video review: 'jungle' by jungle

Ugh, this was a dud. You hope indie projects in this vein would turn out better than this.

Okay, I need a little more time for Shabazz Palaces and Common, so next up will be someone you normally haven't seen and might not expect. Stay tuned!

album review: 'jungle' by jungle

Let's talk a little about disco.

As a genre, it tends to have a much worse reputation than it really deserves for a lot of wrong reasons. It was scorned because it was dance music made primarily by producers instead of songwriters... but then again, we now live in an era where EDM has become one of the hottest selling genres worldwide. It was hated because it was synthetic and electronic and felt plastic... in other words, like every other genre that touches pop music in the mainstream for the past twenty years. It was loathed because it emerged from the gay dance club scene and thus the backlash that had been seething against that music and much of the black culture that had supported the jazz, funk, and soul of its roots finally had an outlet to explode, and I shouldn't even have to tell you why that backlash was at best misguided and at worst moronic. If we're looking for a more legitimate reason why disco died in the late 70s, it was the same reasons any music trend dies: musical evolution in sound and style; and sheer overexposure.

But given the current musical and political climate and especially the resurgence of soul, dance music and even reggae-inspired tracks on the charts, it wasn't a surprise that acts began jumping towards a new incarnation of disco, even in the underground where with the rise of the internet it has never been easier for unknown acts to snag chart smashes. So with that comes Jungle, a band that began as a viral sensation in 2013 before signing to XL and dropping a debut album they described as 'midtempo 70s-inspired funk'. That, if anything, was enough to attract my interest, so I gave that self-titled debut a few listens: how did it go?

video review: 'g i r l' by pharrell williams

Well, this happened. Can't imagine the controversy that'll come with this one...

On another note, it's taking me a lot longer than I'd like to get through St. Vincent's material, half because I'm enjoying it as much as I am, but also half because this week will probably kill me in terms of the amount of material I need to get through, plus keep my full-time job and a semi-functioning social life. Strap in folks, this might get wild.

album review: 'g i r l' by pharrell

It's always a little worrying when producers step out from behind the sound board and try to make hits of their own.

And I know that sounds terrible, but it circles back to the fact that it's extremely rare that a genuinely gifted producer will be a smash performer, and vice-versa, because while there is some overlap in their skill sets, it's incredibly rare to find someone who can handle both effectively. In modern years, the one that immediately leaps to my mind is Timbaland, who worked with Justin Timberlake and even had a few hits of his own throughout the mid-2000s, songs that might not have been amazing but Timbaland's unique baritone and some decent charisma gave the songs some staying power. But even with that, I'd have a hard time calling his material as a frontman amazing because there was something of a calculated element to his presentation. It was a little stiff, a little awkward, something you never saw in his beats, and that lack of comfort does show in front of a microphone. Then again, when compared to will.i.am, the other beat-making producer who stepped out from behind the mic and and showed nothing but disinterest for the idea of recording lyrics that made sense and sounded anything close good, Timbaland holds up pretty well.

Now to his credit, the artist we're going to be talking about today has never really seemed to have this problem. Pharrell Williams may have started his career in the same era as Timbaland as a member of The Neptunes with Chad Hugo, making slick R&B and hip-hop jams, but his career got a major boost thanks to 'Get Lucky' and 'Blurred Lines' doing so well last year. That, plus his many production credits, some solid live performances, and that ubiquitous hat have led him to drop his second solo album. And from the early buzz, it became apparent that Pharrell wants to be a star all on his own this time, as his newest record was reported to be a feminist borderline-concept album celebrating the place of women in society. Let me repeat that: an album with strong feminist themes, written in the wake of the controversy over 'Blurred Lines', controversy that I will go on record saying was overblown even though that song did contain seriously questionable elements, written by a man.

...well, you might as well hot-link Jezebel and your local MRA forum, because I'm bound to offend somebody in this review, so before I inevitably shoot myself in the foot, how's the album?

video review: 'the electric lady' by janelle monae

Man, I was happy that I got a chance to review this, because it's a great album and I don't think I'll have many of those for the next little bit. 

Seriously, if you didn't get the message in my previous post, you need to check this album out immediately, it's definitely for an artist who deserves far more fame than she gets. Janelle Monae's 'The Electric Lady' might not be as much to my tastes as 'The ArchAndroid', but goddamnit, it's close.

