eMusic.com Inc.

Young Dreams, Between Places

Brimming with youthful vigor and energy

On their debut Between Places, the Norwegian collective Young Dreams rounds out a subgenre in your music collection you didn’t even know existed: well-adjusted coming-of-age anthems. As evidenced by the driving album opener “Footprints,” where the band’s multiple singers toss out vocal harmonies as though auditioning for the musical adaptation of Fight Club, Young Dreams isn’t lacking for scrappy enthusiasm, and Between Places brims with youthful vigor and energy. They’ve obviously worked their way through the Beach Boy’s catalogue, as the bucolic multi-part harmonies on “When Kisses Are Salty” attest, but they don’t merely parrot their influences. Like Vampire Weekend of Fleet Foxes, they work in a light, retro-pop style that came to prominence that came to prominence years before they were born, updating it with lyrical signifiers of modern life: cell phone chargers, drinking games, and the otherworldly quality of summer vacation. Weaving in orchestral flourishes into the mix, Young Dreams haven’t just managed to make what’s old sound fresh, they’ve created something entirely new. Who says youth is wasted on the young?

Mar 04, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Icon: Fela Kuti

The incontestable king of Afrobeat, with a career that spanned over 30 years, Fela Anikulapo (née Ransome) Kuti’s prodigious musical output is overshadowed to the point of cliché by the stuff that’s made him such a mythical figure. A bramble in the claw of Nigeria’s ruling dictatorship; a total dickweed who might have outdone both Miles Davis and Pablo Picasso for total dickweediness; a cult leader with his own compound, the Kalakuta Republic, and a harem of 27 wives; and a ganja horticulturist extraordinaire, it’s easy to forget that Fela actually sang, wrote songs, played saxophone, led a band (in the ’70s, Africa 70; in the ’80s, Egypt 80), performed innumerable concerts and cut dozens upon dozens of albums.

But he did, and though even committed fans would hesitate to recommend everything Fela and his bands and disciples recorded, his peaks stand with those of his most obvious influence, James Brown, and the world of Funkadelic as the most body-rocking music of the ’70s. But while Brown’s music was the sound of a runner getting leaner and leaner in preparation for a marathon, Fela’s overstuffed songs jiggled like a dancing, galloping gourmet. And Fela’s jams certainly rival Clinton and Co.’s for length — as the decade wore on, Fela’s songs would stretch from the lip of the vinyl straight to the label in the center. (Often, one song would occupy both sides of a record; in the digital era, the halved tracks have been joined into uninterrupted wholes.) As for the political fire so central to his music, what the man himself said at the beginning of “Shuffering and Shmiling” says it all: “You Africans, please listen to me as Africans, and you non-Africans, please listen to me with open minds.” — Jess Harvell

Africa Man Original

Afrodesiac
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

Consisting of early Nigerian 45's Fela re-recorded in London in 1971, Afrodesia remains one of his stronger early albums before his afrobeat apotheosis. One of the final Fela albums to be sung entirely in Yoruba, rather than pidgin English, it begins with "Alu Jon Joki," a Yoruban folk tale about a dog who sneaks his mother into heaven rather than consume her during a famine like all the other animals. It's embellished... with psychedelic electric piano and an uncharacteristic male vocal chorus. "J'eun Ko Ko" (Eat and Die), an instrumental version of Fela's first hit record, and "Eko Ile" (Lagos Home), in which Fela asserts his allegiance to his hometown, hardly prepare listeners for "Je'Nwi Temi" (Don't Gag Me), in which Fela prophetically makes his future lifetime's worth of political defiance sound funky, sexy, and almost tragically inevitable. — Richard Gehr
more »
Gentleman
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

The rough and gritty tenor sax solo that kicks off "Gentleman," following a teasing vamp, marks Fela's first solo on the instrument, which he learned quickly after Igo Chico split Afrika 70 earlier in 1973. The song wraps a classic Afrika 70 arrangement around Fela's disquisition on the colonial mentality of Africans who cling to inappropriate European customs and clothing (as suggested by the terrifically non-PC cover collage of a monkey's head... on a suited body). "Africa hot, I like am so," sings Fela scornfully. "I know what to wear but my friends don't know." Two jazzy eight-minute instrumentals provide killer filler. — Richard Gehr
more »
Shuffering And Shmiling
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

An attack on corrupt religions, "Shuffering and Shmiling" opens with a groove that shows Africa 70 at its most minimalist and percolating, with a needling, almost highlife guitar that stings and stabs as Fela rains contempt on "goddamn church[es]" and "goddamn mosque[s]." As the song builds, he savages the idea of living through hell to get to heaven, as his female chorus replies, "Amen!" "Shuffering and Shmiling" proves that Fela was unafraid... to stick his finger in the eye of even the most sacred subjects. — Jess Harvell
more »

The Black President

Everything Scatter
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

Once you get past the first six minutes' of introductory blab, this album captures a vibrant Berlin Jazz Festival headline slot that turned out to be the final performance by Fela's classic Afrika 70 lineup. The group broke up when informed that Fela was going to use the gig's profits to finance an aborted presidential campaign. Perhaps encouraged by the live cameras broadcasting to other European countries and back home, Fela broke... out a big and ballsy new work characterizing Nigeria's rulers as "vagabonds in power" lacking sympathy for the nation's lower social strata. It's also noteworthy for the midsong interplay between guitars, percussion, and voices, a remarkable afrofunk recipe that would never be repeated quite as deftly. — Richard Gehr
more »
Kalakuta Show
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

Undoubtedly the darkest of Fela's records, "Coffin for Head of State" was a response to the death of Fela's mother from injuries she took from a fall from a window during the 1977 army raid on Kalakuta. Unlike the fiery "Kalakuta Show," his previous response to a raid on the compound he had declared an independent state, "Coffin" drags itself through its duration like a funeral march; Fela actually delivered his mother's... coffin to the steps of Nigerian president Obasanjo himself. Gone are the slyness of "Zombie" and "Expensive Shit"; in their place is the anguish of a bereaved son. This is the most emotionally naked record Fela would ever make. — Jess Harvell
more »

Band on the Run

Sorrow Tears & Blood
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

Fela conflates his righteous indignation over being stiffed by Decca Records for back royalties with international corporate evil on this epic 1981 album reflecting the relatively tighter and more orchestral, albeit somewhat more formulaic, tendencies of his Afrika 80 band. Fela has by now perfected a pedagogy you can dance to on his latest in a series of scatalogically themed recordings that includes "Expensive Shit" and "You Gimme Shit I Give You... Shit." "Africa man, we no dey carry shit," he chants before going on to describe how Europeans placed Nigerian "men of low mental power" (such as Decca's chief and a former president) in symbolic positions of authority. The result? "Dem come to teach us to carry shit." — Richard Gehr
more »
Zombie
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

1976's "Zombie" is Fela's most insidious back-and-forth chorus. So catchy, in fact, that Fela's fans started shouting it in the street at those that the song accused of being the real zombies — the Nigerian police and military. Fela's double-time drill-sergeant delivery on the song is joined by his female troops shouting "zombie!" after each line. Unfortunately, by the time Zombiewas released, Fela had poked the bear through the cage one too... many times, and government interest in the goings-on at the Kalakuta Republic would turn from harassment to outright violence in early 1977. — Jess Harvell
more »
VIP
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

Once you get past the first six minutes' of introductory blab, this album captures a vibrant Berlin Jazz Festival headline slot that turned out to be the final performance by Fela's classic Afrika 70 lineup. The group broke up when informed that Fela was going to use the gig's profits to finance an aborted presidential campaign. Perhaps encouraged by the live cameras broadcasting to other European countries and back home, Fela broke... out a big and ballsy new work characterizing Nigeria's rulers as "vagabonds in power" lacking sympathy for the nation's lower social strata. It's also noteworthy for the midsong interplay between guitars, percussion, and voices, a remarkable afrofunk recipe that would never be repeated quite as deftly.— Richard Gehr
more »
Coffin For Head Of State
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

Undoubtedly the darkest of Fela's records, "Coffin for Head of State" was a response to the death of Fela's mother from injuries she took from a fall from a window during the 1977 army raid on Kalakuta. Unlike the fiery "Kalakuta Show," his previous response to a raid on the compound he had declared an independent state, "Coffin" drags itself through its duration like a funeral march; Fela actually delivered his mother's... coffin to the steps of Nigerian president Obasanjo himself. Gone are the slyness of "Zombie" and "Expensive Shit"; in their place is the anguish of a bereaved son. This is the most emotionally naked record Fela would ever make. — Jess Harvell
more »

Afrika 80 Goes International

O.D.O.O.
Fela Kuti
2013 | Knitting Factory Records / PIAS Digital

By 1989, Fela had codified his funk-highlife didacticism into a multilayered maximalist sort of neo-griot musical theater that anticipated Bill T. Jones's Broadway adaptation of his life story. "ODOO (Don Overtake Don Don)" delivers a breezy percussion jam, vocal chorus, and snazzy jazz-guitar solo before Fela gets down to serious business. He condemns Africa's military kleptocracies, naming them one by one until revealing their true moniker: "soldier come, soldier go." Having been... warned not to record the song by a Nigerian government official, Fela took advantage of this momentous session to speak funk to power by reprising some of his greatest hits, including "Zombie," "Mr. Follow-Follow," and "Unknown Soldier." — Richard Gehr
more »

Mar 04, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Interview: Youth Lagoon

“It’s easy to just find beauty,” Trevor Powers says of his Boise, Idaho, hometown. The singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist might almost be talking about the two albums he has recorded under the name Youth Lagoon. 2011′s The Year of Hibernation was an indie-rock moonshot, resonating with wide audiences precisely because of how personal its winding guitar lines, sighing synths and fragile vocals could sound. New album Wondrous Bughouse was recorded with producer Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Washed Out) in Atlanta, and this time unexpected vistas await around every corner.

What exactly makes the Rockies so beautiful, though, is hard to say. The source of Powers’s muse isn’t always apparent even to him, but on Wondrous Bughouse he has a way of channeling it into expansive, magnificently warped dream-pop that can be breathtaking. Chatting on Kurt Cobain’s birthday from Boise, where he’s relaxing before a tour that will take him as far a Brooklyn arena gig opening for the National, Powers discusses the subconscious, the ineffable and, inevitably, Nirvana.

How was it different writing this album knowing people would actually hear it?

As soon as The Year of Hibernation was done and it started getting a little bit of attention, it kind of psyched me out. But as time went on, I just went back to the mentality that I’ve always had ever since I started doing music, just doing it for myself. Once I got back into that mindset it was easy to zone out and create whatever I want to create. As long as I do that then I’m happy.

On the last album, you compared some of the songs to entries in a journal, but on Wondrous Bughouse the song titles have less obvious connection to everyday life. What were some of the inspirations this time around?

Especially lyrically, this record is a lot more across-the-board. It’s mainly idea-based. I oftentimes write in a stream-of-consciousness type of way to start off songs. So a lot of stuff was just coming out of my system. It would be common themes I didn’t know I was dwelling on that much and I’d just go back and shape them.

Mortality seems like one of these themes. But it goes from “you’ll never die” to “here’s to death, drink up.” Is there a thread running through?

It’s always the type of thing where certain songs just play out different ideas. You mentioned some lyrics from “Raspberry Cane.” That’s kind of about, I got obsessed with this idea of just picturing what it would be like to stumble on this being that was by water, and all these crowds, they want this thing to come back to life, but they don’t always know what it is. And it could be something that’s dangerous, it could be something that’s very kind, but just the idea of something dying all the sudden makes it bad. Like, “Oh, this thing shouldn’t have died.” But maybe it should have died, you know? Sometimes death — I don’t know how to phrase it.

Children come up at least a couple of times: “Couldn’t have babies” on “Attic Doctor,” and then on “Daisyphobia,” there’s something about “and children are…”

That’s what I was saying as far as the subconscious stuff. A lot of it I was just writing. With this record I was trying to approach it in a way that’s very free and not agenda-driven, not trying to be like, “OK, here’s an idea that I’m going to write a song about.” It was more like, “OK, let me start writing and see what’s inside of me that wants to come out.”

That’s something Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox has talked about doing. I know you’ve mentioned Deerhunter before. Has that been kind of an inspiration, or what were some of the inspirations musically for the album?

One of my biggest inspirations musically for this record was the band This Heat. Just how at times it’s very, very minimal — it’ll be certain things that just keep going and it’s hypnotizing — and then at times it would be really chaotic. And that sense of freedom in music to where it’s really just letting your — back to subconscious — letting your subconscious guide what you’re doing. Letting the song take you where it wants.

I’ve always been a fan of A.R. Kane and a lot of early, early dream-pop stuff. Just that similar mindset of taking you to a different place. You turn on a record and you’re instantly someplace that’s unfamiliar and at the same time there’s a certain sense of familiarity to it.

The album cover last time came out of a vacation with your family to Hawaii. This time it’s art by a teenage drug-abuse patient in West Germany in the ’70s named Marcia Blaessle. What about the art connected with what you were feeling with the record?

I can’t put my finger on it. I saw it as I was closing the writing process, and I stumbled on this stuff, and there was something about it that really connected to what I was trying to say. I don’t even know what it was. There was just this sort of mental connection where it just felt right. I almost got into panic mode because I tried to track her down, track down the publishing rights, all that kind of stuff. And for a while there was nothing. The publishing company that released the book way back in the day folded, and they passed on the rights to another company. And it got to the point where I was like, “This needs to be the art,” because it was so connected with what I was trying to say. But I don’t know exactly what it is. It kind of just was, you know?

You’re hitting on a theme that I’ve seen in your interviews, that I love and think is interesting to talk about, because it makes sense with your music: You’ve said before maybe you can’t explain too much about the songs. But can you explain a little bit about that, about why sometimes it’s hard for you to put in words too much about your songs, or about the connection between the art and your songs?

I think it’s just because music for me is almost like this bubble that I live in. When I’m writing, I’ll just close myself off. It’s almost like transportive, like taking you to that other place. And when you come back, like say I’m done writing a song and I come back to reality or whatever you want to call it, it’s just hard to explain your visit to that other place when you’re writing it. Do you know what I mean? It really does suck though from my vantage point because then you have people asking questions about your mindset. It just kind of is.

Today’s Kurt Cobain’s birthday. What did he mean to you, if anything?

On Netflix, I found the documentary on the making of Nevermind. I happened to just watch that a couple of days ago. And I was just so, so fascinated with it, because I’ve always loved Nirvana. People like Kurt have left such an impact. It’s funny because, back to the idea of mortality and stuff: Certain people die at a younger age, and for a lot of people it’s really sad, but at the same time he lived so much more than most people do if they grow to be 85 years old. He experienced so much stuff. It’s so beautiful if someone can leave that kind of footprint at such a young age.

Mar 04, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Kate Nash, Girl Talk

A messy, personal-meets-political chronicle of post-breakup grief

When British singer-songwriter Kate Nash said that Girl Talk consists of her “blood, sweat, emotional puke and tears,” she wasn’t just being dramatic. Her third full-length is a messy chronicle of post-breakup grief that veers between relief (“Fri-end?”), soul-searching (“Conventional Girl”), wistfulness (“Are You There Sweetheart?”), sadness (“Lullaby For An Insomniac,” “O My God”) and anger (“All Talk”). Appropriately, Girl Talk‘s music is also all over the place; styles covered include wobbly, girl group-inspired indie-pop, brash punk, stormy post-punk, grimy new wave, sparkling Britpop and vulnerable acoustic pop.

