Drake’s new single drops like a neutron marshmallow, a fairly WTF bit of pomp and pompenstance that just. doesn’t. function. as a single, especially not after the Robotech-stomp of “Forever.” I will not preclude the possibility that on a proper record it serves a narrative purpose, but on its own “Over” is a weirdly ornate but intense! poof of snoot and bloat, at once too long and too mean-spirited lyrically and too big and too insubstantial musically. We hear tiny armies of trumpeteers and android choirs and the beat claps to attention for a moment at a time before halting, glib as fuck. There is absolutely no context in which I can imagine playing this track for a large group of people. And while Drake’s flow remains wonderfully solid and direct it starts here at a whine and gets worse as the track goes on, lending the whole thing the feel of a curtain-tearing temper tantrum. It feels clipped gracelessly from something larger, either a desperately myopic synth-studded rap opera or one big budget shit-show of an embarrassment. I may not be thanking you later, Drake, as your new album title insists, but I’ll definitely be getting back to you on this one.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Drake

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You might not expect a sane Canadian to draw power from Vanilla Ice’s coattails, but that’s exactly what Toronto’s John O’Regan has done while on break from his main act the D’Urbervilles. Now sporting a look that could start a catfight between Van Winkle, Gok Wan, and Morrissey, and churning out pop so slick it makes fashion designers hang themselves, O’Regan is poised to be Torch Carrier #1 in the run for new LCD Soundsystem. However, the fact he’s been signed to Tomlab—home of the super-candid Casiotone for the Painfully Alone—should tell you this homeboy isn’t just about the makeup, and his follow-up to last year’s “All Yr Songs” isn’t your average genderbender battle cry. O’Regan’s got a voice like Chris Isaak and the temperament of a jilted librarian, making “Wait & See” an altogether more earnest kind of battle cry. In fact, it’s sober enough to be labeled just a catchy angst song sung by a man who happens to prefer eyeliner.

Face paint aside, “Wait & See” has all the feel of a very conceivable hit single paired down with guilt and self-awareness, and shows that O’Regan’s matured (or at least been dumped) since his surfacing on Hype Lighter a year ago. Against a background of slippy keyboards and straight-up guitar, Rings recounts his life as a series of daydreams that failed to mesh, the sum of which has left him with a mental warning light which he flashes to ward off a partner. “For your heart’s sake / Don’t you wait around for me to decide what I want to grow up to be / I’ll just let you down if I do decide that I just want to wait and see”. Only a man with a dress sense this vivid would wear doubt like it’s a size thirteen shoe, tripping so cooly over the cracks in his conscience it’ll makes girls want to wait for him even longer. Don’t worry though, mothers—yes he’s a rascal, and yes he’s a synth-wizard, but fuck it: can that man accessorize.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Canada Gloss Pop, D'urbervilles, John O'regan

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It starts with what sounds like an excerpt from Jeff Mangum’s woozy radio collages: first a wash of melancholy accordion, then a compressed drum loop, a couple micro-chopped sitars, and some bass notes. That’s it. The accordion fades back in, and there’s some electronic stuttering, but it’s the simplicity that makes “Ancestors” such an album-defining song. Flying Lotus’ production echoes musically what Gonja has said about his lyrics: “Bottled-up energy, then all of a sudden, the way it came out seemed perfect…it kept flowing.”

Gonja’s vocals are consistently hushed and slightly distorted throughout A Sufi and A Killer, his debut album, and while this occasionally makes it feel like a producer’s album, the whole thing hinges on his sad, eerie ramblings. “Ancestors, take my hand,” he says, and the vague, soulful plea—“of my skin and flesh I’m so ashamed”—feels almost terrifyingly lived-in, of internal workings becoming one with the mythology that they stem from. That kind of perfectly executed restraint, the kind with lots of thought implied but very little visible, is what makes the song so striking and otherworldly.

The patient confidence of “Ancestors” and its parent record are refreshing and instructive when kids like Neon Indian can do their own experiments with compression and end up on Late Night with an embarrassing imbalance in their swagger-to-substance ratio. That a debut single can sound this old while still having the visceral, head-turning qualities needed to stand out is both reassuring and sort of mind-blowing.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Flying Lotus, Gonjasufi

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When Dan Snaith flipped the switch three years ago from funky, diced, largely instrumental music to purely vocal psychedelic pop, it was the right move at the right time: with help from his origins as Manitoba, he had a solid enough back catalog to instantly make Caribou a broadly defined band while affording a growing audience more accessible entry points; call “Melody Day” the most accessible of the accessible. “Odessa,” Caribou’s first new release since Andorra (2007), might not represent a similar kind of game-changer, but like the canvas-broadening moves made between his first three albums, it takes familiar elements—Snaith’s soulfully minute voice and the rich loops that dominated his last LP—and propels them somewhere he can fitfully reign: the dancefloor.

