album review: 'the ecology' by fashawn

Well, apparently for me this week is catch-up week, because man, this slipped the net. Not going to lie, I forgot that I was going to cover this when it first came out, and I'm kicking myself for it. And it was either this or talk about the new Tech N9ne album, and look, for as much as I respect his talent as a technical lyricist and his charisma, I can't get behind the majority of his production or his content, and his most recent release was even more guest star overloaded and all over the place than usual, with so many mainstream guests below his level included in a way that looks desperate more than anything else.

So that I've pissed off a fair number of you, let's talk about a rapper I actually like a fair bit more, and who has never really come across as having something to prove: Fashawn. West coast MC, affiliated with Nas and known for working with a slew of excellent producers like Evidence and Exile, he dropped his debut album Boy Meets World in 2009 - and my God, that record was something special. He may have been telling a very similar story to many rappers in talking about his come-up, but there was a spirit of youthful hope and optimism that drove that album, and paired with detailed yet plain-spoken stories and gorgeous old-school melodic production that really grabbed me. To me he fell into a similar lane with J.Cole, but came across with a more assured, tightly written presentation that resonated with me a lot more.

And yet after 2009, he seemed to drop off everyone's radar. He did a lot of touring, a couple mixtapes, put together a pretty damn solid collaboration album with Murs in 2012, and dropped a slew of guest verses, most notably for me on 'Banging Sound', from The Alchemist & Evidence collaboration album Lord Steppington early last year. From there, he signed to Nas' label Mass Appeal and set himself up for a long-awaited solo sophomore album... which I ended up missing for no adequately explained reason. I think my justification was that the reviews had only been lukewarm, but really, that's not much of an excuse, as others have absolutely raved about it. So about three months late, I dug into Fashawn's The Ecology - how is it?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 23, 2015 (VIDEO)

Well, I guess I needed that bit of extra sleep, because I was preparing to do this last night and instead passed out damn near instantly.

Eh, whatever, it happens. Next up, I think I have one last artist in my backlog, and then back to our regularly scheduled programming, so enjoy!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 23, 2015

So after last week, I was hoping for a bit of a breather this week – and believe it or not, I got it. After the storm comes a sort of calm, and we might have one of the least active weeks of the year thus far, thanks the album release schedule slowing down to give us all a breather. And considering I used most of this week to catch up on releases I wouldn’t have otherwise covered, it’s kind of nice that Billboard BREAKDOWN also feels a little easier.

video review: 'stages' by josh groban

And that nearly takes care of my backlog. One more album that I might tackle this weekend, but first Billboard BREAKDOWN. But before then... zzz...

album review: 'stages' by josh groban

It seems like I've been breaking a number of 'rules' that I've traditionally held for myself, and today it looks like we're going to be tackling one of the biggest examples of that. Because everyone who begged me to cover Lady Gaga & Tony Bennett's Cheek To Cheek last year and who were put off that I really didn't have any interest are probably going to be exasperated I'm covering this - because hey, wasn't his rule that he didn't cover albums of covers?

But in the lead-up to this record, I began wondering why that is. After all, I'll talk about covers when they appear on an album, and there are plenty of examples where a well-positioned cover is just as thematically appropriate. Not really the case when you have a selection of Broadway covers put together by a classically trained operatic pop artist who is more well-known for his jawdropping vocal talents than his songwriting, but it could work. And let's be honest here: I knew Lady Gaga would do a fine job with Tony Bennett - Gaga's done that sort of material before, she's got classical training - but it didn't interest me in the same way, and after listening to the album a few times, I realized I had nothing I could really say about it, outside of it sounding exactly what I expected it would.

This is slightly different for two reasons, the first being Josh Groban himself. I'll admit that I like the guy: his material has never had stunning depth, but the man has the pipes, charisma, and power to elevate less-than-stellar writing, and I hold that his more complex 2010 record Illuminations - that had a Nick Cave cover of all things - is actually pretty damn excellent. My issue with him is that I've always wanted to see his material with a little less polish, see him get a little more visceral, challenge that incredible voice of his and test his emotional range. Now some of you might think that doing an album of Broadway covers might be flying in the exact opposite direction of that, but look at the shows he chose: Phantom of the Opera? Les Miserables? Into The Woods and Sweeney Todd? And - of course - a track from my favourite musical Chess? Sure, we're not crossing that many boundaries, but there's enough material to push Groban, and I honestly wasn't sure what to expect. That said, I didn't exactly have high expectations, and I'll admit the theater geek in me comes down hard on musical adaptations, so what did Josh Groban deliver with Stages?

video review: 'carrie & lowell' by sufjan stevens

Well, this took WAY too long to get to - it happens, but man, I want to ease back on wait times for these records. 

