A blog about hip-hop, jazz, punk, psychedelic rock, funk, and whatever other kinds of music I get inspired to write about. There are too many good sounds out there for me to get to them all, but I'm doing my best.
In late February, I submitted a proposal for Bloomsbury’s
generally excellent 33 1/3 series.
Unfortunately, my proposal for MF Doom’s classic Operation: Doomsday was not accepted, but I am still proud of the
work I put in and think it would have made a great book. The process of
conceptualizing and putting together a book proposal burned me out, so I took a
break from this blog for a few months. I’m starting to have a few irons in the
fire again for No Exchange, and I
thought it only fitting to kick things off again with the draft introduction
and full chapter breakdown from my rejected proposal for Operation: Doomsday. Regular No
Exchange content will be resuming in the days to come.
Around the middle of the 2000s, there were a few years when
it seemed like a ton of indie rock kids rediscovered the pleasures of vintage
Guided by Voices and Exile in Guyville
all at once. As a result of this (or because all of these kids were broke),
lo-fi briefly became a viable trend again. After all of the initial lo-fi
excitement subsided, most of these bands were promptly forgotten, but a few
left us with records that still stand up to their initial hype. Wavves’ second
album Wavvves remains a delightfully
cracked collection of surf rock tunes. The Thermals’ first few records, and
especially its first album More Parts Per
Million, are packed with songs that are still as catchy as they were a
decade ago. Times New Viking and No Age ripped apart pop and punk with the kind
of noise that only the cheapest recording technology can provide. And a few
psychedelic garage punks, including Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees, moved past
their lo-fi beginnings to create some of the most exciting catalogs in 21st
century rock.
While they were never quite the best of their class of lo-fi
rockers, the Vivian Girls possessed an easygoing charm that, paired with their
impressive songcraft, pushed them through one of the most consistently
satisfying careers of any of their contemporaries. They broke up last week, putting
a fitting cap on a final phase of their run that saw the band’s members being
pulled in different directions by new ambitions.
The European free improvisation scene has produced a handful
of genuine iconoclasts. While that term tends to get thrown around a lot,
especially when talking about free jazz and free improvisation, the greatest of
the European free improvisers truly reoriented music permanently. They managed
to break free from the bonds of the jazz tradition that ran through the music
of their American contemporaries and create something wholly European. Peter
Brötzmann, Han Bennink, and Alexander von Schlippenbach from Germany and Evan
Parker and Derek Bailey from the UK stand as possibly the most recognized of
the titanic iconoclasts of European improvisation. These five are not only
representative of the scene as a whole in terms of their musical advancements
but in their countries of origin. Germany and Britain have served as the binary
stars around which European improvisation has orbited for the last 45 years.
Yet this does a disservice to the other countries that have
produced great, innovative players who haven’t reached the level of recognition
as their German and British peers. While BYG Actuel primarily released records
by expatriate American musicians, it wasn’t totally blind to the advancements
occurring in its own country. Michel Puig, Jacques Coursil, and the
ever-present Claude Delcloo all led albums for the label, but these artists
(with the exception of Coursil) are eclipsed by the mysterious Acting Trio,
whose self-titled album was the fourteenth that Actuel put out.
This is certainly up for debate, but in most fans’
estimation hardcore punk’s ground zero can be found in October of 1978. That
month, an inauspicious Southern California electronics company called Solid
State Transmitters morphed into SST Records and released the first salvo from
what would make up one of the best runs of any record label in any genre ever:
Black Flag’s debut EP Nervous Breakdown.
With SST founder Greg Ginn on guitar and Chuck Dukowski and Brian Migdol
filling out the rhythm section, the young band proved themselves an immediate
and exciting force in the world of punk. Frontman Keith Morris found the
perfect balance of snotty and intimidating, fashioning his own gritty style out
of the remains of Johnny Rotten.[1]
It isn’t too surprising that his charisma and amazing voice have allowed him to
sustain the most satisfying post-Black Flag career of any member.
I have regular segment called Fresh Produce on the MusicVox
on Vocalo Public Radio in Chicago every Tuesday. I highlight three to five new
albums that are out that week. As such, I listen to at least five and usually
closer to ten new releases each week, most of which I never listen to a second
time. Even with all of this time I spend keeping up with the torrent of new
releases, I still find time to listen to great older albums. To honor some of
these older albums that dominated my year, I put together this list of my top
non-2013 albums of the year in no particular order. Some are albums I’ve been listening to for years,
and others are ones I discovered for the first time in the last twelve months.
