Robin Thicke: Blurred Lines (2013)

(Interscope)

!! CAUTION !!

This album review prompts the first-ever Only Engine Music Blog sweepstakes. There is no prize, only the satisfaction of a job well done. Take a good long look into the luminous puppy dog eyes of the man on that hideously photographed album cover. Gaze into them, let them burn into you for a moment. Now, a question: do you think this man is concerned about the size of his dick? I know the answer, but to determine if your guess is correct you'll have to highlight the text below.

He is.

Robin Thicke is the rich American blue-eyed soul singer responsible for this past summer's major earworm "Blurred Lines," a toxic but undeniably infectious and endearingly weird plagiarism of Marvin Gaye's "Got to Give It Up." Lyrically, the song is a tiresomely simple-minded anthem of no-doesn't-really-mean-no, in which guise it's only slightly different from the average male-led pop hit about getting a woman drunk and leading her semi-involuntarily to your place, the operative phrase being "I know you want it," the implication being "I know better than you." That's bothersome, as is the giddily unbalanced video, but T.I.'s guest verse in which he imagines systematically ripping you to shreds is a lot worse, and Thicke is not the single person to blame for pop's weird "thing" about consensual sex not being sexy enough. For all its troubles, legal and ethical, it's the best song goofball loverboy douche Thicke will ever be involved with, so we hope he relishes his cultural moment.

Thicke looks a bit like the idiot from Sugar Ray and the bigger idiot Vanilla Ice, and the great lesson he offers is that hollow big-haired pop star dreams aren't generational. He has better stylists than Jimmy Ray or else who knows where he'd be. Outside of the audaciousness of the title cut and a series of agreeably generic R&B tracks that reflect some nostalgic craftiness (with titles like "Ain't No Hat 4 That" and "Ooo La La," we're using the idea of craft loosely), he presents us with bargain-basement funk and comes on like the biggest insecure crybaby in your OKCupid inbox, the kind of guy who asks "does it feel good" in the same guttural monotone about eighty times and that's just during the foreplay. The actual sex probably doesn't start because he's too busy announcing that you're not merely "sexy from the back," no, you are also -- perhaps not coincidentally? -- "sexy from the front."

The guy's a banana popsicle with a face. He idolizes Marvin Gaye and Prince but he'll end up joining a thousand Billy Joels, Bruce Johnstons and James Blunts trotting out showstoppers like the scrunched-face emotional "Good Life" to a small army of county fair attendees in 2053. I'll be the guy in the crowd requesting "How Bizarre" because now that I'm an old man I can't remember which phase of my life which one-hit dipshit came from.

Here's your guide to the notable songs on the rest of this "album": "4 the Rest of My Life" is the stupid ballad. "Top of the World" sounds like Seal's cover of "Fly Like an Eagle" and is readymade for a Pepsi ad. "Good Life" is one of the worst things I've ever heard in my life. The first few songs are pretty good. "Give It 2 U" is the followup to one of the year's best singles that happens to be one of the year's most awful singles, a hookless plod of ego and schmoozing by Thicke and several storied guests who should know better than to encourage him. Want to hear the rest? Buy the rights.

Are you still reading this? Okay, summary: Robin Thicke's a drag. A well known drag. We turn the sound down on him and say rude things. He's the kind of guy who buys a black leather couch and is like "I love it." I bet he has a really big car though.

Over the Rhine: Meet Me at the Edge of the World (2013)

(Great Speckled Dog)

RECOMMENDED

Probably the best double album of the year. Yeah, including that one.

Once playful, erotic and even slightly jazzy, Over the Rhine have evolved into one of the softest, most polite things I listen to. Even though it means they're unlikely to really blow my mind again, I don't mind the change much; their songcraft is still impeccable, Karen Bergquist's voice is still as hauntingly Linda Thomsponesque as ever, and their albums have ample room to fall into and paint a room with both calmness and yearning. After their last album helped me cope with the death of a family member, I had the chance to interview them, albeit by email, and I'm here to tell you that they don't particularly like being told that their music has come to sound "hushed" -- so let's be clear: it's emotionally intense as always, just very controlled and very wistful and pretty. "Agreeable" doesn't necessarily mean "unoriginal," you know.

