album review: 'a town called paradise' by tiësto

So here's something you might not know about me: I listen to a lot of trance.

See, there was a brief period for me in around 2009-2010 that I started delving into this melodic brand of EDM, mostly out of a desire to find out was else was in this musical landscape beyond drum & bass, dubstep, and my appreciation for The Chemical Brothers. And with its melodic focus, mid-tempo energy, and sweeping production, I came to like a lot of trance music and listen to a decent bit even today.

So why haven't you seen me review many, if any, trance records? Well, you could put it down to an overloaded schedule and the fact that I still struggle somewhat with reviews of instrumental albums, but the truth of it is that I just drifted away from the genre. A lot of modern trance got more glitchy and staccato and began co-opting elements that took away from the soaring, melody driven trance I tend to like. What's kind of hilarious in hindsight was that even as I was moving away from that particular brand of EDM, the larger genre in general was moving towards the mainstream faster than ever with the success of house DJs, the rise of dubstep, and the general acceptance of EDM on this side of the Atlantic.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Tiesto, who started releasing trance albums in the early 2000s before drifting into darker, electro-house territory, which culminated in his 2010 release Kaleidoscope. The funny thing with that record was that you could see the shift towards a more pop-friendly sound already in the works, with shorter, more conventionally structured songs, and the biggest arsenal of vocal collaborators outside of an Armin van Buuren album. So when I started to see Tiesto songs cropping up on the lower ends of the Billboard Hot 100 chart his year, I wasn't exactly surprised - with EDM becoming more mainstream, it wasn't a surprise that those that would crossover first would be the most accessible to a pop audience, not to mention to a critic who has difficulty reviewing EDM. So on that note alone, I figured I'd give A Town Called Paradise by Tiesto a look - how did it turn out?

video review: 'x' by ed sheeran

Kind of a fascinating listen, but not exactly a great one. Ed Sheeran's an odd dude.

Next up... well, I've got a few ideas. Stay tuned!

album review: 'x' by ed sheeran

Believe it or not, I kind of feel a little sorry for Ed Sheeran.

See, like the majority of the world, I discovered Ed Sheeran through his breakout hits 'The A-Team' and 'Lego House' and immediately dropped him into the 'white guy with acoustic guitar' subgenre for which I just don't care. But to be fair, Ed Sheeran was one of the entries in said subgenre that stood out as better than average - he came across as sincere, he wrote some interesting melodies, and he was willing to take some risks with the subject matter in his songs. Take 'The A-Team', a song where Sheeran sings about a dying crack addict - and then frames the song as a classical tragedy. Maybe it's just me living in Toronto the last two years, but when I think of crack addicts, the image is less of 'an angel in white' and more of a fat belligerent mayor who became an international laughing stock and yet will likely win re-election because... Toronto.

But putting that situation aside, it turned out that the image of Ed Sheeran that I originally formed from his singles wasn't quite accurate, because while there still was the sincerity and acoustic elements, there was also a fondness for hip-hop on that first album that reminded me a lot of early Jason Mraz albums with the actual courage to step into slightly edgier subject matter. The hodgepodge of influences painted the picture of an interesting songwriter who was too sincere and awkward for his own good and whose occasional offbeat goofiness or darker touches made him hard to nail down. But at the same time, those strange dichotomies, awkward lyrical choices and pop culture references also made Ed Sheeran a little hard for me to take all that seriously - which is a shame because on some level, I kind of like the guy. I don't think he'll ever be an act I can consider as 'cool' or more than a fun oddity, but I respected his creativity and honesty, and thus was curious what would happen with his second album, x. What did I get?

video review: 'a.k.a.' by jennifer lopez

Ugh, this was a dud. Guarantee that it'll be forgotten by the end of the year.

Next up... either Ed Sheeran or Tiesto. We'll see, so stay tuned!

album review: 'a.k.a.' by jennifer lopez

It kind of amazes me that it's been over fifteen years since Jennifer Lopez released her first album. It definitely amazes me that this is her eighth studio album over the course of the past fifteen years, and that people are actually requested that I cover this album in some way.

