Danny Brown: Old (2013)

(Fool's Gold)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The title, Old, doesn't refer to Danny Brown himself, but he does talk about his age (31) an awful lot on his exquisite third album. He's more interested in the conflict of his cultivated privilege as a result of becoming one of the nation's most-watched and inventive rappers versus the version of himself that he remembers from his youth and adolescence, in turn the hard shit he wrote in response and protest. In between accounts of the mortifying sights he saw growing up in inner city Detroit -- junkies being shot, dope being cooked, "family fucked up and hungry" -- he chides those who would demand a return to excess-glorifying youth, to "that old Danny Brown."

Brown himself hasn't changed much, though. He was always an intelligent and thoughtful artist, but he's grown intrigued with these Jekyll-and-Hyde chasms in his performance style and writing. So have we as his audience. His nasal, mocking cadence wasn't easy to take in greater than limited quantities, though even on his earlier records it was hard to name anyone who'd done so much with such an at-first-blush terrible voice. Now, as he grows more deliberately reflective, he crafts a record as haunted by the past -- and as emotionally specific a storytelling achievement -- as Kendrick Lamar's good kid, M.A.A.D city.

But Brown does it his way -- pervasive as the themes are, Old is first and foremost an intensely elated hour of hip hop excitement. Anyone who knows what it sounds like to hear a tremendous artist reaching his or her peak will find evidence of Brown's enthusiasm and restlessness everywhere here. The simplest way of explaining Old's most immediate pleasures is that it comes across as an identifiably independent and invetive creation by virtue of its fusion of two familiar impulses in hip hop -- another cracked mirror: the fall into production innovation and the unstoppable verbosity.

Old takes advantage of a broad but small and, some would say, improbable group of producers including Oh No, SKYWLKR, and most prominently, Paul White, among others. Brown argues that the beats are the thing on Old, and they are indeed consistently surprising and impressive. But if Brown released an album that was all atmospheres that didn't hit hard, he would be his former collaborator Black Milk, or the Roots, or even Kanye West. Instead, Brown barely shuts up across the body of this album. "Side A (Old)" doesn't get more than a few seconds underway before he starts in like he's got no time. What he has to say is too urgent for a break in the flow, even as an introduction.

The impulses converge in a duo of tracks that render trauma out of cute and hellish backing tracks: "Gremlins" and "Wonderland" carry the strange sing-song vibe of novelty songs from the '60s and '70s. They are presented as short, two-minute fantasies but "Wonderland" in particular directly documents street terror and violence with eerie precision. When Brown mentions PTSD elsewhere on the record, it's easy to think of a trick like this as an outgrowth of unspeakable chilhood pain: the need to forget is strong enough that it's all couched in something relentlessly cheery, yet vaguely sinister.

The brigade of producers render this an impressively varied but remarkably cohesive experience. The terrifying loop that drives "Torture" is as sobered and angry as the beautiful "Lonely" is simply despairing and sad. The surrealist pieces "Dubstep" and "Handstand" are crazy, relentless, brave even. The record is completely full of nonstop bangers; you know you're onto something when a cut that would be the windows-down killer of the year -- "Smokin' and Drinkin'" -- isn't even one of the best on the album. Even the lesser songs, like "Red 2 Go," have brilliant hooks. Brown and his producers' sense of history is formidable, too, referencing everything from "Niggas in Paris" and Outkast to Radiohead and Freak Nasty.

Lamar's album probably didn't influence Brown's; the chronology is too tight. But it's hard not to compare the two albums, or to notice that Brown intentionally resists philsophical wisdom in the same exact ways that Lamar embraces it. He sounds like he's still in the heat of all the bullshit and wants to escape more than he actually can -- and he's also playing a character considerably more than Lamar probably is. He's as interested in analysis as in catharsis, which is probably why Old is so artful in even its hedonism. The least clever moment is the dated, terribly misogynistic "Dope Fiend Rental," and even its most egregious error is a dreadful Schoolboy Q verse.