Perhaps the best way to define OTR these days is to listen to their cover of the Band's "It Makes No Difference" on this album. That's even though both of them are writing some of their strongest songs these days; the way they turn the Robbie Robertson song around into something so intimate, closed-off yet full of hope, reminds you why less is so often more, in and outside of pop music. Producer Joe Henry, who also handled previous LP The Long Surrender, is a perfect match for the band -- amping up their often minimal arrangements into a swooning, enveloping sound that doesn't resort to sap or adult-contemporary overreach. If more bands learned to strike this balance, there wouldn't be such a stigma around "growing up" in a rock & roll context.

All this time, Bergquist and bandmate-husband Linford Detweiler are in my head, residual from the one conversation we had, telling me to stop making them sound like old fogies who've somehow stayed relevant. They remind me a bit of the couple played by Jim Broadbent and Ruth Sheen in Mike Leigh's Another Year -- tweeting about the beautiful, middle-of-nowhere farmhouse they purchased a couple of years ago (which largely inspired the outpouring of creativity on this album) and the lovely nights and fireflies and moonlit tranquil romance of it all, recording songs that make no bones about being taken in by and subservient to this specific beauty and harmony: they come across as a happy brood who simply know how fortunate they are. As stated in the film, they've found some way of leading by example and becoming a glow in a lot of lives.

There are supposedly limits to what we can say about harmony, but OTR's songs are hardly one-note in their attitudes or concerns, and I've never truly believed that was the case anyway. Meet Me is divided in half but the songs blend seamlessly together as a singular, moving experience. Berguist's vocals stick to a stirring low register until she very pointedly bursts out into oblivion on track number four, "I'd Want You." The songs are built around the joy of the performance more than hooks, but they are nevertheless superbly crafted and memorable; the first disc closes with an emotional climax of sorts in Berquist's "Wait," but from there the album hardly meanders.

It's so damn consistent, as this band always is, that one could get too lost to even notice how different the songs are, especially when the record is sequenced so well. Lay the lilting, solid-as-a-rock ballad "Baby If This Is Nowhere" and the impulsively romantic "All Over Ohio" together and in a certain guise they'd sound like a different mood on a different day, but Meet Me as a whole strikes such an unerring chord that the progression is natural.

And you could easily object to the sentimentality in Detweiler's lyrics on the latter cut, but you'd be missing strong evidence that he is proving himself (along with his wife) one of the best living composers of true Americana -- the fact that it's often unclear whether he is singing about love of a human or of his home, and the metaphorical power of that confusion, is a suggestive and provocative enough element to exemplify how well Over the Rhine continue to make music that feels effortlessly comfortable and yet challenges and pushes artistically. You can't buy emotions, but this is the next best thing.

[SEE ALSO:]
The Long Surrender (2011)

Run the Jewels (2013)

(Fool's Gold)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The world's changed. This is an official studio album that was released for free onto the web; if you like it enough, you can buy a physical copy. With its slapdash artwork and casual attitude to its own importance, Run the Jewels is hardly devoted to impressing you or instilling bloghype in its built-in audience. The two performers involved, El-P and Killer Mike, are already established and successful, and seem to have created this primarily because they enjoy working together, as discovered when El produced Killer Mike's excellent R.A.P. Music in 2012. So this strange artifact slips out like some kind of afterthought, until people hear it -- if said people have ears, they're impressed.

