Category: Music

Some cool August night in 2010, I was sitting in the passenger seat of my best friend’s car as we drove to another friend’s house. It was late at night and there wasn’t much traffic in our small town, so we made idle conversation and listened to the radio. The DJ was saying something about the next track being her favorite song of the summer, because she felt like it summed up how she’d felt about it, chiefly melancholic. It was by a band called The National, a band I had heard of but never seriously listened to. She introduced the song as “Bloodbuzz Ohio” and then began to play it. Shortly after, we arrived at the parking lot outside our friend’s apartment. My friend turned off the car. “Turn it back on.” I said. “I want to finish that song.” I got a raised eyebrow for my remark, but he turned the radio back on and we sat in silence for the rest of the song.

To call The National “sadcore” would miss the point, although Matt Berninger’s easily-identifiable baritone does seem to perpetually reside in that state two or three weeks after a big breakup where everything begins to slowly sink in. With a rhythm section liable to give you claustrophobia and minimalist guitar crunches synced with the occasional synth hit or string section, The National occasionally come off as a Joy Division minus the suicidal tendencies.

Yet, there’s something about their body of work that is oddly entrancing, even hypnotic. From their somewhat awkward alternative country beginnings to their trio of critically acclaimed albums beginning with 2005’s Alligator and ending with 2010’s High Violet, Berninger’s earnest vocals, mixed with word salad lyrics and beautifully tragic music have made them indie darlings. In those first few albums The National struggled to find their ideal sound, but by Trouble Will Find Me, the band’s sixth album, released earlier this week, they’ve perfected it.

Realistically, there could be no real follow-up to High Violet. The duo of Alligator and 2007’s Boxer ultimately served as teasers for High Violet, the critical and commercial peak of the band. As such, any new album was always going to be measured against their last offering.

Any song on Trouble Will Find Me would sound perfectly at home wedged into High Violet. In terms of exploring new ideas, The National have done very little in the last three years to evolve their sound. Berninger’s voice is as dramatically depressed as always, and the music provided by the guitarist Dessner brothers and their rhythm section counterparts, the Devendorf brothers, is simultaneously as intimate and bombastic as always. Given the success of High Violet, it’s understandable that they’d stick to the script for the follow-up.

It’s a tad disappointing, even so. On Trouble Will Find Me, The National largely stick to their middle-register. The slower ballads don’t match emotional heavyweights like “The Geese Of Beverly Road”, and the more uptempo almost-rockers never quite match the chaotic breakdown in the chorus of “Mr. November” or the rawness of rollicking stompers like “Murder Me Rachael” and “Available”. As a retrospective of their career thus far, Trouble Will Find Me sounds less like an alternate Greatest Hits and more like an alternate universe version of High Violet that was slightly less good.

In no way is Trouble Will Find Me a bad album. It doesn’t really even have any bad songs. Early single “Don’t Swallow The Cap” and first track “I Should Live In Salt” stand among the best songs the band has ever recorded, and the rest of the album offers more than enough to satisfy hardcore fans and casual listeners alike. As far as albums go, The National could have done far, far worse than release High Violet: The Sequel. It is a bit of a missed opportunity, but it still stands as a very good album, if not the great one that its predecessor was.

Somewhere in the peculiar brainspace between John Hughes movies and beating your friends at Mario Kart (I suggest being Luigi, because who doesn’t like Luigi? Dirty Communists, that’s who), there exists a genre of music known as chiptune. Defined by the use of Game Boys and other old-school video game consoles as instruments,  chiptune has found a niche at geeky conventions and through the internet, but has struggled to break into more mainstream outlets. You’re unlikely to find anything by Disasterpeace or Sabrepulse in a record store. Elements of chiptune have crept into pop and hip hop songs (Go listen to Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok” for evidence), but chiptune bands themselves haven’t made the same impact.

With luck, that’s about to change. Anamanaguchi, one of the most celebrated bands of the genre, released their new album, Endless Fantasy, earlier this week. Funded through Kickstarter (where it has earned over 175,000 dollars, far from the 50,000 dollar goal), the album will be released on CD and vinyl and is expected to hit record store shelves in the near future if all goes as planned. A music video for the first single, “Meow” was released in January and further videos are planned.

