You, Tim, 2009

Let's do this.

Paramore - Misguided Ghosts
http://www.sendspace.com/file/qkirsr

I love Paramore for their uncomplicated jaggedness, the way their songs seem to bounce so effectively from riff to drum fill to singer Hayley Williams' slightly snotty vocals like they're levitating - if Paramore are emo-pop at its most radio-friendly and slick in the same way that Garbage (initially) were grunge-pop at its most radio-friendly and slick, what both also share is that marvelous sense of craft, their best works absolute joys to behold. In this sense, the most wonderfully Paramore track on their new album is the single "Ignorance", which races through its pose of jaded disappointment with such deliciously mounting anticipation I have to engage in fistpumps as I listen to it on headphones while walking home - plus, it has, like, three choruses.

Meanwhile the best moment on Brand New Eyes is the bit on "Where The Lines Overlap" when the music falls away and Hayley sings "Well I've got a feeling if I sing this loud enough / you would sing it back to me" like she's teaching the world to sing. Although "Misery Business" may be their signature song, Paramore aren't really all that sad: Hayley's lyrics, which frequently impress me, seem to vent her impatience with fools more than anything else, and much of this album possesses a giddy sense of optimism, an unabashed joy at the prospect of being in a successful pop band. They're anthem writers, pure and simple.

But my favourite song on Brand New Eyes is in fact the acoustic ballad "Misguided Ghosts", which doesn't really make sense given how weighted towards punchiness the band's talents are. Maybe it's a bit like with Ashlee Simpson's I Am Me, where the ballad "Say Goodbye" took on a special lustre by virtue of its point of difference. And how different: a simply beautfiul vulnerable vocal performance over impossibly warm guitar, "Misguided Ghosts" was even compared to Joanna Newsom of all people on an ILX thread. Its simplicity allows the lyrics to jump out at you, and I adore them, though am hard-pressed to say why exactly. It might be that mixture of clarity and inscrutability: "So now I'm told that this is life / and pain is just a simple compromise / so we can get what we want out of it. / Would someone care to classify / our broken hearts, our twisted minds, so I / can find someone to rely on..." Hayley's singing here is perfect, expressive but unselfconsciously so, perfectly balanced between clear and trembling. Almost imperceptibly a thrumming kickdrum emerges to give the song a sense of gliding restlessness, the compulsive drift of Hayley's misguided ghost whose lesson is less "be yourself" and more "we are all equally lost".

The pain of adolescence, the sense of a void at the heart of identity and the desire to quench it with romance, forms an endless spring for fantastic pop music because we never quite recover ourselves. "Our suffering was pointless" we think later, but no-one gets the chance to go back and explain that to our younger selves. But we can listen to songs like this instead.

STOKED

All I have to do today is figure out a way to insulate my windows against draughts and WAIT IMPATIENTLY FOR TIM'S NEXT POST

STOKED

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, 9 December 2009 11:32 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm so happy you're back Tim.

YAY to this thread and THIS!

Baby Dollz - My Cookie (Boys In The Skinny Jeans)
http://c.wrzuta.pl/wa6652/8462d97c001d02974afefda7/0/baby%20dollz%20-%20my%20cookie.mp3

"My Cookie" is possibly fake-jerk: the video clip is a bit too slick for this stage of the sub-genre's commercial evolution, the Baby Dollz themselves just a little too pretty (though one rather endearingly sports braces in the clip), especially when compared to the erm honesty of presentation that is often one of jerk's more refreshing qualities. And of course, it's a big, bold, catchy pop song. Smells like someone jumping on a crossover phenonemon in the hope of easy cash?

But what would fake-jerk be, precisely? If this umpteenth reiteration of old-skool minimal beats is distinguished by its fashions (see the title in parentheses to this track), its slight kiddie vibe and the high quotient of rudimentary pubescent female rapping, it's not clear what line of authenticity Baby Dollz could possibly fall on the wrong side of. Anyway, these girls are just awesome, packing in one of my favourite lines of the year ("His skin is like a job, make a chick go to work!") within moments of starting. And that beat: as if the standard doom-bass section wasn't resounding enough, the groove intermittently flips into a rattling steel percussion counter-rhythm that feels like it's being played against the inside of your skull. This is one way in which the minimalism of styles like hyphy and jerk can be liberating, setting up a space in which the contrast of just a handful of musical ideas can sound really effective. There's few if any grooves from this year that sounded as startling, memorable or distinct as this did for me, which might seem a surprising outcome given how "template" based jerk appears at first glance (it shouldn't be though - jerk through up a whole bunch of my favourite rap tracks this year, and several are still to come).

Moreover, while some people might mark the song down for being a tribute to boys in the skinny jeans, this simply makes me love it more - although less because I like skinny jeans and more because I highly approve of songs about boys in anything at all really.

Dotstar - Stick Up
http://www.sendspace.com/file/jcms37

Most UK Funky "skank" tracks don't really survive the transition from homemade youtube craze to proper crossover phenomenon. Fr3e's "Tribal Skank (Skank Calm Down)" being a case in point - when it was the soundtrack to a dozen amateur dance-offs it seemed like the best thing ever, but the eventual silly pro video clip immediately transformed it from gimmick-good to gimmick-bad, and it's hard now to hear it with the same enthusiasm and fondness I once held (the annoying extra vocals didn't help, admittedly). Why does "Stick Up" work in the opposite fashion? Well maybe it's because the video is just awesome, a weird and unexpectedly successful melange of high-tech alien futurism, high street humour and dance instruction class. Such a triumph of little details: the girls dancing in the shiny tops with the overexposed lights streaking across them is maybe my favourite music video visual this year.

