Satie Listens to 2016

[Satie]

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The Life Of Pablo by Kanye West

Genre: Hip Hop
Sounds Like: no wait actually no wait actually no wait actually
First Listen: February 14, 2016
Current Rating: 4/10
Yearly Ranking: N/A

February 18, 2016
I still think this album is pretty bad, but I've come around on a few bits of it and see it as something that could have been salvaged. I don't think that simply abridging or altering the tracklist would have been quite enough to make a good album, but there are some good (if not great or thematically cohesive) songs here. I was too hard on "30 Hours," I think, and it's good for what it is, but I maintain that at this point in my life Kanye's rapping has just become borderline intolerable when it's always rubbing shit on the walls of these good beats he assembles. I think that's what makes "Fade" such a great song, honestly. "Famous" and "FML" also both have their moments that have made me return to them. Unfortunately, every time I think about coming back to this album as a whole now that I've heard it I think three times in full, I just dread sitting through most of the album, which is a real slog. Besides these small clarifications, I stand by my review and score at this point. I'll probably revisit this at the end of the year to see if I change my mind on it.

February 15, 2016
My girlfriend wanted to listen to this with me so that she could get my first-hand response to it and talk through the album a bit. We're both casual Kanye fans, enjoying the odd funny couplet that he's really built his fame on (yeah, yeah, he's a great producer, but his complete dominance in the age of the Internet owes as much to French pastries as it does to Northern soul) and both admiring 808s and Yeezus far more than the rest of his discography, which ranges from bloated to throwaway. The first track divided our opinion - she falling head over heels for particularly the incorporation of the gospel choir and me finding the whole thing ostentatious and annoying - but we quickly settled into a groove of agreement - The Life of Pablo is the sound of Kanye trying to keep it together. And I don't mean that in the way that 808s, MBDTF, and Yeezus have been portraits of the artist as troubled, confused, schizophrenic, lonely, braggadocious, contradictory, where it's music critic bait for days, but in the sense of thematic unity and quality consistency. This is the first album of Kanye's, despite my general apathy or distaste for a lot of his work, that hasn't at least offered a unified experience, an album. And there's plenty of music I like that doesn't really fit this pattern, and yeah yeah Jayson Greene has all this stuff about this transcending the album format or whatever, but come the fuck on. We've been ~transcending the medium~ since Kid fucking A, and that album could start driving this year. This Kanye apologism knows no bounds, apparently.

The Life of Pablo clearly was maybe two albums that were ready to be made - follow ups each to MBDTF and Yeezus - and then grafted together in the unholiest of ways and given some cosmetic surgery in the form of a plastic soul sheen. Kanye definitely is trying to return to his strengths, and a pattern is definitely emerging in his latter-day discography of taking big creative risks that polarize audiences and then settling back into his role of Auteur of Rap, the Rocker's Rapper, a Scholar of Sound rather than someone taking serious creative risks. The problem is that Kanye can't seem to keep his eye on the prize, and maybe I'm just biased towards this view because of how much more public the creative process of this album was than others, but the thing just feels endlessly reshuffled and tired the first time it's hitting my ears. If this really is some elaborate performance art blah blah, all it's done is make me sour on the concept of new Kanye music prematurely and then deliver nothing to defy expectations. There's weak Yeezus b-sides strewn through the more minimal middle stretch, corny-ass MBDTF throwback opulence that opens the ride, callbacks to Dropout Bear-era skits and ZING lines (aka fucking memes), and then a bunch of songs I didn't like in the first place tacked onto the end. You could reverse engineer this album, for God's sake.

I think the biggest weakness of the album is that the only tracks I even care to delve into further for discussion are possibly bonus tracks. After serviceable closer "Wolves," we're treated to some fucking skit that I barely remember because it's a skit on a rap album ostensibly about Paul the Apostle that has nothing to do with any of the already very tenuous themes. Then, we get a really lame song that reminded me what enjoying music is like with an Arthur Russell sample since Kanye always has to demonstrate that he has deep enough pockets to hire people with big record collections to get him "cred," which is a fairly outdated concept in the age of poptimist music journalism. After gagging through two Soundcloud reject monstrosities (at least "No More Parties in LA" is mastered in a more palatable way now, but it's unforgivable to just loop the beat for four minutes while I endure a Kanye verse) there's finally as far as I know the first high quality release of "Fade," which, while far from being a masterpiece, is at least the most carefully honed song on the album, an infectious Chicago house groove that transcends its vessel. If this is supposed to be "Bound 2," The Album, striking some uncomfortable precipice of swaggering Kanye, backpacking Kanye, and actual sonic innovator Kanye, it comes up quite short, but he could do worse than to try to make "Fade," The Album next time around. I'm just not gonna hold my breath for another three years while we wait. 4/10

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[Anti]

[Applerill]

Thanks for the GIF rec, BTW. I think it's one of my all-time faves now.