Now only one more record to knock off my backlog, but first, let's tackle something light, shall we...

album review: 'carrie & lowell' by sufjan stevens

Man, it's taken me too damn long to get to this review, especially considering this is a guy I've been wanting to talk about for a while but have always had a hard time nailing him down. Because of the many, many artists I've talked about, Sufjan Stevens is damn close to one of a kind - and for the longest time, I had just ignored him because on my first few listens through his debut, he was just another quirky singer-songwriter from the indie scene that had critical acclaim and little else that really stuck with me.

And man, was I wrong in spectacular fashion. After a hard left-turn into weird electronica, Sufjan Stevens dropped the absolutely incredible Michigan, a tribute to his home state that had such an incredible balance of sound and tone it's incredible. Sufjan might not be the biggest presence as a singer - one of the reasons I've found him difficult to get into in the past was that he tended to feel overtaken by his instrumentation - but his writing and hooks were impressively detailed and eclectic, with a vibrant energy and life that made the odd kitsch of his instrumentation incredibly endearing. Is it a little over-long, off-kilter, and oddly corny at points? Yeah, but I didn't mind it, because the songwriting was so well-grounded and human that it clicked incredibly well.

Ever since then, though, Sufjan Stevens' work has struggled to recapture that balance. The closest for me came on Seven Swans, which eased things back perhaps a bit too much to bring the songwriting into tighter focus - which I'll admit clicked because most albums exploring religion with Stevens' complicated brand of framing have a lot of potential to really connect with me. His follow-up state album Illinoise went in the opposite direction and was even more elaborate, and while it did hit some spectacular highs, it didn't quite stick the landing as well for me. And then came The Age Of Adz, a weird, warped record diving back into electronics in a way that felt even more garish than before - and honestly, it doesn't quite connect, at least for me.

So when I heard that Sufjan was stripping things down to folk again and opting for a much tighter, personal focus, I was looking forward to it, especially considering the titular characters of his late mother and stepfather are placed in greater focus. Of course there'll always be moments of indulgence that are quintessential parts of his records, but it's been over a decade since Seven Swans - so what did Sufjan Stevens deliver as he came home?

video review: 'traveller' by chris stapleton

Man, I really do wish I could have loved this album instead of just liking it. Meh, it happens.

Next up, I think it might be finally time to talk about Sufjan Stevens. Stay tuned!

album review: 'traveller' by chris stapleton

I've talked a little before about songwriters working as part of the Nashville machine occasionally feel the desire to strike out and find the spotlight for themselves. They churn out dozens if not hundreds of songs for other acts, perhaps giving them a certain artistic touch or just flavourless mush, but more often than not it often serves as a sort of boot camp for aspiring artists. They start off writing for more successful acts until they can have enough clout to do it on their own.

And what's startling about Chris Stapleton is that it took so damn long. For those of you who don't read the liner notes or Wikipedia, Stapleton has been a country songwriter for acts as varied as Kenny Chesney, George Strait, Luke Bryan, Darius Rucker, and even Adele. What most people don't know is that he's also chugged away in smaller bluegrass and southern rock acts over the past few years, which were never huge commercial successes but gave him outlets to explore and refine his craft and live presence further. But now he's finally dropping a debut country record at the age of thirty-seven, and with the waves of critical acclaim coming in, this looked to be a record I had to cover, because believe it or not, he actually cowrote 'Whiskey & You', the Jason Eady cover of a Tim McGraw song I actually placed on my year end list of the best songs of 2014. And sure, there was the possibility that other, less-interesting, more mainstream approachable songs might fill this album, but if he could write something with that sort of punch, who knows what he was saving for his own material? So I dug into that debut Traveller - what did we get?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 16, 2015 (VIDEO)

Overall, it was a better week than expected. Shame most of hip-hop is in the shitter in the mainstream right now, but you can hope for the future.

Next up, probably Chris Stapleton and finally - finally - Sufjan Stevens. Stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 16, 2015

So remember when I was lamenting last week that the expected chaos after the collapse after a long-running #1 didn't happen? Turns out I should have just waited one week, because we might have one of the busiest weeks on the Hot 100 I've seen in a long time. Massive gains, sizeable losses and dropouts, a slew of new and returning tracks, and even new entries to the Hot 100 that show that even if the #1 slot might be safe, everything beneath it sure as hell isn't. And in some cases, that instability might end up being a good thing.

video review: 'jackie' by ciara

Well, this was... honestly better than I expected. Seriously, I expected this to go in one ear and out the other, but there's some quality here, and 'I Bet' is genuinely excellent. Sincerely hope it's a bigger hit...

