wire and Dome, she probably does not feel the need to do just one thing, and that’s a healthy angle if one wants to stay interested and flexible. But there’s also something to be said for really digging into an idea, and that’s what she has done here. Ingrid is a one-track, one-sided 12.” Burrowing further into one-ness, it is made from one looped cello phrase, which gets filtered and distorted on each pass. The effect suggests decay, but not so much the gradual transformation of a William Basinski piece as the pitiless abrasion of a woodworker going over a plank with sander. The combination of repetition and coarsening hits a spot closer to one that Tony Conrad might reach, and that’s an itch worth scratching.

Bill Meyer

Luis Lopes Humanization 4tet — Believe, Believe (Clean Feed)

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The cruel economics of contemporary creative music-making favor an ensemble like Humanization 4tet. At a minimum, the filial Texan rhythm section of Stefan and Aaron Gonzalez (drums and bass respectively) and Lisbon-based duo of Rodrigo Amado (tenor saxophone) and Luís Lopes can each count on having the other half of a band on the other side of the Atlantic. But any project that’s on its fourth record in a dozen years has more going for it than the chance to save on plane tickets. For the Portuguese musicians, it’s an opportunity to feel an unabashedly high-energy force at their backs, as well as a chance to drink from a deep well of harmolodic blues. And for the Gonzalez brothers, it’s the reward of being the absolute right guys for the job; it has to be a gas to know that the heft they put into their swing is so deeply appreciated. While Lopes’ name remains up front, everyone contributes compositions, and everyone gives their all on every tune.

Bill Meyer

Joanna Mattrey — Veiled (Relative Pitch)

Veiled by Joanna Mattrey

This solo CD, which closely follows a collaborative cassette on Astral Spirits, is only the second recording with Joanna Mattrey’s name on the spine. But Mattrey is no newcomer. The New England Conservatory-trained violist has been playing straight and pop gigs for a while. If you caught Chance the Rapper on Saturday Night Live, Cuddle Magic with strings or a host of classical gigs around New York City, you’ve seen her. But if black dress and heels gigs pay her bills, improvised music nourishes her heart. And if sounds raw enough to scrape the roof of the world nourish yours, this album is new food. The premise of Veiled is finding veins of concealed beauty concealed, and that search impels Mattrey to tune her viola to sound like a horse-haired Tuvan fiddle, clamp objects to the strings and blast her signal through some satisfyingly filthy amplification. And whether it’s a slender tune or a complex texture, the reward is always there.

Bill Meyer

Angel Olsen — “Whole New Mess” single (Jagjaguwar)

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Everyone processes a breakup differently (though, to be fair, that’s probably less true now than ever). For Angel Olsen in 2018, it meant retreating to The Unknown, a century-old church in Anacortes, Washington, that Mount Eerie’s Phil Elverum and producer Nicholas Wilbur made into a recording studio. What ultimately came from those sessions was All Mirrors, but Whole New Mess is a chance to revisit that album (fully nine of these 11 songs are ones you’ve heard before; only the title-track and “Waving, Smiling” are new) in a more intimate framework — just Angel, a guitar, a mic and her reverberant heartache. The most cynical view to be taken here is that it’s a stopgap capitalizing on people’s vulnerability amid a pandemic quarantine, but it could also be a corrective for the bloat of All Mirrors, a record I listened to once and haven’t thought about since. Late Björkian excess doesn’t suit her nearly as well as the light touch delivered herein, and your interest will similarly hinge on how much Whole New Mess sounds like the old one.

Patrick Masterson

Ono — Red Summer (American Dreams)

Red Summer by ONO

Ono, the long-running noise-punk-poetry-protest project headed by P Michael Grego and travis, tackles the Red Summer of 1919, evoking the brutal race riots that erupted as soldiers returned from World War I. During that summer, conflicts raged from Chicago to the deep south, as white supremacists rioted against newly empowered returning Black veterans and an increased number of Black factory workers employed in America’s northern factories. Ono captures the violence—and its links to contemporary race-based conflicts—in an abstract and visionary style, with travis declaiming against an agitated froth of avant garde sound. “A Dream of Sodomy” lurches and rolls in funk-punk bravado, as travis declaims all the nightmarish scenarios that haunt his nocturnal hours, while “Coon” natters rhythmically across a fever-lit foundation of hand-drums, mosquito buzz and flute. “26 June 1919” wanders through a blasted, rioting landscape, sounds buzzing and pinging and roaring around travis’ fractured poetry. “White men, red men, Manchester town, send ‘em home, Oklahoma, send ‘em home, in a Black man house, send ‘em home, send ‘em home,” he chants, ominously, vertiginously. The center isn’t holding, for sure. The disc closes with the uneasy truce of “Sycamore Trees,” where steam blasts of synthesizer sound rush up and around travis’ vibrating, basso verses about meeting under the sycamore trees, a metaphor like the blues and gospel and nearly all Black music is full of metaphor about reuniting in a better place. Powerful.

Jennifer Kelly

Julian Taylor — The Ridge (Howling Turtle, Inc.)

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Singer-songwriter Julian Taylor does the little things well. That's not to say that he doesn't do the obvious things well, too, on his latest release The Ridge. His easy voice fits his songs, letting autobiography come with comfortable phrasing. As a writer, he tends toward the straightforward, avoiding extended metaphors or oblique references. The title track considers a particular form of life, and Taylor sticks to the tangible, singing about the stable, “Shovel manure, clean their beds, and prepare the feed for the day.” Taylor's songs make sense of the immediate world and relationships around him, but they avoid woolgathering. The album feels a bit removed from the current climate, but that's no complaint when Taylor's developed a welcoming place to visit. It isn't always easy here, but it's always companionable.

But back to those little things. Each song has carefully detailed orchestration and production. The record goes down easy whether tending toward James Taylor, Cat Stevens or something closer to country, and much of that easiness comes from the precise placement of every note. Burke Carroll's pedal steel, for instance, never exists for its own sake, but to serve the lyric that Taylor sings. The album contains enough space to feel like a rural Canadian ridge, with details drawn into to support Taylor's direct stories. The Ridge could easily go unnoticed (unobtrusiveness not being a highly rewarded trait), but its subtlety and care make it worth taking your boots off and sitting down for a minute.

Justin Cober-Lake

Various Artists — For a Better Tomorrow (Garden Portal)

For A Better Tomorrow by Various Artists

Compilation albums loom large in the American Primitive Guitar realm. Takoma, Tompkins Square and Locust all had larger ambitions than merely offering a sampling of wares, and to them, Garden Portal says, “hold my beer. I’ve got some collecting and playing to do.” For A Better Tomorrow started out as a Bernie Sanders fundraising endeavor. But when Bernie bailed and COVID-19 came on the scene, Garden Portal pivoted to support Athens Mutual Aid Network, an umbrella organization that coordinates aid to the underserved in this trying time. But in addition to good works, there’s some good work going on here. Not all of it is guitar-centric, but even the tracks that aren’t are close enough to the strings and heart template of the aforementioned parties to merit consideration under the same rubric. Joseph Allred’s been ultra-productive recently, so it’s actually helpful to be reminded of the spirit that infuses his playing by listening to it one track at a time. Rob Noyes’ “Diminished” takes the listener on a deep dive into the construction of sentiment and sound. And Will Csorba’s Pelt-like blast of fiddle drone, “Requiem for Ociel Guadalupe Martinez,” will put your hair up high enough to make that self-inflicted quarantine do a bit easier to execute.

Bill Meyer

Various Artists — The Storehouse Presents (The Storehouse)

The Storehouse Presents by The Storehouse

The coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on many things. You doubtless have your own list of loss, but for the proprietors of The Storehouse, the catalog of things kissed goodbye directly corresponds to their endeavor’s inventory of reasons to be. Over the past few years, the Storehouse has invited audiences out to a West Michigan farmhouse to enjoy a potluck meal and a concert played by some musicians of note. If there had been no lockdown, listeners could have enjoyed the Sun Ra Arkestra last April. Instead, no one’s playing, and no one’s getting paid, so the Storehouse has compiled this set of live and exclusive studio tracks to sell on Bandcamp in order to benefit the musicians and the Music Maker Relief Foundation. The cause, is good, but so are the tunes. Want to hear Steve Gunn and William Tyler in sympathetic orbit? Or Joan Shelley pledging her love? Or the first hints of Mind Over Mirrors’ new direction? Step right this way, preferably on one of 2020’s first Fridays.

Bill Meyer

Z-Ro — Rohammad Ali (1 Deep Entertainment / Empire)

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On one of his previous tracks, Z-Ro admitted that he’s basically just writing the same song over and over again (that’s how meta he is now, writing songs on writing songs). While he exaggerated a bit, he was not that far from the truth. In the last half dozen years he’s been writing the same three or four songs in various combinations, reconfigurations and forms. Rohammad Ali follows the same template: haters hate him, but he’s OK and is counting his money. Multiply this by 17, and here is the album. Despite this self-cannibalizing (lots of poets did that), Z-Ro with every new album sounds fresh and far from tired. The self-repeats just fuel him. Rohammad Ali has only one rap guest, and it’s Shaquille O’Neal whose rap career didn’t jump off in the 1990s. A lack of guests only proves that Z-Ro can self-sustain without support from the outside. The only thing from the outside he needs is hate.

Ray Garraty

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tawnyyeyed · 4 years

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a very belated birthday gift ! 02.06.1988 —— @lyricalrose . ♡

shopping for him is always a difficult task, and a hurdle in which almost every woman faces — whether it be a birthday gift, a christmas gift, a valentine’s gift, or even just a gift for him in general. men are seemingly hard to please and it’s never easy, but for her favourite red-haired rocker from the sunshine state, elouise is adamant on pulling together one of the most perfect and elaborate birthday gifts she has EVER generated with her own two hands. after all, his birthday seems to be the most fitting occasion for her to express her unconditional appreciation for him — the thought of the singer having occupied her mind a lot more often than not over the past six or so months. with the amount of laughter and joy he has brought her through some of the simplest of conversations, he is well deserving of all the gifts he is about to receive as they sit at his apartment door.

the process all began weeks in advance, back in early january in fact. elouise was attending a house party, sitting with her artist friend richard when quite randomly he pulled a blade from his jean pocket — one of his latest works. it was a pocket knife, ornate in just about every way. silvery and glimmering in the dull light, the metallic grip was engraved with the finest of details. a pile of fanged and beastly looking skulls, thorny and wilting roses amongst them whilst a thick chain coils and tangles around them. the very first thought that popped into her mind was; axl would love this ! the whole design reminiscent of his entire aesthetic, or at least she thought so. immediately she offered to buy the thing off him right then and there, and within minutes the blade was sold and stuffed into her purse at the discounted cost of a mere twenty.

however, the bargain didn’t end there. with elouise’s confession that the blade would be given as a gift to someone, a certain someone that richard was familiar with, the artist was more than happy to design a custom tee for the singer he had met once before. a halloween ago, now. it doesn’t take very long for the two to come up with a concept, and it’s only two and a half weeks later that richard is arriving at her apartment door with a black tee in hand. adorned in airbrushed imagery, the design is a caricature of axl — he’s a menacing skeleton in a leather jacket and matching leather pants, his features exaggerated in the way that his shoulders are broadened and the rest of his body tall and skinny, hunched over almost as a cigarette smoulders between bony fingers and a razor sharp grin resides upon the skull’s face. his exaggerated hair resembles actual flames, and beautifully compliments the burning leaves that fall from autumn trees in the background as well as the signature brooklyn brownstone building that towers over him from behind. the imagery is frightening, but insanely cool — and elouise can’t help but let out a shriek of sheer amazement and excitement and AWE when she sees that at the top of the design, ‘mr. brownstone’ is written in big grey letters in a graffiti sort of style. richard never fails to wow her, and he continues to prove that as he turns the tee around show that on the back he has painted a brownstone brick wall littered with graffiti and tagging, though most importantly, it writes; ‘ w. axl rose was here ’. it’s perfect, and it also happens to be the perfect reminder that axl’s birthday is just around the corner and is quickly creeping up on her.

one late night after a long and tiring shift at the deli, elouise sits down on the floor of her studio apartment with a box and begins decorating it. using various different types and patterns of birthday gift wrap to line the inside of the box, she lays down some multi-coloured tissue paper and sprinkles the bottom of the box with metallic cut-outs of stars and zig-zags that come in green and purple — all purchased from the party store just around the block. carefully, she folds the shirt and wraps it in dainty blue tissue paper. the pocket knife, too — only for both bundles to be prettily tied with multi-coloured ribbons. she can’t help but smile at the job she’s done. loving the decorations and more so the thought of him seeing them for the first time, and then taking the time to open each gift individually. she honestly wishes that she could be there just to witness the opening of the gift, see the hopeful joy that it will bring him and see that darned smile of his. the thought brings about butterflies fluttering in the pit her stomach and she can’t pinpoint exactly why. it even has her blushing as she sits there, alone on cold and wooden floors as she thinks about a boy two and a half thousand miles away. rush’s closer to the heart playing softly on a nearby stereo.

𝒚𝒐𝒖 𝒄𝒂𝒏 𝒃𝒆 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒂𝒑𝒕𝒂𝒊𝒏 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒊 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒅𝒓𝒂𝒘 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒕 𝒔𝒂𝒊𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒐 𝒅𝒆𝒔𝒕𝒊𝒏𝒚 𝒄𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒆𝒓 𝒕𝒐 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒕

that is when she has a lightbulb moment. a mixtape. what if she makes him a mixtape ? or two. pondering on it, it’s only a matter of seconds before bare hands and knees go crawling across hard floors to the cabinet on the wall. a storage place holding every record and every cassette tape she holds dear. her entire life story is tucked away on these shelves, written on various tracks and played through many differing instruments and riffs. suddenly, she feels the need to compact it all down onto one singular tape. a 60 minute run of her all time favourites. some songs that make her smile, some songs that move her to tears, and some songs that remind her of him. it’s a grand idea, but it’s one that she executes and executes well. after all, they are both virtuosos. they both live and breathe music, and she’s sure that axl will appreciate something such as this. especially given how dorky the end result is. a 60 minute tape of elouise, sitting on her apartment floor at nearly 5 in the morning, playing her all time favourites all whilst talking sappy in between songs. comments on how much she loves them, why she loves them, and how some of the said songs remind her of him. it’s a strange concoction of david bowie, the rolling stones, rush, led zeppelin, bob dylan, and last but most certainly not least — guns n’ roses. who happen to be the bearers of her number one, all time favourite song: DON’T CRY .

the final song begins to play and unlike the rest of the tracks, the quality of this one is by far the poorest. after all, it is a mere demo that he gave to her. a tape of a tape of a tape, and so on. but still — regardless of the quality — she believes it to be the greatest song that she has ever heard in her entire life, and makes sure to say so. a song that has miraculously got her through some of her darkest hours. moments of reflection, remembering those who let her down and those whom she let down. her mother, past lovers, friends that she no longer talks to anymore. and during the recording of this final song, elouise finds herself laying in the middle of the floor in her satin nightgown, her eyes gently shut — the tape recorder only inches from her head now as she slowly drives her fingers through her wild mane of auburn hair and hot tears form along the lines of her lashes. that guitar solo sending her to another planet, as it always does. her heart rate picks up entirely and by the end the solo, the singer is breaking out into a sweat upon axl’s sweet voice filling her ears again. it’s sonic therapy in it’s purest form, and it’s something she wants to thank him for — but now isn’t the time. she has to focus on finishing this tape, and ending it the way that she had planned to. so as the song comes to an end, the brunette is silent as she tries to pull herself together again. a deep breath audible in the recording before a whole lot of rustling and crackling can be heard, elouise rolling onto her stomach and leaning on her elbows, the tape recorder now in her shaky hands as she wishes the redhead a happy birthday, and then again through song. her voice sweet, soft — with lingering remnants of former sorrow albeit happiness as the gentle smile that sits upon her pretty lips can be FELT in the mere way that she delivers the hushed tune.