In many ways, Anamanaguchi are apt flag-bearers for the entire genre. Releasing music since 2006 (beginning with their EP Power Supply, followed by their 2009 full length debut Dawn Metropolis, and a handful of non-album singles in 2010), the band’s “big break” came in 2010 when they scored the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World video game for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. The soundtrack hit number 3 on Billboard’s Heatseekers chart and was highly acclaimed. However, it epitomized the biggest hurdle for chiptune music as a whole; it sounds too much like a video game.

That in itself is not a bad thing. Even on old consoles like the NES, the music in video games was top-notch, and the music in some modern games is so thoughtfully composed, it could belong in a film. However, the type of chip-based, glitchy beep boops of Anamanguchi and their contemporaries made them a “sometimes” band. When jumping perilously over a puddle as if it were a set of spikes in Mega Man, or when day dreaming about beating up an endless horde of muscle dudes a la Final Fight or Double Dragon, listening to chiptune makes you feel like a serious badass. Other times, it felt out of place. Since their beginning, Anamanaguchi has leaned towards dance music. Early songs like “Helix Nebula” and “Flora/Fauna” had a kind of danceable groove, but other songs sounded abrasive, or too minimalist to really work as alternative pop music.

These problems disappear on Endless Fantasy, which sounds like Koji Kondo DJ-ing at a sick rave. It’s eminently danceable and nothing short of a dance pop rock chip masterpiece. Chiptune music with vocals usually sounds gimmicky and Anamanaguchi have traditionally stayed away from it unless remixing someone else’s music. On Endless Fantasy, guest vocals by Bianca Raquel and Meesh add a dimension to the album and make tracks like “Prom Night” and “Japan Air” stand out as some of the album’s gems. Although video game sounds are still at the forefront of the music, the guitars have been moved further and the songcraft perfected. These aren’t gimmicks; they’re legitimately great songs. Many of them tend towards up-tempo dance stompers with great beats, but the band also shows their softer side with a couple shorter songs, including a bizarre (though very good) chip cover of the classical piece Gymnopedie No. 1.

Endless Fantasy is a true modern masterpiece in its field. It’s chaotic and jumbled and straight-up weird, but it creates beautiful art inside the mess. If you’ve never listened to music made on a Nintendo, start with Endless Fantasy.

Watch the delightfully weird music video for “Meow” here!

[youtube_sc url=”http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc3JWo2iiGc”]

I have never posted on the website, but I feel the need to now. Words do not describe my excitement at the moment. For those of you who don’t know, some of the Music Directors are big (In my case BIG) fans of the Ska/Punk/Jazz amalgamation known as  Streetlight Manifesto. After years of waiting we finally have a new original album to obsess over! Excuse me if this announcement/review/gushing session lacks any semblance of literary value, as I’m writing this I am also listening to this album for the second time. Oh by the way, the album entitled The Hands That Thieve and it rocks.

For the time being, this is my favorite song from the album is “With any Sort of Certainty.”

So for those who don’t know why us crazed ska fans love Streetlight, we all have our own reasons. For me, it starts with the fact that they play THE best live show that I have ever seen. Hands down, no contest, end of conversation. All of Streetlight’s members are amazing musicians and they simply bring an energy to their jazzy melodies which no other group I’ve ever seen can match. As a group  they are as loud as a ska band, with the sound quality of big band jazz and the energy of a great punk band.

Though there are not yet well recorded live versions of Streetlight’s new release, I will be going out of my way to see them this summer and I expect it to be awesome.

Bobby

P.S. Though Streetlight is selling the album, they have actually gone on record suggesting that their fans download it illegally. So, if you are so inclined it won’t cost you a thing.

(DISCLAIMER: WDCV, Dickinson College and this author do not condone these practices as they are illegal)

I went through a period when I was in eighth and ninth grade where I had messy long hair, a variety of black band t-shirts advertising bands like Iron Maiden and Guns N’ Roses, and a perpetual scowl. This was before I embraced most of my favorite bands of today, like Arcade Fire and Neutral Milk Hotel, but it was also before I saw the value in pop music. I didn’t see the musical value in pop stars like Katy Perry or Lady Gaga, and even less in dance artists and DJs like David Guetta and Deadmau5. I spent most of my music time listening to killer guitar solos and howling metal vocals and deriding things that weren’t hard enough as pop garbage spoon-fed to the mainstream masses.

