Viet Cong - Viet Cong (Jagjaguwar)

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Perhaps the most impressive thing about Viet Cong is their strong grasp on juxtaposition. They seamlessly transition between the murky and melodic to bring out the innately exciting qualities in both. The violent and brooding war march of opener “Newspaper Spoons” soon gives way to chirping guitars that turn the whole event into a vibrant fireworks show. "March of Progress" is an even clearer example of this, as its uncompromising drums pound for three minutes before slowly transforming into the album’s most jubilant passage. But this track also shows that there’s a nuance to Viet Cong’s songwriting that extends past simple dark vs light. As the song enters its final stretch, the plodding quarter notes of Matt Flegel’s bass soon feel bouncy from corresponding snare hits and rhythmically contrasting guitars. And as Flegel starts to sing, the hi-hat’s simple switch to eighth notes settles the song into a groove that allows the bass to finally resolve. But the band knows how to combine both elements too, like on “Continental Shift”, a song whose “Be My Baby” beat and moody coos are equal parts ghastly and comforting.

These juxtapositions serve a greater functional purpose though, often amplifying the anguish that pervades these tracks. The catchiest moment on “Pointless Experience”, for example, only makes clear the cynicism that characterizes a line like “we’re desperately debilitated / if we’re lucky, we’ll get old and die”. And on “Silhouettes”, its chorus highlights a hopelessly mechanistic self:

There’s no connection left in your head
Another look at things to forget
An overwhelming sense of regret
Relay, reply, react, and reset

Viet Cong ends with “Death”, an 11-minute trek that summarizes everything that’s come before. It’s a bleak track made bleaker through mixing that brings out the bombast of its drums and the sharpness of its guitar tones. Its eventual release from repetition doesn’t sound all that chipper either. "Don’t want to face the world, it’s suffocating" screamed Flegel on “Continental Shelf”. With these final minutes on “Death”, it sounds like he’s trying to do just that. The result? Something’s that just as emotionally draining and frantic as the song’s first eight minutes.

Rae Sremmurd - SremmLife (EarDrummers / Interscope)

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January proved to be a great start to the year in hip hop. If official releases from Joey Bada$$, Lupe Fiasco, and Doomtree weren’t enough, then mixtapes from names both big (Lil Wayne, Future) and small (Rome Fortune x OG Maco, Young Simmie, Young L) had enough to keep any insatiable hip hop fan satisfied. But above all towered SremmLife, the debut album from the youngsters that make up Rae Sremmurd. And while Mike Will Made It proved he could make the most out of a 20-year-old Miley on ”23“, SremmLife works so well because it doesn’t shy away from Swae Jimmy and Slim Jimmy’s youthfulness. As expected, every single track on SremmLife is imbued with the same charisma and energy that made early singles "No Flex Zone” and “No Type” so addicting. From the hyped-up meme-worthy hook on “Unlock the Swag” to the melancholic, actual meme-referencing "This Could Be Us", it’s evident that any artist with any less confidence couldn’t sell these songs the way Swae and Jimmy do. The album closes on the surprisingly radio-friendly, Honorable C.N.O.T.E.-produced "Safe Sex Pay Checks" and it’s a fitting reminder of SremmLife as a philosophy/way of life. Even more, it points to the fact that these are just a couple of guys that want to have fun. For kids that were homeless a couple years ago, they seem to understand that it’s a positive embrace of the ephemeral that makes life bearable. If there was ever a need for “real hip-hop” in January, it came in the form of SremmLife.

[note: this mini-review originally appeared in a multi-part post recounting my ten favorite records of January]

Project Pablo - I Want to Believe (1080p)

Purchase I Want to Believe here

While more straightforward than his works as 8prn and less flashy than his two Hybridity releases from last year, I Want to Believe finds Patrick Holland making the strongest, most economical tunes of his career. He uses the breezy atmosphere of these disco and funk-inflected house tunes to his advantage, making sure the elements that sustain it are always purposeful and part of a larger, cohesive whole. The synth pads are at the forefront of doing all this: they swell to establish a mood on a track like “In the Mat” but also function to counteract the whimsical string stabs on “Follow it Up” before they eventually converge into a thick groove. The mixing on the album is crucial too, propelling tracks like “Why, Though?” and “Always” forward through sound design alone. 

