May 20 2013
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Credibility, Discussion, hip-hop

Some thoughts RE: Kanye on SNL

Kanye West SNL

I have kind of a tradition that goes all the way back to when I was a child: I watch Saturday Night Live semi-religiously. Even when it’s bad, I love it. Now that we’re in the age of Twitter, I like to watch SNL whilst reading what people are saying about it. It’s kind of a shared-experience thing.

This week, the musical guest was Kanye West. I have some mostly unrelated thoughts on this performance.

1) It was pretty frickin’ rad.

I’ve never been a huge Kanye fan. He kind of seems like a dick, and I tend to hold that against people. However, his 2 performances, especially “Black Skinhead,” was, from a performance standpoint, amazing. Here it is:

Frickin’ rad. Based on that song, I want to hear the new album. And that shit going on in the background? Also rad. Those dogs are freaking me out.

2) People I know didn’t like it. At all.

“I am seriously rethinking watching SNL after seeing Kanye West’s performance last night…painful.”

That was one of my friends on the facepage, but it’s also just one example of what some of the people I know were saying. Now, it seems like a lot of the random people on Twitter were saying good things about the performance, so I would say that, in general, it was well-received. However, the subset of white people from Northeast Ohio in their mid-thirties didn’t seem to like it. I understand that musical taste is subjective and all, but I think that that performance was objectively powerful, even if you don’t like hip-hop. Is it just that my generation is getting old and doesn’t like this in-your-face stuff? Is there some sort of latent racism that’s starting to show up in my high-school class? I dunno.

3) While powerful, I’m not sure Kanye is the right guy to tell us about how evil Capitalism is.

Here’s his second performance, “New Slaves”:

Pretty rad, if minimalist, performance. And I can totally get behind the message, but I don’t think Kanye is the proper spokesman for the dangers of the way corporations manipulate people into wanting…stuff. Dead Prez? Sure. Mos Def? Despite his film career, I’d buy it. I just can’t take Kanye’s anti-capitalism seriously, even if I do agree.

And I’m not sure making references to The Waterboy is the strongest way to get your message across.

Still, there is something about that performance that feels like Kanye just got away with something.

So, what do you all think? Click comment and…well, comment, I guess.

-jason

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May 17 2013
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Review

Review: Carpenter Brut – Carpenter Brut EP

Carpenter Brut

Carpenter Brut put this album out back in December of 2012, but I just found out about it.

Meanwhile, this week the new Daft Punk leaked and people online were just going nuts to hear it. It was a huge deal to a lot of people. Then it got put on iTunes and literally in the time it took me to walk to the end of the block and back, everyone had turned on it because well, it’s a disco album. After work I checked out two of the streaming tracks. Here is my micro review of Daft Punk’s newest whatever it’s called, it’s like mom disco. It’s that kind of whack 1984 disco-is-dead-but-hasn’t-stopped-moving disco that your mom listened to on FM radio while taking you to daycare. That is basically my indictment of it, it’s disco, but it’s just not funky.

After checking that out, I found myself listening to the Carpenter Brut EP for the the first time because someone I follow on Twitter linked to it. In extremely sharp contrast, the Carpenter Brut EP is funky. A thing of retro synths it’s a weird combination of self-conscious and sexy. This is on one hand, a nerd album. The 80′s synth sounds have more to do with the music you’d hear coming from C64 or NES games than any kind of nascent New Wave what have you. The Carpenter part is also very literally a homage to John Carpenter movies, with song titles derived from and samples taken from the same. (Including that one Prince of Darkness sample. You hear that allll the time, but I have never met anyone that’s actually seen that movie.) Despite that, because of that maybe, this album really, really goes hard. Here’s where the disco comparison comes in. It’s been a really, really long time since anything has made me want to get up and move as much as the Carpenter Brut EP. It’s just impossibly kinetic. Seriously, every time I put this on, I have visions of the office or wherever I am just bursting into the contrived “going wild dance party” but really meaning it because how could you not when this is playing? It’s not disco, but it makes you want to dance like it was.

- Jayson

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May 13 2013
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Pop, Review, Rock

Review: John Vanderslice – John Vanderslice Plays Diamond Dogs

John Vanderslice Plays Diamond Dogs
John Vanderslice – John Vanderslice Plays Diamond Dogs. Self-released, 2013.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I put some money towards John Vanderslice’s Kickstarter campaign for his upcoming album, Dagger Beach. One of the rewards I got was a digital copy of his upcoming, limited-edition John Vanderslice Plays Diamond Dogs, a track-by-track cover of Bowie’s 1974 album.

First of all, I know it’s kind of weird to review an album that was a Kickstarter reward. I don’t believe it’s getting an official release date. There were only 500 copies of the LP printed for this promotion, but Vanderslice still seems to have some left, so I imagine this will show up at his shows, and possibly on his website later, so I think it’s worthwhile to talk about it.

