Roundabout Midnight
For a brief period as the Aughts drew to a close, a Eurodisco splinter cell formed in the southern hemisphere. New Zealand’s Ladyhawke and Australian acts like Van She, Cut Copy, The Presets, and Midnight Juggernauts, all with nurturing from the Modular record label, managed to loosen the Continental stranglehold on blog house and indie dance. Midnight Juggernauts may be first back to the record rack and download queue, but the results on their 2010 album The Crystal Axis might end up pretty far (if you will) down under those of their compatriots. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in Reviews Midnight Juggernauts, Modular
In these last few years marked by economic downturn and technological advances and encroachments, one thing has been the financial saving grace of musicians large and small: concerts. Shrinking profits may be killing records, record labels, and the record industry as we once knew it, but touring—with its merchandise offerings and its potential for fans to witness unique output at every venue—has long been considered an ironclad moneymaker. Then sweet and sultry songstress Sarah McLachlan goes and resurrects Lilith Fair, the female-focused traveling festival she spearheaded in the late 1990s, and all manner of alarms go off. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in Show Reviews Beth Orton, Carly Simon, Cat Power, Chairlift, Chan Marshall, Indigo Girls, Jill Hennessy, Lilith Fair, Priscilla Renea, Sara Bareilles, Sarah McLachlan, Selena Gomez, Serena Ryder, Suzanne Vega
Scratchin’ the Surface
If nothing else, Amanda Blank’s solo bow I Love You successfully suggests that the Baltimore booty-bass dance movement has more to offer than just squelching synth riffs, blatantly dirty lyrics, or rhythms that thunder into oblivion. Sadly, that evidence from the Philadelphia native and her band of misfits comes in tiny pieces with no clear assembly or arrangement. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in Reviews Amanda Blank, Diplo, spank rock, Switch, XXXChange
Growing Up in the Spotlight
A news cycle and music industry both forever changed by technology have conspired to burst the professional bubbles of a growing number of musicians given premature media-darling status. Look at the likes of Uffie and The Black Kids—performers who moved to the front of public consciousness and then just as quickly threatened to move immediately to the back after respectable periods of press praise and small releases eventually centered around a debut or new album. In this day and age it builds word-of-mouth, sure, but does it also kill momentum? And why do some of these artists, including Chicago rapper-ette Kid Sister on her own debut Ultraviolet, complicate matters by smothering any whiff of promise? Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in Reviews Kid Sister
Digging Out of Their Own Hole
As we approached the 2010s, Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons watched their career trajectory as The Chemical Brothers plunge about as far and hard as the world’s financial markets. The acceptance developed over a 12-year-old catalog up to and including Push the Button was pretty much destroyed with We are the Night, an album so lifeless that even its gimmick track “The Salmon Dance” was notorious poison on top of poison. But recovery is possible, and on Further The Chemical Brothers seem to turn to an unlikely remedy: improvisation. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in High Fidelity, Reviews The Chemical Brothers
Inventor, Re-invent Thyself
Music can be a perfect vehicle for storytelling. For much of its history, it told tales using the ink of voice and the paper of hand-played instruments. Only recently has artificially generated music been up to the same task—plot and dialogue sculpted by Steinski et al., tone and tenor found in Portishead’s crime dramas and more. Under his stage name Daedelus on the new release Righteous Fists of Harmony, West Coast producer Alfred Darlington is part of a new crop of artists—existential, experimental, interpretive and thematic—taking up the cause of electronic bards past. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in Reviews Daedelus
Happening Ever After
James Murphy and his cronies in LCD Soundsystem (and DFA Records, by extension) have spent the majority of this new century tracing the template of the British-German dance-music axis across America. Their self-titled debut used genius grooves to support deadpan humor and prideful calls-and-responses closer to yelling than real lyrics. Those beats moved to the forefront of Sound of Silver, linking variations on rubbery, paranoid electro-funk by Parliament, David Bowie, and Kraftwerk. Their new third album This is Happening manages to tie elements of both efforts into one pretty package. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in High Fidelity, Reviews DFA Records, James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem
Listen Again, for the First Time
Regularity comforts the human animal. There’s a sense of relief gleaned from things that suggest order in the world. It’s evident in the passing seasons, Old Faithful’s eruptions, the life cycle of cicadas, and to no small extent the voice and temperament of one Sade Adu. Leading her namesake outfit Sade on Soldier of Love, Adu has quietly slipped into the role of a female Barry White, as consistently warm and romantic as a bear rug in front of a fireplace. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in High Fidelity, Reviews Sade
Take Only What You Need From It
The decent singles on MGMT’s popular debut Oracular Spectacular poked out of a neo-psychedelic haze that, truth be told, was painfully inferior to that of contemporaries like Yeasayer and Animal Collective. Brooklynites Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden proved themselves as adept at hiding their hammy history as spinning the thread of their college jam-band fandom into gold. Their follow-up Congratulations finds MGMT—yikes—doubling down on the retro weirdness. Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in Reviews MGMT
Someone Else’s Soundtrack
Daptone Records built their tower of soul power in Brooklyn, but they quietly draw an axis down through Augusta, Georgia, home to the true face of their company, Sharon Jones. The former prison guard has fronted three albums with the label’s house band The Dap-Kings, but album number four, I Learned the Hard Way, is a sobering reminder that you can’t spell “seriously funky” without “serious.” Read more…
By Adam Blyweiss Posted in Reviews Daptone Records, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings
