I’ve been listening to quite a bit of jazz recently and got into Yusef Lateef due to his work being sampled by several HipHop Artists. On the album Eastern Sounds we get some lovely jazz renditions of music from other genre and film soundtrack.
The blend of piano, drums, flute and Double Bass manage to complement each other perfectly creating a track that’s musically complex without loosing its smooth sound:
Listening back to Less Than Jake for me is like stepping back in time to my early teenage years and i have been enjoying it allot recently. Although at the time Loosing Streak didn’t really hit home (being packaged in with their more well-known Hello Rockview In the UK) It now stands out as the album that seems to exemplify Less than Jake at their greatest point. Ska-Punk in its purest thrashy form before the influences of more modern punk sunk its nails into their sound.
Were greeted with fast paced tracks that manage to provide raw anarchic engergy which is beautifully acombanied with great moldys from the sax/trombone section.
Over the past few months I have been catching up on the Band Slowdive, after the fantastic Pitchfork documentary on their album Souvlaki
The Shoegaze genre has a lot of influence on modern music, but through listening to Slowdive I notice just how much this band influenced some of my favourite artists today.
They have a more dreamy, woozy feel that we associate with the Dream Pop and Chillwave genres but instead of just being the seeds of this music you notice how the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree. In fact releasing one of their albums today with modern mix and mastering equipment and Slowdive would sit alongside the Beach Houses and Best Coasts of this world.
Crazy For You is drenched in reverb and the guitar lines are covered in effects. It all merges into this beautiful pool of harmony. It could have come out yesterday and it would sound current. The fact it came out 20 years ago indicates how effective this type of sound can be when done well.
I have been listening to the eponymous album by Clark allot more than I originally thought I would on first listen. With its blend of floor filling dance with complex and creative sound design Clark manages to cover all bases and Winter Linn is a perfect example and one of my favourites.
This track gets the album running after an intro that feels like the album stretching its muscles. Large synth lines with big reverbs and heavy side chain compression is the name of the game on this piece and it sounds epic. Then somehow at the 45 second mark you get hit over the head with a synth line that is close to filtered noise and it just keeps getting bigger from there.
This is Chris Clarks seventh album and you can tell as the experience shines through, If you want to hear some top shelf modern dance music listen to this and then do yourself a favour and pick up the album:
Loops by definition are repetitive. Short samples of audio playing over and over again with little change. They can be annoying at their worst but when done well can have an almost hypnotic effect on you. It’s this strange polarity that has fascinated many musicians about loops since we have been able to create them.
The Field is one such musician and has focused heavily on loops throughout his career but most prominently on the album Looping State of Mind which opens with my track of the week.
Is This Power has a detuning synth line that repeats every 4 bars throughout the majority of the song and yet with time it just blends into the background allowing you to focus on the driving drums and bass line that arrive around the 1 minute mark.
It’s this driving force that keeps me hooked throughout the tracks nearly 9 minutes and by being very repetitive you are more open to noticing the subtle changes going on throughout the track:
Bloom by Beach House Was a fantastic album from 2012 and I have been looking forward to what Beach House would do next. Sparks seems to be the beginning of what’s to come.
Sparks is the first track announced from their upcoming album Depression Cherry, it starts with a looping vocal sample that provides a bed for the iconic Beach House sound of Female Vocals, Organ and Guitar.
This week I got to see Sun Kil Moon live at the RNCM in Manchester. Mark Kozeleck may get more press now for his outspoken attitude then his music but what can’t be denied is his talents as a lyricist and persona onstage. He oozed a confidence that only comes from years of live performance and over 2 hours took the audience through a history of his work in ways that were fresh and captivating. Keeping me on edge with a constant element of uncertainty and anarchism.
His previous album Benji was my album of the year and I have waxed lyrical about it on this blog before. With his newest album Universal Themes, Mark Kozeleck has taken his unique lyrical style of stripping away metaphor and simile from his songs and applied it to modern, almost immediate experiences. This Diary like style is applied across all elements of the album from its composition to its arrangement. It is hit and miss but when it does hit it packs a punch of brutal honesty that manages to summarise the experience of human existence unparalleled in any music I have heard before.
When I first heard Birds of films I was shocked by one verse. The song tracks his experience on the set of a film in switzerland and manges to cover both the mundane and the remarkable. But when he talks about his experiences of taking a woman out to a bar one evening, and flirting with the idea of cheating on his girlfriend before deciding against it. I felt like I was intruding on something too personal to be out there for public consumption.
Yet It’s these moments in all his work that show a mirror up to our existence. They show the fragility of our emotions and the randomness of our experiences. This isn’t an exaggeration of what it is to be a human like most music, It’s the truth and I find that captivating.
The fact that I can write so much about Mark Kozeleck’s work is a clear indication of what I think about him. He’s a true artist, someone who has found their own niche in folk and rock music, and over his career has developed it in new and varied directions. He’s flawed and has his weaknesses that may come across badly in some articles about him but these are the imperfections of being human. They are part of who he is and how he expresses himself and when he does that through music it can lead to the most personal musical experiences I have ever heard:
I watched Soil & “Pimp” Sessions last week at Manchester venue Band on the Wall. Their energetic performances and exiting take on Jazz has always made me a big fan and I wasn’t disappointed.
The night was wrapped up with their cover of the Love theme from Spartacus which was originally popularised for jazz on Yusef Lateefs album Eastern Sounds and used as a sample on the Nujabes song The Final View found on his album Metaphorical Music.
There’s something fundamentally fantastic about the melody of this piece, its simple yet manages to portray so much, being both joyous and mournful at the same time. Soil & “Pimp” Sessions have their own take on it diverging from the original source material in the same creative way that they became famous for when they covered wheel within a wheel years ago.
Burst Apart by the Antlers was in my favourite five albums of 2011 and is still a favourite of mine 4 years later.
All 11 tracks are great but Hounds has stuck with me. It’s repeating melody starts gently along with the vocals but over time more layers are added to the track untill brass forces its way into the mix creating direction, the rest of the instrumentation is then stripped away giving the vocals poignancy for the tracks conclusion.
The track also has a really nice atmosphere. It sounds like the whole thing was recorded in one space with a particular ambience. This reverb makes the whole thing drift arround providing some lovely textures without ever loosing control into a muddy mix.
On his album In Colour Jamie XX blends interesting samples with modern production that has its routes In the London dance music scene. It has grown on me on every play through and with his DJ sets at festivals and the popularity of the album increasing it seems to be working its way into the top spot as the album of the Summer.
Girl wraps up the 11 tracks in a woozy dreamlike way driven by electric bass and a snare sound that is sublime.
Give it a listen below: