Cartoon virtual band Gorillaz is back this month with the release of its third studio album, Plastic Beach, this time railing against the hazards of human excess. As you would expect, the guest stars are of breathtaking number and variety. Who else but Gorillaz would be able to convince Lou Reed, Mos Def and The Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music to work on the same project?
Of course an album this ambitious is prone to problems, and there are times when things simply don’t work. The orchestral lead-in to White Flag feels out of place, Snoop Dogg’s contribution to Welcome to the Plastic Beach provides more comic relief than quality work and the track Broken probably shouldn’t have made the final cut.
But the songs that are good are very good. The lead single Stylo relies on an incredibly propulsive bassline to carry the listener through a series of vocal performances by 2D (Damon Albarn), Mos Def and aging soul singer Bobby Womack, highlighted by 2D’s Beegees-esque delivery of the hook-line “coming on to the overload,” a reference to world overpopulation.
On an album characterized by many special moments, Sweepstakes stands out as the best. The song is left raw in all the right parts and Mos Def delivers a fantastic performance, perfectly framed by the track’s swelling pandemonium. It is a truly original track, a great example of the magic that can happen when a talented rapper and his producer are on the same page.
Although Plastic Beach would at times benefit from less heavy handed production, there are simply too many great songs too ignore this must-listen.
Vampire Weekend first made a splash on the indie-rock scene in 2008 with its eponymous debut, an album that inspired very strong opinions, both positive and negative. Fans embraced the band’s playfulness and coyly clever lyrics tucked neatly within readily accessible genre-bending songs. Detractors bemoaned an apparent lack of depth resulting from an overly simple, cutesy approach to songwriting, feeling the sounds they borrowed from the world of Afro-pop to be used in poor taste.
Contra, the band’s second album, sees them running even further down the path laid out on Vampire Weekend. But if you have the stomach for it, it is quite a treat. The opening track, Horchata, named after a spiced beverage popular in Latin America, is driven along by a happy marimba and thumping electronic kick drum while vocalist Ezra Koenig delivers quirky lines such as “In December drinking horchata/I’d look psychotic in a balaclava.” It’s shamelessly catchy and sets the tone for the rest of the record. The band typically sounds best on its high-energy tracks, but the album’s last and best track is an exception. I think UR a Contra is sad, slow, and spacey, with Koenig singing in his sweetest voice atop strings and flowery guitar.
Keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij is also the producer, and he clearly has a talent for laying down unusually vibrant sounds side by side and giving them each the space to breathe in a mix, lending even the more experimental tracks on the record a comfortable, laid-back feel. The result is an album that feels richly adorned but never cramped.Endless Falls is experimental electronica solo artist Loscil’s fifth release on the avant-garde label Kranky Records, also responsible for releasing music by such acts as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Low and Deerhunter.
This is ambient music, so there are no catchy chorus hooks to hum along to and no triumphant chord changes to demand your attention. The album begins and ends with the sound of rain recorded in the musician’s backyard, a fitting bookend for a record as unobtrusive as this one. Like falling rain, the music in Endless Falls can act as soothing background noise, or, if given an active listen, a catalyst for endless melancholic musings.
At times you may find yourself bobbing your head to beats that barely exist, buried deep beneath swirling harmonic drones and intricate, otherworldly textures. The inclusion of acoustic instruments such as strings and piano gives the record a more organic feel, but I would not go so far as to say it adds warmth. This is, first and foremost, a record that puts space between itself and its listeners in the sincere hope that they will be the ones to bridge the gap with their own thoughts and experiences.
British multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter Sophie Madeleine wrote Love. Life. Ukelele. while working on her master’s degree in songwriting at Bath Spa University. She put the album up for sale on the Internet last year with the help of Bandcamp (www.bandcamp.com), an online digital music company. This year, Love. Life. Ukelele. became the first vinyl release of BCWax, a new “unlabel” from Bandcamp that hopes to provide its customers with something that can’t be downloaded: a beautiful, collectible piece of art they can hold in their hands. The artwork for the vinyl release is by Dan Stiles, who has also worked with the likes of Sonic Youth, Death Cab for Cutie and Feist and who is slated to provide all the future artwork for BCWax releases.
Love. Life. Ukelele. is a collection of pleasantly simple pop songs. It won’t blow anyone away with its originality, but it is solid from top to bottom. The instrumentation (often led by a ukelele, though Madeleine also adds guitar, keys, glockenspiel, melodica, organ and percussion, all played by herself) is eccentric enough to hold your attention, and, most importantly, Madeleine has the sort of effortless voice that can carry a cliche as far as it needs to go.
The album won’t make anyone’s Top 10 list this year, but it is definitely worth a listen if you have a penchant for folky pop music.
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