Sugar and Noise

Summer Shuts Down Slowly: The-Dream and The Weeknd.

The-Dream is much beloved in my immediate group of friends. If there’s a laptop playing music at a social gathering and me or my friend Matt get near it, we will always, always drop Love King or Yamaha or FILA… Pretty much anything from the “Love King” album. It’s such bright, glorious, perfect sounding music and it never fails to make me happy.

The Weeknd seemed to be much beloved everywhere this summer. I can’t remember a party that didn’t see some of “House of Balloons” blasted during the initial or closing hours (and once or twice we tried out some of the many, many danceable remixes in the middle). People rave about the atmosphere and the tension and the cold, dark sounds - and that stuff’s all great, but “House of Balloons” isn’t a great record (album, mixtape, whatever) because of the production aesthetic, it’s because the songs are good songs. The chorus of “The Morning” demands a singalong and that vocal melody would still be great if (as I rather expect they have, but I don’t want to look) a teenager in a baseball cap played it on an acoustic guitar and stuck it on YouTube. ”Glass Table Girls” is just incredibly quotable, and every time a room full of my favourite people shouts “IT’S THAT 707 NOW!” it’s really, really good fun. I mean sure, High For This has it’s fantastic bass-entry moment but it only works so well because of the careful contract-and-release structure of the song.

Anyway.

As summer decelerates into Autumn, The-Dream has released a free album under his real name (“1977” by Terius Nash) and The Weeknd has finally dropped the second of the three mixtapes he’s promised us this year. It’s like there’s a free-music party and some of my favourite R&B artists were invited.

1977 is (as you’ll have read everywhere else) perhaps the darkest record Terius has made, lacking a “Love King” or “Shawty is tha Shit!” style pop single and heavily carrying the bruises of his recent(ish) divorce. Tom Ewing* doesn’t like it much, lamenting the thinner, minimal production and the cold, perhaps whiney lyrical voice.  I think it’s kind of great. Once you get past the entry-to-enjoyment barrier of, uh, the fact that a guy is complaining (a lot) about the fact that his wife left him because he cheated on her, you’re on your way to a lot of great, meticulously constructed songs. And yes, there’s less of the layering and building than on his Dream albums but there are still great songs here - the Casha sung “Silly” sounds like a modern reinterpretation of a lost, classic love song from the 50s,  “This Shit Real Ni**a” is an over-the-top slice of aggro where he threatens and belittles his rivals (and somehow coaxes an actually GOOD guest verse out of Pharrell Williams. And I realise how hard to believe that is, but I mean it. And it’s followed by a gloriously ludicrous Prince-esque guitar solo), and “Wedding Crasher”…

“Wedding Crasher” might be my favourite song of the year. I just wish it had great big drums all over it so I could play it at parties. The call and response chorus is gorgeous and funny (“I hate to have to crash your wedding with this shit - Let me sing you my drunk song”), the lead vocal surrounded by a distant cycling loop of something like a flute and a warm buzzing bass synth. The verses are so human and vulnerable and there’s the great moment where Nash drops the bravado and just admits “I know you’re probably not thinking about me but I’m here thinking about you, I know it might be a little late to admit that I was just afraid” but also classic ridiculous Dream-esque moments like where he brings in a double tracked vocal for the line “just me and this bottle of Patron”.

“1977” is emotionally rough, sure, but it’s still filled with big lovely hooks, stuff that sticks in your head all day and makes you want to break in to lewd singalong on the bus. And frankly, I’m not at all bothered by the grim lyrics because…well, you know. Lots of my favourite recording acts are quite emo and write very, very honest and direct lyrics all the time - Los Campesinos!, Xiu Xiu, BARR etc. Terius never even drops the girls name.

So, it’s great, but there’s nothing I can play at parties here. We’ll have to wait for the next full on The-Dream record, which will hopefully turn up before the year’s end. But maybe The Weeknd’s “Thursday” will plug that gap?

Nope.