Interestingly, Holland was inspired by “ultra-real types of smoothness” a la George Benson, Sade, and Steely Dan’s Aja when making this record. Those artists are often pigeonholed as cheesy and trite but there’s a sincerity to them that makes listeners vulnerable and engage with their music wholeheartedly. So be it the confidence that you’ve found a new, bigger love on Benson’s “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love For You”, a picture of love as a support system and everlasting friendship in Sade’s “By Your Side”, or trying to overcome disenchantment with the world in Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues”, it’s ultimately an unabashed belief in what they’re saying and doing that makes their songs so immersive, even when there aren’t any lyrics. I Want to Believe adopts similarly smooth instrumentation—the guitar plucks on “Sky Lounge”, the interjecting horns on “Movin’ Out"—but it’s Holland’s commitment to this laid-back, carefree aesthetic that makes these tracks so cozy.

Jonghyun (종현) - BASE (S.M. Entertainment)

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BASE opens with the incredibly feel-good Déjà-Boo. Like everything Zion.T's been in, it’s effortlessly cool and micromanages syllabic stresses to ensure that feeling is easily transferable. There isn’t another track on Jonghyun’s mini album that sounds quite like it though—BASE functions more or less as a showcase of Jonghyun’s versatility and, frankly, it works. The SHINee member’s always had a strong command over different aspects of his vocalizing and he’s able to use it here to bring out the most of these eight different tracks. On “Crazy (Guilty Pressure)”, he’s constantly stretching his voice to a falsetto to make the song’s dramatic tone believable. On “Beautiful Tonight”, his voice is slyly confident amidst specific inflections and shifting vocal rhythms. It outperforms the funky bass line in capturing the lyrics and driving the song forward. This is all even more clear on “Fortune Cookie”, a song whose production utilizes sparsity to its advantage, consequently highlighting the sensualities of Jonghyun’s coos and talking a la D'Angelo’s Untitled (How Does It Feel). Best of all though is “NEON”, a track whose lush and ambitious production warps in the bridge to carry the urgency in Jonghyun’s declaration that being with this girl helps him feel complete. It’s so unexpected that the final chorus feels like catching your breath, and it makes it feel even more powerful.

At this point, it seems pretty clear that S.M. are one of the most reliable labels in all of K-pop. SNSD’s Japanese albums are some of the best pop albums of the decade and there was even some experimentation in structure that came with “I Got a Boy”.  Then S.M. released the most experimental K-pop song last year with f(x)’s “Red Light”, the lead single to an album that continued to solidify the girl group as one of Korea’s most consistent and adventurous. And when appropriating RnBass tropes for Zhou Mi’s debut, the minimalist bassline and “hey!” chanting was recontexualized to feel unique but wholly appropriate. Even Red Velvet’s cover of S.E.S.’ “Be Natural” last year acted as a reminder that S.M. had strong beginnings. Is it any surprise, then, that after Taemin’s phenomenal mini album last year that bandmate Jonghyun would make something just as good?

Jeph Jerman / Tim Barnes - Matterings (Erstwhile)

Purchase Matterings here

There’s a certain patience that’s required to fully engage with Matterings. It’s a good twenty minutes longer than the other recent Erstwhile releases but it goes beyond album length—when your source material is different aspects of nature, the process of recording, editing, and compiling tracks feels like excavation. It’s with these slowly unfolding tracks that we as listeners can partake in this enduring process to recognize the fascinating qualities that lie hidden in the world around us. On the hypnotic long-form drone of "bight”, we can hear the sound of rocks breaking near the end of the track. String-like melodies loom overhead, as if to soundtrack the destruction that occurs at such titular locations from oncoming waves. On "mammatus", Jerman and Barnes sound like they’re recreating the inner workings of the cloud feature itself. We hear slow-moving machinery complimented by periodic thuds and static, all of which result in an undisturbed stretch of rainfall. “in situ”, the album’s 22-minute centerpiece is perhaps the most cinematic of all. In it we hear crotales slowly gain prominence, erupt in distorted noise, and eventually deteriorate. There’s an ashes to ashes-like narrative to it and it feels surprisingly poignant. It seems to point at what Matterings is all about; in conception and execution, it often feels like a love letter to the world around us. And in the process of interacting with nature, we see a certain beauty that comes with being able to relate to it.

[note: this mini-review originally appeared in a multi-part post recounting my ten favorite records of January]

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - A Year With 13 Moons (Mexican Summer)

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Purchase the album here

I’ve always loved Jefre Cantu-Ledesma at his most relentlessly romantic. From “Faceless Kiss” to “Devotion” to “Songs of Forgiveness”, he’s recently been honing his craft in a way that I find far more interesting than like-minded artists who also released great noisy ambient records in the mid-2000s (e.g. Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Belong). And while Cantu-Ledesma doesn’t need to use feedback to make gorgeous soundscapes, I’ve always admired his use of noise as a tool to capture infatuation, nostalgia, and pain—he’s making music that’s essentially the closest thing we have to a modern-day Loveless. Thankfully, A Year with 13 Moons continues that trend and also happens to be one of his strongest works to date.