Its glittery video also helps "Stick Up" pass some credibility test that I didn't even think I believed in. Skank tracks - with their basic "nursery grime" chants and rudimentary or outright pirated grooves - attract all the kinds of criticism you would expect: made in 2 minutes, no soul no feeling, blah blah blah. I don't truck with this, but nonetheless it's difficult not to feel like their cheery populism is slightly wasted when the tunes are too literally cheap to appeal to a pop audience weaned on high-tech production values and glamorous photo shoots. "Stick Up" as a tune could go both ways. On the one hand, with a homemade dance routine video it sounds like a defiantly unprofessional mishmash of R&B signifiers, funky beats and the tune from Faithless' "Insomnia". Plus as near as I can tell the accompanying dance routine is rather too straightforward - though this may be because it's almost more of a singalong tune than a dancealong tune; I've found myself singing "all the girls in the club want to hold me for ransom / 'cos I'm young and I'm fly and they think that i'm handsome" in the most inappropriate locations.

On the other, it really is impeccably produced: there's such a widescreen vibe to it, the bass when it drops is just so lugubrious and doom laden, and in this context the Faithless synth riffs sound exotic as much as anthemic (plus it's made me go back to "Insomnia" itself - better than I remember!). The mixture is kinda inspired. Funky is probably the only house-related sub-genre in which sampling "Insomnia" wouldn't sound obvious as well as corny, and where its corniness might become a strong point in the song's favour. If "Stick Up" does well in the charts (highly unlikely as that prospect may seem) it would be a vindication for that disaster-courting magpie tendency. If, as is more likely, it doesn't do well, it'll still be a glitzy and glamourous minor classic in my book. Plus how cool is it that Dotstar looks so much like Green Velvet.

yah i love that song

^^^

this is the real end-of-year list highlight

bookmarked

If "Stick Up" does well in the charts (highly unlikely as that prospect may seem) it would be a vindication for that disaster-courting magpie tendency

If there's one thing that is almost guaranteed to get you a UK hit it's hitching your sound to a sample from a massive late 90s pop trance track.

this is the real end-of-year list highlight

Yup.

i too enjoy the music of Dotstar

to expand on that a little, i was thinking why do i like 'Stick Up' and not a lot of other similar stuff (i don't like most of the big 'skank' tracks) but it probably does come down to the vocal effect and his tone - not necessarily cold but yeah kinda monotonous and machine-like in a way that still compels - which combined with the aforementioned visual impact just gives the good-but-anonymous instrumental an edge over others.

BOYS IN THE SKINNY JEANZ DO THE REJECT.

Which is to say...Finney raising the bar for all of our end of year efforts.

Natasha Bedingfield vs Chicane - Bruised Water (Michael Woods Radio Edit)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/f7p5cb

I don't tend to like an awful amount of airy trance-pop that gets released these days. This was not always the case. In 1999 (the time of the last proper pop-trance boom, or "euro" as it is sometimes called to distinguish it from, um, serious trance I guess) I was 17 and going through that painful process of self-identification that involves disliking more things than you like. At the time I was not in a position truly to appreciate the carnival of delights on offer, although let us be honest for a moment, Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone" was good for nothing except providing raw material for Wiz Khalifa many years later.

In 2000 though I was seduced by the trembling delights of Fragma's "Toca's Miracle", which has to be one of the finest office Christmas party songs ever. The secret is to be drunk AND the best dancer in the room. At this point the tune is not merely great (as usual), but possibly the single most important cultural event in world history.

There have been other highs: any trancey cover of a Bryan Adams tune is sure to astonish, but the ecstatic "Boys of Summer" is a favourite of mine. Along similar lines, I have a sneaking affection for Bryan's work on Chicane's "Don't Give Up". But the last few years have seen a decrease in the volume of fine trance-pop being produced, if only for the simple reason that many producers have switched over to (often dire) commercial electro-house efforts with bad faux-rock vocals. This is a trend that has to be killed BTW.

So it's rather lovely to discover this number, which not only recalls everything that was great about the decidedly more innocent, more sincere-sounding golden age of trance-pop at its best, but also learns a few tricks from bouncy electro-house opportunism. Nominally, this is a bootleg of Chicane's late 90s anthem "Saltwater" (which I'm not hugely into in its original form - a bit too earnestly ethereal perhaps?) crossed with the vocals of Natasha Bedingfield's decent and largely forgotten ballad "I Bruise Easily". Turns out Bedingfield is an excellent trance vocalist, her squeaky clean whiter-than-white vocals capturing that sense of soaring fragility that trance has cornered perhaps uniquely (it is of course rather odd to soar in a fragile manner). Although I'm not sure if trance-pop versions of "These Words" or "I Wanna Have Your Baby" are in the offing. Additionally, the tinge of euphoria that the trance backing gives to Natasha's melancholy vocals and lyrics create an interestingly conflicted air of emotional largesse that compares favourably to Sugababes at their mid-period best - think "Million Different Ways" or "Ace Reject" (AKA one of the greatest pop songs of recent years).

Having said this, you can skip the actual bootleg and head straight for the much more popular Michael Woods Edit, which includes all the rushy lost-at-sea synth work of "Saltwater" but adds a few tricks of its own. Specifically, at about one minute in, the tune breaks down into a hectic, nervous bouncing trebly synth riff groove that sounds like Fedde Le Grand on a good deal more ecstasy. I love this idea: so much actual commercial electro-house is cynically tied up in an air of can't-be-fucked half-arsery, all jaded female monologues (Vandalism, I'm looking at you) and only fitfully energetic grooves (Le Grand's "Let Me Think About It" and Axwell's "I Found U" as the last truly great commercial electro-house numbers: Discuss) - as if they can preemptively explain away audience indifference with a wave of the hand, "oh, we weren't really trying to be liked anyway." See also: The Ting Tings, and all who follow in their dispirited and dispiriting footsteps.