❝ 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒚 𝒃𝒊𝒓𝒕𝒉𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒚𝒐𝒖, 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒚 𝒃𝒊𝒓𝒕𝒉𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒚𝒐𝒖, 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒚 𝒃𝒊𝒓𝒕𝒉𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒅𝒆𝒂𝒓 𝒂𝒙𝒍, 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒚 𝒃𝒊𝒓𝒕𝒉𝒅𝒂𝒚 𝒕𝒐 𝒚—— . ❞

suddenly, the tape cuts and that is all. an entire sixty minutes of jovial conversation and song. an entire hour of elouise pouring out her heart and soul through music and laughter. it’s unlike anything she’s ever done for anyone before, and for a few days she even reconsiders whether she should be sending the tape to him. is it too personal ? is it too dorky ? is it just outright WEIRD of her ? these thoughts bubble about in her head like water boiling in a pot, tormenting her until one night she receives a phone call — less than a week now until the big day. it’s axl himself. to hear his voice is like music to her ears, her face aches from grinning so much, and any reluctance is suddenly pelted from her third-storey window. she can’t wait for him to receive the shirt, pocket knife, the goofy ten-to-one tape she stayed up all night recording for him, and now all the new york related knick knacks she has purchased for him in the meantime. new york candies, new york koozies — even a silver statue of liberty fridge magnet that doubles as a bottle opener and a keyring that bears the image of her beloved brooklyn bridge. atop all the bric-a-brac wrapped in pretty tissue paper is a ornate envelope, signed beautifully in his name with a card sitting inside. once opened, the card transcripts:

to axl,

wishing you the happiest of birthdays, my dear friend. i hope that it is filled with laughter and joy, and that the guys are treating you like the king you are —— because you deserve it !!! anyway, i’d love nothing more than to be there with you to celebrate your special day but this whole living on polar opposite sides of the country thing really sucks ! sucks ass major ass ! it’s fine though, have a drink on me tonight and i’ll make sure we celebrate your born-day the next time we happen to cross paths !

p.s. —— call me whenever you find the time, i’ll probably to be dying to know whether this made it to you or otherwise is currently being held in the hands of some stranger ! haha !

whole lotta love,

elle with the z from nyc ! ♡

it isn’t much, and it isn’t anything too extravagant — she’s a small-time singer working on minimum wage, after all. she just hopes that this is enough, and that he doesn’t see it as being too tacky. especially when she’s just forked out sixty percent of last week’s earnings to pay for a courier to drop the gift off to him on his birthday exactly. a big spend for her that she sees worth it, and a cross-country expedition that has the brunette stressing the entire four days it takes for it to arrive at his doorstep. afraid that it might get lost or even worse, stolen, as was expressed in the card.

the courier arrives at his apartment door with the box in hand, a notepad and pen atop the mysterious parcel as he raises a hand to knock upon the door — each tap against the wood filled with reluctance as he wonders if he has the wrong place, the wrong apartment. though before he can fret too much, the door is opening and he is being met with a redheaded figure. “ are you w. axl rose, by any chance ? this parcel has just come all the way from new york. ” the young courier asks with a scratch of his head, though his question is answered immediately as the stranger nods his head in affirmation. “ sweet. i’ll get you to sign here and then it’s all yours, buddy. ”

#is this? the moment? that el realises she loves him? oo p #this was really long but really cute to write so super worth it lol #i hope you enjoyed it !! <33 and also an fyi:#i linked the don't cry demo if u wanna go listen to it :")#for those extra feels lol #ohhh and i also left the end pretty open just in case you wanted to reply but don't feel like you HAVE to!! <3

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intoxicatingimmediacy · 5 years

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Big Ups: Clipping Pick Their Bandcamp Favorites

“Right from the beginning, we always wanted to make a horror-themed record,” says Jonathan Snipes, a producer in the Los Angeles-based progressive noise-rap trio Clipping, alongside MC Daveed Diggs and fellow beatsmith Bill Hutson. The group’s third project for Sub Pop, There Existed an Addiction to Blood, updates the cult horrorcore hip-hop trend of the mid ‘90s in a thrilling and forward-thinking fashion. It’s a striking and deeply atmospheric record, powered by synth-based sonic experimentalism and grisly concept-focused writing that exudes a sinister and shadowy feel.

There Existed an Addiction to Blood adds to a stellar canon of work that kicked off with Clipping’s introductory midcity mixtape in 2013. “That one was really us learning how to be Clipping, and what we sounded like,” says Hutson, who helped mastermind the project’s metallic, glitch-afflicted beats. On the following year’s debut album, CLPPNG, the crew moved further towards what Hutson calls “dark and noise-tinged instrumentals.” The omission of the letter I in the album title represents the way Diggs avoids rhyming in the first person. Hutson maintains that if much of hip-hop involves MCs rapping about their own lives, Clipping’s music strives to be “a novel, not a memoir.” Case in point: 2016’s Splendor & Misery took shape as an Afrofuturist sci-fi adventure that explored an artificial intelligence world; 2017’s single “The Deep” inspired the author Rivers Solomon to expand the song’s environment into a novella of the same name.

Basing There Existed an Addiction to Blood around horrorcore and gory movies is a natural representation of Clipping’s influences and the way the trio approach writing songs. “Horrorcore is this forgotten and maligned subgenre of hip-hop that we’ve always had a tremendous amount of affection for,” says Hutson. “So much of Clipping is about referencing styles of hip-hop—almost all our songs were conceived as our take on a certain type of rap song—so this horror album was always going to happen.” Snipes adds, “We think of each of these songs as self-contained movie scores of vignettes in a specific genre.”

The original horrorcore movement that inspired Clipping’s latest album was spearheaded by RZA and Prince Paul’s Gravediggaz project, plus artists including Houston’s Ganksta N-I-P, Detroit’s Esham, and New York City’s Flatlinerz. ‘90s horrorcore lyrics were packed with macabre imagery and references to psychological disorders, satanism, and cannibalism; the gruesome verses were often relayed over willfully dank and grimey production. Clipping’s resurrection of the subgenre taps into the same lyrical themes—but this time Digg’s intense verses are backed by marauding waves of monstrous synths, sharp abrasive stabs of discordant noise, and snatches of field recordings that bring a chilling realism to There Existed an Addiction to Blood.

Key song “Run For Your Life” plays out like a frantic short movie. It co-stars Memphis MC La Chat, who used to roll with Three 6 Mafia and the Hypnotize Minds roster back in the ‘90s. “She’s hunting down Daveed and approaching and moving behind him in a car,” says Snipes. “Then in the third verse, we’re fully in the car with her.” To drum up the effect of the protagonist being chased to a bloody demise, Digg’s lyrics are surrounded by constantly shifting ambient noise: The sound of passing cars blasting music and dogs barking literally pulls the listener into the chilling scenario.

The same blend of adventurous production techniques and concept-heavy writing present on Clipping’s latest album also runs through Hutson and Snipes’s Bandcamp recommendations. Blasts of abstract hip-hop lyricism mix with innovative thematic albums and avant-garde film scores, adding up to a smart representation of Clipping’s advanced-level musical DNA.

Bill Hutson

Dax Pierson - Live In Oakland

I first saw Dax Pierson play around 2003, when he was in a group called Subtle that was an Anticon side project with Dose One and Jel. Dax was also the secret weapon of the Themselves project, which was also Dose and Jel, and on tour he’d play keys and finger drum on MPCs. Dax is this compelling, creative performer and composer. This tape came out on Ratskin and it’s from a more recent show—I might have even been at the show! His music is fascinating, almost uncategorizable left-field dance stuff that’s blending all these ideas.

John Wall - Hylic

I was really enamored of improvised music in the early ‘00s, and it’s a lot of what fueled my ravenous collector habit, which came from having to track down these obscure records that came from Japan and Germany and Switzerland and England, where they were only pressing a couple of hundred copies. John Wall is very careful as a computer music composer, and he’d spend years and years cutting up tiny pieces of improvised sounds and turning them into these totally austere and totally alien compositions. I was fascinated by the disparity between how much intention there was behind it and how alien the result sounds. Hylic almost sounds like there’s no human brain making logical choices that would compose this music—it feels like it’s naturally occurring in some way, like you’re listening to the background radiation of the solar system—but there’s also the most extreme version of authorship going into it.

billy woods - Hiding Places

I think billy woods is a fantastic example of this very abstract and angular and strange rapper but with these really strong connections to the history of New York rap. It’s almost like he’s from a different timeline where southern hip-hop didn’t take over the mainstream in the ‘00s and we kept going with Nas and Wu-Tang, and it’s developed into this new form. [Producer] Kenny Segal is a buddy—we’ve toured with him—and he would have been a youngster in the Project Blowed days but came out of the experimental L.A. hip-hop scene that produced Abstract Rude and Freestyle Fellowship and, later with the beatmakers, birthed the whole Low End Theory and Brainfeeder movement. This album is a New York and L.A. collab record that seems to perfectly synthesize two different types of left of center aesthetics, but feels completely natural in a way we wouldn’t have expected maybe 20 years ago.

Kevin Drumm - 09082001 gtr/synth ‘solo’

I included this not because anyone needs me to tell them Kevin Drumm is a fuckin’ noise hero, but I wanted to include Drumm because I think what he’s doing is a really unique thing that Bandcamp can provide: A couple of months ago I bought Drumm’s entire discography for like $22, which was like a hundred or so releases! He puts out so much, and it’s all of such high quality. This specific recording is from my favorite period of his work in the early-2000s, but it wasn’t available [back then] until he started bypassing labels and physical copies and started putting everything up himself direct to the fans.

DEBBY FRIDAY - DEATH DRIVE

[The label] Deathbomb Arc put out some of the first Clipping stuff. I think of [founder] Brian Miller as A&Ring my listening habits because he’s out there finding new artists I wouldn’t come across and putting out their records. DEBBY FRIDAY completely blew me away—this release seems both out of nowhere and so fully formed. It’s just brilliant and sort of industrial hip-hop. It’s really like the best Skinny Puppy album we never got but with way better lyrics and content and performance. It’s so smart and dark—she’s a really great lyricist.

Jonathan Snipes

Missincinatti - remove not the ancient landmarks

Missincinatti was Jeremy Drake, Jessica Catron, and Corey Fogel, and they had this band for a short time in L.A. where they played these contemporary arrangements of sea shanties. They’re all incredible musicians, and their arrangements were always so off-kilter and smart. This album is only on Bandcamp, and it’s like a little monument to this band that I loved so much for a short time. One of my favorite things is arrangements of folk music that almost feel like critical theory about folk music and this project feels like it’s in this realm. I wish they were still around playing shows so I could go to them.

François-Eudes Chanfrault - Inside

I discovered François-Eudes Chanfrault when I saw the movie for which this is the score. Then, when I started looking into François’s music, I realized that I’d run across him in online nerdy computer music circles. He became one of my favorite composers, and I became obsessed with tracking his music down. The development of the Inside score is really slow and tasteful, and that’s hard to accomplish when working with film. I also score movies, and film music always feels like if the music’s following a picture. It wants to be fast and have abrupt changes—but François is someone who is somehow able to make these really long elegant cues that actually play against the action of the film in this really striking way. It’s probably the last score I’d expect anybody to write for that movie, and it hits exactly the right tone. His use of electronics and computers and his use of a chamber ensemble are perfectly matched.

Lauren Bousfield - Fire Songs

Lauren’s a really good friend, and this album’s only available on Bandcamp. She’s an incredible musician—an absolute genius. This is the album she released shortly after her house burned down and she lost all her possessions in the fire. It feels very personal. It’s easy to think of electronic and breakcore as just splattered breakbeats that feel mechanical and machine-based. But this one, with the context [of the backstory], feels very emotional, and almost makes me tear up when I hear it.

Bryce Miller - W A S P

Bryce Miller is someone I found through some Bandcamp journalism, which I read regularly. This album, which is based on the Stieg Larsson Millennium books, is elegant and precise. There’s a lot of this retro ’80s synthwave stuff flying around—I’ve made a fair bit of it myself—but somehow this really nailed the tone of feeling very contemporary, but also very ancient. It’s like what I wanted synth records in the ’80s to sound like at the time, but they never quite did. The sense of melody and structure and tension and release is really spot on. Bryce feels like a real composer in that realm.

Max Tundra - With Love To Mummy

I first heard Max Tundra on the double disc compilation Tigerbeat6 Inc. from like 2001. I was really into Aphex Twin and Squarepusher and Kid606 and Matmos, and I was trying to figure out who was doing weird electronic music and that comp came out and it ended up being a huge window into bands I’d never heard of. Max Tundra’s track [“The Bill”] sounded like a general MIDI soundtrack to a spy show that he’d recorded into his answering machine! I’ve been a lifelong fan of his since then, and this collection is, like, his teenage recordings—it’s really interesting to hear his old music. It’s charming and fun to listen to as a fan, and to note where his music took him after that. I suppose other people feel the same way about that Radiohead release.

#clipping.#clipping #bill hutson #jonathan snipes #daveed diggs

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chadsavage · 5 years

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Just in Time for Halloween – Overview of Spooky Indie Music Releases!

