Tim's overflowing bounty of 2010 pop riches extravaganza thread

one more time

Starting to feel a bit uncomfortable about posting download links here. Instead there'll be youtube links, plus you can join the equiv facebook group for download links (link to the group shortly).

preparing for statisfaction.

Drake - Fireworks (Deadboy Slo Mo House Edit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oMgqdAPESY

Figures that one of my secret favourite songs of the year was a secret lush weepy house mix of Drake of all people that also secretly sounds like an anthem about a certain golfer - "Fireworks (Deadboy Slo Mo House Edit)" is a tune that piles together so many unlikelihoods that I suspect a lot of people check it out of sheer perverse curiosity. Of course it sounds like none of the things I just mentioned: basically this tune is about sonorous piano chords, gorgeously shuffling house percussion, bass as deep and still as a lake and layered high-pitched vocals delicately tiptoeing across a pleasure/pain tightrope stretched between twin peaks of relief and regret.

Recently I've become a bit suspicious of overly emotional dance-not-dance music, which sometimes strikes me as people endlessly reprising Aphex Twin's "Xtal" (classic tune don'tgetmewrong) and the like as an excuse for failing to, like, make people dance. Or, worse, Burial knock-offs. All without ever remotely coming close to the genuine, thrilling bittersweet sensuality of the real classics of the form - 2-step anthems, duh, from the Dreem Teem's remix of Amira's "My Desire" to the Artful Dodger's remix of Valerie M's "Tingles 2000".

Deadboy however comes very close here, and I suspect it's because he recognises that sadness in dance music is almost always best approached obliquely, as a kind of neccesary implication of whatever the tune gazes at directly: in this case, acres and acres of desire, and a certain awe-filled awareness of the accidental beauty of life, that kind of awareness that only hits home against a backdrop of loss. Or more bluntly: the e rush, flaring most gloriously in the moment before it dies.

Message Bookmarked

Fantasia - Man of the House

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1Nxpes6wgM

Fantasia's gotta be one of the best storytellers in pop. Not in terms of lyrics - though I doubt there's many songs in 2010 with better lyrics than "Man of the House", whether or not she wrote them - but in terms of exploiting the endless variety of tics and wavers and melismatic twists in her vocals to inject each line with just the right little bit of additional nuance to push the story along. In some ways her voice is a blunt instrument: she has no choice but to wield it in this matter, so inevitable is her slide into vocal over-signification. Or maybe the better analogy is a river: Fantasia's voice is like this unstoppable natural force that requires the right material to extract the best use out of it, and storytelling lyrics allow Fantasia all sorts of opportunities to flex her tremors, warbles and coos.

"See it's getting a little outta hand/cook, cleaning, providing, taking care of little man/you wanna talk about who's wearing the pants/(huh) baby well I don't understand..." she sings in the pre-chorus, and the put-on puzzlement is palpable, perfectly played even when you know she's putting it on and she knows that you know. There's the slightest wink in there, like she's inviting you to take a seat and watch her win this argument with her flawless pose of earnest reasonableness - and it's a mark of just how sympathetic Fantasia's voice (and by extension persona) is, that a song about what's reasonable in a domestic relationship can be so captivating.

I suspect nothing from Fantasia will move me quite so much as her grand final performance of "I Believe" on American Idol way back when, and in truth "Man of the House" is somewhat too restrained to be the perfect showcase of what Fantasia can do with a pop song, at least as compared to, say, her previous album's "When I See You". Whereas there Fantasia seemed to have a nervous breakdown on record, here she contents herself with some mildly OTT wailing and hollering in the song's final minute. But Fantasia can't (quite) subsist on nervous breakdowns alone, and the steely strength of "Man of the House" is as loveable for its everywoman approachability as those songs were for their unmistakability. As with "Single Ladies" (and Beyonce is surely the other great everywoman of contemporary pop in this regard) it's a song to be sung along to. People should sing along to it more.

"man of the house" is amazing.

Whereas there Fantasia seemed to have a nervous breakdown on record, here she contents herself with some mildly OTT wailing and hollering in the song's final minute

but the point of the song is that she's not going to have a nervous breakdown. "cuz if you can't, baby i can - i CAN and i WILL, so figure it out..."

also, it has to be said that her album, back to me, is one of the best r&b albums of 2010 - the los-produced "who's been lovin' you" and the star-spangled "falling in love tonight" are two more highlights.

Those were the other two I played with nominating instead. Love "The Thrill Is Gone" and "Collared Greens & Corn Bread" as well. Re "Man of the House", the point you identify was the point i was trying to make as well - but contrasting that to what I've previously loved in Fantasia tunes.

i love this performance of it, too.

That Fantasia album is one of the big slept-on pop releases of the year, does she even have a profile at all outside the US? It's a great record, maybe a bit cloying all in one sitting - once I get past Collared Greens & Corn Bread I kind of want to take a break. Although I might change my mind on that as December progresses, and Man of the House is probably my favourite thing on it.

The two tracks Lex mentions are both gorgeous as well even if they ape The-Dream's My Love and Cassie's Turn The Lights Off respectively. Possibly because they do.

bookmarking...

That Fantasia album is one of the big slept-on pop releases of the year, does she even have a profile at all outside the US?

as far as i can tell she has even less of a profile than jazmine sullivan outside the US. trying to drum up editorial interest in jazmine is some blood/stone ish - i just can't even face trying with fantasia ;_;

fucking hate rock criticism sometimes.

I'm gonna go ahead and post the art for that drake track because I think it's a great photo

http://i.imgur.com/JDa8p.jpg

also where's this facebook group

bookmarking, etc. Great post on Fantasia, I think there is so much to be said about the year she's had - both in terms of her music and her personal life and how they inform eachother, it's hard to listen to a song like "Bittersweet" and not put it in the context of her suicide attempt/relationship drama - and she is most definitely one of the great interpreters in music right now - a lot of people write off "melisma" as just showboating, but Fantasia (and Jazmine as well - "Redemption" in particular) is a great example how vocal runs and ad-libs really add to the impact and 'story' of a song. One of my favorite moments in music this year is in "Bittersweet," near the end when she says "my lord, my lord, my lord/it's bittersweet/oh love, love can hurt/love can hurt you sometimes... this shit is bittersweet"). There's just so much pathos in that passage, it's heart-wrenching. Her voice elevates the material, I don't think "Bittersweet" would've been as remarkable as it is were it sung by, say, Keyshia Cole or Melanie Fiona or someone like that, but in Fantasia's hands it feels like a new standard. Also, one of my fave Fantasia tracks this year that didn't make the album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9rTKyn3Pwo

"Control Freak," Fantasia doing "sexy" in a way that is ACTUALLY SEXY. There's so much tension in this song, I can see the sweat when I listen to it!

That's not to mention "Collard Greens & Cornbread," "Teach Me," "I'm Doin' Me," etc. - yeah, the lack of critical attention paid to Fantasia is ridiculous (but not surprising - her last album which is also incredible was universally slept on).

sorry didn't mean to post a youtube in your youtube thread Tim

oh man, my favorite holiday tradition

^^^

Tim F, I love you.

^^^

postin' youtubes in tim's youtube threads, jordan's favourite holiday tradition

always misread the thread title as Time's overflowing bounty of 2010 pop riches extravaganza thread which i think sounds sorta melancholy

i do hope all this love actually leads to people listening to the fantasia album

hoooooly shit @ that fantasia track, LOVE

i do hope all this love actually leads to people listening to the fantasia album

― lex lex lex lex lex on the track BOW (lex pretend), Wednesday, December 8, 2010 12:26 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Downloading now. Hadn't heard anything of hers, but "Man of the House" has been on repeat since yesterday.

as much as i love fantasia's voice, i still haven't heard any of her own songs that didn't leave me completely nonplussed, this one encluded. i kinda wish she would take the retro-soul route tbh, as a contemporary r&b singer she bores me.

that drake rmx is great tho.

i didn't like either of these but i always LOVE this thread. thanks tim!

bookmarked etc. ;)

fantasia track is bangin thnx bro ^__^

Erykah Badu - Turn Me Away (Get Munny)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Jn3pcc178

My big philistine moment is not really getting Erykah's New Amerykah Part One, which I listened to heaps last year and just found uncomfortably desiccated sounding - something I accept was a conscious choice and is part of what makes the album interesting for so many people. It's not so much a stumbling block I have with Erykah herself, who I've always liked well enough, but with that whole sub-genre of post-Dilla scleroto-rap (and by extension scleroto-soul), whose aesthetic valorisation of queasiness is largely lost on my cloth ears.