[craola]

[Satie]

[Satie]

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Painting With by Animal Collective

Genre: Neo-Psychedelia
Sounds Like: The Beach Boys, I swear!!!, an intro stage to a 3D Sonic game
First Listen: February 15, 2016
Current Rating: 4/10
Yearly Ranking: N/A

February 15, 2016
Guess I'm going two for two on killed idols today. The other landmark February release leaked in high quality at some point this weekend, I presume earlier today, and I've had a chance to listen. Let me frame this first before you freak over the score - most anyone who's really liked the direction Animal Collective has gone, both as individuals and as a group, for the past few years will see this as a welcome and natural evolution of their sound in an even bigger step into finely honed, laser-precision pop. In many ways, you kind of already know how Painting With sounds and whether or not you're going to like it based on how readily you accepted "Floridada" and the latest Panda Bear album into your life.

But let's explain anyway. Painting With sees Animal Collective at their most stripped-down. That still makes for a noisy, busy record, but more in the fact that the production on Animal Collective albums is always a big noisy. The doo-dads and whats-its of Centipede Hz have been cut out, and if that album was a creative (if absolutely fucking putrid) take on FM radio, this is Animal Collective's return as high quality automatic U2 iTunes download. Okay, maybe that's a little too harsh, but this album really is pretty much the bare bone package of what could constitute an Animal Collective album, the sound of complete stasis. It's a step ahead of its predecessor, but only because I can sit through it. Gone from Animal Collective, apparently forever, are the layered, textured melodies, and instead here are the bouncy synths that sound like they're from a rhythm game with bright forest backdrops or the soundtrack to a game where you jump on giant inflatable frogs to get where you're going. They give the illusion of Animal Collective returning to form with a more direct sound, when in reality, it's just a palette swap for whatever straightforward rock album you could muster. Animal Collective's strengths have been completely destroyed over the course of the seven years they've had since Merriweather Post Pavilion. There is no drama, no circumstance, no tension, no release. This album could debut in an airport because it's just that compared to the grandiloquence of master statements like Here Comes the Indian - muzak for commuters.

Perhaps there's an edge of bitterness to this review, and I guess that's to be expected from any continually scorned delusional "fan." What could I really expect from a band that I arguably like more in name than in execution, a band that put out a handful of masterpieces over a decade ago and really only returned to glory for the one-two punch of Person Pitch and Merriweather Post Pavilion? As the world continues to turn, these flash-in-the-pan broadly celebrated masterpieces prove to be exceptions, not the rule. I wish Animal Collective and their many new fans all the best in the new chapter I took far too long to accept. Enjoy the synthetic beaches of Floridada. I'm going back to the forest to see if I can dust off those animal hide drums and tap out a tune I haven't heard in ages. 4/10

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[Satie]

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Hivemind by Mhysa

Genre: Glitch, Contemporary R&B
Sounds Like: ethereal hellfire, resilience
First Listen: February 16, 2016
Current Rating: 7/10
Yearly Ranking: 3

February 16, 2016
I've only been able to give this the one listen so far today, but Mhysa (a.k.a. E_SCRAAATCH, whose works with plus_c are released as SCRAAATCH) dropped her new EP this morning on NON. This is NON's second EP release of the year so far, and it jumps up ahead of San Benito right out the chute. I could see it growing on me a lot more, but for now, it's scratching all the right itches. Hivemind is a small package with an overflow of ideas and quality. On EP opener "Jezebel," which also opened SCRAATCH's FADER mix earlier this year, Mhysa's vocals stretch over and rise above cloudy, opaque production like a thin razor of light. There's a certain spiritual quality to the vocal delivery and the slowly churning haze that surrounds it, and that sound is continued over the course of the EP. What else is carried across are the quick, violent counterpoints of immediate bursts of jumbled percussion. These brief moments of chaos take the NON sound even deeper, letting it splash and ripple instead of sounding like precision targeting. Also returning is Mhysa's incredible collaboration with DJ Haram, "No Ordinary Love," which was an immediate sensation in my listening rotation when it came out late last year.

The new original offerings are great, too - "Feel No Pain" expands on the sound of "Jezebel" and makes Mhysa's vocals collapse on themselves over increasingly frantic rhythmic bursts, while "bullshit, bullshit, bullshit" offers a nice coda to what might be considered the "core" EP of the first four tracks. There's a "Jezebel" remix that was the only real miss on the release and kind of holds it back from greatness, but maybe over time I'll warm to it. For now, it seems like the immersion of "Jezebel" is being constantly yanked out from under the listener by a somewhat eclectic hodgepodge of rhythm laid over the track. The obvious standout here, though, is Mhysa's reworking of No Doubt's "Just a Girl." Unlike reworkings of Chino Amobi and Angel-Ho, for example, who manipulate pop vocalists' performances digitally in a more chopped & screwed/plunderphonics style, Mhysa actually wholesale lifts the lyrics and general pacing from Stefani's vocal performance and recreates it herself. The result is fascinating, and further listens will probably reveal a clearer interpretation than just finding it really well-assembled and great. Definitely another excellent release on NON that's well worth your time. 7/10

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[meccalecca]

Thank you for crushing my hopes that Painting With would be a return to form after Centipede Hz.
_________________
http://jonnyleather.com

[Satie]

[meccalecca]