No Genre is on a much-deserved vacation for the next week, but it’ll be back soon enough. Look out for reviews featuring, among others, Shabazz Palaces, Beirut, and How to Dress Well. If this vacation is anything like the one I took last year (see photo above), then I should have some excellent stories for y’all.
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Raphael Saadiq’s new album, Stone Rollin’, is out this week, and it’s garnered some respectable press from an impressive range of critics. While I think the album has some nice moments (especially “Over You” and “Heart Attack”), nothing even touches Saadiq’s crowning moment: Tony! Toni! Toné!’s first single from 1993′s Sons of Soul, “If I Had No Loot.” Whereas most New Jack Swing fused hip hop beats with R&B melodies, Tony! Toni! Toné! tried to add a distinctly Motown feel to their work. The structure of this Cross Colours masterpiece of is right out of the Barry Gordy playbook: clean jangley guitar riff on the verses and a carefully layered chorus more addictive than any known substance, plus Saadiq’s voice is so understated that it’s hard to miss the incredible flourishes he adds in the harmonizing tracks. As much as Teddy Riley is solely responsible for some of the best New Jack Swing singles (Jane Child’s “I Don’t Want to Fall in Love” and Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative“), he was never able to write something that looked so far forward and so far backward to to perfectly capture the present.
It dawned on me this afternoon that No Genre Music turned one year old a couple of days ago. Oops. In lieu of a party (No Genre is a mean drunk), I’d like to present the website with this festive birthday balloon package. Happy Birthday, No Genre!
Seriously, thanks to all the readers and commenters and mp3 hounds. I feel very fortunate to be able to do this, and I am eternally appreciative of all the wonderful feedback I’ve gotten from everyone over the past year. I’ve got to communicate with some really terrific people and artists. I hope that I can continue to deliver a product that you enjoy for years to come.
Scott
In some Not-Sure-How-I-Managed-That news, No Genre is going to be featured on a Breakthru Radio program called Anatomy of a Blogger this Thursday (8/05/10). I’m incredibly humbled by and immensely thankful for this awesome opportunity. While I’m pretty nervous about putting together a good playlist, you should gird yourself for some bold choices. As Roger Sterling advised last night, I’m going to turn this from a convelescent home into a Roman orgy (of music, featuring everyone from Pere Ubu to How to Dress Well).
All of this is to say, too, that you should probably be familiar with the great work that they do over at Breakthru Radio. Very nice people doing very good things with music. Pay them a visit if you haven’t before.
UPDATE: The show is currently streaming on Breakthru Radio’s right now. The experience was actually fun, athough I sound horrendously nervous in my interview. Here is the tracklist of the mix:
A heartfelt thank you goes out to DJ Thompson Davis for taking the time to feature No Genre in such a cool venue.
As much as I enjoy geeking out by building best-of album lists, song lists are infinity more interesting. A song is a high-wire act: one slip, one faulty step and you’ve got a mess on your hands. Albums, almost by their very nature, are more forgiving: great albums still have awful, awful songs. So a list of the best songs of a period tend to be more inclusive of different types of talent. Quite a few of these bands here don’t have enough of it to sustain an album (yet?), but they have enough to absolutely crush one. So, culled together with scraps of time over the past week and crafted with a fair amount of thought and consideration, I humbly submit 40 songs that have it pretty well locked down this year. Comments, omissions, counter-arguments all certainly welcome.
A cadre of good looking hipsters arm themselves to the teeth for a battles between the sexes. At the end of the day, the only two left standing are the denim-shirted Widower and the cigar-chomping Generalismo, facing each other down in a field at twilight. The whole thing is impressively soundtracked (more like choreographed) by Hecq and Exillon. Check it out:
Hecq Vs Exillion – Spheres Of Fury from Tim.Chris.Film on Vimeo.
mp3: Spheres of Fury
I’ve been meaning to write about this video for quite a while. The video begins with Active Child’s good cover of Joy Division/New Order’s “Ceremony,” a song so well-constructed that it seems to have internal regulators that prevent any bad cover versions. But it’s the rendition of Active Child’s own stunning “Wilderness” that deserves the accolades. The faithfulness to the recorded version is impressive.
If you haven’t already done so, pick up a copy of Active Child’s newest single “She was a Vision” out now on Transparent.
Welcome to the new No Genre Music.
As a gesture of preemptive self-preservation, I decided to move the blog to a self-hosted site. I have spent the weekend teaching myself WordPress, some basic HTML, and a bit of CSS. I’m still not very good at any of those things, but I’m certainly learning. So, I ask that you be patient while the new No Genre goes through its awkward stage.
But for the time being, what do you think?
Consequence of Sound has pointed out that Trent Reznor has updated his Vimeo account to include a great performance of covers from a 2006 radio show in Boston which includes a take on Iggy Pop’s “Nightclubbing” with Peter Murphy handling the vocals. The song, of course, just throbs with sleazy menace. The beat skulks and cowers and hides in the shadows while the synths sound like they’re spoiling right before your eyes.
And considering that Reznor stole the beat for “Closer” from “Nightclubbing,” it’s not surprising that the cover is excellent. Jeordie White provides all the right accent marks with his fuzzed out guitar solos, and Reznor’s piano slinks along like a dirty old man. Peter Murphy adds a bit more oomph to the song than Pop, rounding out the natural bass in his voice. The clean production coupled with Murphy’s stately voice adds a certain elegance to the song that I never heard in the original. This subversive reading of the song makes it a surprisingly compelling cover.
You can also take a listen to Murphy’s needlessly theatrical cover of NIN’s “Hurt” right here if you’re so inclined.
The Purple One was so inspired by my Vikings’ ruthless performance last week that he wrote and recorded a rousing fight song for the team in a single night. The lyrics are pretty absurd: “We r all amped up like a rock n roll band/Ready 2 celebrate every score/Ready 2 fight the elegant war.” I get the sense that Prince doesn’t really hasn’t watched a lot of football. Elegant war? The National Football League a stunning spectacle that celebrates everything that is good and bad about this country. The oxymoron “elegant war” doesn’t begin to cover the contradictions that the NFL carries in its soul.
But I think the song is just further proof that Prince is among the most inspired men on the planet. Literally everything that swings into the orbit of Prince gets translated into a song: sex fiends, various jewels, oddly colored rain, Batman, oral sex, Reagan’s Cold War politics, and, evidently, winning football teams. The only place on the planet that seems to be more grotesquely fecund than the Amazon rain forest is Prince’s Paisley Park Studios.
Dig out your horned helmet folks because Old Man Favre is going to run roughshod over this snooty little asshole this Sunday. Long reign the purple and gold.