There's been much less talk about New Amerykah Part Two, but for me this explicitly soft, svelte, generous sounding album (well, in relative terms) is much more to my taste, and no moment more so than "Turn Me Away (Get Munny)", possibly Erykah's breeziest moment ever, with its debauched funk bassline (the most recognisable element from Sylvia Striplin's "Can't Turn Me Away" and Junior M.A.F.I.A.'s "Get Money"), its soothing rhodes keys, its high pitched vocals and ridiculous lyrics and general vibe of playing at inconsequentiality - even, given the way it steals so much from its forebears, a surface level redundancy (which, needless to say, is entirely illusory). For me this works in a way that the rigorous consequentiality of Part One didn't so much, perhaps because the - shall we say - weightiness of Erykah's performances hardly needs foregrounding, and I just click with Erykah when she sneaks up on me with loveliness. Whereas the Striplin original floated across your consciousness with a gorgeous barely-there lightness of touch, "Turn Me Away" seems subtly to grow and expand and swell with each reiteration, like a message whose meaning starts off throwaway and then becomes more and more complex, more pregnant with significance as you keep reading into it a wealth of situations, contexts, resonances.

There's not really a message though: if the lyrics to the song are frequently funny, they're hardly the star of the show, which remains Erykah's voice as it adopts an endless succession of effects, modes and poses from model to robot girl. Even the song's central conceit, drawing both on an old disco-soul classic and the rap song that sampled it, is meta in a fairly carefree sense, its point being a kind of inclusive fondness for how hooks inhere despite being shaped and folded by the context and the purpose of their deployment ("can't turn me away"/"get money" becoming strictly equivalent earworm phrases). It's a song then, about the joy of performance itself, of performance that doesn't have to be about or for anything, but can remain compelling - intoxicating even - by virtue of its own self-delight. "Can't turn me away", Erykah insists time and time again, and maybe that's the message of the song: irresistibility is its own motive, and its own reward.

J Stalin - Money on the Way

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4X-hfJfslsM

I loved J Stalin's album Prenuptial Agreement at the start of the year, then forgot about it for a long time, then discovered it again towards the end of the year, reminded of how awesomely massive and shimmering its sound can be, from the delicately stabbing "Birthday" to the morose squelches of "Red & Blue Lights" to the doomy "When The Club Over", halfway between club banger and Moroder's soundtrack for 'Metropolis'. Bay area rap usually strikes me as sounding like a mixture of millennial southern rap (plus Irv Gotti) and eighties r&b-funk revivalism (sometimes with a sweet whiff of cheese), but this album takes that sound closer to Cash Money to my ears, with its restless density, the groove always changing even as J Stalin mostly raps about hustling on the block with a certain monotonous urgency that reminds of B.G. a bit anyway.

That sense of changing same was pretty crucial to Cash Money material and it is to J Stalin's album as well, the refusal of the music to stabilise fully matching the portrayal of street dealing as a daily grind that nonetheless is always claustrophobically hemmed in with anxiety and paranoia. "Money on the Way" is actually one of the most open feeling tunes on Prenuptial Agreement, all showy widescreen synth stabs that add a sense of lofty grandeur to Stalin's semi-hoarse boasts of drug trade prowess ("my campaign to advertise cocaine" etc.), and a depressive chorus that makes "money on the way" sound fully as much a dire prophecy as it is a fervent wish.

If Stalin is less interesting here than elsewhere on the album, this slight shortfall is more than compensated by the almost innocent earnestness of the tune's acquisitiveness, grandiloquent but also melancholy in its seemingly misplaced optimism. The halcyon promise of the music - evoking the future as it was once imagined to be perhaps 20 years ago - is a fitting accompaniment, suggesting (to my mind at least) the fragility of a future prosperity that disappear at an moment. Forget Daft Punk, these guys would have done a great job scoring Tron Legacy.

^^^ holy shit

can someone post a zip when Tim's done? I always spend three months downloading every link, three months waiting to see if he'll post any more, and then a month later get around to taking the folder to work on a thumb drive to listen to.

i forgot abt that j stalin album too!

J Stalin album is far too long and almost anything with a male rnb chorus is a bit ropey, but there's still more than a normal album's worth of fantastic shit in there. Mostly it's the harder moments that do it for me, but Money On The Way is great but there are so many awesome tracks (Rock Day, D-Boy Blues, Don't Front, Self Made Millionaire all A++).

self made millionare has a sung male chorus tho? u don't bump birthday & red + blue lights? you're right that it seems too long tho, i almost never play this record all the way thru.