Okay, next up is Billboard BREAKDOWN, then time to see what all the fuss is about with this Chris Stapleton record. Stay tuned!

album review: 'jackie' by ciara

So here's the thing: even though I was a teenager who listened to popular music in the mid-2000s, I never really got into R&B in a big way. Part of it was that I was busy listening to symphonic metal at the time, but part of it was that the mid-to-late 2000s wasn't a great period for the genre, at least in the mainstream and especially for its female artists. Sure, you had Beyonce, Alicia Keys and Mary J. Blige, but the R&B boom of the 90s and early 2000s had faded significantly in the wave of crunk and the rising swell of pop. The male stars of the genre had fared better, with Usher, Ne-Yo, Chris Brown, and even Justin Timberlake raking in significant rewards, but many of the starlets who had done exceedingly well in the years prior began to struggle a bit.

And one of those artists was Ciara. Now let me admit right out of the gate I was never really a huge fan - her lyrics were frequently underwhelming when they didn't just get weird for no adequately explained reason, she occasionally worked with some obnoxious co-stars, especially early on, and her voice was so thin and delicate that it often seemed peripheral to the music, analogous to Janet Jackson but often lacking that core of strength and personality that I've tended to like about Janet's work. And yet in the era of snap percussion and incredibly minimalist beats, Ciara thrived for a few years. But as pop started to take over in the late 2000s, Ciara's material started to seem a little desperate to hold the spotlight, and that third album Fantasy Ride with its murder's row of top-line producers and guest stars ironically only stole more of the spotlight away from her. And after the follow-up the next year Basic Instinct did even worse, and I assumed, like many, that Ciara's career was over.

And yet in 2013 she came back with a self-titled album and with the rising tide of R&B, she was back on the charts. Now I'm not going to say that record's great - it's not, like most of Ciara's work I tended to find it pretty thin, as I tend to like my R&B more soulful or fiery, although Ciara's voice was becoming more rich with age. And the two Future collaborations didn't help, both of which I assume are there because they were in a relationship at the time. But two years later, the scene has changed - her engagement broke off with Future, her first child was born, her album quietly filled with some more material focusing on that broken relationship, and more cowriters and producers than ever. And as I said, I've never been a huge fan of Ciara's, but I really liked her debut single from this album 'I Bet', and hey, if she was going to spend an entire record taking potshots at Future for being a cheating asshole, that's a theme I can get behind! So how did Jackie turn out?

video review: 'wilder mind' by mumford & sons

Man, I had low expectations for this, but it could have been a hell of a lot better than this... ugh.

Next up, either Chris Stapleton or Ciara, so stay tuned!

album review: 'wilder mind' by mumford & sons

So I've mentioned a couple times that I'm a fan of karaoke - hell, anybody who follows me on Twitter knows I occasionally post semi-witty observations when I head out to one of my favourite watering holes to sing. And one of the songs that I've put on semi-permanent rotation for myself is 'Little Lion Man' by Mumford & Sons - I can sing it well, I know the song by heart, and it's got an anthemic vibe that plays incredibly well to a crowd. One could make the argument that it's the best song Mumford & Sons ever wrote, one of the few where critics and fans could listen and acknowledge that it worked... because not since Nickelback will you find a more passionate and egregious divide between the critical press and the mainstream public than on Mumford & Sons.

And I can see both sides of the matter. When the band broke in the last few years of 2000s, they gained some attention from the mainstream public for having strong singles with anthemic choruses and a ton of rollicking energy that rarely ever got popular... and then in a quirk of fate, they did get some chart success that only increased with their second album Babel, which launched a fair few singles into the charts, won a Grammy, and solidified the folk boom of the early 2010s. And most of the critical set couldn't stand them, seeing them as a pop sellout of 'real' folk music, one of the few genres left where a vestige of authenticity still mattered. And they weren't wrong here: Mumford & Sons were slick and polished despite the folk instruments and image, and Babel was even more so, and even despite the braying howl of Marcus Mumford's voice, the band had nowhere near the grit of acts like Old Crow Medicine Show or the Avett Brothers or any slew of alternative country folk acts.

Now for me the issue was different, because I didn't mind the bluegrass tinged Mumford & Sons sound and I'm a sucker for a great stomping chorus. But the larger problem revealed itself in the framing of the songs in their lyrics - namely that they wrote a lot of catty, passive-aggressive songs about sour relationships and played them all with such serious earnest power to disguise the nastiness of the material. It's why 'Little Lion Man' remains their best song: at least they admit they were the ones who screwed things up, but beyond that? To this day, I'm still debating whether it's an issue of incompetence - the bargain-barrel symbolism would support that argument - or just douchebaggery, but it sure as hell did not make Mumford & Sons remotely likeable. And just like Nickelback, their post-grunge parallel, their material gets formulaic in a hurry if you listen through an entire album front to back.

