NO GENRE

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Behind Janelle Monae’s baffling The Archandroid, The-Dream’s Love King is the most expertly crafted mainstream R&B release of the year.  The album opens with the bouncy “Love King,” a romantic manifesto that defines The-Dream’s Lothario-cum-committed-lover routine.  While the original bubbles with snappy swagger, Sail a Whale’s re-imagining of the song wraps the song in a gauzy synths that smear the crisp production of its source material.  Wisely, Sail a Whale doesn’t cut up the original, whose build is a carefully orchestrated system of added layers.  Instead, the remix (if you want to call it that) pulls the strings up from the depths of the original to bleach the song in pastel washes of grainy sound.  Overall, the remix is a self-assured and subtle re-imagining of a song that is already plenty self-assured and subtle.  [via]

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This is exactly what I thought when I first heard this song:

If some bed-sit chillwaver discovered one morning that he had a hairy chest and a passable falsetto and a sense of fun, then it’s likely that he would produce something as quality as Miami Horror’s “Holidays.”

This is exactly what I thought when I learned that bed-sit chillwaver with a smooth chest and a weak falsetto and an annoying sense of fun Alan Palomo (Neon Indian) actually handles the vocals on Miami Horror’s “Holidays”:

If he’s capable of the kind of sunset disco that positively brims with good vibes, then why has he been wasting our time for the past year with his muddy dreck.  This is great!

While I’m not as wild about the rest of Miami Horror’s first LP, Illumination, I think that Miami Horror and Alan Palomo hit this one right out of the park.  Between the bubbling synth bassline and the jangly R&B guitar figure and stutter-step horns, instrumentation that recalls the best of Michael Jackson and Prince in the late 70s and early 80s, it’s hard not to feel good listening to this one.  [via]

Let me be clear here:  How to Dress Well is my favorite rookie artist of the year simply because Tom Krell makes the most vital, the most interesting work I’ve heard in a long time.  He makes me remember what was (unironically) admirable about acts like Jodeci and Shai; he makes me think of R&B as a template rather than a means to an end.  But more than anything else, HTDW has captured my attention because Krell has written some of the saddest songs (“Suicide Dream 2,” “Escape the Rain”) and some of the weirdly funky songs (“Mr. By & By,” “Lover’s Start”) that I’ve heard in ages.  Look, if you’re not sold on HTDW by now, then I’m not sure what it’s going to take.  In the event that you still need more convincing, check out the two choice cuts that are represented on a new 7” courtesy of Transparent (order here): “Ecstasy with Jojo” and “Take It On.”

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Holding down the a-side is “Ecstasy with Jojo,” a Michael Jackson-sampling throw down that slowly disintegrates as the reverb carries off the good times until all you’re left with is the ghosted skeleton of Jackson’s beat.  Krell’s ability to shift gears subtly like this makes his work so consistently engaging.  Just as the remarkable “Decisions” gradually puts on a weary smile, subtly shifting the tone of the song, “Ecstasy with Jojo” slowly switches gears, allowing itself to peter out in an ocean of echoes and reverb.

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Whereas “Ecstasy with Jojo” gradually loses its way in a funhouse of echoes, “Take It On” is a haunted house constructed of demonic bass and satanic tape hiss.  The song is a stark piece of anxiety: the inexorable metronome clicks away as the very foundation of the song rumbles underneath.

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The strange fact is that I know almost no one who listens to No Age.  In a way, this is hardly surprising.  I live in the Northeast, the site of punk’s  metamorphosis into art fuck (Glenn Branca) or hesher rock (Dinosaur Jr) or fractured mirrors of punk’s original promise (Sonic Youth).  And No Age are just too, you know, California for many folks up here.  Too bummed out, too un-self-conscious, too un-righteous.  This is all to say, though, that No Age are important for the very reason that I now think of Abe Vigoda and Mika Miko when I think of California punk instead of The Offspring and Bad Religion. They are important because they sound like a couple of guys who decided to revive and reinvent punk on a fucking lark.