But as always, Nash’s emotional tumult has a depth — and directness — that makes her music arresting. On Girl Talk, that’s largely due to lingering influence from her various bouts of women-first activism. (She was recently named Global Ambassador for the Because I am a Girl initiative, whose goal is to educate and empower girls residing in developing countries, and she was also outspoken about supporting Pussy Riot.) The brash “Rap For Rejection” calls out the presence of casual sexism and demands that people start speaking out against it. The thrashing neo-riot grrrl anthem “All Talk,” meanwhile, is a fiery personal declaration: “You got a problem with me cause I’m a girl?/ I’m a feminist/ And if that offends you/ Then fuck you.” Nash has always nailed the complex hell that’s dating and relationships, but Girl Talk is superb during these moments when the personal is political.

Mar 04, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

eMusic Welcomes Brilliance Audio

Over the past few months, our audiobooks ranks have been growing even more than usual. The reason? We’re thrilled to welcome our newest publishing partner, Brilliance Audio, who have been creating great audiobooks for nearly 30 years in all genres, from bestsellers like Dean Koontz and Lee Child to award-winning nonfiction and memoirs, classics, and more. The one thing they have in common is a focus on marrying the author’s voice with the narrator, creating a listening experience that’s thrilling or emotional, instructive or inspiring. We’ve rounded up some favorites from the first crop of Brilliance titles below for you to start exploring; there are many more to come.

Mar 01, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

March Music Days: The Crucial 100

Enter for a chance to win $500 in eMusic Credit!

I’m going to be candid about the inspiration for this list: In 1995, Alternative Press published a list ofthe 99 best records to be released since they began publication 10 years prior. As an amateur student of rock music, by that point I’d consumed dozens of lists like this, all of them in established, respectable music publications, and all of them bearing an eerie similarity to one another. So you can imagine my surprise when I scanned the Alternative Press list and came across not familiar glorified workhorses, but names like The Dwarves and PJ Harvey and the Fastbacks.

That list was revolutionary for me. It was the first list that dared to say the canon was wrong. It was the first list that redefined which records mattered and why, and the first list to present popular music through a decidedly defiant perspective. Most importantly, it was the first list to suggest that maybe you don’t really need to own all those James Taylor records. It is in the spirit of that list that we present eMusic’s Crucial 100: 100 albums that we think it’s important you own. These are the albums that rearranged our brains, and influenced the music that we care about. And for you lucky winners of our $500 credit contest: This is where we think you should start spending.

Songs of Unrest & Revolution

There's A Riot Goin' On
Sly And The Family Stone
2007 | Epic/Legacy

No one — not Bob Dylan sneering at Mr. Jones, not Roxanne Shanté tearing other female rappers to ribbons, not U-Roy sending up "gal-boy I Roy"— has put so vicious a mockery on record as Sly Stone did with There's a Riot Goin' On. Only he wasn't attacking a straw man or the competition: as his band disintegrated around him (Sly did much of the instrumental work himself, with few full-band performances... and a handful of guitar parts handled by Bobby Womack), Stone was side-eyeing his impossibly hopeful earlier records. Riot turns everything he'd ever done inside out — and, as the ultimate proof of his genius, made it even stronger. Here, the affirmations of old turn queasy, and set up withering denouements: The brave and strong survive . . . But you're crying anyway 'cause you're all broke down. When I'm lost, I know I will be found . . . Look at you fooling you. That extended to the music, too, most clearly on "Thank You For Talkin' to Me, Africa," in which the audaciously celebratory 1970 single "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" is sent back on the road covered in soot and at a third of its previous gear, but it's equally easy to hear the stuttering horns of "Brave & Strong" and the jagged guitar vamp of "Africa Talks to You 'The Asphalt Jungle'" as Bizarro World versions of "Dance to the Music" and its kin. It's the longest, darkest night of the soul ever put on record; it's also the deepest, most compulsively listenable album Sly — or anybody else — ever made.
more »

Things Fall Apart
The Roots
2004 | Geffen

In February 2000, the Roots won their first and only Grammy for "You Got Me," the lead single from fourth studio effort Things Fall Apart. In its chorus, Erykah Badu sings as if she's already lost hope in her tour-diary romance; remorse breaks her words into two. But Things' Grammy-winning single barely indicates just how much the Roots had learned to illustrate the hip-hop stories they'd grown so adept in telling —... tales of a pained, conscious existence rather than a drugged-up one, orchestrated by mellowed-out arrangements far more nuanced than even Badu's masterful aching. In "Table of Contents (Parts 1 & 2)," ?uestlove's cymbals whirr as if being sucked into a vacuum cleaner as Black Thought ricochets across his retelling of the band's origins in South Philadelphia. A playful tit-for-tat with Mos Def ("Double Trouble") simmers and pops around gently pulsing chimes. Scott Storch's fingers listlessly drag their way through a keyboard melody over which a fraught Black Thought cries: "Building his fifth foundation in the wilderness/ thoughtless, trespassing into the Thought's fortress." "You Got Me" helped the Roots sell more than 900,000 copies of Things Fall Apart — more commercial attention than the Philadelphia band's ever received before. But as soon as the Grammy-winning single thrust the Roots into mainstream airwaves, the band decided to stray as far from Top 40 territory as possible. The result? The genre-bending Phrenology.
more »

Radio Ethiopia
Patti Smith Group
1996 | Arista
New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)
Erykah Badu
2008 | Motown

The C.D. Version Of The First Two Records
Bikini Kill
1994 | Bikini Kill Records

"We're Bikini Kill, and we want revolution girl style noooooow!" On this album's first song, nestled between shards of feedback, lead singer Kathleen Hanna howled the battle cry that lit riot grrrl afire. But it wasn't a double dare, it was a promise: for an instigative seven years, Bikini Kill dealt fierce blows to punk rock's misogynist "White Boy" (as one song is titled) through abrasive guitar blasts and lyrics that combined... feminist polemic with the distinct intellectual valley-girl patois of their progressive hometown — teeny-tiny Olympia, WA. Encouraged by the DIY dictum that playing music sloppily was better than not playing music at all, Bikini Kill tore through their riffs with punk-rock vehemence and vision — but it was Hanna's exceptionally raw singing style that really got the band motoring. Sounding like the final hour of an exorcism, she growls, grunts, sasses, snarls, whines and screams this mother out; witness the snotty, possessed energy of "Suck My Left One" (a song congruous with X-Ray Spex's "Oh Bondage Up Yours"); the bloody shrieks and feedback tilt-a-whirl of "Thurston Hearts the Who"; and the self-determined anthem "Feels Blind," where Hanna spits, "I eat your hate like love!" Though their best album, Pussywhipped, arrived two years later, these tapes (half-produced by Fugazi's Ian MacKaye) seethe with untamed, eruptive energy and the thrilling first spark of ideation.
more »

Money Jungle
Duke Ellington
2002 | BLUE NOTE
We Can't Be Stopped
Geto Boys
Rap-A-Lot Fontana

Legalize It
Peter Tosh
1999 | Columbia/Legacy

The token communal house/dorm room/juice bar/island resort's reggae album (second only Bob Marley and the Wailers' Catch A Fire), Peter Tosh's solo debut Legalize It remains a stone classic, even if most of its fans rarely explore beyond the dense foliage of the front cover and title track to the treasures within. As a teen in the early '60s, Tosh befriended Bob Marley and Bunny Wailer and the trio became... a vocal group before eventually evolving into the Wailers. After two smash successes (Catch A Fire and Burnin') as well as a car accident that fractured Tosh's skull, Island refused to release a Tosh solo album and he left the fold to pursue his own rebel path to stardom.

While "Legalize It" has remained a rallying cry for decades (most recently in California), it's actually his least politically-charged album, though it is his most emotionally-fraught. Aside from the lilt of "Ketchy Shuby," Tosh grapples with darker moods. The heave of "No Sympathy" has Tosh match his aching guitar line: "Only me feel the pain/ not one good word of advice/ from any of my so-called friends" and "Why Must I Cry" — despite its bright synth line and island meter — finds him isolated by his heartache. On the roiling piano of "Igziabeher (Let Jah Be Praised)," Tosh conjures up biblical disasters to scatter non-believers and his enemies "as the smoke was driven away." And he doesn't mean that kind of smoke.
more »

Fear Of A Black Planet
Public Enemy
1994 | Def Jam/RAL
London Calling
The Clash
2000 | Epic

Repeater (Plus 3 Songs)
Fugazi
Dischord Records

If 13 Songs was a soup of dubbed-out Stooges songs, Repeater boiled it all down to screeches and thuds, welding shards of feedback, bass thrum and tom rolls — a sound as stark as the album's blue-and-white cover, and as dynamic as the interior photos. Lyrical impressionism mixes with guilt and rage. At one end: "What a difference/ a little difference would make." At the other: "We are all bigots/so filled... with hatred /we release our poisons." The title track bellows at D.C.'s crack crisis; "Merchandise" reminds you of what they don't sell on tour. "Provisional" from Margin Walker gets a two-guitar reboot as "Reprovisional," hinting at power that was once only implied. "Shut the Door," a compassionate, furious look at a heroin overdose, is almost haiku-like in its simplicity and all the more powerful for it.

The CD pressing of Repeater was appended to include the 3 Songs 7-inch. "Joe #1" is a thudding instrumental, "Break-In" an older song about assault, but "Song #1" is a almost a post-hardcore manifesto: "Fighting for a haircut?/ Then grow your hair/ Crying for the music?/ I doubt you really care/ Looking for an answer?/ You can find it anywhere/ It's nothing."

Dig the new breed.
more »

Pink Flag
Wire
2009 | CAROLINE WORLD SERVICE
Lyte As A Rock
MC Lyte
2010 | Rhino/Elektra

Dark Nights of the Soul

Exile in Guyville
Liz Phair
ATO Records

In 1991 — at least five years before the first blog was identified as such — Oberlin art history grad Liz Phair quietly sent around a series of home-recorded cassettes she'd made under the moniker Girly Sound. The recordings were crudely rendered, rudely conceived (covering such post-feminist subjects as "Black Market White Baby Dealers" and "Willie the Six-Dicked Pimp") and immediately caught the ear of alt-nation's underground cognoscenti, who recognized an art-damaged... rebel without a cause when they heard one. Those recordings quickly went down in rock history as one of the finest albums of its era, maybe even of all time: she released 1993's Exile in Guyville, which for all intents and purposes reads today as an eighteen-track, album-length blog, replete with all the technologically-enabled oversharing and snarktastic, hit-and-run gender politics this description implies.

Phair was living at home with her parents in Winnetka, Illinois (suburbia being the best locale from which to wage war on an unsuspecting, male-dominated rock hierarchy) when she began re-recording some of her early Girly Sound demos with producer Brad Wood. What took shape was originally touted as a song-by-song response to Pussy Galore's noisy assassination of the Rolling Stones classic Exile on Main Street — a claim that no longer seems plausible (is "Girls! Girls! Girls!" really Phair's answer to "Turd on the Run?"); the record helped paint her as something of a pop-culture pirate princess from the get-go. The album quickly established its no-holds-barred M.O. with "Glory," an ode to cunnilingus ostensibly meant to "empower" but equally intended to shock, to determine which people were paying attention (and most certainly, the little girls understood, championing Phair as their tough-talking older sister almost immediately). This was followed in rapid succession by rough-and-ready autobiography that portrayed Phair as little but "a cunt in spring, you can rent me by the hour" ("Dance of the Seven Veils"), a scheming pleasure addict who "jumps when you circle the cherry" ("Canary"), a commitment-phobic tramp who secretly wishes for a boyfriend who "makes love 'cuz he's in it... and all that stupid old shit" ("Fuck and Run"), employs devastatingly personal self-critique ("How sleazy it is, messing with these guys") on "Shatter" and showcases her signature Girly Sound tune "Flower," a multi-Liz madrigal promising some anonymous indie rock dude she'll be his "blowjob queen" and "fuck you and your minions too" (unfortunately changing the "and your girlfriend too" lyric from her original tapes). All of this devastation was delivered in a voice so deadpan and emotion-free it was described by Rob Sheffield as "Peppermint Patty on a bad caffeine jag" and came across like the alt-nation's musical answer to another Liz, Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, whose self-skewering pseudo-confessional narratives also oddly prefigured the stylistic norms of the blogosphere by a number of years.

How an album so prescient and influential — one can argue that Alanis Morrissette owes the entirety of her career to the firewalk first traveled on Guyville — ever disappeared from Matador's catalog is beyond me, particularly when you consider that in this post-digital, file-sharing age, nothing should ever truly go "out of print." But the album's re-release, while not offering anything particularly revealing in the way of extras save for Phair's interpolation of "Wild Thing" as something of a Mean Girls rewrite, does underscore its importance by stripping away the pretend-porn veneer that originally defined it and revealing the core of what it was, is, and always shall remain: the document of a generation of women in transition, preparing the way for what the New York Times recently described as the lingua franca of the internet, a dialogue that, by turn, has emerged as "smart yet conversational, funny in a merciless way, righteously indignant but comically defeated, where every man [cheats] on his partner and all the women are slutty." Welcome, boys and grrls, to the 21st Century.
more »

De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas
Mayhem
1997 | Century Media / IODA
Blood On The Tracks
Bob Dylan
1984 | Columbia

Low
David Bowie
1999 | VIRGIN

"One day I blew my nose and half my brains came out." That was David Bowie in 1976, nearing the end of a years-long coke binge that had burned through the better part of his nasal passages and rendered him so clammy and paranoid he was diving into black magic to escape, drawing pentagrams on the floor of his L.A. apartment, keeping his own urine in jars in the refrigerator and burning... black candles as protection from evil spirits. He was seeing ghosts, giving loopy interviews heavy on Hitler-praising pull-quotes and his marriage to Angie was on the verge of collapse.

And so Bowie, with Iggy Pop in tow, went to Berlin to get clean (an aim at which he only fitfully succeeded) and, as he put it, "[to discover] a new musical language." Low, the first part of his celebrated Berlin Trilogy and the first stage in a full sonic reinvention. Unlike the plastic soul of Young Americans or Station to Station's manic panic, Low revels in total existential blankness. Bowie was openly in the thrall of bands like Neu! and Kraftwerk, and Low clearly reflects the influence of the former's stentorian, motorik rhythms and the latter's subzero synthesizers.

The album is famously divided into two halves, with a batch of Bowie-sung "song fragments" counterbalanced by a suite of gorgeous but deeply unsettling ambient-instrumentals; what's most notable is that, spiritually, Bowie feels as ice-cold and absent on the songs where he sings as on the ones where he doesn't. Herky-jerk "Breaking Glass," with its hectoring Carlos Alomar guitar line finds Bowie as self-referential as he'd ever been, darkly warning "don't look at the carpet — I drew something awful on it," before snidely declaring: "you're such a wonderful person — but you've got problems." De facto pop single "Sound And Vision" — if only because no other song on the album features an immediate hook — finds him distrusting his own senses, cooing "Don't you wonder, sometimes, 'bout sound and vision?" over the kind of chilly cascading synths that typically turn up on Joy Division albums.