2019 has seen a number of great spooky seasonal releases from a wide variety of artists – here are just a few for your ghoulish listening pleasure, just in time for the High Holiday: Halloween Booootie 6 Not only is Halloween our favorite holiday, it’s also our biggest party of the year. (Yes, even bigger than New Year’s Eve!) So to celebrate the spooky season, here’s the sixth installment of our “Halloween Booootie” mixtape series, featuring another 13 spooktacular mashups. Some are brand-new, while others have been exhumed from the mashup crypt (such as that Kleptones track from 2007). We went a little creepy synthwave towards the end, since that’s pretty much the soundtrack of so many classic horror films from the ’80s. And of course, we’ve also got your obligatory mashups of “Thriller” and “Ghostbusters.” Download this merry mashup mayhem FOR FREE at https://bootiemashup.com/mix-tapes/halloween-booootie-6/ ! I Was A Teenage BoJo Spooky Mix Tape 2019 A 27 track macabre mix, FREE to download at https://bojospookymixtapes.bandcamp.com/album/i-was-a-teenage-bojo-spooky-mix-tape-2019 , where you can also grab mixes from previous years, also FREE ! Slasher Dave: The Horrors of Hellhouse Sinister synthwave at its finest! Also check out singles “A Pumpkin’s Tale” and “The Creaking Door” at https://slasherdaveofficial.bandcamp.com/ ! Figure: Monsters 10 Figure’s diabolical dubstep is always something to look forward to – grab his latest at https://smarturl.it/monsters10 ! The Marshmallow Ghost: The Old Witch’s Cavern For the 11th annual Marshmallow Ghosts Halloween album, we have quite the treat for you! In addition to featuring collaborations from Casket Girls, Kid Dakota, Dreamend, Chris LaMartina and more, this year’s release comes with an incredibly bizarre backstory. Read all about it, listen and buy the album at https://graveface.bandcamp.com/album/the-old-witchs-cavern . Soundtracks to Tales of Halloween & Candy Corn You can get the soundtracks for these two fantastic Halloween films (not to mention a plethora of other amazing creepy music offerings) from Burning Witch Records at https://burningwitchesrecords.bandcamp.com/music . Boo Dude: Candy Corn Sells… But Who’s Buying? “Mr. Boo’s new record may be absolutely terrible, but it’s full to the brimstone with valuable veiled messages and wikileaks put in place to expose the globalist agenda. Notice the “G#” position on his bass. The G represents the shape of our spiral galaxy and the sharp symbol is commonly called a HASH tag. Universal Hash conspiracy? Did you know Haint Anger was the original soundtrack to Madea’s “Boo!”? Notice her hypnotized gaze locked on to the Amulet of Financial Feardom and turned away from the equilateral triangle with a pumpkin and skull representing the essence of Halloween and the Masonic square and or compass. Did you know Dave Ramses crafted the Amulet of Financial Feardom to protect it’s wearer from unwise financial decisions? What are you trying to tell us, Jesse Boo. The world is listening!” -G.M. Hackenslash, who does not appear on this record. Name your price and get the album at https://boodudes.bandcamp.com/album/candy-corn-sells-but-whos-buying ! Songs of the Pumpkin Boy Vol. IV At last, the season of the witch has come so grab your rubber mask and scare up some fun for these songs are a toast to the goblins and the ghosts gaily haunting autumn through October 31. For our 4th annual Songs of the Pumpkin Boy, we’ve summoned 13 macabre minstrels to celebrate all things mysterious, spooky, and all-together ooky. We hope this serves as a groovy and ghastly soundtrack to your favorite Halloween frights and festivities. Available at https://pumpkinboy.bandcamp.com/album/songs-of-the-pumpkin-boy-vol-iv . Vince Romano: Zombie Walk While not a new release, it’s a really fun track – grab it at https://vinceromano.bandcamp.com/album/last-year ! And don’t forget Sinister Sonics – our own Soundcloud channel full of spooky soundscapes old and new – http://www.sinistersonics.com ! Do you have a spooky Halloween music or sound FX release that isn’t covered here (or in a recent post)? Tell us about it in the comments! The post Just in Time for Halloween – Overview of Spooky Indie Music Releases! appeared first on Cult of the Great Pumpkin . - https://www.pumpkincult.com/2019/10/just-in-time-for-halloween-overview-of-spooky-indie-music-releases/

#Halloween Music

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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

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BILLIE EILISH - BURY A FRIEND

[7.76]

Why you always play that song so loud? Oh.

Ian Mathers: Over a series of songs and videos, Eilish has practically offered a survey of fears and bad feelings: spiders, isolation, drowning, physical assault, mental illness, poison, other people as monsters, the self as a monster, etc. and here she leans harder than ever into the horror tropes, both sonically and visually. The sampled dentist drill, lyrics equally evoking the monster under the bed and sleep paralysis, the haunted house/nursery rhyme lilt of the verses, the bravado that at least partially stems from her narrative persona already feeling bad enough about herself that you sure as hell can't touch her, and of course the line that recurs over and over: "I wanna end me." It's the sort of thing you can imagine parents freaking out over, and even possibly the (yes, yes, very young) Eilish looking back years from now and thinking the better of. But, much as plenty of pop music conjures up outsized romantic sentiments that listeners gravitate towards despite not actually wanting to follow through with them in a literal sense, it also feels like the kind of darkness that I know many people who don't struggle with suicidal ideation still identify with in the context of a pop song. I'm not actually arguing for its total harmlessness so much as admitting that I don't think total harmlessness is necessary or even desirable in pop, maybe especially when it is from someone as young and who seems to be as tapped into a new vocabulary (sonic and gestural as much as linguistic) as Eilish is so far. The line and the song make me uneasy even as I love it and feel seen by it, as opposed to (say) Juice WRLD's bullshit which doesn't to me feel like it has any redeeming element at all. Eilish and "Bury a Friend," meanwhile, don't need a redeeming element unless you have a problem with the rich history of darkness in pop (as opposed to the rich history of misogyny in pop). Not for nothing does my friend Jess Burke describe her as "Fiona Apple for a Blumhouse future" and of all the paths to go down, that honestly feels like a pretty great one right now. [9]

Tobi Tella: Billie Eilish is one of the first true Gen Z pop stars, and as someone only a year or so older than her I'm impressed with how fresh her music feels on the pop landscape. The sense of dread that appears in most of her music is in full force here, and while I have found some of her music to be a little "2edgy4me," this works by fully leaning into it. It's unlike anything anyone else is making right now. [7]

Alfred Soto: If "Bury a Friend" is a gesture, an experiment -- as if Billie Eilish said, "Let me show how minimalist my music can be, and put in cool noises too" -- then its failure to be more than this is my failure. She's been tuneful before, which means she knows what she's doing. [6]

Jonathan Bradley: "Bury a Friend" sounds like the product of a musical landscape where anything can be heard on demand and none of it comes with context. Billie Eilish's artless murmur suggests that her roots lie in the DIY aesthetics of bedroom folk, but while her music can be wispy and personal in that mode, it wanders into other realms in which it seems not to realize it doesn't belong. This song is punctuated by producer Crooks intoning Eilish's name like a mixtape DJ's drop, while the shrieks that tear into the dark low-end pulse seem torn from Yeezus-era Kanye. There's even some Fiona Apple in the stops and starts punctuating her phrasing. Like Lorde before her, Eilish is adept at playing up the adolescent's attraction to darkness, and the haunted house atmosphere and lyrics about stapled tongues and glass-cut feet settle into a delicious murk. Perhaps most unsettling and most unexpectedly novel about it all is that Eilish doesn't sound like a paralysed gothic heroine. She sounds like one of the monsters. [8]

Katie Gill: Insert that Marge Simpson 'kids, could you lighten up a little?' reaction image here. It only makes sense that the hot new pop sensation is the musical distillation of nihilistic memes and the lolz I'm so depressed joke culture that's permeated the popular consciousness. To her credit, Eilish has her finger perfectly poised on the zeitgeist. Unfortunately, we've been dealing with the zeitgeist for at LEAST two years now. Such ironic detachment and 'I want to end me lmao' already feels out of date -- the fact that the song seems tailor-made to score an American Horror Story scene only dates it even more (those backing screams were a baaad choice). The main thing this does is make me wish that Eilish leaned in more towards her lighter fare. [5]

Vikram Joseph: I've been a Billie Eilish sceptic, but "Bury A Friend" is, if not quite Damascene, certainly revelatory. It feels deliciously, obscenely engrossing; that minimalist pulse, the mocking, nursery-rhyme motif ("What do you want from me? Why don't you run from me?"), those swift, decisive industrial gut-punches, the breathtaking turns of pace and time-signature tightrope-play. Most of all, it's fun, especially when her vocal affectations come off like a demonic sonic negative of Lorde. It feels like her entire aesthetic coming together, a camp horror-flick dark-pop queen finally wearing the crown she's been threatening to unveil for a while now. [8]

William John: At 28 I feel far too old to be pontificating about Billie Eilish, but what I will say is that if their new formula for chart success is to mine the aesthetic of Róisín Murphy circa Ruby Blue, then I'm ready to submit to our new zillennial overlords. [7]

Iris Xie: I've been hearing Billie Eilish everywhere I go, and her music always vibrates with a moody, dark warmth while I move through thrift stores, coffee shops, and sidewalks. Reclaiming whisper-singing from Selena Gomez is a fantastic move, especially when paired with that slight rhythmic drumming, sudden starts and stops, and that little omnipresent danger that I miss so much from f(x)'s Red Light. Our times are escalating faster to some kind of destruction, but in the air, there is exhaustion and energy of both a defiant joy and a quiet numbness. "Bury a Friend," and her album overall embodies that energy in spades. [7]

Will Rivitz: Jump scares in horror movies suck; they're cheap, calculated cash-ins on human predilection to react badly whenever something threatening pops out from the underbrush. Much more difficult to pull off, and much more impressive in its execution and creativity when it succeeds, is the slow-burn thrill. When a ghoulish, uncertain threat is buried ever so imperceptibly below the surface, it roils adrenaline in the most painfully pleasant of ways, as we fail to put our finger on anything about what's about to destroy us except that, make no mistake, it will indeed destroy us. "Bury a Friend" nails that most sublime skin-crawl. The lowing bass and teeth-scraping industrial synths roll around the aural triggers that make every hair on a back stand up with the cold impersonality of coins circling a hyperbolic funnel forever, the end always implied but never achieved. Appropriate, too, since Billie Eilish's main triumph is capturing the slow-burn existential dread of living as a young person in a world thoroughly ruined by those who won't live to see out the ramifications of their present actions. Obliquely, that's "Bury a Friend," a nightmarish Borges y yo resurrection, endlessly Genius-ready especially given the original story now has a Genius annotation itself. (The internet continues to be bizarre.) Instrumentally and lyrically, it's a warped and terrifying celebration of a muddling and destruction of identity supercharged by the less savory bits of our constant interconnectedness; it is, in other words, the best summary of Billie Eilish she could possibly present to us. Eilish affirms our base fears that things are fucked, we're all irrevocably in shambles, and there's absolutely jack shit we can do about it; we might as well learn to celebrate where we're at, since there's nothing else awaiting us. [9]

Alex Clifton: I can't remember the last time I felt this astonished by a song, nor can I remember hearing anything this sublime. I mean this in the gothic sense -- something beautiful and terrifying and subsiding where you've just got to stand and soak it all in. "Bury a Friend" is every nightmare and melodramatic thought I had as a teenager set to music, the suspicion that I was a monster who was better off dead and everyone knew. It felt so plainly written on my skin. But it's not just dark and monstrous. Billie feels scared and sad on the chorus: when we all fall asleep, where do we go? Something in her voice is so vulnerable that I feel cut open myself just hearing it. I fear some older people may hear "Bury a Friend" and write it off as emo teenage poetry, but it's so much more than that. It's the honesty of Lorde's first album mixed in with the sharp crunch of being a teen in 2019, living in a world constantly on fire with questionable prospects for a future. I would expect nothing less from a teenager to be honest, especially one as talented as Eilish. I just wish I had had the courage to be this dark and messy when I was her age. [9]

Will Adams: So much of the Billie Eilish discourse concerns her aesthetic and how it relates to Gen Z, but it often misses a key part of her appeal: how electrifying her music sounds. Tactile, confronting and claustrophobic, Billie and her producer brother Finneas create music that tightens its grip and refuses to let go, and "Bury a Friend" is as good an example as any. Alternately screeching, skittering and booming with sub bass (like "Black Skinhead" crawling with spiders), it conjures up a nightmare you can't look away from. [9]

Katherine St Asaph: A game that is both fun and great for making yourself acutely aware of how fast the grave is yanking you down is asking yourself, and being honest: if you were a teen today, who would you stan? Would you be an Ariana Grande Teen? A Blueface Teen? A Billie Eilish Teen? The depressing truth is that I probably would've been a Lana Del Rey Teen, but I could see myself reluctantly liking this for its weird drama, its dramatic weirdness. I'm convinced people confused about why Billie's dark music appeals to teens have never themselves been teens, the time of life where you endless-repeat Nirvana (ask Dave Grohl) or Sarah Brightman's cover of "Gloomy Sunday" or "Bury a Friend" and often make it out regardless. The flavor of darkness here is more than a little Tim Burton, in the twisted-nursery-rhyme melody, but there's also more than a little "Black Skinhead" and "Night of the Dancing Flame," and how many teen sensations can you conjure those references up for? [9]

Stephen Eisermann: Billie Eilish, especially here, is the exact representation of what would happen if Lorde pulled a Jack Skellington and entered the portal in the trees to find herself in Halloween Town. The same intriguing vocal tics, off-beat metaphors, and bold production choices -- just decorated with horror-tinged jack-o-lanterns and ghost sheets. In other words, I love Billie and I love this song. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: "Bury a Friend" is less a song and more an intentionally jarring collection of phrases -- even Eilish's individual lines sound cut off, as if they've been reassembled from a previously coherent whole. Not every piece works -- Crooks' vocal additions are unnecessary and some of Eilish's longer phrasings in the bridge are too stylized. Moreover, the picture that this collage is supposed to be forming never gets cleared up. And yet there's almost an illicit thrill to listening to a pop song that sounds like this, in all of its chaotic terror and joy. [6]

Edward Okulicz: In truth, this song feels like it runs out of gas, but its first 30 seconds are incredibly arresting. It's not that the rest of it is bad, I mean there's a bit where she sounds exactly like Róisín Murphy and that's never bad. Over the course of a bunch of singles, Eilish has used lots of existing musical tropes in an interesting way and built up a style that's unmistakeably her -- maybe I'm just disappointed she's taken it to complete fruition in half a minute and maybe there's nowhere else for her to go but to do a full-on macabre Glitterbeat thing. She's got fans that'll go with her to any place she chooses. [8]

