Foxygen: We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic (2013)

(Jagjaguwar)

Hey, these California dudes have the same taste in music as me! Their '60s obsession runs rampant, like they're single-handedly carrying the torch of folk-rockers who try to play drums. On the first cut alone, you can spot every Anglo heavyweight of the relevant period you can likely recall without craning too hard: Zombie harmonies, Beatle guitar chimes, Stones riffs, and horns from across the pond at the Wrecking Crew's station. Why am I not therefore enamored? Lord knows liberal appropriation of things I love has never stopped me from falling for a band before, or else why bother with rock & roll at all?

The answer all comes down to passion, I think, and vitality. The duo of Jon Rado and Sam France is obviously playing on an audience's semi-familiarity with the lovingly recreated sound and approach of the Boomer-era titans they seek to reanimate. But when they play this music, it remains old music; to illustrate as carefully as I can what I mean, if I put a Kinks album on, suddenly that's new music. But We Are the 21st Century Blah Blah Blah Blah never escapes the trappings of an adorable retro throwback; it has no presence to speak of. It's like Turtles sans wit, so all you're left with is cotton candy barroom trills and a lot of ear-teasing compression.

Except in moments like the down-home piano-driven nod to the Band "No Destruction" and the simplistic garage-noise build "Bowling Trophies," Foxygen's songs are lengthy and meandering, and this is by and large deliberate, a product of their labored trickiness that calls to mind one of their few modern reference points, MGMT. I loved that band's Congratulations, which owed just as much to Love and the Zombies as this does (see "Shuggie" for an almost eerie suggestion of the former, only with self-conscious lyrics and a terrible melody), but they came to this sound with a sense of oblique restlessness that Foxygen's on-the-nose, painstaking costume play sorely lacks. There's something lazy about it, and not even just in the way suggested by the fact that the record contains songs called both "Oh Yeah" and "Oh No" (the former coincidentally being the most MGMT-like moment here, the latter being the big Jefferson Airplane drugged-up album closing ballad move).

Alert listeners will also detect more superficial connections to concurrent hip groups -- hipper, if anything -- Girls and Tame Impala: the latter because psychedelia looms so large in the foundation of both bands' sound, the former because of the overly affected vocals and a kind of reverence toward coked-up lethargy that I find sort of befuddling. Sure, you can aurally remake Get Back and Abbey Road in the theatrics of "On Blue Mountain," but the hooky yet obnoxious flamboyant drama that slowly unfolds is more strongly reminiscent of bad prog or, gulp, Red Rose Speedway. That down-your-throat good time sensibility comes with the territory of trying to file a new record in sneakily between Oar and Pet Sounds, and so it goes that the attempted "communal" peak "Shuggie" falls flat, that the imitation-garage gimmickry of the title cut is all too florid to fit snugly on Nuggets. Inescapable indeed that, in terms of both vocals and compositions, these valentines to an era are far more self-serving and hollow than the now-equally musty but remarkably alive work of a band like the La's, whose fixations came with genuine adoration and exuberance.

There is one moment that lands here, though, and it seems nearly accidental. "San Francisco" is so beyond-belief twee that its ridiculous charms become undeniable; you want to hate every note of its pandering, readymade-for-a-She-&-Him-cover cheeriness, but it parks itself halfway between Belle & Sebastain and the Lovin' Spoonful and, despite ludicrous lyrics like "that was many years from now" (ugh, and that's not even as bad as the horrors of "Shuggie"), you fall head over heels for its delightful pop structure and jaunt. You can almost hear the street set being constructed for a Wes Anderson film as you listen, and the reason that's actually tolerable is that something shines through: there is a knowing lilt in that chorus that you just can't get away from, and that's how you know there's intelligent life in here. Someday maybe it will be ready to present us with something a bit more truly inventive and felt.

The Animals: Best Of (1964-65)

(Abkco)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There was an abhorrent article by David Gates in Newsweek in 2008 called "It's a White Thing" arguing that white attraction to the music (jazz, blues, rock & roll, and on down the list) made by American blacks is a detached and even self-congratulatory exotic fascination, a symptom of our Western color schism that can never be bridged. The thesis is that the young Caucasian college student who listens to Charlie Parker or Skip James is really doing so out of a combination of trad racial guilt and an impersonal infatuation with a dangerous Other and sense of gritty "authenticity" (Gates' word), a modern-day manifestation of the privileged lady checking out slaves in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus who wants to see "the big black one" fight to the death. The logical conclusion of writer Gates' ideas: white music is for white people, black music is for black.

Thank heavens he's wrong or we unfortunates of Euro descent would have little beyond a lot of bilge to listen to, which isn't to say white people haven't made some dandy music, but outside of classical (which frankly is beyond my depth of non-aesthetic understanding anyway), how many white musical pioneers have we really had? If you excuse Brian Eno, they can't claim to have invented any major genre we listen to in America today. I wouldn't claim to know why this is the case but I don't see how anyone can credibly dispute it. But Gates' thinking has plenty of precedent. Up until not that long ago, Billboard monitored a "Black Music" chart week after week, and it was not unusual to enter a store and see a "Black" section marked off.