What Vanderslice has done on John Vanderslice Plays Diamond Dogs is re-imagine the entire album. When I say this, I don’t mean that he has taken the songs out of context, changed their tunes and words and what-have-you. In this regard, his album is very faithful to the original. However, Vanderslice has added his pop sensibilities to Bowie’s rock masterpiece.

Are any of these tracks going to replace the originals in my mind as the definitive versions of the songs? No, but I don’t think that’s what Vanderslice is going for, either. He explains on the Kickstarter page that this album was recorded in five days. While it certainly doesn’t sound rushed at all, it still seems more of an exercise in the urgency of recording on a time-budget, rather than and intense exploration and re-interpretation of a classic.

If you’re familiar with JV’s work, you can probably imagine what John Vanderslice Plays Diamond Dogs sounds like: It’s kind of mellow, with lots of guitar and synth. The production is an instrument here, as always with Vanderslice. The man knows exactly what sounds to push to the back and which ones to bring forward at exactly the right time. In fact, he’s one of the few artists whose production is obvious but not irritating. I tend to like my music unpolished, but Vanderslice never gets in his own way. Even his bleeps and bloops sound natural.

The highlights on the album are most likely so because they were the highlights of Bowie’s original, but Vanderslice’s lazy cover of Diamond Dogs, called “Diamanthunde,” manages to be as fun, if not as raucous as the original. His cover of “Rebel Rebel,” renamed as “Juvenile Success,” is soft and minimalist, and one of my favorite tracks is the trippy “Jump in the River Holding Hands,” a cover of “Sweet Thing.”

Overall, John Vanderslice’s cover of Bowie isn’t earth-shattering, and it’s definitely not as good as the original, but I don’t think that’s an insult. John Vanderslice has made a worthwhile covers album and makes these songs his own, which is what every artist covering any song should aspire to.

John Vanderslice Plays Diamond Dogs isn’t available in retail outlets, but keep a lookout at his shows and his website to get a copy while he still has them.

-jason

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May 10 2013
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Ambient, Post-rock, Review

Review: Sunwølf – Midnight Moon

Sunwølf - Midnight Moon

The UK’s Sunwølf are back with their sophomore album Midnight Moon.

While that Kinski-esque vibe remains, Midnight Moon is cool because it manages to achieve a sound best described as stonerdrone. Less ambient than their last outing, Sunwølf get to the riffage quickly and keep at it for the duration. As that Polygon Window album was titled Surfing on Sine Waves, Sunwølf have created a sound that is surfing on riffs. The first three tracks of Midnight Moon are not drone enough to be boring/for enthusiasts only, nor does it ever quite hit that “gonna drive my Camaro into the heart of the sun” level of groove. It maintains a slow, steady groove balanced right between

Later in the album, we do hit the point where the music is much more ambient. In these moments the music sounds quietly beautiful to the point where I started feeling a little reflective while listening. Compared to their first album, Midnight Moon isn’t as evocative of a specific locale or sense of place, but an emotional space. A lot of the rest of what I said about Beyond The Sun is true here, Midnight Moon is also lovely stuff. As good as the first one was, this sophomore effort demonstrates a huge artistic progression.

- Jayson

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May 06 2013
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Pop, Review

Review: The Blank Tapes – Vacation

The Blank Tapes - Vacation
The Blank Tapes – Vacation. Antenna Farm Records, 2013.

When I saw that The Blank Tapes newest release was called Vacation, I figured it would be pretty appropriate for my to review it right now. My girlfriend and I are just finishing our vacation, so I’m in a vacation sort of mood. You know: the right kind of mood for this kind of album.

When I say “this kind of album,” I really do mean the vacationy sort of album. The Blank Tapes really have put together an album that makes me want to sit on a beach with a beer in my hand and an umbrella over my head to protect me from the sun. Right from the opening track, “Uh-Oh,” there’s this kind of lazy, sunny, AM radio vibe, with just a little bit of Spoon mixed in to keep things current. It’s mellow, it’s relaxing, and it’s fun. These guys are good at what they do, but they don’t take themselves too seriously.

The Blank Tapes run the gamut from Beach Boys-style sixties rock (on “Coast to Coast”), Indie Pop (“Tamarind Seeds”), Lou Reed-inspired pop-rock (“Pearl”), to Latin jazz-pop (“Brasilia”), to early solo McCartney (“Holy Roller”). The real feat heat is that through all of this, they still manage to sound modern and relevant.

Overall, Vacation is a nice, breezy album that remembers yesteryear, rather than trying to recreate it.

Vacation by the Blank Tapes comes out on May 14th on Antenna Farm Records.