It amazes me because I, for the life of me, do not understand the continued appeal of Jennifer Lopez outside of the Hispanic demographic, or even inside it. J.Lo began her career in TV and movies before jumping into the oversaturated pop diva scene of the late 90s, and for a few years she was very successful. However, looking back on that material, I can say that it's not exactly good. She never had the pipes of a Christina Aguilera or the creative songwriting of Shakira, instead riding the Latin trend of the time before transitioning into R&B and giving The LOX a legitimate charting hit. It didn't help matters that songs like 'I'm Real' and 'Jenny From The Block' tried to coast by on assertion of 'realness' and down-to-earth authenticity that plainly didn't reflect her multi-millionaire lifestyle and tabloid fixture romances. Eventually, hip-hop got dirtier and Jennifer Lopez's material got milder, which lead to her mid-period albums not catching on and her to star in a succession of terribly forgettable romantic comedies after the hilarious catastrophe that was Gigli.

And yet in 2011, thanks to the rise of Pitbull, Jennifer Lopez's music career suddenly got a second wind and began to ride a second smaller Latin wave that saw Enrique Iglesias and even Marc Anthony briefly return to the charts. And look, the hits that J.Lo charted in this wave of dance pop weren't bad, but at the same time, we weren't exactly short on pop divas making club songs, and with Rihanna, Ke$ha, Beyonce, Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Pink, Britney Spears, and even Christina Aguilera, what unique elements did Jennifer Lopez bring to the table?

And thus, I was planning on skipping this Jennifer Lopez album. I mean, while Pitbull's career has somehow held steam despite his consistently awful lyrics, the club boom is over, and somehow I didn't get the feeling J.Lo was going to be hopping on the EDM trend, so I had no idea what to expect, especially consider twenty-six different producers worked on this record. So, what did we get?

video review: 'copper gone' by sage francis

Holy shit, this album was fantastic. Definitely worth many a listen, and while it's a little late, I was happy I had the chance to really dig in and dissect this album.

Next up... hmm, not sure. Stay tuned all the same!

album review: 'copper gone' by sage francis

Let's talk about emo rap.

It's a term that's used with a lot more denigration and scorn than it really deserves, because it highlights the acceptance of the toxic posturing that can exasperate me with mainstream hip-hop and how honesty and authenticity are often less and less viable. Because let's be honest, it's a lot easier to write rap about the traditional 'cash money hoes' topics than actually dig deep and expose vulnerability and feelings and confessional subject matter. And almost paradoxically, I have a lot more respect for rappers who are willing to put themselves out there and expose those deeper emotions

And the mainstream has had a very complicated relationship with this sort of material, especially in recent years. Many would point of Kanye West's excellent 808s & Heartbreaks that strongly influenced acts like Drake or Childish Gambino, or would go a little further back and point to Eminem's artistic suicide on the much-maligned Encore, but to some extent these acts have retrofitted something from the underground that has been more open to this sort of confessional songwriting. And let me stress, I think it's a good thing that there are more mainstream rappers who are willing to approach this 'softening' of hip-hop culture, but I knew it'd only be a matter of time before an established heavyweight from the underground would step up to the plate.

Enter Sage Francis, rapper and spoken word poet and widely hailed as one of the 'godfathers' of emo rap, a term to which he's mostly ambivalent. Starting in the late 90s, he smashed into the underground scene with a succession of extremely solid records throughout the 2000s, with my favourite probably being Human The Death Dance in 2007. And what I loved about Sage Francis wasn't just his layered yet very understandable wordplay, his willingness to tell many stories beyond his own and comment on society as a whole, and his rich collection of uniquely textured and slightly off-beat instrumentals, but the fact that he was an impressive rapper none the less. Sure, he was willing to show his emotions and write how he felt, exposing his own flaws and failures which always rang as genuine, but you could never mess with him as a rapper. 