Taylor Alatorre: I'm inclined to dislike most of the well-manicured teenage dramascapes that make up Billie Eilish's discography so far. Maybe it's the narcissism of generational differences -- sure, I was moody and disaffected as a 17-year-old, but I wasn't this kind of moody and disaffected. You're doing anhedonia all wrong, kids! Yet somehow, "Bury a Friend" is able to dislodge me from this self-consciousness by brandishing its own self-consciousness as a weapon and waging a merry war on itself. It's a staging ground for a bunch of one-off experiments and on-the-nose signifiers and 2spooky vocal tics and vintage 2013 alt-pop tropes, all of which seem to communicate: "This is a song that I wrote, and I can debase it however I want." It's squeamish about its own existence yet sure of its purpose, with a simple driving beat that yields to miscellany while warding off the specters of musical theater. Its high point is an archly written low point: the sneeringly drawn out "wowww." in response to a blunt confession of suicidality. If it turns out that reducing the stigma doesn't always lead to better outcomes, at least we got some good banter out of it. [8]

Joshua Copperman: Huh, I guess we are seeing the beauty at the end of culture. And it's suicidal, it's offensive, it's ugly. Then it's fake-deep, and it's edgy, because Heaven forbid we legitimize the concerns of teenagers. The common thing is supposed to be how, as a teenager, everything feels like it matters, but today's teens are growing up in a political moment when nothing feels like it does, if it ever will again. Okay, that's a bit much -- there's a chance that actual teens aren't like this, and this is what people whose brains have been poisoned by Twitter pundits think teenagers must be like. It can't be a huge coincidence, though, that "I wanna end me," "why do you care for me?" and "I'm too expensive!!!" all wound up in a Top 20 hit by a 17-year-old. Like any good writer, Eilish sublimates those fears into a horror movie song from the point of view of the monster under her bed, a pure Tumblr or r/writingprompts move. But with this many Spotify plays, with this much success, it's hard to shake the feeling that along with the stellar "idontwannnabeyouanymore," Eilish is actually onto something with The Youths. Finneas O'Connor's bonkers production, with dentist drills and the 12/8 "Black Skinhead" bounce, certainly helps this stand out. (Rob Kinelski, too, has crafted a mix more interesting than anything his more successful contemporaries like Serban Ghenea have done lately.) Underneath the grimdarkness, what really separates Eilish is the sense of humor; the nursery rhyme bridge seemed a bit obvious, but after hearing songs like "Bad Guy," Eilish sounds completely aware of the tropes she is using. I have no doubt this blurb will age badly if her music gets worse after this, but who cares when there's not much aging left to do? Lead us into the apocalypse, Billie and Finneas! [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Billie Eilish #pop #music #music review #writing

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dfhvn · 6 years

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A Day In LA With Deafheaven // Stereogum

Loud Love : A Day In LA With Deafheaven The California screamers open up about real life, baby ducks, and 'Ordinary Corrupt Human Love'

Full article by Larry Fitzmaurice via Stereogum

Everyone has to grow up eventually — even ducklings. “Look, dude — the baby ducklings!” Deafheaven guitarist Kerry McCoy stops as we’re mid-conversation, pointing out a plump of web-footed friends on a small rolling pitch alongside the walking path of Los Angeles’ Echo Park.

“I know! They’re getting big,” the band’s howling lead singer George Clarke marvels, as the two stop to briefly ponder the not-quite-grown, no-longer-young fowl squatting and waddling on the grass.

“I saw them the other day, too,” says McCoy.

“They were more yellow before,” Clarke explains with a level of attentiveness that would make one think he raised the ducklings himself.

I’m here to observe what Clarke describes to me as “what a normal day for us is like,” as Deafheaven luxuriate in the relative calm before the busyness of touring and promo that will accompany the release of their fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (out July 13 via ANTI-). These days, Clarke and McCoy are sticklers for routine — and as they recount their regular goings-on to me, it’s slightly adorable that these longtime friends’ day-to-day approach bears close similarity: wake up around 7 in the morning, hit the gym, run some errands, meet up in the park for a bit, and watch a movie or an episode of Billions before crashing out. Both spend part of their day caring for others: Clarke for his grandfather who currently lives with him, and McCoy for a few persistently hungry cats. “I have to stay out until 6 or 7 PM, otherwise they meow until they get food,” he mock-complains with a grin.

Earlier in the day, Clarke and I hit up the Echo Lake outpost of crunchy Cali natural-food chain Lessen’s, as he dumps a variety of salad-bar ingredients — corn, beets, kale, shredded cabbage and peppers, and a heaping helping of steamed veggies, if you’re looking to take on the Deafheaven Diet — into a container. We walk over to the sprawling Echo Park and Clarke unfurls a sizable blanket, festooned with the album art for the band’s 2013 star-making LP Sunbather, before stripping to a white tank-top and laying out belly-down to nosh while we chat about the latest mixtape from Oakland rapper All Black. McCoy joins us soon after along with former member Stephen Clark, who stoically sips from a bottle of water and sucks down a few cigs while the trio are quite literally sunbathing under the LA rays.

All it takes is one listen to Ordinary Corrupt Human Love to deduct that this period of respite is well-earned. Since their alluring 2011 debut Roads To Judah, the band’s dark-arts alchemy of death metal’s frigid rush, shoegaze’s impressionistic swarm, and the emotional catharsis of post-rock has somehow only grown more epic with every release. That’s even more true with their latest record, which at times recalls Mellon Collie-era Smashing Pumpkins and Sunny Day Real Estate’s Diary in its ultra-bright melodic sweep. There are female vocals present, courtesy of West Coast occult-rocker Chelsea Wolfe — as well as actual singing, as Clarke shows off a deeper vocal register beyond his signature burned-out bark.

The personal boundary-pushing and overall prettiness of Ordinary Corrupt Human Love doesn’t so much suggest a newer, shinier Deafheaven as it does a natural progression (or a full realization, even) of the genre-blending hard rock sound they’ve spent most of the decade refining. As tempting as it might be to refer to the album as Deafheaven’s “mature” turn, there’s still a youthful passion that courses through it like a lit match dropped into dry brush — but that doesn’t mean the quintet haven’t gone through some serious personal changes in the interim between 2015’s New Bermuda and now (which marks, to date, the longest gap between Deafheaven records).

“We were 24 when Sunbather came out,” Clarke reflects while discussing the intense emotions and personal strain the band’s been through since that record’s release. “We were still sleeping on floors when we were home, but the rest of the time we were on tour with idle hands and free cash.” He pauses for a second and chuckles ruefully. “Some people are smart — but we decided not to be.”

Before their current residence in LA (Clarke and McCoy have lived in the city for about four years now) and Deafheaven’s teeth-cutting Bay Area days, the pair spent their adolescence scrapping about in the central California suburbs of Modesto. “It was normal,” McCoy describes their respective upbringings, “but it’s all relative. I’m sure Bill Gates’ kids have seen some shit, too.” But he’s quick to note that the relative mundanity of their upbringing also made for a normalization of the intolerance the young punks experienced growing up, too: “I’d just accepted that the way the world went was seeing a giant truck with a Confederate flag drive by, calling me a fag.” (In the middle of this parkside recollection, Clarke interrupts to point out something decidedly not normal: a shirtless pedestrian sporting a full-chest Monster energy drink tattoo. “Check out how lit this tattoo is,” he giggles, as we briefly debate its authenticity.)

When he was 15, McCoy’s father took him to a protest against the Iraq War, and he wore a white armband to school afterwards, which resulted in him getting “destroyed” by his classmates. “We recently went to the March For Our Lives,” Clarke mentions, “and I think it’s really cool that kids these days — even if they’re not 100% informed on stuff — are really making an effort to be. Comparatively, there was no one [in high school] thinking about anything else other than the direct narrative you were given in this small town.”

Music had been in both of their lives from an early age — McCoy’s father once worked as a music journalist, and some of Clarke’s earliest memories include leafing through CD booklets with his mother — and the outsider feeling both of them shared only further deepened their sonic interests. “When you’re living in the Central Valley and you’re into ‘alternative’ things, it forces you further into the hole you’re digging for yourself,” Clarke explains. “You’re already a loser with acne, and now you’re painting your nails for a Misfits show,” McCoy follows up with a chuckle. His first band was a punky high school outfit called The Confused, which self-distributed a CD called What The Hell that everyone in his social circle thought “sucked.” Clarke’s inaugural musical foray was in a band called Fear And Faith Alike that, in his words, “was very 2002 metalcore.”

CREDIT: Frazer Harrison / Getty Images

Clarke and McCoy first became friends when the latter saw “this fool” (Clarke) sitting outside in the rain during high school, decked out in fishnet arm sleeves, a Slayer T-shirt, and a white backpack covered with pentagrams and band names scrawled in Bic. They stayed close as the former bounced around high schools, returning to Modesto after barely graduating in San Jose; after a few failed attempts at forming post-high school bands, the two formed Deafheaven in 2009 after McCoy joined Clarke to share a $500/month apartment in the Upper Haight area of San Francisco.

Deafheaven began as a pretty much anonymous project, to the point where the pair created a Facebook page for the band that essentially positioned it as a one-man act. “We didn’t tell anyone we grew up with about it,” Clarke explains. “We knew if we told people it was us, everyone would be like ‘Fuck off.'” In 2010, they recorded a demo with Bay Area producer Jack Shirley for the cost of $500, a sum which Clarke and McCoy (who were scrambling to even make monthly rent) struggled to pay back for six months.

“This man’s patience is endless,” Clarke speaks admirably about Shirley, whom McCoy refers to as “the Ian McKaye of the West Coast” and “like a straight-edge Marine”; he’s produced every Deafheaven record since. “They were broke beyond broke,” recalls Shirley, whose work with Deafheaven has led him to record acts like Wolves In The Throne Room and Jeff Rosenstock. “It wasn’t a huge deal, though. I try to be patient in those situations, and I’m glad I didn’t [let money get in the way], because it would’ve severed my ties with a band that I have a great relationship with now.”

After the demo made the rounds online, Deafheaven expanded to a full-band lineup and signed to Converge frontman Jacob Bannon’s Deathwish Inc. label, who released Roads To Judah and Sunbather — the latter of which received a profile-raising critical response that metal and “heavy” music in general typically doesn’t enjoy. “We went from a band that nobody really gave a fuck about, to … not the world’s biggest band, but a thing!” McCoy exclaims. “I had an apartment, I moved to LA, I got a girlfriend — life got kind of big.”

The success Deafheaven enjoyed following Sunbather’s release was, for a band on their level, a bit dizzying. Their fanbase spanned kindred spirits like Mono and Explosions In The Sky to rapper Danny Brown and Third Eye Blind’s Stephan Jenkins. On the other hand, the band found themselves unwittingly receiving the indie-TMZ treatment after a Swedish blogger spotted them hanging out at the VIP area of Gothenburg’s Way Out West festival with a Sub Pop representative (full disclosure: I was also present for said hang), ginning up a post shortly after speculating about the band’s potential next career moves — a surprise to the folks back at Deathwish. “I felt so bad,” Clarke says in a tone of sincerity about the accidental reveal.

CREDIT: Gari Askew II / Stereogum

Combined with the extensive post-Sunbather touring schedule, the increased attention on Deafheaven — as well as the pressures of writing and recording the band’s next album, which they’d committed to within a tight time frame under new label home ANTI- — was starting to take its toll on everyone involved. “All this touring and great stuff was fun and exciting, but it blows up your personality with regards to things you have when you become middle-class,” McCoy states. “And you have habits that blow up with that.”

As work on New Bermuda progressed, the pressure of following up their big breakthrough began to wear on the band — hard. Shirley states that, as a “habitually sober” person, he didn’t witness any dysfunction in the recording studio; but McCoy describes the ways in which Deafheaven’s members dealt with the situation as “unhealthy,” and he and Clarke started to literally lose sleep over the prospect of what would come next. “I’d wake up in the middle of the night thinking that everyone was mad at me because the record sucked,” says McCoy, “and we’d all have to go back to Whole Foods — everyone was laughing at us.”

Various substances were on-hand and frequently present during this time — a product of bad habits never dropped and exacerbated by the party-hardy temporary lifestyle that touring afforded. “You’d be like, ‘Well, I gotta be in the practice space for five hours today — better bring two 40’s,'” Clarke remembers. “When you’re touring for five years, your body degrades,” explains guitarist Shiv Mehra, who joined the band along with drummer Daniel Tracy while Sunbather was being recorded. “Drinking doesn’t help.”

Clarke recalls a show in Sao Paulo on the band’s first South American tour supporting New Bermuda as a colliding point for the band’s substance use and personal strain. “It should’ve been insane,” he recalls with a touch of regret, “But everyone was backstage burnt that the booze wasn’t there yet.”

“We were all just sitting there staring at our phones, waiting for whoever — or whatever — to show up,” McCoy adds. “Our entire world wants to come backstage and be the guy to hang out with you, and they know there’s a certain way to do that.”

“We were all still bothered by each other from touring,” Clark, who possesses a quiet yet thoughtful demeanor, states. “We didn’t have any time off from each other for years.” Following New Bermuda’s tour cycle — a period of time he says “quite literally ruined his life” — he chose to leave the band and was replaced by current bassist Chris Johnson, but still remains close with everyone.

“I didn’t handle having money well,” Clark asserts with straightforward conviction. “It was so easy to party, and I was never much of a partier — so I was all over the world having fun, with no longevity in mind. It all came crashing down.”

“It was a dark and bad experience,” McCoy states plainly on the time period surrounding New Bermuda. By the end of the album cycle, everyone was exhausted, and the mere act of being in the band had turned into drudgery.

“It stopped being fun,” Clarke states on his view towards the band at that point. “It became a chore.”

I ask if there was ever a point during this period of time in which he thought Deafheaven would cease to exist. Later, when I relay his answer to others in the band, they’re quick to note it was an exaggeration, but it’s a rough reply regardless: “I kind of thought someone would die,” says Clarke. We’re not gonna break up because we don’t have anything else, but something drastic or scary happening was within the realm of possibility. If anything would’ve taken us down, it would’ve been … tragic.”

When I press on if there were any specific close calls that took place, the three demur, nervously laugh, and murmur to themselves, “Maybe — not really,” declining to elaborate. “When you’re fuckin’ around, you’re fuckin’ around,” Clarke says with an uneasy chuckle.

Clarke quickly follows up: “When you have a problem, you have a problem.”

Work on Ordinary Corrupt Human Love informally began in late 2016 around a single piano riff McCoy had been toying around with, but much of the album was written and recorded from October of last year until this past February. Deafheaven camped out in a cluster of Oakland homes and, after an informal jam session during the first day of recording, found that the time off did them good.

“We finally dealt with all the stuff that made New Bermuda so dark — and when we did, we realized that all that other stuff was junk,” McCoy passionately describes. “When we all got in a room together, I was like, ‘This was the juice of life right here.'”

“It was like we’d been holding our breath for three years, finally let it out, took another one, and said ‘Everything’s gonna be OK,'” Clarke adds.

In truth, there was still a ways to go. To this day, Deafheaven’s members describe themselves as living “healthier” than before, but McCoy is the only band member who’s completely sober, a decision he made during recording late last year after an extended struggle with drug addiction. It’s a sensitive topic for him to discuss, and the details he’s willing to offer regarding his path to sobriety are scant — but he makes it unmistakably clear that things could not go on the way they were for much longer.

“I’d come to a point where I was done being out there,” he explains, “And I was willing to try anything to get off it.” McCoy reached out to a friend, who helped put him on the path to recovery; he’s been sober since late 2017. “My favorite thing in the world was to play guitar,” he states, “And for a long time, I forgot that. Ever since I made this decision, my life has gotten immeasurably better.”

Casting aside the past was essential for not just McCoy, but the entirety of Deafheaven to move forwards after the fraught period of time they were trying to leave behind. “I don’t think anyone who worked on New Bermuda wanted to make another record that sounded like New Bermuda,” Clarke states, who goes on to describe Ordinary Corrupt Human Love as the sound of “people enjoying what they’re doing.” If the aesthetic of the new album reflects the emotions of the people who recorded it, then the lyrical content zooms in on the world around them — the splendor and sameness of peoples’ everyday lives.

CREDIT: Gari Askew II / Stereogum

The universal, explicitly humanistic focus was developed after Clarke began collaborating with photographer Nick Steinhardt to, in his words, “photograph people in their natural habitat.” “I told him I didn’t want anything extraordinary — just people in their everyday routine, looking at a snapshot of someone in their day and just drinking it in,” he explains. The album’s cover features an anonymous woman in Los Angeles’ Civic Center area, her scarf blowing in front of her face; the inlay art features a child holding out his hand to his mother as he prepares to cross the street.

McCoy describes the album cover as “a potential alternate version” of the iconic album art for Radiohead’s The Bends, and Clarke cites the tinted-hue portraiture of Belle And Sebastian’s visual art as a parallel — both comparisons serving as reminders that, despite their roots in heavy music, their palettes span far beyond what genre purists might come to expect.

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And if Deafheaven’s genre-agnostic approach seemed polarizing around the time of Sunbather, it seems weirdly prescient now. In a way, the 29-year-old McCoy and Clarke are indicative of the landscape-flattening streaming generation, in a good way. Sure, it’s easy to bemoan the age of the algorithm and the fluctuating state of discovery for budding music fans in the digital age. But it’s even easier to forget that discovering “good” music used to possess a distinct social element not far off from joining the football team in high school: Are the indie kids any different than the jocks if they still bristle at people joining their lunch table?

For Deafheaven’s and younger generations, discovering new music is easier than ever, and if you’re willing to turn discovery into creativity as they have been, the possibilities are endless. And anyway, even though Deafheaven’s earlier work was sometimes overshadowed by the band’s perpetual and ineffective battle with the metal scene, the band’s members have since learned to hang with the genre misconceptions. “My girlfriend sent me a screenshot about how ‘Honeycomb’ has a punk section — that’s textbook Oasis!” McCoy says with an easygoing laugh that speaks to a greater truth when it comes to getting older. Sometimes it’s easier to just let old grudges go.

Despite the cloudy forecast, it’s a bit brighter of a day than we’re expecting. With the threat of sunburn fast approaching, we pack up the blanket, take a leisurely walk around the park, and head to the 826 Time Travel Mart. The Mart’s a funky Sunset Blvd. spot funded by the Dave Eggers-founded nonprofit 826, featuring arch, kitschy items ranging from giant dinosaur eggs to a powdered concoction called “robot milk” — but McCoy’s less invested in the temporally-out-of-whack wares on display than he is in the tutoring courses being offered in the next room of the nonprofit-funded space.

An employee explains the programs offered as McCoy listens intently, and when Clarke returns from grabbing a coffee nearby he does similarly. At first blush, the thoughtfulness and social investment that the pair show during my time with them might seem too fitting of a narrative for a band trying to straighten up and fly right — but such character traits often come with growing up, too.

“Nikki Sixx was 27 when shit got really bad and he tried to clean up for the first time,” Clarke points out as our time comes to a close, before McCoy has to go check on the cats and Clarke’s grandfather needs help getting his computer fixed. “We reached that age too. We want to take what we do seriously and have a career — and to eliminate the things that get in the way of that. If you don’t die at 27, you can do a lotof shit.”

#Deafheaven #Stereogum

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voodoochili · 3 years

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My Favorite Songs of 2020

With nowhere to go and nothing to do in 2020, I had plenty of time to listen to as much music as I could stand. Luckily for me and for everyone else, 2020 supplied an embarrassment of musical riches; the endless creativity of our artists providing necessary emotional support during the Worst Year Ever™.

I’ve compiled my favorite 100 songs of 2020. Again, I limited my selections to only one song per artist, but as you’ll see, I couldn’t quite stick to it this year. Narrowing the list down to 100 was a painful process, with many excellent songs left on the cutting room floor.

Check below for Spotify playlists

Top 100 Songs of 2020: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ySKk19paBFgO698vw7HTs?si=-al-SyEsTqWzqKfmEraNFw Best Songs of 2020 (Refined): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1ET0aA5TPj5JDsUtosaCVv?si=MyDxjcXKQpy3SNs7dV0wIQ Best Songs of 2020 (Catch-All): https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0XxtEo0PrNSyZDWBCjJtuR?si=pBZWRoNGSGWBCaqxJrHoyw

Without further ado, my favorite songs of 2020.:

25. Yg Teck - “What You Know”: Yg Teck has one of the more prominent Baltimore accents in rap music, elongating “ooh” sounds and shortening “er” sounds with reckless abandon. “What You Know” is buried towards the end of his excellent mixtape Eyes Won’t Close 2, but it stands out as one of Teck’s strongest songs. The buoyant piano-led beat offers Teck an opportunity to reflect on his struggle with heart-breaking directness: “So what if they hate me, sometimes I hate myself.”

24. Brian Brown - “Runnin” ft. Reaux Marquez: Filtering the conventions of southern rap through his easy-going drawl and omnivorous musical appetite, Brian Brown is the brightest light in Nashville’s burgeoning hip-hop scene. Built around producer Black Metaphor’s circuitous jazz piano, “Runnin” is a soulful and poetic meditation on breaking out of the staid existence that can creep up on you if you stay still for long enough. Brown serves up the song’s irresistible hook and provides a grounding presence on his second verse, evoking the styles of two Tennessee rap titans: Chattanooga’s Isaiah Rashad and Cashville’s own Starlito.

23. 42 Dugg - “One Of One” ft. Babyface Ray: Detroit producer Helluva’s beats provide the tissue that connects the Motor City with the West Coast, creating anthems that mix D-Town propulsion with soundscapes perfect for a top-down drive down PCH. The Helluva-produced “One Of One” is an electric duet between two of the D’s most distinct voices: low-talking, whistle-happy guest verse god 42 Dugg and nonchalantly fly Babyface Ray. They trade bars throughout the track, weaving between squelches of bass to talk about the ways women have done them wrong.

22. PG Ra & jetsonmade - “Keeping Time”: The phrase “young OG” was invented for guys like PG Ra, who is somehow only 20-years-old. On “Keeping Time,” the South Carolina rapper spits sage-like wisdom about street life over Jetsonmade’s signature trampoline 808s, decrying nihilism and emphasizing the importance of holding strong convictions in a deliberate, raspy drawl: “Oh, you don't give a fuck 'bout nothing, then you damn wrong/Cause every soldier stand for something if he stand strong.”

21. Empty Country - “Marian”: After spending a decade as the main songwriter for Cymbals Eat Guitars, Joseph D'Agostino is an expert at crafting widescreen indie anthems. CEG is no more, but D’Agostino is still doing his thing, opening the self-titled album of his new entity Empty Country with “Marian,” a chiming and heartfelt power ballad with sunny vocal harmonies and a fist-pumping riff. It’s hard to make out the lyrics on the first few spins, but a closer listen reveals some striking imagery (“In a sea of Virginia pines/A burnt bus”), as the narrator imagines the life that lies ahead for his newborn daughter.

20. Raveena - “Headaches”: Raveena’s music is a soothing balm, capable of transforming any negative emotion into peaceful reverie. “Headaches” starts as a sensual, woozy, reverbed-out slow jam–typical Raveena territory, perfect for emphasizing the enlightened sensuality that she exudes in her vocals. The song mutates in its second half into an invigorating bit of dream pop, picking up a ringing guitar riff and a prominent backbeat as Raveena struggles to stay close to the one she loves (“There's no sunset, without you”).

19. Los & Nutty - “I’m Jus Fuckin Around” ft. WB Cash: In which three Detroit emcees receive an instrumental funky enough for ‘90s DJ Quik and proceed to not only not ride the beat but to fight so hard against it you’d think they’re training to get in the ring with Mayweather. I love Michigan rap.

18. Sufjan Stevens - “My Rajneesh”: I’ve never seen Wild Wild Country, or read about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his cult, so I don’t know too much about the subject matter of “My Rajneesh.” I do know, however, that it’s a story that involves crises of faith and the state of Oregon, which means it fits perfectly into Sufjan’s milieu. “My Rajneesh” does an excellent job of relaying the ecstasy of a devout believer, layering celebratory chants, South Asian traditional percussion, and glitchy electronics into a 10-minute epic. As the song progresses, the sonic tapestry grows distorted, mimicking the emptiness that lies beneath Rajneesh’s surface and the darkness and confusion faced by his followers when the illusion fades.

17. Koffee - “Lockdown”: Leave it to rising dancehall superstar Koffee to find ebullient joy in a situation as bleak as quarantine. Weaving around piercing guitar licks and euphoric vocal samples, Koffee schemes to turn her lockdown romance (”quarantine ting”) into a long-term deal, fantasizing about travel with her love even as she’s content to just spend time in her apartment. Everything is dandy as long as they're in the same room.

16. Rio Da Yung OG & Louie Ray - “Movie”: Flint’s answer to Detroit’s “Bloxk Party,” one of the best rap songs of the past decade. Rio and Louie trade verses throughout the song, competing with one another to see who can be the most disrespectful.

Rio’s best line: “Ma don't drink that pop in there, I got purple in it/I know it look like Alka-Seltzer, it's a perky in it”

Louie’s best line: “Let me cut my arms off before I ball, make it fair”

15. Ratboys - “My Hands Grow”: “My Hands Grow” shines like an early-morning sunbeam, hitting that circa-2001 Saddle Creek* sweet spot with aplomb. But “My Hands Grow” is more than just a throwback–it’s an oasis, populated by sweeping acoustic guitars, electric leads with just the right amount of distortion, and especially Julia Steiner’s affectionate vocal, which blooms into gorgeous self-harmonies during the bridge.

*Obligated to add that this song came out before Azure Ray signed to Saddle Creek, but the point stands.

14. J Hus - “Triumph”: J Hus and Jae5 have the kind of telepathic artistic connection and song-elevating chemistry only present in the best rapper-producer pairs. A great example of how their alchemy blurs the lines between genres, “Triumph” is the J Hus/Jae5 version of a boom-bap rap track. Hus rides Jae5’s woodblock-and-horn-accented beat with unassailable confidence, gradually elevating his intensity level as he sprays his unflappable threats. Like most of Hus’s best songs, “Triumph” is home to an irresistible hook, which I can’t help but recite whenever I hear the words “violence,” “silence,” or “alliance” (more often than you think!).

13. Sada Baby - “Aktivated”: Every post-disco classic from the early ‘80s could use a little bit of Sada Baby’s wild-eyed intensity and dextrous flow. On “Aktivated,” Sada runs roughshod atop Kool & The Gang’s ‘81 classic “Get Down On It,” turning it into an irresistible and danceable anthem about going dumb off a Percocet. Sada is a master of controlled chaos, modulating his voice from a simmer to a full-throated yell within the space of a single bar. It really makes lines like “Coochie made me cry like Herb in the turtleneck” pop.

12. Yves Tumor - “Kerosene!”: Prince is one of the most-imitated artists on the planet, but while most artists can only grasp at his heels, Yves Tumor’s “Kerosene!” reaches a level of burning passion and sexual literacy that would make The Purple One proud. A duet with Diana Gordon, “Kerosene!” is a desperate plea for connection, each duet partner thinking that a passionate dalliance might cure the emptiness inside. The song vamps for five minutes, filled with guitar pyrotechnics and moaning vocals, its extended runtime and gradual comedown consigning the partners to a futile search for a self-sustaining love that won’t burn itself out when the passion fades.

11. Special Interest - “Street Pulse Beat”: “Street Pulse Beat” sounds like “Seven Nation Army,” as performed by post-punk legends Killing Joke. It’s a strutting, wild, propulsive anthem–part come-on, part self-actualization, all-powerful. Dominated by an insistent industrial beat and the fiery vocals of frontperson Alli Logout, whose performance more than lives up to the song’s grandiose lyrics (““I go by many names such as Mistress, Goddess, Allah, Jah, and Jesus Christ”), “Street Pulse Beat” was the song released this year that made me miss live music the most.

10. Megan Thee Stallion - “Savage” (Remix) ft. Beyonce: The first-ever collaboration between these two H-Town royals was the most quotable song of the year, firing off hot lines and memorable moments with an effortless majesty. Megan does her thing, bringing classy, bougie, and ratchet punchlines about the men who grovel at her feet, but it’s who Beyoncé elevates the track to transcendence. She prances around the outskirts of Megan’s verses, applying the full force of her lower register to her ad-libs (“THEM JEANS”), and during her verses, the Queen proves once again that you can count the number of rappers better than her on your fingers.

9. DJ Tunez - “Cool Me Down” ft. Wizkid: WizKid is almost alarmingly prolific, releasing enough amazing songs per year that he would be a worthy subject of his own “best-of” list. My favorite WizKid song of 2020 didn’t come from his excellent album Made In Lagos–instead it was this team-up with Brooklyn-based DJ Tunez. A favored collaborator of WizKid (Tunez is partially responsible for career highlights like 2019’s “Cover Me” and 2020’s “PAMI”), Tunez’s organic and textured approach to Afrobeats is an excellent fit for his voice, mixing swelling organs, 808 blocks, and the occasional stab of saxophone into a percolating concoction. The “Starboy” rises to the occasion, hypnotically repeating phrases in English and Yoruba, making octave-sized leaps in his vocal register, and stretching syllables like taffy as he sings the praises of his lady love.

8. Sorry - “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”: Part swaggering indie anthem and part skronking no wave, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” struts with the woozy confidence of someone who’s had just the right amount to drink. It’s the ideal throwback to late L.E.S. (or Shoreditch) nights, sung with irresistible gang vocals on the chorus and a detached sneer on the verse that jibes with the sinister undertones of the deliberately off-key backing track.