It's out of my league to argue about whether racial background factored into the actual creation of art by Miles Davis or Muddy Waters or Stevie Wonder or even Michael Jackson and Berry Gordy. I'm quite sure it did, because you cannot live in the United States without realizing that blackness, rightfully or not, has an inherent and external meaning instantly. It is well in my league, however, to tell you that beyond the entirely understandable pride and inspiration an artist may hold for their heritage, it would make little difference to me if Chuck Berry were white or John Lennon were black. It may, sadly, make a difference in their audience shares, and in a more meaningful sense it may affect the creation and cultural appreciation / appropriation of their art. But I find it obscene to suggest that my enjoyment of the music made by people of a different skintone means more or less to me for some artificial reason, be it guilt or a desire for earthiness -- itself, I would argue, a racist concept, and an absurd one, as we all ultimately originated in the same place.

That idea of universality -- the feeling of music coming from your bones, moving you down to the barest instinct -- applies very fittingly to the Animals' music. Led by the consistent goofball Eric Burdon, his later sins still far ahead, they are not generally labeled as being of a piece with the British Invasion. I would say they matter more today than the Who. To even hear a snippet of the songs on this disc today is to be knocked out, led irresistibly to dance with the world. If the British Invasion -- itself a hugely appealing (across any racial barrier) souffle and distillation of everything revealed by rock & roll in the preceding decade -- were a giant cupcake (bear with me) and the Beatles represented the frosty, flawless icing (sweet but not too sweet, the latter task left to Herman's Hermits and the Dave Clark Five), the Kinks the cream filling, the Rolling Stones the thick marble cake, and the Who (in my analogy) the wrapper, the Animals were the crusty, slightly burnt bottom of the dessert. Anyone who argues the Stones represented the dirty rock & roll of the movement is delusional. I love the Stones, but virtually anything on this compilation outmatches them for grit. And these are just the singles. There are some pop concoctions here: you will know "It's My Life," which is pure British Invasion (and brilliant), as well as "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and "We Gotta Get Out of This Place," both of which are unmistakably undercut with the shade of dirty groove.

To go back to race for a moment, the chief reason my bringing up Gates' article is to excuse something I don't really want to say but feel I must. I think of all of the B.I. bands, the Beatles were in spirit and flavor closest to the rock & roll luminaries -- probably around three fourths of whom were black -- that led the way for them, partially because the Beatles had been playing together the longest and absorbed more of the styles and trends of the '50s than any of their peers. But in terms of raw, uninhibited rock & roll, rhythm & blues sound, the Animals had the knack above anybody else. When Little Richard saw the Beatles for the first time in 1962, he told a Liverpool reporter he was amazed they were white British guys, calling their music "authentic negro." If Richard Penniman and the world at large indeed feel safe using such a descriptor as shorthand for rock & roll (as it once existed and no longer specifically does), so be it; my only protest is that Buddy Holly, too, was pure rock & roll, and probably no one was whiter. These Animals songs are some of the raunchiest rock & roll ever recorded, so steaming they verge on entire other worlds, blues especially.

It is easy enough, of course, to argue that whereas the Beatles were nonchalant about their color and what it meant about them, the Animals embraced it, striving obviously -- as many bands do today -- to sound as much as possible like they were recording music twenty years earlier, and that they as the artists were different people entirely. This meant something altogether different then. It is hard to imagine now a time when country, R&B, rock & roll, and pop were constantly meshing and melding in the most casual of settings. Genres were not the hard line then. Elvis was played on every station. When you hear these songs today, it's impossible to overstate how little anything about them matters except their base, undeniable appeal. Regardless of the authenticity and earthiness of the men recording them, the songs themselves are as authentic and earthy as anything can be. I suppose a case could be made that there is condescension of a kind in Burdon's attempts to mimic his black idols' vocal styles exactly, but there is probably no more pronounced illustration of the fusion of white and black sensibilities in the '60s, of the birth that continues to this day of the oblique cultural reversal, in which artistically we worship our cultural assets while politically and socially we either condemn them or try to pretend they're not there.

