TOTW: Death Grips_I’ve Seen Footage

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Death Grips skirt around the fringes of Hip Hop as a genre. As they develop their sound they continue to delve into this abrasive world of harsh tones and heavy samples. It can seem daunting to a new listener who starts from their most recent works.

For this reason I would recommend their first full length album “The Money Store” as a great starting point. It already has their unique style but is centered on the traditions of Hip Hop making it more accessible. Yet it still has the creativity to turn some of these traditions on their head.

I’ve seen footage is a favorite of track of mine. A strong synthesized drum beat drives the lyrics of MC Ride which focus on the viewing of material that is damaging and yet you can’t get it out of your head, something highly prevalent in the modern internet age. It’s the way that the Vocals are processed that adds interesting elements to the track. They are sampled and looped in smaller parts to create rhythms, cut off mid delivery to add elements of surprise and ran through distortion to merge them into instrumentation it all comes together to create an aggressive sound which still holds its own today:

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TOTW: Lou Reed_ Walk On The Wild Side

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I have been listening to Lou Reed a lot this week and looking back to my previous Track of the week’s I’m dumbfounded that he hasn’t made an appearance on any of them until now.

Transformer for me is a perfect album; it manages to exemplify what Lou Reed was best at, telling tales about the fringes of society but with a fragility that could only originate from his unique perspective. Every track could and probably will make my Track of the Week segment in the future but for now I have to pick one and so I thought I would start with the track that initially got me into his music.

Walk on the wild side manages to introduce us to a world of characters that are side-lined by the most of society. Brief tales of transvestites, prostitutes, drug dealers/takers and celebrities who congregate together around Lous life are delivered in a light and joyous way that’s backed up by the instrumentation.  This fairytale like counterpoint to some darker and more serious issues allows the track to work on several layers.

It can be enjoyed as both a light pop song and a historical document of late 60s/early 70s New York. It makes the track timeless, exemplifying a time and a place you can travel to every time you hit play:

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TOTW: Sir Deja Doog_I Put A Spell On You

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Aside from my Love for music I’m also a fan of Podcasts and on occasion they provide inspiration for my TOTW.

I heard about Sir Deja Doog on Here Be Monsters, a podcast that tells true and fictional story’s about the darker/mysterious sides of life and his story made me want to listen to his work especially the album Love Coffin which was created at the same time as the artists issues with brain cancer.

Dark and slightly vaudevillian in style, Doogs music manages to be a mix of the bleak and the camp. When he gets it mix right it works brilliantly which is the case with his cover of I Put A Spell On You by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

Doogs guttural vocals give the lyrics a far more sinister edge and the song builds to a rapturous saxophone solo which takes the track up a notch before it vanishes abruptly. A great cover creating a different take on a classic piece:

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TOTW: Aphex Twin_We are the Music Makers

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The sad news of Gene Wilders death this week reminded me of this track on which his voice is sampled.

Selected Ambient works 85-92 is Aphex Twins earliest studio record and it sounds fairly lo-fi in today’s standards of digital production. A large amount of the production was recorded on cassette tape, which causes the synthesisers and drum machines to wow and flutter throughout. This slight wobble in pitch and speed really gives the work a sense of place and a character that is still really unique. Add exelent melodies, brilliant ambient sound design and the lofi production methods become a stylistic strengh rahter than a weakness.

Although this doesn’t show Richard James at his most technically competent the fourteen tracks show him in an era of youthful creativity. Tracks are diverse but exemplify the creativity of electronic music. Rooting themselves as one of the foundations to modern electronic music today. Selected Ambient works 85-92 is a great introduction to both Aphex Twin and electronic music as a whole and should be heard by anyone with an interest in modern music as we know it:

 
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TOTW: Anna Meredith_R-Type

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Varmints by Anna Meredith is a wonderfully eclectic album that takes elements of electronic music and organic and subverts them in interesting ways to create new and exiting music.

R-Type is named after a Side Scrolling Shoot-em-up game and its clear that the inspiration of the track is the soundscape of music from this era. Limitations in the musical power of the hardware at the time meant composers had to be verey creative with their tools and fast arpeggiation and melodys that bleded with percussion became synonymous with the genre. Anna Takes these styles but applies them to some traditional string insturmentation and creates an interesting hybrid of the two:
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TOTW: The Beatles_Tomorrow Never Knows

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It’s about time that I addressed putting a Beatles track on my TOTW playlist. It’s hard to tackle a band as influential and creative as The Beatles. It’s staggering that in a seven year window they created some of the most revolutionary albums and tracks of all time. With the fiftieth anniversary of Revolver this year I thought it was time to highlight one of those.