Yeah Self Made Millionaire is an exception, it's songs like Last Night and Get Off Me that I end up skipping.

u don't bump birthday & red + blue lights

Yeah these are both great.

This is the facebook group if you want links:

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_168312249874081¬if_t=group_r2j

There's been much less talk about New Amerykah Part Two, but for me this explicitly soft, svelte, generous sounding album (well, in relative terms) is much more to my taste

cosign 100% -- "gone baby, don't be long" is one of the most beautiful things of the year

^^ YES

This is the facebook group if you want links:

yeah, but you have to have facebook to look at it

"out my mind, just in time" might be erykah's masterpiece

"desiccated" is kind of the last word i'd ever use re: part one though - it's so rich-sounding!

"rigorous consequentiality" - it only has this if you want it to. and why's it a bad thing anyway?

It's not a bad thing, I just don't like it as much personally. Different strokes. But something like "Hip Hop" just doesn't really appeal to me.

i guess you could say that it's just a mood thing -- 'rigorous conseqnetiality' vs the sensuality of part 2... but there's just something about part 2 that always appeals to me more

i don't want to say that it's "warmth" because i think part 1 has that too, but maybe it's more comforting? that sounds kinda twee tho

idk, it's "prettier"

i'm sort of fishing

yeah I'm happy to sub "comforting" and "pretty". I'm a superficial kinda listener in this regard (and most regards).

hah we had a big argument about this on the badu thread right? about how the 1st one is more critic friendly & what the differences between the two were

is that what happened?

24. Yelawolf ft. Trae - Shit I Seen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MURg4qesYL8

Yelawolf was my favourite discovery of 2010, and pretty immediately entered that twilight zone of "when will he blow it?" Like, a doubletime rapper from Alabama who looks like a trenchcoat high school drop-out can't help but turn into a caricature, right? "Shit I Seen" proves he hasn't fallen off yet, Yela and Trae getting paranoid quicksilver over louche soundtrack beats.

23. Swindle ft. Roses Gabor - Spend Is Dough

http://soundcloud.com/swindleuk/spend-is-dough-ft-roses-gabore

Sugary but queasy mascara'd zombie-lurch grime-house. Like the vocal - superficially sweet but actually mean-spirited - the groove here walks an expert tight rope between svelte and murderous.

22. John Talabot ft. Glasser - Families

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfPP6Y1gEic

Talabot's arrangement on "Families" sounds like a more ornate, illustrious take on The Tough Alliance's impossibly optimistic plasticky sunshine balearic, all echoey piano chords and hazy synth harmonies and a vaguely Carribean slow but propulsive groove. Glasser's happy but still typically mysterious, almost forbidding give this a more hymnal air, as joyous as an apocryphal imagined celebration of vernal equinox.

21. E-40 ft. Slim Thug & Bun-B - That Candy Paint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hW1EqdzCDI

E-40 has released so much amazing material (4 albums!) in the past year that picking out one song is a pretty arbitrary process, but for first timer action it's hard to go past the sugary slickness of "That Candy Paint", a lovely summery companion to Jacka and Laroo's "Don't Be Scared" from last year.

20. Jennifer Hudson - Where You At

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB_IvRcr04E

Love me some J-Hud big-chested drama, and she delivers the goods consummately here, really putting the "power" in "power-ballad". One of the subtly excellent things about Hudson is how good she is at locating that point in R&B where her Idol tendencies can be given full rein without overpowering the real pathos in the underlying song. Maybe it's just that for Hudson affectation always involves attitude: "Now you said you'd go to church / stop slanging, find a real job and go to work!" Consider yourself told.

19. TOK ft. Sleepy Hallowtips - Heroin Needle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw2VD0H_LdM

The rawest, craziest tune in this list, I think, an endless assault of beats and rhymes that attacks with a singleminded intensity you'd possibly forgotten people could still summon up in 2011.

18. Beth Ditto - Do You Need Someone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-xRaxdxEhA

Beth Ditto's recent EP leaves The Gossip's snarls behind entirely for glamorous, glassy Chicago house revivalism a la Azari & III. This is my favourite pick: a marvelously percolating beat, brilliant bumping bassline and lovely, shimmering vocals promising succour and sympathy - seems Beth has learnt a thing or two about being a house diva.