But after the indie rock-inspired album Li(f)e in 2010, Sage Francis announced he was going on hiatus and after a mixtape release last year, he's back with a full album this year - was it worth the wait?

video review: 'stay gold' by first aid kit

I'd argue this isn't one of my better videos, but I wanted to make it all the same. Damn good band, damn great album.

And speaking of great, Sage Francis is coming up soon - stay tuned!

special comment: the youtube indie music streaming controversy (video)

Honestly, this is probably one of my best shot Special Comments to date. Really proud of this one.

But seriously, YouTube needs to address this sooner rather than later, so I'll be tweeting about updates to this story as they come out. Stay tuned!

album review: 'stay gold' by first aid kit

So when I reviewed Sharon Van Etten's pretty damn solid album Are We There a few weeks back, I made reference to the acoustic musical genre that I cheekily branded 'white girls with acoustic guitars', and how while there are more acts in this vein I like than their male counterparts, I couldn't say I was a huge fan of the genre. I wasn't saying you couldn't make good music with just a girl and an acoustic guitar, but that sort of basic, minimalist setup requires every element to be on point or it'll get distracting. 

So what do you get when you get two white girls with acoustic guitars put together? Well, you get First Aid Kit, a Swedish country folk duo of two sisters that started on YouTube and was first discovered through a coincidental connection to one of the members of The Knife. After a cover of theirs of the Fleet Foxes went semi-viral, the duo began to release albums, starting in 2010 with The Big Black & Blue. And while I was struck by some of the intriguing songwriting that showed flavour beyond their years, it was an album that did suffer from amateurish production and a fair number of rough edges. Their second record The Lion's Roar was much stronger, with richer and more diverse production that leaned more towards country, and some of their best songwriting to date. This was a duo with serious melodic chops, and when fused with wryly clever songwriting and measured delivery, it was enough to set First Aid Kit away from the crowd and get me intrigued about their new album, Stay Gold. And honestly, as good of songwriters as they were, they were still just an acoustic duo and I wasn't sure how their signing to a major label would turn out for the band. Was I concerned for nothing?

special comment: the youtube indie music streaming controversy

We should have seen this coming.

I mean, as soon as Billboard started factoring in YouTube streams into their charts, we should have known that at some point, an executive at Google was going to look up from the cocaine bucket and realize that all that music streaming going on at YouTube could be monetized even further to bring in even more revenue. They likely saw the success of Rdio, Spotify, and other streaming sites and figured, 'Well, we're the biggest aggregation platform for music across the board, so why don't we offer a streaming or downloading option directly? And hell, why don't we make it subscription-based, a monthly fee to watch videos ad-free? And why don't we sweeten the pot even further and offer a download link as well, let the listener pull the music right out?'

In theory, this is a solid idea - until you start looking at the details and the fine print. Until you start considering the implementation of such an idea. As such, I have a series of questions I'd like to ask Google and YouTube, questions that really need answers before you shove this system out and you get the massive public outcry in the vein of what happened with Content ID. That explosion of righteous fury was mostly limited to the video game industry and the YouTubers that consume that media - you're now tackling a much bigger monster, and from the media's current coverage of this debacle, you should be in damage control if you aren't already. 

So keeping in mind that I'm intrigued by this streaming option and even think it could work, I do have a few concerned questions:

video review: 'the hunting party' by linkin park

Well, this turned out surprisingly decent. Turns out going back to hard rock was a good fit for Linkin Park - who knew?

Okay, that should take care of the major releases for the week - next up... hmm, either Sage Francis or First Aid Kit, we'll see. Stay tuned!

album review: 'the hunting party' by linkin park

Do I honestly have anything more to say about Linkin Park?