All of them are excellent.
#1: Mr. Lif - I Phantom (2002)
Mr. Lif was one of my first favorite rappers. Mo’ Mega and the Emergency Rations EP were so important to me in high school, and
Mr. Lif was more instrumental than almost any other rapper in getting me to
really plunge into the world of hip-hop, but I didn’t hear I Phantom until a couple of years into college. Spurred on by
El-P’s phenomenal work last year, 2013 has found me listening to a ton of Def
Jux stuff again, and I Phantom has
gotten the most plays from me this year out of that crop of exceptional albums.
It’s a great album that follows a loose multi-part concept, and Mr. Lif proves
that he is a remarkably talented rapper, especially on tracks like the second
half of “Return of the B-Boy.” More than anything, revisiting I Phantom reminded me why I got into
hip-hop in the first place. And “Live from the Plantation” helped me get
through a lot of drives to a shitty job.
Throughout his insanely prolific career, Ty Segall had
certainly given the impression that his strengths came from fuzz and noise and
general garage rock abandon. So when word came that his first album after his
trifecta of amazing albums from 2012 would be largely acoustic, it was cause
for some minor concern. Sure, his knack for songwriting could be expected to
remain intact when it was ported into an acoustic setting, but what about that
power? SLEEPER dashed those fears,
finding the power in quietude. Even the most pleasant of dreams often come with
a feeling that something isn’t quite right, and the prettiest songs on here are
the most unsettling. Songs like “She Don’t Care” are gorgeous, but the lyrics
signal the deterioration of an important relationship. It’s a dark, sad, beautiful,
catchy record, and it’s possibly the best of his career so far.
Electronic music has spawned so many distinct subgenres
over the last forty years that it’s hard for a relative outsider such as myself
to find a good place to start with most of them. Outside of the recent L.A.
beat scene which I have listened to a lot of, my explorations of other vibrant
electronic forms, such as house, techno, jungle, drum and bass, dubstep,
minimalist/ambient, and others is unfortunately been very limited. As a Chicago
native, the sound that I am most disappointed in myself for ignoring is
footwork, which was built by local producers from pieces of house, juke,
hip-hop, and R&B. It’s a sound that’s gained increasing traction over the
past few years, and it’s pushed into prominence through the Bangs & Works compilations, exciting
live performances by Traxman and others, and Chance the Rapper’s Acid Rap, which counts footwork as an
important influence. DJ Rashad’s debut album Double Cup proves that the community of footwork artists is ready
for and deserving of more attention. It’s about as funky and soulful as
electronic music, even sample-based electronic music, gets, and it makes the
most of footwork’s sonic parameters. Rashad’s canny use of vocal samples and
guest features, which he chops up and uses in the same way he uses the
instrumental, is the best part of this record, which situates him as the man to
beat among footwork producers in Chicago.
#20: The Delfonics - Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics
Due to his prominence as the bandleader of the Roots,
Questlove is in the rare position where he can try to make a record with Bill
Withers and end up with Al Green as a consolation prize. With his work
revitalizing the Delfonics, Adrian Younge deserves to jump up to that level,
allowing him to work with some of the greatest and most prominent artists in
the history of soul. Younge absorbs old music with the ear of a great sampler,
flipping old film soundtracks and obscure break-filled R&B nuggets into his
own compositions. When this instinctive method is paired with an unfairly
forgotten soul legend like William Hart, the resulting album sounds like it was
made in a world where seventies soul and nineties hip-hop somehow developed
simultaneously. Adrian Younge Presents
the Delfonics sounds completely out of time, a record some future crate
digger will be mystified by.
Insepctah Deck’s verse on Gang Starr’s “Above the Clouds”
remains one of his career best. It was also a tantalizing view into what a
member of the Wu-Tang Clan could sound like over more traditionalist New York
boom bap as opposed to the groundbreaking RZA sound that the Wu generals mostly
stuck to during the group’s best years in the ‘90s. Czarface, Deck’s full length collaboration with 7L & Esoteric,
shows how great it could have been if any of the generals had made a more
straightforward boom bap record back then. Deck sounds revitalized here,
turning in the second best album of his career (for all its detractors and its
couple of weaker songs, his first album Uncontrolled
Substance remains the most underrated Wu album of the ‘90s). Esoteric
remains a very good emcee in spite of his general lack of personality, but the
stars here are Deck and 7L’s head-knocking beats. Czarface manages to be both an enticing alternate history and a
strong revitalization for one of the best rappers who never quite managed to
pull off a satisfying solo career.