17. S-X - Wooo Riddim (DJ Q Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1NzVp2MSuY

Increasingly, bassline is moving into this weird ecumenical rave-pop zone where it happily steals the best ideas from grime, funky, 2-step, dubstep et. al. and I have strong suspicions that it's gonna make a dramatic comeback this year or not. This isn't that pop but it's pretty ravey, and also beautiful, churning synths and unsettled vocal samples playing off one another with masterful aplomb.

16. Richelle - Mascotte

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjfDD6Fy9cw&feature=related

Nominally post-dubstep or "global bass" or whatevs, "Mascotte" basically is brilliant because it resembles about 10 Jammer circa 2002 grime instrumentals intricately interwoven into the most restlessly mutational club banger ever. The first time I heard it I chalked it up to some insane feat of DJ alchemy - would never have assumed it was all just one track.

15. Tanya Stephens - Shame On You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnzlf_Ccy70

Lighters in the air. Tanya is one of my favourite pop characters, which is to say that she is one of my favourite dancehall chanteuses, which is the same thing or near enough. "Shame On You" is deceptively breezy summery fun, Tanya trying literally to shame the object of her desire into spending the night, but as the song progresses things get tinged with desperation and outrage: "I want to take legal action, if I don't get no satisfaction!"

14. Groove Theory - Tell Me (George Fitzgerald Remix)

http://soundcloud.com/george-fitzgerald/groove-theory-tell-me-remix

Have very strong, very clear memories of the video clip for "Tell Me" sending out chill vibes during the mid-90s. The best thing about this housey update is that it preserves those vibes perfectly: yes this may have a very 2011 syncopated beat but it's really about those gorgeously morphing synth chords and the nurturing 2-note bassline. And that vocal. God that vocal.

13. Art Department - I C U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Wed69VmFWU

The best track on Art Department's album of lugubrious male vocal house is its closer, where the singer recedes into the middle ground as an evocative voyeuristic siren, allowing the music to patch the emotional punch: insistent cowbell, crunchy snares, melancholy arpeggios and a lovely repeated synth chord like a heart palpitating with intermingled doubt and desire.

12. Lloyd ft. Awesome Jones - Cupid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tuSqN4pNF4

I love stupid big uplifting pop tracks, and "Cupid" certainly is that, quickly moving from its rumbling bass intro into Lloyd's vocal saccharine so thick you'd need a knife to start scooping it out of the jar. I think this may be his finest moment, possibly, which is saying something. The chorus really does take off.

11. Kelly Rowland ft. Lil Wayne - Motivation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1XozsBN5Z4

Gorgeously becalmed R&B reminiscent of Cassie's "Me & U", only with Cassie's whispery barelythereness replaced with a Kelly's suggestively breathy sighs, so that instead of that tune's faintly ahuman menace "Motivation" captures very precisely that post-coital spent vibe, quiet shivering tremors where full-throated bellows might have been only moments before.

10. Nicki Minaj - Super Bass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JipHEz53sU&feature=player_embedded

"Super Bass" is only now being released as a single but already it sounds like a karaoke standard, Nicki's opening rap in particular just so fun and natural to inhabit that for the first time she seems a character who, if she didn't exist, would have had to be invented. But more than this "Super Bass" is like a redemption of modern rap's plasticky fetish, its tinny synthetic flare and amateur but enthusiastic R&B chorus and yes even its dodgy autotuned middle eight attaining a certain grandeur and sense of purpose that is hard to credit when the song's not actually playing.

9. Cherine Anderson - Make Up Sex

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSRi8_20fno&feature=share

"Make Up Sex" actually sounds like something you've gotta work at, an exhaustive and exhausting panorama of lust and fury - or is it fury and lust? Where one ends and the other begins is never exactly clear. Not sure what I love most about this. Is it the bizarre gonzo groove? Is it Cherine's shocked declaration, "Boy you got me breakin' breakin' glass / boy you got me cussing so low class!" Or maybe it's when she slams her man against the wall and pulls down his pants to check whether he's been getting some recent action (how does that even work?)?

8. Diddy-Dirty Money - No Ordinary Love

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS8aH7pLVF8&feature=player_embedded

Diddy is weirdly obsessed with Sade: in the past year he's released one song that namechecks her, one track actually called "Sade", and this, which is like one of those X Factor style "mash ups" of Diddy/Dirty Money's "Hate You Now" with Sade "No Ordinary Love" and "Soldier of Love", just to ram home the fact that, hey, how good is Sade? Well, yeah! Also this is amazing, icy and foreboding and sensual all at once, its multiple switches like a dream that keeps wandering in different directions in a way that always seems to make perfect sense.

