NO GENRE

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I’m a pretty loquacious guy; the blog has been great because I get to indulge in instantaneous editorials about whatever I’m really into at the moment.  But every now and then I come across a song that I really hits me and I have the damnedest time explaining what’s so great about it.  Take, for instance, Sunvisor’s “Sky Dive,” a song that I’ve been hanging out with pretty steadily since the duo sent it to me a couple of weeks ago.  I’ve been struggling with my review because I can’t get much past a list of all of the things I like about the song:  the vague clang of the snare, the woozy synths, the way the gentle background vocals waft across the track, the way the bassline recedes as the layers pile up, the reverb blurring and smearing the vocals.  But I dawned on me tonight, when I sat down to work on it again, that I don’t need to make an argument for the song.  The song stands on its own.  Sometimes it’s best to shut the fuck up and let the song do all the talking.

mp3:  Sky Dive

My favorite wunderkind, Mikey Sanders, was recently forced to change the name of his band from Bye Bye Blackbird to Blackbird Blackbird.  Regardless of what he calls himself, he’s still pumping out some of the most generously warm music I’ve heard all year.  His latest is a song called “Avalanche” from his forthcoming Pure EP (release date pending), and, as always, the song bubbles with warm synth tones and hypnogogic vocals.

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Blackbird Blackbird was also kind enough to send along a remix of Teen Daze’s lauded “Shine On, You Crazy Whitecap.”  For my money, Sanders really improves the song by airing it out, giving it some color, and curing it of its anemia.  Check it out:

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mp3:  Avalanche

mp3: Shine On (Blackbird Blackbird Remix)

Photo: Ryan McGinley for The New York Times

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I have really tried to refrain from commenting on M.I.A.’s ever-growing beef with the New York Times over their recent profile of the artist.  The whole thing is really unsavory because it reflects very poorly on an artist that I respect, especially her wildly inappropriate response.  Again, today, M.I.A. took to the boards of N.E.E.T. to correct some (really minor) insinuations written by Lynn Hirschberg about the hypocrisy of truffle-oil French fries and radical politics.  But the most significant part of her post today is that she has posted a new song.  It’s unclear whether this is part of her response to Hirschberg or if this was a song intended to be on her new record.  Regardless, the song is M.I.A. at her most righteously angry: “You wanna talk about my politics?/Yeah, I could show you things that could make you sick.”  Over a deathly minimal beat, M.I.A. proceeds to eviscerate everyone and everything in sight:  the military industrial complex, the west in general, racists, misogynists, and, of course, journalists.  For each target, her equation remains the same: “Lies equals power equals politics.”  I’m starting, though, to wonder when all this non-music-related publicity starts to overshadow the songs themselves.

mp3: Haters

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Keep your master’s thesis about Lady Gaga’s gender-bending antics, I’m sticking with Kanye.  No other pop star in the last 10, 15, maybe even 20 years is such a compelling whirlwind of contradictions.  And no other element of his character is more alluring than his powers of reflection.  For a man whose every move is played out on the public stage and whose every artistic gesture is a apology/justification of those moves, Kanye’s ability to understand his own strange station is unparalleled in pop music. Kanye, unlike any other rapper of his generation, understands that his confidence doesn’t ring true until he shows you his insecurities.  The impact of his best work, then, depends entirely on displaying both sides of his character simultaneously.

Borrowing from King Crimson’s terrifying “21st Century Schizoid Man,” the first song to leak from his forthcoming Good Ass Job is, indeed, a schizophrenic work that speaks to the contradictions that define Kanye’s fame.  And for a man whose career seems to be increasingly threatened by his public weirdness, Kanye is quick to remind listeners of the complex power dynamic between celebrity and the public that confers it:  “No man should have all that power.” Over the vaguely tribal cadence calls, Ye becomes increasingly defensive:  “At the end of the day, goddamit, I’m killing this shit/I know damn well y’all feelin’ this shit.”  But in the end, Kanye recognizes what should be his real role:  “I got the power to make your life so exciting.”  But it’s only at that moment that the song takes off: the so exciting from the last line echoes out until it imperceptibly morphs into suicide.  The song ends with Kanye contemplating a beautiful death at his own hand.  What begins as an aggressive response to his very public breakdown over the past few years ends with a broken Kanye standing at an open window.  Try to imagine Lady Gaga airing her suicidal thoughts and then it becomes clear that Kanye is light years ahead of anyone else.

mp3:  Power

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I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days this week in NYC, and I made a short detour from wandering around to drop by the unbelievably well-curated Other Music.  I was able to pick up a couple of cool things that I had been shopping for, including Alex Bleeker’s newest 7” single “These Days.”  While the song was released a while ago on Underwater Peoples’ winter sampler, the visual quote of Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was too good to pass up.  The title track itself is a sour suburban romance: “Lost sight of what was right/Sleep down the street from you tonight/But I’ve got better things to do.”  The single’s topside is the uplifting melancholy of “Getting By,” which might be something of an anthem for Bleeker.  Between his own band and his role as bassist for Real Estate, Bleeke’s music is frequently about the pleasing aura of contentedness and the vague sadness that invariably attends it.

mp3:  These Days

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Arcade Fire‘s career is built on sensationally anthemic bombast, so the most striking thing about the two new songs from their forthcoming The Suburbs is that they are relatively modest affairs.  But, then again, almost anything after “Intervention” or “Keep the Car Running” or “No Cars Go” is going to sound modest. “The Suburbs” is a sunny affair that belies the dark lyrics: “But in my dreams, we’re still screaming and running through the yard/And all of the walls that they built in the seventies finally fall.”    Meanwhile, the claustrophobic new wave of “Month of May” is a pretty radical change for the band. Here, the band swaps the passion of their most carefully crafted songs for the urgency of a distorted guitar and the harsh snap of a snare.

mp3: Month of May

mp3: The Suburbs

Now that Big Boi’s promising Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Dusty Chico has a street date (July 6th courtesy of Def Jam), I can sleep a little easier.  For an album that very well could have been the best hip hop record for any of the last couple of years, Sir Luscious Left Foot already feels like a classic: “Royal Flush,” “Fo Yo Sorrows,” “Shine Blockas,” and “Shutterbugg.”  And now his latest single “Shutterbugg” gets the video treatment, and it features a headless Big Boi, a couple of Tron dancers, and a wall of red plastic cups.  Check it out:

And if you have the time to spare, check out his appearance on Martha Stewart.

mp3:  Shutterbugg

This is too fucking cool.  New Arcade Fire 12” single soon.

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Like Happy Family’s excellent “Youtube,” “Endless Spring” by Chicago’s Houses is a modest affair.  The song does not make any undue demands on the listener.  It’s upbeat without being cloying, contented without being arrogant.  And unlike a lot of the music that gets shackled with the sunny/beach/chill adjectival derivations, Houses’ “Endless Spring” sounds thoughtfully contemporary.  There is no false sense of nostalgia here: only the stuttering strum of looped guitar progression and the warm embrace of an electric piano.  While only having created a myspace page 16 days ago (!), Houses evidently has an EP coming out the first week in June. [via]

mp3:  Endless Spring

How to Dress Well‘s “Suicide Dream 2″ sounds like abject, windswept emptiness.  It’s the sound of a voice, a piano figure drifting to the coldest corners of the universe.  This is what it sounds like before you cut all ties that tether you to the earth.  And now How to Dress Well have released a video that accompanies the suffocating loneliness of the song.  The video, like HtDW itself, is a ghostly amalgam of borrowed images reconfigured in an entirely new context.  The unconnected images flash like the hurried last memories of someone on the verge.

If you haven’t already done so, pick up How to Dress Well’s amazing new EP, Can’t See My Own Face: The Eternal Love 2, which features the unbelievable song “Decisions.”

mp3:  Suicide Dream 2