Category Archives: Music

Aaliyah

AaliyahLast summer I finally got on the R&B tip when I took some time to actually listen to the incredibly inventive vocal and production wizadry driving the non-stop Destiny’s Child tunes available on Napster. That opened up a whole new section of the record store for me (a point clearly lost on the RIAA), and I eventually discovered Aaliyah, whose new eponymous album is really, really impressive. It’s been playing on my CD player for a few weeks now, and every time I think I’m tired of it, I find something new in her amazingly assured delivery to make me want to listen to it all over again.

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Planet of the Pop Star Apes

GorillazThere must be some way I can tell you all about Gorillaz without coming across like a marketing lackey. The fact is, they’re a marketer’s dream — a multi-media collaboration between Damon Albarn (of Blur fame) and Jamie Hewlett (of Tank Girl fame), plus various hangers-on like the over-rated Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and the mega-cool Dan the Automator. How’s that for name dropping? Even the concept is too cute to be true: rather than front an absurd side-project, these pop stars have chosen to express themselves through an imaginary cartoon band. Whatever, the full-length release is a hectic, loopy collision of smart beats and dumb singing stunts, and it makes for a surprisingly excellent collection of tunes — especially for a super group.

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Just in Time, Again and Again

Nina Simone at the Village GateBack on 08 May, I wrote that the recording of Nina Simone’s 1961 performance “At the Village Gate” was in heavy rotation on my CD player. That’s still the case. In fact, this past week, I became somewhat irrationally fixated on the disc’s opening track, “Just in Time.”

Simone’s performance of this small-scale paean to luck and love is sublime genius. She begins with her trademark casual precision, a subdued exuberance that quietly erupts towards the end into a beautiful, joyous crying. But these vocals are just bookends — after singing just a few bars at the beginning of the song she seemingly and suddenly abandons her audience to a quietly playful guitar, bass, drums.

The amazing trick she manages is this: defining the whole of the song by her very absence from its center, controlling that undefinable intersection of sound and time wherein the audience craves the form of her voice the most by not giving it over at all, withholding it almost cruelly. Yet, in spite of this absence, the whole of the song and every tiny detail in its crevices are clearly of her own design and volition — though the voice is gone, she’s not. She’s unmistakably there. It’s a brazenly confident gesture with which to open an evening’s performance, but her delivery and its effectiveness are immaculate. I’m left in wonder after each listen and I can’t get enough; since Thursday, I’ve had my CD player set to repeat that track without end.

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What I’m Hearing on My Stereo

AnimaVladislav Delay’s “Anima” gives you only one track for your fifteen bucks, but it’s a sixty-four minute-long one. I’ll bet it could’ve been broken down to a more atomic level, but this makes for an arty kind of marketing statement. Nevertheless, it’s an hour-plus of beepity-blippity melancholy, intricate and subtle like a miniature factory of noises.

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If You Like This, You Might Like…

Media Unbound is at the forefront of a new kind of personalization, according to Salon.com, but the traffic resulting from that article has their system maxed out. It sounds promising though: a recommendation engine that actually refers you to obscure music that you like and that you might not have heard about otherwise. Speaking of which, it’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve heard any new music that’s really gotten me excited.

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A List of Things I Consumed

This is a little late, but in December, the lists came out—‘best of’ lists, what’s in and what’s out lists, lists of New Year’s resolutions etc. So I figured, what the heck, I may as well make a list. I mean, that’s kind of what Internet content is all about— realizing the compulsion to express an opinion, regardless of intrinsic value — right?

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