Lykke Li - Wounded Rhymes (2011)

Lykke Li has an outstanding capacity of expression in her music, something of value taking notice that she’s only 24 years old, for a young woman she has an exceptional profound lyrical understanding of love, heartache, deception and all those human emotions that make songs so great, but unlike other pop artists she doesn’t put the simple words to express emotions, she captures the complexity of relationships and doesn’t go straight to say I love you when she loves, but somehow you feel the love.

For “Wounded Rhymes” Lykke Li pushed the production to a bigger scale with Björn Yttling of Peter, Björn and John in charge, therefore, the sound quality is more expensive just in the first listen, and on her account the song writing is much more mature. The album has the trademark voice of Lykke Li already known for a lot of people, but brakes up the sound adding this time much more eloquent sounds, the percussion pound a little bit harder, thing that can already be seen in the two singles that are out “Get Some” and “I Follow River”, and the formula repeats itself in some other tracks but the ones that attracted my attention were the ballads that can be beautifully depressive, melancholic, vulnerable, complex and show the real evolution of the artist.

Simple songs with old soul like “Unrequited Love” remind heartache ballads compared to the quality of El Perro Del Mar, Camera Obscura or St. Vincent, and if in the past she was singing about being just “a little bit in love”, this time around she jumped in with both feet and felt incredibly hard just to fail in the end, elevating the lyrics to phrases like “sorrow, the only lover I ever known” in “Sadness Is a Blessing”, definitely one of the best songs of the entire LP.

What charms me the most about Lykke Li is her old soul mixed with her youth appeal, and for sure she’ll keep the hype of the upbeat songs to get the album running, but once is established in the public I would love to see a video of one of the sad songs, maybe “I Know Places”, and make everyone cry and be incredibly touched by image like she did with the minimal video of “Tonight”.

She kind of reminds me of Fiona Apple, the way that she’s able to make heartache sound beautiful when said harshly, of course, Lykke Li is way too depressed and tired to fight her emotions, so she’s less of a fighter and more the existential kind, who knows well that the good days might be good, and the bad days hit hard, but lets the river flow until the rapids end hoping to survive in the end, specially if she´s not really sure. The power of love most definitely is one of the great mysteries that cause angst to people around the world, and what Lykke Li does is not distract this feeling with a silly little love song that will take you appart from the reality, but also doesn’t leave you inside with no way out; she walks through with you not giving hope but as a loyal companion.

Lykke Li - Get Some (Director: Johan Söderberg) from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

Lykke Li - 'Untitled' from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

Lykke Li - I Follow Rivers (Director: Tarik Saleh) from Lykke Li on Vimeo.

Tracklist:

1. Youth Knows No Pain

2. I Follow Rivers
3. Love Out of Lust
4. Unrequited Love
5. Get Some
6. Rich Kid Blues
7. Sadness Is a Blessing
8. I Know Places
9. Jerome
1o. Silent My Song

Rate: 8.3/10

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#FlashbackSunday #Oscars2011 (Ryan Gosling) Dead Man's Bones - Dead Man's Bones (2009)

For the last flashback I’m going to talk about one of my favourite actors and his music project that not a lot of people know, Ryan Gosling is the other half of the Zach Shields; they met when they were dating sisters and in time they started a music project. Now there’s a lot of reasons to be sceptic about this project, for starters, not all actors that make music do it good, and the band was getting inspiration from everything dead, zombies, corpses, heartbeats, and this sort of theme of making music is not very attractive and the last part is the featured voices of “The Conservatory of Music Children’s Choir”, some hipster kids contributing in every song.

The sound of all of this together seems awful, one that only talent could really put together, and the harmonies that they get in here are ones that could make Arcade Fire jealous, they march through a very dense lyrical contents of allegoric and poetic power and the instrumentation goes from interesting percussions to even one song of synths and electronic indie rock that can also remind some of the moments in Oracular Spectacular of MGMT, without making the influences of all the names I’ve said sounding out of place.

Putting kids to say inappropriate stuff like “My Body is a Zombie for You” can also be a treat of this record, and also the playful nature of the kids singing on the top of their lungs and not paying attention to the real intonation but just having fun with it gives it a naivety that’s refreshing. Poetry, sultry, innocence, heartache, zombies, death, wolfs and ghost make of the first album of Dead Man’s Bones a very underestimated album of really epic music delivery.

I really hope this two keep making music and have a better chance of promoting it than they had this time around, if you saw my 2010 best songs list you can find that even last year I was still in love with this Halloween record of 2009 that stickled around long gone Halloween.