7. Busy Signal - Pon Dem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJIFf8XH_As

Real down the rabbit hole dancehall madness. Each time you think it can't possibly get more impossibly, brilliantly overblown it, well, does.

6. Invisible Conga People - In A Hole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58mBcLTQa68

Invisible Conga People were my favourite cult niche group of a few years back, but so niche and cult that they seemed apt to disappear entirely, which they did for a while there. Luckily "In A Hole" (and it's flip, "Can't Feel My Knees") is just fantastic, managing yet another utterly new-sounding iteration of their signature collision between weird drony pop and foreboding percussive dub-techno, only the hooks are bigger and deeper than before.

5. Ill Blu - Monsta

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

Ill Blu are the finest producers in the world right now in part because of all the people they're not afraid to remind you of, from The Prodigy to Scooter to Caspa, though of those only The Prodigy at their best ever aspired to such heights of compositional grandiloquence. "Monsta" is a series of bombs that trigger each other like dominoes, build up to breakdown to explosion and repeat.

4. Britney Spears ft. Nicki Minaj & Ke$ha - Till The World Ends (Remix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngmz7Dfs9CU

It took its brutal exploitation at the hands of Max Martin and Dr Luke for common garden variety dubstep to reach its true aesthetic pinnacle, though duh you won't hear dubstep fans saying that. But this really is fantastic, and certainly better than even the best bits on Britney's latest album, which always puts me in mind of the ex-cons at my gym . Here the dramedy of the staggering dubstep lurch sections gives the inevitable steroided 4X4 sprints more heft and release than they'd ever manage on their own.

3. Fuzzy Logick ft. Myshy - Playground

http://www.hulkshare.com/h51ggljdilv2

Remember when Basement Jaxx used to do those amazing multicoloured multitextured polyrhythmic polymorphous dance-pop tunes and it seemed like nothing could possibly be better? Yeah. The interplay here between Myshy's vaguely threatening vocal and Fuzzy's lumpen beats is magical. As with all UK Funky, this should be listened to slightly pitched up.

2. S.E.C.T. ft. Ben Westbeech - In The Park

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnRgO0jq_bM

Beautiful.

1. Purple Pop - The Way (The Living Graham Bond Dub)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aImVAxAtRY4

The Living Graham Bond's remix of "The Way" is a late 2010 tune, but this largely vocal-free dub has never been released to my knowledge and is only now getting some play (from Ill Blu and DJ Eastwood and the like). And, needless to say, it's the one to listen to. Quite simply, this is like a new standard for mindmelting percussive frenzy, squeezing about five different rhythmic attacks into one absolute blinder of a tune.

Been absorbing nearly all of Tim's 2011 list on repeat w/friends over the past week (sorry rtc for any teeth-gnashing) - urgent & key stuff, though I'd recommend against googling "ussy" + "playtime".

Or maybe it's when she slams her man against the wall and pulls down his pants to check whether he's been getting some recent action (how does that even work?)?

lmao

gonna charge you for the use of "svelte"

what about "wine & balance", tim? probably my favourite single so far

"coloring book" is really poignant in light of the skin bleaching thing

also this thread is super youtube-heavy and browser-crashing

Spotify playlist, missing quite a few as you'd expect but managed to get about 40 of them, http://open.spotify.com/user/unterwasser/playlist/4esovlsG6EeP8KCWcDJC4A

love coloring book so much

I wish I liked the vocals on Playground more than I do - would love a Fuzzy Logic dub but otherwise it feels like the first big funky vocal tune in ages that's left me kinda cold.

Haha also I had been ignoring that Beth Ditto recommendation and had no idea it was a house record. It's great!

re: Benoit & Sergio:

A certain autumnal elegance at work here (I even crafted a mixtape called "Boys of Autumn" around it)

The new "Let Me Count The Ways" EP even has an "Autumn Version" of the title track which immediately made me think of this quote. What else was on your mixtape?

S.E.C.T., NDF, Jamie Woon, No Regular Play, Destroyer, Art Department etc.

i think the boys of autumn need to man up

Lex do you have an opinion on Benoit and sergio or is that just boilerplate lex.

what i've heard is okay but not something i'd think to highlight

Been absorbing nearly all of Tim's 2011 list on repeat w/friends over the past week (sorry rtc for any teeth-gnashing)

what's this supposed to mean...?

i mean i agree with lex that if escoffier buys a loaf or two off me it'd be nice to see him do something better than just go down the park and feed the pigeons with it, but then again it's a free world and i don't despise pigeons in themselves really.