And now for the shitstorm to commence... 2 Chainz, you're up.

album review: 'the electric lady' by janelle monae

Back in my review of Robin Thicke's album Blurred Lines, I mentioned why R&B as a genre doesn't tend to work for me as well as others, mostly because I've found the traditional topics in their songwriting a little overused. Now, you get this in every genre, but it got on my nerves a lot more in R&B because so many of the artists had a serious problem in having their songs be criminally underwritten, instead preferring to fill the verses with vocal gymnastics and other such elements that might sound pretty but don't really have a lot of substance.

Now I'll admit that my particular point of view has already been proven wrong once this year by Ariana Grande, but to be fair, she was using the conventional songwriting topics for R&B, just written with a little bit more wit and sharp poetry. But considering that I do like to be proven wrong when in the process I'm exposed to great music, I finally took the opportunity to get into the discography of Janelle Monae, an R&B act who has amassed some serious critical acclaim and who reportedly eschewed genres traditions in favour of weirder topics. And while I definitely was optimistic, I remembered the catastrophic example of 30 Seconds To Mars and I prepared myself for the worst.

Instead, I was blown out of the water. Folks, if you're not listening to Janelle Monae and her Afrofuturist sci-fi masterpieces, you should be. Not only are her high-concept topics of choice brilliantly realized in some of the most innovative and strikingly original ways I've seen in a long time, she's also an extraordinarily talented singer and songwriter, fusing a dozen genres of the past into a coherent, frequently beautiful whole that somehow remains catchy and emotionally evocative just the same. I'll admit that I'm a serious sucker for great space rock (and Janelle Monae is one of the best in the genre, hands-down), but I'm still stunned by how well she manages to make so many disparate genres sound distinctly fresh and new, breathing new life into them in a way I haven't seen since Daft Punk released Random Accessed Memories earlier this year (before that, I'd probably have to go all the way back to The Love Below from OutKast). People say that Justin Timberlake is innovating in R&B - all respect to Justin Timberlake, but he doesn't possess a tenth of the imagination, soul, and creative genius that Janelle Monae has.

And I could spend the next several hours raving about how the music is striking and unique and how Janelle Monae sells all of her material with well-chosen and incredibly heartfelt emotion and how she manages to get her guest stars swept up in her eclectic vision and how her Afrofuturistic themes are a perfect blend of past and future African-American art synthesized from multiple generations and how even with her high-minded ideals she still has that streak of populism to make her music compelling to a wider audience, but really, all I need to say is this: Janelle Monae is to R&B what Arjen Lucassen's Ayreon project is to metal. And if you're one of the three people who are looking at this and know what the Ayreon project is, you'll understand precisely how high of a compliment that is.

So to say that my expectations for her new album, The Electric Lady were high is a bit of an understatement. Continuing her ongoing space-epic saga from her 2010 album The ArchAndroid and recruiting guest stars like Miguel, Erykah Badu, Solange, and even Prince, one of the legends of R&B himself, I was incredibly excited to find out her newest album was coming out this month, and I was looking forward to seeing how her story would continue. So what does the next chapter in her story look like?

album review: 'random accessed memories' by daft punk

You know, for every terrible will.i.am or Chris Brown album I review, there's one great benefit to this gig, and it's a fairly simple one: getting the chance to go through the discographies of the greats.

It's a real thrill of anticipation, knowing that you're going to be perusing the collected works of acts that have amassed critical praise and massive success, but that you've never really had the chance to enjoy in detail. It's that amazing feeling when you realize you've discovered an artist for the first time (in your mind, at least) and you're experiencing something special, getting the chance to listen or watch something that can open your mind to all new possibilities. Because as fun as it can be to tear the justly deserving a new one, it's even more fun to find an act that has experienced critical praise and discover for yourself just how and why they got it. And while you will run into occasional duds or stretches of mediocrity, more often than not you find greatness. Of course, it's even more fun to find an unjustly overlooked act and sing their praises to the high heavens (which was my Nick Cave experience), but sometimes it's just as revelatory to join with the crowd.

And thus it becomes so cruelly ironic that it is only now I'm examining Daft Punk, one of the most critically acclaimed and beloved electronic acts of all time, and one that has built so much of their music on the principle of bringing people together. I'm completely serious here: up until this week, my experience of listening to Daft Punk has been confined to the few singles I've heard and a viewing of Interstella 5555 a long time ago. I've known they're great - they're one of the few unequivocably great things about TRON: Legacy - but I've never really had the chance to delve into the Daft Punk oeuvre.