As solid and striking as the vocals are, though, Low's back half is where it moves from experiment to masterpiece. Using layer upon layer of unholy synthesizer, Bowie — with the help of producer Brian Eno, himself no stranger to the power of ambiance — create an entire, flickering nighttime urban cityscape, where hustle and busyness ("A New Career in a New Town") slowly give way to the awful eeriness of nighttime ("Subterraneans"). Bowie's voice appears in fits and starts, mostly chanting strange, monosyllabic nonsense words — a thin, pale warlock looking glumly into his cauldron, drawn and spent. Taken together, the two halves of Low offer a picture of an artist at a crossroads, unsure of where to go next, but knowing all roads lead to darkness.
more »

Children of God/World of Skin
Swans
2003 | Young God / Revolver

Up until 1987, the last place in the world you might have expected to hear an acoustic guitar was on a Swans album. But with Children of God, the band augmented its brute physicality with a "New Mind," as the opening track put it, and a new palette to match. ("I will be there/ With my eyes wide open/ I will be there/ I will be ready/ To receive/ The new mind.")... From the cover alone, with its puce-and-fuchsia color scheme, its swirls and crosses, you could guess that Swans had entered a new phase, and the album's first three tracks made that abundantly clear. "New Mind" sounded more or less like the Swans of yore — more cleanly produced, perhaps, but still displaying the same doomy riffs, the same war-dance drums, the same call-and-response vocals — but the "In My Garden" came from a different universe entirely, with a high-necked bass melody inspired by Joy Division, limpid pianos reminiscent of Harold Budd, and a wraithlike Jarboe intoning, "In my garden/ We'll never die." "Our Love Lies" completed their transmutation with strummed acoustic guitars and tambourine and Michael Gira not just growling but singing, his baritone sinking to the lower limit of his register like a body weighted by stones. The rest of the album alternates between slow-motion head-bangers, like "Our Love Lies" and "Like a Drug," and deathly folk songs judiciously touched up with synthesizers and effects, like "Blood and Honey" and "You're Not Real, Girl." On the hypnotic title song, Jarboe's ecstatic mantra ("We are children/ Children of God") swirls above see-sawing guitars and stark, metallic drum beats; there's little doubt that, whatever their previously nihilistic outlook, Swans finally see the light of redemption, however fleetingly.

A few months before Children of God, Gira and Jarboe explored even more gentle textures on a pair of albums recorded under the name of Skin. Jarboe's voice carried Blood, Women, Roses, while Gira assumed center stage on Shame, Humility, Revenge, but both albums shared the same downy textures, forsaking Swans' usual sturm und drang in favor of strings, acoustic guitars, hushed synthesizers, and echoing electronic drums — a mixture that could almost have been mistaken for This Mortal Coil. Both records were repackaged in 1988 as the double LP, The World of Skin, and 14 songs were selected for 1997's Children of God / World of Skin reissue.
more »

Bone Machine
Tom Waits
1992 | ISLAND RECORDS

Released after a five-year break between albums — then the longest in his career — Bone Machine marks the beginning of a era in which Waits's records are isolated and self-contained, as if he goes dormant after each session and reemerges only after he's come up with something to say. The marionette march of "Earth Died Screaming" recalls the clatter of Rain Dogs' "Singapore," but Waits strips the songs bare as he... goes, paring away the excess; "Jesus Gonna Be Here" is just upright bass, dobro, and Waits's voice echoing in what sounds like an empty warehouse. On "In the Colosseum," he sounds as if he's been to hell and back and might just consider repeating the journey, the clanking percussion forging a concrete link to the album's title. Like the contemporaneous The Black Rider, Bone Machine risks falling into a fire-and-brimstone rut, but "Black Wings" shifts the album into a slightly less apocalyptic register. "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" could be a demented Disney theme, and "That Feel" closes with a dash of ghostly gospel harmony. It's hardly Waits's most approachable album, but its skeletal embrace is surprisingly welcoming.
more »

Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
Wu Tang Clan
1993 | RCA Records Label
Pornography
The Cure
2006 | Rhino/Elektra

good kid, m.A.A.d city
Kendrick Lamar
2012 | Top Dawg / Aftermath / Interscope

The connective tissue of Kendrick Lamar's major-label debut is a series of not-quite skits — prayers, voicemails, front-seat conversation — that string together an album that reveals itself as a long day in his adolescence. This isn't exactly a new trick in rap, but it's rare that found sound is so immersive, and so effective at absorbing the listener. Then again, the Compton rapper subtitled the album "a short film by Kendrick... Lamar," so maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise that good kid, m.A.A.d city is purely cinematic in scope and execution.

It is, to be clear, a striking achievement. Yet the truest strength of the album is that it still hits even once you've untangled its various knots. The complex narrative is a leap in ambition for Lamar, but in doing so he's retained the elements of his writing that made him famous in the first place. On his last album, Section.80, he showed a keen eye for observing, analyzing and understanding those close to him, and it's from that place this record grows.

The story isn't the only thing that stuns. Despite being raised in L.A. rap's epicenter and mentored for years by Dr. Dre, good kid sounds like it was stewed in the South. Its sonic bedrock is the same muted, plaintive future-funk that bathed the Alabama group G-Side's Starshipz & Rockets — a sound shaped for, and by, dark nights and deep thoughts.

In totality, the album awakens the spirits of Outkast's legendary Aquemini — no small praise, indeed. That is rarified air in hip-hop, but Kendrick Lamar, out from the jumble of a new class of rap stars, now finds himself in very different company.
more »

Funhouse [Deluxe Edition]
Stooges
2005 | Rhino/Elektra
The Queen Is Dead
The Smiths
1986 | Rhino

Rid Of Me
P.J. Harvey
1993 | ISLAND RECORDS

The cover of PJ Harvey's second album shows her in the shower — a typical setting for a male fantasy, but one that she upends by being depicted mid-hair-flip, creating an arc of wet hair and water that frames her gently grinning face. That upending of traditional tropes of desire was all over her debut, Dry, but it becomes even more in-your-face on Rid of Me, which is littered with body parts... and fluids and the emotions brought forth by their deployment. Engineered by Steve Albini in such a way that it brought the essential tensions of Harvey's music — masculine/feminine, beautiful/ugly, ecstatic/unfulfilled — right to the forefront, Rid of Me contains some of the most iconic songs of Harvey's career — the ode to swagger "50ft Queenie," the low-end-plumbing depiction of female frustration "Dry," the take-the-reins cover of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited." There's also "Yuri-G," a depiction of romantic madness that might be one of the most-overlooked songs in her catalog, despite its garage-borne chorus and fearless troop toward its endpoint.

But it's the differing treatments of the gender-flipping "Man-Size," which are presented as both a straightforward, slow-build rock song and as a piece arranged for strings and voice (called "Man-Size Sextet"), that perhaps best encapsulate the tension that's all over the album; while the Albini-engineered "Man-Size" has at least a bit of foreplay involved before Harvey breaks into a caterwaul on the song's final chorus, on the string-assisted version (which was arranged by Harvey's percussionist Robert Ellis) nerves crackle and snap against each other thanks to the strings clashing against each other in an icy, dissonant way as Harvey declares her dominance — at times, though, she does it in such a controlled way that it sounds like she's communicating through a jaw wired shut from repressed desire. The beauty brought forth by the strings only serves to underscore the jitters brought on by the idea of possibly possessing what is desired; that fear isn't brought on by the idea of possible transcendence as much as it is borne by the idea of losing that always-desired feeling, and subsequently having to root around the ugly, unfulfilling world of debasement and thwarted intentions explored elsewhere on the album.
more »

Sonic Terrorists

The Cold Vein
Cannibal Ox
2001 | Definitive Jux / The Orchard

The enduring idea of a hip-hop underground relies on our faith in the entrepreneurial spirit. Nobody wants a boss, and this is part of what compelled El-P to leave Rawkus in the late 1990s and form his own label, Definitive Jux, future home of Aesop Rock, Cage, Mr. Lif, Murs and others. He poured himself into the label's first album, the debut from Harlem rappers Vast Aire and Vordul Mega. The Cold... Vein remains an outlier classic, El-P channeling his inner Eno, and Vast and Vordul looking up from their comic books and imagining their escape from the present might come in the form of teleportation.
more »

Richard D. James Album
Aphex Twin
2005 | Rhino/London-Sire

Arguably Aphex Twin's definitive album — and not only because it bears his birth name — 1996's Richard D. James Album keeps you guessing. How can something feel at once so slight and so substantial? Whimsical melodies play out like music-box fantasias against forbiddingly complex drum programming; James has never seemed more like a trickster, with his self-evident sense of humor running from goofy ("Milkman") to deranged (the strange outro to "Girl/Boy... (Redruth Mix)"), but tracks like "Boy/Girl Song" and even the quadruple-time "4" hide an unmistakable sense of melancholy beneath their cartoonish folds. Many of the tracks here run to a measly two or three minutes — a blink of the eye, compared to the epic inclinations of so much electronic music. But with tempos racing to 180 BPM or so, and with chopped and rearranged breakbeats sprayed in a kind of hyperrhythmic slurry, James squeezes more action in his short-form sketches than many producers manage in an entire album. Hyperactive and/or mischievous listeners will get their fix in the brazenly kinetic antics of "Corn Mouth" or "Inkey$"; sensitive types are advised to start with the coy "To Cure a Weakling Child" or the plangent "Figerbib."
more »

Dummy
Portishead
1994 | Island Def Jam
Screamadelica
Primal Scream
1991 | Sire/Warner Bros.

Untrue
Burial
Hyperdub / IODA

We all know about the "Difficult Second Album" — the oft-rushed record made amid suffocating expectations and incessant touring. But some follow-ups not only make good on a promising debut but also retroactively imbue the entire enterprise with more intrigue than could have been recognized at the start. In 2007, M.I.A.'s Kala and LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver entered the ranks of this special kind of second album, and so did Burial's... Untrue.

Part of the allure of dubstep, the sound that Burial — an anonymous London musician — helped establish, is that it's so sparse and elemental that it eludes description almost by design: To formally address the qualities of dubstep is to paradoxically do damage to its most evocative parts — the parts that aren't there, the haunted parts, the spectral spaces that surround the tangible sounds and make it all happen through the force of their very absence. It's complicated, but it's also extremely compelling — and more immediately so on Untrue than it was on the self-titled 2006 debut that made Burial's name.

Untrue benefits from the conspicuous presence of vocals that prove newly forceful and free. Whereas voices served as atmospheric agents on the debut, here they drive tracks into the space of certifiable songs. "Archangel" announces the change at the start, with a mercury-mouthed male diva singing about "kissing you" and "holding you" in desperate, unsettling tones. A similar strategy plays out in "Near Dark," in which the vocal sentiment in the refrain "I can't take my eyes off you" applies just as much to ears.

The way that Burial foregrounds vocals as melody-makers veers back toward 2-step garage, the poppy post-jungle sound that ultimately evolved into grime and then into dubstep. The formal lures of dubstep proper remain here, but they also sound more kinetic and progressive. Even when the voices fade and drift like mist in the background, there are moods to be gleaned from the beats — the ticks and trips that toggle like drum 'n'bass risen from the grave as something irretrievably decayed but also irresistibly angelic.
more »

Homework
Daft Punk
1997 | VIRGIN

The mid-1990s was a prosperous time for aspiring dance artists, as big beats graced TV commercials and briefly invaded the charts. But the album-length statement of genius remained an elusive quest. That's what made Homework, the debut album from the mysterious French duo of Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, so absorbing. Rather than a collection of singles — massive though they were — Homework managed to capture a feeling of discovery... and exploration.

So there were the era-defining hits "Around the World" and "Da Funk," as well as throbbing club wonders like "Phoenix," "Revolution 909" and "Indo Silver Club." But there were also occasions for reflection and nostalgic pauses, like the ethereal, cresting "Fresh" and the noisome funk of "Oh Yeah," or skits like "Daftendirekt" and "WDPK 83.7 FM," a tribute to the teachers broadcasting daily along the FM dial. As the name suggested, Homework resulted from years of careful study of the finest house, techno, electro and hip-hop records. Perhaps this appreciation for musical history is what compelled Daft Punk to even greater heights in the years to follow. Despite the mystery around their true identities, this is a debt they were never above repaying, from the elaborate, reference-filled Homework album sleeve to "Teachers," a roll call of the duo's personal heroes.
more »

The Raincoats
The Raincoats
1979 | We ThRee / IODA
The Shape Of Jazz To Come
Ornette Coleman
2005 | Rhino Atlantic

Short Films & Diary Entries

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill
1998 | Ruffhouse

Wanting to shed the sexist perception that fellow Fugee and ex-boyfriend Wyclef Jean had shaped her, Lauryn Hill retaliated by creating one of the best albums of the 90s. "Music is supposed to inspire," she sings on "Superstar" — perhaps to Jean, her failed svengali, perhaps to her label bosses, perhaps to her own demanding audience. "So how come we ain't getting no higher?" She then sets out to answer the... question for herself.

Like Marvin Gaye's epic albums of the 1970s, "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" is an emotionally raw set of performances. Hill's voices proliferate, sometimes moving in unison or harmony, sometimes commenting on or responding to one another, sometimes pleading, preaching, declaring and doubting all at once.

The incendiary, hard-rocking "Lost Ones," the witty, winning "Doo Wop (That Thing)," the angry, avenging "Final Hour," and the sweetly remembered "Every Ghetto, Every City" are her moments of clarity. But for the rest of the record, she works through the confusion and ambivalence wrought by love and betrayal — never more intensely than on "Ex-Factor" and "I Used To Love Him." Even the songs about uplift, like "Tell Him," "Everything Is Everything" and "Forgive Them Father," are rooted in the possibility things truly might not improve.

"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" reached its commanding heights only by ruthlessly plumbing the depths. It remains a searingly honest, deeply wrung portrait of a great artist at the peak of her powers.
more »

Mama Tried
Merle Haggard & The Strangers
2001 | CAPITOL
What's Going On
Marvin Gaye
2003 | Motown

Court And Spark
Joni Mitchell
1975 | Rhino

At a time when the lyrics "ro-ma, ro-ma-mah/ ga-ga, ooh-la-la" can land a singer a spot high up on the Billboard charts, it's fun to play an album like Court & Spark, if only to remember the range of feeling that the English language can express when one knows how to use it. A quintessential Joni Mitchell record, Court & Spark looks at loneliness, solitude and love from many sides, and... concludes that no matter whom you're with or what good times you may be having, the sad, gray days will soon come calling.

At least it's not a bummer to listen to. Far from it, in fact. Mitchell's voice is clear and lovely, as fresh and flawless as spring. And her music is a wild, beautiful tangle of jazz and folk that gives audible form to love's crazy contradictions. (Not surprisingly, it's the best-selling album of Mitchell's career). Listen to Court & Spark, and you might imagine that, instead of giving her lover a clutch of pretty flowers to show how she feels, Mitchell would take him by the hand and run with him through a fragrant garden labyrinth. A simple woman she is not.

Court & Spark yielded her highest-ranking single: "Help Me," which reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the summer of 1973. It also features a cover of the Wardell Gray bebop composition "Twisted," which jazz singer Annie Ross popularized with her swinging 1952 rendition. But for me, its telltale track is "Down to You." Mitchell sings, "Everything comes and goes/ Marked by lovers and styles of clothes/ Things that you held high/ And told yourself were true/ Lost or changing as the days come down to you." It's practically a Joni Mitchell manifesto: feeling love fully yet expecting — no, knowing — that it will end and that we are all ultimately alone. Oh, Joni.
more »

My Life
Mary J. Blige
1994 | Geffen

Both singer and sound were more confident on this second album from Mary J. Blige, the first she co-wrote, and considered by many fans her best. Out went the chilly New Jack Swing echo and synth deco of her debut; in came an extended heart-to-heart with fans by the fire over a beat that meant business.

Let it be admitted that the sound is more conventional: The '70s soul samples of... the title track and "Be Happy" are seamlessly blended or recreated rather than recontextualized in a rap way — the direction executive producer Sean "Puffy" Combs and frequent studio guest the Notorious B.I.G. were taking hip hop in general. But if D.C.-hired producer Carl "Chucky" Thompson was brought in to make Blige sound like a true soul singer at home in her mother's music, he did his job: Blige makes Rose Royce's "I'm Goin' Down" her own, in part because down was exactly where she was going.

Or as she would sing 11 years later, "'94 was My Life, and my life wasn't right, so I reached out to you and told you what I been through." She also told you what she was still going through: "I'm satisfied even when I cry," she sings on "No One Else," presumably to the track's co-producer K-Ci Hailey, whom she later described as the inspiration for much of My Life's blueness. "Mary's Joint," with its longing melody later borrowed for Janet Jackson's "I Get Lonely," sounds like hopelessness kidding itself, while the No. 1 dance hit "You Bring Me Joy" seems unconvinced. Most double-edged of all is "I Love You," with its repurposed Isaac Hayes piano line and dog-whistle synth (a nod to Dr. Dre), as funky and resigned as Marvin Gaye at his most autumnal. Has the title sentiment ever sounded more doomed?

Blige put the question to herself squarely on "Be Happy": "How can I love somebody else, if I can't love myself enough to know when it's time, time to let go?" The album sold 2.8 million copies in the U.S. and was nominated for a Grammy in the R&B album category. But it marked the twilight of Uptown Records and a parting of ways with Puffy.
more »

Coat Of Many Colors
Dolly Parton
2007 | RLG/Legacy

Coat of Many Colors is the moment when Dolly Parton became a star. Its title track a Top Ten narrative of Dolly's humble origins a story that follows her still Coat brought her out from Porter Wagoner's shadow and cast her as country's Self-Made Woman No. 1. It also wonderfully encapsulates every element of the nearly 40 years of Dolly's career that have passed since its release: it dabbles in bluegrass and... roots music, features triumphant, Memphis-style R&B, and winks at the majesty of pure pop, all in a tidy 27 minutes. It's a killer. The best song by a long shot is "Here I Am," a song so stupendous it's a miracle it was never an enormous, career-defining hit. Written by Dolly (as is almost every song here), "Here I Am" is a big, '70s-style power ballad, a finger-wag to any man that might underestimate how great even a little bit of Dolly would be in your life. "I can help you find what you've been searching for," she brags with stunning boldness. No bashful lady, she. It's hard to call Coat of Many Colors a country record; it's so much more than that. But every song has its roots in Americana, in the humble hollows of the Appalachians and the songs and tunes passed down through God, through love and through sorrow. Dolly knows all of these. She sings from experience "Traveling Man" and "My Blue Tears" (which can make you weep from its beauty) and it's one she boldly shares. Dolly's career has been incredible in its longevity and its sincerity. And even amidst all of her success, this is her best moment.
more »

Different Class
Pulp
1996 | ISLAND RECORDS
Ready To Die The Remaster
The Notorious B.I.G.
2006 | Bad Boy Records

Leviathan
Mastodon
Relapse Records

Featuring two ex-members of influential noise-metal band Today is the Day, Mastodon creates fringe music for the mainstream — proggy, rhythmically complex torrents of melodic noise that incorporate elements of death metal, grindcore, hardcore, thrash and math rock, and somehow still groove like Skynyrd on crank. With Leviathan, the band funneled its multifaceted attack into a concept album based on Herman Melville's literary classic Moby Dick. Nothing could seem less metal;... little sounds more metal.
more »

Bakesale
Sebadoh
Sub Pop Records
Being There
Wilco
1996 | Reprise

Innervisions
Stevie Wonder
2000 | Motown

Early '70s protest soul had as much silliness and bandwagon jumping as any other musical era. But it can't be a coincidence that Stevie Wonder's greatest album is also his most deeply pessimistic — not only because there was so much to rail against in 1973, and that the government's and society's crimes against humanity had a special sting that would dissipate the more frequently they occurred (familiarity breeds disinterest at least... as much as contempt), but Stevie has always been at his sharpest when he has a direct target to aim for.

On Innervisions, Wonder took stock of the world around him and found a good deal of it wanting — yet he refused to give in to despair, even when sneering at drug abuse on "Too High," cutting a flim-flam man to pieces on "He's Misstra Know-It-All," or, most unforgettably, turning his voice to gravel to warn against damnation on "Living for the City." There's an inherent optimism that lights the darkest passages of this very dark album; that fits with Stevie the activist. But surely the amount of wrong to lament in the early '70s did its share to spur Wonder to his peak.

Rather than a soothing, instantly iconic rolling electric-keyboard melody of the sort that opened Talking Book ("You Are the Sunshine of My Life"), "Too High" worms in at a daunting angle, heavily informed by jazz (Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters was released only two months after Innervisions) as well as funk, and sounds as slippery as the song's subject. The falsetto doo-doo-doo refrain is a little shticky the first time it appears and mournful the last, after the woman who lets drugs take her life over dies: "What did her friends say?/ They said she's too high." "Misstra Know-It-All" and parts of "Jesus Children of America" dig at false preachers. "Living For the City" ends on a sermon. Stevie was a scold, all right, but he picked his targets perfectly.

The mammoth Songs in the Key of Life is rightly seen as Wonder's I-can-do-it-all culmination, but Innervisions ranges more confidently across nearly as much terrain. "Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" goes to Cuba and brings back a great spoken intro: "I speak very, very, um, fluent Spanish." "Visions" is a spiderweb of guitars (and Stevie's Fender Rhodes) that could have been on any number of the period's folk albums. The moony synths of "Golden Lady" turned prog heads around; "All in Love Is Fair" will surely end the first act when Broadway finally gets around to a Stevie jukebox musical (step on it).

And "Higher Ground" is classic rock, flat out: the rhythm swinging and jittery, pounded along by Wonder's sinewy drumming, the twining synthesizers and clavinet tangling like guitars, and Stevie at his most call-the-troops. It's like a totally sober version of John Lennon in "Tomorrow Never Knows": "Believers, keep on believing/ Sleepers, just stop sleeping." Yet listen close to the song's fade-out. There's an ad-lib, just barely audible: "Don't you let nobody bring you down — and they'll sho' nuff try." Brrr.
more »

Mystic Visions

Judee Sill
Judee Sill
2005 | Rhino/Elektra

With her tender, imperfect vocals, lank brown locks and low-slung acoustic guitar, the singer and songwriter Judee Sill embodied the earnest, folksy spirit of California's Laurel Canyon in the 1970s. Sadly, Sill also embraced the era's excesses, and her dark biography is befitting of a martyred cult idol: After running away from home as a teenager, she married an aspiring gangster, was arrested for armed robbery and hauled off to reform school,... picked up a heroin habit, and hustled for cash as a petty thief. But with help from Graham Nash, David Crosby and David Geffen, Sill channeled her personal lapses — and the gospel hooks she collected in reform school — into two stunning folk records before dying of a drug overdose in 1979.

Judee Sill was released in 1971, and — unsurprisingly — it's lyrically preoccupied with grand notions of redemption and hope. "Sweet silver angels over the sea, please come down flyin' low for me," Sill begs on the impeccable "Jesus Was A Crossmaker," over building piano and eventual percussion. On opener "Crayon Angels," Sill lodges another plea for rescue: "Nothin's happened but I think it will soon, so I sit here waitin' for God and a train — to the Astral plane," she sings. Like Nick Drake, Sill's records weren't particularly appreciated in her lifetime, and her posthumous canonization feels almost cruel, but Judee Sill remains a haunting, evocative portrait of a singer using her voice to seek salvation.
more »

Ah Um
Charles Mingus
1999 | Columbia/Legacy

If you're looking for a first serious jazz album to listen to, this might be the one. Charles Mingus occupied a unique place in jazz, one foot planted squarely in tradition — particularly the composer's tradition of Duke Ellington — and the other in the new thing which, in 1959, when this was recorded, was in the process of coming into existence. Both tendencies are in full display here, with one... of Mingus's finest bands (although he referred to it as a "workshop," which is quite accurate) running through a brace of originals that pay tribute to the past ("Open Letter to Duke," "Jelly Roll") and express the present ("Fables of Faubus" refers to the governor of Arkansas 'bitter opposition to racial integration).

There are first recordings of two of Mingus 'immortal classics here. "Better Git It In Your Soul" is infused with a gospel feeling, with Mingus yelling encouragement in the background, and was a shout-out to the "soul" movement in jazz, which stood in opposition to some of the more hyper-intellectual stuff on the scene. "Goodbye Pork Pie Hat" was Mingus 'obituary for the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who had just died. The overwhelming sadness of the melody disguises the fact that it's absolutely of its moment in structure and harmony.

Mingus, as a bassist, relied heavily on his reedmen, and three of his best, John Handy (alto sax, clarinet), Booker Ervin (tenor sax), and Shafi Hadi (alto and tenor sax), are on board. The trombone underlying the ensemble is Jimmy Knepper on some tracks, Willie Dennis on others, piano is by the incredibly underrated Horace Parlan, and Mingus 'long-time rhythm partner, Dannie Richmond, sits at the drums.

It doesn't get much better than this: I've been listening to this album for over 30 years, and I hear something new every time I sit down with it.
more »

Fables Of The Reconstruction
R.E.M.
1998 | IRS CATALOG
Sign 'O' The Times
Prince
2007 | Rhino/Warner Bros.

Manos
The Spinanes
Sub Pop Records

The first indie-label album ever to hit No. 1 on the college radio charts was an unlikely one: this debut by the peculiar, wonderful duo of singer/guitarist Rebecca Gates and drummer Scott Plouf. The Spinanes had initially been very much a part of the early-'90s "international pop underground" scene ("Entire" mentions a cassette by Olympia, Washington, band the Go Team), but they quickly became as interested in precision and complexity as in... soft, fragrant melodies. Gates's lyrics here are impressionistic and emotive, but the duo plays so crisply that they sound absolutely specific. It helped that half of their hooks were rhythmic: "Spitfire" is built around Plouf's snare cracks, "Noel, Jonah and Me" around variations on a stop-time lurch. And they had a sense of negative space that's rare for a rock band — Gates's dreamy murmur and resonant, open-tuned riffs up top, Plouf's inexorable attack at the bottom, and nothing but air between them.
more »

Psychedelic Soul
The Temptations
2003 | Motown

When Dennis Edwards replaced David Ruffin in the Temptations in 1968, producer/songwriter Norman Whitfield gave a brand new bag to Motown's most popular male group. Introduced to the psychedelic sounds of Sly and the Family Stone via Temp's member Otis Williams, Whitfield took Stone's fusion grooves and made them cinematic. Starting with "Cloud Nine," Whitfield de-emphasized Ruffin's departure by distributing the vocal line across the Temptations' widely differing voices á la... Sly and Family, while white session guitarist Dennis Coffey brought the wah-wah of Jimi Hendrix. "Cloud Nine" won Motown its first Grammy, and it established the label's new sophisticated, yet streetwise style soon embraced by all of its stars. For its 1969 sequel "Runaway Child, Running Wild," Whitfield expanded the track's length to nearly 10 minutes, and the prototype for disco's extended mixes was born.

What distinguished Whitfield's sprawling productions from lengthy acid-rock tracks was that they weren't mere jams. Based on verses and choruses just like the group's early hits, "Papa Was a Rolling Stone" and the others are paced as miniature symphonies with multiple peaks and valleys. The same strings that gave Motown its density during the mid '60 were now isolated over the beat. Instead of a constant blare, instrumentation came and went, swelled and subsided. The constant fluctuations made the listening experience more like a journey — a key disco metaphor. Rather than encouraging dancers to sprint, Whitfield paced his records to suspend them in rapture.
more »

All-Night Dance Party

Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-6
Soundway: Various Artists
2011 | Manufacturer / Believe Digital

Some compilations that highlight a particular sound during a particular time follow a straight line. But when that time and place is as relatively under-documented as early '70s Nigerian pop, such tidiness isn't so necessary — it's enough to just crack the door and to keep it open for an enticing while. That's why Nigeria Special, a brilliant two-hour tour through a musical world that ranged far more widely than even a... serious fan of this era and place might have been aware, is such a triumph. Covering the period just after the Biafran War (1967-70) had ended, Nigeria Special concentrates on the region's late highlife and the post-Fela Kuti fallout of Afrobeat — Kuti was an exemplar of the style, but by no means the sole model of success. If that means the collection's focus blurs a little, that's more than made up for the sheer breadth, range and intrigue on display here.

Many of Nigeria Special's cuts are so juicy it's impossible to believe they've never been made available outside of Nigeria before. The Funkees'"Akula Owu Onyeara" — originally released in two parts, and edited together here for the first time — works like Fela at his most rhythmically sinuous; the simple keyboard figures could be Morse Code signal for uncut funk, and it has one of the most perfect endings you'll ever hear. George Akaeze & His Augmented Hits'"Business Before Pleasure" is delectably light-footed Afrobeat with laconic chants and jazzy horns so friendly they belie the title: this is business as pleasure. The nonstop forward motion of the Semi Colon's "Nekwaha Semi Colon" is formally disco — the hi-hat/kick-drum pattern points right at it — but it's so hypnotic it seems rooted in something far older (and more intrinsically Nigerian). The highlife tracks are equally hot: St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band's "Onwu Ama Dike" is made even lovelier by its slightly messy rhythmic feel, not to mention the semi-sweet horn line.

Compiler Miles Cleret claims that there are thousands more such goodies that have just been sitting in Nigeria waiting to be rediscovered. The 26 included here are such a pleasure to listen to that, for anyone who loves them, they could inspire fantasies of booking a flight to Lagos and starting a treasure hunt of one's own.
more »

New York Dolls
New York Dolls
1987 | Island Def Jam
In the Jungle Groove
James Brown
2003 | Polydor

Get Happy
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2007 | Hip-O Records

After a drunken quarrel on the Armed Forces tour turned into a disaster that left Costello looking like a dick at best and a racist at worst (in retrospect, it was definitely "dick"), he took solace in old soul records — the deep Southern soul of Stax most of all — and somehow ended up cranking out even more amazing songs than he had been over the previous few years. The album... that subsequently came out of a frantic recording session in Holland speeds through 20 songs in 48 minutes, and it's the Attractions' most impressive work as a group: flexible, powerful, psychically synched-up, and above all fast. They effortlessly pull off one soul groove after another (keyboardist Steve Nieve cops licks from Booker T. and the M.G.s all over the place), as well as tear-in-my-beer country ("Motel Matches"), ska ("Human Touch") and garage rock ("Beaten to the Punch"). Those last three, by the way, all happen in a seven-minute span.

If some of these songs are formal exercises, they're fantastically entertaining formal exercises: The opener "Love for Tender," for instance, is the riff from "You Can't Hurry Love" taken at bottle-of-amphetamines speed, wrapped around approximately five thousand puns about money ("I pay you a compliment/ You think I am inno-cent"), and executed in less than two minutes. The first single, oddly, was a cover — Sam & Dave's downtempo soul duet "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down," reworked as crazed new wave — but Costello's original songs reward ungnarling their tightly-knotted wordplay, especially "New Amsterdam," a little waltz about portable exile that he recorded on his own. The big lyrical picture of Get Happy!! is a bitter young man measuring himself against the guys that the girls he likes seem to be more interested in, and figuring out reasons to despise them all; by the end, though, he's figured out that he's kind of a dick, too.
more »

Rocks The House
Etta James
1992 | Geffen

This 1963 show from Nashville's New Era Club is a candidate for best live album ever, and you need only hear her version of Jimmy Reed's "Baby What You Want Me to Do" to realize that. It's one of the sexiest things ever recorded, with Etta wailing and moaning before making erotic nonverbal sounds — you can't even call it scat-singing — that bring the house down. The raunchy band, featuring David... T. Walker on guitar, is torrid; the audience, which roars out call and response with Etta, is fevered. "Tell Mama," indeed. Or else.
more »

Gold
Buddy Holly
2005 | Geffen
Aquemini
Outkast
1998 | Arista/LaFace Records

One Night Stand - Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963
Sam Cooke
2005 | RCA/Legacy

1963, Miami, Florida — below the Mason Dixon line. Jim Crow was still law, Martin Luther King was just about to march on Washington, and the bluntly named Chitlin Circuit (the collection of clubs where black artists played and sang for black audiences) was still in full operation. Sam Cooke had been a star for most of his life by the time of this now-legendary gig at the Harlem Square Club. At... 32, the singer already had a best-selling Greatest Hits album, and had entranced legions of church-goers as a certified gospel sex symbol through the fifties (including a very young Aretha Franklin, who has always admitted her melismatic signing style was a straight-up tribute to her friend's liquid vocals). Cooke had been working his audience members, especially those of the female persuasion, into bosom-heaving frenzies for years — and not just because of his movie-star good looks. The plain truth: Cooke could sing like no other man before or since.

This live recording shows off all of Cooke's gifts. "It's All Right," is the gospel classic "Touch the Hem of His Garment" (which, not coincidentally, Cooke had already made into a hit with the Soul Stirrers), secularized. Except instead of praying to Jesus for mercy, Cooke advises each man in the audience to "shake and wake" his woman up when he comes home at night, wait until she "wipes all the sleep from her eyes," and tell her "Believe me baby, it's all right." A perfect lullaby.

Songs such as "Cupid" or "Twistin 'the Night Away" may sound retro now, even corny at times, especially to ears used to the tough funk of James Brown or George Clinton. But that's because it's almost impossible, in our current Yes We Did era, to imagine what it must have been like back then for a soul singer whose rough edges were so easy to smooth. Cooke could charm with such ease, it would have been a piece of cake for him to go the Sammy Davis route. But he didn't. And JB and Dr. Funkenstein, not to mention Prince and (early, fantastic) Michael Jackson, wouldn't have been the same if he had. Live At the Harlem Square Club does have a bit of a preserved-in-amber quality. That's not the record's fault, however. By 1964, Cooke was dead, shot to death in a motel under circumstances that were never clear (his last masterpiece, the introspective, heartbreaking, "A Change is Gonna Come," was not released until after his death). It's wonderful to be able to hear his voice here, so relaxed and true, and with the audience he knew and loved the best. As Cooke tells the ladies in the crowd, and they ecstatically croon back, "I think of you every morning, and dream of you every night."
more »

Off the Wall
Michael Jackson
1983 | Epic
Absolute Belter
Various
2010 | FINDERS KEEPERS

Bruised Knuckle Bottle-Breakers

Dig Me Out
Sleater-Kinney
2009 | Kill Rock Stars / Redeye

t the end of the decade of "women in rock" (yes, Virginia, we only get one), this trio born of the Northwest "riot grrrl" scene defined feminist punk by ingraining the lessons they'd learned in their Women Studies classes as deeply into their music as phallocentrism is etched into the sound of Led Zep or Snoop Dog. Go beyond the lyrics (which do read like a punk Sisterhood Is Powerful) to revel... in the non-linear dialogue of awesome yowler Corin Tucker and chatterbox Carrie Brownstein, the taut-yet-flexible song structures rising up from Janet Weiss's Amazonian drums and Brownstein's guitar heroism, which sparkles in circles instead of hammering for the gods. Dig Me Out has the anthems any grassroots movement needs, but the band can also do lovestruck ("One More Hour"), funny ("Little Babies") and spooky ("Jenny") —` thus proving conclusively, for any doubters, that grrrls are people, too.
more »

Lifestylez Ov Da Poor & Dangerous
Big L
1995 | Columbia
New Day Rising
Hüsker Dü
1985 | SST Records / The Orchard

Exile On Main Street
The Rolling Stones
2010 | UME Direct

The re-release of a treasured cultural touchstone is occasion for seeing how the work in question has telescoped the years, and, more to the point, how your own perceptions and persona have evolved and grown along with it. With the second coming of Exile On Main Street, the Rolling Stones' controversial and iconic masterwork, the looking-back not only encompasses myself, but the glimmering binary stars of the Stones, Mick and Keith; and,... in some ways, these responses overshadow the album itself.

I have particular reason to welcome a chance for reappraisal, since two weeks after Exile's original release in the late spring of 1972, I reviewed the album for Rolling Stone, giving it a medium-cool analysis I've had some cause to regret over the years. It was a classic case, as the cliché goes, of not seeing the forest for the trees. Song by song, even over the kitchen sink of a double album set, individual highlights seemed hard to come by, though the thrill of hearing "Happy," "Rip This Joint," and "Shine A Light" has been burnished on this reissue by their many sing-alongs over the years, and "Tumbling Dice" is a undeniable classic. But to my then rock-critical ears, thinking with head instead of heart, this was a comedown from the Stones scaling the peaks of some of the most cataclysmic music of their career, an arc that seemed to ascend around Beggar's Banquet, continue through Let It Bleed and burst into fireworks with Sticky Fingers, when, not so coincidentally, they were at their apex of creativity and influence. I was spoiled, and my disappointment showed, especially given the first long form double album of the Stones' career.

But Exile, as the title implies, is more about time and place, a mood and atmosphere, and its sprawling, ramshackle track listing, trying on blues forms and extending heightened jams, stretching out for long solos from Stones' sidemen like sax player Bobby Keys and pianist Nicky Hopkins, with an especial nod to the group's slide guitarist at the time, Mick Taylor, gives the album a documentary in-the-making feel, enhanced by a remastering, which seems to clear up some of the tube-driven haze of the original vinyl edition (whether this is a good or bad thing I will leave to your speaker system).

The tale has oft been told of the Stones setting up a mobile recording studio in Keith Richards's basement in the south of France, inside a mansion called Nellcote, though the album was later pieced together in sessions that transported tapes from London to Los Angeles; and it is within this compressed, hothouse atmosphere, a heart of darkness on the verge of tropic (see the claustrophobic "Ventilator Blues," and the booklet photos of sprawled bodies on the floor of the makeshift studio, not to mention Charlie's striped jacket being used as a bass drum muffler!), that the Stones put together the loosest, most freewheeling album of their career.

That's the way Keith wanted it, and his current view of Exile is that it is a sacred text, allowing no tampering within its concentric circles of recorded groove. Mick, however, couldn't resist and in the bonus disc, gathered with the help of Don Was, adds new lyrics to four songs that are a call-and-response to his younger self: "You always brought out the best in me," he lays his heart on the line in the frankly beautiful "Following The River," and I wonder if he's talking about Keith. The alternate takes and "bonus" material don't change Exile so much as show its process, the tracks that didn't make the official release holding their own: "I'm Not Signifying" is lascivious in its cakewalk, and "Plundered My Soul" is all impassioned romp, galvanized by Charlie Watts' archetypal loping drums, affectionate regret coloring the remembrance.

Beyond bonus, however, it is Exile's remarkable resilience as an album that pushes play in this decade. Much of its myth is just that — a celebration of lifestyle and rock stardom that took root in a fecund, overheated basement as the hours ticked till dawn. It was Mick who gathered the tapes of the Nellcote sessions and overdubbed the gospel-ish feel that imbues Exile with its sense of redemption amidst decadence. The duality of the Stones' was never more manifest than here, with Keith's voice entwining harmonies with Mick, Mick slightly back in the mix, and the force of the band carrying them forward. It's interesting to compare the two versions of "Soul Survivor" with each fronting the song, just as it is fascinating — now almost four decades later — to contemplate the roads not taken: In the opening "Rocks Off," one of the Stones' many nigh-trademark barrelhouse stompers, a bridge appears out of nowhere, and the song slows, turns psychedelic as tremolo phasers wash over the guitars and vocal. It seems almost contrary to the festive mood, a malevolence and an intimation of gathering storm clouds, and I find myself wishing they would have followed its tangent.

But then, I'm not so different than I was when I first took a stroll down Main Street. Neither is Exile.
more »

Walk Among Us
Misfits
2006 | Rhino/Slash
Songs For The Deaf
Queens of the Stone Age
2007 | Interscope

The Black Album
Jay-Z
2010 | Roc-a-fella Records

The song that has always enchanted me on The Black Album is the last song, which is called "My 1st Song," which is meant to be the last song of Jay-Z's career. Got that? It is a beautiful, bedeviling denouement; Jay has rarely rapped better, more intricately, and with such purpose. It's because he knew exactly what he was meant to be doing: Saying goodbye. "Goodbye, this is my second major breakup/... My first was, with a pager/ With a hooptie, a cookpot, and the game/ This one's with the stool, with the stage, with the fortune/ Maybe not the fortune, but certainly the fame."

Knowing what we know now — Jay-Z would be back to full-time recording artist status in three years — makes examining the self-flagellation of The Black Album something of a fool's errand. Elizabeth Mendez Berry wrote for The Village Voice that he'd become "bored by the alter ego he'd outgrown." So how seriously do we take the musings on a half-hearted retirement? Well, maybe without that specter hanging, we can hear it for the achievement it is: a great Jay-Z album.

Originally conceived as a single-producer venture in 1998 with DJ Premier, The Black Album wouldn't come together until years later. It was later advertised with a one-producer, one-song plan, which also never panned out. Finally, it became a typical sort of Jay-Z project, featuring contributions from trusted collaborators, in-house Roc-A-Fella super-producers, Kanye West and Just Blaze, sensing the moment as much as Jay, and crucial additions from a murderer's row of sound men (Timbaland, Eminem, DJ Quik, The Neptunes twice, Rick Rubin, out of rap retirement for a spell) and a handful of then-unknowns and never-heard-from-agains (9th Wonder, The Buchanans, Aqua). Together, there are canonical songs: "Public Service Announcement (Interlude)," initially just a tossed-off one verse proclamation of pride that became a defining document for the MC, with lyrics — from "got the hottest chick in the game wearing my chain" to "like Che Guevara with bling on, I'm complex" — that became rallying cries. Rubin's stomping "99 Problems" still sounds like a tank full of cowbells taking a 40-foot drop onto the pavement. Kanye's "Encore" is a convivial farewell song, though it comes early in the mix. Eminem's "Moment of Clarity" is tightly wound, but never tight-lipped, as Jay raps, "I've dumbed down for my audience and doubled my dollars/ They criticize me for it yet they all yell holler." Even "Threat," the then-ascendant 9th Wonder's contribution, returns Jay to the creeping majesty of his debut, Reasonable Doubt.. And what would a pro forma Jay-Z album be without a Neptunes trifle? At the time of release, "Change Clothes" seemed a grievous error, a cold calculating move designed to ensure record sales. So many years on, it is what it was supposed to be: a palate cleanser.

"My 1st Song" still kills me. It's that "maybe not the fortune" line. Jay-Z has long been a dramatist, a self-styled orchestrator of his own mythology. And nothing could be more grand than a ceremonial retirement. Except, maybe, for the even grander comeback. But then, there is one more Easter egg worth parsing on The Black Album. From "Encore": "When I come back like Jordan, wearin' the 4-5/ It ain't to play games with you/ It's to aim at you, probably maim you." Considering said comeback, he was more right than he knew.
more »

The Score
Fugees
2008 | Columbia
Let It Be [Expanded Edition]
The Replacements
2008 | Ryko/Rhino

Moody and Beautiful

Post
Björk
1995 | 143/Lava/Atlantic

Having established herself on the pop stage with Debut, follow-up Post (1995) saw Björk's ambitions go widescreen.With everyone from Tricky to Howie B to 808 State's Graham Massey fighting over the producer's chair and a musical palette ranging from ambient dub ("Possibly Me") to strident techno-pop ("Army of Me") Post boasts a musical vision to match Cecil B. DeMille.

And then there's the lyrics. Bizarre, brazen and remorselessly tongue-in cheek,... songs like "Enjoy" and "You've Been Flirting Again" are dark, delirious examinations of the mating game whilst "Hyperballad" is euphoric — "We live on a mountain/ Right at the top/ There's a beautiful view" — but only to disguise a damning rejection of consumerism. It was smash hit "It's Oh So Quiet" which kept the accountants happy, however. A reworking of Betty Hutton's Hollywood showtune "Blow a Fuse" delivered with a kindergarten cutesiness, confirming her role as indie-rock's reigning queen of weird. From this point on, Björk was in the big league.
more »

Sketches Of Spain
Miles Davis
Columbia/Legacy

Arranger Gil Evans was one of Miles Davis's key allies throughout his career. Starting in 1957 they collaborated on four projects for trumpet and orchestra, beginning with the fine Miles Ahead and ending with the problematic but still rewarding Quiet Nights. The series 'middle volumes are Porgy and Bess, where Gershwin's music inspires some of Miles's most poignant trumpeting, and the exquisite Sketches of Spain. Its long flagship number recasts a... slow movement from a 1939 guitar concerto by Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo; it's enlivened by Evans 'gorgeous dissonances for flutes and massed brass, and flamenco echoes from rattling castanets. But the album's real marvels are a pair of shorter pieces derived from field recordings, which push Miles into previously uncharted territory. "The Pied Piper" is based on a Peruvian Indian pennywhistle melody, played by a pig castrator to advertise his services as he makes his rounds. Miles imbues it with such deep feeling, it's as if he empathizes with the pigs. "Saeta" draws on music for a Spanish Holy Week procession, right down to the sound of a brass band advancing from and then retreating into the distance, like something out of Charles Ives; the dire, wounded sound of Davis's trumpet is unforgettably stark.
more »

Bandwagonesque
Teenage Fanclub
1997 | Geffen
My Favorite Things
John Coltrane
1998 | Rhino Atlantic

Voodoo
D'Angelo
2000 | NOO TRYBE

The success of his 1995 debut Brown Sugar left D'Angelo in a minor funk, irked by the music industry and suffering from a bout of writer's block. The unease that accumulated during his sabbatical surfaced with his 1998 single, "Devil's Pie." Built on a paranoid, tail-chasing DJ Premier bass loop, D'Angelo turned away from the earthly delights of Brown Sugar and crooned about the spiritual crisis in hip-hop and beyond: "Drugs and... thugs, women and wine/ Three or four at a time/ Watch them all stand in line/For a slice of the devil's pie." From its very title to its dark aesthetic, Voodoo fixed on the possibility of purpose and redemption beyond the material world — this was an album that explored the meaning of "soul" as something more than a musical classification. There were still crushing moments of conventional beauty, like "Untitled (How Does it Feel)" or the charming "Send it On," and Method Man and Redman lend their intimate chemistry to the muscular "Left and Right." But on moments like "Chicken Grease," with its sketches of a bygone Southern simplicity, and the captivating "Africa," Voodoo felt ghostly and haunted, as though D'Angelo and Soulquarians were trying to conjure a portal to the past during their marathon jam sessions.
more »

The Bends
Radiohead
1995 | CAPITOL
Nina Simone Sings The Blues
Nina Simone
RCA/Legacy

Lady Soul [w/bonus selections]
Aretha Franklin
1987 | Rhino Atlantic

The first four songs here, including the gigantic hit "Chain of Fools," are Aretha the newly minted superstar stepping out from behind the gospel pulpit to address the secular world. The rest, from the "I Never Loved a Man" outtake (!) "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" to her sister (and backup singer) Carolyn Franklin's deep ballad "Ain't No Way," are all about the pulse and ache of sex —... they're not come-ons, exactly, but meditations on what happens behind the bedroom door, and what that means to everything outside it. And the all-star band, featuring Bobby Womack, Spooner Oldham, and (briefly) Eric Clapton, rolls toward the blues right alongside her.
more »

Mar 01, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

eMusic Welcomes Brilliance Audio

Thrills and Kills

Play
1 Credit
Cell 8
Anders Roslund
2013 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Shiver
Lisa Jackson
2013 | Abridged
Play
2 Credits
Last to Die
Tess Gerritsen
2013 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Taken
Robert Crais
2013 | Unabridged

Celebrity Skin

Play
1 Credit
The Guy Under the Sheets
Chris Elliot
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story
D. T. Max
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
My Mother Was Nuts
Penny Marshall
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
The Passage of Power
Robert A. Caro
2013 | Unabridged

Other Voices, Other Worlds

Play
1 Credit
Dragon's Time
Anne McCaffrey
2013 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Pathfinder
Orson Scott Card
2013 | Unabridged
Play
2 Credits
Odd Apocalypse
Dean Koontz
2013 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Down these Strange Streets
Gardner Dozois
2012 | Unabridged

Fiction Heavyweights

Play
1 Credit
Waiting
Ha Jin
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Indignation
Philip Roth
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
2012 | Unabridged

Deep Thoughts on Pop Culture

Play
1 Credit
The End of Men
Hanna Rosin
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
I Want My MTV
Rob Tannenbaum
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Googled
Ken Auletta
2012 | Unabridged
Play
1 Credit
Fear and Loathing at Rolling Stone
Hunter S. Thompson
2012 | Unabridged

Mar 01, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Who Are…My Gold Mask

File under: Spellbinding breakup rock

For fans of: Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Kills, The Cure, Lightning Dust

From: Chicago

Personae: Gretta Rochelle and Jack Armondo

At this point, the breakup album has been bent into countless shapes. So rather than try to re-shape it, on their debut album My Gold Mask’s Gretta Rochelle and Jack Armondo simply amplified its effects. They didn’t skimp on dramatics, with Rochelle’s pleading vocals, Armondo’s spiraling guitar riffs and lyrics that grapple with psychosis and reference Gothic literature and Italo horror flicks. The result achieves a spellbinding emotional intensity that’s easy to inhabit.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller chatted with the duo about their Jane Eyre-meets-surf-rock aesthetic, dealing with panic attacks through song, and maintaining a sense of humor throughout their theatrics.

On being influenced by Chicago:

Gretta Rochelle: We do a lot of our writing during the winter. It gets really frigid here, which lends a hand to our writing. We bury down in our studio, which is this warehouse that doesn’t have heat.

Jack Armondo: Chicago influences our music environmentally, but not as much musically. Stylistically, there are a lot of great Chicago bands, but there aren’t a lot that we fit in with.

On the origins of My Gold Mask’s aesthetic:

Armondo: I was always in more hard rock and pop-punk bands, which is very different from what we do now.

Rochelle: I had played in high school riot grrrl bands — I love me some Bikini Kill — and a rock-pop band before this. When we first started, we experimented with different sounds and tones and vocal approaches.

Armondo: We’ve said from the beginning that there aren’t any rules for what My Gold Mask can be. Our first nine songs were really different. There are clues in all the early EPs that have kind of led to our heavy vibe now. The album is a natural extension. We wanted to hone in more on specific feelings: lost love, longing and conflict of emotion — wanting something even if it’s not good for you and pursuing it anyway.

On taking inspiration from Italo horror films:

Armondo: When we were writing Leave Me Midnight, we were on this Giallo kick — old Italian murder-mystery, horror films from the ’70s. There’s usually a lot of psychosis involved, visceral moments. It can be kind of hokey, but that mood, tension and dramatic feel is something that we try to do with our music. We try to create tension and a cinematic [feel].

Rochelle: Suspiria is one of the most gorgeously-shot horror films from that time and has so much beauty and darkness. It inspired me to play around with layering vocals and try to capture that same dark beauty.

Armondo: The album art was our tribute to [Suspiria director] Dario Argento, but we didn’t want it to look exactly like it was lifted from the movie. We wanted it to look like something from the past that could also be from the future. We wanted something that was pretty, but also foreboding and a little mysterious.

Rochelle: The album deals with duality, which we tried to capture in the artwork and the title: Leave Me Midnight, can be either inviting [midnight] or warding it off.

On writing about panic attacks first-hand:

Rochelle: A lot of times, I write from personal experience. I feel like I have to have experienced something to be able to convey it accurately. I suffer from panic attacks, and “Lost In My Head” is very true to that. It’s a very personal song to me.

Armondo: That song was something Gretta really wanted to talk about. Because she deals with panic attacks, the way she talks about it in the song is very accurate to the way it feels.

Rochelle: People are always talking about stress or anxiety, but when you live with panic attacks, that feeling that lasts about 20 seconds feels like death for an entire day. So I thought it was important to flush that out for myself.

On the album’s Gothic moments:

Armondo: “Wound,” to me, sounds like someone that’s trapped in this big old Victorian house in this relationship with someone who is completely neglectful. This person is left alone in the house and is sort of numb to the whole situation. A lot of the album has to do with relationships that didn’t turn out the way you imagined when you started. Love and loss and conflict of emotion – wanting something even if it’s not good for you and pursuing it anyway — are all themes on the album.

Rochelle: It’s a lot about the bittersweet moments that may not be so healthy for us, but we crave those things regardless.

On Gretta’s zig-zagging vocals:

Rochelle: My vocals emulate a drugged-out state on “In Our Babylon.” It’s one of those party songs about a party you shouldn’t have gone to.

Armondo: It’s about the downside of partying like staying too long and thinking, “Oh God, I should go home, but I can’t.”

Rochelle: I want the listener to get dropped into the song and kind of swim around with us. I think after a couple listens the lyrics will pop out.

Armondo: We like having a little bit of murkiness in our lyrics. When I listen to music where you can’t hear the lyrics too well, I almost listen closer, because I’m trying to hear and understand. That can draw you into songs, and that’s why things aren’t ultra-clear. I think our songs grow with a few listens. That can be a dangerous game in today’s world, when people can listen things only once and move on, but we still like music that reveals more the more you listen.

On balancing the darkness with a sense of humor:

Armondo: We’re lighthearted people — we’re not sitting in a cave wearing monk outfits. We take our art seriously, but we think it’s important to have a sense of humor in our personal lives. We weren’t trying to be campy on the album, but at the same time there is almost a melodrama to it, and we’re aware of that. Like, “Burn Like the Sun” has a lot of post-apocalyptic imagery — “letting it all burn like the sun” and the idea of watching things melt. It sounds like a natural disaster, but that’s because some relationships are like natural disasters!

Feb 27, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

New This Week: Autre Ne Veut, Sally Shapiro, Emmylou Harris & More!

Autre Ne Veut, Anxiety: A new one from Arthur Ashin aka Autre Ne Veut. eMusic’s Andrew Parks says:

So while Anxiety features more than its fair share of Timbaland-vis-Timberlake tropes and unironic Top 40 nods, the shuffle and sheen of the singer/producer’s muscular studio mix can’t hide the confessionals that are exorcised across 10 mildly creepy tracks. It’s as if we were all invited to Ashin’s American Idol audition, only to watch in horror as he writhes around the floor to a rubberized Rihanna beat like a freshly-killed eel.

Sally Shapiro, Somewhere Else: The third set from the mysterious Sally Shapiro and producer Johan Agebjörn. Laura Studarus says:

An unabashedly romantic head rush, the third effort by the Swedish duo (consisting of Shapiro and producer Johan Agebjörn) contains a world of candy heart-worthy sweet nothings, rendered irresistible by Shapiro’s coquettish whisper. No longer simply contented to fall lockstep with Italo Disco, Somewhere Else lets elements of acid house, dance and good ol’ fashioned electro pop bleed around the edges of each track.

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, Old Yellow Moon: A long-awaited collaboration between country greats. Holly George-Warren says:

Old Yellow Moon, with its rough-hewn, live-in-a-room ambience, offers what Harris refers to as “living room music.” “This project — like Rodney’s and my relationship — started with sitting around on the floor with two acoustic guitars and finding songs that we love,” according to Harris. “This record represents that.”

The Mavericks, In Time: A triumphant turn after a decade-long hiatus. Says Peter Blackstock:

In Time is awash in Latin rhythms and horn flourishes that suggest The Mavericks would be a better fit for the Buena Vista Social Club, and that’s as it should be: Leader Raul Malo’s powerful, distinctive voice is at its best when freed from boundaries of market or genre.

Charles Lloyd & Jason Moran, Hagar’s Song: These two are generations apart but make a perfect musical pair. Peter Margasak says:

Jason Moran, one of the most visionary composers, improvisers and conceptualists of his generation, has appeared on three of Charles Lloyd’s albums since 2008, and with Hagar’s Song, they not only share equal billing for the first time, but they demonstrate that their artistic partnership has never been more simpatico and sublime.

Various Artists, Change the Beat: The Celluloid Records Story 1979-1987 - Stunning compilation highlighting Celluloid Records, an imprint that can boast post-punk bands like Killing Time as well as the earliest hip-hop releases. An overview of some of the most fertile of late-1970s to 1980s downtown NYC cross-genre experiments.

Doldrums, Lesser Evil – Maxed-out, overload electronic pop from a mischievous experimenter. Stevie Chick says:

Montreal-based fractured-pop auteur Airick Woodhead is a sonic collagist who clearly isn’t happy until he’s saturated his track with untold layers of noise and fragmented melody. “She Is The Wave,” a collaboration with Canadian electronic artist Guy Dallas, is a case in point. It’s a cyclone of elements that, at first, seems random, but on closer inspection, has a beautifully choreographed tunefulness deep in the chaos. On “Egypt,” Woodhead weaves industrial noises, blips and crashes into ever-changing, sweetly discombobulated pop — it could be Art Of Noise for the GarageBand generation.

Johnny Marr, The Messenger – Marr’s back, this time not as a sideman but with a breezy, agreeable solo record.

Nadia Sirota, Baroque - The violist Nadia Sirota’s follow-up to her vital disc of new classical works First Things First. New works by Judd Greenstein, Missy Mazzoli (of former eMusic Selects alums Victoire), Nico Muhly, and more.

Olafur Arnalds, The Winter EP - Patient, glowing miniatures from this composer who works in a soundtrack-friendly ambient-classical mode.

Bilal, A Love Surreal - Liquid, languorous and understatedly funky and weird neo-soul record from Bilal, whose career has never been paid the attention of his contemporaries. This record is excellent, shades of Shuggie and Frank Ocean.

Mogwai, Les Revenants – New EP from post-punk legends is a soundtrack to a French television show, and it sounds like it suits their alluringly dour mood just fine.

Ed Harcourt, Back In The Woods - Latest effort from the singer/songwriter finds him in fine, dependable, apple-wry form.

Kutt Calhoun, Black Gold – Hard-bitten raps from the Midwest rapper Kutt Calhoun, from Tech-9 Strange Music imprint.

Ill Bill, The Grimy Awards - Former Non Phixion member releases another brutal, hardcore testament to his roots.

Gensu Dean, Abrasions - Low-key street erudition, shades of GZA, from Gensu Dean, who makes crisp, cold DJ Premier-style classic rap out of Texas.

10,000 Maniacs, Music From the Motion Picture - The return of 10,000 Maniacs! The band’s first studio LP in 13 years.

Darkthrone, The Underground Resistance - The black metal progenitors continue blazing down their late-period operatic path, confounding early fans and discovering new territory along the way.

Kavinsky, OutRun – The debut from the French house artist, out today.

Girls Names, The New Life - Indie-poppers from Belfast go darker and more cinematic on their excellent-sounding Slumberland second LP.

Popstrangers, Antipodes -Britpop-influenced New Zealanders ready their first missive.

Golden Grrls, Golden Grrls - More cuddly indie-pop, with guitar tones fuzzier than a baby chick and boy/girl vocals. Great songwriting and perfect production help this one stand out.

Vietnam, an A.merican D.ream - New record on Mexican Summer, slightly bent and drunk-sounding jangle-pop.

Various Artists, FatCat Records Winter Sampler 2013 – FREE SAMPLER, everyone, with new material by Frightened Rabbit, Twilight Sad, U.S. Girls, Mice Parade, and many more flagship Fatcat acts! Your “no reason not to click this button” of the day.

SINGLES

David Bowie, The Stars (Are Out Tonight) - The second inkling of what to expect from David Bowie’s new record A New Day,. This one snarls and scrapes where “Where Are We Now” sighed and moaned. This record is going to be interesting.

Ducktails, Letter of Intent - Latest single!

Feb 26, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

The Mavericks, In Time

A decade later, Raul Malo and his mates leave country in their past

At this point, it’s flat-out inaccurate to refer to the Mavericks as a country band. They were always left-of-center anyway, despite placing more than a dozen singles on the country charts and earning a 1996 country Grammy. Their origins in the multicultural melting-pot of Miami ultimately inform their music more than their music-biz ties in Nashville. In Time, their triumphant return after a 10-year hiatus, is awash in Latin rhythms and horn flourishes that suggest they’d be a better fit for the Buena Vista Social Club, and that’s as it should be: Leader Raul Malo’s powerful, distinctive voice is at its best when freed from boundaries of market or genre. It makes sense, then, that the group reprises the sultry, seductive, danceable groove of “Come Unto Me” at the end of the album with a Spanish-language rendition. It’s not that country is entirely absent from their music now — traces of honky-tonk (the upbeat “Lies”) and classic balladry (“In Another’s Arms”) still linger — but they’re elements rather than parameters for a band that has reached beyond such easy categorization. Nowhere is that more evident than on the sweeping 8-minute opus “Call Me When You Get To Heaven,” as the McCrary Sisters’ harrowing chants push the band toward untraveled territory; it’s practically the Mavericks’ own personal “Stairway To Heaven.”

Feb 26, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Who Are…Pascal Pinon

File under: Ethereal folk/pop interwoven with haunting vocal harmonies

For fans of: Sigur Ros, Sin Fang, Fleet Foxes, Psapp

From: Reykjavik, Iceland

Personae: Twin sisters Jófríður and Ásthildur

When they were 14, Jófríður and Ásthildur started a band for no other reason than it seemed like fun. However, the twin sisters never anticipated Pascal Pinon would be anything more than an enjoyable after-school activity.

“We’re so super shy,” says, Jófríður laughing while recounting the horror of their first concert. “We couldn’t stand, we had to sit down. My feet were shaking tremendously! I could barely speak between songs.”

Now 18 and on the cusp of graduation, the girls’ hobby has taken them further than they could have anticipated. On the strength of their childlike self-titled debut they signed to Morr Music (home to likeminded acts such as Sin Fang, Mum, and Amiina), and caught the attention of Sigur Rós producer, Alex Somers. Pascal Pinon’s second album Twosomeness (produced by Somers) is full-spectrum expansion on their delicate blend of porcelain Icelandic/English vocal harmonies, ghostly found sounds and familial intimacy. There’s still a hint of childlike wonderment, but maturation — as it turns out — can be pretty magical as well.

Before Jófríðurleft to watch a symphony performance, she told eMusic’s Laura Studarus about Pascal Pinon’s fragile beginnings, surviving the teenage years, and how working with producer made them more themselves.

On their humble beginnings:

When we started, we were 14 years old. We both felt that we didn’t fit with our classmates. We were kind of outsiders. They were just kids who lived in our neighborhood who we had nothing in common with. For that reason, when we started, I thought that they would hate it, that they wouldn’t like it at all. I was very shy. I didn’t want them to see it or hear it at all. But then, we got such positive response from people I had never talked to at all! I felt like people actually respected that we were doing something. Nobody laughed at us, which I thought initially they would do. It was very encouraging. We were so young and everything was so fragile at the time.