The breakbeats of Up In Flames (2003) and the IDM of Start Breaking My Heart (2001) always stayed resolutely in the background, as colorful as they could be, and even Snaith’s poppier past few albums have seemed haltingly intellectual. But like Four Tet’s own move towards the more immediately pleasing elements of dubstep and more straightforward electronica, “Odessa” locks in the tambourine-heavy beat over an infectious, watery bassline, with Snaith’s repetitious vocal reminiscent of Erland Øye’s soft-rock, disco-tinged whisper throughout his Whitest Boy Alive project.

The almost-too-quiet descending guitar riff that slips in under the comparatively ostentatious, panning samples between verse and chorus demonstrates that Snaith still possesses tricks to be revealed, perhaps exposed more explicitly throughout the upcoming Swim. But very little else is hidden here. The bass gets piano emphasis; the weird samples get fun variations; the tambourine gets a pulse-quickening tempo shift from some sort of cowbell; the Arthur Russell grooves that have been James Murphy’s bread and butter are given enough color and depth to survive headphone repetition, but retain a relieving translucence: this is the sound of an unfairly talented control freak no longer giving a shit. And it makes me want to shake my ass. As Mystikal would advise, I ought to watch myself.

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⊙ Keyword Tags: Caribou, Manitoba

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So you all know Mr. Wednesday: he came number two in a list of Top Ten Things Which Catch You Out (with number one being glugging back hot coffee which on swallowing proves to be cold). Wednesday won his prize based on the momentary horror you experience when you think there’s only one day left to go before the weekend, but then suddenly come to and realize today’s not Thursday—it’s Wednesday. Two more days to go! The joke’s on you, Mr Wednesday. Now put down that coffee and get the fuck back to work.

What the Top Ten Things Which Catch You Out didn’t know is that if you swing off that momentary horror long enough, it can draw you into the fast lane of the Road to Reinvention, where the old-fangled working week is a good four or five police chases behind you. Hence why this A-side from previously wyrd/folk meddlers Lykes of Yew ramps up like old-school Steppenwolf, rumbling along on a three-minute chopper like Dennis Hopper on flexi-time. Dave Jonathan Jones’ benzo drawl paints a picture of a die-hard who once was a travel agent, now decked out in fine stolen duds that help add sex to his dialogue: “As he tips the brim broad of a deep blue fedora / And his words speak of travel to places inside and outside / He moves his hand as he speaks and it trails an aura / And his voice spreads in ripples of colour, so deep and so wide…” The fuel tank of pharmaceuticals is definitely kicking in now, Benicio and Johnny D hot on its tail. It’s this psychoactive element that helps Terry Davey’s guitar solos whipsnap like angry Frusciante, and mentally marries “Mr Wednesday” to a biker clone of the Mock The Week jingle. Which, ironically enough, is on Thursdays.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Marsh Rock Blues

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On “Epic Song”—er, “World Sick”—Broken Social Scene at last find the midpoint between the slickly produced rhythmic thrust of You Forgot it in People (2003) and the type of music a journeyman director with one foot in the indie crowd would play at the climax of a romantic comedy. This is Ryan-Philippe-standing-at-the-top-of-the-escalator-rock, Edward-Cullen-staring-moodily-out-of-a-train-rock. It is a big, hot, wet piffle. It is as refreshing as a Mountain Dew, and roughly as welcome. I do not drink Mountain Dew.

Perhaps the only interesting thing about it is how profoundly uninteresting it is, succumbing to the sort of production-bloat that crippled onetime weakerthans like Stars or I’m From Barcelona. Beneath all this orchestration is neither a song nor a jam, as if every component of the track along those lines was workshopped and sessioned out in some sort of refining post-production process, removing structural support until all that’s left is the frills. This is less a monument to ornamentation—as the band has seemed occasionally, thrillingly to be—than it is a pile of ornaments. And a couple of gigantic choruses, to be fair, but if we’re going to reduce a song to a single element that element ought to be a little more substantive than these choruses, which sound more like futbol fightsongs than, like, music.

But wevs, right? David Gray fans gotta rock out to something.

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⊙ Keyword Tags: Broken Social Scene

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In space, no one can hear you scream; on Mars, nothing can grow except moss; Doff™ garden weedkiller’s just been banned in the UK. Connect these events via crooked astrology and you have “Overtaken by Moss” by DoF (or Pennsylvania’s Brian Hulick as his taxman likes to call him). Hulick may well have actually been in space for all his recent activity—his last uploads to MySpace were some acoustic Christmas covers a year ago—but now he’s back with an entire album for P*Dis Tokyo: the imprint to go to for robot/folk sounds when everyone back home says “put beats in it.” Hulick’s sixth album, Suddenly Shifting Against The Sky, is a feisty little jewel of a bedroom record—with slick beats a-plenty, in fact—and his hiatus and time eating berries in the wild has mixed a picnic Buddhism into his work, nature now crackling where there once was just lots of machines. Crackling.

