Music Lately
Copying from y, Devenrda Banhart, Young & Sexy. Banhart sounds like Nick Drake traveled back in time and got discovered by Alan Lomax. As tired as I am of cliched-praise being heaped on the cliched-mysterious genius singer-songwriter, this guy’s in a class of his own. Young & Sexy, self-described “two-bit, ham-fisted pussy-rock act from Vancouver,” fucking kick ass on this their latest album. Highlights for me are Herculean Bellboy, One False Move, and More Than I Can Say – love that lazy guitar solo! Please, go pick these albums up.
The Barcelona Pavilion are the future of music and I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned them yet. That is all. Oh, and Now picked them as Best New Band. But when’s the next show, folks?
Almost fully recovered from Prince and Johnny Cash binges, I indulge in Manitoba, The Shins, Roots Manuva (what a voice), and more. The Beatnuts, whom I have not listened to since their debut, did not impress me at first with A Musical Massacre, but then I heard them rhyme “Niagra Falls” with “Viagra balls” and everything was A-OK. Continuing my revisitation of rap, I rock the Aesop Rock and the El-P. Great production and tongue-twisting lyrical science on both. I surprise myself by loving Plastikman‘s latest. He’s a house DJ, not the sort of shit I normally get down to, but don’t you have to love a house album that only drops the beat halfway in? It’s an introverted, minimalist, morose album, and it has backwards-talking, and I love it. Peaches’ latest, on the other hand, is junk. People listen to naughty sex songs because it’s fun, not because they want to be preached to about how they should take it in the ass. Pitchfork is spot-on: if you don’t give a fuck, why go to the trouble of making a song in which you scream “I don’t give a fuck” over and over?
On the mainstream tip: Andre’s album is princely and masterful; Big Boi’s is disappointing, although I haven’t really given it a chance. The Strokes bored on first listen, then impressed on the next, then I realized I hadn’t put it on in a couple weeks. There’s too much music out there, ain’t it so?
Dspot *i’m writing this from your lap top* Hawtin + house in the same sentence just seems wrong. House gets tossed around like the word producer does. I cant speak for Hawtin, perhaps he would’t care. It just kinda torks me out that u called it a house album. Please hurry, i’m so frickin hungry.x0 juice
have to agree with Juice on this one D, Hawtin and House are never said in the same sentence. Hawtin’s work would be considered minimal techno other wise known as Detroit techno characterized by minimal beats mixed with funky and quirky layering of all kinds of unique sounds and baselines. Hawtin is awesome, he has always been ahead of his time.
As for Peaches I like a couple of tracks from her new CD, I love that she gets all raw and dirrrrrty.
Point taken, dudes. No matter how hard I try I can never distinguish certain electronica genres, and I’ve heard nothing of Hawtins’ other than this album. I tend to categorize anything electronic with a nonstop bass drum on each beat as house. After reading this vs. this I’m still not exactly crystal clear. Which is to be expected, after all this is music, not the Dewey Decimal System.
There are a couple good songs on that Peaches disc, but nothing like on the first one, and too much shit that I find wall-punchingly annoying (the duet with Iggy Pop).
There’s a red hot French comic book series called Le Chant de la Machine which gives a pretty exhaustive genealogy of popular electronic music and charts all the microclassifications in goofy little narrative increments. One of the guys died after the second issue so I guess it’s an unfinished thing but what’s in print is pretty great. Afterwards you’re left with the feeling that all the subgenre-designation and fragmentation is basically valid but that it usually has more to do with cultural aesthetics, history and geography than rhythmic structures or bass frequencies or the presence of “disco handclaps”(!).
I knew this techno guy who I couldn’t help but get in these epic arguments with because he was so insecure about people’s perceptions of the distinction, integrity and complexity of techno that he’d make these totally sensationalist statements like “Jeff Mills is more talented than John Coltrane” or “The British are all plagiarists and the only real electronic music comes from Detroit”.
Dusty Rusty Smith wrote yet another intellectual trainwreck of a column this week, implying some sort of potential link between techno music and fascism, which is laughable and acutely ignorant even when you consider the source.
Oh and thanks for the plug D-dogg. We’re going to be playing Wavelength again on Sunday, December 21. Also playing is The Blow, the one-woman singing extravaganza whose “Bonus Album” from last year and “The Concussive Caress” from this year are as fun, sincere, and close to perfection as anything I’ve ever heard. There’s also a really stupid interview with yrs trly in the new Wavelength magazine.
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