I did not listen to the Animals growing up; mine was a Byrds and Simon & Garfunkel household (not mentioning the Beatles, as I assume they are part of nearly every household). I do, however, remember my mom practicing "House of the Rising Sun," a song as ancient and mysterious as some murder ballads, and being intoxicated by the sense of beautiful dread and fear in its chords and melody. It still moves me in a basic and inexplicable way suggestive of enormous power and tragedy. Burdon's voice almost doesn't seem worthy of it; he certainly is more than slightly out of his league on the song, which is ironic since it is the Animals' most popular and successful track, though maybe not because Burdon's modesty adds to the charm and, to repeat a phrase, grit. He more than any electrical current is what identifies it as a record of 1964 and not some ghostly paean lifted from a lost and found 78 from an attic somewhere. You sense history in the song, no matter who plays it, and maybe there's a manner in which it is inappropriate that most of us now know it because of the Animals. The Byrds comparison is needed here; some time before the American band popularized folk rock and decades before our po-mo infatuation with history as style, the Animals electrify and fetishize a Time Before. With this as their signature, like the Byrds, the Animals would forever exist and be known primarily as interpreters, rendering them nearly alone among post-Beatles rock bands.

But the instant the second song, the delirious and rollicking "I'm Cryin'," overtakes, there is no more doubt as to the Animals' intentions. There is an astonishing purity to the songs that follow. If we are able to stretch ourselves in 2008 to make this distinction, it is like a modern take on a greatest hits by some forgotten great rock & roller of the '50s rather than a few kids from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Adding to the ingratiating toughness and rawness is the production style, which -- despite the band's considerable proficiency -- lends them a garage band feel that other B.I. denizens completely lacked, so that they sit comfortably by the down-and-dirty American proto-punk acts of the time: again the seamless fusion of past and future. For the past, you may turn to the amped-up "Around and Around" (Chuck Berry) cover or to the base sexual urges of "Boom Boom"; for the future, "Gonna Send You Back to Walker" is miraculously effective at drawing a line from Robert Johnson to the Buzzcocks. And what's more, Sam Cooke's immortal "Bring It on Home to Me" brings out Burdon's unexpected sweetness, and "I'm in Love Again" -- a Fats Domino cover -- sounds uncannily like the Rolling Stones. And their take on "Story of Bo Diddley," which contemplates the reaction of elder statesmen to the Brit Invasion, suggests they had more of a sense of humor than their doom-and-gloom Vh1 "Behind the Music" profile suggested.

If there's anything more you need out of an album, I don't know what it could possibly be; these songs refute everything about Gates' thesis -- they are pure and good rock & roll, and there is nothing strained or inauthentic about it. I don't know much of anything about the Animals' discography except it's not very big; this sequence is so addictive it may be too good to taint by investigating more, but I know I will anyway because if there's a possibility that more of this exists, I want to hear it.

[This review was written in June 2008 but never posted. My feelings about Burdon's conflicted attitude toward his sources have grown somewhat more complicated since then, and I'm not fully onboard any longer with some of the thoughts about race and music above... but I'm leaving my thoughts as they were above, with just a few edits for clarity.]

[SEE ALSO:]
Animalism (1966)

Dawn Richard: Goldenheart (2013)

(Our Dawn)

RECOMMENDED

Progressive rock's gradual invasion of R&B is complete now; we needn't fight it, if The ArchAndroid didn't already convince us it wasn't necessary. Former Bad Boy associate Dawn Richard's phantasmagoric, ethereal solo sophomore effort clinches the transformation -- and not merely because compositions by two members of Genesis are interpolated at various points. The record begins with teasing, ghostly orchestrations calling up "In the Air Tonight" -- a desperate and haunted melody that here serves to introduce us to Richard's fiercely smooth, carefully tentative M.O.: her songs are bottom-heavy and shimmery but twist their various knives in a confident, celebratory manner when the moment calls for it. That confidence is well earned even though Richard enters the world as a self-releasing solo artist without much clout behind her. We have to turn to deep cuts on R&B albums these days to find anything as terrifically bold as the stunt of melding Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" with a hi-NRG backbeat. Richard embraces everything she can think of, and the result is a consistently surprising, affectedly atmospheric record whose ghostly orchestrations and tricky, sensual beats amply reward the nocturnal heart.

Hooks are scattered, but hooks aren't really the point of an album like this anyway. Listen carefully to "Return of a Queen"; though its "do what you want to me" refrain offers concurrent strength and delicacy enough, you're stricken immediately by another, deeper contradiction: musically, it's sparse and direct but also florid, expansive, immersive, and its build into propulsive electro with an "Adorn"-like center is sweeping and feverish, especially in the properly moody setting it deserves. For a quicker primer on Richard's intriguingly warring impulses (war being a constant lyrical theme here, with even sex a "tug of war"), move up closer to "Northern Lights," something akin to Robyn Miller's music from MYST fused with a Jock Jams compilation -- it claps to insanity, peaking in a sharply exhilarating melodic chorus, one of many that are carefully mounted and dispersed by writer-producer Druski (Andrew Scott), who lays the bedrock for Richard's glorious vocal acrobatics. Her singing is perfectly nuanced, glowering and towering without a hint of the cloying easiness of a less adventurous pop singer.