The first glimpse at their forthcoming Everything in Between (with that awesome Zizek-like cover) is the surprising “Glitter.”  All of No Age’s trademarks are present: the beautiful squalls of feedback that envelope you before they stab you, the disaffected vocals, the insistent drum work that’s both pushy and restrained.  No, the surprise is in Spunt’s dead-on (and probably inadvertent) Billy Corgan impression.  The nasal quality of the vocals is a dead-ringer for Corgan’s stopped-up snarl, and the romantic overtones to the song don’t help the analogy.  The key difference, however, is that Billy Corgan hasn’t written anything this engaging, this challenging, this rewarding in, like, 20 years.

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Big K.R.I.T. – K.R.I.T. Wuz Here The hype around Big K.R.I.T.’s debut mixtape K.R.I.T. Wuz Here has been a pretty ridiculous.  Mixtapes (let alone rap albums) are almost never perfect; the density of the music makes it much better suited to singles.  And the chances of this relatively untested upstart releasing one of the best hip hop albums of the year seemed far-fetched.  Eating crow is easy when you’ve got Big KRIT. keeping you company.  K.R.I.T. carefully balances the push-and-pull between his southern-friend trunk-rattlers like “Country Shit” and the reflective thought experiments like “Hometown Heroes.”  And, strangely, he’s at his best when he fully commits to one or the other of the personas.  “Country Shit” is a chest-beating banger filled with regional pride that elevates K.R.I.T. to the arena of the best Southern rappers rep’ing the landmass below the Mason-Dixon.  But quickly, he can turn on a dime and heart your heart with tear-jerkers like “Children of the World” (which features a fantastic closing acapella rap) or “As Small as a Giant.”  It’s such a pleasure to watch K.R.I.T. balances these tendencies, but it’s even more pleasurable to realize that you’re listening to the ascendancy of a potentially great rapper.  And while the tape is far from perfect (there are a few forgettable songs here), the bulk of it justifies the hype. Rating:  7.5 / 10

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Kompakt generally releases electronic music for people who are uncomfortable with electronic music.  Their artists tend to create warmly digital environments where genre considerations and sample identification don’t much matter.  Walls might be a quintessentially Kompakt kind of duo: pop ambient for people with no patience for pop or ambient.  It’s tempting, then, to say that Walls is a great uniter, but the truth is that this one will probably struggle to find its core audience because, in effect, it has no core audience.  On the whole, the album is a soup of formless ingredients: guitar drones, sparkling synthesizers, vague microbeats.  Approachable enough to extent a hand to electronic novices, but also simple enough to discourage electronic experts.  To make matters even worse, none of it quite stays with you after you’ve spent a half hour listening to it.  But if you’re willing to let it hang around your headphones on lazy afternoons, then I’m sure you’ll find more than enough to love about this strange little album. [mp3]  Rating:  7 / 10

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Blackbird Blackbird – Blackbird Blackbird At this point, I think I’ve made my feelings very clear about Mikey Sanders and his excellent Blackbird Blackbird project.  For his debut album (which you can download/purchase here or here), Sanders collects some of the great songs that announced him to the world, including “Happy High,” “Pure,” and “Avalanche.”  The album, though, isn’t a quite recycle job.  There’s enough new material here to warrant throwing down a few bones for the pleasure.  Among these new songs is the titular “Summer Heart,” a song that feels nostalgic and wise and melancholy and hopeful all at the same time. Aside from his ability to write unbelievable hooks, this tendency to create enough layers of sentiment that his songs often feel like emotional phyllo dough has been Sanders’ core strength.  While some of the songs feel out of place (“So Sorry, Girl” feels too distinct with its pop sensibility to contribute to the whole), this is an excellent first album from someone who, if there’s any justice in the universe, we will be listening to for a while.  Rating:  8 / 10

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Here We Go Magic‘s Pigeons is one of the year’s most underrated albums.  Perhaps this is because it’s a strange and modest album that doesn’t reveal itself for quite a few listens.  And it also doesn’t help that the band dropped a lot of the endearing folk touchstones that defined their debut in favor of bold Krautrock flourishes.  If the album hasn’t resonated with some listeners yet, then I’m hoping that their recent cover of Neon Indian’s popular “Deadbeat Summer.”  Stripped of all its lomographic haze, “Deadbeat Summer” is almost barely there, a lilting melody that worms its way deep into your ear.  HWGM replaces the stoned disco of the original with a funky bassline and a gentle, lapping waves of harmonies.  In a lot of ways, I think the cover is an improvement over the original (no mean feat): the original sounded so much of its time and place that it’s hard to believe that it’s not going to sound dated at some point soon.  It’s going to be a real skull-fuckingly postmodern moment when you hear “Deadbeat Summer” a couple of years from now and feel nostalgic for a band that created nostlagia for a time that never quite existed.  Weird.  [via]