13 Moons takes its title from a Fassbinder film that was created in response to the director’s lover committing suicide. The film spans only two days but opens and closes with dates that are a month apart, reflecting the beginning and end of the film’s production work. It’s an unmistakable injection of the personal, and Cantu-Ledesma does the same here. If the music isn’t enough to convey that, then mentions of specific times (“The Last Time I Saw Your Face”, “Early Autumn”, “At the End of Spring”), locations (“Agate Beach”, “Along The Isar”, “Görlitzer Park”) and the hyperspecific “A Portrait of You at Nico’s Grave, Grunewald, Berlin (for Bill. K)” make it all the more evident. In a press release, Cantu-Ledesma states that he was also influenced by the works of Alain Resnais, Chantal Akerman, and Chris Marker. That influence is clear—the use of numerous flashbacks in Hiroshima mon amour, the reading of letters over long takes of New York in News from Home, the use of still photography-as-narrative in La Jetée—it all points to the use of memory in art as a way to allow the audience to reflect upon similar moments in their own life. There’s a similar methodology at play here too. “The Last Time I Saw Your Face” and “Love After Love”, the first two tracks on the album, take up a third of the runtime and function as establishing shots. The following fourteen tracks, all of which are under three minutes, act as miniature time capsules that add color to the emotional canvas that is 13 Moons. It’s as exhilarating as it is sincere, and Cantu-Ledesma succeeds in making an album that manages to feel personal to both him and us as listeners.

Graham Lambkin / Michael Pisaro - Schwarze Riesenfalter (Erstwhile)

Purchase Schwarze Riesenfalter here

Schwarze Riesenfalter is a wholly unique work for both Lambkin and Pisaro. For one, it feels like a modern day tone poem. The symmetry of the track times as well as the fact that the album and song titles match the accompanying poem indicate that there’s an intention to create a narrative and representation of the text through music. Consequently, a clear reference point seems to be Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire and the Giraud poems from which that work builds on. Talking with Pisaro, he states that the creative process for the record was mostly intuitive, however, and the literary allusions that were then used for the track titles “seemed more than appropriate, almost like we’d been visited by it”. He also mentioned the works of Trakl, and it seems incredibly appropriate because like the Austrian poet’s (later) works, Schwarze Riesenfalter is incredibly visual and atmospherically ominous without feeling heavy handed or dishonest. It’s precisely the way that Lambkin and Pisaro handle the theatrics on this record that makes it so admirable. The piano is most impressively utilized, often providing restraint by grounding the sounds it juxtaposes while simultaneously creating tension through rumbling overtones and the weight of single atonal notes. And with a large sound palette and effective pacing, Schwarze Riesenfalter proves to be a journey that’s as mesmerizing as it is entertaining.

[note: this mini-review originally appeared in a multi-part post recounting my ten favorite records of January]

Dawn Richard - Blackheart (Our Dawn Entertainment)

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Purchase the album on iTunes and Amazon

The sheer ambition on Blackheart is immense. Even before pressing play, the fact that this is the second album in a trilogy and that every track (barring the intro and interludes) is over four minutes hints at the grandiosity of the project. The most arresting thing about Blackheart is that it gives equal weight in its narrative to the lyrics and music. At times, Dawn Richard’s voice becomes obfuscated in the mix, making lyrics unclear. It’s a purposeful and effective artistic choice, one that allows the vocalizing, production, and mixing to all magnify the emotional intensity of these tracks. As Richard’s stated in different interviews, her history as a dancer leads her to emphasize music’s ability to evoke visuals and movement. Nothing is a better example of this than “Calypso”, the first full song on Blackheart. Certain samples made me smile this past month—the “Hey Ma” and “Club Goin’ Up On A Tuesday” interpolations from Korean rapper Gaeko and company, the unexpected “Only” sample at the end of Jason Lescalleet’s “New Age Fake Cupcakes"—but nothing was as striking as "Calypso” naturally incorporating two Twin Peaks themes into its chaotic whirlwind of a pop song. Later, the seven-minute “Adderall / Sold (Outro)” constantly shapeshifts in conjunction with its heavy lyrics. Sparse production highlights the sincerity and innocence of a line like “she only wanted the pop life” but it soon turns into “oh the days when she slept ‘til noon / she was living like she’s dying soon” sung in vocoder a capella. The song eventually becomes aggressive and dark, ending with the repeated phrase “get thee right / don’t believe the hype” over urgent bass wobbles. 

