... is so subdued that it's like watching a movie through your neighbour's window, which I can attest from personal experience is not as fun as it sounds.
Man, this album makes me FEEL THINGS. Hval is so self-revealing she makes everyone else look like a coward. Kingsize summons the most horrible feelings of dread (NOT THE BANANAS), Take Care Of Yourself aches with the weight of a million vaginas, and on Heaven after she says "I want to sing religiously", does she literally turn into a bird and start flying into the night sky? Good grief, what a beautiful voice. It's a raw confronting experience somewhere in the vicinity of an ego death, attacking parts of my psyche that were laying dormant. There's so much gravity here that it demands complete attention and doesn't work any other way. She's one of those rare artists that seems to have the ability to connect a transmitter directly from her brain into yours. Her lyrics are like those weird fuzzy early morning thoughts you have as you're waking up, where it feels like you're solving some really important internal puzzle and everything is equal and nothing is taboo and your conscious identity hasn't fully uploaded yet so the real fundamental essence of what you are has a chance to- damn, it's gone. It's not so much that her music is otherworldly and escapist, it's more like she draws your attention to the strange ambiguous elements of what it means to be a human being in waking life. The kind of thing your brain likes to shift its awareness away from whenever it can in favour of the mundane. Apocalypse, Girl is a temporary escape into reality.
I remember giving Perfect Hair a couple of (perhaps inattentive) listens last year and it never quite clicked for me. Looks like this one is going to be my Busdriver gateway drug though. I found this way more accessible than expected, and the beats actually have a lot of breathing room for something this colourful and eclectic. There's a lot of melody in there too. Honestly I could see a lot of these tracks going down well at a social gathering. I remember his last album being somewhat of a sensory assault. Am I imagining things? I need to revisit. Anyway, this is great. I can't think of anything more in-depth to say yet.
I remember giving Perfect Hair a couple of (perhaps inattentive) listens last year and it never quite clicked for me. Looks like this one is going to be my Busdriver gateway drug though. I found this way more accessible than expected, and the beats actually have a lot of breathing room for something this colourful and eclectic. There's a lot of melody in there too. Honestly I could see a lot of these tracks going down well at a social gathering. I remember his last album being somewhat of a sensory assault. Am I imagining things? I need to revisit. Anyway, this is great. I can't think of anything more in-depth to say yet.
If I had to summarize it in the most crass reductionist terms possible, I might describe it as Broadcast meets David Lynch meets Cyndi Lauper. But I'm not going to do that because this album just surprises me with something new and unexpected at every turn.
"Oh cool, a cute upbeat surf-rock song whoa this guitar tone is filthy and I'm drowning in distortion! Now this beat keeps skipping and I'm creeped out, but the bassline is so catchy... what the hell is that moaning in the background? Oh, a little intermission with two girls joking on the phone... about some fairly heavy Oedipal stuff and it just ended with creepy echoey 50s sitcom laughter. Okay hang on, since when was this a synthpop album, and how does this seem to fit the overall aesthetic so perfectly?"
Nothing about this album fits neatly in any time period. It's like I'm listening to music from an alternate timeline after America suffered a natural disaster in the 50s and is now mostly covered in desert, but there's a quirky little town centered around a desalination plant that simultaneously functions as a saloon, and the punk movement was spearheaded by people that only listened to surf rock and boogie-woogie piano music, and people have to go out shooting muskrats for dinner, and everyone builds their own electronics and people drive around on rickety little scooters painted with bright colours, and the bubblegum and lipstick industries are still inexplicably booming. There's also probably a lot of sex trafficking. It's a dark timeline.
@dbz, I'll give those other Hans Werner Henze and Busdriver recs a listen soon.
Well this is different. A bit less pretty than Thumbs, closer to... I don't know, something rebellious and sardonic along the lines of El-P. I'm bad at hip-hop comparisons. Busdriver is a fun presence though. His voice always puts me in a good mood. He has a pretty acrobatic flow too. The production isn't grabbing me as much here. It's kind of dry and acerbic. I tend to need a bit of melody in my hip hop since I'm still a bit of a pleb when it comes to decoding rap lyrics.
First relisten since last year. It's interesting how tonally different all these releases are. This one is pretty trippy. There's this sense of unease and self-consciousness throughout most of it. I remember it being a bit of a sensory overload, and now I'm realizing it's not so much that it's particularly cluttered or loaded with different sounds, it's more that the different elements tend to exist in some kind of tension with each other. There will often be one little background element running counter to everything else that's going on, and this disorienting quality ties pretty well into the general vibe of the lyrics. Feels like an acid trip that keeps threatening to go bad. The beats make me want to just let go and float around, but then Busdriver's vocals grab me by the collar and force me to stand at attention even though my shoe is turning into a seahorse.
I came across this one a while back when I was putting together my 2010 teams for the BYT and it quickly became a favourite. A beautiful hazy melancholy hum of oscillating electronics and understated electric guitar. Feels like I'm gliding over a landscape and watching tiny cars drive around on the surface.
Not sure if I can explain why I connect to this more than so many other albums in a similar vein. There's something intimate and comforting about it, like lying next to someone and staring at the stars. It makes me think about stuff like ancestry and monomyth and helps me de-individualize my problems the way all good art does. It's also just really pretty.
Also spent an afternoon listening to Peter McConnell soundtracks. As I said, comfort music. Obviously a bit of sentimental value attached here and not everything is as effective out of context, but I really love this guy's style. Grim Fandango single-handedly got me into jazz music as a kid, and McConnel has developed this weird sort of orchestral-Americana-hybrid that I never get sick of hearing, like Ennio Morricone is hiding in a woodwind ensemble making twanging noises. I get this impression like every instrument is a little organism wriggling around in a throbbing musical soup, a bunch of creatures with flutes and violins for mouths. It just feels cute and endearing. Did I mention that I pretty much listened to nothing but movie and videogame soundtracks as a kid?
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