Moonjock: pulse like you mean it, pulse like we don’t know what meter is, lay the vocals across it like it’s the easiest thing. we know when the radio set’s ended. it’s disappointing to lose the bass and drop into 4/4, building the energy back together to jump around like you’re someone flipping the volume on the radio in rhythm. I don’t feel what you’re developing but when the bass dives back I wonder if maybe the crescendos will blow out my ears with headphones. at the very least you’ve made a music of density and lack thereof. the album rises from the synthy muck just as much as from the list of influences.
Today's Supernatural: chick choom. the kind of energy it takes to drop the beat away on your “lelelelelelet”s is the same it takes to drive the arpeggios together. MPP never really gave up on its sense on silence. It’s not that you haven’t been this tight before, but you’re not just pushing the tempos up, you’re dancing more clearly in front of the eye. I feel like you trust me more, undistorted and playing on regular beats with handclaps. It’s not about pop, trying to genrify into that is either a tautology or useless. you’re straying too far from your hook and that’s part of your game, to spread us out and make us feel lost even while we know that the rhythm is something almost too familiar to the radio. nice accelerating part; rhythm is still in your control, your god to toy me with.
Rosie Oh: and you start a third groove and it’s corrupted from the start, and the halo of noise becomes more interesting and worthwhile as the passenger’s more worth it than the car. you’re opposing what your bass is plucking out and its rocky progressions and drifting into them when you feel, riding the synths back in and out. this is music of attention, attention is the manipulated factor, the pitch and timbre are a harmonic language that-
Applesauce: oh this one’s pretty. nice use of “lil honey” to draw intensity from what was just a little push. in some ways this sounds like their first record with the tempos up and synths up, is that the same bass tone? this song I could get into forever, progressing from part to part holding my hand a lot more than the earlier ones. I’m not quite bored yet, I wonder if the word for what you’re doing in spinning out these parts is in “progressive” or in “epic” (as in, the theater, and Of Montreal’s fortspinnung) or in “collage” since the parts don’t quite fit together in a really refreshing way, like there’s a bit of modulation to get from one instrumentation and chord progression to another, a certain amount of potential energy to overcome. a lot of these songs repeat themselves a lot! goodness guys I can’t hear the differences between the repeats on these speakers. the song winds down to counting and four-on-the-floor with the 12/8 you hint at flitting about like a ghost.
Wide Eyed: wispy whispery. a contained rocket-arpeggio, an engine. you use tricks like this to hide the quicker pulses, like there’s some 14-year old drum student tapping out double-tap rolls behind each song that you phase in and out or something. not literally. nice use of the bass to alter and compress the groove. these songs could go so many more places, at the same time! they could lose some of their structural redundancy and each generate enough material (pleasant motivic redundancy, Mozart!) to kick around for 8-9 minutes. who’s singing? this song paces about in its pen for a bit and then never really gets out, brings you down into it kinda.
Father Time: starting without mama bass! you oh my good just insert yourself where needed. you’re clearly working with the same materials in all of these songs, using idioms that blink briefly into the most intense beat you’ve ever heard and dropping itself back into a stable home for what a “song” should be.
New Town Burnout: up and down, up an down, up a down. the rhythm’s only the most stressed and tentative of glues, the road and the empty space, slowly populated by motion and by sync with the rising density of the vocals. this is fun, this is fun, this is easy too. when you drop it all out like that, though, it’s not as exciting, it’s built into us and we never really lose it, it doesn’t have the same tension as your “leleles.”
Monkey Riches: Please get into some glitch here PLEASE it would make my day, I want it to come! I don’t want every facet of how you can mix things together and turn your face away from the massive cathedral-in-process-of-collapsing house of rhythm that this could be. once you get used to this, there’s no drama I can hear…am I asking the wrong things? you get to a great place at the end of that one!
Mercury Man: oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh that that that that that that “sounds like she’s talking to me on the phone” I’m in love with the groundwork for this one, if this is what your formulas can do then I do not mind, I can not mind the crown this jewel is in. kick stop! kick stop! woooooeoeoeo.
Pulleys: I don’t have much else on the rest of these. They invent themselves in clever ways that I can’t quite pinpoint right now, it sounds like the subtlties are worth diving into, I can’t quite hear what the currents of synths are doing to carry the sounds along. This feels like something very new in pop, something not in the 2k0s, hinted at in Radiohead and Sufjan’s last releases, something using a quieter language to make louder things, a decade of whirring and silence and loops.
Amanita: there was another song! it was fine.
this was a good read. i want to listen to this again now but i think i can resist. i regret even more not being able to listen to it with you when it was first streaming.
ReplyDeletewould you want to have a listen when I'm up in guleph?
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