Scott and Richard's taste may or may not be great, but it's certainly interesting, making entertaining and useful hay out of its intense schlockiness -- and as on recent totem albums by Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, and Frank Ocean, there's a certain pleasingly calm normalization of verbal and aural weird that artists outside of the R&B genre never seem to find quite so easy and joyous. Yeah, Richard's intricate lyrics aren't too far from Led Zeppelin's tiresome advocacy of fantasy novels, but she at least lives in 'em. When she starts a war on "Riot," it's a statement of purpose with giggly excitement toward the wet 1997 streets evoked by its heap of radio club music influences; the point being that even when she's relatively conventional, she finds excitement in it. And not to bring things back to a rockist platform, but one of the startling things about Goldenheart is its absolute heaviness -- the backlit sci-fi beauty in instant touchstone "Gleaux" boasts a tremendous focus and seriousness as the sex and subversion in its melody get steamrolled by its quixotically manic pace changes; the sound is positively huge, never mind Richard's unwavering voice.

Call it "modernist urban nocturnal pop" if the existing umbrellas don't satisfy you; they don't seem to satisfy Richard, who can exercise so many ideas in so little time it's kind of exhausting. The only song here with full-on outside production, by an outfit called the Fisticuffs who've worked with Miguel and others, is "Tug of War," and what a batshit piece of wonder this is. Initially it's stunningly soft, leaving room for emphasis on the expressive vocal and beat; but as the massive bass takes over, the pleading and strong insistence in Richard and her pure-sex determination to "be the champion" reaches a critical mass even as the song comes to seem ever more felt and layered. Its push and pull drum sound, its gloriously sensual rhythm make the forbidden point that we should be so lucky to deserve "what's coming to you," as she puts it. It's enough to make you wish for an immediate follow-up with a broader string of producers, something I generally don't advocate.

With all this talk of heaviness, we're underselling how fun this record is; its crafty camp and dissonance are the initial attraction and a strong reason to return. "Tug of War" segues splendidly into the great "Ode to You," which builds and releases its frustrated grooves with kiss and seduction, occupying firmly the sense of desire and need that seems so verboten in so much modern rock music. Case in point again, the classicist slow-jam and hot-shit single "86," conventional but sort of glorious and bringing us the killer hook of the whole LP. And remember that Richard herself, though she displays no sense of outsize ego, is a determined and dedicated artist; we don't abide much by the rather sexist "diva" distinction for anybody, but "Goliath" is the kind of showpiece that brings the house down in every capacity -- the size of it fills your head, the rhythmic vocal interactions and overdubs are Marvin Gaye-worthy, and note how Richard never forgets the record's swirling, cohesive motif of that starkness that's only pounded through with the incessant beat.

No doubt describing an album like this can seem reductive; "spacey" doesn't tell you much of anything, nor does the fact that a song with the line "vibrations set the tone" ("Frequency") actually is deliriously fun and sexy and not just silly. If you need a basic rundown on what's going on here, the single won't tell you much. Track down the craziest moment of all here, the Cruella Deville as Laura Nyro nonsense "Pretty Wicked Things" and fall the fuck into it. Distant, intense, almost shapeless, it's high cinematic drama with the wild ambition of contact you'll remember from the girl groups, but nothing like their letter or spirit. Its sweetness and darkness are so playfully skewered, especially in the vocals which "ooooooo" and "ohhhhhhhh" out into oblivion, that you feel like you're gonna lose patience with it any second now, but its muffled goth-soul keeps ingratiating. Leave the record on in the background and you're impressed enough by it already, but pay close attention and it's an absolute jolt.

Richard is going somewhere for sure... but she's not quite there yet. This would be an even more special record had it been pared down a bit, but like so many major R&B releases in the last few years, it's simply too long, to the point of being overwhelming. And in this case, it's also front-loaded, which makes the back half disappointingly forgettable, especially when it drifts into faux-inspirational stuff like the piano-heavy "Warfaire," which is no match for the Des'ree hit it immediately recalls. Cut this down to eleven or twelve songs and it's an enduring, remarkable dark night in, preferably shared with someone good in bed who either has drugs or feels like drugs. That's not to be reductive toward Richard's craft, it's just that her work here is genuinely, uncompromisingly erotic and adventurous, and you'll want all the time you can have with her most breathless and inspired work here. Never see the break of Dawn, indeed.

Otis Redding: Very Best Of (1962-68)

(Rhino)

RECOMMENDED

You'll find no challenge in this household, uh, blog if you wander in and announce that Otis Redding is the finest male singer in the pop idiom. We might in our hearts say similar things about Sam Cooke and John Lennon but really, there's no way to challenge you on this basic point: he was a master vocalist, a brilliant composer, and a ball of energy as a performer. He was also a consummate artist who, in a painfully brief recording career, laid down a rather shocking amount of stellar material; along with the Beatles, he may be the only major rock & roll performer who isn't best introduced with a greatest hits compilation. Not one best-of I've heard gives any real hint to his versatility, or to the depth in his catalog.