Michael Woods understands that the specific sounds of commercial electro-house (in particular post-"Put Your Hands Up For Detroit" bounciness) are still viable, just as trance riffs are viable. What was required was an urgent injection of sincerity and commitment: a sense that this music can still be affective (and so effective) emotionally. On his edit of "Bruised Water", electro-house's still occasionally infectious sense of druggy energy and groove-friction are put in the service of a broader and more timeless vision of dance-pop architecture, and with a single sigh from Natasha it is as if all those disaffected sneers have been replaced with glittering tears.

Florence + The Machine - You've Got The Love (XX Remix)
http://www.mediafire.com/?jodztvfd1nm

I've only very recently come around to the XX album in a massive way, while convalescing in hospital in fact. I think for a while I held against them that they were much more reserved and conservative sounding (especially the way they hold to the guitar/bass/drums format) than the breathless press analogies had led me to believe, but of course this is a silly thing to hold against a band, and I later realised that what I took for caution was rather a certain... deliberateness. Just as the group's female singer seems to perform her vocals with a reserved and paced sense of intentionality and thoughtfulness that immediately makes me flash on Insides' Kirsty Yates, songs like "Heart Skipped A Beat", "Shelter" and "Infinity" are precisely as widescreen, as unpredictable and as expressive as they need to be, no more and no less.

Still, it's nice to find that bandmember Jamie's remixes stray from the beaten path a bit: his remixes of Jack Penate's "Pull My Heart Away" and the XX's own "Basic Space" draw from dubstep's high-tech isolationism (clanking beats, lugubrious rubbery textures) without actually being dubstep per se. In fact I'm put in mind of experimental 90s art-pop such as, well, Insides, but also Laika. The band's remix of Florence + the Machine's cover of "You've Got The Love" is a bit different, partly in that it's explicitly a "2-step remix" (of all things), but mostly because it ends up being a cover of the cover, with the XX themselves redoing the bulk of the vocals and Florence herself only appearing in fleeting, chimerical form.

Announcing itself with rippling harp, a shiver of chimes and a fitful, rudimentary stop-start 2-step beat, "You've Got The Love" is both prettier and more physical than anything on the XX's album, and more wide-ranging too, though it also feels just a bit more haphazard and less "perfect" maybe. This seems a more than fair trade to me, especially since any retreat from the studied flawlessness of the album tracks is in relative terms only. Plus the music here is simply fabulous, its thrilling and surprising collision between delicacy and darkness recalling (perhaps deliberately) MJ Cole's Y2K remix of his own "Sincere". In both the evocations of class and refinement become... not unambiguously ghostly, but unreal-seeming and out-of-joint, like the bar scenes in The Shining, and yet somehow rendered stronger and more substantial by the eruptions of booming bass. And the bass here, sometimes underscoring the ostentatious prettiness above it, sometimes shaking ominously by itself, is pretty astonishing, its baleful rumblings putting me in mind of a gigantic worm questing sightlessly for the surface.

The XX's traded vocals are on the more relaxed end of their style, especially the female singer, who sounds as if she's just been woken up and had a microphone put in her face. I don't tend to approve of simple/plaintive/unadorned indie reimaginings of diva performances, but the air of domesticity that fills the duo's mutual pledge "you've got the love I need to see me through" gets a free pass, perhaps because this song is now old enough that recasting it has little if any irony factor, and perhaps because the XX seem to have such great taste in pop music that I mentally exclude the sneer I might otherwise read into this performance. And perhaps because the lyrics are so well suited to a more homely pledge of devotion. At any rate the drama which the XX's own performances exclude come rushing in with a section devoted to chopping up Florence's histrionic cyber-diva vocals over a riotous snare pattern that shocks me with its brute physicality, the effect coming on like a rococo, vaguely sickly-feeleing Sunship. The XX let Florence - and the beat - do the sort of expressive emoting that they deny themselves, Florence's swooping "yo-ou kno-ow it's REALLLLLL!" and the energetic-ecstatic beat revealing the fluttery heart palpitations concealed by the XX's shy smiles.

although let us be honest for a moment, Alice Deejay's "Better Off Alone" was good for nothing except providing raw material for Wiz Khalifa many years later.

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f14/snouts/6fc0bcacc4c6a970ccd3e7b7d1ea1445.gif

Wow you disagree with me that much?!?

Awesome avatar for me btw.

i know rite.

tend not to bust humorous gifs when consumed by righteous fury btw, although yes i will ride for alice deejay vs wiz khalifa any day.

while convalescing in hospital in fact

Nothing serious, I hope (I'm not on here much, so am out of touch). Anyway, enjoying this thread so far. Guess I'm going to have to go and listen to FAT Em now...

the xx remix is great precisely because it has effectively nothing to do w/florence - agree w/tim on the jamie xx remix of "basic space", loads better than the original!

don't care for either alice deejay or wiz khalifa tbh

Permission requested to use that gif on King Boy Pato at some point.

(Would it be churlish to point out that Boys of Summer is by Don Henley rather than Bryan Adams?)

I think I just worded that confusingly Matt - obv "Heaven" is the Adams cover.