The best song on “Thursday” is The Birds Pt. 1. Which he released as an mp3 well over a month before the album appeared. And it’s great, hyper-dramatic bravado with militaristic drums as Abel Tesfaye requests that you not make him make you fall in love with a n***a like him, on a ridiculously cactchy hook. As if anyone involved has a choice.

But beyond that… there’s a lot of songs that needlessly breach the 5 minute mark without ever hitting a memorable hook. The production and atmosphere is still exquisite and does exactly what it wants to - it’s 3am, it’s cold outside and everything’s kinda hazy and nobody’s sure what happened. And some of the songs get by on that, like opener “Lonely Star” with it’s head-bob inducing kicks’n’snares loop, or “The Zone” with it’s layers of delay and vocal processing (and a great Drake guest verse, a moment that really makes it feel like the soundtrack to the widescreen, movie version of a nasty night out) but others… ”Life of the Party“‘s reggae drums are so annoying that I can barely listen to it, ”Gone” is enjoyable for it’s quick first three minutes and interminably dull for it’s slow closing five (FIVE). His vocals are still great (that falsetto!) and he’s clearly a great producer but there’s so little good songwriting on “Thursday” that it renders the thing a chore to listen to - less like a dramatic night out and more like someone telling you about it, two days later, badly, missing out all the fun details. I’m hoping the third, winter mixtape will see a return to his “House of Balloons” form.

And Abel, if you’re self-Googling in a moment of weakness, please, please, no more reggae.

[*Something of a music-writing hero of mine and even though we’ve got different views on it his piece is very well written and enjoyable]

Heya.

It’s been a while. I’ve not had internet.

I’ll be back later with words about: Johnny Foreigner, Slow Club, The Rapture, The Weeknd, Terius Nash.

Jay and ‘Ye Invite Us to Watch the Throne

It’s very difficult to talk about albums that are good. It’s easy (and fun!) to shittalk a bad record . It can be a little tricky to talk about a great one without being reduced to a stream of babbling superlatives, but that’s nothing like the challenge of trying to accurately describe a record that’s just good.

Especially not when it’s a huge “event record” like this. Watch the Throne is a collaboration between two of the biggest ego’s, two of the highest earners, two of the most visible faces in hip-hop ever. One coming off the back of an album that’s been pretty universally praised by left leaning music press (and mostly liked by hip-hop heads), the other… Well, I mean, I really like Blueprint 3 but I feel like I like it more as a pop record than a hip-hop one. The “star” on most of Blueprint 3 is the hooks and production, Jay-Z doesn’t spit a lot of quotables on that thing. Either way, it spawned a couple of absolute monster singles that dominated everything forever, etc. etc.

Watch the Throne, if we free it from all that baggage, is a good to very good hip-hop album. Kanye is on fine lyrical form throughout (excluding his half-sung weak-ass verses on “Lift Off”) with the occasional clanger (In uh, in what way is this “something like the holocaust”, ‘Ye? I don’t um. I don’t think you want to be throwing that word around) balanced out by reams of great stuff, both funny - “Ixnay of my dicksnay, that’s pig-latin itchbay”  , serious - “I feel the pain in my city wherever I go, 314 soldiers died in Iraq, 509 died in Chicago” and occasionally a nice mixture of the two, as on the pretty RZA produced late-night head-bobber “New Day” where a gorgeously autotuned Nina Simone sample coos away beneath Kanye declaring “And I’ll never let my son have an ego/He’ll be nice to everyone wherever we go/I mean I might even make him be Republican/So everyone know he love white people”.

Jay-Z on the other hand comes off less flashy and more competent with his actual words. There’s too much very generic wealth-boasting (stacks/Maybachs/etc) from him, and the “Rappers hear Watch the Throne/They gonna be pissed off/Earth is boring to ‘em/Shit is making my dick soft” run in “Lift Off” makes me cringe every time. “Lift Off” in general is a great, great Beyonce hook in search of some support that never comes from either the undeniably nice but aimless production or the “verses” that are (barely) there around it.