Now, those of you who have read these reviews before likely know why I've been slow to listen to Daft Punk, but I'm sure a few of you are asking, 'well, if you knew Daft Punk was so goddamn great, why the hell didn't you listen to them before?' And really, that's a completely fair question - unlike Nick Cave or Depeche Mode, Daft Punk really don't have the massive backlog discography that would render tearing through their early albums all that strenuous. But those of you who have read my reviews before likely remember my general objections to reviewing electronica, mostly because I'm still not all that sure how to do it properly. That's one of the reasons you never saw a review of Armin van Buuren's new trance album that came out early this month - as much as they'd make my reviews considerably shorter, I tend to respond better when it comes to more lyrical material that relies more on words and less on feeling. And considering so much of electronica is based on feeling and mood (unless you're a serious sound nerd who can pull apart individual pieces of the song and assign meaning to them - I've seen a few of these guys and they're something else), I feel a little unqualified to talk about it.

Incidentally, this is one of the reasons I can speak at great length about an electronic act like The Chemical Brothers, of whom I'm a big fan. But this, I think, comes down to an issue of construction - so much of The Chemical Brothers' material is based upon judiciously chosen samples and a semi-coherent narrative that I find them more accessible, at least for reviewing purposes. It's a little easier to chart out album themes and messages with lyrics or samples, instead of just coming from the musical 'feel', per se.

But Daft Punk were different, at least on their early albums. They came onto the scene in the late 90s with Homework, and were immediately distinguishable from the rest of the Eurodance with an embrace of funky electronica and an array of weirdness in their audiovisual style. Like the rest of their contemporaries, the thematic elements of their music were about bringing people together to dance and have a great time, but the introduction of funk into the mix gave their music a strange edge that was distinctive, but not confrontational. In comparison to the sugary, super-optimistic dance tracks of the mid-to-late 90s, Daft Punk were expressing the same emotions but filtering them through a very different aesthetic, which gave their music a lot of character and personality. Their embrace of mid-to-late 70s funk tunes might seem a bit confrontational for electronica, but by filtering the energy and looseness of funk through their unique vision they created a sound unlike any of their contemporaries. It was a fusion of two musical genres very different in tone and theme, but very alike in energy and passion, creating something very much unlike anything else in modern music.

Then came Discovery and Interstella 5555, and at least to me, these two are halves of the same incredible whole. The music so perfectly matches the animation that considering one without the other feels a little incomplete, but it's a real testament to how great the disco-inspired album is that it still manages to hold up as an incredibly solid album on its own. If I was forced to make a choice between Discovery and Homework... damn, that's a tough choice, but I'd probably go for Discovery if only due to the fact that it's a little tighter and the disco melody lines are a little stronger. Plus, the sound is a bit more varied and there's a lot of emotional texture on Discovery that I really appreciated. As it is, it's one of the greatest electronic albums of all time and I can't help but place it in the upper echelons of great music.

And then Daft Punk made Human After All, and I'll be the first one to say that I don't dislike this album with the same intensity that a lot of Daft Punk fans do. Yes, it's not nearly as good as Homework or Discovery, but I still dug the hell out of the sludgy, rawer feel they were looking to create. The problem was that they didn't quite deviate enough from the formula, which got old and tired pretty fast. But while I'm convinced Daft Punk could have made a stronger album here with the material they were pursuing, it was enough to push Daft Punk back towards the material that made them stronger and iconic. 

And with that, after a series of live cuts and soundtracks, they made Random Access Memories, the now critically-acclaimed album that has been embraced and beloved by many? So what do I think of it?

album review: 'overexposed' by maroon 5

Short version: an album that's bitter, detached, and genuinely unpleasant to listen to. Worse still, the entire exercise comes across as completely insincere when in comparison with the one truly genuine song on the album. Top it off with a real loss of unique sound and some horrible lyrical choices, and you have a real mess of an album from a band who is capable of so much better.

Longer version...

It's always interesting to take a step back away from the typical pop music scene and consider the genres that influence it at various points. At points, rock music has been dominant, at others R&B or hip-hop or rap. At some points, there have even been influences from the indie scene or the country scene, particularly recently. 

But what becomes more interesting that even that are the acts that influence the music scene and the pop acts. These are the bands that push the boundaries, try something new, experiment with concepts or production techniques or interesting sounds. Sure, the experiments sometimes fail, but the attempt can be important as well, as it could be worthy of analysis to try and figure out why things didn't work out.

And today I'm going to talk about Maroon 5 - a band that once had a unique sound and looked to influence pop music, and then completely sold out and lost it. I can't say I'm all that surprised or all that disappointed.