April 2023 - Ba-doot-doot chk, chika-chika chk!
Albums
Yaeji - With a Hammer
Yaeji is one of my favorite artists working today. She’s made her career out of incredibly ambitious electronic music that travels between avant-garde pop, psychedelic soundscape experiments, and straight-up dance music. She has a couple thing that make her unique in my estimation though. Like, she has an interesting earnestness about what she’s doing, writing songs about the value of friendship and being proud of yourself for getting simple things done during the day. Also, major chords. Who uses major chords these days?
This album has her doing some really strange things with analog instruments, which is new territory for her, along with her signature haze of vocals, resolving into heavy bass and sharp vocal lines. I think she’s a genius. And also, like, she’s Korean and she speaks Korean on her albums. I love that. Like, why should people in non-English speaking countries have to speak our stupid language just to get their albums released over here?
Anyway, her stuff is brilliant and complicated and danceable. See also her first LP, WHAT WE DREW 우리가 그려왔던
JPEGMafia x Danny Brown - SCARING THE HOES
Speaking of ambitious sonic adventures, here’s JPEGMafia. He’s known for complicated, chaotic headbanging hip-hop productions that bounce around between hip-hop subgenres and incorporate everything from trap, noize, vaporwave, classic R&B, to um… Fergie. Just off the top of my head.
This album is a fascinating, hyperactive sonic collage - loud, abrasive, bottom-heavy, tinny, intellectual, dystopian - strung together by Danny Brown, who’s perfect for this kind of thing. Even just the sound of his voice is a lot. I have no idea what he’s talking about here. I mean, I generally have no idea what he’s talking about, honestly, but especially on this album.
Soil & “PIMP” Sessions - Lost in Tokyo
Let’s change gears for a second here.
Jazz. People hate it. But I think a lot of what people hate is its most opaque, complicated iterations like some of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, or to take a more modern example, Kamsai Washington. If you’re not a jazz musician yourself, or if you didn’t grow up with this stuff, it’s kind of tough to see why anyone would care about these 12-chord monsters with interminable solos and abstract melodies (I love some of that stuff, tho. Don’t @ me).
But jazz doesn’t need to be like that, and a lot of the time it’s not like that! For whatever reason, more approachable jazz tends to get buried (I think maybe it’s because jazz fans are kinda like, well, idk, a little pretentious. Don’t @ me). There’s plenty of stuff out there with fun, energetic beats and solos that capture an energy and a vibe, without being as cerebral.
Getting around to the point, here. Idk why, but Japanese jazz - or at least the Japanese jazz that makes it to this side of the ocean - tends to feel more like that. Soil & “PIMP” Sessions sounds like that.
My personal experience with this: my friend KKV texted me saying that she was at Record Store Day in Paris, and spotted a whole rack of Japanese RSD releases. What followed was an hour-long frantic research session, and this was one of the promising finds. What really solidified it though, was the other night when I watched David Lynch’s 3-hour film, Inland Empire. I enjoyed it, but afterwards I felt like I needed to do something with a little more negative space, and this album came to the rescue.
You may want to skip track 2, though.
Jon Kennedy - MMXX
I think that the title of track 1, “Once Upon a Time,” captures a lot of what this album is doing. Music can be a form of story-telling. You can create a sonic universe and travel with the listener from one place to another, adding and taking away elements and transforming the vibe from one thing to another. I think that’s what’s happening here. There’s a reason that these tracks are all more than 3 minutes.
I think this album is also trying to visit another “time” in music - using the tropes of late 90’s trip-hop and drum-and-bass to transport us to that era, and updating them to a modern sensibility. Listen to that trip-hop bassline on “The Base” and try not to think of Funki Porcini’s Hed Phone Sex. Even the reverbed-out treatment of those vocal samples is super late 90s-y.
Filmmaker - The Love Market
I’m just going to let Filmmaker’s words do the talking here:
”Revisiting my engravings i found that image so i decided to make the music to it.
Some ideas around: hostile party culture, relationship standards, destructive hedonism, system castrating creativity, biased innovation, infoxication break-ups, fake hope, abusive friendships, and as the album title suggests, trademarking of feelings.”
I hadn’t heard the word “infoxication” before, but I like it. For more great synonyms of “information overload” see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload#cite_note-3
Tracks
Fat White Family - Feet
I did a little research here. Fat White Family are from the UK, but the songwriters are of Algerian heritage. Which makes a lot of sense given that the predominant theme here is the difficulty of being Muslim and homosexual. There’s also something happening with race in the UK - “sand [n-word]” makes an appearance, as well as “feet, don’t fail me now.”
Brief aside - I’ve always been curious about the phrase “feets, don’t fail me now.” You hear it a lot in old Loony Toons shorts, for example. The googling I’ve done suggests that like, no one really knows where it originates? But the trope is a black person running away from something, and the consensus is that it’s probably from vaudeville and the weird grammar suggests that it’s like, well, probably racist in some way. Some people think it might be from the chitlin’ circuit, which would make things a little more complicated because it would probably mean that whoever said it first was a black performer.
Anyway, Fat White Family is (I assume) playing on the racist history of that phrase.
Nicole Willis & The UMO Jazz Orchestra - Still Got a Way to Fall
We’re in a very different territory of jazz from where we were above. This is much closer to the world of soul/R&B that you might associate with, for example, Aretha Franklin.