7. Destroyer - “Cue Synthesizer”: As Dan Bejar ages, he becomes less like a singer and more like a shaman, his incantatory near-spoken word verses grounding his band’s instrumental heroics. On “Cue Synthesizer,” Bejar plays the role of conjurer, summoning synthesizers and electric guitars in celebration of music’s ability to breathe life into modern mundanity.

6. Chloe x Halle - “Do It”: Pillow-soft R&B that walks the fine line between retro and futuristic, powered by the Bailey Sisters’ playfully twisty melodies and sumptuous production from a somewhat unexpected source. That’s right, piano man Scott Storch took a break from smoking blunts with Berner to deliver his smoothest beat since he teamed with Chloe x Halle mentor Beyoncé for “Me Myself & I” in 2003.

5. Fireboy DML - “ELI”: Nigeria singer Fireboy DML is an unabashed fan of ‘90s adult contemporary, worshipping idols (‘90s Elton John, Celine Dion) that even some devout poptimists wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. A modern-day retelling of the Biblical fable of Samson and Delilah, “ELI” seems to take inspiration from Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants,” its rocksteady beat, wobbling bassline, snake-charming flute, and “lonely girl, lonely world” lyrics recalling the 1994 Swedish pop smash. It’s a testament to Fireboy’s charisma and melodic mastery that “ELI” is as invigorating as “All That She Wants” is annoying. He switches from playful flirtation on the verse, to hopeless devotion on the chorus, to lascivious swagger on the bridge, gently ratcheting up the intensity in his vocals until the song’s climactic guitar solo* grants glorious release. *The build-up on “ELI” is so great that it makes it easy to ignore that the guitar solo itself is a mess. It sounds like the producers couldn’t get Carlos Santana, so they settled for Andre 3000 instead.

4. The Beths - “Dying To Believe”: If you’ve ever audibly cringed while thinking about something you’ve said or done in the past, The Beths have the song for you. Carried by its driving backbeat, “Dying To Believe” chronicles singer Liz Stokes’s rumination on a crumbling friendship, her fear of confrontation preventing her from removing her toxic friend from her life. Though the lyric is pained and uncertain, there’s no such lack of confidence in the music. An adrenaline rush of muscular, sugary power pop, “Dying To Believe” is an immaculate construction, each fuzzy guitar riff arriving with mathematical precision and each “whoa-oh” chorus hitting like a ton of bricks. Jump Rope Gazers might not have been as consistent as the Auckland, NZ band’s self-titled debut, but “Dying To Believe” is as good as anything on that album and helps solidify The Beths’ deserved reputation as some of the best songwriters and tightest performers on either side of the International Date Line.

3. The 1975 - “What Should I Say”/“If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)”: I know, I know. I was supposed to only pick one song per artist, but sue me, this is my list and I just could not decide between these two. The 1975 have always balanced their affinity for ‘80s-style pop anthems with an interest in experimental electronic music. In 2020, they released the two very best songs of their career, each seemingly fitting into one of those two boxes. On its face, “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” is the band’s transparent attempt at recording their own “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”–it’s in D Major, it has a chugging backbeat, an echoing two-chord riff in the verse, and an ascending E Minor progression in the pre-chorus. Where the Tears For Fears classic takes a birds-eye look at the yuppie generation, Matty Healy uses his song’s swelling bombast and gleefully cheesy sax solo to explore the awkward intimacy of cyber sex. The burbling Eno-style synth that opens up “If You’re Too Shy” evokes a dial-up connection, simulating the thrill of discovery felt by those whose only connection to the outside world comes through their screens.

“What Should I Say,” meanwhile, combines Boards Of Canada-esque bloops with bassline that strongly resembles Mr. Fingers’ oft-sampled “Mystery Of Love”, over which Healy sings in a heavily-manipulated voice that sounds like the lovechild of Travis Scott and Sam Smith. Fittingly for a song about loss for words, the best moments of “What Should I Say” spring from vocal manipulations, imparting more emotional resonance than mere words could ever hope to provide. The final minute of “What Should I Say” is almost tear-jerkingly beautiful, as a single computerized voice cuts through cacophony, determined to let the world know how it feels, language be damned.

2. King Von - “Took Her To The O”: His career was far too short, but King Von had plenty of chances to demonstrate his god-given storytelling ability before he passed away in November. Accompanied by regular collaborator Chopsquad DJ’s chaotic, circular pianos, Von recounts an eventful night in his home neighborhood of O’Block. Von’s gripping narrative is packed with writerly detail (“Nine missed calls, three of them from ‘Mom,’ other six say ‘Duck’”), peeking into his justifiably paranoid state-of-mind (“My Glock on my lap, I'm just thinkin' smart”) and ending with a smirk on a bit of gallows humor that recalls prime Ghostface. Long Live Von.

1. Bob Dylan - “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself to You”: It’s impossible to escape that 2020 was a year of mass devastation, on a scale not seen in American life since the second World War. In the midst of the cascading chaos of this year, I married my best friend. So it’s fitting that the song that resonated most with me this year was “Throat Baby (Go Baby)” by BRS Kash.

*Ahem* Excuse me. It was a love song, and not just any love song: the finest love song of Bob Dylan’s six-decade, Nobel Prize-winning career.

Bob Dylan spent much of the 2010s trying his hand at the Great American Songbook, applying his craggy croon to standards made famous by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. It felt like a weird turn for such an iconoclastic figure, one known for his massive (and valuable) library of originals. “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You” proves that Bob’s covers and Christmas albums weren’t larks or cash grabs, but an old dog’s attempt to learn new tricks by digging into the past.

“IMUMMTGMTY” shares a lot of DNA with “The Way You Look Tonight” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” bringing florid metaphors and touching pledges of devotion, but it also inherently understands that love is a decision–a weighty decision that imparts great responsibility–as much as it’s a feeling. What really makes “IMUMM” sing is the tastefully folksy arrangement, which ties into the old weird America explored by Dylan’s compadres in The Band, filled with bright Telecaster leads and easily-hummed choruses. And the lyrics are excellent even by Bob’s elevated standards. It turns me into a puddle every time I listen. I’ll let Bob take it from here:

Well, my heart's like a river, a river that sings Just takes me a while to realize things I've seen the sunrise, I've seen the dawn I'll lay down beside you when everyone's gone

Here’s the rest of the list. Check back later this week for my albums list!

26. Katie Gately - “Waltz” 27. Bonny Light Horseman - “Bonny Light Horseman” 28. Bullion - “Hula” 29. Omah Lay - “Lo Lo” 30. Greg Dulli - “Sempre” 31. Fiona Apple - “Shameika” 32. Anjimilie - “Your Tree” 33. Key Glock - “Look At They Face” 34. Lido Pimienta - “Te Queria” 35. Morray - “Quicksand” 36. Obongjayar - “10K” 37. Xenia Rubinos - “Who Shot Ya?” 38. Kiana Lede - “Protection” 39. Flo Milli - “Weak” 40. G.T. - “What You Gon Do” 41. Chris Crack - “Hoes At Trader Joe’s” 42. Lil Baby - “The Bigger Picture” 43. The Orielles - “Memoirs of Miso” 44. Shoreline Mafia - “Change Ya Life” 45. Masego - “Mystery Lady” ft. Don Toliver 46. Junglepussy - “Out My Window” ft. Ian Isiah 47. Siete Gang Yabbie - “Gift Of Gab” 48. Rosalía - “Juro Que” 49. Black Noi$e - “Mutha Magick” ft. BbyMutha 50. BFB Da Packman - “Free Joe Exotic” ft. Sada Baby 51. Andras - “Poppy” 52. Lianne La Havas - “Weird Fishes” 53. Crack Cloud - “Tunnel Vision” 54. Lil Uzi Vert - “No Auto” ft. Lil Durk 55. Fred again… - “Kyle (I Found You)” 56. Burna Boy - “Wonderful” 57. Lonnie Holliday - “Crystal Doorknob” 58. Mozzy - “Bulletproofly” 59. Tiwa Savage - “Koroba” 60. Frances Quinlan - “Your Reply” 61. Ariana Grande - “my hair” 62. Bad Bunny - “Safaera” ft. Jowell & Randy & Ñengo Flow 63. Yhung T.O. & DaBoii - “Forever Ballin” 64. Katie Pruitt - “Out Of The Blue” 65. Sleepy Hallow - “Molly” ft. Sheff G 66. Niniola - “Addicted” 67. Prado - “STEPHEN” 68. Drakeo The Ruler - “GTA VI” 69. Boldy James - “Monte Cristo” 70. Caribou - “Like I Loved You” 71. Andy Shauf - “Living Room” 72. Hailu Mergia - “Yene Mircha” 73. Kabza de Small & DJ Maphorisa - “eMcimbini” ft Aymos, Samthing Soweto, Mas Musiq 74. Gunna - “Dollaz On My Head” ft. Young Thug 75. Roddy Ricch - “The Box” 76. The Lemon Twigs - “Hell On Wheels” 77. Sun-El Musician - “Emoyeni” ft. Simmy & Khuzani 78. Madeline Kenney - “Sucker” 79. Natanael Cano - “Que Benedicion” 80. ShooterGang Kony - “Jungle” 81. Don Toliver - “After Party” 82. Chicano Batman - “Color my life” 83. Pa Salieu - “Betty” 84. Chubby & The Gang - “Trouble (You Were Always On My Mind)” 85. Dua Lipa - “Love Again” 86. Rucci - “Understand” ft. Blxst 87. Skilla Baby - “Carmelo Bryant” ft. Sada Baby 88. Bartees Strange - “Boomer” 89. Jessie Ware - “Read My Lips” 90. The Hernandez Bros. & LUSTBASS - “At The End Of Time” 91. Brokeasf - “How” ft. 42 Dugg 92. Mulatto - “No Hook” 93. Eddie Chacon - “Outside” 94. Veeze - “Law N Order” 95. Polo G - “33” 96. Bktherula - “Summer” 97. Jessy Lanza - “Anyone Around” 98. Perfume Genius - “On The Floor” 99. ComptonAssTg - “I’m Thuggin’” 100. Mario Judah - “Die Very Rough”

Honorable Mentions: Jamila Woods - “SULA (Paperback)” Demae - “Stuck In A Daze” ft. Ego Ella May Good Sad Happy Bad - “Bubble” Guerilla Toss - “Human Girl” Kaash Paige - “Grammy Week” ft. Don Toliver Kre8 & CJ Santana - “Slide!” Laura Veirs - “Another Space & Time” Angelica Garcia - “Jicama” Malome Vector - “Dumelang” ft. Blaq Diamond OMB Bloodbath - “Dropout” ft. Maxo Kream SahBabii - “Soulja Slim” Shabason, Krgovich & Harris - “Friday Afternoon” Skillibeng - “Mr. Universe” Waxahatchee - “Fire” Westerman - “Float Over”

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thepixelresponse · 6 years

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The Burning Barrel Awards 2017: Gaming Edition

Welcome to the Burning Barrel Awards for 2017!

This year, Hank and I decided to do something a bit collaborative for the site in which we came up with a list of categories, chose some personal winners for each category and then decided what compromises we could make to do an official site list up.

So below is the list of winners. Yes, some things are spoilers and yes, the VERY LAST CATEGORY is nothing but a spoiler category so beware.

I highly suggest listening to our deliberations here first:

Burning Barrel Awards 2017 Gaming Deliberations

So without further ado please enjoy our official list:

The "Irrationally Angry Because of Video Games" Award

Gaming has a certain culture about it. Sometimes it's annoying. This is the award for the most annoying thing in gaming culture, not so much a "game".

"Cuphead tutorial stage hijinx" - Paul

"Motherfuckers who knock away the ball in Destiny 2's Tower" - Hank

Grossest Industry Practice

The "death of single-player"? Loot boxes? Konami? What was the worst instance of business getting in the way of hobby this year?

Loot boxes. Seriously, stop it.

SHOUT-OUTS:

WB exploiting DLC sales over executive producer death

EA (just in general)

Worst Level/Sequence

You know those awesome set-pieces that get you in the mood to never stop playing? Yeah, this is the opposite of that.

Resident Evil 7's Tanker Level

SHOUT-OUTS:

The Leviathan Raid's Pleasure Gardens [Destiny 2]

Darker Side of the Moon [Super Mario Odyssey]

Flying Battery Zone [Sonic Mania]

Mirage Saloon Zone Act 1 [Sonic Mania]

Grey Prince Zote Boss Fight [Hollow Knight]

2B infected and trying to walk across the city ruins [NieR: Automata]

Worst Game

The game that not only didn't meet expectations but is barely a product. The exact opposite of what we want. Fuck that thing.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

SHOUT-OUTS:

RAID: World War II

Friday the 13th

Sundered

The Awards

The Glitchy Award

For excellence in being broken as fuck on a technical level.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

SHOUT-OUTS:

PLAYERUNKNOWN's BattleGrounds

Destiny 2

The "Asura’s Wrath" Award

For excellence in spectacle action with emotional impact.

Tekken 7

SHOUT-OUTS:

Persona 5

NieR: Automata

The "Mass Effect" Award

For being the best Mass Effect in lieu of the trash-fire that was Andromeda.

Horizon: Zero Dawn

SHOUT-OUTS:

Persona 5

Night in the Woods

Pyre

The "MetroidVania" Award

For excellence in backtracking and drip-feeding abilities.

Hollow Knight

SHOUT-OUTS:

Metroid: Samus Returns

SteamWorld Dig 2

Mummy Demastered

Most Hateable Character Award

For perhaps single-handedly ruining any sort of good experience.

The Narrator from Tekken 7

SHOUT-OUTS:

Rip Blazkowicz [Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus]

Everyone in Ghost Recon Wildlands

Game You Would Hate to Play With Your Parents Award

For being "that" game...

NieR: Automata

SHOUT-OUTS:

PLAYERUNKNOWN's BattleGrounds

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands

Besties

Best Music

Best Transition to 8-Bit

You know that moment. It's like waiting for the bass drop... only the exact opposite!

NieR: Automata

SHOUT-OUTS:

Super Mario Odyssey

Persona 5

Best Track

Single song/track.

Paul: https://burningbarrel.co/year-in-gaming-2017-mixtape/

Hank: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQ5c76q9b0yHqFkshQhfMmSZLd8jd8TvR

Best Soundtrack

Full soundtrack from a video game.

Pyre

SHOUT-OUTS:

NieR: Automata

Persona 5

Cuphead

Shovel Knight: Spectre of Torment

Oldies But Besties

Best Game That Isn’t Actually New (Best This Shit Again)

Remakes, remasters or a game finally getting an international releases, the best game that was released this year officially but isn't actually new and people have been playing, possibly for years, before now.