Case in point is this serviceable enough Rhino collection from 1992, part of a large series collecting various important performers' A-sides of the '60s. The offerings here couldn't be better, of course; "That's How Strong My Love Is" into "Mr. Pitiful" into "I've Been Loving You Too Long" into "Respect" makes a Voyager I-worthy case for Redding's immense gifts and the reason he looms so large in any survey of midcentury music. If we're strictly grading a compilation like this on musical content, well of course this rates an easy A+. And really, chances are that if you're reading this you're somewhat familiar with Redding's catalog, but if you're not: you can do so much better than this. Start, let's say, with Otis Blue, universally regarded as a classic and still one of the most wondrous albums of the '60s or ever; then tackle a personal favorite of mine, The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul, then grab one of two oddities: the magnificent posthumous classic The Immortal Otis Redding or the searing Carla Thomas collaboration King and Queen, unsampled here aside from the lively "Tramp." Or go chronologically and gather up Pain in My Heart, Sings Soul Ballads, and The Soul Album. Trust me, once you've started you'll want them all.

But Redding is not unique in his genre or era in regard to being an album artist; Motown albums were mostly filler in the '60s, but travel outside of that circle and you'll find Wilson Pickett, for instance, churning out consistently high-quality and robust full-lengths, yet I'd still advise you to kick things off with a Pickett compilation. What's different about Redding? Mostly it's that the aforementioned grandness and versatility of this catalog doesn't pare down well to a format like this; the Beatles analogy is the easiest one -- how do you explain the Beatles in forty-five minutes? Every comp I've heard is fixated upon Redding as balladeer, and sure, he was a great one, one of the best. But ballads don't dominate the performance mastery and songwriterly expertise inherent to his body of work, certainly not in the way they define, say, Gene Vincent or even Marvin Gaye, whose world was always so passionately contained. Redding was a cut-loose-and-move-free performer; you get a taste of it in the cover of "Satisfaction" included here, wherein he comes to own the song so thoroughly that I don't recommend you hear it if you deeply love the Rolling Stones' version, because it will never sound anything but quaint again. Redding's own songs were great but his dominance over the material he covered, his ability to tower over and transform it, was above reproach, and our only real hints here are "Satisfaction," admittedly a great choice, and the relatively conservative "Try a Little Tenderness."

Again, these are all essential cuts, but vocally Redding would go on these astounding near-wordless tangents like on "Satisfaction" wherein he seems to nearly lose control of his singing, he's so wound up, and his relationship to the music becomes so blisteringly powerful and complex, and it's as if he's creating some wide-scope canon of American art in real time with nothing but the whims and tics and fiery blowouts of that fearsome instrument of his. That's what I think of when I think of how much I love this man's work. I think also of the natural gruffness and swagger of "Hard to Handle," the a cappella explosion on "Love Man," the cocksure simmer of "Knock on Wood," none of which are here.

But the issue with Very Best Of isn't simply that it doesn't contain enough material, it's that it's unable to really justify its own existence. On the theory that the prospective buyer will end up eventually acquiring all of Redding's albums, the Carla Thomas collaboration, and the first two posthumous LPs (the first of which, Dock of the Bay, is often listed as a proper studio album), there is but one cut on this disc -- the buoyant "I Can't Turn You Loose" -- that won't be duplicated. Each and every one of those other CDs is more essential than this one, and is at least its equal as a primer on the man's work; even his weakest LPs, The Soul Album and Pain in My Heart, are stronger educations. You'd think that placing Redding's most shining classics all together would be some sort of a revelation, putting an overwhelming glow around his body of work, but Redding's moment was so short that to chop it up seems like a dilution or skewing of a coherent narrative. And hearing the slow ones all end to end with a few relieving bits of rollick and bombast isn't representative, nor is it much fun, except maybe for sex, then have at it. But being totally honest: get the albums and everything else, go to iTunes and get "I Can't Turn You Loose," and adore all of it for the rest of your life. Skip this. Satisfaction (!) guaranteed.

[SEE ALSO:]
Otis Blue (1965)
The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul (1966)

A$AP Rocky: LongLiveA$AP (2013)

(RCA)

RECOMMENDED

You remember that interview Paul McCartney gave announcing his break from the Beatles, wherein among other things he noted the way that Let It Be had become an old record before it even came out? This comes to mind a lot when we spend time with LongLiveA$AP, an album that even in its title suggests the iconography of a comeback -- but it's the dude's first LP. It seems like so long ago already that this record's first hot single "Goldie" showed up and already seemed to signal that one of hip hop's youngest golden boys was starting to sound a little exhausted -- his unwavering, consistent flow as smooth as ever, yeah, but now stunted by expectation like he's already on the defense about a mythology he long since established succinctly, one that already made itself familiar to us before we could buy a note of his music. Produced by Hit-Boy with a sort of goofily strident Jack in the Box toy of a hook, "Goldie" is engagingly brief but also overblown ("to complement the mink") and just doesn't have the presence of a big memorable radio moment. And it still trades a few yards further ahead of the curve than the Skrillex cameo "Wild for the Night," which mixed in with its wheat-thin revision of some of the most determinedly annoying sequencer trills of R&B radio circa 2004 is like this bonkers signal of what a weird world popular music has really become by now. And yet A$AP Rocky himself, the supposed star of this production, seems scarcely to be doing much to assert his control over it.

