New Music Roundup, 3/27/13

The Strokes - Comedown Machine

My book on the Strokes has remained remarkably consistent: I dig their vibe but have trouble listening to their albums the whole way through.  There are always really great individual moments on every Strokes release, but there are also inevitable slogs.  Comedown Machine actually seems a little better at avoiding this: the album is probably more balanced than anything since their debut.  Still, I think almost all my favorite moments occur in the first half.  Comedown Machine shows the band reaching back more to the New Wave 80's on some tracks.  It's a move that seems jarring upon first listen but eventually makes a certain kind of sense.  This album doesn't feel like a radical departure, a triumphant comeback, a tragic misfire or anything else used to describe albums released by well-established bands; this is just another solid addition to a fairly consistent career.

Selections
Tap Out

All the Time

One Way Trigger

Wavves - Afraid of Heights

A thought experiment:

Assume for a second that reincarnation is literally true, and that upon his death in 1994, Kurt Cobain did not in fact attain nirvana (get it?) but was instead reincarnated into a new person.  Assuming soul turnaround time within this hypothetical scenario is fairly quick (I have to confess a decent amount of ignorance on most doctrines of reincarnation, but Live's "Lightning Crashes" at least led me to believe that it was fairly instantaneous), that new person would have entered young adulthood by now (the 19th anniversary of Cobain's death is this April 5).

In other words, he or she would be just entering an age where were they so inclined, their artistic ethos would begin manifesting itself.  Now (and I'm fairly certain this is not a part of reincarnation), what if this young person had the exact same angst, the exact same alienation, and the exact same need for self-expression that Cobain had?  What if he or she similarly turned to music to address those issues?  If Kurt Cobain was born in 1994, what would his band sound like today?

I won't presume to definitively know the answer to that question - it probably merits its own article's worth of consideration, or at least a good protracted drunken argument with a few friends - but one thing that seems quite likely is that this hypothetical band would sound quite different than Nirvana sounded on Nevermind.  They likely would not detune their guitars, they likely wouldn't fall into what we classify as grunge, and they likely wouldn't rely heavily on soft-loud-soft song structures (at least not as much as Nevermind did).  True, the next Nirvana won't sound like Nirvana because the public craves uniqueness (or at least the appearance of uniqueness) within its cultural phenomenons, but perhaps more importantly, the next Nirvana won't sound like Nirvana because the sonic blueprint they established will not be sufficient for the next iterations of Kurt Cobain.

I bring this thought experiment up because it seems to suggest two fairly self-evident truths that apply to the new album by Wavves released tomorrow entitled Afraid of Heights, which owes a huge debt to Cobain and Nirvana.  The first is that a band's impact is more than the sum of the notes they play on albums or in concert, i.e. The "Even When They Say It's All About the Music, It's Never All About the Music" Theory.  The second, related truth is that context always matters.

Wavves itself has a fairly interesting context.  Formed in 2008 in San Diego by notable slacker Nathan Williams, Wavves garnered a great deal of buzz at an incredibly early point in the band's history from hundreds of music critics whose opinions I don't respect and one or two whose opinions I do.  Before I had listened to a single note of theirs, I was familiar with Wavves as a hipster band: there was the aforementioned early buzz from places like Pitchfork, the name itself (and perhaps even more annoyingly, the fact that one of their albums is called Wavves and another Wavvves), Williams's public relationship with Best Coast's Bethany Cosentino, and there was Williams's projected indifference to just about any and everything.  Wavves acted more or less like you would expect a hipper-than-thou band to act.

New Music Roundup - 3/20/13

Lest I be accused of solely focusing solely on Justin Timberlake's album, an album that everyone was likely going to listen to anyway, here's some other interesting recent releases:

The Delfonics - Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics 

Adrian Younge is a fascinating guy, something of a Renaissance man.  Back in 2009 he helped edit the incredibly underrated blaxploitation send-up Black Dynamite while also handling producing duties on the film's soundtrack.  An instrumentalist himself, he formed the group Venice Dawn, which released an album in 2011 titled Something About April that was primarily inspired by psychedelic soul of the 60's (for the record, both the Black Dynamite soundtrack and Something About April are totally awesome).

Sometime after this, Younge became enamored with the idea of combining early 90's RZA type hip hop production with the sweet Philadelphia Soul sound of the 70's characterized by the Delfonics.  He struck up a friendship with William Hart, the Delfonics' lead singer and primary songwriter, and the two began to collaborate together.

This album is the result of that collaboration.  Though I think it highly unlikely any true Delfonics fan is going to read this review, it is important to note that Younge changes the Delfonics sound fairly significantly.  The Delfonics made their bones on multipart harmonies and smooth sweeping orchestral arrangements that melded 60's soul with 70's funk.  This album has much sparer production, and Hart is the only member of the Delfonics to participate, so Hart's falsetto if featured far more often on this album than it was on traditional Delfonics ones.

Nevertheless, the combination of Younge and Hart produces some absolutely fantastic soul music, and Younge really is able to capture the sound of some other early 70's soul acts.  Had I not been aware of it being new before listening, I would have likely placed the recording date to be sometime between 1970-1972 but by some obscure soul act I had never heard before.

Selections
Stop and Look (And You Have Found Love)

Enemies
Adrian Younge – Enemies

I Can't Cry No More

New Music Roundup - JT Edition

Justin Timberlake - The 20/20 Experience

Well, I suppose if I'm being true to the ethos of this blog, the only relevant question I should concern myself with is whether or not I enjoyed listening to this album.  The answer to that question is probably best summed up as, "Yeah, sort of."  This album is not nearly as disappointing as I had feared it would be when I first heard a handful of songs weeks before the album's release.  Despite a relative dearth of immediately accessible hooks, the album is consistently interesting to listen to, and a couple of the songs manage to lodge in your head almost in spite of themselves.  Timberlake doesn't do anything on this album to challenge your preconceptions of him as a recording artist, but maybe that's entirely the point.

Some of the problem with the album is undoubtedly its context.  JT is unique (and ultimately important) as an entertainer because he is the rare figure in our current Internet age whose appeal transcends nichification.  He's the one guy seemingly everyone has agreed is ok.  Saying I like him as an entertainer (which is an important distinction: his appeal is not solely as a recording artist) doesn't really say anything about me or my tastes, beyond maybe placing me in a fairly expansive age range.  Similarly, saying you don't like him is similar to the dismissal of countless pop stars by any number of outcast groups, from punks to metalheads: rejecting JT is rejecting a mainstream sensibility that we have been told ad nauseum no longer exists.

Because of that, and because he had been away for seven years, there was undoubtedly expectation that The 20/20 Experience would be a massive cultural event.  Here was the last entertainer with truly widespread popularity; surely he would reclaim pop music as it had been twenty years ago.  If ever a Thriller could exist in 2013, now was our chance.

New Music Roundup, 3/5/13

Autre Ne Veut - Anxiety

For all I care, everyone else can spend time talking themselves into Justin Timberlake's new album; I'll be off listening to this fascinating R&B/soul record from Arthur Ashin, who records as Autre Ne Veut.  At different points funky, soulful, and expansive while being just off-kilter enough to be unique (but consequently likely incongruent to radio), this album plays as either a more jittery Miguel or a less comatose Frank Ocean.  Either way, I like it.

Selections
Play by Play

Counting

I Wanna Dance with Somebody
Autre Ne Veut – I Wanna Dance with Somebody