The analogy is clear when you notice almost right away that "Side B (Dope Song)," a wonderfully irritating piece of pop filth, is wholly ironic. It has Brown schmoozing for the mic and Scottish producer Rustie comes on like a very angry Prince circa Lovesexy; the song posits itself as the last anthem of its sort for Brown -- the last celebration of the blasted-out ghetto misery he documents on other parts of the record. "Clean Up" makes good, realistic snap-out-of-it shit that registers as a driving, pounding taunt, and the sweet and wistful "Float On" carries us out like "Real."

The most obvious cracked mirror of Old is the voice. That would be the voice for which we know Brown best, the one he careens outward with on "Side B" and utilizes efficiently on both the most party-ready and stressed-out productions here. But Brown is capable here of sounding like an entirely different person, deep-throated and melancholic, and he comes forth from what seems a different place entirely, as though he's wounded -- or outside looking in upon himself. Besides the thoughtful, sad "The Return," "Lonely" is the essence; it's less self-pitying than its chorus makes it sound, but its chorus is still the point: "So I'm smoking by my lonely / By my goddamn self / I don't need your help, homie / Cause don't nobody really know me." The suffering of an absence of communication and understanding is the buried agony of Old, the reason for multiple voices, maybe the reason for multiple sounds, maybe the reason for announcing that things are changing and then only half-heartedly following through.

Everything that's great about Old -- and there's a lot -- comes together on "25 Bucks," which feels like not only the culmination of Brown's output to date but a summing up of the last decade-plus of hip hop. It's high drama, a stunningly huge gangsta production by Corin Roddick in a vein that was quaint even when T.I. was still making major hits within it. But the delivery is all alienation only slightly broken up by Brown's Das Racist-like levity. Its mood of strangeness and paranoia clashing with culture shock captures our time all too well -- no longer is the dark dance floor safe. It is now a void, into which escape and doom are equally possible. Fun as it is, Old's reality is a fearful one, studying the past to investigate a potentially grim future: "Because the weak don't speak, get left in silence / And when you don't listen, gotta speak with violence."

The Field: Cupid's Head (2013)

(Kompakt)

RECOMMENDED

Axel Willner is about texture, about bodily reactions to the most minimal of changes. Each of the six lengthy cuts on his third album (under the painfully nondescript label the Field) finds a sprawling, hypnotic groove and mangles it. Your responses are the music: that delectable key change on "They Won't See Me," the way "Black Sea" fades in and out of consciousness and druggily alter's one relationship to time (no, really) for twelve minutes, and the brilliance of the carefully treated "nononono" sample on "No. No..." that takes on multiple identities based on what noise Willner puts around it until he finally takes the rug out from under us in the last couple of minutes.

Willner's first two albums had no quarrel with moodiness and boredom, nor does this one; boredom, in some ways, is the point. This isn't really proper dance music -- it gets too much of a kick out of its own carefully cultivated weirdness. Plus it fades until you concentrate, then it's suddenly demanding. He has a giddy, mad-scientist sensibility about his knob-twiddling, which translates also to a studied distance from his material. That isn't necessarily a criticism of any of the Field's music, but it's in greater evidence here, with an established formula that has only deviated from his earlier work in the sense that he no longer seems so worried about being accessible.

You can't fault him for his focus or command, although Cupid's Head is noticeably less precise and impeccable than Looping State of Mind; it's a set of individually impressive tracks that don't necessarily complement one another. At its best, however, it is thoroughly enveloping and charged dance music. Just a little cold around the heart.

[SEE ALSO:]
Looping State of Mind (2011)

Disclosure: Settle (2013)

(Island)

RECOMMENDED

Like no album since My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Disclosure's proper debut Settle covertly built demand and interest over the course of a year or so with a conspicuous and highly pleasurable series of brilliant dance singles, some that made the cut of the LP and some (like last year's superb "Tenderly") not. The keynotes "Latch" and "White Noise" are heavenly throwback, owing as much to early '90s hi-NRG beats as to any modern iteration of club music; dubstep, for one thing, is conspicuously absent.