StarCraft Remastered

SHOUT-OUTS:

Puyo Puyo Tetris

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe

Parappa the Rapper Remastered

Disney Afternoon Collection

Best Additional Content (Best More Shit)

Best content that expanded on the original game.

Shovel Knight: Spectre of Torment

SHOUT-OUTS:

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

Resident Evil 7

Best Updated/Supported Game (Best Same Old Shit)

Best game that continues to hold an audience by updating consistently enough to remind people it exists.

Tabletop Simulator

SHOUT-OUTS:

Warframe

Killing Floor 2

Battlerite

20XX

Path of Exile

Rainbow Six: Siege

Heroes of the Storm

DOTA 2

Player Experience

Best Girl

The most controversial debate on the internet!

Cala Maria

SHOUT-OUTS:

Senua [Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice]

Makoto [Persona 5]

Tae Takemi [Persona 5]

Sandra [Pyre]

Aloy [Horizon: Zero Dawn]

Kazumi Mishima [Tekken 7]

Bea [Night in the Woods]

Best Mount

Because running on your own two legs is for chumps! Unless your legs are a mount?

The Moose [NieR: Automata]

SHOUT-OUTS:

Link’s Motorcycle [Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild]

The T-Rex [Super Mario Odyssey]

Bowser [Super Mario Odyssey]

Broadhead [Horizon: Zero Dawn]

Lord of the Mountain [Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild]

Jaxi [Super Mario Odyssey]

Camels [Assassin's Creed: Origins]

Panzerhund [Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus]

Mona [Persona 5]

Goblin Throne [Battlerite]

Golden Lunar Rooster [Heroes of the Storm]

Best Menu/UI

There's nothing quite like a nice menu.

NieR: Automata

SHOUT-OUTS:

Persona 5

Destiny 2

Best Skybox

Sometimes you just stop and look at the sky... this is the prettiest one this year.

Star Wars: BattleFront II

SHOUT-OUTS:

Horizon: Zero Dawn

Destiny 2

Best Photo Mode

A picture is worth a thousand words. This was the best in-game way to take them!

Super Mario Odyssey

SHOUT-OUTS:

Final Fantasy XV / No Man's Sky

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

Horizon: Zero Dawn

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

Best Level/Sequence Design

That part that was just so satisfying in how it was put together, it was a stand-out.

Ending E [NieR: Automata]

SHOUT-OUTS:

The Gauntlet in the Leviathan Raid [Destiny 2]

The White Palace [Hollow Knight]

The Epilogue [Pyre]

The first Chosen encounter [XCOM 2: War of the Chosen]

The audition [Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus]

Dr. Kahl's Robot fight [Cuphead]

King Dice encounter [Cuphead ]

The cannery story [What Remains of Edith Finch]

Best Level/Sequence Aesthetic

That part that was just breathtakingly beautiful or cool looking.

The Almighty mission in Destiny 2

SHOUT-OUTS:

Jacking into people’s brains in Observer

Fenrir boss fight in Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice

Cauldron Sigma from Horizon: Zero Dawn

Cala Maria in Cuphead

Best Extra Shit to Read

Whether it be loose collectibles, an in-game book or weapon descriptions, the best supplemental reading material within a game.

Pyre

SHOUT-OUTS:

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus' Alternate history

NieR: Automata's weapon stories and email messages

Horizon: Zero Dawn logs

Observer tenant notes and computer documents/emails

Best Use of a Slime as a Main Protagonist in a 2D Platformer

This whole category just exists to give Slime-San a platform for recognition. Because we can do that.

Slime-san

Social

Games I Didnt Play Myself

We all have that one or two games that we experienced solely through someone else. Whether it be watching a YouTube series or livestream, this is the best game you didn't play yourself.

Nidhogg 2

SHOUT-OUTS:

Night in the Woods (Paul)

Little Nightmares (Hank)

What Remains of Edith Finch (Hank)

Get Even (Hank)

Better With Friends

Most things are better with friends, right? Well, this is the one game this year that was made better by being multiplayer.

Divinity Original Sin 2

SHOUT-OUTS:

PLAYERUNKNOWN's BattleGrounds

Destiny 2

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Wildlands

Fan Art Community of the Year

All popular things received fan art. This is the game that inspired the most and best fan art of the year!

NieR: Automata

SHOUT-OUTS:

Super Mario Odyssey

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Cuphead

Hollow Knight

SPOILERS: The "I Probably Could Have Just Told You About This" Award

The best moment in gaming this year that would NOT have lost any impact hearing it from someone else first.

You fight Ganon [Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild]

SHOUT-OUTS:

Cappy controls Bowser [Super Mario Odyssey]

Mario fights a dragon [Super Mario Odyssey]

Mushroom Kingdom [Super Mario Odyssey]

Peach w/ shotgun [Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle]

Opera singer boss [Mario+Rabbids Kingdom Battle]

The horror comic-book part [What Remains of Edith Finch]

Chris Redfield is back [Resident Evil 7]

SPOILERS: The "I Can't Tell You About This" Award

The best moment in gaming this year that would have legitimately been better if you didn't read about it from some asshole on Twitter.

B.J. gets his head cut oFF [Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus]

SHOUT-OUTS:

The audition with Hitler [Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus]

2B is actually 2E [NieR: Automata]

Path C & D [NieR: Automata]

What the Zero Dawn is [Horizon: Zero Dawn]

The Narrator [Pyre]

Who the Hollow Knight is [Hollow Knight]

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oneweekoneband · 7 years

Video

youtube

Saved- Khalid

I'll keep your number saved because I hope one day I'll get the pride to call you/ To tell you that I'm finally over you

Saved is another song about heartbreak, but like its predecessor, its also not quite a song about a breakup. Saved instead takes place way after the seperation actually happens, when you've migrated to different circles and built new lives and by all intents and purposes entirely moved on, except for that single thread of communication that's holding you together, one that lives and flourishes in the back of your mind even when you don't want it anymore.

Breakups have always had certain kinds of visual imagery attached to them. There are entire social rituals we attach to seperation that old romcoms and sitcoms churned out season after season: packing up yout things, avoiding the places you used to frequent together, crying to your friends in private about it while they pat you on the back and offer platitudes about how the other person didn't deserve you and then putting on a brave face in public. Finally, as the narrative goes, you're supposed to emerge truimphant bigger and better than ever while your ex is still stuck in the same place and has no choice but to watch you in awe.

In my third year of high school I hosted the first ever alumni meet we had which lead to an entire round of discussion about who in our class would return to high school twenty years later, and shock us all by being completely different. We discussed a whole number of people and pictured them in a number of scenarios: the smart kid, coming back with a billion dollars to his name and a beautiful girlfriend, the closeted lesbian (that's me) coming back with a wife and three kids while smirking at the homophobic teachers, the kid we all thought was going to places now a housewife that clearly hates her life, the guy who thought he was hot shit now broke and living in his parents basement. All the people we pictured were familiar to us but they also had the added element of being future strangers, who we would have lost all contanct untill they too, emerged truimphant in their own way.

As I grew older, I learned that scenario is entirely possible-in my parent's time. Today, we're always hearing from people, even if we're not quite sure we want to. Facebook started off by connecting people to their school friends, and now Instagram has created an entire culture where the point is to make everyone feel slightly bad about themselves by putting up a curated feed of the best moments of your life. Falling out of love in today's world comes with an entirely different rituals, like deleting all your old photos instead of burning their mixtapes. Its a ritual that's equally permanent, except it's so much terrifyingly easier. You unfollow someone on social media, move away from them and stop talking to their friends, and then suddenly after hearing from them almost 24/7, it almost feels like they disappeared. All that history you shared, and that future where you want to tell them you're thriving without them, might be nonexistent. Breakups on social media comes with the heavy realization that as you make someone else vanish from your life, they can do the same for you too and because of that you might matter less than you want to admit.

Saved is a song saying I'm not ready for that. Saved is keeping a tenous connection to someone in a tiny byte of data, not so you can get angry, but so that you can have the space to grow courage. Saved is a song confessing that you were important to them, and that they want to remembered, which is one of the most vulnerable thing you can do in this day and age. Sonically, it feels like quieter and more intimate because its about admitting something to yourself as much as it is about telling the person on the other end. It's calling all your friends and getting smashed and deleting your Facebook posts and publicly stating you're over it, but quietly deciding to keep the other person's number saved. It's a ritual in itself, one that might be more common these days than anyone realises. It's the also admission that there's something different you need to do in order to heal, which in its way a huge part of growing up.

Saved is also a kind of open ended song, one where you're still left wondering if you ever will call up that person, or whether that number will live on your phone forever. Later on in the album, Khalid picks up the story again, and answers for us.

#khalid #saved

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andrewrosswatson1987 · 5 years

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REVIEW: OSO OSO ARE BASKING IN THE GLOW ON NEW ALBUM

Long Island emo band, Oso Oso, have now reached that third full-length album point. This brand new album, Basking In The Glow, out today (August 16), is released via label, Triple Crown Records. They signed to the latter only back in January 2018. The engine behind it all, Jade Lilitri, is used to pessimism. It’s what he’s written most of Oso Oso’s music about. This time round on their new album he’s radically committed to letting the light in, if only because he knows the darkness like the back of his hand. If 2016’s beloved The Yunahon Mixtape found Lilitri leaning more into the pessimistic side of his brain, Basking In The Glow is an experiment in its glass-half-full opposite. Here, he acknowledges that there are certainly more bad days than good, but maybe for once he could actually embrace the latter instead of just anticipating its inevitable departure. Sonically-speaking, Basking In The Glow delivers on this. Lilitri writes songs bigger than himself at times, leading us into the light with rainy-day riffing and hushed, staccato vocal delivery before it gets tense and charged. It’s an ambitious, complex scheme, this album. Basking In The Glow is a wrestle, and it’s hard work; it’s the sound of refusing to capitulate to darkness at any given moment. It’s a practice, or perhaps a battle plan. It’s filled with the delightful, subtle melodic imagination that characterises the sound Lilitri has perfected with Oso Oso, but this time, he’s put this sound to use declaring happiness. The darkness does return, it always will, but Lilitri has come to terms with it, armouring himself with the good he’s found. Lilitri is clear-eyed, leaving us squarely in the sunlight. The singles for the project are, so far, “Dig” and “Impossible Game”. First, there’s the “Intro”. This’s careful, descending melody on the guitar, the subsequent vocals dreamlike and airy. “Never thought twice; no, I never thought at all/Always comin’ up short ‘cos you’re dreamin’ so small,” indeed. This ending with calming, pattering rain. Second track, “The View”, is more strident, much verve leant by the hit of the drum. This driving feel then also becoming quite earnest. Bass searches with apt licks, melodic. Things then grow impassioned and choppy, fading suitably anthemic. “Basking In The Glow”, now. This begins with slightly fuzzy bass; then scratching chords of rude guitar, raucous. This in line with quotes like, “So I take another sip/’cos I’m still not sick of it/And I guess if the shoe fits/You’ll know when I quit.” Living life to the full. A bit of doubt trailing like low slung mist, “I hate these songs I sing”, before casting aside and basking in the glow. Hit of drum and rallying guitar before a degree of finality.

youtube

Then comes key track, “Dig”. This’s grasping happiness before it seeps like sand from between your fingers. It’s quite sedate; before increasing in volume, pulsing. Busy and unassuming, then reaching for the out loud and heavy industry music equivalent. The closing licks of guitar and slow beat of the drum are then subsumed by wailing, passionate lead guitar. “One Sick Plan” has that immediate feel of strummed acoustic guitar. The vocals murky like submerged under gallons of water. “A Morning Song” is suitably sleepy, at least at first. Then the boom of drum rouses from that closed eye reverie. Bold guitar chord like leaping from out of the bed. Blaring lead, whilst simple, really embellishes a seeming feel of loving life, even when there’s the temptation to stay a bed a little longer. “Priority Change” opens despondent, like a slightly amped The Cure. Dainty guitar melody, melancholic. It then searches, more self-assured with the knowledge to move on forward. “Slippin’ away/Flag’s left astray” like laying a marker, but you can’t retrace your steps. The only way forward, sort of thing. Then the unlikely “Wake Up Next To God”. This unbridled enthusiasm, like so many questions to ask that entity upstairs. That and not burning in a lake of fire. “This one’s going straight to hell,” like seeing someone turned away at those pearly gates?

youtube

They’re playing the “Impossible Game”, next. It’s about doing your all to maintain happiness. It begins industrious, drum machine clapping in the distance. Then drums proper, and the rest gradually becomes more organic. “I got a glimpse of this feeling, I’m trying to stay in that lane” perhaps an impossible game to play, at least to do so in perpetuity. It then swells with the hit of drum and guitar chord, before deflating then immediately hammering back in, again. The concluding “Charlie” looks towards the good times. This drives, searches on the bass. Haunting melody shimmers before bass’s adjoined by vocal, guitar and drum. This really despondent, set contrary against, “…and it feels so good to stay up all night, just to hear what she’ll say and her words stick like glue to the walls of my brain.” This builds to crescendo before being knocked back down. It finally climbs that peak, ethereal guitar crying sonic tears of climbing determination. Then it plays delicate and unassuming, “And in the end I think that’s fine/’cos you and I had a very nice time.” Ones to look out for are “The View”, “Basking In The Glow”, “Dig”, “One Sick Plan”, “A Morning Song”, “Wake Up Next To God”, “Impossible Game” and “Charlie”. One particular thing to remark upon looking at this album is how well spread the highlights are. What you’ve basically got are highlights more or less on the exact start, middle and end of the album. The other two are by no means bad, maybe just not as striking, with a different energy to the rest. Oso Oso are a good mix of the loud and quiet, happy and sad. Certainly the latter in the occasional acoustic moments. Where they strike it right is what they do for the majority of the time, that being the electrified, rocking parts. They’ve got energy of the most raucous of rock, with, now and again, the melancholy of The Cure. Oso Oso’s Basking In The Glow can be bought on iTunes, here. Also visit their Facebook, Twitter and Spotify pages to keep tabs on Oso Oso.

#Oso Oso #Basking In The Glow #Jade Lilitri #The Yunahon Mixtape #Yunahon Mixtape #The Cure #Triple Crown Records

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dippedanddripped · 5 years

Link

A skinny, gap-toothed kid gesticulates wildly in the parking lot of Mike’s Drive-In in Oregon City. Short dreads stick up on either side of his head, like antennae to some alien planet. His friends, in the deep background, hang out of a silver Honda, goofing on one another. But it’s nearly impossible to take your eyes off the skinny kid, with his awkward dance moves and urgent facial expressions. He commands your attention. He needs it.

This is the video for Aminé’s persistently catchy “Caroline,” a half-sung, half-rapped summer anthem that went viral in 2016—the video has more than 200 million YouTube views, and the kid front and center is the artist himself. It’s Aminé’s best-known song, and for most music fans both within his home city of Portland and beyond, it represented the MC/singer/director’s colorful first impression.

