GO: OD AM, Mac Miller, Remember/Warner Bros
Rappers spend lots of time on their rhymes, and producers spend lots of time on their beats, but you’d be surprised how often those two practices don’t neatly intersect. There’s little in hip-hop more disappointing than a great rapper with a tin ear for beats. Conversely, a sharp ear can rescue a bum rapper, or elevate a good one to great.
Mac Miller is a producer and musician in addition to being a rapper — you can hear it all over GO: OD AM, his first major-label album, and one of the most musically appealing hip-hop LPs of the year. It’s lush and crisp, and also diverse: The smooth love song ROS is produced by DJ Dahi; the woozy shuffle Time Flies is by Christian Rich; and the post-Heatmakerz soul with a bleating sax outro titled Brand Name is by ID Labs.
As a rapper, Mac Miller is an East Coast formalist, and good at it. He’s from Pittsburgh, and a clear inheritor of New York’s mid-90s to mid-00s golden age, with the polysyllabic internal rhymes to prove it.
But as he’s getting more established, he’s bending flows. On a couple of songs here — Brand Name, When in Rome — he speeds up for forays into Southern style, and on Doors, he’s slurry.
Those innovations have come amid turmoil in Mac Miller’s life: Much of this album is focused on the glories of fame — women, money, drugs — and, more vividly, the downside of embracing those temptations. On Ascension, he grumbles about not knowing how “I’m supposed to look into my parents’ eye/ when I’m scared to die/ my eyes same color as the cherry pie.” He sounds sad, but the piano behind him is sadder; the moaning background singers are morbid; and the snares land sharply, like a stick to the wrist.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
La Di Da Di, Battles, Warp
Hasta la vista, vocals. Battles, the definitive math-rock band, goes fully instrumental on La Di Da Di, the group’s third studio album and a tour de force. Vocals from a founding member who has left the band, Tyondai Braxton, meshed with the instruments on Battles’ 2007 debut album, Mirrored; guest singers on the 2011 Gloss Drop often cluttered up their songs.
Now, Battles has recalibrated. The tracks on La Di Da Di are often dense but always streamlined. They’re all about forward momentum, dollops of melody, layered repetition that mutates as it goes, and out-of-nowhere pivots and swerves that turn out to serve an underlying plan.
Battles has honed a kind of high-impact minimalism, situating its music between the methodical propulsion of loops and the upside-your-head power of impulse and surprise. John Stanier’s drums are the music’s visceral core, keeping things funky and sometimes knocking sense into a welter of burbling synthesizers. Ian Williams, on keyboards and guitars, and Dave Konopka, on guitar and bass, stack up the rest of the sounds: blurry and crystalline, fractured and tuneful, programmed and played. The components of the music are often cyclical, but it’s rare that a Battles track goes for more than 10 seconds without some conspicuous change.
The Yabba, which opens the album, descends from a sustained ether and moves through sections in 5/4 and then 6/8 time before suddenly settling into a rock 4/4, which then spasms into double time, unfurls an Asian-tinged fanfare and dips under whizzing effects out of vintage sci-fi. For all the compositional ambition, there’s also tomfoolery; yes, those synthesizer motifs sound like squeeze toys.
It’s just the beginning of the album’s sonic and structural multiplicity: perky dance music (Dot Com), hints of exotica (FF Bada, Luu Le), urgently surreal action themes (Non-Violence, Summer Simmer). Battles thinks hard and kicks harder.
— Jon Parles, NY Times News Service
Speaking in Tongues, Luciana Souza, Sunnyside
Luciana Souza has used her voice as an instrument of empathy and intimacy, cultural linkage and poetic disquisition. Sometimes, too, she has used it as an instrument in a more literal sense. Her history with a range of jazz and classical composers has shown that she can be a color in a larger palette, singing wordlessly but with full expressive intent. That’s largely the point of her fine new album, Speaking in Tongues.
It places her limber, dusky voice within the stir of an excellent band, featuring Lionel Loueke on guitar, Gregoire Maret on harmonica, Massimo Biolcati on bass and Kendrick Scott on drums. Each musician hails from a different country of origin, one reason for the album’s title. Another is Souza’s use of scat syllabics, a lexicon she imbues with shadowy gravity rather than coquettish razzle-dazzle.
Souza, 49, has composed more than half the album, with the dynamic capacities of this ensemble in mind. Straw Hat has a hard-driving pulse and a frisky, syncopated melody; Free at Last suggests a nod to the Pat Metheny Group. And Filhos de Gandhi gives Souza a welcome excuse to flirt with the samba phrasing of her native Brazil. (It’s distinct from the famous track of that title by Gilberto Gil and Jorge Ben.)
Souza’s main point is connection — music as a universal language that transcends difference. Meaningfully, the only tracks with proper lyrics are musical adaptations of Leonard Cohen poems, from his Book of Longing.
In one of these, Split, Souza sings of the bond of marriage in terms suggestive of a rift. In the other, No One to Follow, she projects an existential resignation: Despairing that “the goal/ Falls short of the reach,” she ends up holding that last word for a good 10 seconds, to properly devastating effect.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
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