Temporary Obsession
Mining Cultural Ephemera since 2009
And, since my post for tonight wasn’t working how I liked, a treat – one of my favorite mixes I made over the course of the year.
There’s not much new material on this mix, but it is an exploration of chronological dance sounds in recent indie and pop. Enjoy.
So I totally called this being an awesome 2011 track when I first heard it last December. It’s a shame the album didn’t quite live up, although I suspect it’s not entirely Joe Flory’s fault. I covered the circumstances behind the album’s unceremonious dumping earlier in the year when it came out, so I’ll repeat it here:
Flory (who performs [well, performed -- I'll get to that in a minute] as Primary 1) is one of a rising number of artists like Washed Out, Diamond Rings, and Toro y Moi that started out making music in their bedrooms and sharing it via social media, only to get major label contracts to share that with a wider audience. while most of this output has been hazy, atmospheric music, Flory’s work has a distinctive bent that sets it apart. His Mess Detective, still available for free on the Primary 1 site, plays with texture and synths in a way that felt fresh. After finding it after his fantastic single ”Never Know” came out, I eagerly anticipated the album dropping in February.
But then, February came and went and Other People was nowhere to be found. A quick Google search revealed that Flory had ditched the Primary 1 moniker and was recording music under a new name, with the album to be dropped post-humously (is it post-humous if the artist in question hasn’t died?) in Mid-March. It didn’t feel like an announcement so much as an apology, but a late album is better than no album at all. I found a site that would allow me to purchase the album even though I’m not a Brit and hoped for the best.
So, after all that backstory, how’s the album? Not great, but pretty good. The worst offenses it makes are a slightly disjoint arrangement of tracks (which may not be his fault) and a few too many tracks that feel like filler. ”A-OK” starts things off on the right foot, and “The Blues” and “Nightmare Power” keep the momentum going. Even some of the slower cuts, like “Magic” are, well, magic; album closer “Get Rope” is beautiful. The standouts are still early singles “Never Know” and “Princess”, but overall it’s a shame the project collapsed on itself before release — Flory’s clearly got the talent and with better sequencing, this album could have been a stunner.
Next in the continuing series of artists with EPs that I look forward to hearing more from next year: Surfer Blood
I remember hearing Surfer Blood’s debut Astro Coast and liking with I heard, but I never really made any effort to track it down or download it. When they released the Tarot Classics stopgap EP, there was enough difference that I had to pick it up. Although lead tracks “I’m Not Ready” and “Miranda” are getting all the attention, there’s something really special about the EP’s third track, “Voyager Reprise”.
It starts out a sea of chaos that resolves itself into a brief instrumental, and finally the song itself. The sound is like The Smiths gone surf rock, and if their next release is like this track, it’s another album to look forward to in 2012.
Don’t judge a song by its title, even if its title is something dumb and hipster-y like “Pumped Up Kicks“.
I resisted checking out Foster the People simply because of the for the majority of the year and didn’t find out how awesome their album Torches was until they performed on SNL. The entire album has this wonderful energy, but “Call It What You Want” in particular captures it so well. Mark Foster’s voice isn’t hidden behind a filter, and the melodies are hooky and contagious. There’s a bunch of other winners on the album – “Houdini” and “Waste” come to mind immediately. So here’s to maybe not being quite so judgemental the next time a song with a dumb name gets popular. It might be getting popular for a reason.
Also, you have to love a video that goes back to the old tendency to cram as many interesting visuals into 4 minutes than focusing on some sort of real plot.
This is another one of those posts (like my Adele post) where you’re going to cock your head to the side and I’ll lose all my indie cred, but I don’t care it’s worth it.
This song is _so_ happy. And so intense (every time it finishes, I can’t believe it’s been only 3 and a half minutes). And the video is (obvious reference-stealing) fun (especially when run through yoouutuubee. warning: may cause brain explosion). It feels like a spiritual followup to “Crazy in Love”, 10 years later. Marriage isn’t making the relationship boring, it’s only intensifying the love they have. While I hold by my claim that lead single “Girls” was falling-down-stairs awful, the rest of 4 has proven to be really really good. As long as I’m listening to mainstream pop, it’s going to be the good stuff.
Also: I’m a sucker for marching band/brass hits.
Hip-hop in 2011 was a bit like coffee to me. Let me explain.