Taking all this to full length, Disclosure disappoint slightly. Settle is just a tad repetitive, even at less than an hour, and cursed with a series of feature shots that don't add much and grooves that hop along but fail to really, well, stimulate. "Latch" is their most complete construction as a functioning outlet. That sublime single features a great vocal by Sam Smith; "White Noise" boasts AlunaGeorge, who released a dandy record of their own this year. Both these cuts set the roadmap for all else to follow on the record. There's nothing wrong with being a great singles act, but it feels like much of the music populating the middle of the record is less extrapolation and variance than mere belaboring of already-established points.

The Eliza Doolittle guest turn "You & Me" is a step up, and "Grab Her" is just obnoxious enough to stand out, but the best one can say about Settle is it's a consistently agreeable body album. Guy and Howard Lawrence keep the beat going flawlessly, but perhaps because they seem to feel they have so much to prove about the long-declining UK dance scene, they bury their sense of individuality under a lot of numb crowd-pleasing. Not that it isn't pleasing indeed -- it has so much more to offer and such a greater degree of pop intelligence than the overwhelming majority of modern electronic music. But where the singles seemed playful, the album seems slick and obvious.

There's more to these two, though. Take note that the album begins and ends with outliers. "When a Fire Starts to Burn" is nothing new, part "Elektrobank" and part My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, an fiery inspirational speech set to mumbling, cascading d'n'b, but it's a bold way to start the program and there's nothing else here quite like it -- certainly nothing so confrontational, which calls to mind the towering strangeness of their 2012 twelve-inches.

The revelation of Settle, though, is the song that competes with "White Noise" as its most conventional and pop-crafty. "Help Me Lose My Mind" sounds less like an album-closer than an afterthought bonus track, so little does it share aesthetically with the record's generally dogged resistance to letting the pace slip. It's a slow, soulful trip-hop oddity with vocals by the largely unknown Nottingham trio London Grammar. It's an emotional rush, sad and remarkable, and feels like the moment on U2's Zooropa when Johnny Cash suddenly appeared like a warm breeze over an arid, docile landscape. Disclosure have the capacity to create something magical. They already have, in short form. Even if Settle is merely serviceable for most of its duration, it justifies its entire existence by giving us "Help Me Lose My Mind," and maybe the success of Settle will in turn justify Disclosure's potential boldness and exposure of their obvious eclecticism next time.

Oneohtrix Point Never: R Plus Seven (2013)

(Warp)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There's something comfortingly old-fashioned about Daniel Lopatin, and not merely because his new album evokes "Revolution 9," old MIDI keyboards, Art of Noise and (on "Inside World") Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Even though his breakthrough records Returnal and Replica arrived in sync with -- and seemed of a piece with -- the peak of lo-fi bedroom music, his work as Oneohtrix Point Never suggests a kind of invention that's somehow younger, less labored, and more magical: kids playing around with VHS dubs for the hell of it, getting a kick out of the humorous trickiness of it all and the sensation of making things whoosh around before they bite, even as they always move with a purpose. R Plus Seven, a formidable achievement and his best record to date, feels like the fruit of one feverishly creative late night, even as we know such an image has been painstakingly cultivated in a real actual recording studio.

R marks Lopatin's move to prestigious Warp Records, and while it doesn't entirely leave behind the alienating drones of yore, it makes no secret of its sense of absurd fun in all its musique concrete aspirations. This is not straightforward ambient or electronic music, nor is it an act of ear-teasing aural experimentation like Nicolas Jaar's Space Is Only Noise; it's more like a movement of sorts, of teasing and usually engrossing waves of sound bumping against each other as often as they build or merge. The quintessential track is probably the second, "Americans," with its callback to the electronic tongs and heavy kalimba of early '90s worldbeat coalescing into both menace and beauty. The siren sounds and half-voice restlessness have a structure of their own, and they eventually build into a fussy but beautiful Kate Bush-like crescendo. The entire bizarre creation is bright, fragmented, and surprisingly sweet.

