[Satie]

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[Satie]

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Perfect by Half Japanese

Genre: Indie Rock
Sounds Like: crunchy power pop with all sorts of electronic doo-dads
First Listen: January 31, 2016
Current Rating: 5/10
Yearly Ranking: N/A

January 31, 2016
I've always been a big fan of Jad Fair and Half Japanese. There's a huge amount of whimsy and sincerity to all of Fair's projects, whether at their extremely discordant as on my personal favorite 1/2 Gentlemen Not Beasts or at their most lovely, such as Fair's collaboration with Tenniscoats on Enjoy Your Life. Honestly, Fair is an outsider-ish indie/punk rock institution who's outlasted the quality streaks of several artists he's come up alongside. I can't say I've kept in extremely close touch with new releases as they've come out, as my Half Japanese proclivities usually lead me into their extensive back catalog that I'm nowhere done with, so I can't really comment on how long an album like this has been coming, but I can give my vague sense of it. An important thing to keep in mind if you haven't heard the band before is a famous quote from Fair that the only c(h)ords involved in Half Japanese at the offset were the ones that plugged the guitars into the amps. Half Japanese's subject matter has ranged from batty covers of Bob Dylan to plot summaries of Rosemary's Baby to parents walking in and beyond. Half Japanese have never really comfortably fit into a mold of "quirkiness" so much as "teetering on the edge of complete psychosis."

Which makes this record kind of a surprise to me. Not that I haven't heard them be more melodic - Horrible, for all its noisiness, is much more of an accessible pop record than the debut, and Fair's collaborations, for example with Daniel Johnston, tend to emphasize this angle of his songwriting and performing. No, on Perfect, Half Japanese are entirely ordinary. There's a bit of noisiness added in around the edges, but the guitar lines are straight ahead, Fair's vocal delivery is a pretty obvious half-talking that any old punk rock singer would whip out occasionally filtered through an echo. There's even one of those fucking post-hardcore/alternative rock mini-guitar solos on this thing! The fuck?! This would all be fine, if not desirable, but all the songs are pretty same-y, too. Really disappointing to hear the pop excellence and the noisy discordance excellence completely eschewed for this. 5/10

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[Satie]

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Super Saiyan Vol. 3 by Sicko Mobb

Genre: Bop
Sounds Like: the past Super Saiyan tapes
First Listen: February 1, 2016
Current Rating: 6/10
Yearly Ranking: N/A

February 1, 2016
Sicko Mobb seemed to erupt as a fully formed and realized project of rejecting the more caustic and depressive, drowning elements of Chicago's rap scene in favor of an ecstatic buoyancy in 2013 with their first Super Saiyan mixtape. Of course, the bop scene grew out of what is in some ways its polar opposite, drill, a few years earlier for those at ground zero. For a lot of us, it was our first taste of the genre at any length and realization. It was the hour plus version of "Zan With That Lean" we could have never known we wanted. In many ways, years later, it has never been topped, either in Sicko Mobb's or others' discographies. Between the orgiastic synths and trappy beats that made most beats sound like steam locomotives up against bullet trains and a psychotic DJ screaming over the proceedings at every turn, Super Saiyan, Vol. 1 became an instant classic mixtape. Since then, Sicko Mobb have released two more mixtapes - one, a direct sequel to that original opus earlier last year and another, a quick follow up released a month after that. Stirrings of a new Super Saiyan tape began with the "Expensive Taste" single featuring Jeremih drop in December, and since then, I've been prepping myself for another round.

Super Saiyan, Vol. 3 is a serviceable continuation of the Super Saiyan line, falling into a lot of the same pitfalls as its predecessor in the series. I would blame it on lost novelty if I didn't constantly listen to the first volume to this day, but it seems these past two tapes have just been the slightest amount phoned in. With Vol. 3, Sicko Mobb have expanded their repertoire to include a few more stripped down production credits with their iconic auto-tuned warbling overlaid for some variety, and it's certainly commendable that they seek to expand their sound, but a lot of what makes the act great has been missing. The faster songs no longer move along at frantic speeds, instead building up sonically dense backgrounds that with no swift melodic lines zig-zagging through them begin to feel a bit top-heavy. There's never a moment when the 40-minute mixtape feels badly paced, per se, but it certainly doesn't feel as immediate and fresh as the debut. The features are less inspired here, too. Where Twista threatened to (and did, in many people's minds) steal away "Bitches N Bikinis" on Vol. 1, Jeremih is completely missable on "Expensive Taste." On the whole, Vol. 3 manages to keep the Sicko Mobb bandwagon rolling, but it seems to have definitively announced its trajectory on the scenic route to wherever exactly Lil Trav and Lil Ceno could eventually take us if they sharpened their focus just a bit. 6/10

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[Satie]

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I'm Up by Young Thug

Genre: Trap Rap
Sounds Like: Young Thug
First Listen: February 6, 2016
Current Rating: 5/10
Yearly Ranking: N/A

February 6, 2016
A few people on the forum have probably read me openly lamenting that I don't love Young Thug as much as other people do. There are a couple individual songs that I think are incredibly, particularly "Stoner," which really showcased how Thugger's flow could transcend its own novelty to interplay with creative production to make a thoroughly ungrounded, alien music. In the tradition of the best Southern hip hop, Thugger transcended into drug-induced psychosis on that track. Eagerly going into Barter 6, I was disappointed to find that the whole package never really pushed on that boundary again. I checked out the first Slime Season mixtape a couple times, but I still felt like I was chasing the dragon despite at least thinking it was good front to back. Now we're onto his latest mixtape, I'm Up, and I'm left with largely the same feeling.