“One More Time” by Daft Punk was one of the first dance tracks I really got into. From there, I started listening to all of Discovery, and then Homework and Human After All. All three albums had something of a different vibe (Homework’s street sound, Discovery’s slick, funk groove, Human After All’s hard rock guitars), but carried the same extreme professionalism and production values. Even though Human After All had its detractors, it was still pretty well received, and it seemed like Daft Punk was about to go on a creation spree. They released a remix album for Human After All in 2006, followed by a great live album in 2007.

Then nothing. No word on a new album or singles or anything. Eventually, it came out that Daft Punk would be doing the soundtrack to Tron: Legacy. It wasn’t a new studio album, but it was something. Still, after it came out, it didn’t FEEL like a Daft Punk album. It was good, solid score and had some great tracks like “Derezzed”, “Solar Sailor” and “End Of Line”, but it felt too much like a film tie-in. The Daft Punk staples weren’t there and all it did for me was make me more excited for something new.

Enter Random Access Memories and “Get Lucky”. Weird viral marketing with Saturday Night Live promos, a teaser at Coachella, and a series of fifteen minute videos called The Collaborators, interviewing artists who worked with Daft Punk for Random Access Memories. Dozens of “leaks” that consisted of fifteen second loops recut and remixed into something passing itself off as a Daft Punk track.

The moment has passed and “Get Lucky”, the first single from the first true Daft Punk album in over eight years, is out. It features guitar work from Nile Rodgers of Chic and vocals from Pharrell Williams of N.E.R.D. and production duo The Neptunes. Rodgers absolutely destroys the guitar line, creating one of the funkiest and most danceable guitar hooks in recent memory, while Williams croons his way through the verses, nearly creeping into a falsetto in the chorus.

“Get Lucky” isn’t the best Daft Punk song ever made. It also doesn’t have much in common with the traditional Daft Punk singles, like “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” or “Human After All”, instead opting more for a sound like Discovery’s “Face To Face”. It may be a curious choice for a lead single from an incredibly hyped album, but when it comes down to it, “Get Lucky” is an extremely catchy, danceable track that doesn’t sacrifice artistic integrity. If this is a preview to the “new” Daft Punk, I can safely say that I’m excited to see what they have in store for the rest of the album.

Random Access Memories comes out May 21^st.

I was 15 or 16 when my father bought us tickets to see Aerosmith. At the time, my music tastes leaned more towards hard rock and heavy metal than indie and alternative, and I was ecstatic to go. After KISS, Aerosmith was probably my favorite hard rock band. I had a vinyl sleeve of Toys in the Attic mounted on my bedroom wall and I owned their first four albums (from Aerosmith to Rocks) on CD. As a budding rock guitarist, Joe Perry was one of my all-time idols, and Steven Tyler was a hell-raising, cocaine-snorting rock n’ roll demon who probably should have died half a dozen times in his heyday.

With that in mind, it was pretty absurd to think that he’d fall off a stage and break his shoulder. My 93 year old great-grandmother falls down and breaks things, not Steven Tyler. The idea that this golden god (to borrow a term from Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous) could break his shoulder and cancel the rest of the tour was unthinkable. To compensate for our mutual disappointment in the concert being canceled, my father bought us tickets to see Heaven and Hell that summer instead. That show was excellent, but not a year after we crowded in the small WaMu Theater in Seattle, Ronnie James Dio had succumbed to cancer.

In that year, I realized that rock stars are people too. They get old. They go gray. Their shoulders break and their voices rot, turning iconic rasps and croons into shadows of what they once were. Even if the parts still work, the spirit feels a little gone. Something just feels off listening to Alice Cooper sing “I’m Eighteen” at the age of 60, and while Paul Stanley may have been a hot, androgynous sex symbol in 1975, I don’t want anywhere near his Love Gun in 2013. Even new material feels a little stale. AC/DC is pretty obviously running out of ideas, given the number of songs that have some variation on “Rock And Roll” in the title off of Black Ice.