A couple of years ago, I was one of many enamored with A$AP Rocky's autumn 2011 mixtape LiveLoveA$AP, not to be (read: inevitably to be) confused with his oft-delayed debut album LongLiveA$AP, which now sits before us at last. We've learned since then that he's a bit of a dickbag; did you read the interview in which he asserted that he wanted to have sex with Lana Del Rey less after he came to respect her, thus offering some pandering old-world values on both femininity and sexuality in one fell swoop? But we can choose to avoid brutish dudes who say and do misogynistic shit in our culture and then we can spend the rest of our lives avoiding James Brown and John Ford, so the point's somewhat moot. But if we come to LongLive with a bias, what supports it is not Rocky's less-distinctive-than-before lyrics but the rocky bounce between malaise and caffeinated drive in his performance style. The excitement over his rapid-wealth burst onto the scene has long faded now, and what's technically a first album comes to feel like a grab at redemption already. The record opens what seems almost an obligatory feeling of hazy drift-off in its ambiance, Rocky struggling to announce himself as fate swallows him. He's dying in prison, but he still has to rant and rave -- none too originally, but passionately -- about hypocritic Christians and, uh, Santa. And by the time the first fade comes, he's won us over again at least in part: that lively brew of tricks and alter egos and general feverishness he calls forth when he feels like it, when he wants to make his strongest impression, is actually worthy of Kendrick Lamar. But Rocky has far less to say, cause he's still just a baby.

That baby is one who decided to make himself a career in hip hop just for the hell of it, and we can tell by his pay stubs that he was justified in the endeavor. But maybe easy is too easy sometimes -- throughout this record, lethargy sets in as soon as Rocky asserts himself, often leaving others like Lamar or Schoolboy Q or (memorably) Danny Brown to pick up his slack. His relative apathy isn't even of the smoked-out variety like Curren$y's charming trippiness, but in this case at least it seems almost conceptual, a kissoff posture to prove a point; LongLive is a surprisingly drab affair, which isn't fully a negative criticism. "PMW" holds a familiar fusion of bigness and snails-pace sound and center-stages a sense of welcome desperation in A$AP's voice, and it's just a strange and lumbering enough grind to be intriguing and infectious. But as will prove typical, he dilutes it with a tired roll call of clichés; he's still a pretty motherfucker, lest you forget, but "pussy money weed / yeah" recalls nothing so much as that dunderheaded hook at the center of Limp Bizkit's "Nookie," something I never wanted to relive (can't speak for you kind folks). I slightly prefer the Zen-like "ungh, pain" that drives the lounged-up trip hop "Pain," or even "lights camera action" ad nauseum. Anything. But the most compelling rapping here is all on the rather quaint (in both form and content) all-star lineup "1Train," which says a lot. Laid up against that, I actually don't mind a bit of arrogant prickishness. I'm in luck cause there's plenty, and though the hungover dance music of "LVL" is already just as in danger of sounding outdated as the bizarre Skrillex track, it is bewildering enough to be a singular experience. And stretch-skewed, slowed-the-fuck-down A$AP is really more fun at this point than whatever else he's doing.

When the breakneck-impossible skill demonstrated on Rocky's old mixtape bullhorn bursts through the dross and weird, there's genuine artistry to be found here, and mixed in with the oddity of what remains we have to count this record as something of a victory. Three cuts in particular fuel the starmaking potential of the record: my personal choice for the full breadth is "Hell" -- a stunning, troubling spiritual of sorts, a cartoon tour of an infernal dark night with disorienting, miserable echoed vocals and chilly vastness suggestive more than anything of Cab Calloway's cycle through the afterworld in the Fleischers' cartoon "Snow White." Rocky is wallpaper here, but so what? He's bold enough to know how rich this is and gives it up to Clams Casino's brilliantly unsettling production and, maybe more importantly, a shattering chorus by Santigold. I'm nearly as enamored of the glorious hi-NRG throwback "Fashion Killa," on which A$AP seems to surrender to the widescreen seduction with full force enthusiasm; that as well as the piece's surprising warmth make it the most utterly infectious thing here, except for...