Songs like "Special" hint at how claustrophobic Young Thug's atmospheres can be, but the real pleasure there is listening to him eek out that bizarre curved hook. Any of the better paced tracks here shows off how truly masterful and varied his flows are, and it's hard to grow too tired of all the little details on the periphery of him skeeeeting and brapp brapping, but the production never keeps up with him, and so we're left with merely inventive rapping, and not that whole package. I can't really get more detailed than this, which frustrates me, because I can't quite put my finger on what is missing here. I know that when "NASA" was re-worked into "Bloody Eye" by Rabit (and then reworked from there by Why Be and Sami Baha) it became one of my favorite songs ever, so I'm inclined to think that a more thoughtful approach to overall sound design instead of trying to center the obviously novel rapping at all moments by pulling the production into the background might be in order. I dunno, I'm glad these mixtapes come out 'cause I always seem to miss some genius that gets dragged out by people like the producers I mentioned above. I'm just ready for the person who has provided some of my absolute favorite rap vocal performances to have a full mixtape of the kind of batshit material that that voice was made to contribute to the world. 5/10

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[Applerill]

Satie doesn't like Young Thug

HAVE YOU READ THE JAYSON GREENE PIECE, TYLER?

And yeah, that album was amazing, my #1 of 2016 so far.

[Satie]

[Applerill]

[Satie]

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Brute by Fatima Al Qadiri

Genre: UK Bass
Sounds Like: less dense Chino Amobi
First Listen: February 7, 2016
Current Rating: 6/10
Yearly Ranking: N/A

February 7, 2016
Fatima Al Qadiri's been one of the biggest names in UK bass music's 2010s Renaissance, dropping a series of widely acclaimed EPs (my favorite being Desert Strike) before her 2014 debut album, Asiatisch. She's also released material as a member of the Future Brown project which is where I originally heard of her. She is one of a number of musicians in this scene focusing on the grimier aspects of UK bass, and her solo work as well as her work with Future Brown are quite political. It's very tempting for me to compare her to NON, but I'm clearly a bit saturated with that label, so I don't want to be too anachronistic in my explanation of where her sound comes from. Still, it's the closest sonic referent I can think of.

Brute opens with a brief track of police sirens and shouted dialogue snippets to set the stage for what's to come. Honestly, the intro sounds very much like the album cover looks. There's a thematic unity and clarity to Brute that is obvious but works well. Unfortunately, that obviousness, and the ensuing predictability of much of the material here, kind of weakens the impact. What we have are a bunch of very slooooowed dooooown "atmospheric" (read: lots of echo effects) grime beats. There are big, sustained bass chords, those terrible keyboard choral vocals, and those keyboard horns that you hear in grime beats all the time. These elements work in that music because they're not being relied on for their textures as individual sounds, and the melody line is of interest in providing forward propulsion to the tracks. Here, those effects are being put front and center as a means of longer-form composition that departs from loops, but the result is pretty underwhelming. It's a neat idea, I suppose, but the effect is that it just seems like a fairly sparse record that unravels pretty quickly. Tracks like "Breach" show what even a modicum of effort could have delivered in the sense of a richly textured experience, but it's hardly something I would think was standout on a more thoroughly good release. I've enjoyed all of Qadiri's work that I've heard more or less, and this is no exception, but I'm ready for that more. She's more than capable, and she's more than overdue. 6/10

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[Satie]

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Animals by Not Waving

Genre: Progressive Electronic
Sounds Like: Liars, Tuning Circuits
First Listen: February 8, 2016
Current Rating: 6/10
Yearly Ranking: N/A

February 8, 2016
I downloaded this last night or maybe the night before after seeing it on RYM in a couple places. Progressive electronic is usually a tag that will draw me into your work eventually, which I guess is interesting 'cause I very rarely uphold progressive electronic works as all-time favorites. I guess I see the variety, thoughtfulness, and listenability that the genre tends to foster really attractive qualities for first-time listens but not long-term satisfaction. Maybe I should take this thought to our current Point of Discussion... Anyway, I had been getting around to this one when Tap dropped our first Album Listening Club thread for 2016 with a focus on it, and so I was jumpstarted into checking it out over a couple other releases I was kicking around listening to today. I thought it was good, but not without its faults, as I detailed in that thread. 6/10