For honesty’s sake here, I must confess that ever since mildly dissing Taylor Swift in March, I have since come to really love and enjoy Red — quite obviously, I was just being a colossal idiot. Sure lots of guys feel threatened by Swift, but that’s no reason to be one of them. Red comprises sixteen great pop songs that achieve emotional release and emotional empowerment simultaneously, autonomously combining Nashville convention and Top 40 convention to engage both audiences. If you had asked me in March, I would have said this was impossible. One of the best albums of last year, that’s for sure. And the compliments I’ve gotten on my Taylor Swift T-shirt are priceless.
AlunaGeorge: Body Music
Island, 2013 [BUY]
There’s plenty of electronica out there, but not even Purity Ring makes music this brashly sterile. Having quickly left the London underground scene with their comparatively full-formed songs, Aluna Francis and George Reid zoomed onto the international market and found the pace a little too hectic. Here they slow down, dragging their heels, immersing in thorny alternaprog convention.
Compared to most other competing technopop outfits, this one does have its selling points. The pristine keyboard texture that whooshes and glitters all over this album is moderately engaging, and even coalesces occasionally into a hummable melody. Nevertheless, said keyboards are still overly complicated, padded with questionable harmonic motifs and swirly filigree. With Reid’s queasy electropatterns swelling and surging in the background, Francis preens numerous solemn declarations of lust and seduction. For those accustomed to strained musical dynamics, or those with a taste for her precious, babyishly enunciated proper-Brit accent, these songs might sound tantalizingly sexy. Otherwise, she’s ominous, menacing, and affected all at once.
Quite streamlined and fashionable, this band is for tastemakers only. They epitomize “future pop,” an alleged movement that ventures to synthesize modern Top 40 styles with avant-garde experimentalism, in other words tarnishing the former with the latter.
A$AP Ferg: Trap Lord
RCA 2013 [BUY]
Since Ferg’s boss Rocky is a cartoonish one-trick rapper who’s at once too aggravated and too relaxed, nobody expected transcendence from the sidekick. In fact, he’s crafted the fiercest, most genuinely innovative hip-hop album all year simply by dispensing with the relaxed. Few angry tough-guys can reach this level of beefy force or energetic persistence, and the mix is rich and rewarding.
At first, Ferg’s beats sound thickly hookless — whatever subtle melodies are there are meant to support his own tough rapping and are hence confined to the background. Then you notice just how tough these beats really are, heavily packed with metallic, percussive syndrums and triumphant crunked-up hi-hat snarerolls whose staccato crackling could drive the music alone, but gets a lot tighter in conjunction with the sinister, dissonant keyboards that color their rhythms. Ferg’s barked disquisitions on sex and money have long since become meaningless in hip-hop, but in this context they signify as gruff, emphatic vocal release. Technically, the reason the drums are mixed this high is so people will hear them in clubs. But they wouldn’t dominate in clubs if they weren’t also so in-your-face aggressive.
If this is the new sound of commercial rap, I’d say the charts are in good hands. It’s all stressful assertion, densely uncompromising snarl, exuberantly letting off steam. Once you adjust to its frenzied pace, it’s exhilarating.
Kurt Vile: Wakin On A Pretty Daze
Matador, 2013 [BUY]
Having expected an indie-rock singer-songwriter of monumental wit or insufferable mannerism from his apparent pseudonym, I was surprised to find neither — for one, Kurt Vile is his real name. He’s the subject of much indie-rock quarreling because of his lo-fi quasiacoustic style, which takes a while to get used to but does eventually kick in for those willing to find inspiration in an unassuming slacker.
Allegedly a basement-dwelling idiot savant, Vile has much more outreach than his reputation would imply. While the record does seem to go on forever, and though he does sing under his breath, his roots-rock band jams heartily, expanding and elaborating on his friendly melodies with warmth and humor. He finds a number of actually engaging and interesting ways to juxtapose electric and acoustic guitars, counterposing heavy strumming with sprightly riffs and vice versa. Nevertheless, there hasn’t been this stereotypical a hippie in rock since J Mascis. He’s lazy and wasted; he lets it all hang out in a sloppy way; he’s indulgently uninhibited. His music is basically escapist, which makes you wonder about just how much outreach he really commands.
Where many indie-rock singer-songwriters mumble in order to hide from the world, Vile is largely unsublimated, expressing way too many inner urges in a shamelessly naked display of his own psyche. Even if he claims not to smoke regularly, this form of catharsis is exactly what draws many people to drugs. Having to deal with people in this state is also why I avoid stoners at all costs.
James Blake: Overgrown
Polydor, 2013 [BUY]
This singing pseudo-DJ made his name on a number of short EPs in which he invented a faintly anguished version of obscure electronica, but his full-length albums are where his indulgence really lets loose. Although his restrained, tasteful keyboard palette does offer some relief from commercial techno overkill, and every now and then he hits upon a cool sound effect, his preferred style is hazily unobtrusive.
Aspiring aesthetes view Blake as having mastered dubstep crossover, but I prefer to think of him as a contemporary-classical experimentalist applying his erudite, sophisticated harmonies to quotidian popform. Intentionally simplified and diminished, his compositional structure loops soft synthesizer atmosphere around muted rhythmic percussion to create miniature mood pieces one must knowingly concentrate on to truly understand. Fail to register every systemic nuance, however, and chances are you won’t hear anything at all. While Blake’s stately moans take on a certain self-pitying majesty as his opus begins to repeat itself, and though his rejection of melody is quite transgressive, his minimalism is so passively quiet at times it barely sounds like white noise, let alone music.
Those who pay immoderate attention to tone color and textural variation will find many fascinating details here. But there’s no unifying structure, nothing to draw a casual listener in. As a whole, the album is completely static.