I think working at a 24 hour cinema at Crown Casino during 1998-2001 turned me against quite a few of the trance-pop hits of the day, but in particular "Better Off Alone", which used to pipe out of a gruesome arcade game cum adult bar venue next door at 4am without fail. Somehow I was able later to forgive tunes like "Can't Get Enough", but not "Better Off Alone".

i remember loads of really great pop-trance tracks from that period though - sonique's "it feels so good", fragma's "toca's miracle", roger sanchez's "another chance"...idk "better off alone" always seemed tinny and annoying to me.

<3 wiz khalifa

i remember loads of really great pop-trance tracks from that period though - sonique's "it feels so good", fragma's "toca's miracle", roger sanchez's "another chance"...idk "better off alone" always seemed tinny and annoying to me.

These are all great! though in my head the sanchez is pegged as filter-house?

Anyway people download "Bruised Water" and tell me what you think eh.

any dance track that goes top 10 gets filed as "commercial dance" in my mind. rui da silva's "touch me" too - all of these needed to be exhumed by rappers last year but never were

permission most decidedly granted re kbp.

i think the xx remix does have something to do with florence actually - the unexpected charm of the thing is in how that sort of 6th-cup-of-tea-today domestic comfort tim's talking about undercuts both 'you got the love's original power AND its tedious halflife as a cliche indiedance cover curveball, rinsed by postrave chillout compilation clubbers and zane lowe/annie mac and whatever. (ie i disagree there's no grand irony at play here, even though the xx might be being perfectly sincere about it for all one knows.) it's this extra involvement of a sense of the actual functional day-to-day life of this sort of tune with its listeners that allows it to escape it either being a cute-but-pointless-pr-stunt (if they'd remixed something more connoisseurial instead) or an idiotically bovine la roux/skream affair.

yeah lex i kinda figured you wouldn't be an alice deejay fan, being the noted enemy of the tinny and annoying that you are and all.

I'd like to hear someone, possibly a grime MC, take on Sandstorm by Darude.

The chopped up, whooping Florence sample is the single best thing about that XX remix - it gives it the ravey feel that the original lacked. I'm not sure about the remix in general though - call me a traditionalist bore but I generally like my basslines to be in the same key as the rest of the track.

the fake blood remix of sandstorm is, frankly, utterly amazing. i shit u not

Royal P - Between Us
http://www.sendspace.com/file/0zgkfd

One of the loveliest, and certainly most startling UK Funky tracks this year, "Between Us" simultaneously renders unclear the meaning of funky and provides a glimpse of just how far the genre can go. With its unsettled, cluttered, fluttering beat (but none of the usual Caribbean counter-rhythms), warm Mr Fingers bassline and stomach-butterfly synthesiser arpeggios, "Between Us" pinpoints a specific vibe peculiar in pop and dance music both: a sense of being seduced against your will, being sucked into a languorous pool of desire that you're trying to fight.

The deep female vocal, cut-up to make very little sense, seems (upon careful reverse engineering) to be a promise that nothing will come between the singer and her music. But if sense is already lost, has something already disrupted the relationship? More likely, "Between Us" provides the location of a mind so lost in the music's twists and turns that sense itself can't come between. In one particularly startling moment the shattered vocals intone what feels like an eerie statement of compulsive desire for "music/ah!/music/LOVE/for my/music/that I have for my/music/that I have for my/music/that I have for my..."

Royal P's beat - as nuanced as any R&B production, the firm 4X4 kickdrum notwithstanding - and febrile synthesiser melodies suggest that the relationship ultimately could be damaging, unhealthy: the singer is too close to her object of desire, too much in love with its slinky perfection, and Royal P's counterpoint melodies seem to mock her with their dark dolorousness, before going all chilly and defeated and soft-focus at the end, like Boards of Canada soundtracking a funeral, acknowledging that it's too late for the singer ever to find her way back. "It puts a smile on my face" she mutters, exhausted, but addicts will come up with any excuse.

^^track of the thread so far, yes!

way better than boreds of canada though

Tim - have you checked out any post-Deadmau5 progressive? that's where i go for my trance fix nowadays, with all the pretty melodies intact but at a more humane tempo, and it can get very poppy on occasion too... as for recent-ish ethereal trance proper, here's some lovely Dido-trance with a 2-steppy feel.

Le Grand's "Let Me Think About It" and Axwell's "I Found U" as the last truly great commercial electro-house numbers: Discuss

what i find interesting about the second, commercial wave of electro-house is that it simultaneously got more girly and more blokey than the '04 og... compared to something like Klaas' "Infinity 2008", with its beery riff and its swing-levels ratcheted up as high as they can go without the groove starting to trip over itself, early Get Physical et al sounds not only positively androgynous but also somewhat... y'know, funkless! and while i agree that electro-house in any form is pretty much played out at this point (and the general public increasingly does too, i guess), i think there's still some mileage left in edging ever closer to fruity euro-dance - so i'd say that the last great commercial electro-house number (so far) was released just a few months ago.

'between us' = kinda reminiscent of boy better know's tropical, in its same preternaturally unknowable, almost voidlike compulsion. also very different though.

thirsty... so thirsty

Fool's Gold - Yam Lo Moshech
http://www.sendspace.com/file/e2q2m9

I don't mind US indie being so fanboyish about Animal Collective, not just because I like Animal Collective, but also because I think in the choice between "indie that wants to be experimental and playful with genre" and "indie as the keeper of rock's eternal flame" I'm more partial to the former, regardless of whether the music is living up to either precept half the time. Don't get me wrong, I liked The Strokes' debut album as much as the next person, but even so, the current meaning of "indie" seems more likely to throw up inspired accidents - anomalies that go halfway toward justifying indie's entire raison d'être - than it has in quite a while.