Well, you know the one. "Fuckin' Problems" is maybe the song of 2013 so far, and to Rocky and his far-flung cabinet's eternal credit, it's a thoroughly unique creation despite its myriad throwbacks and influences, a pun-heavy and wicked classicist-nutzoid groove evoking Stan Freberg by way of Ice-T. It's here that everything suddenly snaps into gear better and brighter than on Rocky's first tape; the track's evil and vicious, dumb even, but its mad-scientist groove is so deliciously clever that even its deplorable sarcasm resonates, and there's something magnificent on a "Lola" level about how the central couplet winds up: "I love bad bitches, that's my fuckin' problem" -- and wait for it -- "and yeah I like to fuck, I got a fuckin' problem." You dig? The chrome to your dome make you sweat like me? Come on. And this isn't "Ms. Jackson" or anything, but take your pick on whether the complete absurdity of "I'm the nigga / The nigga nigga" (forever? for ever ever?) or "Stare up at the stars and put the Beatles on" makes you gladder to be alive. Hey, Kendrick's here; it's fun. Drake's even here and he also fucking produced the thing, by far his greatest cultural accomplishment to date.

That Drake would provide the most indelible, mysterious beats and track here -- its chorus a monster, its verses heart-flippingly shapeless -- is one of the many surprises A$AP's offered in this fragmented but highly worthwhile mess. Danger Mouse contributes too, and his track "Phoenix" is so much a symbol of his own tastes and his own now-fading era that it's like, who decided what belonged here? The words are added to the heap of vaguely nonsensical rants about "Illuminati lies" but Danger acts like he's unsure if he's on top of the Geto Boys or Coldplay, casting Rocky's tonguetwist -- which, by the way, is weirdly and surely unintentionally reminiscent of the midsized '70s Beach Boys hit "It's OK," only too appropriate given how good a time Mike Love and A$AP Rocky would have discussing "bitches" -- against, uh, gospel? Gangsta's lament circa '93? The organic piano and beat and the in-vogue distortion? What the fuck is he doing? Danger Mouse's mere presence here, much less the terrifying Frankenstein creation he conjures up once he arrives, is the major outlier here and yet also a microcosm of this bizarrely put-together album.

It never really falls into place, not except those few seconds on "Fuckin' Problems" when everyone in the galaxy is having a beachball-bursting good fucking time, but I'm still not sure I'm actually criticizing this record. I might forget a lot of things but I doubt the genuine originality and unnerving strangeness of something like creepy-crawly finale "Suddenly" will leave me anytime soon. This one has A$AP cleverly deconstructing himself over a freaky-deaky vocal sample that's probably not actually that discomforting but is repeatedly drilled down into wispy horror and stretched weirdness heading out to oblivion. What's happening here is actually an old DJing trick, the stop-start of a familiar bite of a celebratory song or moment as last-call approaches, as people are drunk enough to sing along and lose themselves a bit. But it's turned on its head like some spotlight cast on all our drunken indulgences, and somewhere behind the turntables Rocky stands there laughing knowingly with an evil look in his eyes. Dunno what he'll do now but I'm slightly afraid of it.

[SEE ALSO:]
LiveLoveA$AP (2011)

One-sentence reviews #5

I lived through high school once, I don't really want to do it again.

Cake
Fashion Nugget (1996)
(Capricorn)

!! CAUTION !! - Bought this in seventh or eighth grade primarily because all my friends bought it and I wanted to be cool too, then by the time I actually did so it was considered passe -- but I ended up a great fan of the band for a time anyway; sadly, like fellow ironic-detachment titans Beck and Ben Folds, Cake is now unlistenable to me, and this is their worst record of all: smarmy and smug and care-ful-ly en-un-ci-at-ed deadpan, badly sung and performed by people who kinda seem to hate rock music, excluding solely the serviceable rockabilly "Stickshifts and Safetybelts" and strange meander "Italian Leather Sofa" and yes this really is one sentence.

Faithless
Reverence (1996)
(BMG)

!! CAUTION !! - Distinctly of-its-time trip hop might pass on quaintness except its actual content, as opposed to its production, is just so fucking inept compared to the many practitioners of this genre whose trend-mongering was less explicit; do you prefer the obnoxious attempted Stax invocation "If Lovin' You Is Wrong" with its comic book panel of sensuality or the bad-breath charmer "Dirty Ol' Man"?

The Joy Formidable
Wolf's Law (2013)
(Atlantic)

As throwback major label arena rock bands go in 2013, this is probably stellar and certainly eclipses the similar glitziness of Florence and the Machine melodically and vocally, but this person with a onetime soft spot for Muse has lost whatever connection would let him admire any band whose primary touchstone seems to be Queen; if you feel otherwise, I advise you to listen to this.

Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career (2009)

(4AD)

!! CAUTION !!

The lengthy lapse since the last post here has been for a variety of legitimate and pathetic reasons, not the smallest of which is that I set a goal for myself -- with the recent announcement of new work from long-quiet Camera Obscura -- to tackle this album full bore to try and figure out why it's one of the biggest disappointments of recent vintage for me. Because my reaction seems inexplicable; more than one critic pointed out that at a glance, it's a carbon copy of Let's Get Out of This Country, the record that made me love them to begin with. I put up Country and Underachievers Please Try Harder as touchstones of a certain type of modernist baroque. The follow-up doesn't really fuck with the formula, so what's wrong?