Sometimes I play a game when I’m listening to my Tidal recommendation algorithm, where I try to guess the year of release of each track I hear (it’s not as hard as it sounds. Tidal knows that almost everything I listen to is a recent release, so if I just always guess some year between 2015-today, I’ve got a good shot at it). For this track, I thought it could be pretty much any year after like 1975, until I heard the phrase “predatory loans.” They certainly had those back then, but I don’t think the phrase made it into a whole lot of songs.
Sofi Tukker - Purple Hat
“People” is a great word to use if you want something percussive to say over and over. I assume “purple” must be in here somewhere too?
HAAi - Be Good
Ok, I LOVE this track. The tension is palpable from the beginning and just keeps growing for a full six and a half minutes. I also have positive associations with it because it was used by one of my favorite art collectives, Racer Trash, in their take on Hitchcock’s Vertigo. If you don’t know Racer Trash, you owe it to yourself to check out their stuff. If you like what you see, do a little digging and you can find their full-length edits of films. They’re weird and beautiful. Or if you really just want to see how they use this one track, check out this archive.org copy and scroll to roughly 1:07:30, which should be the beginning of the famous tower sequence (contains spoilers).
CFCF - Life Is Perfecto
There’s plenty of vaporwave out there right now, but I don’t hear a whole lot of it with prominent guitar lines. Usually it’s more like, ethereal boops and bells and stuff. Don’t get me wrong, though, there’s plenty of that in here too.
Damu the Fudgemunk & MF DOOM - Coco Mango Diced (Boy Scout Mix)
I don’t know very much about Damu, but I know plenty about MF DOOM, and that’s plenty to make me listen to this track.
Digitalism - Chrome.exe
I haven’t listened to a whole lot of Digitalism since their awesome 2007 album, Idealism, but they’re still out there cranking out tracks. I’ll have to dig into their catalog a little more because I love this, and I think Idealism has aged a little better than other stuff that was kind of in the same vein.
SebastiAn - Pleasant
Let’s stick with the buzziness for a second, and add some out-of-phase effects. Wee-enhhhhh (ee-enhhh).
Wajatta - Don’t Let Get You Down
Here’s a little palate cleanser. Pleasant, happy whistling! Enjoy!
Wild Belle - Mockingbird
This one is a strong callback to The Specials’ “Ghost Town” with all the reverby horns. Maybe like, that by way of MIA?
WOOZE - I’ll Have What She’s Having
I’d also like one of those, please.
Chinese Man - Maläd
Another fun game you can play while listening to your recommendation algorithm is, if you hear a track or artist that sounds like it’s from another culture, try to guess if it’s actually from another culture or if it’s just some white dude. Take a guess!
(it’s a white dude)
Birdy Nam Nam - Hammerhead
I love dubby chanting. And I love when people say things like “I’m a Frankenstein and I’m goin’ to hell.” I dunno why, but going to hell is a very compelling idea for me.
It’s probably too soon, but someday, someone is going to have to dig through all the stuff that came out during the much-maligned “EDM explosion” and remind everyone how much great stuff there was that got totally overshadowed by all the awful dubstep (aka brostep, or my favorite term for it, buttstep).
Hookworms - Negative Space
This is a nice swelling electro track from a pretty good album called Microshift. I didn’t spend enough time with it this month, but there’s a chance that Hookworms will reappear at the end of May :)
Courtney Barnett - Pedestrian at Best
With all this electronic stuff happening in here, I’m finding a little rock music to be a breath of fresh air.
It turns out that washing your hair with turpentine is a thing that Queen Caroline did back in the Georgian era. I looked it up because that idea crops up both here and in Suzi Wu’s (I assume unrelated) “Teenage Witch.” Who knew!
Ponzu Island - Super Koto
Obviously this is super retro. What immediately occured to me was the 80’s, but the track’s title reminded me that this kind of sound goes back to the 70’s with artists like Ryuichi Sakamoto, or if you really want to dig you could probably find it as early as the 40’s or 50’s in some more experimental stuff. This stuff goes way back.
strongboi - honey thighs
(sic). Speaking of retro. Every now and then you encounter a band that’s so retro that it might not even fit the term.
I get in arguments with people about this sometimes. Like, my opinion is that if a track sounds exactly like a genre from another era, well, it just is that genre. Like, you don’t need a term for Yard Act other than post-punk just because their album came out in 2022. It sounds exactly like post-punk. It’s post-punk.
Anyway, that has nothing to do with this track, which is just a fun little 50’s style pop song, with a little electronic playfulness in there too.
CHAI - ACTION
I think Chai is really interesting, but I don’t always “get” what they’re doing. However, I love when people spell things aloud.
Ross from Friends - The Revolution
I mean, who doesn’t love old-school electro sounds? Throw in a couple cowbell breakdowns for spice and you’ve got a spot on my playlist.
Laura Les - Haunted
Last month, I included the most recent 100gecs album, and dear reader August sent me this solo track by one of their members. And just as he said, major Crystal Castle vibes. Good find!
72-Hour Post Fight - UNGLUED
There are a few different bands working in that sweet spot between moody electronic stuff and what one might call “jazz.” This is in there, I think. If you like that, see also The Comet Is Coming - Trust in the Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery.
Pedestrian - Pick Your Shots Clean
Breakbeats! Let’s all get Propellerheads-y.
Boy Azooga - Loner Boogie
Let’s wrap up here with a great rock track. This is another one where you might well see them again, once I listen to this album a couple more times.