s e r i o u s b u m m e r

Borgore

2011-12-13T17:35:00.003-05:00

Yes, ^that^ guy.

Dubstep has reached its post-moment. Where once there was a bustling and mysterious underground there now appear liquor commercials and Grammy nods. The onetime cutting edge now barely qualifies as the middle of the road. It's hyperdriven cultural evolution for our times — the sudden omnipresence of the once-elusive, the death of the cool. Yet somehow dubstep adapts. Intransigent though EDM may be it is also swift-moving and cavernous in scope, and it remains that to know dubstep you gotta know dubstep. The amorphous subgenre trends ever upward due in large part to a constant barrage of innovators and rabble-rousers, feisty Diplo-approved producers whose sole goal is to keep one another on their toes. Call it friendly competition — or don't. "There's two [kinds of] people that are getting into dubstep right now," explains Asaf Borger, or Borgore, the brash Israeli DJ best known for his callous songwriting and furious, genre-bending mixes. "The people that really love the music, and the musicians that like the money."

Read the rest here.

Top 25 records of 2011

2011-12-09T17:44:00.001-05:00

Below, behold my top 25 records of 2011 as submitted to Tiny Mix Tapes.

Yeah, I know, year-end lists are whatever. As always, the numbering is largely arbitrary. And there are inevitably a handful of great records I discover right at the November deadline (which is too early, by the way) or after - namely, there are a whole bunch of hip-hop mixtapes I managed to miss and a few sweet drone records that I've been digging on lately. Regardless, these are all albums I thought were pretty damn great. They come heartily recommended.

25. Stalley - Lincoln Way Nights (Intelligent Trunk Music)
Backpack-throwback type stuff from Rick Ross's new signee. Smart and smooth.

24. Low - C'mon
Latest album from slowcore heroes was lean and mean.

23. Gillian Welch - The Harrow and the Harvest
Solid stuff from Ms. Welch and longtime compatriot Dave Rawlings.

22. Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow
Glad I heard this one in time. Not an everyday listen, but remarkably poignant.

21. Hella - Tripper
Fast and furious, the best straight up rock album of the year.

20. Elzhi - Elmatic
Detroit dude tackles Illmatic 'cause his balls are apparently huge.

19. Cass McCombs - Wit's End
Slow and deliberate, canny and cold.

18. Anna Calvi - s/t
British babe plays a mean guitar, Lynchian production the cherry on top.

17. KWJAZ - s/t
Meandering Nyquil-psych (did I just coin that?) outta San Francisco. Deceptively captivating.

16. Fabio Orsi - Stand Before Me, Oh My Soul
Italy's finest guitar/drums drone.

15. The Field - Looping State of Mind
Newest record from Lionel Richie-sampling minimal techno group was their best yet.

14. Amen Dunes - Through Donkey Jaw
Some of the drowsiest and yet most elevating bedroom pop, hazy and hard to resist.

13. Curren$y - Weekend at Burnie's
This guy put out a billion tapes this year. This is one of the best.

12. Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges
Insane sax workouts but less freakout than you'd expect. Sparse and frantic.

11. Wye Oak - Civilian
Beautiful songs, beautiful production. Gorgeous.

10. James Blake - s/t
You know.

09. Big K.R.I.T. - Return of 4eva
Best southern rap album in a long time. 'Kast-repping but future-focused.

08. Crooked Fingers - Breaks in the Armor
Terrific new album from Bachmann and Liz Durrett, the best sad-sack musical pairing since Molina and Johnson.

07. The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient
Kurt Vile's former band put out a far better album than he did this year.

06. Shabazz Palaces - Black Up
Forward-thinking hip-hop from ex-Digable Planets MC.

05. Thurston Moore - Demolished Thoughts
Sweeping chamber pop from the king of noise. Who knew?

04. Oneohtrix Point Never - Replica
Synth fella puts out a glitchy sample-based record that's totally catchy in spite of itself.

03. Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972
Breathtaking organ/laptop drone about falling pianos and the demise of electronic music.

02. Bill Callahan - Apocalypse
Some of Callahan's simplest and most inspiring work yet. Seeing him live for the first time this year helped propel this one up to the two slot.

01. Grouper - A I A
Simply amazing. Portland's enigmatic Liz Harris put out two records (Dream Loss and Alien Observer) meant to be consumed as one; the set contains some of the most affecting, meditative music I've ever heard. Not only a grower; this one blossoms.

Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow

2011-11-29T20:07:00.001-05:00

Kate Bush is weird in the best way. 50 Words for Snow is a great winter album yeah, but it's also sort of the perfect album for this specific moment in time, this season, on the calendar but also culturally, politically and on some base level of human existence. (Let this album occupy your headspace for a while.) It all sounds totally grand but it's entirely relatable in its weirdness, familiar despite being painstakingly new. My TMT review of 50 Words for Snow (a fast last-minute entry on my Top 25 of 2011, which I'll post here soon):

Kate Bush is of a time when pop singers didn’t need faux-lesbian makeout sessions to express nascent female sexuality, when eccentricity was not some contrived aesthetic end but a consequence of the creative process itself. For Bush, the beauty and weirdness of sex — of sensuality — was the basis of art. Her early music was shocking not for any overtly explicit content, but for its desperate attempts to celebrate sensuality in an age of technology and the vicious detachment it wrought.

Read the rest here.

Future Islands

2011-11-15T16:50:00.001-05:00

I spoke recently with Future Islands frontman Samuel T. Herring, who told me tales of the construction of the group's new album, the impressive On the Water (pictured). I whittled it down to 350 words for the Portland Mercury.

Synthesizers and self-flagellation were the last two things anyone expected at Pickathon, but there was Samuel T. Herring barreling across the stage, pounding his chest, gagging himself with his free hand. He was a maniacal mirage, a dense cloud of danger interrupting the idyllic panorama. "I was intimidated," Herring admits regarding Future Islands' chaotic incursion into the folky, family-friendly Portland festival. "At the same time, it was liberating, too, to get up there and do what we wanted."

Read the rest here.

Mark Kozelek @ Aladdin Theater, Portland

2011-11-15T16:48:00.001-05:00

Last weekend the lady and I braved the Sunday night sleepies to go see Mark Kozelek play at the venerable Aladdin Theater. It was a performance peppered with, how do I put it... uncomfortable moments. I'd heard tales of Kozelek's off-putting stage demeanor, of his impatience with excessive crowd noise and the like. The crowd at this show was impossibly submissive, hanging on every note the man played. Kozelek managed to alienate nonetheless. Still, he continues to be able to write a mean heartbreaker.

I wrote about it for Tiny Mix Tapes' recently revived live blog.

“Shit, I had a bunch of dirty jokes I wanted to tell,” Mark Kozelek deadpanned upon seeing a child in the front row of the reverent mid-sized crowd at Portland’s Aladdin Theater. It is itself a venue that demands some reverence, an aged and atmospheric place ideal for intimate performances such as this one. Kozelek’s most recent outing as Sun Kil Moon, last year’s Admiral Fell Promises, was a chilly and cartographic affair that sent listeners across the physical and emotional distances of the American West and through the tangled recesses of its creator’s wry and yet tortured headspace.

Read the rest here.

Sonia Leigh

2011-10-20T17:05:00.003-04:00

I recently penned a piece on Sonia Leigh, a swiftly rising figure in the Atlanta country scene. She's best buds with fellow Georgian/Grammy winner Zac Brown, which explains said swift rise. Also, her songs ain't too bad, I guess.

Sonia Leigh speaks with quiet confidence, in a measured drawl that implies a lifetime of Southern living. It's an artist's coolness, one that's been nurtured since she saw Loretta Lynn at age five and first realized her calling. Largely because of the supportive influence of her musician father, Leigh recalls songwriting as "something I never questioned [if] I could actually do."
It was this sense of destiny that gave rise to an honest career. As a child, Leigh absorbed and imitated every note of family favorites such as Hank Williams and George Jones. As she grew older, she began writing her own material. "I always had these songs in my head," she says. "I used to sit in school and write songs. I'd get home and get to my guitar and try to get some music connected to what I was hearing in my head."

Read the rest here.

Wilco: The Whole Love

2011-10-13T16:20:00.000-04:00

Pleasantly surprised by Wilco's new one, since their last two outings didn't exactly inspire confidence for their career trajectory. Thankfully, the Tweedmeister and company have managed to break out of their formula-rock rut to deliver a startlingly fresh-sounding record in The Whole Love. Even though the title sounds like some gross, borderline-criminal pickup line from the Tweed Jacket. Oh, Tweedums, you so-and-so.

Looking back, it’s entirely possible that music critics and listeners alike put too much stock in Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. That record, hailed both as Wilco’s breakthrough (true) and an infallible slice of American-made genius (more debatable), was and is still analyzed through a decidedly distorted lens. That the album was conceived and recorded long before September 2001 was of secondary importance in the minds of many who found a deep, if accidental, profundity in Jeff Tweedy’s blurred depictions of tall shaking buildings and general human malaise.

Read the rest here.

Das Racist

2011-09-26T17:57:00.002-04:00

Since their arrival on the scene some three years ago, much blog hullaballoo has been made over Das Racist's post-ironic clusterfuck rap. But though the internet debates have raged, the wider hip-hop world has mostly shrugged; now that the group has delved into Diplo-fied club-a-dub-dub with its debut LP Relax, expect folks to start paying a little more attention.

I recently penned a feature on Das Racist for Creative Loafing in which I tried to parse the dudes' labyrinthine musical language.

There's a moment of quiet impact in a now-famous Dave Chappelle sketch about a "Leave it to Beaver"-esque family whose last name happens to be homophonous with a certain racial epithet. Clad in milkman-minstrel garb, Chappelle finally turns to the camera and utters a smiling SOS: "This racism is killing me inside."
Rappers Victor Vazquez and Himanshu Suri operate with less comedic masochism but with a similarly absurdist eye for racial politics, cloaking their observations in a stoned but studious tone that could rightly be deemed subversive. It's Chappellian-via-Wesleyan, less "Did he really just say that?" and more "Wait, what did he just say?" As Das Racist, the Brooklyn group self-released two stellar and much-blogged-about mixtapes in 2010, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man. On the surface, Das Racist consisted of a couple of wildly talented jokesters musing on dumb shit: junk food, rap culture, weed. Underneath, they were a couple of wildly talented jokesters with a penchant for profundity. "We are family," goes the deadpan chorus to "Puerto Rican Cousins," from Sit Down, Man. "At least that's what we look like we might be."

Read the rest here.

MusicfestNW 2011

2011-09-26T17:09:00.001-04:00

The piece I did on the always impressive MusicfestNW is up over at Tiny Mix Tapes. Though I didn't make a point to see some of the fest's many oldsters (Butthole Surfers, Archers of Loaf), I did witness some pretty spectacular sets from the new guard. Some (Ume) killed outright; others (EMA) seemed on the verge of greatness but were charmingly flawed. Great lineup this year, and though Iron and Wine confused the fuck out of me (and everyone), I was glad to see folks like Sam Beam venturing outside their comfort zones in favor of some next level ish.

My generation is truly lost. Most people feel isolated some time or another, but in our case, everyone seems to feel this way all the time. What do any of us have in common, besides the internet and the sickly persistent desire to always be connected? But to what? And to whom?

The MusicfestNW 2011 lineup boasted anachronistic names like Archers of Loaf, Butthole Surfers, and Sebadoh. Now, before we get too far, I should note that I didn't see most of these bands. They don't interest me much now. If it were 1994 or 1989 or whenever, I'd be all about it. But it's 2011, and these are not our artists, as much as we want to think they are. Never before has a generation so lustily consumed the culture of its forebears. It's one big memory daydream, like our whole society's turned into one big nostalgia pit ready to open up and swallow it all.

So it was with a warrior's countenance that I approached MFNW, with the constant nagging mental backdrop of time, time, time...

Read the rest here.

Wild Flag: Wild Flag

2011-09-17T14:20:00.001-04:00

What surprised me the most about the debut from Wild Flag is how much Mary Timony's songs really stand out. Brownstein still knows how to write a solid tune, but it's MT who steals the show. If you haven't heard the record yet, it comes highly recommended, from me and, uh, just about everyone else.

Supergroup alert: The all-female, all-badass Wild Flag consists of former members of Sleater-Kinney, Helium and the Minders. Since its rather inconspicuous formation last year, Wild Flag has steadily garnered a fair share of hype from media and fans itching for a real-deal rock resurgence in the increasingly gutless indie landscape. Now that the album's finally here, can it fulfill its destiny?

Read the rest here.

Young Jeezy returns! (To Portland?)

2011-09-01T15:58:00.001-04:00

I did a piece for the new issue of the Portland Mercury on Young Jeezy, who's playing the Roseland tonight with Freddie Gibbs. Yes, Jeezy is in Portland. I'll bet he's in line at Voodoo Doughnut as we speak.

TM103 has been a loooong time coming. Too bad it looks like it's gonna suck.

Two years is a good chunk of time by any measure, but in rap, it's an eternity. In the days since Young Jeezy first conceived Thug Motivation 103, hiphop has changed in ways both predictable and unexpectedly exhilarating. Even as it seems to slip inextricably further into a labyrinth of slick soullessness, smart alecks like Das Racist, and misanthropes like Tyler, the Creator have forced us to reexamine our complex relationship with the genre. With TM103 finally slated for a September 20 release, the question arises: Will rap's new guard make room for the king of the coke anthem?

Read the rest here.

Hella: "Tripper"

2011-08-22T17:20:00.004-04:00

An unexpectedly good, insanely energetic return to form for these math rock luminaries. Zach Hill rules the world.

Some folks think if you've heard one Hella album you've heard them all, but they're overlooking the intricate subtleties that make the band such a monster. The one constant, though, is its insanely complex approach — of all the bands ever labeled "math rock," Hella is the only one that honestly seems to rise to the term.

Read the rest here.

Pickathon 2011 Review

2011-08-15T21:52:00.001-04:00

I had a transcendent time at Pickathon, so much so that I didn't wanna leave. If you're able to go to this next or any year, I recommend you do so; it's as close to perfect as any music festival I've ever attended.

It’s Sunday afternoon, the third and final day of Pickathon 2011, and I’m staring at the old dancing hippie with the outie bellybutton. His rubbery skin, his shockingly lithe movements, his manicured white beard – it’s terrifying but weirdly alluring and I can’t look away.

It’s Sunday night and I’m overhearing a Pendarvis Farm resident explain to a performer what it’s like after the festival, when the crowds disperse and the music stops. Earnestly, he compares it to post-partum depression. “There are like 5,000 people here,” he says. “Then, all of the sudden, there are five.”

It’s Thursday, the day before the festival, and I’m pondering what Pickathon might be like. Perhaps unfairly, I’ve already stereotyped. (Hordes of dancing hippies, I imagine.) The folkish, rootsy lineup looks great, but it’s packaged with some red-flag buzz words (“Camping, hiking and a sustainability ethic”) that suggest a faint bouquet of moral superiority, that weird, cringeworthy mix of egoist libertarianism and mobbish progressivism that runs off the slopes of Mt. Hood and snakes its way into Portland’s water supply. But I will try to keep an open mind.

Read the rest here.

Watch the Throne

2011-08-15T21:46:00.002-04:00

Forget all those other reviewers who spurted out half-assed analyses of Watch the Throne mere hours after it hit shelves - I reviewed that shit before I even heard the whole thing. Sort of. It's all part of a piece on collaborative excess I did for Creative Loafing.

When Watch the Throne, Jay-Z and Kanye West's long-awaited studio alliance, finally hits brick-and-mortar stores on August 12, it will be the culmination of months of hype. If early hints are to be believed, it will also be the latest in a strange and storied line of artistically deficient unions between superstars — the collaboration, that musical equivalent of the Hollywood vanity project. Indeed, leaked tracks seem inconsonant with Throne's lengthy gestation period: "Otis," a slice of greasy ham featuring hyperactive but feeble performances from both Jay and Ye, is both hero- and self-worship, all the lifeblood sadistically drained out of the Otis Redding sample that provides the muddled basis for the track.

Read the rest here.

Pickathon 2011

2011-08-04T18:34:00.000-04:00

Gonna be covering Pickathon this weekend for TMT. LOOK AT THAT LINEUP Y'ALL! Mavis Staples! Bill Callahan! Wye Oak! Future Islands! Califone! Damien Jurado! I could go on. I'll be twatting this jam all weekend long, so check up on that if you're so inclined.

Haven't been camping in a long time, so let's hope I don't get eaten by bears. There are bears in the woods, right?

Musicfest NW: September 7-11, 2011

2011-08-01T17:20:00.000-04:00

Pretty amped for the return of MusicfestNW. Very nice lineup they've got going this year, heavy on the '90s reunion tip (Sebadoh, Olivia Tremor Control, Archers, Butthole Surfers) but laced with some pleasant surprises as well (Charles Bradley, Crooked Fingers, Centro-Matic).

I recapped the fest last year for TMT, and I'll be doing the same this go-around. I only hope Spike Can Dance makes a repeat appearance.

Polvo: "Heavy Detour" 7"

2011-08-01T17:06:00.001-04:00

Polvo's back!

Well, they've been back for a couple years, I guess. But now they're like, back back! Again! This pretty decent 7" single is supposedly a precursor to an upcoming Merge full-length; if it's an indication of the new record's style, I'm into it. Brawny and booming. The B-side, "Anchoress," is my fave of the two tracks. Dig it.

Gillian Welch: The Harrow and the Harvest

2011-08-01T17:01:00.001-04:00

Here's a brief review I did on Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings' latest.

Can't really think of a more stunningly consistent pair of contemporary songwriters. Not as immediately blown away by this new one as I was by Time (The Revelator) a few years back, but it's gonna be tough for anyone - even Welch - to top that beauty. Harrow is still a gem.