Jay does have some moments of nigh-on-breathtaking flow though, one could argue that while he says less and says it less well than Kanye here he sometimes sounds better saying it. On the slow-building album opener Jay delivers this properly brilliant bit in a manner that may well have you rewinding a few times - “I’mma need a day off, think I’ll call Ferris up/Bueller had a Muller but I switched it for a Mille/Cause I’m richer and prior to this shit was moving freebase” which stands up next to even Kanye’s slippery to the point of liquid first verse on (sigh) “That’s My Bitch”.

Yeah. There’s a song called “That’s My Bitch”. And it has properly great hooks by Elly Jackson (the one from La Roux with the hair and the questionable opinions) and (no, seriously) Justin Vernon - the one from Bon Inver with the beard and the questionable second album production choices. (Can I get a “hey-oh”? No? Anybody?) But, y’know, it’s called “That’s My Bitch”. It would be nice if it wasn’t.

Frank Ocean delivers the album’s two best hooks and almost bookends the album. “No Church in the Wild” opens things up dark and foreboding and will make you want to blast it in a big black car while driving to do something dangerous. Or alternatively, you know, just maybe replace “Dark Fantasy” as the first song on your pre-drinking playlist. So, at the start of the album Ocean plays prophet, on “Made in America” he’s more down to Earth priest, delivering a homily about black American heroes. 

“Almost” because it’s unnecessarily followed by “Why I Love You”, which would be a perfectly good song if it weren’t for Mr Hudson delivering the chorus like… Well, like he’s constipated and fronting a Genesis cover band. There’s a few moments of baffling “editing” choices like that - why’s the wonderfully brooding “Illest Motherfucker Alive” relegated to a deluxe edition bonus track? Why are those snippets of the same jazz-hop instrumental stuck on the end of so many tracks? Why is one “intro” feeling track followed by another? Why does anyone let Swizz Beats play hypeman or hookman on their records? 

To be fair to Mr Beats he turns in some solid production work, with “Welcome to the Jungle” featuring a great stuttering synth line and snappy snare-heavy beat, occasionally joined by big emotive piano stabs. Swizz also did the first half of “Murder to Excellence” where he marries a children’s choir vocal to minimal tom drums and a subtle guitar line. The only other big name production here is The Neptunes who make the decent-but-dull “Gotta Have It” beat. Hit-Boy mans the boards for the gloriously ridiculous “Niggas in Paris” which features the (genuinely well deployed) “Blades of Glory” samples you keep hearing about. And I’d be remiss to write about this album without mentioning that “Who Gon Stop Me” is built on cut up sections of Flux Pavillion’s dubstep wobbler “I Can’t Stop”. It’s frequently a big ugly mess, but points for trying, I suppose.

In the same way that, when writing about an album I love, I’m inclined to just run together the words “amazing” “incredible” “fantastic” and the like, writing about an album like Watch the Throne makes me feel the need to use too many qualifiers. It’s great but… It’s interesting but… It’d be even better if… 

It’s a solid, enjoyable hip-hop record but it’s not the second coming of MBDTF (nor, for that matter, of The Black Album) and it lacks something like “All of the Lights” or “Power” that you want to play at every house party forever, but “No Church in the Wild” and “New Day” will hopefully be popping up on Best Song of the Year lists come December.

Of course, by then we’ll have new Lil Wayne and Drake records to compare/contrast in the “High Income Rap” bracket. It’s going to be an interesting winter.

mixtape: Hard Mix

disconaivete:

Hard Mix delivers the next mixtape in our ongoing series, in which he gently blends jams like Nicolas Jaar’s Problems With The Sun and Nosaj Thing’s Coat Of Arms into a dreamy substance. His debut LP Defaults is still a free download over at Dovecote Records and very much worth the MBs - and so is this mixtape.

mp3 Hard Mix - Mixtape for Disco Naïveté

This is loaded with stuff I like. I think Hard Mix is incredibly underrated, check out his (free?) album Defaults and especially ”Bright Eyed Child” (ESPECIALLY the second half) - it’s some of the most beautiful sun-damaged post-everything end-of-summer electronic stuff you’ll hear this year.