A skip to the mossy place shows that DoF 2010’s composition skills have blossomed to be almost as fertile as his lichen muses. “Overtaken by Moss” is what you’d call a classic washing powder track: smells fresh every time, works best spread in the sun, virtually stainless bar the odd crumb of detergent. A green tangle of banjos, glock, and frazzled hard disks gambol to a pacifist reveille, glitches hopping brazenly out of line as morning breaks calmly across the tree trunk. Like Scotland’s Frog Pocket, Hulick has that third ear for syncing haphazard drum programming with string movements in a way that doesn’t instantly induce convulsions, carefully adding sandblast effects to his midget triffid takeover. If you don’t normally go for the whole expertly-tidied-up-mess-of-nature shebang (my own idea of a window box is fly-paper), take a look at the way Hulick’s begun re-pollenating. It might make you want to go and lie still in a sunny field and realize you’re only a blip in the food chain.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Dof, Electronica, Kyoto

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In an interview with the Quietus, Peter Gabriel describes making his cover of “Flume” by saying, “There were a couple of lines of lyrics that felt awkward at first, but the more time I spent with it the more natural it became.” There’s something so haltingly nice about that; it reminds me of his cameo in a documentary about Alejandro Jodorowsky, sitting in his house, good-natured and somewhat spacey trying to answer silly questions about his outré tastes.

Gabriel’s latest, Scratch My Back, is a lot like that, in general: the feeling of a pedestal’d, wizened artist bringing some originals from less pedestal’d, less wizened newbies to where he’s at—that is, the airless rock star stratosphere—giving the songs a chance at sounding like assured pop standards. “Flume” succeeds better than most perhaps because its awkwardness is so obvious; Justin Vernon’s always had some fairly questionable lyrics, albeit slurred over and generally rendered awesome through alliterative context. So one’s breath is held for “lappy lakes like leery loons” and rewarded with the original in a tux: piano, tasteful horns, and boombox-outside-her-window-worthy vocals. This earnestness is what works so effectively, bridging the gap between dinosaur and hatchling, and in his voice I find warmth and boundless familial feelings. While the album as a whole dubiously justifies its own existence, the fact that a tasteful, professionally recorded version of “Flume” tugs at my emotional center as much as the original might mean that Vernon, if not now then one day, is capable of writing a standard without Uncle Pete’s help.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Bon Iver, Peter Gabriel

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13 February 2010 :: Congress Theatre, Chicago, IL

I suppose, in theory, in hindsight, things could’ve ended up okay. The bait and switch to this vaunted double-bill was that it was no double bill, because there was no DOOM: just super-fan Mos Def in the Mask, taking his turn as a Doompersonator and leading the crowd along in some of Doom’s greatest hits interspersed with mask-free cuts from his recent, excellent The Ecstatic. When he emerged to “Accordion” and the “gotcha!” was revealed, it felt for a brief moment to me like an inspired bit of theater, and (I hoped) indicative of some sort of collaboration between the two recently revitalized emcees. There have been some rumors of a deep Mos Def involvement on the second Madvillian record, after all.

⊙ Keyword Tags: Doom, Mos Def

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I appreciate my own familiarity with bullshit enough to feel bad about suggesting this, but perhaps it is a simple calculus for Frog Eyes: in the moments when Carey Mercer feels completely honest, his band sounds kind of ordinary. In the moments when Carey Mercer feels esoteric on purpose—when he fronts mythological, shoots from the dick, soft-shoes himself off a ledge toward abstraction—his band sounds kind of astonishingly good. Kids: earmuffs! There is no lesson here.

“Bushels,” off 2007’s Tears of the Valedictorian, is an obvious touchstone for this latter pose. Frog Eyes’ best moment to date, it’s a song compounded with the blueprint of a band aiming high: an applicable, listenable stroke of genius on everything from the relationship between fathers and sons to whether London is that dreary all of the time to whether guitars equal machismo anymore. It is music stuffed with ideas to the absolute brim, and a reminder of how dumb the word “pretentious” can be when it wants. It’s how “All My Friends” might sound if New York actually was the whole universe. Also, yeah, it’s nine minutes long.

While “A Flower in a Glove” is perhaps not quite a sequel to “Bushels,” it certainly comes off as its spiritual kin. Another nine-minute epic, it feels similarly defined by the language of ebb-and-flow. The song’s first minute-plus rides a descendant vocal melody onto a backdrop of (what my caps-lock likes to call) A LOT OF GUITAR. “I shall weep for love, I shall weep for love / You will always need a saint, a flower in a glove,” Mercer shouts, sings, fucks an irony, makes earnest to the max. And yet by the end of the verse things are almost a cappella. “A night made for the raising of your glass,” he announces, and like the best toasts Mercer’s is both brilliant and strange.

Soft / Hard / Repeat scarcely does “A Flower in a Glove” justice: one never feels manipulated by these shifts; its calmer moments are no less the punch-line than its fiercest. In a way, Mercer’s control over his band’s chaos simply becomes part of the narrative. “Did you ever think of a bad idea? / Oh man, no no no no no no no no,” he insists, an irony finally seeping through. And then it hits you: nine minutes is a lot of minutes. For the sake of authority, one claims what one must.

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⊙ Keyword Tags: Carey Mercer, Frog Eyes

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