I’m not a huge coffee drinker — if I am having coffee, it’s usually mixed with enough chocolate, sugar, and cream to fool my brain into thinking it’s some other kind of drink. It’s the same way with hip-hop; I don’t associate myself with liking it, but when you mix it with enough other things I do like, I don’t even recognize how much I like it. jj’s 2010 “mixtape” album, kills, is a great example of this — all of their sources are hip-hop, but through interpolation, sampling, and distortion, it became something greater than its original source. It’s the exact same way with The Go! Team’s Rolling Blackouts.
The Go! Team mixes so many different influences it’s amazing they all cohere so well. Songs sound like a mix of 70s action movie montage music, educational TV themes, and hip-hop, and somehow all of this meshes into greatness. “T.O.R.N.A.D.O” sets the stage for the album and lets the listener know exactly what to expect. Ninja, the group’s charismatic frontwoman and main vocalist, bursts through the wall of sounds with a boundless energy that makes other tracks like “Apollo Throwdown” stand out. Elsewhere on the album, guest vocalists add their own particular flavors; Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast sweetens “Buy Nothing Day” and the album’s title track, while Dominique Young Unique’s rap on “Voice Yr Choice” suits the lazy summer feel of the instrumentation perfectly. It’s a mashup of styles that pulses with energy throughout the album’s runtime.
I was having trouble writing about why I liked Coldplay’s album this year without referencing M83′s equally brilliant Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, and I was finding the reverse true as well. So like the image above, it just seemed best to combine them.
Coldplay are masters at changing their sound while still sounding like themselves. Viva La Vida introduced them to Brian Eno, and his touch is still felt all over MX. And the music sounds like them reaching the pinnacle of their sound – they’re poppier than ever on “Hurts Like Heaven”, dramatic as ever on “Paradise”, and “Don’t Let It Break Your Heart” is an anthem made for stadiums the world over.
Another artist whose latest album is their biggest this year is M83. Besides the phenomenal “Midnight City” (which is soundtracking more things than ever), Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming shows Anthony Gonzales reaching even larger than on 2008′s Saturdays=Youth. What’s more, the album sounds like Gonzales taking everything he’s learned in 10 years as M83 and applying it to the album. ”Reunion” feels just as anthemic with it’s soaring “OH” chorus as any track off of Mylo Xyloto, and I often found myself getting the two confused when hearing intro seconds on my iPod (the fact that both albums sat in my “recently added” playlist at the same time didn’t help. Still, it’s cool to see that both “mainstream” and “indie” acts are reaching for the same ideas and influences in their work.
Annie Clark’s work as St. Vincent has a wonderful eerieness about it, something that just doesn’t feel quite right. As every reviewer seemed to note in their reviews/articles about her/the album, there’s a lot of darkness coming from such a pretty face. I think that’s what makes the material on Strange Mercy, her third album, so great. Her previous work has always felt a little too baroque – one too many things in an arrangement that probably wouldn’t be there in the live version, but that’s changed on this album – it feels like everything she did in studio can be replicated elsewhere. ”Surgeon”, the lead track that previewed the album, showed this new direction. Only keyboard, guitar, and bass, it has a killer two line chorus (supposedly inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s journals) – “Best finest surgeon/Come cut me open”. There’s a lot of dark subject matter in St. Vincent’s work, but it’s delivered in the best possible manner.
See also: “Cruel”
Somehow my post list and the AV Club’s feature on what music their writers discovered for the first time this year fell at the same time. It’s not all about finding what’s new – sometimes it’s about dipping into what’s inspired your new favorites to find out you like those just as much. I had 6 groups this year where I either found them through another group’s influences, saw them open for other bands I like, or had them randomly pop up on Pandora. They’re after the jump.
There tend to be a few continuums in my listening habits – a set of mental sliders that I end up using to pigeonhole what something sounds like. There’s one for electric-acoustic, one for what decade something tends to fall under (whether in age or sound), and one for folk-electronica. Not that there’s a huge disparity between those last two, but a lot of what I listen to tends to fall closer to one or the other. Fleet Foxes, like few other artists in my collection, are all the way to the “folk” side of the slider.
“The Shrine/An Argument” is a great example of this All that drives the song is the traditional instrumentation and multiple layers of vocals. All of these merge into a rich tapestry illustrating an argument and its aftermath. The various movements of this song have such power – particularly the startling horn blast near the end and the song is one of the richest moments on an album full of woderfully textured songs.
Equally as powerful is the song which follows, “Blue Spotted Tail”. Listen below.