But there are side projects -- generally the creatively less-than-stellar product of musicians who don't necessarily have chemistry enjoying one another, or a solo artist having fun doing something that isn't a particularly good idea -- and then there is serendipity. Run the Jewels requires none of the standard apologies for either a stopgap release or an underground freebie. The album is like a lightning bolt, blazing through thirty-three ferocious minutes before you have much time to register it. That feeling remains the more you listen to the thing and try to discover its subtleties. They exist, sure (that apocalyptic opening on "A Christmas Fucking Mistake," the wall of sound on "Sea Legs"), but the blunt force of this record is what makes one want to return to it immediately after it's over; how often does one really listen to a new album and immediately feel they want more, right then?

In contrast to so much of what's labeled "alternative" rap -- a classification secured by the presence of Brooklyn noisemaker El-P, though even Mike can hardly be called a mainstream player at the moment -- RTJ comes on truly hard: badass, brutal and quick. The pair spits out imaginative, playful, often angry and aggressive rhymes over El's booming, crunching, minimal but impossibly heavy backbeats -- building brilliantly on his work with Mike last year. It runs through its ideas and changes so rapidly -- every single time, I look up and I'm surprised it's halfway over -- it's hard to pick out individual tracks or moments.

It's cruel to even separate specific cuts -- this is one of the scarce modern albums, like good kid, M.A.A.D city, that demands to be heard complete and in sequence every time. The guest spot by Big Boi is bang-on and it's delightful to hear Prince Paul's cameo, but this is completely the show of the two stars. They bounce off one another like old masters, each playing up the other's best points and reining in their indulgences, though both are thankfully as unafraid of addressing politics as ever. Best of all, they almost never stop rapping -- this is true hardcore hip hop, not an elaborate production flavored by occasional rap music elements, and if your favorite thing about this music is hearing a beat enhanced or even entirely provided by an MC's emotional and nonstop delivery, an immediate download is advisable. This isn't the best hip hop LP I heard this year but it's for sure the heaviest moment-to-moment, and possibly the smartest.

It all goes to show that one rapper I don't like all that much (usually find El-P's rapping too busy and lightweight, though I've got mad respect for him and I enjoyed his last release, and obviously he's a great producer) and one I love but was once ambivalent about (think R.A.P. was the first record to really harness Mike's personality) working together when they're completely on their fucking game is preferable to two rappers I practically worship (Jay-Z and Kanye West) only half-interested in their own collaboration, the technically superior rapper (Jay) on an off-day and the more eccentric and playful Yeezy not fully able to pick up the slack or find the right context to be his real self. And take a look at the release pattern for these two records. How much money was spent promoting -- not even recording -- Watch the Throne? And this instantly appealing, lean, dross-free stunner just showed up suddenly and is available to you for free. Its artists unmistakably cared about the product, even though most people hearing it will never even be expected to pay a dime for it. I don't know what it means, but it's provocative.

One-sentence reviews #13

We're in the home stretch, I promise. 14 or 15 more full reviews and one more of these and then [throws papers out window] BYE YALL. 2013 list will be up some time after just about everyone else's. I'll do better next year.

Boards of Canada
Tomorrow's Harvest (2013)
(Warp)

Almost thirty years too late to make a "Boreds of Canada" joke, and they deserve better, but this is one of those lingering downbeat things that just blows right in and out of my apartment like an unnoticed breeze.

***

These New Puritans
Field of Reeds (2013)
(Infectious Music)

!! CAUTION !! - So so precious -- classical aspirations, vocals derived from 19th century Portugese music, more session musicians than the Wrecking Crew and Polyphonic Spree put together, and yet its labored foreboding and schmaltz just sounds like where we always knew British "art rock" was headed, doesn't it?

***

Midnight Juggernauts
Uncanny Valley (2013)
(Record Makers)

Sad about this one, because they're one of the bands I feel I'm always championing to deaf American ears who wonder what it would be like if Muse was in on the joke; it's not sonically all that different from the previous two, but the writing's taken a dive, even if the group's wicked sense of outsized fun remains -- but I was in the minority position on Tame Impala too so don't be discouraged from checking in.