I'm not sure about 2010-11's strain of slightly ramshackle dance music with creepy old man vocals, all feels a bit of a slog somehow.

notes:

- i will freely admit i still don't think i've really recovered from the sore frankenlesson of the "living graham bond" fiasco

- i see you too are inadvertantly stuck on the horns of the assassin vs busy wildlife riddim dilemma (or was this just an error)

- 'super bass's "amateur but enthusiastic R&B chorus": YES SPOT ON i really do think that little juvenile delinquent "yeaah that's that super bass! voice (esther dean?) is the key to this song and what makes it so very much more likeable than when katy perry and others inadequately try to grope at the teenpop anthem with laughably straight faces

- owe you one for 'mascotte' cos otherwise had i ever even bothered to click on it i wouldnt have sat thru it to let it unfold. however regarding jammer 2002 instrumentals...

- ... i wonder if your haunted bassline foible isn't subconsciously actually tracing the old jme tropical leyline? (am kinda mad i didnt think of this again myself)

- "When did Vybz's work become so tinged with melancholy?" well er, 'sen on' you could argue. but i rather think you're conflating too far vybz's songwork with his rapping persona, and it takes away from 'coloring book's sui generis brilliance; the way he has grasped the wayne/lil b polymorphously perverse deviant anti-hero role with the full weight of jamaican social mores bearing down on him and made it more fascinating than either. 'coloring book' is its anthemic march - literally its tattoo in the martial sense - and its trudging, sorrowful admission of transfixed addiction to himself; "skin pretty like a coloring book" the most unbearably sweet perfume lingering across putrid self-indulgent decay

'coloring book' is its anthemic march - literally its tattoo in the martial sense - and its trudging, sorrowful admission of transfixed addiction to himself; "skin pretty like a coloring book" the most unbearably sweet perfume lingering across putrid self-indulgent decay

:-O

Kinda don't want to sully your response, but I was referring to the fact that Pon Di Gaza mostly seemed on this sad autotune tip - nothing as good as "Coloring Book" but in honesty there might have been gems nestling in there I was too exhausted to pan for.

- i see you too are inadvertantly stuck on the horns of the assassin vs busy wildlife riddim dilemma (or was this just an error)

haha a bit of both. That would have been caused by revisiting both so many times. Would happily go with the former except it's so short and I suspected Busy might befuddle the intended audience a bit less.

what i've heard is okay but not something i'd think to highlight

I'm not sure about 2010-11's strain of slightly ramshackle dance music with creepy old man vocals, all feels a bit of a slog somehow.

You could rope Benoit & Sergio into this category via "Walk & Talk" (which is more Villalobos vocals than creepy old man) but the rest of the time they're closer to that old trope of Martini Bros / Captain Comatose et al I think.

Though I must concede they don't really compare to the thousand shades of gray exhibited on the non "L Word" parts of the deniz kurtel album or the exquisitely lackluster songwriting of the tom trago album.

Is this the thread for secondhand bobbins lovers who've been confusing Benoit & Sergio with Borneo & Sporenberg for nearly a year now? But then the earlier B&S were also a Skykicking favorite back in the day, no?

Thanks for sharing this. Recommended-by-Tim playlists (mix CDs, originally) have sourced more of my favorite music than anything else for >10 years now. Much appreciated, cheers.

/fanboy

criticising the tom trago album for lacklustre songwriting is kinda like criticising a basement jaxx album for bad lyrics

the deniz kurtel album is more green than grey in my mind. forest green.

kinda toying with finishing every sentence with "forest green". forest green.

i get what you meant with the pon de gaza reference but i' guess i'm saying i see some of his tunes (like 'summertime') as busy signalish one offs, self-contained, and others as those that shore up and layer over his public persona on a more intimate larval level

i wonder if this is where deej comes in

I'm not sure about 2010-11's strain of slightly ramshackle dance music with creepy old man vocals, all feels a bit of a slog somehow.

― Matt DC, Thursday, June 2, 2011 6:19 AM Bookmark

More than not sure about this. I basically hate this shit.

Does that even refer to anything other than Art Department?

Cause yeah, I can see how the first two tracks of their album could put anyone off this idea for life, but off the top of my head I can't think of anything else that fits (and not surprisingly the best parts of the AD album all backtrack from this vibe significantly).