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How to Dress Well‘s debut album, Love Remains, will be released on September 21 on Lefse Records.  In celebration of what will assuredly be an awesome album (over half the tracks we’ve heard before on his free EPs), HTDW have released a rerecorded version of “You Won’t Need Me Where I’m Goin’.”  After Krell’s promise that the songs featured on the debut were going to be reworked and rerecorded, I was a little worried that he would scrub some of the rust and filth from his songs.  I was relieved to find this version of the song crusted in the same kind of blown-out EQ gunk that makes HTDW’s work so endearing.

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:

1. Galaxie 500 “Strange”
2. Pere Ubu “Ubu Dance Party”
3. The Raincoats “No Side to Fall In”
4. Neko Case “Train from Kansas City (Live)”
5. Phosphorescent “The Mermaid Parade”
6. The Smiths “Hand in Glove”
7. Jens Lekman “The Wrong Hands”
8. Dirty Projectors “Temecula Sunrise”
9. Animal Collective “Derek”
10. Destroyer “Rivers”
11. Wolf Parade “Killing Armies”
12. Frog Eyes “Bushels”

A heartfelt thank you goes out to DJ Thompson Davis for taking the time to feature No Genre in such a cool venue.

This week True Panther announced Glasser’s forthcoming debut album, Ring.  The label has promised that the album “builds on the tradition of classic albums like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Joni Mitchell’s Blue, and R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet song-cycle: albums that as a whole create stories that are bigger than the sum of their individual songs.”  And the promises keep coming:  “Ring is named for [the] chiastic, or “ring,” structure, an idea borrowed from the oral tradition.  In it, ideas are pair in a symmetric order, often leading bidirectionally toward a central idea.  Cameron [Mesirow, the woman behind the project] structured the album similarly, with no set beginning or end, with its songs representing fluctuating and often contradictory emotional states.”

All that, of course, remains to be seen, but I could certainly use more albums as good as Astral Weeks or Trapped in the Closet.

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Here’s what I know: the woman can write a great song and the label can line up an all-star lineup of in-house artists to throw down some great remixes.  Glasser’s debut EP, which True Panther released last year, features a trio of charming songs that were simultaneously spare and lush.  My favorite song, “Glad,” incorporates a maraca and an organ and an electric piano into a song that belies its seriousness:  “There’s a fire in your eye/Fires calm but the truth burns on/While we wait around to die.”

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Whereas Mesirow is content with the skeletal percussion to drive her song, Delorean’s remix swaddles her composition in a echoing synths and a programmed cymbal ride.  Rounding out the mix with a Balaeric bass thud, synthetic strings, and sampled fireworks exploding in the sky, Delorean opens up in the insular world of “Glad” to the wider world.  The Spanish band shows a surprising amount of restraint with the remix, which is appropriate considering the restraint shown by Mesirow in the original.

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Who knows what the shit this means!

The song is called “Repercussions,” and it’s a new Lauryn Hill song.  Perhaps it’s the lead single from a new upcoming album.  Or, it may be an old Lauryn Hill song that’s just new to all of us.  There is a good chance that it just doesn’t mean anything whatsoever.  I don’t want to get my hopes up over a decade-too-late follow-up to the instantly classic The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.  So, let’s just pretend that this was a strange one-off from Hill’s camp, evidence that she’s still recording but not in any great hurry to release another album. And regardless of what “Repercussions” means, it’s just nice to have another Lauryn Hill song in your life.

“Repercussions” is held together by a swirling piano figure that sounds like rain falling lightly on the keyboard of a Rhodes.  The beat has a particular sheen to it that seems to place it squarely in the mid-to-late 90s, which leads me to believe that this is little more than an old demo that finally, thankfully saw the light of day.  And, as always, Hill’s voice is the the star attraction.  She’s in full “Ex-Factor” mode here:  an aching duet between two Hills twisting their harmonies around one another until they braid themselves into a complex melodic knot.