In the movie Blue Valentine Ryan Gosling sings to Michelle Williams a version of “You Always Hurt The Once You Love”, which it was a part of the movie trailer and got a space in the Grizzly Bear amazing soundtrack, but this flashback was not about soundtracks but about actors that were not nominated tonight, just a film in which they act, hope you enjoy the awards that are already happening.

Tracklist:

1. Intro
2. Dead Hearts
3. In The Room Where You Sleep
4. Buried In Water
5. My Body's A Zombie For You
6. Pa Pa Power
7. Young & Tragic
8. Paper Ships
9. Lose Your Soul
10. Werewolf Heart
11. Dead Man's Bones
12. Flowers Grow Out Of My Grave

Rate: 9.4/10

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#Flashback Sunday #Oscar2011 Justin Tumberlake - Futuresex/Lovesounds (2006)

Another actor who’s got a movie nominated tonight is Justin Timberlake. He’s better known as a singer and a well respected one, but since 2006 he doesn’t make an album and have been doing decent in the movie industry. Its common for a lot of singers to cross over from acting bus as a musician Timberlake has done a lot of things, from boy band cutie to well respected music solo artist. In his first LP Justified he did a very pop Michael Jackson album, and the results were big, he did better than with ‘N Sync and had the opportunity to dance and flash his singing as a solo act.

The kid was known for beat box and everyone could predict that on any minute he’ll become another white guy with hip hop sensibility and would look for the way to relate to that with baggy jeans and sneakers, and the idea will always be to sing and dance and make a big show. Surprise to everyone, in 2006 he’s last album to date amazed a lot of people, he took hip hop beats and made them flirt a little bit more with synthesizers and the flashy voice was toned down, also the image changed, he became this cool guy with swagger. The entire concept had a primal idea, bring sexy back, and he did so well that no respectable music critic judge the record as a disposable pop record, everyone knew that he was in the beginning of a huge success.

This LP was changing stuff of the mainstream pop and taking it to unexplored levels, not necessarily experimenting with sound to a big level, but giving personality to the project adding early hip hop sounds, funk and a flow between genres not common for a mainstream pop record. The contribution of Timbaland in this record adds a lot of power and crank to the songs, but the talent of Timberlake and personality is what definitely makes the record, or else Timbalad’s works would have been more critically acclaimed than this.

In music land, Timberlake made a big tour with Christina Aguilera, popped a booby of Janet Jackson on the live Superbowl broadcast, and then started to peruse a movie career no real steps in wanting to come back to music, but one thing he accomplished was that as a musician he’s not only a selling force of mainstream proportions, but also he can deliver respectable music quality that have the consumers happy and the everlasting pop culture impression insured.

Funny Fact: He made one of the videos with Scarlett Johansson, who's also in this FlashbackSunday of 2011 Oscars with two different movies nominated.

Tracklist:

1. Futuresex/Lovesounds
2. Sexyback
3. Sexy Ladies/Let Me Talk To You Prelude
4. My Love
5. Lovestoned/I Think She Knows Interlude
6. What Goes Around.../...Comes Around Interlude
7. Chop Me Up
8. Damn Girl
9. Summer Love/Set The Mood Prelude
10. Until The End Of Time
11. Losing My Way
12. (Another Song) All Over Again

Rate: 8/10

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#FlashBackSunday #Oscars2011 Scarlett Johansson - Anywhere I Lay My Head (2008)

Tonight is Oscar night, so I decided to post actors who have music projects and also acted on a movie nominated on anything this year, being Scarlett Johansson one of these actors. In 2008 Scarlett made a record called “Anywhere I Lay My Head”, containing Tom Waits cover songs, it was amazing to listen how a beauty of the proportions and fame of Scarlett didn’t turn to music to become even more famous, doing a crossover with blond bimbo quality like Mandy Moore.

The album is full of references of the tom waits sound but in moments she makes them darker and add instrumentation making them a little bit more epic sounding than the original songs, also the sentiment she uses when singing shock a lot of people, singing her songs almost like she didn’t care how they were sounding, just needed them to come out; it was that feeling of unawareness of the voice just putting the emphasis in the sentiment.

Another beautiful side of this LP was the echo and Shoegaze that she created in every track; it was really a smart way to not wanting to be better than Tom Waits, but to update the songs and the sounds with a smart approach to some other music genre, something that a cover is all about. This was a smart album and is not a milestone in the history of music but adds to Scarlett’s mystery and charm as an Icon, no mater if is for the fashion, indie or movie industry.

She explored the blues and the jazz and mixed it with Shoegaze and synths getting close to Dream Pop in some songs, she later got out the album she made with Pete Yorn, but this was her first solo music project, might not be a successful one, but it was a good one.