Sub in "creepy old man" with "effete dude" and sure, it's a trend, but in that case you all are being hella inconsistent.

well, in a hole, but no one doesn't like that song

creepiest b&s vocals 2 me are on full grown man bc they sound like billy joel

It may actually just be Art Department and I am feeling like this trend is more prevalent than it actually is, but definitely yeah, Art Department.

What are the good tracks on the AD album then?

"What Does It Sound Like" and "I.C.U.", to a lesser extent "Vampire Nightclub" and "Are You Living The Life".

"What Does It Sound Like" is basically ace Classic Records bumping house. I can't really imagine anyone not loving it, though it doesn't get mentioned much because everyone gets stuck on creepy vocals as the album's key talking point.

The other three all feature male vocals but they draw them back into balance with that bumping house sound rather than turning them into a lugubrious, bloated raison d'etre like "Much Too Much" (spot on song title or what) or "Tell Me Why" do.

Whereas a lot of reviews of the album seem to think that (a) "Much Too Much" is the best track on there, perhaps because they also think that (b) "the Joy Division of vocal house" is a good idea.

Basically I stand by the following from my review:

"Unfortunately, as is often the case when tunes become big off the back of their point of difference, discussions of "Without You" tend to focus on that slightly off-center vocal and the murderous bassline, understating Art Department's impeccable arrangement skills and, in particular, exacting sense of timing. Possibly Art Department (a Toronto-based duo of Glasgow and Jonny White) have listened too keenly to their own hype, as their debut album, The Drawing Board, leads off with two long-ass tunes dominated by dolorous basslines and Glasgow's morose, out-of-tune vocals. In particular, the aptly titled 10-minute-plus opener "Much Too Much" gambles that a miserablist refusal of excitement and intensity or, you know, something happening, will end up seeming evocative and atmospheric rather than half-hearted and aimless. The gamble succeeds only in part: These tracks work, but more in the sense of the listener understanding the concept rather than feeling it in their guts and hearts.

If you're someone who wants dance music to mean something, then these tracks may be the drawcard here, representing a kind of alternate reality where house vocalists like Robert Owens and Romanthony were more obsessed with the hollowness of Scott Walker's Climate of Hunter than the giddiness of Prince's 1999. And it is a great idea, but ultimately Art Department don't strike me as ideas people-- let alone songwriters-- first and foremost. They are, however, consummate arrangers, and The Drawing Board becomes immensely more involving each time the suicide tone poems take a step back and the arrangements a step forward. In terms of sheer groove, the album's easy pinnacle is "What Does It Sound Like?", whose hypnotic jacking is reminiscent of the debut albums of Motorbass and Fuckpony, each carefully sculpted component interlocking with each other in a satisfying display that Art Department can do mindless release fully as well as pent-up morbidity."

Haha I didn't like Fuckpony that much either.

Does that even refer to anything other than Art Department?

Haha maybe not. Or maybe it's a sticking point with male vocal house at the moment (really want a dub version of Forward Motion) with less Ali Love, and yeah I'm not crazy about In A Hole either. "Effete" is better than "creepy old man" though, the SECT/Ben Westbeech track from those Soul Clap mixes is lush, and I'm sure part of that comes from having heard them in a better context.

I keep meaning to get around the Deniz Kurtel album, it kinda managed to fall into the crack of my internetless couple of months and it's been way down my catchup list. My favourite house albums of this year have been Steffi, Robag Wruhme and Frivolous and they're obviously looking in a different direction entirely to the Art Department etc.

Haha I didn't like Fuckpony that much either.

O_o

Children of Love is pretty amazing FYI.

My favourite house albums of this year have been Steffi, Robag Wruhme and Frivolous and they're obviously looking in a different direction entirely to the Art Department etc.

you can probably triangulate frivolous/nicolas jaar/art department if you squint - frivolous def way out in front there though. that and tom trago are the two house albums i think are real keepers this year, above stuff which is just very good (kurtel, wruhme, jaar, steffi, audiofly) and stuff which is not that good (art department)

If you squint very hard indeed.

Matt can you listen to this please:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ke1Q0hnN0

Cheers Tal for the heads-up!

hey Tim! any chance of a zip of the dancehall tracks from yr column this week?

wait, waht column??? details/link please

link? it's in local freebie papers

I'll try to organise something.

Don't worry Paul I basically cribbed it from stuff i'd already written on here/facebook about my favourite dancehall tracks of this year.