***

Surfer Blood
Pythons (2013)
(Sire)

!! CAUTION !! - Slick to the point of barely existing, this is polished major label surf-punk pap and exactly the wrong direction for a band that wrote great songs and distorted the hell out of them with glorious abandon, were potentially the next Barracudas; I'm not slamming it because the kid turned out to be an asshole -- I'd feel a hypocrite given the kind things I've written here and everywhere about Phil Spector (convicted murderer), James Brown (definite batterer), Sam Cooke (possible batterer), John Lennon (self-confessed (in a Beatles song, for heaven's sake) batterer) -- but I don't mind telling you it, as an ancillary, feels sort of good not to be telling you to buy this.

***

Dent May
Warm Blanket (2013)
(Paw Tracks)

Dude, you are so fucking smart and talented, please stop writing the same song over and over.

***

Speedy Ortiz
Major Arcana (2013)
(Captured Tracks)

Not really qualified to offer an informed take on this because it's heavily influenced by a branch of alt-rock (heavy post-grunge; I'm not hearing the Pavement comparison) that never did much for me growing up -- it sounds remarkably like something I'd have turned on the radio and heard around '96 and then turned off to go listen to synthpop -- but it's certainly convincing, passionate and crafty, with special notice to Sadie Dupuis' captivating vocals.

***

Fuck Buttons
Slow Focus (2013)
(ATP)

!! CAUTION!! - Still empty, and whether you like their boorish meandering or not, this does nothing you're not expecting it to when you turn it on, and it does that nothing at length.

***

KT Tunstall
Invisible Empire / Crescent Moon (2013)
(Blue Note)

RECOMMENDED - Hey, I actually liked this -- a little goes a long way, but Tunstall's whisper and acoustic guitar meld into a highly specific sad that makes for near-perfect mood music at the right lost moment.

***

Julianna Barwick
Nepenthe (2013)
(Dead Oceans)

!! CAUTION !! - Goofy vocal layering and careful key-pressing is no different from a gazillion New Agers, but neither are Fuck Buttons; they just know their own audiences and take the one-note atmospheres to their groan-inducing, lofty limit, by now so indulgently that the results are simply asinine to anyone excluded from that audience.

***

Forest Swords
Engravings (2013)
(TriAngle)

!! CAUTION !! - Laughed a lot the first time I heard it, because I set this to play just after the above album and honestly had no idea that one had ended and this one had started.

***

Nine Inch Nails
Hesitation Marks (2013)
(Columbia)

Could honestly echo every word I wrote about The Fragile in 1999 (had been a massive fan at an age when the PMRC would have not approved of me listening to "Big Man with a Gun") if I could find it; the point was/is, he is a fucking master -- one of the best creators of sound in the business, ever -- and if he would stop his perpetually adolescent whine from playing over all of it I'd be onboard, subsequently proven in the wild by his film scoring, but it's clearly just a taste quirk of mine by now.

Jon Hopkins: Immunity (2013)

(Domino)

Onetime Eno collaborator Hopkins aspires to his hero's control of an environment and an extended moment. While glitzy and interesting, though, his music lacks something: beauty, for one thing, even if sterile and alien. The songs dance around without ever introducing variations that seem interesting or effectively bewitching. The best ambient music rewards concentration as well as it does its traditional sonic wallpaper usage.

Even if you do find yourself hypnotized by these sometimes striking grooves and loops, none of the songs -- whatever their length -- does much that isn't obvious from the first few seconds. Yet again, that's only a complaint depending on what you want out of the record. You may love it, but there's just not much setting it apart -- except the strange vibe that it sounds like house music interspersed with the sound of someone repairing a boat. That's right; electronica has entered its yacht rock phase. Beware, or embrace.

