Album Review: J Tillman's I Love You, Honeybear - A-
(02/11/15 10:01am)
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2014 is nearly over, and the music world has all but come to a close until January, unless we get another surprise Beyonce or (fingers crossed!) Kendrick Lamar album for Christmas. Rather than rank albums in a giant head-to-head end-of-the-year list, I decided to give various eclectic awards to a select group of albums that represents music from a variety of genres.
This past year’s Barclaycard Mercury prize winner was Dead, the February release and debut LP by Scotland-via-West Africa hip hop trio Young Fathers. A confident rap record blending heavy Afropop influences with topical, socially-relevant lyrics, the record is a forward-thinking departure from recent electronic and rock winners (James Blake, alt-J) and further advances the globalization of musical cultures and genres.
Taylor Swift has been on the pop scene for nearly a decade, making her a staple of radio music since elementary and middle school for me and many of my peers. Her new album, 1989, is named after her birth year. That makes Swift nearly seven years older than the average Rice University freshman. But I still think of her as the seemingly perennial teenager that burst on the scene in 2006 with songs about the overwhelming emotions associated with high -school romance. And her country-tinged, guitar-rock ballads are at least partially responsible for the introduction of country into mainstream-pop radio, although her detractors will call those tunes ‘country pop’ or just ‘pop.’
In retrospect, it’s easy to label what each year sounded like in music. 1969 was psychedelic rock music; 1977 was disco; 1985 was new wave (and Bruce Springsteen); 1991 was grunge; 1999 was teen pop stars; 2012 was dubstep. It’s much more difficult to describe what the “sound of today” is. For one thing, each year brings more genre crossover than the year before it, from Taylor Swift featuring dubstep production to Avicii featuring a folk ballad. Additionally, as streaming and MP3 downloading become more and more popular, to the point where far more students listen to Spotify than the radio, popular taste becomes divergent as individuals develop keen, eclectic tastes. So that’s why listening to the excellent second album, Wonder Where We Land, by British electronic musician SBTRKT should both amaze and confound listeners; it’s composed of everything popular now but still carves out its space as an album unlike any other released this year.
The sophomore album from a young, successful band is often the most important to their career arc and for good reason: The sophomore slump is a very real thing. Countless upstart indie bands, from MGMT to The Strokes to The xx, have received some degree of critical backlash for their second LPs, typically because they either changed nothing about their formula or they changed it too much. This is the stage set for alt-J, the Leeds-based folk and electronic crossover band that came out of nowhere in 2012 to win the Mercury Prize, the award given to best British LP of the year, for their debut album An Awesome Wave.
Some albums make you think, like the multi-layered dramas penned by The National. Others make you feel, like the heart-wrenching ballads on Arcade Fire’s Funeral.
“And the only thing that really matter is the one thing I can’t seem to do,” vocalist and lyricist Martin Courtney sings on “Talking Backward,” the third song off New Jersey-based jangly, indie-pop band Real Estate’s third LP, Atlas. Although the track gives some insight into his emotional dilemma, there is the ever-present sense that we are missing something. If this was a 60s-pop lyric, we would safely assume the “one thing” is to say is “I love you,” but Real Estate always leaves the listener feeling a bit unsure, partly because Courtney uses words so sparingly, but also because the eternally sunny, bright landscape created by Real Estate’s trademark trebly, wavering guitar lines always seems to cloak even the darkest lyrics in radiant light.
Where the 2000s will be seen by some as the great rock ’n’ roll revival era, boasting scores of new guitar bands paying homage to the legendary rock bands from 30 years earlier, the 2010s may be seen as the revival of synth music, paying similar dues to the founding synth and progressive groups of the 80s.
When it comes to music made by Los Angeles songwriting veteran Beck Hansen, aka Beck, I think Bender from Futurama said it best: “I always dreamed of being a musician-poet who transcends genres even as he reinvents them, just like you!”
Favorite tracks: "Going Out," "Nightingale" and "Inauguration" Album available for $9.99 on iTunes.
Favorite tracks: "Going Out," "Nightingale," and "Inauguration" Album available for $9.99 on iTunes.
When Beach House, a Maryland duo, first put out minimalist tracks with spacey, echoing vocals, the music community dubbed it "dream pop." That same style quickly caught on and was reinterpreted until the genre was saturated with watered-down dance music, shoegaze and everything in between. Luckily, Warpaint has emerged from the late 2000's dream pop swamp with new music that is simultaneously subtle and powerful while placing the listener exactly where the genre intended: in a dreamlike trance that moves and sways with the dips and turns
In the wake of the Internet came a whole new way to gain fame in the music world - make something that people want to listen to, put it on YouTube, gain fame overnight. Such is the story of Wesleyan-Brooklyn-based rap trio Das Racist, who made waves with their 2008 jam "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" before releasing two impressive mixtapes and a single debut album prior to breaking up to pursue solo careers. From the ashes of the group have risen an impressive and prolific run of five mixtapes from one of two primary Das Racist rappers, Victor Vazquez, aka Kool A.D. His latest mixtape, Not O.K., demonstrates his further development as a rapper since the breakup of the group while returning to the style of his Northern California roots.
Last December, as we spent late nights in the library cramming for our finals, Beyonce Knowles dropped Beyonce, a surprise visual album on iTunes, a full-blown LP with 14 tracks, each accompanied by a music video. The quality of the production, combined with a change in the direction of the songwriting, set the music world abuzz as critics were clamoring to complete their year-end lists.
2013 is practically gone, and we have seen a lot of great records put out in what is sure to go down as an important year for music in recent history. Rather than rank albums head-to-head in a giant end-of-the-year list, I decided to give various eclectic awards to a select group of albums that represent the entire spectrum of music released this year.
Arcade Fire recently appeared on The Colbert Report to support its new album, where Colbert asked "What do you like more: getting people to listen to your message about isolation in the modern world, or getting them on the dance floor to shake that ass?" Despite its comedic intentions, Colbert's question concisely sums up Reflektor, the fourth LP from the Grammy Award-winning, Montreal-based 10-piece. While previous incarnations of Arcade Fire have been noted for their seriousness and sobriety, often performing in Amish-style clothing and retaining solemn poker faces during interviews, this time around, the group seems to feature a relaxed, humorous approach to public appearances, a PR change also "reflekted" in Arcade Fire's new style of music.