-jason

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May 01 2013
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Pop, Review

Review: John Vanderslice – Dagger Beach

John Vanderslice - Dagger Beach
John Vanderslice – Dagger Beach. Self-released, 2013.

Back in February, John Vanderslice started a Kickstarter campaign for his upcoming release, Dagger Beach. He was asking for $18,500, and the 1,224 people who backed it got him almost $80,000. In other words, when JV says he’s doing a thing, his loyal fanbase listens.

I’m one of those fans, backing him at the level to get me downloads of Dagger Beach, as well as his rarities album and his track-by-track cover of Bowie’s Diamond Dogs. I assumed two things about this project:

1) It would sound like a John Vanderslice album.
2) It would be great.

I was right on both counts.

According to the liner notes, Dagger Beach was written after John and his girlfriend broke up. He insists it’s not a break-up album, and I agree. Break-up albums are cold and wintery. This is an album of Spring, of rebirth. It’s an album in which the narrator, after having everything stripped from him that wasn’t him, sees himself for the first time in a while. The first track, “Raw Wood,” opens:

one day the paint will be stripped right off
your pretty veneer and you can bet for sure
raw wood never looked so good

Even though it’s an album about growth and rebirth, it isn’t without its bitterness. On the very next track, “Harlequin Press,” Vanderslice sings of a woman whom he helped edit a book, and who, I imagine, is a metaphor for his ex:

a year had passed, she showed up at my door
she rewrote the book and handed it over
she replaced the songbirds with pornographers,
the love scenes with brutal murders

The most surprising thing about the album, and really, it shouldn’t be a surprise as it is the natural evolution of his sound, is that I would no longer call him a powerpop artist. The music on Dagger Beach would almost be folky if Vanderslice didn’t love his production so much. He puts enough bleeps and bloops to nudge the overall sound to pop music, though if he ever released an accoustic-only version (as he did with Pixel Revolt when he released Suddenly It All Went Dark [Which you can download for free RIGHT HERE]), it would totally be a folk album. However, despite the folk nature of Dagger Beach, it is unmistakably a John Vanderslice album. He has managed to evolve without losing that which has always been the quintessential Vanderslice: those specific chord changes and those slice-of-life lyrics.

Overall, Dagger Beach is a solid album that is just as well written, produced, and performed as any of his work with a label, and is a solid case for the Kickstarter generation of music.

Dagger Beach is officially released June 11, 2013, and will be available in several formats from John Vanderslice’s Website.

-jason

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Apr 29 2013
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hip-hop, Review, Twitter

Review: Sankofa – Just Might Be

Sankofa Just Might Be

Sometimes you really only get into someone’s music at the end of their career. That’s the case with Sankofa’s Just Might Be album. This is adios, Sankofa is retiring to focus on being a dad.

Sankofa has been on my radar a bit, but Just Might Be is the first thing I’ve actually sat down with for a serious listen. The is a proper old school album, for my old school days anyway. Anyone that was a fan of the non-gangsta stuff that was going on from the mid-90s through the early 00s will be happy with Just Might Be. Sankofa is one of those rappers that values lyrical prowess and flow over all else. Most of the tracks here are slice-of-life type stories ranging from fun songs (the first two about swearing and sneakers are great) to darker stories about people’s screwed up lives. Through it all the quality remains consistent and high. For a 16 track album there’s no duds. Even the songs I don’t like as much suffer only in comparison with the better ones here. By way of comparison, Sankofa’s style reminds me both of Aesop Rock and Soul Khan to a degree. He’s quirky, but not annoyingly so like I tend to find Aesop. His strong delivery reminds me of Khan, but this isn’t a political album like most of his stuff tends to be. Really, you can hear that Sankofa is doing this for the love and that approach makes this a completely solid listening experience.

I’m writing this review the week of that Onion “people are legitimately worried about the future of hip-hop” article made the rounds. It’s funny, but honestly I’m not.

- Jayson

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Apr 22 2013
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hip-hop, Review

Review: Ghostface Killah – Twelve Reasons to Die

Ghostface Killah - Twelve Reasons to Die
Ghostface Killah – Twelve Reasons to Die. Soul Temple Records, 2013.

I don’t listen to as much hip-hop as I used to, but if I’ll listen to just about any Wu-Tang related project. I was pretty excited about Twelve Reasons to Die, Ghostface Killah’s concept album about death, revenge, and the supernatural. It’s a concept that would be clumsy in the hands of many rappers, but I knew that Ghostface could pull it off.

And pull it off he did. Producer Adrian Younge has done a great job and giving this thing that 60′s and 70′s Italian Horror vive, with a little Spaghetti Western thrown in. It sounds like a horror movie directed by Tarantino.