Aminé—born Adam Amine Daniel, son of Ethiopian and Eritrean immigrants to Portland and a graduate of Benson High—had been around awhile before “Caroline” hit. His debut album, Odyssey to Me, appeared in 2014, though it has long been expunged from the commercial internet. It begins with a low-key prophecy: “I’m headed to my next show / I gotta go / Headed to that Madison Square / 25,000 fans in the air.” Then an accented female voice repeats “Adam, wake up.” It’s Aminé’s mother, coaxing him back to Portland obscurity. But it’s too late. The dream has taken root.

Aminé hasn’t played Madison Square Garden just yet, but he has definitely found a bigger stage. In 2017, the hip-hop magazine XXL included him in its influential Freshman Class, which functions as a sort of critical watchlist of stars in the making. Billboard and the New York Times both weighed in favorably, the latter calling his major-label debut, Good for You, “one of this year’s most intriguing hip-hop albums and also a bold statement of left-field pop.” The album sold 13,000 copies in its first week, debuting at no. 34 on Billboard’s US charts. After a set at Lollapalooza, Daniel posed for photographs with his arm around a new fan, Malia Obama.

Through sheer will and a catchy song, a colorful dream world became Aminé’s reality. From the outside, it’s like he came out of nowhere. That’s intentional. To become the next big thing in the music world of the late 2010s, you have to let the world in on the ground floor. That can sometimes mean recalibrating, or even erasing, your pre-fame history. All the way along, Aminé—who, through manager Justin Lehmann, declined to be interviewed for this piece and did not respond to requests for comment on this story—had boosters and collaborators. Some have come along for the ride. Some were left in the dust. This is the years-long story of Aminé’s overnight success.

Born in 1994, Aminé grew up in Northeast Portland. He’s said his biggest aspiration back then was “to be Kobe Bryant,” a dream dashed when he was cut from the Benson basketball team as a freshman. But he also grew up in a musical environment—he’s told interviewers his parents listened to everything from Ethiopian music to John Mayer—and music eventually became an obsession. In his first recorded performance, he told Vice in August, he rapped about girls and rival high schools over Waka Flocka Flame’s “O Let’s Do It.”

Josh Hickman, a thoughtful and soft-spoken 26-year-old, is three years Aminé’s senior. He also went to Benson and both ran track, but the two barely knew each other then. Three years after high school graduation, as Hickman began his senior year at Portland State University, he connected with Daniel, a PSU freshman, who messaged him about music.

“My first impression of Adam was that he seemed older than he was,” says Hickman, who spent his college years composing and producing rap music under the name Jahosh. “There was a determination, or a focus, that resonated with me. It probably goes back to track and field at Benson. We would work out six days a week. It really instilled me with this work ethic and discipline. So when I met Adam, I was just like, ‘Man this is dope. He’s just like me.’”

I was screaming to the moon, ‘Check out Aminé! He’s doing the thing! Are you guys paying attention?’

Daniel loaned Hickman money to buy a microphone and portable vocal booth, and they began writing and recording on a relentless schedule. “He would come over in the morning and he wouldn’t leave till night,” Hickman says. “But it didn’t even feel like work.” Daniel would give Hickman input on the beats; Hickman says he helped with song concepts and even lyrics. Together they created the first DIY Aminé release, a mixtape called Genuine Thoughts.

With help from PSU music students whom the charismatic Daniel had recruited along the way—including multi-instrumentalist Irvin Mejia, who would go on to produce “Caroline” and other songs on Aminé’s major-label debut—Hickman went on to produce the bulk of Odyssey to Mein his windowless recording studio in East Portland in late 2013. The album’s songs run from vulnerable, confessional slow-burners (“My Emotions”) to explicit sex jams (“Feelin’ Like”). It’s ambitious both sonically and conceptually: The cover art adapts the poster from Richard Ayoade’s 2010 cult film Submarine, about a small-town 15-year-old named Oliver looking to lose his virginity. The album echoes the film’s plot in places, and references its protagonist throughout.

By Odyssey to Me’s 2014 release, Aminé had picked up a few key supporters in Portland, including Fahiym Acuay, an MC and writer (under the name Mac Smiff) for the popular regional hip-hop blog We Out Here. Meeting Aminé for a video interview, Acuay remembers a funny, slightly shy kid who seemed unusually driven. “He knew that he was a little bit different,” Acuay says. “He had a really different sound—kind of playful—but he also had these really deep melodies.” Acuay became an evangelist for the young artist: “I was screaming to the moon, ‘Check out Aminé! He’s doing the thing! Are you guys paying attention?’”

IMAGE: COURTESY MARCUS HYDE AND REPUBLIC RECORDS

While local acts like U-Krew, Five Fingers of Funk, Lifesavas, and Cool Nutz have made some waves, Portland has never spawned a true national hip-hop star. Instead, we have a closed rap ecosystem with its own set of references, stylistic tendencies, and small-town kingpins. Portland rap artists tend to be judged more on their lyricism and verbal ability than on their melodic instincts or pop savvy. And on those fronts, Acuay notes, Aminé is no match for local mainstays like Illmaculate and Rasheed Jamal—battle-tested MCs with dense, intricate rhyme delivery. In fact, if Aminé had emerged a decade earlier, there’s a good chance he’d figure in the Portland hip-hop story as an eccentric side character, selling mixtapes out of his trunk at rap shows. But Aminé was born in a new era, where the home-burned CD has been replaced by lightly curated “mixtape” download websites that connect artists directly to a national audience, with no middleman and no local-cred hurdles to clear.

And Daniel knew how to work that system. He spent $1,000 of his student loan money to secure Odyssey to Me a spot in the featured albums section of Datpiff.com, a popular hip-hop mixtape-sharing blog that has served as a bellwether for artists like Drake and Chance the Rapper. By the end of summer 2014, Odyssey had reached 20,000 downloads. Daniel and Hickman found a promoter to take a punt on them—Ibeth Hernandez, who offered them a show at Peter’s Room in the Roseland, opening for critically acclaimed California hip-hop trio Pac Div. “It was so sweet,” Hernandez remembers of Daniel and Hickman. “They got me a thank-you card afterward, and it had, like, a Starbucks gift card inside.”

But the biggest payoffs came from shows Aminé and Jahosh booked for themselves. A few days after Christmas 2013, they threw a show marking Odyssey’s imminent release, hit social media hard, and drew 250. A party the next year drew 400, among them Blazers star Damian Lillard. His presence alone hinted that Daniel and Hickman had sidestepped most Portland hip-hop rites of passage. Not everybody would be happy about it.

But Daniel was making connections outside of Portland, too. In summer 2014, after landing internships with Complex magazine and Def Jam Records, he connected with a young, unestablished New York City manager named Justin Lehmann. To Hickman, something about the new arrangement set off alarm bells.

“I was with Adam from day one,” he says, “thinking, his success is my success and my success is his success.” Though he won’t dive into specifics—and allows for miscommunications—Hickman says he decided to get his handshake deal with Daniel into writing. Daniel refused. Hickman “got even more weirded out.” The partnership slowly unraveled, taking the pair’s friendship with it, and Hickman would later pull Aminé’s first album and the subsequent En Vogue EP from the internet, asking social media outlets and blogs to do the same. “It was my assumption that he would have most likely taken the music down himself, had I not,” says Hickman.

He was building this full package for himself. He didn’t just focus on Portland.

Aminé’s second full-length album—the excellent, world-music-inspired collection Calling Brio—proved that he was capable of making great music without Hickman. That too has been scrubbed from the web post-“Caroline,” along with videos and articles from 2014 and 2015, as has become standard practice for many indie artists who take on a major-label rebrand. Around the same time, Daniel texted Acuay to ask him to remove all the pieces We Out Here had written about Aminé from the site. Acuay reluctantly agreed. Later, when he saw a national piece on Aminé billed as “the first interview” with the young artist behind “Caroline,” Acuay admits, “I was kind of salty for a second. I had the first interview.”

Two years after Josh Hickman and Adam Daniel parted ways, Aminé struck gold with “Caroline.” The single and video led to a deal with Republic Records, a Universal subsidiary home to artists from Ariana Grande to Black Sabbath. While Daniel moved to Los Angeles in 2016, his official label bio still begins with “Now, Portland isn’t traditionally referred to as a hotbed of hip-hop like Brooklyn or Compton is, but Aminé could very well change that perception.”

For a moment, it appeared that Aminé might force the issue. In November 2016 on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, Aminé performed a striking and minimal version of “Caroline” with a string section. At the end of the performance, the yellow stage lights switched to red, white, and blue, and he delivered a message to the incoming president elected just days before. “You can never make America great again / All you ever did was make this country hate again.” It was a bold choice, one the Times and other outlets focused on. But Portland music fans noticed something else: two vocalists backing up Aminé were established players in the Portland scene, earthy R&B artist Blossom and inventive MC the Last Artful, Dodgr.

Acuay was watching that night. “It was so very Aminé. ‘I’m not going to do what everyone expects me to do.’ I was really proud of him. I remember thinking, he’s making us look good. He’s really holding it down for Portland right now.”

Publicly, “Go Aminé” is the party line in the Portland hip-hop scene, as well. But there is grumbling behind closed doors. A handful of artists and music scene staples contacted for this story declined to be interviewed about Aminé, or did not respond to requests. One artist formerly associated with Aminé indicated a reluctance to be seen as a hanger-on. A polite decline came from Nikolaus Popp, the prolific Portland director credited as the cinematographer and editor behind the “Caroline” video. Popp sent a somewhat cryptic statement: “Respect is everything in this world and that really goes for any human being. People will try to minimize you, but you always have to know your worth. Money doesn’t pay for respect, no matter the amount. It’s about how you treat people.”

In his first big national profile in the New York Times, Daniel used the phrase “super depressing” to describe his path through the Portland music scene, which the article’s author further characterized as “dead.” Aminé’s lyrical take on Portland has been bittersweet since his earliest songs. And on Good for You, he raps about coming home to find kids who bullied him calling him a hero. In the song “Turf,” he details the city’s gentrification in a mournful chorus: “I look around and I see nothing in my neighborhood / Not satisfied, don’t think I’ll ever wanna stay for good.” Another lyric speaks to those mixed emotions with even more clarity, and perhaps provides an explanation for the artist’s systematic eradication of the old Aminé: “I used to have dreams / Now I dream.”

I asked Vursatyl, one-third of the Portland crew Lifesavas—they released their debut, Spirit in Stone in 2003—if his group experienced a Portland backlash when they surfaced on the national radar. “The difference is we were really trudging it out in the local scene for a long time,” he says. “There were a lot of us trying hard to make it. Some of it was friendly competition, and some wasn’t. But everybody wanted to be the guy to put the city on the map.”

That city—before the gentrification of its North and Northeast quadrants—was a place where the black community was still somewhat centralized, and Aminé’s family home, off NE MLK and Dekum, sat at its heart. “There’s less of a sense of community now,” Vursatyl says. “And I think that, in the long term, Aminé would have benefited from what was the black community still being fully intact. He’s had an awesome journey and he’s doing great, but I feel like there’s a disconnect in terms of local pride in him. And you want that groundswell. You want to play to your base.”

But for Hernandez—who also booked Aminé’s first South by Southwest performance (“The whole showcase fell apart. It was a disaster, actually.”)—the fact that Aminé’s dreams were bigger than his hometown is exactly what made him stand out. “He didn’t make the rounds like other artists, but that’s OK,” she says. “He was building this full package for himself. He didn’t just focus on Portland. A lot of artists put themselves in a box, and that’s cool, but at some point you have to expand. I saw him expand at such an early point, and he’s still expanding.”

Where Aminé is expanding to is an open question. In interviews, he’s low-key and likable—the right mix of confident, humble, and self-deprecating. Critics praised Good for You as “honest” and “carefree.” Its impressive breadth spans from the floaty Frank Ocean-esque Auto-Tune ballad “Hero” to a curious diss track laid out over progressive, minimal electronic music, “STFU.” If anything, the album seems built—albeit on a solid pop-rap foundation—as a showcase for Aminé’s versatility in both sonic approach and personality. He’s a sensitive, brutally honest outcast on the molasses-slow “Sunday,” and a bitter ex-boyfriend on “Wedding Crashers.” Album closer “Beach Boy” spells out the MC’s thoughts on his own mutability: “Who knows what the future holds / I don’t, if the truth be told / They say play it safe, young soul / Fuck that, I’mma take control.”

Two years ago, taking control meant parting ways with Josh Hickman, now studying software development in Los Angeles and making music as a hobby. When he won an $18,000 scholarship for making a tutorial video about sampling, Hickman used a song he built for Aminé as the video’s source material. “I took it as a message from the universe or God that, hey, I got what I needed out of that situation,” he says. He hasn’t spoken to Daniel in years, he says, but he’s not bitter about the experience. “We had all these doubts,” he remembers. “We’d be in the studio just talking, saying, ‘Man, are we crazy?’ And it’s dope to see those doubts were unfounded.”

In October, Aminé posted a new video to YouTube, this time for his playful song “Spice Girl.” It hit one million views in three days. The video features a cameo from a childhood hero, from the first concert he ever attended: the Spice Girls’ Mel B. Like every artifact of Aminé’s newly rebooted career, the video is colorful, cinematic, and dreamlike.

The video also makes obvious what should have been clear all along: Aminé never had Portland dreams. He saw himself, a first-generation American-born citizen living in an unlikely corner of the country, playing Madison Square Garden. He saw himself in the company of stars.

Something familiar about the particular inflection Daniel gave the titular “Caroline” suggests she’s the same character André 3000 sang about 15 years ago, on Outkast’s smash-hit “Roses.” In Aminé’s later song “Veggies,” from his 2017 so-called “debut” album Good for You, he refers to himself as “André’s prodigy.” These tributes to the eccentric vocal genius and fashion icon who got every wedding party in America dancing to “Hey Ya” are rare signposts from an artist who seemed, to most fans, to “come out of nowhere.”

Just one year after he uploaded the “Caroline” video to YouTube, Daniel posted a street-corner selfie to Instagram. On the left, wide-eyed with his mouth forming a stunned “ooh,” is Aminé. On the right, Outkast’s André 3000.

Adam Daniel used to have dreams—now he dreams. And his most compelling characteristic seems to be that he’s living out his fantasies in the public sphere. But dreams, by their nature, are not collaborative. They are personal. One dream lived is always another deferred. It’s been clear from the moment “Caroline” hit YouTube that the skinny, gap-toothed kid in the front was going to stay there. It’s still anybody’s guess whom he’ll take with him.

#amine #music blog #pdxhiphop

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