Songs like “Projection” and “Castles” follow a more straightforward verse-chorus structure but even then, they still seem uncharacteristic of most of the r&b that’s coming out now, much of which can be accredited to the detailed and thoughtful production here (all of which is provided by Noisecastle III). Before the album spirals off into its outro, the album ends with the moving piano ballad “The Deep”. There’s been a lot of tragedy in Richard’s life recently:Goldenheart did poorly in sales, the crowd-funding campaign for Blackheart failed, Danity Kane reunited but quickly disbanded after Richard got in a fight with Aubrey O'Day, her grandmother passed away, and her father (who co-wrote “The Deep”) got diagnosed with lymphoma; the track acts as a reminder of how personal the entire record actually is.  On “Billie Jean”, she reframes the original song’s lyrics into that specifically of a groupie’s. In an interview with FACT, Richard states that “there is a thin line between the whore and the artist starving and willing to do whatever to make it on her label” and claims that “by the end of the record I’ve become [Billie Jean]. I had to do what she did just to get a number one record.” This sentiment is made clearer on “Warriors”, where Richard declares "fuck failing, I’m it / kings wear crowns for a reason and royalty’s the robe that we’re wearing". It’s a boastful statement but it also feels like the sort of mentality that you need in the midst of adversity. Either way, everything about Blackheart proves that if there’s anyone that can get away with saying something like that right now, it’s her.

Eric La Casa / Taku Unami - Parazoan Mapping (Erstwhile)

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With fifteen untitled vignettes and varying source material, Parazoan Mapping often feels like an aural scrapbook. And when looking through any scrapbook, the different photos and pieces of ephemera always point to something bigger: a sort of unraveling of the people contained within. The pictures of your family’s vacation from several years ago may not explicitly show it but you very well understand how then compares to now—that feeling of joy when you conquered your first wave after hours of learning to surf? You know that same dedication has carried into your hobbies today. That picture of mom in her crazy, vibrant dress? You know that’s the same woman you continue to admire for her eccentricities. That picture with everyone eating the ice cream dad bought? You know that’s the same father who sacrificed everything to make you happy since day one. Similarly, Parazoan Mapping may seem like a random assortment of stuff on the surface but La Casa and Unami enhance our appreciation of each individual sound they trace by making known the cohesiveness that exists within the numerous aural landscapes of our everyday.

Parazoans are part of the kingdom Animalia and, when translated, literally mean “beside the animals”. Parazoan Mapping, then, feels like an apt title; it acts both as a signifier of what you’ll hear but also as a statement regarding its function and purpose. Recording from mostly familiar and recognizable settings, La Casa and Unami want us to feel the liveliness of the sounds all around us. Perhaps most exhilarating is the sound of a basketball court on tracks eight through eleven. The first two tracks highlight what’s specifically happening on that court; we’re barraged with the noise of basketballs bouncing and shoes sliding but it’s the mixing and editing here that make the intensity palpable. The thud of each basketball feels surprisingly forceful and the movement of players even becomes dizzying at one point. The following track focuses on those waiting to see the game while the track thereafter combines the two groups of people to showcase the energy radiating from inside the entire gym, both on court and in the stands.

It’s completely unrelated musically-speaking but these tracks naturally made me think of "The Courts" from Jam City’s hugely influential Classical Curves. On that track, Jack Latham utilizes the sounds you’d hear on a court (bouncing basketballs create a 4x4 beat, the sliding of shoes weave in and out) to make the stadium-ready dance number even more grandiose. It’s the relentless excitement we associate with basketball games that informs the listener and consequently makes the track so enthralling. What La Casa and Unami do here though is completely different; they’re the guides and we as listeners are invited to explore and understand what’s being heard through close inspections of an object’s timbral qualities. This participatory element isn’t particularly unique when considering these artists’ previous works but what makes this record so satisfying is that in the process of appreciating these seemingly mundane sounds, we see an apparent continuity that exists between them. The ticking on track two sounds similar to the ticking on track three, sure, but they also resemble the isolated rain drops in track five. The sound of someone chopping food with a knife is punctuated by squeaking that undoubtedly sounds like the aforementioned sounds of shoes sliding on a basketball court. And soon after, we’re hearing more quick-moving feet and balls but recontextualized on a tennis court. It’s as if La Casa and Unami are slyly winking at us, telling us that if you enjoyed any of the sounds on one of these tracks, it won’t be long before you enjoy the sounds on every one of them.