The story is your basic “Mob Enforcer goes into business for himself-falls in love with mob bosses daughter-gets himself melted down in a vat of vinyl and pressed onto records-becomes the spirit of vengeance when the records get played” tale. I know…it’s an oldie but a goodie. In this regard, Ghostface Killah stays on topic, and the whole album really does feel like each song progresses a plot that ends in a bloodbath. There’s cocaine, there’s murder, there’s a love story, there’s murder, there’s…murder. Lots and lots of murder, but in that sort of campy, 60s horror-style murder that seems less of a glorification of violence and more of an obviously fictional variety. Ghostface runs down some of the ways he exacts revenge on the track “Murder Spree”:

Torture, chop your legs up, thrown off the boat
Guillotine, nigga, one chop to the throat
Suffocation, saran wrapping your face
Buried alive, throw a few nails in the case
Manslaughter, eight degrees of separation
Leave your body chopped up in a piece, that’s mutilation

Sure, it’s violent as hell, but Ghostface makes it clear that this is a work of fiction, that Tony Starks, AKA Ghostface Killah, is a sort of dark super-anti-hero, bringing EC Comics-style justice from beyond the grave. There’s never a time when you think he’s serious at all about any of this. As gruesome as Twelve Reasons to Die is, it’s also a hell of a lot of fun.

Twelve Reasons to Die by Ghostface Killah is available pretty much anywhere you can buy music, and in several formats. You can also order it from the Soul Temple Bandcamp Page.
-jason

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Apr 19 2013
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Alternative, Review, Rock

Review: Bush – Sixteen Stone

Bush Sixteen Stone album cover

Honestly, Bush was the best band of the whole 90s with Sixteen Stone was the best album of the 90s – a monument to an era, encompassing everything that was both right and wrong with alternative music and alternative music fans of that era.

I had this on CD but sold it because I was ashamed to own it since Bush didn’t have a proper major label debut. I’m not going to re-indict 90s alternative fandom politics again but like seriously think about how messed up that is.

Looking back, 2013 Jayson sees Sixteen Stone as the ultimate evolution of the whole “grunge” sound – those poetic/nonsensical songs that gave you Feelings (“Glycerine” – seriously, what is that even about?) and that heavy but melodic guitar sound. Yes, it’d been done by then, but not to death. Sixteen Stone really represents distillation, not duplication. Yet, they were widely held to be by “real” alternative fans and musicians reflects everything that was actually wrong with that era. I remember a lot of initial anger that they were “ripping off Nirvana” but that may have been a local thing. A basic compare & contrast of Gavin & Gwen compared to Kurt & Courtney tells you everything you need to know about how misplaced our priorities were then. I mean, Gavin and Gwen are still together and have careers but we thought Kurt and Courtney were the new Sid & Nancy and we liked that because we’re idiots.

Sixteen Stone itself is actually a pretty uneven album, it’s not the pure solid gold slab of non-stop hits that I said it was last October. Clunkers like “Testosterone” and “Monkey” mix roughly with the four well known and brilliant sings. The remaining third of the album is solid stuff, including my personal favorite “Alien” which is the prefect makeout moodsetter for any disaffected slacker. Added up though, it’s head and shoulders above so much other stuff that came out at the same time.

Anyway, this is better than anything new I was listening to last week.

- Jayson

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Apr 15 2013
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Meta, Rambling, Real Talk

Serious Stuff

Here at the To Eleven Institute for Sound, it may seem like it’s fun and games all the time, but it’s not. There are some things we care very deeply about, such as space. Outer space. Frickin’ space shuttles and shit.

We also care about using our nation’s resources to further space exploration, as well as furthering Sonic Research. To that end, we have taken our cause to the second authority in the land*, and have petitioned the government to do both, while investigating the safety of every man and woman on this planet.

I’m talking, of course about the “Corgan Hypothesis.”

Artist's rendition of the Corgan Hypothesis. Original photo: NASA.gov

Artist’s rendition of the Corgan Hypothesis. Original photo: NASA.gov

Here is the text of our petition:

WE PETITION THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TO:
Fund a mission to the moon to test “The Corgan Hypothesis.”
The To Eleven Institute of Sound requests that NASA send a mission to put a giant mirror on the moon with which to view the Earth, thus testing “The Corgan Hypothesis,” which states, “The world is a vampire.” From the vantage point of the moon, scientists will be able to see if the Earth casts a reflection, thus determining once and for all whether the Earth actually is a vampire.

This is important because vampires, if real, are dangerous, and humanity will benefit from knowing if the very ground beneath them could rise from the dead, set to drai-ai-ain.

Testing the Corgan Hypothesis might be the most important endeavor our Space Program will ever embark on, but only if YOU make it happen.

Sign the petition, tell everyone you know, and help NASA and To Eleven to potentially save the world!

-jason

*The highest authority, of course, being the Secret White House, under the David Lee Roth administration.

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