This is a band of whom I've covered twice before, first with Living Things in written form and then my video review of the remix album Recharged - and honestly, I wasn't a fan of either album, as they felt like regressions into stale subject matter they'd already covered more effectively elsewhere and a musical sound that alternated between being dreary and boring and atonal and insufferable. And this is coming from a critic who can admit that Linkin Park has never really been a terrible band, even in their earlier days with Hybrid Theory. Yes, it's material that hasn't exactly aged well in comparison with their mid-period work, but it does have a certain visceral pathos that can work if you're in the right demographic for it. And I will give Linkin Park for two points that aren't often noted: a knack for incredibly solid hooks and an ability to evolve with the times, culminating with the excellent, more conceptual album A Thousand Suns in 2010, which I'll place myself in the minority by saying is probably my 'favourite' Linkin Park record. And yeah, there are better records exploring nuclear holocaust, even in the electronic rock and metal veins, but I'll give Linkin Park credit for experimentation and mostly sticking the landing.

And honestly, that was one of the reasons Living Things was such a disappointment for me, in that it simply took much of the same electronic rock sound and fused it with lyrics that couldn't support it, and it felt like a regression. And when I heard about The Hunting Party this year... well, I had no idea what to expect. Not only did the band say they were putting aside electronic rock and going back to a harder edge, they were planning to show more maturity in their subject matter as well. That, if anything, got my curiosity raised enough to pick up the album - how did it turn out?

video review: 'ultraviolence' by lana del rey

I predict to get hit with a hailstorm of hatred over this video, but I do think it's one of my better written reviews, so what can you do?

Okay, Linkin Park, show me what you've got. Stay tuned!

album review: 'ultraviolence' by lana del rey

How many of you are familiar with Hollywood director Sofia Coppola? The daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, she defiantly made a name for herself with an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Lost In Translation, which I most remember for an absolutely stellar performance from Bill Murray. But since then, Sofia Coppola's movies have drifted towards a theme she has explored many times: the hedonism and existential emptiness of the idle rich. Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, and The Bling Ring hammered on these themes, and while each film is beautifully shot, the framing of the movies always frustrated me, in that there always seemed to be an attempted justification behind her protagonists' poor behaviour that tended to feel flimsy. Coppola seemed to show a lot of empathy for her characters, even when that empathy didn't feel earned by the script.

And I get the exact same feelings whenever I listen to Lana Del Rey. Like most people, I listened to her major label debut Born To Die in 2012 - and like most critics, I wasn't impressed. Yes, the production was lush, and Lana Del Rey could create some very pretty and opulent songs, but there was an air of artificiality and calculation surrounding every song of the record, from the arsenal of brand names to the completely out-of-place trip hop elements placed to blend both old and new ideals of wealth and success. And on a certain, shallow, fantasy-level, it kind of works... but in an era where we have Vienna Teng, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Tori Amos, Lykke Li, and Sharon Van Etten, you're not going to convince me that any of this is soulful or deep. It's not even a commentary on this sort of opulence in the vein of Lorde, but is instead framed as a glorification, a fantasy - and to be fair, I got the impression that was Lana Del Rey's intention. And such a fantasy would be fine if there weren't some really troublesome narratives beneath it, such as Lana Del Rey's obsession with glamorizing bad relationships or retrograde sexual politics, and she didn't really step up with the personality to back it up. So when I heard that Lana Del Rey had written 'Young And Beautiful' for Baz Luhrman's version of The Great Gatsby, I wasn't surprised in the slightest - because like that film, it's a fusion of old and new flavours of glamour that misses the depth in the spectacle. But even if I were to give Lana Del Rey the benefit of the doubt and say she was self-aware, her artistic framing certainly wasn't - coming back to Sofia Coppola, there's shallow hedonism and existential emptiness in Lana Del Rey's music, but it's framed as though we should empathize with the drama she presents when the text and subtext don't support it.

And thus when she titled her second album Ultraviolence, I had no idea what to expect, especially considering the album was mostly produced by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys. But, since it was requested time and time again, I decided to give the album a fair chance: what did I find?

video review: 'hebrews' by say anything

Believe it or not, this album took a lot of effort to decode and figure out. In the end, mostly ambivalent on it, but there were pieces that worked.