For 2011 she acted on Iron Man 2, big blockbuster that landed nominations of Visual Effects, today I’m not celebrating her as an actress but taking the opportunity to talk about her music. Hope you like it.

Tracklist:

1. Fawn
2. Town with no cheer
3. Falling down
4. Anywhere I lay my head
5. Fannin' street
6. Song for Jo
7. Green grass
8. I wish I was in New Orleans
9. I don't want to grow up
10. No one knows I'm gone
11. Who are you?

Rate: 7.6/10

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Rafter - Quiet Storm (2011)

Up until now, Rafter Roberts has had a very playful experimentation in his music; I have compared him to a lot of sounds until I got to a formula that was 20% Chromeo, 20% Of Montreal, 20% Passion Pit and 40% Originality. If you already know Rafter’s work, you’ll know he’s cool, with swagger and pop sensibility; but that things that seemed part of his nature were dismissed for this LP, this time he goes straight up experimenting big time, the sounds are very Lo-Fi and the production has the idea of broken saturated noise.

The first two songs I was waiting for Rafter to come out, you can recognize the old stuff but hidden behind a bunch of noise and is until “Nothing Here Worth Stealing” (the third track) that it sinks in that this is not what you expected, the sound is very Lo-Fi, and is so repressed that the only thing coming through is noise with a washed dark metal guitar and sporadic acoustic pop overtones. For the track “Innocence, in a Sense” the guitar riff really gets heavy and tends to be a little bit flashier and 80’s like.

The reason, as Rafter himself explains, is that when touring around with the “Animal Feelings” promotion he kind of got into Metal; though this influence, still the songs conserve a little bit of his characteristic sound, but is so drowned and washed out by Lo-Fi effects that make each track very hard to digest. When asked about the record he said “we listened to a lot of black metal demo tapes in the car... it was really inspiring, extreme, blown out, ridiculous but heartfelt... I made this album, fed by those inspirations and a wave of existential freakout, human mind explosion. in my fantasy, it's like darkthrone meets the kinks meets lee perry...”.

The record is a little bit under 30 minutes and is so heavy that it gets actually really long, none of the songs are great for me, not even the ones that conserve more of what Rafter is all about, and keeping up with my composture, I guess I won’t talk about how disappointed I am of this record because I consider Rafter an amazing artist, and I’m not disappointed because he did different, in fact, I applaud the brave concept he pulls off. If something you get loud and clear from this album is that in fact a Quiet Storm of really epic proportions is happening.

But non the less the concept is well putted together, and you get that everything is intentionally, the reasons of the album are an artistic expression so closed to only Rafter’s understanding that even to his most loyal fans is hard to get, if something, this LP will open the door to new listeners and probably a lesson to not making expectations on his music but never giving up on it, because you never know what you can get, and this element of surprise can be risky, but I'm still waiting to see what next stuff he can come up to.

Still remembet that this is my opinion, and you can listen and make your own, so stream the LP in bandcamp down here and come to a conclusion.

Tracklist:

1. Convenience or Death
2. Fire Fire, Water Water
3. Nothing Here Worth Stealing
4. Innocence, in a Sense
5. Sick Princess
6. U Used Me Up
7. Interlude
8. Coldness of Space
9. Braden's Song
11. Oh No
10. Pummelled
12. Born Again

Rate: 3/10

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Tim Hecker - Ravedeath, 1972 (2011)

Tim Hecker is a drone artist whose albums always have a deep sense of concept. For his sixth LP he became obsessed with sonic decay, and the consistency of the concept this time around is so obviously wonderful that could easily be an installation on a museum. The record is called “Ravedeath, 1972” and the cover art shows people destroying the first MIT Baker House Piano in 1972, this story began with a project of some students to make an assignment for a professor of the university, and has something to do with alums wanting to film the piano drop with a high speed camera; the project got an A and the piano drop became a tradition in the MIT Baker House dorm since then.

I’m sure the idea of the MIT tradition had something to do originally with the project; and Hecker made the record in two stages, the first one being a church in Reykjavik, Iceland; where he recorded the echo and distant sound of a groaning pipe organ to make the base of the entire LP. The second part was released in studio under the production of Ben Frost (who’s well known for very heavy toned ambient experimentations as well that goes from the minimal quietness of ambient to the powerful noise of black metal). The studio part of “Ravedeath, 1972” incorporated the drones and sounds that Frost is accustomed and shows the capacity of Hecker to play with heavy synth and noise until the experimentation becomes a powerful shoegaze sound very claustrophobic at times.

The first track “The Piano Drop” starts with a lot of violence, with a heavy electronic scratch over the pipe organ, the synths tremble back and forward and sometimes allows the listener to come inside the melody and suddenly backs him out again with another scratch, a very interesting layered opener that plays with static and ends with abrupt silence and the sound of the piano drop on the beginning of the second track. This act of violence against the piano sets the mood and starts giving all sorts of tones to the constant presence of the church’s organ pipe and goes trashing that sound with incredible violence through out every song, a feeling that gets unbearable in the “Hatred Of Music II”.

It always seems that the message Hecker is trying to get behind the noise is that the way we consume music with technology sometimes doesn’t add to it beauty but destroys the concept and opens it until the message gets lost behind everything. Kind of remind me the reading I did of the concept behind the Alexander McQueen’s fashion show named “Weird Science”, if in that moment McQueen was talking about the aggressive nature that technology can have against fashion and humanity when not used properly, Hecker is communicating exactly the same but with music, maybe is a little harsh for a fashion designer destroy the closing dress with mechanical arms throwing paint at it, and is the same idea of Hecker throwing trash sounds over a pure sound. But in the end Hecker’s message goes further, everything doesn’t get lost, because “In The Air III” two songs after the “Studio Suicide”, the studio sounds finally die, and all that’s left is the sound of the pipe organ and a piano recorder live from the church.

I see this record (no matter the unbearable that it can seem to get and the claustrophobic nature it has standing in the listener point of view), a quality of spectacle that not much artist attribute to modernity and Hecker seems to know very well, these age could be about destroying and pure creations are about surviving, this is a performance piece of theatrical quality that portrays the survival of music, no matter how much trash you throw over it, in the end music will always survive on a pure state.

Tracklist:

1. The Piano Drop
2. In The Fog I
3. In The Fog II
4. In The Fog III
5. No Drums
6. Hatred Of Music I
7. Hatred Of Music II
8. Analog Paralysis, 1978
9. Studio Suicide
10. In The Air I
11. In The Air II
12. In The Air III

Rate: 8.6/10

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Win Win - Win Win (2011)

Win Win is the project collaboration of two DJ’s; Alex Epton (XXXChange, member of Spank Rock and producer of bands such as The Kills and others) and Chris Devlin (Of Devlin & Darko, also known as the tour DJ’s of Spank Rock); one thing these two guys have is talent and connections, both things great to make an excellent record, not only did they wanted to do the Win Win project, but also they had A list collaborators, such as Gang Gang Dance’s Lizzie Bougatsos and Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, two of the biggest names featuring this LP. The record label backing up the project is Vice, known for outputting some of the best party hip musicians out there, such as Chromeo, The Streets, Justice, etc.

The rhythms and beats inside this record go from cool guitar riffs with synths to chill pop structured songs and Dub, everything with the one intention of having fun and going straight to the top in club scenes; they’re not attempting the reinvention of the weal, they stick to a very classic electronic club beats and play with indie pop winks every now and then, they manage to blend electronic music genres and maintain the sound without sounding monotone or boring,

The first single “Release RPM” features Lizzie of Gang Gang Dance, and though is excellent to dace along and sing, the sound that they produce is very quiet; with intoxicating synth loops and Lizzie’s voice very ethereal on top of the mix manipulating her voice with simple effects that make variation of the tone while saying “All I need is some form of release”; the song has the chillness of good relaxing clubbers that dance with their hands on the air, really a great song for a Friday night cocktail after work. But this airy singles match with some really heavy straight up party songs, like “Not Too Late” that play with a drum loop on top of very spacey synth and chipmunk voices singing “Is not too late for me and you”, sounding more like The Prodigy crossing the street to party with Boys Noize.

And don’t forget the strong second single “Interleave With You” featuring Alexis from Hot Chip, a very reflective slow song, not made for the club on the original version and conquering the melancholy that hot chip tends to do when making a slow song. This Poly-Tronic super group makes a classic electronic sound that doesn’t pretend to be more than what it is, confident of what it has and knowing that by keeping the basics with quality the rest adds up to the formula. This is a humble excelent electronic display of what two great producers can deliver, it gets better with every listen.

Tracklist:

1. Planet Playground Interlude
2. Victim
3. Future Again (Oakland)
4. Mother Mary Interlude
5. Release RPM (ft. Lizzie of Gang Gang Dance)
6. Interleave With You (ft. Alexis of Hot Chip)
7. Cada Buen Dia
8. Pop A Gumball
9. Distort Reality
10. Glen Beck Interlude
11. Ghosts Delerium
12. The Nature Of Transendent Forces
13. Not Too Late
14. Not Too Late Pt 2

Rate: 7.8/10

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