All of this buildup means that when ”Where Are We Now”, the lead single off of David Bowie’s new album, The Next Day, was released without any warning or buildup last month, I was cautious. Although I was mostly a metalhead in junior high, I always had an affinity for David Bowie, so much so that I wrote a play about his music once, a la Mama Mia or that once Billy Joel musical. It’s been a decade since Bowie last released an album, with 2003’s Reality. “Where Are We Now” sounded like it could have been recorded during the Reality sessions. It’s a slower, contemplative song, with Boiwe’s distinctive croon in full swing.

I still had my doubts. I had resigned myself to the notion that Bowie would never put out another album. I own every Bowie album from 1969’s Space Oddity to 1980’s Scary Monsters, as well as 1995’s Outside, Reality, and the live album Live from Santa Monica, 1973. When I read that longtime Bowie collaborators Tony Visconti and Earl Slick featured prominently on the record, I worried that The Next Day would be an attempt at recapturing the spirit of Ziggy Stardust or Low. Even the cover art, a white square with the words “The Next Day” scrawled in it, pasted over the cover art for “Heroes” seemed like a ploy conjure up nostalgia for Bowie’s old work.

In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have worried. After a few missteps in the late 80s and early 90s (Tin Machine, anyone?), Bowie got his career back on track and released some great albums like Reality and Heathen. Reality, especially, showed that Bowie knows how to grow old gracefully. He mixed the modern with the retro, merging the avant-garde with the mainstream. The disparate influences (folk, industrial, hard rock, funk, etc) that pepper his work may change from album to album, but the telltale signs of a Bowie album remain.

The Next Day continues the legacy of Heathen and Reality. We are officially in the era of Modern Bowie, after moving through the decades with Folk Bowie, Glam Bowie, Funk Bowie, Avant-Garde Bowie, Disco Bowie, and perhaps half a dozen more. Many Bowie albums can be grouped into trilogies. Most famously is Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy of Low, “Heroes”, and Lodger, so-named for their place of recording. Less often grouped together are Bowie’s Glam Trilogy of Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs, each a concept album with glam rock influences, or the Comeback Trilogy of Black Tie, White Noise, Outside, and Earthling, that established Bowie’s continued relevance by embracing techno, drum n’ bass, and industrial music styles.

Now we have the Modern Trilogy. Musically, there’s a little of column A, a little of column Z, and everything in between. The Next Day’s second single “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” is pure modern Bowie, an up-tempo rocker with acoustic guitar, piano, and synthesizers all dancing around a standard rock tune. “If You Can See Me”, with frenzied drums, paranoid vocals, and claustrophobic production wouldn’t be out of place on Outside, while “(You Will) Set The World On Fire” could have been cut from one of Bowie’s early 70’s albums. “Valentine’s Day” and “Love Is Lost” are darker, more sinister songs in the style of Station to Station or Diamond Dogs.

The Next Day serves almost as a career retrospective for Bowie. It hits a lot of the same themes that Bowie has written about for forty years, from war and politics to the tragedy of the human condition, not to mention liberal use of historical and artistic references. It incorporates broad sweeping genres and styles that Bowie has moved through in his career. It is a classic David Bowie album, only released in 2013 instead of the 1970s.

And yet, The Next Day never reaches for the low-hanging fruit. Despite borrowing subject matter or even musical cues (the outro of “You Feel So Lonely You Could Die” uses the unmistakable drum beat of “Five Years”, the opening track of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust), it never feels trite or gimmicky. The Next Day doesn’t indulge in nostalgia. Unlike some aging rockers who rely on rewriting mediocre versions of their own past hits, Bowie uses his history as a stepping stone. The sounds of Ziggy Stardust and “Heroes” and Scary Monsters don’t appear on The Next Day to deceive the listene into a sense of nostalgia. Instead, they serve as roadmaps to the new, exciting direction that modern Bowie has taken. For what it does, for how it’s able to bridge the new and the old, the comforting and the edgy, The Next Day is an exceptional example of a legendary star growing old gracefully.