And now... ugh, let's get Linkin Park and Lana Del Rey over with. This is going to piss so many people off... but until then, stay tuned!

album review: 'hebrews' by say anything

About a year ago, just about a month before I converted my blog to videos, I took a request to do a retrospective review of In Defense Of The Genre by Say Anything. Widely heralded as one of the strongest emo bands to break in the 2000s, Say Anything rode the tremendous success of ...Is A Real Boy into their 2007 release, an overloaded, messy, and thoroughly interesting record co-opting every variant and subgenre of emo music popular at the time and throwing it in our faces. It was ambitious, swollen with collaborators, and while I'd argue it didn't really work as a cohesive whole, it was still compelling and definitely worth a listen.

But ever since that one-two punch from the mid-2000s, I've had the frustrating feeling that Say Anything might be falling into a holding pattern, The band has long ago stopped being a traditional punk act, to the point where their 2012 release Anarchy, My Dear felt distinctly underwhelming as the band attempted to recreate the visceral emotions that fueled ...Is A Real Boy to very mixed results. And when I heard that Say Anything was following it up with another collaborator-overloaded album this year titled Hebrews, I had to restrain my desire to groan with exasperation. Unlike some fans, I didn't hate Anarchy, My Dear, but my issue was that it felt distinctly neutered and lacking in dramatic force compared to Say Anything's best work, especially considering that they were trying to make a punk record and yet sounded more tame and reserved than ever before.

And when I heard that not only was Hebrews going to be filled with collaborators, but that there would also be no guitars on the album, with the melody lines entirely replaced by strings arrangements and keyboards... well, I'm in favour of bands experimenting, so out of sheer curiosity, I took a look at the album. Was it as bad as I feared?

video review: 'kill the architect' by cage (a second look ft. myke c-town)

Man, this video took too damn long to create, but I think in terms of the content, it's worth it. Thanks again to Myke C-Town for the conversation, it really was quite enlightening and I really appreciated it. :D

Okay, now to make massive catch-up on my schedule, it's going to be a crazy week. Say Anything first, so stay tuned!

video review: 'lazaretto' by jack white

Well, this was more frustrating than an otherwise enjoyable album should be, but that's what makes the albums interesting.

Next up is the 200th episode, a very special episode indeed. Stay tuned!

album review: 'lazaretto' by jack white

It'd be hard to argue that The White Stripes weren't one of the most essential rock acts of the 21st century thus far. It'd be even harder to argue that at least four of their albums weren't bonafide classics by doing what more rock bands should: stripping down to the basics, writing gripping melodies, and then building back on top of them, thanks to the virtuoso talents of Jack White. 

But one thing was all the more certain: ever since the breakup of the White Stripes - hell, probably even before then - Jack White has been obsessed with his place with respect to the women in his life. First with his breakup from his partner Meg White and then his divorce to Karen Elson, you can tell these events have haunted him for years, and nowhere did this become more apparent than on his debut solo album in 2012 titled Blunderbuss. And make no mistake, for the most part that album brought everything I loved about the White Stripes to the forefront on this record, and on a musical level, I dug the hell out of it. The guitarwork was solid, I liked the genre-hopping nature of the tunes between garage, blues, and folk, and the melodic composition was as good as ever. Lyrically, though, Jack White was playing in a grey zone with his framing that was tricky to gauge. While he was playing the 'evil women' card more often than was really comfortable, Jack White made it very clear that he wasn't exactly a sympathetic character, and that his damaged views on what love was or should be, all characterized by the female backing vocals that supported him.

But at the same time, there's something of a limit to how much of that brand of blues rock-inspired topic I can reasonably stomach, so when I heard reports suggesting White was going back to this topic, I was a little less enthused about this record than I'd like to be, even if there was signs of more country instrumentation. So on that note, I checked out Lazaretto - how did it go?