Fool's Gold I literally stumbled across by accident, downloading one of their songs - this one in fact - by mistake. But happily they satisfy a yearning I didn't know, and never would I have guessed I had. That yearning is for percussive psychedelic kraut-cum-world-pop somewhere between 'Soon Over Babaluma' and 'Remain In Light', only with marvelously heartfelt Hebrew vocals. I'm ignorant enough of jewish language and culture that anyone singing in Hebrew just spells "devotional" to me, with an ease that would be impossible in English short of, like, Gregorian chanting or some such. Or maybe it's just the preponderance of guttural consonants that makes Fool's Gold sound so mystical - singing in Russian probably would have the same effect for me.

Or maybe it's the music itself, which, like the singer's vertiginous vocal leaps, always sounds awed, bedazzled, almost exhausted by visions of light and majesty. 'Yam Lo Moshech' skips along on a repetitive, massive snare, enormous horns and psychedelic Santana guitar solos transmitted from the end of the universe, while the singer sighs like Moses staggering down Mt Sinai weighed down by stone tablets - forgive my blatant cultural/religious cliches, but this is the great advantage of coming to music such as this with pretty much zero appropriate knowledge or sensitivity - you can imagine everything writ as large as possible. And anyway, Fool's Gold are totes gettting off on the cross-cultural collisions in their music (hints of Africa, of Indonesia, of Turkey, all wrapped up in Hebrew singing like a bow round a particularly haphazard Christmas hamper), so why shouldn't I.

You need the entire album - the lovestruck shimmer of "Nadine", the heatstroke hallucinations of "Ha Dvash", the gamelan rattle of "Momentary Shelter" - but I particularly like the structure of "Yam Lo Moshech", the way it just drives on its beat from start to finish without deviation, growing ever more topheavy and histrionic and overblown, always finding a way to make overripe psychedelia and circular rhythmic dances feel like the same thing. Too many assume you can have one only at the expense of the other. This is a charming exception.

Ryan Leslie - Gibberish
http://www.sendspace.com/file/fck448

I'm not a massive fan of Ryan Leslie's album, but then I guess I didn't really give it a chance: on the first few listens too many of the tunes sounded like also-ran Neptunes-productions, and I just haven't cared enough to go back. Maybe I should: Ryan Leslie, of course, was the brains behind the music on Cassie's debut album, which of course is totally classic. But - whether because Ryan ain't Cassie or for some other reason beyond my ken - I'm happier to wait for Cassie's endlessly delayed, endlessly revised second album.

The stronger reason to give Ryan a second chance is "Gibberish", the closing track on his album and one of my absolute favourite tracks of the year. Things start off genteel: soothing piano chords, stately bassline, gentle fingerclick percussion. Then Ryan, his voice wounded and mutilated by autotune - but slightly, subtly, plastic surgery scars rather than the elaborate bodysculpting of T-Pain - sounding frustrated and pissed off, "Time is running out! Please don't make me wait! I don't wanna know! I'll stab a day..." Sure, those lyrics don't really make sense, but it hardly matters, because after that I can decipher hardly anything else on this song. The bridge, whispered and sighed over smart sixties horns, seems to be: "Oh didnyknow, ohdidyknowabehh, oh didnyknow, ohdidyknowabehheberyday, eberyday..." And then, suddenly, clarity: "Your body's everything! Everything! Everhebehh ehh... oh.... I see your body when you rock in the moonlight..." and then he's off again, lost in his own world of incomprehensible mewling.

"Gibberish" is a gimmick track of course, but one with a point: so much pop music focuses on the sense of absolute self-abasement and loss of control inspired by the desire for another, but it does so in a hyper-articulate, self-controlled manner. With "Gibberish" Ryan tries to show, rather than tell: there's not enough explicable sentences here to tell a story, but Ryan's constant drift into intelligibility captures perfectly the kind of distracted reverie whereby the most inane of details (your body rocking in the moonlight) takes on the air of the sacred, something beyond words but not beyond pathetic mumbling. "Gibberish" gets at the inescapable silliness of desire in a way that most R&B is too accomplished to countenance.

To say NOTHING of the awesome falsetto, piano tinkles and distinguished synth sweeps in the chorus.

Major Notes - Holy Ghost
http://www.sendspace.com/file/g9vr1e

The Major Notes production I really want to give you is the guy's remix of J-Will's "Deja Vu" - an R&B/funky fusion whose awesomely tactile sonics and febrile menace put me in mind of Adamski's "Killer" - but unfortunately I've been unable to find a copy for love nor money. "Holy Ghost" will have to suffice, though it's seriously underselling this great track to describe it as "sufficient". Major Notes does a lot of different spins on the funky template (see "Friend of Mine" for a gorgeous piece of classy R&B-tinged vocal house); "Holy Ghost" is something of a superior follow-up to the widescreen, complex rhythms of "Jungle Book" only here the template is pushed about as far into "tribal" territory as it can possibly go: deep resonant kicks not following anything like a 4X4 pattern, around which he weaves a series of grunts and vocal samples "oh ah! oh! ah! oh", "oh meh!" and the like, and of course, a sighing Chorus "aaahaaaaahaaaahaaaahaaah" under a blizzard of heavy kicks - this is serious virgin sacrifice in the jungle bizniz.