Rhye: Woman (2013)

(Republic)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

It's derivative. Rhye doesn't do much creatively that Sade (to whom singer Michael Milosh's voice is strikingly reminiscent) or even the xx haven't already. It's a couple of dudes aping the classic soul music they like in minimalist layers of keyboard and a general vibe of calm sensuality, encompassing even its Herb Ritts-like album cover. But it is tremendously well-crafted, and beguilingly sexy enough that if you happen to be two hours away from your primary romantic partner it's... well, let's not go into that. But turn your lights down, hold somebody close, let this play on a good or at least decent system. (Not your laptop speakers.) It's low-key but only in the most superficial manner; the hooks are constant and you will notice that regardless, but Woman's subtleties and grinding undercurrent are too rich to come across on, say, an iPod dock.

This is R&B with a specific kind of closed-off beauty; the space and emptiness in the recording is as important as the noise made, the songs performed. "Open" is immediately disarming with its rush of strings, horns, synths, and that simultaneously familiar and alien voice of Milosh, laid against Robin Hannibal's beautiful arrangement. The record feels instantly comfortable, an organic romance, but also like it's stretching, malleable, new. It's a love letter to a great deal of music that came before it, no doubt, and it is conscious of its effortless cool: something like the airy but uncompromised funk of "Last Dance" is improbably stylish. But there is tension in it -- real longing, real desire -- and these are things that never grow old or stale, in or outside of the pop idiom.

Some of that tension comes from the hushed but not ghostly nature of the music -- it's more dynamic than quiet per se -- but a lot more is in the genuinely erotic androgyny in Milosh's performance, which has some deep-voiced grit running underneath it but is mostly notable for rendering gender all but irrelevant. Few if any of the lyrics come across differently with knowledge or lack thereof that he is male. The point being that it doesn't matter, and almost hasn't since "Don't Worry Baby": the silkiness and vulnerability are the story here more than any notion of gender identity. Maybe it isn't progressive exactly, but there's something telling in it.

So at its sexiest -- the piano and bass rumble "The Fall," the nocturnal city music of "Shed Some Blood" -- Woman is a treasure for privacy, intimacy, ideas it's about explicitly as much as it evokes them musically. "Make love to me one more time" could seem an emptily generic command in some contexts, but not here -- the same for the whole of "3 Days," a mirrorball slowdance masterpiece about not having much time and just what some good ways are to fill that time. It doesn't wink or cheapen its sexual content, even if some of the phrasing in Milosh's lyrics is awkward -- and not, crucially, because it documents "romantic sex" or any such thing. It has considerable dignity with regard to the grace of sexuality in and of itself, and the bond it illustrates between people apart from anything that goes on beyond the closed (or open) door.

Nonetheless, Rhye is an incredibly romantic band, which says something for the varied utility of their music. Their vision of people in love has an urgency about it; minimal and soothing though "Verse" is, it sears with the sumptuous beauty of its "ain't got a second to waste" hook. And closeness -- and fucking, let's be real -- in and of themselves are as likely purely romantic as purely sexual. Either way, Woman is a pure and uncorrupted creation, as singular, personal, unbent by head-shaking outside forces as a loving or kinky or loving and kinky relationship ought to be.

The group achieves this through astonishing restraint, especially on Hannibal's part. How he crowds his mixes with so many varied noises and ideas but still makes them so delicately pretty is mysterious, and masterly. The songs themselves (and the album as a whole) score as well with their brevity -- they're short enough to be slim and precise but long enough for the listener to get thoroughly lost in them. A couple, like "One of Those Summer Days," are so wispy, quick and peaceful as to feel almost nonexistent. It's not about anything except a single moment, a tone poem of sorts, but Rhye makes it somehow stirring and dramatic.

Woman's essence is that it's a celebration. It may never burst out of its concentrated, compressed, soft-rock groove until the Tom Tom Club-like "Hunger," track nine of ten, and even it is soft and pulsating save its fevered horns. But it remains a life-affirming paean to the actual pleasures of adulthood, mostly shared but shared quietly. This might not sound like dance music to you at certain points in your life. At others, you'd fucking better believe it will.

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."