And thus it wasn't really a surprise to me when I heard that the band had gotten so resentful of their image and the banjo that they ditched them entirely for a straight-up electric rock sound - proving it was transparaent since the very beginning, but whatever. I'll, I wasn't looking forward to this release - I covered the lead-off single on Billboard BREAKDOWN and it sounded like a watered-down U2 wannabe, and I already heard Imagine Dragons try that earlier this year. So I had low expectations, especially considering the best element of their sound - the folk groove - was now completely gone. But even with that, what did Mumford & Sons deliver with Wilder Mind?

video review: 'escape from evil' by lower dens

And that's two. Much better, and seriously a slept-on record.

Next up... damn, I might as well talk about Mumford & Sons. Stay tuned!

video review: 'suffer in peace' by tyler farr

Not a great record, but I am glad I covered this. Nice to see one bro-country artist actually improving and who might have a career after this mess.

Next up... well, stay tuned within the hour, it's rendering now!

album review: 'escape from evil' by lower dens

So there are some indie acts that just fly under the radar and nobody beyond the hardcore fanbase seems to know. I've barely gotten requests for this act, the buzz has been negligible, and even despite the fact this new record has been very well-received, nobody besides critics seems to care.

And this is something I've noticed about certain acts getting critical acclaim - it rarely means much at all for the actual act outside of very specific circumstances, and it needs to be spread wide enough to drive buzz. But even with that it might not be enough - I can think of a slew of indie acts that because they didn't get the right big performance or that huge hit single, they might have the love of critics but nobody else. Even in the age of the internet, where certain sites like Pitchfork want to define the narrative of what is popular, or where we have music critics who have accumulated enough subscribers to nearly reach half a million people, it's not often enough.

So with all of that in mind, let's talk a little about Lower Dens. Beginning with a shoestring budget in Baltimore in 2010, their debut album immediately reminded me a lot of The War On Drugs in terms of the spacious, hazy shoegaze-inspired mix and willowy vocals of Jana Hunter, but that's where the similarities ended. For one, the bass and guitar tones were far more reminiscent of post-punk, and the melodic grooves were simply phenomenally balanced against the crisp, stripped back percussion. They added more electronic elements with Nootropics in 2012, which eased back some of the haze and added sharper, more defined grooves and some synthesizers, and while I definitely think it's a damn great album, I think I liked their debut a tad more, although songs like 'Brains', 'Lamb', and especially 'Candy' were huge standouts.

And when I heard they were heading towards even more of a pop-friendly direction... well, to be honest, I was a bit mixed on it. I had no doubt in my mind that Lower Dens could write some stellar hooks if pressed for it, but I didn't want to see them shoved towards synthpop like so many other bands in their vein and lose some of their unique identity. So what did we get from Escape From Evil?

album review: 'suffer in peace' by tyler farr

You know, it's always a little fascinating to see what happens to certain artists after the trend they rode to stardom falters or fails completely. In many cases, the artists simply drop off the radar entirely, especially if they were transparently a product of the label looking to cash in. Sometimes they'll stick around for one more awkward, uncomfortable album trying to find footing with the same formula, only to be looked upon as has-beens. Some, especially if they jumped on the trend midway through their careers, will simply go back to what they did normally, with singles from that trendier record hastily wiped from memory and any live shows. And yet sometimes you get artists who are able to roll with the punches, start off riding a trend and yet able to transcend it and become staples of the genre.

And here's the thing: you can't assume that it's just the ones that'll be the most successful that'll end up in the last category. Let's be honest, what gets popular isn't always the material with the most quality, but with the most definitive image or flash or energy, and those seldom translate well into the long term, especially if your artistic persona is so tied to that image. As such, it's typically the artists that are a little more restrained or in control of that image that can ride their debuts to greater success - or, of course, if you actually a distinctive artistic identity, but that might be hoping for too much.

But could I be wrong here? For an example, let's consider Tyler Farr, a definitive b-lister in the bro-country scene who released Redneck Crazy in 2013 in the heat of the craze and rode the absolutely terrible titular single to nearly the top of the charts. Now I reviewed that album and I remember not being kind to it, but truth be told, I can barely remember that album at all. I remember the singles and i remember thinking that Tyler Farr had a good enough voice to do well - turns out the guy had classical training, which is uncommon to see in country music - but his material often came across leering and creepy when it wasn't boring and forgettable. Coupled with production that was all over the place, I was prepared to write Tyler Farr off... but then I heard his lead-off single 'A Guy Walks Into A Bar', and I was struck by its intensity and frustration, and the realization that gruff anger might actually be a solid fit for the guy. And considering rumors that this record was supposed to be a little rougher and heavier, I was actually interested in covering him, whereas you couldn't convince me to cover a sophomore record to other bro-country acts like Thomas Rhett or Cole Swindell. So what did we get with Suffer In Peace?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 9, 2015 (VIDEO)

Man alive, this week sucked. 

Okay, crazy weekend ahead of me in RL, but I'm going to try to get at least one review out. Stay tuned!