I love the nuance of Major Notes' drums, which can be naturalist or antinaturalist but always have a delicious heaviness to them - on "Deja Vu" the beat at the end of each measure sounds somewhere between an explosion and a grave being exhumed. On his nearly as excellent remix of Beyonce's "Sweet Dreams" the contrast between the steady kicks, the crisp snares and the hectic sampled woodblocks is simply delightful. On "Jungle Book" he pitch-shifted the kicks so they sounded like they were tumbling down a stairwell. On "Holy Ghost" the beats can sound metallic or wooden or a dozen points in between, each delectable enough that you could listen to a single bar forever.

But the best part of "Holy Ghost" is the surprise ending, when a wobbly baritone declaims, "Can you feel the holy ghost?" Cue Chorus: "Coming down!" Baritone: "Coming down! Coming down Coming down! Do you feel the holy ghost?" Chorus: "Way Way down!!!" Baritone: "Deep down inside ! Deep down inside! Deep down insiiiiide your soulllll soulllll soulllllll soulllll your soulll soullll soulll..." I can only imagine the destruction this causes on the dancefloor.

you liked the strokes????!!! :(

Lex I think you'll find that most of ILX's pop listeners liked The Strokes!

what's the fool's gold album called? i keep finding stone roses references, and a record label.

Lex I think you'll find that most of ILX's pop listeners liked The Strokes!

:(

Dennis Ferrer - Hey Hey
http://www.sendspace.com/file/vf8g4t
Why is Ferrer always so good? It’s the thick voluptuousness of his grooves, I think, more nuanced and idiosyncratic and (yet) populist than most of his US house peers, but fatter and wetter than almost anything from Europe. It's a mark of Ferrer's ubiquitous reliability that his is the most, um, "accomplished" sounding music (give or take a top-shelf Quentin Harris production) I hear at gay clubs, and then the most catchy music I hear at sophisticated tech-house nights. We don't necessarily all love each other, but we all love Ferrer. Well, unless you're disinterested in perfect anthems.

"Hey Hey" reminds me somewhat of Ferrer’s prior, amazing "Church Lady", partly because it’s a vocal anthem, and partly because both tunes are distinguished by their capacity to use every single component rhythmically; on the slightly cooler (as in less warm, steelier) Hey Hey this trick is reminiscent of Carl Craig on his more anthemic excursions. But as with most recent Craig, this is not at all ostentatiously percussive a la UK funky or lots of minimal or whatever, it's just that every element is crucial to the slithery vibe of the groove. Both producers can make relatively simple tunes that sound utterly distinctive because their philosophy is imprinted deeply on every element, every stray sound.

So we're talking, from the syncopated main synth bleep loop to the pattering snares to the captivating counter-rhythm of metallic sounds like a hailstorm lashing a tin roof (Ferrer allowing the storm to grow more and less bluntly bludgeoning over time, like a rogue surgeon wielding a scalpel now delictately, now cruelly) to the syncopated, jazzy female vocal with its dancefloor-destroying scatting, everything is secretly rhythm. And then there's the gratuitously excellent (and again Craig-ish) portentous strings and THX space bass, just to remind you that, yeah, this guy is on top of everything.

oooh that is really thrilling. great effects!

holy shit, i'd go insane if i head this out!

i did when i did! AND I HEARD U SAY~~~~

that's vivien goldman on vox, that is.

more essential d.ferrer from last year:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmaQpKxb95Y

Admittedly the last couple of times I've been out to gay clubs they haven't played Ferrer or Ferrer type music (wall to wall Le Roux et. al. :-( even more crushing than the US experience in 'A Gayzy Shade Of Winter') - BUT last year I danced to "Church Lady" and (I think) "Touched The Sky" at a summer foam party and that's on again in a few weeks so here's hoping it'll all be warm melodramatic house again.

that record reminds me a lot of carl craig's remix of beanfield's "tides"....but not sure I like it was much as that!

Yeah it's a lot like the Tides remix, I agree.

yeah the structure and the way in which it works...there are v few other records like that.

that's not good news

What, that it's like the Tides record or that there are v few other records like that?

v few others

never heard anything like this either

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkR6-c_xkBg

seemed on topic kinda but really i just love that

Youtube doesn't load for me at work - what is it?

ayumi hamasaki carl craig remix

uh, part of me

Have not heard that!

u def should then but i kinda thought you had heard everything by now

anyway that youtube cuts it in half, needs to be heard in its 8 1/2 minute fullness

I will attend to this at home.

touch the sky was my fav off that album although church lady was all ppl in chicago seemed to play (when i was going to more house clubs about a year or two ago)

quentin harris remix of "touched the sky" <3 <3 <3

"Touched The Sky" is my favourite on that album too - though in more stentorian moods I love most of all the stripped down bangingness of "Transitions". Would say the original and QH remix of "Touched The Sky" are about equal in quality.

Hey Hey is an incredible record. I saw a dancefloor full of people go apeshit to it in December. It's because it sounds so cold and cavernous and metallic and then this rich, warm vocal just pours into the gaps, and then the whole crowd gets to do the "Hey! Hey!" call and response bit. In the hands of a lesser producer that chorus would feel a bit corny but Ferrer's actually quite restrained with it, he never over-eggs the pudding.

sooner or later I'll get around to listening to all of these

One super amazing Ferrer production from a few years ago that gets slept on way too much is "A Drum Stick and a Light Fixture" under the Son of Raw moniker. Totally slamming.

i didn't know there were son of raw tracks other than "a black man in space"! (SEARCH: sax mix of that.)

Yeah there's quite a few!

Obv both versions of "A Black Man In Space" are amazing.

amazingly, i DID actually hear this at optimo tonight! and i lost it.... but i'm still home at half one, for reasons out of my control.

even more amazingly (to me, at least, ha) when it started i was like "is this that beanfield remix?" no kidding.

i have to admit, that i came home and googled - "ordinary day" "i heard you say" - trying to find out what track this was before i realised that i had heard it for the first time that very night. this says more about my brain than it does about this track though! am quite drunk now, cheers all the same.

but what it DOES say about the track is that it sounds like a very familiar, almost classic, track a few listens in.