I still don't know, hence how long it's taken me to actually write this. There are two songs on My Maudlin Career that I sort of like: "James" is like the Go-Go's at a funeral, delicate and pretty, and "Other Towns and Cities" employs a disorienting starkness a la "Morpha Too" behind its circular tune. The latter is impressive because it's a stretch for the band, the only such moment here, and the former because it exhibits something like warmth. If I have to name what's missing to account for the dropoff in affection, it's maybe that... but that's still a "maybe."

Camera Obscura's sound is still an irresistible commodity for me, and on this outling Björn Yttling's string arrangements are often glorious -- to the point that their entrance just before the fade on "French Navy" feels like a major tease and letdown. The production of Jari Haapalainen is equally inspired, as before, but this is all a lot of fuss over a near-total absence of actual songs, at least songs that sound more than half-complete. There are more hooks just in "Teenager" than on the entirety of My Maudlin Career, which might well be all right if the band's crucial stylistic commitments didn't fail so completely to lend themselves to a more nuanced composition style. I mean, let's give it up for the band -- those guitars on "Honey in the Sun" sound great, and they swing a little on "Swans," but it's like we don't really know these people. All plastic, the impersonal posturing of record collectors goofing around in a studio, and that's a feeling that honestly doesn't come across on the two prior albums. (Of Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, I cannot speak as it remains to be heard in its entirety by me.) What's more, these already labored tunes nearly all stretch over four minutes, which inevitably thins out the charm.

Somewhat less easy to forgive, for me, is Tracyanne Campbell's vocal performance -- the depth she exhibited was always what kept Camera Obscura from being one big gimmick, and here she's in surprisingly weak form, which is lethal when she's front and center like in the a cappella intro of "You Told a Lie," but hardly less troubling in near-monotone on "Away with Murder" and thinness and mumbling ("away with mutter" indeed) all around. It's not always just a question of her failing to assert her command over the proceedings; she belts out "French Navy" as though it has some direction that it doesn't and nearly convinces, but with all the bombast drowning her out on the cowboy cartoon "Forest and Sands" you get that she's doing her best, going on and on and on and on with one of the album's many bizarrely convoluted, rambling vocal lines, with what amounts to just bland material, and her labored coolness on this round seems only to add to that problem. She never seems to really rise and she can't truly sing when the songs themselves don't offer the chance; it's like the whole record is a dirge pretending to be pop music. Write a dirge, fine, but go all the way. (Weirdly, I keep thinking of the Magnetic Fields' EP The House of Tomorrow, which attempts and sometimes succeeds to wring mainstream pop beauty out of droning repetition; inevitably, the songs here just don't stack up.) Spector sound requires Spector drama, to put it in annoying crit-speak.

That doesn't mean some won't respond immediately to the dusty library of girl group cheeriness and goopiness here, all these lovely arrangements in search of hooks, but the infectiousness that made Camera Obscura so immediate at their best is lost in these "ooh-ooh"s, even when a point is scored like "I'm goin' on a date tonight / To try to fall out of love with you." That line's buried in the wheezy Skeeter Davis sympathy party "The Sweetest Thing," the uninspired melody and clipped, cut-short chorus of which illustrate the songwriting wall the LP hits again and again: these are weak echoes of old things rather than witty evocations of them. At a different point in their, uh, career, maybe the group's new fixation on country music -- the clip-clop on "Away with Murder" is more Paint Your Wagon than Stagecoach -- might have been an interesting coup for them, but their painful C&W showpiece "You Told a Lie" is like the Carpenters vacationing in Nashville, or a bottom-tier Connie Francis b-side at best. The song (like many here) is a straight, unwavering line that finds no catharsis or outlet, and as for the performance and vocal... maybe the most telling thing I can say about it is it reminds me of the worst output of She & Him, whose entire motif is a dilution of Camera Obscura's dilution of the Shangri-Las, Lesley Gore, et al.

I'm still excited for new material from Camera Obscura -- this sounds distinctly like a fluke to me, and maybe I've just been in the wrong mood. For, uh, the last four years. Plus I can hear something happening in "Swans" -- it opens on a major up-note, you must think it's someone else, and despite another weak bridge and chorus it does have a certain lilt about it in which everyone gives their best. For this specific moment, though, the group stagnates; meeting something nifty like the simple piano trill on the title cut, they give it a big huge backdrop and a completely dull song and that's the M.O. for whatever reason. Even when something builds up like the mostly painfully slow "Careless Love," it's just so twee and "cute" and boring -- emotionless even, and that's a problem. The production and performances and arrangements are still solid as ever, but Career is a cloud of joyless fluff from people who sound like the lifers they aren't quite yet (though they're getting scarily close). It runs together and sounds tired and makes you long for the past, and maybe the grand error is that that last part of the effect is kind of close to what they might have been going for.