One reason Lopatin maintains attention for the full breadth of these forty-three minutes: the songs, already full of eternally shapeshifting life, don't go on for long -- not for Oneohtrix is the idea of a mere trance, a wander off into nowhere. At least not anymore. "He She" tampers with MIDI voices teasingly and fascinatingly for all of a minute and a half. All of R Plus Seven is structured with a sense of brevity, and with the fortifying and careful distribution (occasionally denial?) of pleasure. Beatless and busy, it's cerebral music for sure, but it's also a complete and disciplined thought.

The other reason is that the album is just intensely pleasing and -- the operative word here -- playful. It keeps consistency in all of its surprise and variance, and even betrays a bit of a sense of journey: each half begins quietly, "Boring Angel" with low-rumbling organ followed by sparkly foolishness straight out of the Trumpy-in-Pod People playbook, "Along" with ambient hiss that wakes up slowly, grouchily before finding beauty in its plod, and in the choral pad that provides Lopatin with much of his evident giddiness here. Nothing here qualifies as dance music but some songs come miraculously close given their total absence of obvious rhythm: "Zebra," with its knockout syncopation, and its more focused and relentless twin "Problem Areas" each offer a bath of sound that strikes up an impressive intensity. You can very nearly visualize Lopatin's own pleasure at what he is achieving within the framework and limitations he's set for himself. In this tiny niche, he is our maestro.

Again, it's hard to classify R Plus Seven. "Ambient avant garde music," while terribly reductive, is a decent enough descriptor, but a case could be made that declaring it such could unfairly limit its audience, which seems naturally to go far beyond the class of music fan that would typically leave time aside for either ambient or experimental electronic music. This is the kind of music that immeasurably rewards concentration, and not in an abstract sense. The final two songs gather all of these fragments of chaos into a calmed, emotional peak that are, particularly "Chrome Country," umembarrassed by their gentle beauty. These songs are gloriously pretty without being fussy or overwrought. It's possible to listen to this collection of goofoffs and weird noises and be, yeah, moved. No kidding.

[SEE ALSO:]
Replica (2011) [oh god don't read that please]

Baths: Obsidian (2013)

(Anticon)

RECOMMENDED

Well this is just so darned purtee, y'all. It's never purtier or moodier or sillier than its final track, "Inter," a delicate and swoony slice of desperately expressive frivolity -- wordless cooing defines it -- that will either give you enough laughs to last the rest of the week or will sort of endear itself to you. As usual, Will Wiesenfeld knows his place -- and he knows his audience well enough now that, in its small fashion, record number two is kind of masterful.

"Inter" is merely the apex of what these frilly, cushy songs are driving at. They're catchy at times but usually are subservient to Wiesenfeld's idea of beauty. Several critics talk about this being darker than his first record, Cerulean, but that is a matter of inching degrees at best. He sings about God and failure, and his songs are a little better defined now, but Obsidian is marked more than anything by how pleasant it is, and how ferociously vital and well-crafted it obviously is underneath its immediate appeal. "Phaeda" and "No Past Lives," just to touch the tip of the iceberg, are immaculate and layered productions -- even with the most superficial instant appreciation of them, one never suspects they lack substance or passion. That's something a lot of bedroom pop folks from Wiesenfeld's generation miss.

I sampled Baths' first record a couple of years ago but put it away without comment. Listening quickly again before writing this, I think without question that Obsidian is a far more interesting album. Its predecessor seemed unprofessional and insubstantial by comparison, and while a certain scrappiness may have been important for some of his fans, Wiesenfeld is much more at home in this environment. With an infinite sonic palette and an irresistible taste for the sumptuous, he's able to put together the rare modern album that boasts both subtlety and ornate heaviness. Great for zoning, not for sleeping.

One-sentence reviews #12

The curse of consensus.

Four Tet
Beautiful Rewind (2013)
(Text)

!! CAUTION !! - Never understood the criticism that Four Tet is too repetitive, but admittedly here he's clearly having more fun than anyone who actually listens to this thing, but sure, definitely no "last minute rick rubin," if that's a facet of the modern poplife that deeply troubles you (!?).

***

Dirty Beaches
Drifters / Love Is the Devil (2013)
(Zoo Music)

!!!!! AVOID !!!!! - Mumbly grunty garbage, distinguishable from the Black Keys only because it's dirgy instead of dingy -- the kind of stuff appealing to the sensibility of complains about lead singers having distinctive personalities, I guess.

***


Darkside
Psychic (2013)
(Matador)

Want to support Jaar but can't see much to love in this Cinemax porn soundtrack music.

***

Queens of the Stone Age
...Like Clockwork (2013)
(Matador)

!! CAUTION !! - Just so we're clear, I don't think it's sacrilege for a band to try and blow itself up to memories of Led Zep or the Doors, I just think it's a waste of time cause those bands bloooowwwww dude

Daft Punk: Random Access Memories (2013)

(Columbia)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Disco is my language, more than house or drum'n'bass or any modern branch of electronica ever could be, which is the easiest explanation of why Random Access Memories converted me wholly to Daft Punk after a decade-plus of apathy. Informed by several fans of the duo who hated it that this was nonsense, I put it away for a while and came back but it's all still there: the shimmering sound of a lost adolescence coming back in bright lights. It's not that I didn't like Homework or Discovery -- both have their good points -- but they never meant anything to me, not like this does.

Not like the wistful groove of "Get Lucky" and its almost desperate good-time funk, not like the slow meltdown of "Game of Love" and "Instant Crush." It seems as if Daft Punk are yearning for something here, to call back to a feeling, and their recording in the wake of that noble-enough nostalgia produces something all the more remarkable for the impossibility of reaching the orgasmic heights it wants. The incapability of recapturing memories renders this poignant, flawed, beautiful -- for me, possibly the most emotionally affecting dance record since Bilingual.

As you'd expect in a record that throws out much of their sound and most if not all of their previous working methods in favor of pop structure and an infatuation with the sound of the radio and club in the '70s and '80s -- especially in the U.S., especially in L.A. -- Daft Punk have a lot of help here. The great Nile Rodgers appears. So, improbably, does Paul Williams on "Touch," a song so bizarre that it's tempting to regard it as a bid for attention, but so what if it is. Pharrell Williams shows up twice, on the interestingly relaxed but hooky single "Lose Yourself to Dance" and then on the aforementioned, really wonderful "Get Lucky," an urgent recording that desperately clings to its every moment of vital, passionate, sparkling pop. Previous Daft guest star Todd Edwards contributes to a surprisingly airy soft-rock slash Whispers vamp called "Fragments of Time," which should seal any lingering sense that Ariel Pink has the best handle on this material. And finally, Panda Bear, because Panda Bear must always show up on everyone else's records since his own are so, y'know, daft. He has a beautiful voice and it's beautiful here.

Random wanders off at times. We needed neither the tiresome Chuck E. Cheese soundcheck "Contact" nor the silly "Beyond," and nine minutes of "Giorgio by Moroder" is a bit much. But everything else is luminous in its willful kitsch and consistent surprise. It's not quite in a class with the first three Chemical Brothers albums, even if it compensates for its inconsistency with the titanic power of its many climaxes, but it makes me nearly as giddy as those used to. I listen to this and I feel great, even as it makes me scarily conscious of how much time has passed, in the world and in my own life, since these sounds were the way of the world. That's probably the idea.

[SEE ALSO:]
Homework (1997)