Me, Tim, 2009. enough said!

D-Lo - Hardest In The Bay
http://www.sendspace.com/file/grosmi

I've delayed writing about a D-Lo track because I kept changing my mind regarding which one I wanted to write about/upload. This is rare for me w/r/t rap albums/mixtapes where I usually choose one or two tracks I love mot of all pretty quickly (though maybe it's a 2009 thing 'cos I'm having the same problem with Lil' Boosie), but it's also a roundabout endorsement of D-Lo's DJ Fresh-helmed mixtape 'The Tonite Show' (yeah, the same name as all the rest of DJ Fresh's mixtapes), which I've returned to me pretty much constantly these last few months, always with a different favourite. So I ended up choosing "The Hardest In The Bay", off DJ Fresh's "own" multi-artist mixtape 'The Tonite Show', just to break the deadlock.

Anyway so D-Lo is part of the new (or "new"?) Bay Area rap scene which appears to have grown out of hyphy, and which I'm in no way equipped to talk about knowledgeably - check Deej's piece here instead.

http://somanyshrimp.com/2010/01/13/the-new-bay/

D-Lo's voice is kind of squeaky and breathless and tinged with ridicule, like he's always rolling his eyes at you or something, with a bit of Cee-Lo's high-pitched desiccation, but rubbery or elastic and gruff at the same time. This sounds like it might become annoying, and on D-Lo's big hit "No Hoe" the unhingedness of it all does bug me at times, at least on the chorus (or sometimes it's brilliant, but it depends on when I'm listening), but it's also a big part of the guy's appeal - the D-Lo mixtape closer "Blaaat!" really emphasises this, pushing the weirdness of D-Lo's flow and the lurching post-hyphy groove of "No Hoe" to an almost unworkable extreme. But he's also great with a straightforwardly mnemonic chorus, the wheezy edges of his voice like grappling hooks latching onto your ears and imprinting his almost sing-song rhymes in your head.

DJ Fresh has a couple of different styles, switching easily between the sparse but spacey post-hyphy of stuff like "Blaaat!" and histrionic, austere synth numbers like "The Hardest In The Bay" and "U Already Know Doe", and then sometimes pitch-perfect evocations of eighties electro-funk. What distinguishes "The Hardest In The Bay" is the gorgeous contrast between the glassy synthetic trumpets and the lazily funky rhythms that skip across the surface of the track with laconic grace. It's a typically odd-but-perfect foil for D-Lo, who can't help but undercut the widescreen solemnity of the music with his asthmatic incredulity. And does he really compare the track to duplo, or am I imagining that?

wow, just catchin up with "hey hey"

1000% cosign on apeshit-inducing qualities - it's like DJ Koze doing deep house!

and "julia" is mindblowing - i listened to it before i read your thoughts, tim, and i'm sort of glad i did - it took me completely by surprise

dlo is great yeah

i like how dj fresh kinda stretched out & tried different styles for that particular record

i think i implied in my bay roundup that there werent many good mcs which isnt what i meant really -- more that enjoying the scene relies on a lot of other factors
i didnt even mention guys like messy marv or newcomers like dlo & sleepy d

JULIA, JULIA

i dunno how tim finds the time to listen to all this stuff. enviable amount of attention being paid here.

Boy Better Know - Too Many Man (Jamie Duggan Remix)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/q6id8v

I feel bad about how I dropped bassline so quickly and thoroughly when I fell in love with UK Funky - it really was like going out on a few dates with someone you thought was really nice and interesting and could grow to love, then just abandoning them in the middle of a restaurant to follow an object of obsessive infatuation, not returning calls, being a dick in general. Every now and then I pop back in to see what I've been missing. My sense is that the scene, denied the limelight since, oh, "What's It Gonna Be" I guess, has quietly becoming more itself - the beats more stiff and stringent, the synths more shrill and sickly, the bass more turgid and rumbling and ominous, the tunes in their general constuction more oddball and threadbare. This is the kind of development picked up on and given significance by connoisseurs rather than outsiders, who just hear what they heard before, only more of it. Needless to say, I'd have difficulty wrapping my observations into some purply prosy grand unifying theory.

The other thing that bassline seems to have been doing is growing more hip hop - more tunes are dominated by MCs and the MCs dominate the tunes more than they did. The bassline MCs I'm most aware of - J Star, Slick Don, MC Bones - usually have a pinched, scrappy feel, like they're hectoring you for forgetting to include them in your dinner plans, and it sounds perfect over the harsh right angles and blaring textures of the music, which similarly can feel like it's being abrasively ugly just to spite you a bit (but not too much). Which makes a bassline remix of "Too Many Man" an excellent idea. The histrionic, masculine grime X funky of the original always seemed a little misguided to me, and not merely because its message ("We need some more girls in here! There's too many man too many many man!") was apt to get lost in all the bluff and bluster. Moreover, funky's appeal is always defined by its relationship to house's swing however tenuous and stretched it might become, a factor towards which Boy Better Know appeared entirely oblivious.

Bassline doesn't suffer from this problem: despite (or perhaps because of) it being so squarely in the pocket with respect to its straight-down-the-line 4X4 beat, it has simply no relationship with house swing whatsoever, the rhythm structure providing basically a skeletal framework (and it is skeletal: the slashing snares are usually ten times louder than the kicks), so Boy Better Know's furrow-browed raps sound organically suited to their new environment, although perhaps now nervous and paranoid more than aggressively whingey. Duggan's remix is barely a track, more like a succession of percussive samples, rumbling bass riffs and queasy synth arpeggios that sound like they met eachother for the first time as they arrived at your ears. The effect is a kind of straining instability, like the rappers have to keep staring at the floor and chanting to themselves just to hold onto the basic groove, to prevent the arrangement from floating away into nauseous insubstantiality. That probably makes the tune sound bad, but that couldn't be further from the truth; it's one of the fascinating qualities of bassline that all of its appeals are grounded in a thoroughgoing ugliness. In this context, the chorus becomes something of a pained self-realisation: What have we become? Where have the girls gone? Will we ever feel normal again?

as far as i've heard you're quite right about modern bassline itself (i was actually pretty humbled and impressed by how little it's changed - bit like finding out the spurned fellow you've felt so guilty about all these years is doing quite fine and barely even remembers you and your narcissistic one nighter, to extend yr metaphor) but in terms of uk funky haven't you been missing a speculative trick lately wrt how marcus nasty's been harnessing bassline's energy? (ie something like 70% of recent sets revealed as being of bassline producer origin once the soundcloud tracklisting emerged.) i'm not thinking sonically or structurally necessarily - though there are elements of that too - but perhaps more along psychological lines too, a consonant impulse. it just seems like something stronger than simply the aptitude of moonlighting producers.

(at the same time one could also make a worthwhile compare-and-contrast with the failures of the overdesiring seb chew/marcus set, and form some sort of dialectical triangulation that PROVES "real funky" exists, which it clearly does obv.)

don't really know why i'm posting this here (tricking myself back into posting while not feeling very typey most probably) - feel free to cut & paste onto funky thread.

Ha ha yeah well what's funny is I've been thinking exactly the same thing - why is it that bassline producers seem to "get it" so instinctively, Bass Boy and Screama and Naughty Raver just slotting into the upper echelons of funky producers without sounding forced or overthought or particular about it whatsoever. But as you point to, it's so seamless that it's hard come up with a conceptual framework for the phenomenon at this stage, so every time I've thought of raising the issue I've refrained on the grounds of the triangulation angle being the main fruitful line of inquiry while also being under a Denkverbot.

Interestingly, Tom Lea at Fact's been trying to organise a feature interviewing Marcus and his bassline orphans.

http://i44.photobucket.com/albums/f14/snouts/ggirl.gif

i'll look forward to that.

Kenton Slash Demon - Singla
http://www.sendspace.com/file/to5crv

If you danced to house last year there's a decent chance you danced to Kenton Slash Demon's "Khattabi", which you probably won't recognise now but you'd know if you heard it: the rattling, post-MFF groove; the wailing, stretched, vaguely subcontinental vocal sample; the bass guitar; the breakdown comprised of scary lurching Psycho strings; the irresistible drop. Great track, and one well suited to 2009 in the odd sense of being so 2004 revivalist, reminding listeners that "hey we still like those house tracks with the funny noises", and providing a refereshing counterweight in sets of strenuous deepness. It also helps that right now a lot of people are getting into this kind of house seemingly for the first time: "Khattabi" seems to be very popular with erstwhile dubstep DJs discovering the pull of a seductive house groove as if the world was young and new.

I think I slightly prefer "Singla" on the flip, which mines the some territory to even more mindboggling effect, featuring a groove so springloaded, so moist and bouncy, so itchy and scratchy and compulsive that it's like being inside a giant toy factory run by enthusiastic puppies. There's also some vaguely ethereal choral sighs in the background, and a weird ambient 'n' found sound breakdown, but these are mere garnishes for the main event - that groove, that amazing groove. "Singla" is a straighter track than "Khattabi" in some senses, ruling your life not with a canny sample or two or a well-executed drop but through the sheer "how do they do that" intensity of its rhythmic excess. Amazingly, with each return to the central groove the rhythm seems to mutate and mate with itself, sprouting effects and fripperies like weeds, a never-ending, perfectly orchestrated disaster that spreads and spreads. And like the best tunes of its type, it positively drips with the sense of fun that went into building it.

No one really needs this sound right now, but I'm glad that it's still around: these days it's easy to write off complex, micro-detailed production in dance music as a fad that's passed, which is true in some senses, but ignores the fact that at its best this hyper-detailed, hyper-percussive house sound seems to create its own logic of dancing, the endlessly changing same of the groove provoking in dancers a response of constant extension: the one time I've heard "Singla" played out me and my girls couldn't stop coming up with new moves in an attempt to do justice to the ruthless impatience of the music.

This is actually one of the songs I've heard already. The Khattabi "EP" (is it really an EP? It's got three songs on it..) sounds to me like a kind of Greek Pepe Bradock, somehow. The main track is fairly serious business and the other two are like more whimsical magnifications of certain aspects of it. I agree about the superiority of "Singla" - partially because it is more whimsical, but also because of the irresistable rhythm (maybe these two qualities are connected)? The groove is almost Akufen-like. I can imagine it just repeating with no changes for like five minutes and I'd still be feeling something new each go round.

wow that's great, just checked out their track Brunn on youtube and that's really good too. not a million miles away from that dOP/Noze ethno-jazzy sound but with a bit more oompf.

xp and yes, akufen too for sure

"khattabi" is def amazing

they r some indie band too apparently?

one of the guys is in a band called When Saints Go Machine - i've never heard them

ha, really? no wonder it reminded me of dOP, they did a great remix of a WSGM track, it was on DJ Koze's RA podcast