Tomorrow Never Knows is quite frankly essential listening. Those of you who haven’t heard it need to stop reading this blog press play and let it overwhelm you. When you hear it on the end of revolver it seems to come out of nowhere and in context of the time this must have seemed to come from another planet. Tape loops warped in time and pitch create a sound never heard the mainstream up to this point. It’s a sound that’s now been filtered through and popularised in so many genre that the track now sounds normal.

This is what escalates Tomorrow Never Knows to being one of the most important tracks of all time. It’s a reference point for so many genres to this day. A seed for the creative sprouting of both dance and psychedelic music that now influence every current musician today. If we all stand on the shoulders of giants then Tomorrow Never Knows is one of the grandest Titans:

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TOTW: The Flaming Lips_In The Morning Of The Magicians

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The Flaming Lips have been on of my favourite bands for years, however my introduction to them was quite late in their career. I first heard them through their most commercially successful album (In the UK) Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and was blown away by the lush instrumentation and expansive vision of the band. It stands as a great place to get into the band as it represents the perfection of a sound both the band and their producer  Dave Fridman had spent years developing.

In The Morning Of The Magicians is a perfect example of this. If Phil Spector is known for creating “The Wall of Sound” where multiple instruments are layered to create massively powerful textures. Dave Fridmann should be known as creating a “collage of sound” where complexity in instrumentation and melody rules. If you take an analytical ear to this track for a play through and think about how many instruments/sounds happen you’ll quickly be dumfounded by its intricacy. A sound that moved with Dave Fridmann to other successful albums like Oracular Spectacular by MGMT.

This level of intricacy in the music can only work with an incredible mix. With so many textures of instrumentation going on at the same time it could very quickly turn into a mess without the incredible use of a keen ear. Instruments are panned across the stereo field and carefully blended together to bring the important textures to the foreground at the times they’re needed.

I still hold this up as one of the best mixes I’ve heard and listen to it regularly as a reference point to aim for. But even if you ignore it for its technically creative decisions you’re still left with a great piece of music that holds its own. Stripping the track away to its core leaves you with a traditional singer songwriter piece on vocals and acoustic guitar which focuses on Wayne Coynes introspection, a theme that feeds the entirety of the album.

I would recommend the entirety of the album but this lesser known track is on of my favourites so give it a listen:

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TOTW: Beach House_Wishes

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Some tracks take time to grow for me, I loved the Beach House album Bloom on its release in 2012, enough to put In my favourite five albums of the year.

I still enjoy this album occasionally and its continued to grow on me with one track above all others as a clear stand out. Wishes will get in my head from time to time until I have to play it.

The track opens with with the now iconic Beach House sound. Electric drum machines interweave with arpeggiated synth melodies and provide a bed for the electric guitar and vocals. For me the song is all about the halfway mark where the guitar track fades its way into prominence on the mix. The tone and effects on the guitar along with its multi tracking and panning which widen the stereo field are absolutely perfect for the track, and its melody provides a drive and aggression without overdoing the underplayed sound Beach House are known for. It’s easily one of my favourite guitar parts of all time and well worth your attention so check it out by listening to the track below:

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TOTW: Gold Panda- Time Eater

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Gold Panda mixes dance music with eastern traditional instrumentation. On Time Eater Eastern Strings provide interweaving melodies backed up by strong electronic percussion. As the track evolves more sampled elements are added and washed in thick reverbs to create lush pad sounds that add to the sonic pallet of the track.

It’s the pallet of sounds used on Time Eater that are the highlight of the track, organic and electric textures complement each other perfectly creating a fresh and exiting piece of music:
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TOTW: Suicide_Ghost Rider

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Sad news arrived last weekend with the death of Alan Vega frontman to long running band Suicide.

Listening back to their first two albums over the week really brings home just how ahead of the curve they were in style and sound. Dark looping electronics underpin whaling lyrics of despair and anger. Although in it’s infancy this sound is the foundation of a lot of modern electronic music today. Roots that spread from CBGB a small underground club in Manhattan to the mainstream over the last 40 years.

Suicide may not be the one and only reference to this sound but they’re a really important one and highly influential. Overtly for the likes of bands Crystal Castles, LCD sound system and even Bruce Springsteen but also subtly in many other artists throughout the years.
Unfortunately when you set the trend you’re not usually going to be the one who receives the notoriety. Suicide although highly regarded in the alternative scene never achieved mainstream success. But they won’t be forgotten by the many people they influenced. Alan Vega and Martin Rev will Live on, Not just though their music but as a stepping stone in the evolution of music as a whole.

Over a year where famous deaths (especially musicians) seem to have become the norm, artists like Alan Vega are more likely to be sidelined. But not by me, If you haven’t heard suicide and like my posts on this site you simply have to immerse yourself in their world. It often isn’t a pleasant one but it’s certainly revelatory:

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