On common talking points:

People try to create an image for you because they want to market you. It’s a thing that comes with doing pop music. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it holds hands. You create something that you are, and is easy for people to recognize. I feel like sometimes it’s necessary for me as well. When I’m listening to a new artist, I see a name and I want to know the backstory. The easiest thing and the most eye-catching thing for us is that we’re twins and we started young. Both of those things are actually true. So I’m not going to be fighting against it. I don’t feel like it’s negative, it’s just facts. It’s okay for me. As long as it’s not fake or pretentious. I feel like you shouldn’t fight against something so normal and natural.

On growing up with your best friend:

We fought all the time! We were like cats and dogs. We disagreed on things; we used to fight physically and with words. At the same time, we were really close. When we were not fighting, we were really happy. Now we’re really tight, actually. It’s really good. I’m really, really happy that I have her. It’s like having your best friend all the time. You don’t have to worry about ever losing them. They’re just going to be there. Sometimes that makes you feel like you can mess around with them too much. But if you don’t do that and have respect for your twin, it can be amazing.

On experiencing their teen dream:

I remember I vowed to myself that I would never have “teenage sickness” where you become very moody and make drama out of everything. I said, “I’m never going to have that thing!” But of course I do, like everyone.

I often would think, “In the future I want to do this and I want to do that.” Now when I think back, I think I’m exactly where I wanted to be. I’m doing all these things I find are incredibly interesting, especially when you’re meeting people that you always thought were so far away. But suddenly they’re close and so normal. Like meeting your idols and realizing that they’re just normal people. It’s something that’s weird to think. Because we’re working with Alex [Somers], we met Jónsi. It was strange. I had listened to Sigur Rós for a long time. I got their CD when I was 12. That’s something that I never would have thought of when I was a kid. But when I look back, it’s something that I always wanted. I’m glad now.

On finding inspiration in the absurd:

If there’s something on my mind, it’s very easy to deal with it by writing about it. I don’t know why I do that, but I feel like a lot of people do. It’s a way to clear it up. If there’s something that’s very complicated to you, just some emotions and stuff, it can be easy to get rid of it or make sense of it by creating. It definitely has helped me, and it has given depth in some of the lyrics. I try to be as honest as possible. Even if I don’t tell all the story — that would be boring — I take the feeling of them and make something around it. Or I exaggerate what is good and interesting. Life is an inspiration — normal things, things that are on your mind, and things that aren’t normal at all. All kinds of stuff.

Sometimes I feel so empty if there’s no drama going on in my life. It’s definitely sadness that makes the best songs, for some reason. It’s interesting, because you don’t want to be sad, but it can help you when you’re trying to be creative. A lot of the songs have some kind of sadness in them. But I also try to blend it with some kind of hope. I try to tweak it and make it a good song.

On working with producer Alex Somers (Sigur Rós, Sin Fang):

Alex has a way of exaggerating all the things about us that are weird. It was so good to work with a producer who doesn’t do all the creative work for you. He has his knowledge on how to do things. He talks to us and makes us create something, and then we get ideas, and he’s good at making them happen. That’s how we worked together. It was brilliant. At first I was so scared of doing it with a producer because we thought we’d lose all our characteristics. But it was totally opposite. He made it much more like us, and put all our characteristics in there.

On maintaining perspective:

I’m not sure if being a pop musician is something that I want to do for the rest of my life. It’s something that is interesting while it’s going on. I know this isn’t going to last forever. I want to get an education and go to University and stuff like that. I have to figure out what’s the best thing. You see these things happen and people are very successful, but after being on tour for 10 years, you come back and there’s no special position you can work at. You’re not building up something if you just want to quit. You have to decide if you want to study something and then go back and create a home and work somewhere, or if you want to build a band and make a lot of money from it. It’s like some kind of business. I don’t know if I’m too interested in that. I have to figure it out. Right now it’s something that’s fun, and we’re really enjoying it. It’s not much pressure at all. As soon as it’s very hectic and something that’s not enjoyable, we’re going to find something different. I don’t know if that’s a weird approach to it or if I should be more dedicated, but we’re really enjoying it. That’s a good thing.

Feb 26, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Six Degrees of Rihanna’s Unapologetic

It used to be easier to pretend that an album was its own perfectly self-contained artifact. The great records certainly feel that way. But albums are more permeable than solid, their motivations, executions and inspirations informed by, and often stolen from, their peers and forbearers. It all sounds awfully formal, but it's not. It's the very nature of music — of art, even. The Six Degrees features examine the relationships between classic records and five other albums we've deemed related in some way. In some cases these connections are obvious, in others they are tenuous. But, most important to you, all of the records are highly, highly recommended.

The Album

Unapologetic (Explicit)
Rihanna
2012 | Def Jam Records

What's left for Rihanna? The young star has far exceeded every conceivable metric of pop success, whether it is awards or album sales or her designation as the most popular person on all of Facebook. The 24-year-old recently released her seventh album, Unapologetic, essentially a cross-section of all pop music's various strains circa 2012. There's the arena-sized electronic buzz of "Phresh Out the Runway" and "Right Now," the over-the-top, funhouse wooziness... of "Numb" and "Loveeeeeee Song," the classic pop march of "Diamonds." Its sound is broad and universal, thanks to continent-hopping producers like David Guetta, Stargate, Benny Blanco and The-Dream. This savvy versatility has always been at the heart of Rihanna's appeal, from her dancehall-tinged debut to her present-day attempts to master some kind of global pop template. But Unapologetic's attitude and moods are resolutely her own, and nowhere is this clearer than on "Nobody's Business," the disarmingly buoyant duet with her — to put it mildly — controversial boyfriend Chris Brown. Like many of Rihanna's albums, Unapologetic is a collection of choices that seem both calculated and somewhat eccentric — consider the famously strange week she spent commemorating Unapologetic's release by playing seven shows in seven different cities around the world. In a way, it's those erratic moments that make Rihanna — a new kind of flexible, carefully stage-managed, frighteningly efficient worldwide pop star — still seem human. Everyone knows the names in Rihanna's immediate orbit — her influences Bob Marley and Madonna, her boss Jay-Z, her mates Brown and Drake. Here, we consider the broader constellation of Rihanna — from her lesser-known collaborators to the far-flung, future heirs to her style.
more »

The Visionary

Private Life: The Compass Point Years
Grace Jones
1998 | ISLAND RECORDS

Before Janet Jackson or Madonna — Rihanna's musical influences growing up — there was Grace Jones. The Jamaican-born Jones was one of the most singular artists of the early 1980s, a fashion icon and a visionary of modern-day club music. She had released some well-received disco records throughout the late 1970s, but for 1980's Warm Leatherette, Jones relocated to Compass Point Studios in the Bahamas to record with the legendary reggae drum-and-bass... duo of Sly and Robbie. The result was a breakthrough, a vibrant collision of New Wave and island riddims. Jones recorded two more albums at Compass Point, Nightclubbing and Living My Life. The best material from that period is collected on Private Life. Her alien arrangements of familiar songs (she covers Tom Petty and Smokey Robinson, among others) represented everything fresh about the burgeoning club culture, and the way Jones carried herself — the androgynous style, the almost confrontational raunchiness — was visionary. Rihanna's copped her look on more than one occasion. Don't think Jones doesn't notice these things. Just ask her what she thinks of Lady Gaga.
more »

The Hit-Maker

Just A Little More Love
David Guetta
2009 | CAROLINE ASTRALWERKS - CAT

The Parisian Guetta already had a successful, decade-long career DJing and throwing parties when he finally decided to record his debut album in 2002. It was easy to overlook Guetta, given the acclaim that had met countrymen Daft Punk, Air or Cassius. But Guetta chose a more populist, bombastic approach to French house on Just a Little More Love. It was more vocal driven and club-oriented, its clean sound shaped by massive... hooks and friendly throbs. "Give Me Something" was an amped-up version of classic New York disco, while "Can't U Feel the Change" and the title track — both featuring singer Chris Willis — whittled house down to its fist-pumping basics. The most brazen statement here was "Just for One Day," which threw David Bowie's "Heroes" into the middle of an electro-thunderstorm. By the end of the decade, Guetta would be one of dance music's sought-after producers, particularly among those looking for new audiences. In 2010, Guetta and Rihanna collaborated on "Who's That Chick?" for the former's path-breaking One More Love release. They got back together for Unapologetic, cutting the standout "Phresh Out the Runway" and recent hit "Right Now."
more »

The Collaborator

tracks
Mikky Ekko
2013 | RCA Records Label

One of the high points of Unapologetic is "Stay," a stirring, stripped-down, piano-backed duet between Rihanna and the song's writer, Nashville-by-way-of-everywhere singer Mikky Ekko. Despite his faintly futuristic name, Ekko makes for an unusual collaborator, as evidenced by all the Rihanna devotees wondering who the rumpled vagrant was onstage with her when she performed the song at the Grammys. There's a delicate, rangy confidence to Ekko's songs, and he's equally at ease... singing atop a rollicking band, a Clams Casino beat or nothing at all. Check out the Reds EP, which features the gorgeously woozy "Secret to Sell" and the swashbuckling "Who Are You, Really?" After the recent success of "Stay," his label released Tracks, an EP of new tracks and live sessions. It's a startlingly versatile collection. "Pull Me Down" commissions some moody pop triumphalism from Clams Casino while "Feels Like the End" is an epic brew of falsetto, synth and strings. The EP closes with the most intensely atmospheric cover of the xx's "Chained" you'll likely ever hear.
more »

The Charismatic Heir

Halcyon
Ellie Goulding
2012 | Interscope/Cherrytree

Rihanna's transition from radio R&B toward global club pop has been massive influential for a new generation of young singer/songwriters, and perhaps the most important lesson to be learned is that the songs themselves still matter. Consider Ellie Goulding's carefully restrained cover of Rihannas' "Only Girl (in the World)," which seems to deconstruct the original's hypnotic grooves and overheated synths and highlight the perfectly proportioned melody at the song's core. From... the indie synthpop of 2010's Lights to the cavernous spaces of last year's Halcyon, Goulding has become one of the more charismatic heirs to Rihanna's versatile style. What distinguishes Goulding is that her music, for all its busy, layered production, is quite old-fashioned. YouTube is full of Goulding doing acoustic versions of her own songs, and suddenly singles that sound huge and interplanetary are revealed to be simple and intimate.
more »

The Global Pop Forerunners

2nd Mini Album
2ne1
2011 | YG Entertainment Inc. / Ditto Music

Artists like Rihanna, Pitbull and the Black Eyed Peas may be forerunners of a global pop aesthetic, but this kind of thing has been going for years in South Korea. Beyond "Gangnam Style" lies a healthy and rapidly evolving pop scene, and a group like 2NE1 — pronounced "21" or "To Anyone" — is probably one lucky break away from global domination. All the songs on their latest EP feel instantly familiar... — there's the hyper absurdism of "I Am the Best," the slightly less hyper anthems "Don't Stop the Music" and "Hate You," the guitar-strum introspection of "Lonely." Maybe a breakthrough isn't as far off as it seems. Korean pop idol-watchers were abuzz with recent news that 2NE1's "baddest female" CL had acquired a famous new follower on Instagram: Rihanna.
more »

Feb 26, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Who Is…Autre Ne Veut

File under: Deconstructed R&B with art-pop sensibilities

For fans of: How To Dress Well, Jamie Lidell, Miguel, Terence Trent D'arby

From: New Orleans

Personae: Arthur Ashin

Call it a case of either good timing or musical clairvoyance, but Autre Ne Veut’s Arthur Ashin beat many of his indie peers to the punch when it comes to re-framing R&B. The Connecticut-born musician premiered his falsetto’d, synth-laden take on the genre in 2010, and has fine-tuned it with each new release. Anxiety, his sophomore album, is his most wrenching to date, pushing his unhinged vocals and diary-like lyrics about a failed relationship to the forefront. He’s still finding ways to outstrip his contemporaries too, either with gospel-nodding harmonies — contributed by the Zambri sisters, Cristi Jo and Jessica — or with the unparalleled earnestness in his vocal delivery.

eMusic’s Marissa G. Muller spoke with Ashin about his love for soul and R&B, his willingness to write about the failure of a relationship while that relationship was still in progress, and how his study of psychology informed his music.

On the roots of his moniker, Autre Ne Veut:

Years ago, I was up at the Cloisters, a metropolitan museum on the Upper West Side with a lot of Medieval artifacts, and there was a gold and amethyst hat ornament and on the back was inscribed “Autre Ne Veut.” I can’t verify this at all — in fact, I’ve even called one of the historians there who says that there’s no evidence of this being true — but I have this memory of someone telling me that it was a gift from a French duke to his mistress. I can’t speak a lick of French but it translates to “I want no other.” I thought the tension of the space between what one has and what one wants was kind of poetic. I chose it then and I’m stuck with it now.

On his musical beginnings in college:

I had a rock band for a while and [then gradually] started making Brian Eno-rip off music for cinema. My band was ’90s-nodding alt rock and had a Pavement, Yo La Tengo vibe. I screamed on top a lot. I’ve always been into songwriting and, except for a stint trying to make ambient electronic music, it’s always been something that I’ve thought a ton about. To me, songwriting is the crux of everything I do.

On his move from away from rock:

I’m a big folk music fan still; I love Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classic female folk songwriters. I love, love, love Van Morrison: Astral Weeks is one of my favorite records, ever. But rock isn’t my thing now. I feel like rock is a technology that’s really reached its limit. I like music that sounds like it’s pushing some sort of boundary and, to me, that’s what’s exciting about hip-hop and R&B. It’s still an evolving form and people are constantly looking for new sounds, and even the highest level of popularity. There’s still new things happening and new approaches, and I don’t think that’s really happening in rock. I’m trying to work against what’s there while still maintaining a healthy level of respect for what’s come before me.My approach is a little bit different than other peoples’, in terms of production in particular.

On re-imagining R&B without nostalgia:

I have problems not being nostalgic enough in my life. Even my first record — which, incidentally had a lot of similarities to [other music that was nakedly nostalgic] — I was not going for that. Any similarities [to earlier music] came from being an amateur with synthesizers, which a lot of people were in the ’80s, because they were just getting their hands on them. I’m against nostalgia as a creative practice. I listen to a lot of old stuff, but it’s not because of nostalgia.

I listen to lots of R&B, and have all of my life, so I don’t mind being classified as R&B. [Anxiety] is definitely a pop record. I’m working against it as much as I’m working with it, but I’m definitely working within those modes on the record. The musical references on my previous recordings were more classic soul, and I think that the Stax Records paradigm for songwriting is at the heart of everything I’ve ever done. I was definitely looking to make something more contemporary on this record, so a lot of the melodic decisions were more related to R&B rather than soul or reggae — which my older stuff nodded more heavily to.

On his tribute to Whitney Houston, “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”:

I’m pretty unsentimental, but Whitney Houston was unbelievable in the way that she walked that line between making soul, gospel, R&B and pop. The restraint that she had — and everything about her — freaks me out. I was pretty bummed out when she died and wanted to make a little homage, so I titled my song after one of hers.

On keeping his identity under wraps for so long:

Music has been my fantasy — and the fact that anyone cares at all is amazing — but my big Plan B was to be a clinical psychologist. My music started happening and I wanted to preserve a clean Google search. Clinical psychology is super conservative as a field and it’s also really rigorous and competitive and it’s one of those things where it’s supposed be your priority 100 percent. With jobs and fellowships, I don’t want the first thing that comes up in a search to be a video of me jerking off on stage.

On bonding with How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell over their chosen genre and student status:

He did an interview for Village Voice a few years ago and the way that he wrote felt so private to me in an exciting way, so I hit him up while he was still doing his mixtapes and we’ve been in touch since then. I don’t know how he multi-tasks — all I’ve done is complain to him about it.

On his diary-like lyrics:

I do stream-of-consciousness singing — I mostly sing on the spot. Most of the ideas are really personal and are about relationships I’ve had with different people and complicated moments that I don’t really know how to deal with, so I put them into songs. “Play By Play” is a song about jealousy and paranoia. “World War” is a portrait of my relationship with an ex and some of the difficulties with that. Those two are the most powerful to me and were the hardest to deal with.

The record was written over the past three years. I was in grad school and intense psychoanalysis, and the record is about this period of my life where I felt particularly overwhelmed and anxious about a lot of things. It was interesting: I was in a relationship at the time and the songs are not all positive, and her response was complicated. But, at the end of the day, the difficulties are what make music feel important.

On championing his earnestness:

I’m a super sensitive dude, really fragile, but I also function in the world. So I have to take myself with a grain of salt. On one level, I’m being completely earnest and on another level I’m aware of the fact that it’s kind of corny to be as earnest as I am. I spent my whole life hiding from my earnestness so there is a wink in there, a little bit. But I get more out of people taking it seriously, even if I can’t.

On putting his vocals at the forefront of the record:

I think it’s something you have to do at some point: strip away the veils and try not to hide. I felt ready. The recording space is a safe space for me. I loved being in the studio and working with Dan [Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never]. He’s been my music consultant since I started demoing out this project in 2005 — he was the first person to hear it. I’ve been a singer for a long part of my life and I’ve been a vocalist in live projects before, and I think I was trying to make things more complex than I needed to in my earlier releases. I decided this time I’m going to really sing and see what happens.

Feb 26, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, Old Yellow Moon

A reunion showing that time has given as much as it's taken away

“This is the culmination of a 40-year conversation,” Rodney Crowell has said of Old Yellow Moon, his long-awaited collaboration with Americana doyenne Emmylou Harris, with whom he began his career in 1975. Not only does the album reunite the pair with esteemed producer-guitarist (and Harris’s former husband) Brian Ahern, the rootsy collection features members of Harris’s original Hot Band, in which Crowell served as rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist — guitarist James Burton, bassist Emory Gordy Jr. and pianist Glen D. Hardin. These torchbearers of ’70s country-rockin’ cool (and Elvis Presley and Gram Parsons sidemen to boot) add class and oomph to the proceedings. Other contributors include Vince Gill and Willie Nelson’s secret weapon, harmonica ace Mickey Raphael. While the guest list is impressive, Old Yellow Moon, with its rough-hewn, live-in-a-room ambience, offers what Harris refers to as “living room music.” “This project — like Rodney’s and my relationship — started with sitting around on the floor with two acoustic guitars and finding songs that we love,” according to Harris. “This record represents that.”

The stellar tunes need no pampering. Among Crowell’s four contributions is the cinematic “Bluebird Wine,” which first brought the songwriter to Harris’ attention in 1974. The rest of the album runs the gamut from Kris Kristofferson’s chugging “Chase the Feeling,” to Roger Miller’s woebegone “Invitation to the Blues,” to Patti Scialfa’s elegiac “Spanish Dancer.”

Old Yellow Moon‘s emotional centerpiece is their stunning rendition of Matraca Berg’sheartbreaking “Back When We Were Beautiful,” with the line, “I hate it when they say I’m aging gracefully/ I fight it every day.” Yet for Harris and Crowell, it seems, time has given as much as it has taken away.

Feb 26, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Autre Ne Veut, Anxiety

Exorcising confessionals across 10 mildly creepy tracks

Everything you need to know about Autre Ne Veut’s new album is in the bleak video for its chilling lead-off single, “Counting.” In case you overlooked the line “I’m counting on the idea/ That you stay alive” the first time around, Arthur Ashin hammers its profoundly depressing point home with a clip that features a few forlorn Mykki Blanco verses and the last dying breaths of Ashin’s grandmother. Your typical love song this is not.

So while Anxiety features more than its fair share of Timbaland-vis-Timberlake tropes and unironic Top 40 nods, the shuffle and sheen of the singer/producer’s muscular studio mix can’t hide the confessionals that are exorcised across 10 mildly creepy tracks. It’s as if we were all invited to Ashin’s American Idol audition, only to watch in horror as he writhes around the floor to a rubberized Rihanna beat like a freshly-killed eel. And yet, as the last skittish sample scampers away, something truly special happens — the judges are into it, especially Nicki Minaj and Randy Jackson, who actually says, “You’re crazy dog…crazy catchy!” Believe it or not, Ashin’s bringing his baggage to Hollywood. Let’s just hope he doesn’t have a nervous breakdown in the middle of covering “Climax.”

Feb 25, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Orchestre de la Suisse romande/Neeme Järvi, Raff: Symphony No. 2; Four Shakespeare Preludes

A finely crafted effusion of Romanticism

Contrary to the impression music historians give, when Brahms and Bruckner were in their primes, there was at least one other German symphonist worth hearing. Joachim Raff (1822-82) may not have reach their exalted level, but he was praised in his youth by Mendelssohn and Schumann, was orchestration assistant to Liszt, taught Richard Strauss’s teacher, and anticipated Sibelius.

His somewhat unusually structured four-movement Symphony No. 2, from 1866, is a finely crafted effusion of Romanticism. At 33:41, Järvi gives a generally more vigorous performance than others but grants the opening movement a bit more gravitas than usual. Järvi’s also at the helm of a superior orchestra to either of theirs and is recorded better, making clearer the subtle brilliance of Raff’s orchestration. The Shakespeare Preludes (1879) are colorful tone poems; The Tempest and Macbeth mirror the play plots, while Romeo and Juliet and Othello capture overall ambiance. All four feature quicksilver mood shifts; Othello, with its tritone contrast of D major and A-flat major, is especially striking.

Feb 25, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Ryan Keberle and Catharsis, Music Is Emotion

Ryan Keberle’s third album as a leader is not as different from the first two as he might imagine — and that’s a good thing. The son and grandson of professional musicians, Keberle studied at the Manhattan School of Music and graduated from Juilliard, has a prime seat in some of the most adventurous big bands today, including those led by Maria Schneider and Darcy James Argue, and teaches at Hunter College. So it is hard not to hear a little defensiveness when he writes in the liner notes, “This record is about music from the heart and the soul and not from the brain.”

Keberle probably underestimates the wonderful emotional transparency of his striking compositions and arrangements on his first two discs, especially the second one, Heavy Dreaming. But where those records featured a “double quartet” instrumentation of Keberle’s trombone with rhythm section abetted by four other brass players, Music Is Emotion scales it back to a piano-less quartet, with trumpeter Mike Rodriguez joining him on the front line. The fewer musicians creates greater intimacy, and more chances and space for each member of the ensemble (named Catharsis), to express himself.

Thus, the interplays and calls-and-responses are more individual or duo on Emotion than on denser, earlier discs. It starts right away with “Big Kick Blues,” where bassist Jorge Roeder sets the pulse and the horns follow; later, Keberle and Rodriguez take turns being the refractory moon off each other’s sun — and the blues is served with heart, brain and soul.

For the third straight disc, Keberle pays tribute to the Beatles with a cover song, this one “Julia,” which rolls out a moving horn treatment and then let Roeder go off on a solo. This happens on a majority of the ten songs — the bassist is pervasively in the spotlight and delivers his personality without disrupting the emotional or structural texture of the tune. Other covers include Billy Strayhorn (“Blues In Orbit”) and Art Farmer (“Bluesport”) both with guest saxophonist Scott Robinson, enabling Keberle to bring back the “little big band” feel that is a virtue of his writing. And check out “Carbon Neutral” which open with two minutes of the irrepressible Roeder on arco. In sum, then, another smart, but heartfelt Ryan Keberle outing — hope he gives himself an emotional pat on the back.

Feb 25, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Doldrums, Lesser Evil

Seductively alien pop that's impossible to pin down

This debut album from Montreal-based fractured-pop auteur Airick Woodhead might seem puzzling at first, but rewards patient listening. Like a Magic Eye poster from the ’90s, from deep within the blizzard of sounds, bewitching, pristine pop emerges.

Woodhead is a sonic collagist who clearly isn’t happy until he’s saturated his track with untold layers of noise and fragmented melody. “She Is The Wave,” a collaboration with Canadian electronic artist Guy Dallas, is a case in point. It’s a cyclone of elements that, at first, seems random, but on closer inspection, has a beautifully choreographed tunefulness deep in the chaos. On “Egypt,” Woodhead weaves industrial noises, blips and crashes into ever-changing, sweetly discombobulated pop — it could be Art Of Noise for the GarageBand generation.

While the sonic overload is exhilarating, it is Woodhead’s bruised songcraft that makes Doldrums compulsively listenable. Woodhead’s vision is commendably, uniquely skewed: “Painted Black”‘s sugary synth symphony sounds like it is being played on warped vinyl; “Lost In Everyone” is a wonky choral reverie that feels like it slipped off Pet Sounds. The idiosyncratic production approach means that even at its most familiar, Lesser Evil still sounds seductively alien. Like Woodhead’s androgynous vocals, this is pop that is impossible to pin down.

Feb 25, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

Sally Shapiro, Somewhere Else

An unabashedly romantic head rush

An unabashedly romantic head rush, the third effort by the Swedish duo (consisting of Shapiro and producer Johan Agebjörn) contains a world of candy heart-worthy sweet nothings, rendered irresistible by Shapiro’s coquettish whisper. No longer simply contented to fall lockstep with Italo Disco, Somewhere Else lets elements of acid house, dance and good ol’ fashioned electro pop bleed around the edges of each track.

As with previous albums, retro turns are delivered with a knowing wink (See: dance-floor filler “This City’s Local Italo Disco DJ Has A Crush On Me”). “Sundown” contains a “Careless Whisper”-era saxophone solo, paired with a saccharine synth that blurs the line between slinky and sleazy. Upbeat ode to impossible love “Starman” features both a four-on-the-floor beat and the time-tested metaphor for romantic satisfaction — a trip to outer space. The album implies a promise: that the listener will be transported by the sheer strength of Shapiro’s longing. And indeed, many songs play like a daydreamer’s manifesto. But Sally Shapiro’s music has always been a testament to the transportive power of longing, lust and love, and going Somewhere Else, by now, is just what we expect.

Feb 25, 2013

eMusic.com Inc.

And the Oscar Should Go To…

We all know there are no new stories left in the world — hell, Shakespeare himself had trouble coming up with something original 400 years ago when he was writing Romeo and Juliet. But it’s a problem that is running particularly rampant over the movies today. There are the obvious: sequels, reboots, adaptations of the novel based on the Broadway play. But beyond those, every story we’re being told has been told before. Producers just dress them up in different clothes, or reverse the genders, or set it on the moon, and hope nobody notices. So while the Oscars have an official category to recognize adapted screenplays, we’re pulling back the curtain to recognize the debts all the other Oscar nominees owe to literature.

The Master / Going Clear

Play
2 Credits
Going Clear
Lawrence Wright
2013 | Unabridged
As director Paul Thomas Anderson and Best Supporting Actor nominee Philip Seymour Hoffman have said over and over again in interviews, The Master is not about Scientology. It's a fictional film about the 1950s founding of a cult-like religion by a charismatic writer, an organization based on a potent combination of supernatural backstory, atomic-age science and tight-fisted, often violent control that just happened to call a massive ocean liner home base for... tax evasion purposes. Nope, nothing at all like the Scientology Lawrence Wright describes in his expose, Going Clear. Wright's book is a brilliantly thorough look at the short, fascinating history of the religion, with stunning revelations about the early days of its pompous, fame-obsessed founder, L. Ron Hubbard, that could serve as blueprints for Hoffman's Lancaster Dodd. Was it the fictional character or the real-life leader who invented naval medals to claim he was a decorated war hero? Only one way to find out.
more »

Zero Dark Thirty / No Easy Day

Play
1 Credit
No Easy Day
Mark Owen
2012 | Unabridged
While the Kathryn Bigelow-directed Best Picture nominee is ostensibly based on a very well-known true story, its version of the CIA's hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the years after 9/11 has been criticized by everyone from the current CIA director to anti-torture journalists and Republican senator John McCain. Rather than wade into that moral morass, get your facts from one of the guys who was there on the day:... "Mark Owen," a member of the storied SEAL Team 6 who stormed bin Laden's compound in Pakistan and killed him. The book was published under a pseudonym without undergoing review by the Department of Defense in order for "Owen" to tell the full story without redaction; when the author's identity was revealed, a response written by a number of ex-SEALs criticized the author for fame-seeking, but not one of them questioned his version of the events.
more »

Django Unchained / The Count of Monte Cristo

Play
1 Credit
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
2009 | Unabridged
A man spends years unjustly imprisoned, gains his freedom, then embarks on the single-minded pursuit of the bad dude who stole his woman? Could be Quentin Tarantino's newest genre-skewing blockbuster, sure, but it could just as easily be Alexandre Dumas's classic tale of revenge. While Tarantino's slave Django is freed by Best Supporting Actor nominee Christoph Waltz's German bounty hunter, Dumas's Edmond Dantes is unfairly sentenced to 14 years in prison by... some conniving so-called friends and has to break out on his own. Both set in times of political turbulence, both stories follow our heroes on their epic quests for revenge. But while Django's hunt takes him into a couple of small-time gang fights, Dantes's full vengeance takes years of life under assumed names, accumulating a massive fortune, and ruining the lives of multiple conspirators, driving one to suicide. Even Waltz's character has to acknowledge their mirror-image stories in the film, during a conversation with main baddie Leonardo DiCaprio. Advantage: Dumas.
more »

No / To Sell Is Human

Play
1 Credit
To Sell Is Human
Daniel H. Pink
2012 | Unabridged
As Daniel Pink so convincingly explains in his book To Sell is Human, sales is not a distinct industry but a behavior that we all engage every single day. You sell your girlfriend on seeing the movie you want to see. You sell your boss on letting you take over the big project. You sell your kids on eating their broccoli. It's all a question of strategy — and Pink's book is... all about new strategies to go about the old business of selling, no matter what you do. In No, a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, ad exec Rene Saavedra is hired in 1980s Chile to use his marketing and sales savvyto run a referendum campaign against the ruling dictator Augusto Pincochet. His controversial ads focus on selling the public on the image of democratic freedom rather than relying on the soapbox rhetoric of the past, opening up a new world of political messaging we can see today.Looks like he could have taught Pink a thing or two about innovative selling.
more »

Frankenweenie / The Island of Dr. Moreau

Play
1 Credit
The Island of Doctor Moreau
H.G. Wells
2008 | Unabridged
Of course Tim Burton's Best Animated Feature-nominated stop-motion kids' romp is based on Mary Shelley's granddaddy of corpse-reanimating horror stories, Frankenstein. But take a step back and you'll see that this tale of a young boy whose success at reanimating his dearly departed dog, Sparky, leads the neighborhood kids to try their hand at playing god with their pets, creating a pack of mutated monsters who wreak havoc on the town,... owes a lot to H.G. Wells's early grotesquerie, The Island of Dr. Moreau. Rather than by accident, Moreau's half-animal, half-human monsters, the Beast Folk, are created in the cold name of science. But both tales have the same, powerful message: Don't mess with nature, or nature will mess you up. Unless it's to get your best friend back, that is.
more »

Feb 22, 2013

eMusic.com Inc. Merchant Deal Feed

Africa Man Original

The Black President

Band on the Run

Afrika 80 Goes International

Thrills and Kills

Celebrity Skin

Other Voices, Other Worlds

Fiction Heavyweights

Songs of Unrest & Revolution

Dark Nights of the Soul