New Music: Toro Y Moi - Leave Everywhere (via gorillavsbear)
Just in time for me to see Toro Y Moi unveil his full touring band, Chaz Bundick drops a new song on us. “Leave Everywhere” departs from his earlier chillwave efforts in a poppier direction with plenty of upstroked guitar and glockenspiel for all. It’s far from unexplored territory, but it’s nice to see some diversity in Toro Y Moi’s repertoire. A review on his performance as well as Caribou’s will be up soon. Other upcoming concert reviews:
I apologize for the lack of updates but I promise I will be writing more soon.
New Music: Sleigh Bells - Rill Rill
Here’s my favorite track off of Sleigh Bell’s debut LP, Treats. Get out your lawn chairs and put on your sunglasses. Don’t bother with the A/C, this track’s got all the chill you’re gonna need this summer.
If you were wondering which album will get played at every party ever thrown this summer, you’ve found it in Treats. 2010’s “Rager’s Delight” comes in the form of a collaboration between an ex-Poison the Well guitarist and an ex-teen pop singer. Dangerously sick music ensues.
The Brooklyn duo have been gaining notoriety around the internet for their earlier release “Tell ‘Em”. After signing with M.I.A.’s N.E.E.T. imprint and getting some needed studio equipment, Sleigh Bells deliver nicely on their debut. Unfortunately, this feels like another album that will make its way through the party circuit before being washed away in the short attention-span minds of the bloghouse buzzband faithful.
Treats is yet another brief album, clocking in at slightly over 32 minutes, but it hardly squanders its limited time. Every angle of this album is full of catchy pop hooks and heavy dance beats, often times compressed and amplified to the point of frustration. Some might call it lo-fi, others might say it’s just obnoxious. I feel like it balances the two well enough, the dancey pop of the album shining through the grit of its noise and compression.
Once you get past the high-gain crunch and grow accustomed to it after a few listenings, however, Sleigh Bells’ party anthems quickly turn into a rallying cry for forty-carrying danceoholics to shake their asses. Treats is a sonic apocalypse for people who like to move, with earth-shaking beats and air raid horn-guitar riffs. Notable tracks sure to light up your next rager include the M.I.A.-emulating “Kids”, bloghouse slo-jam “Rachel” and the already well-received “Crown On the Ground”.
Almost in the middle of the album sits a wonderful groove by the name of “Rill Rill” (originally named “Ring Ring”) that samples Funkadelic’s “Can You Get To That” and is, in my opinion, Treats’ best track. Where the rest of the album sits behind (what I would venture to call) a gimmick of compression, this song sheds it and makes something truly beautiful. It would be nice to see more of these songs interspersed with their heavier numbers in the future, as this song proves producer Derek Miller certainly has the wherewithal to write pretty, chill pop songs.
Despite the undeniable catchiness of the band, despite the fact that everyone and their mother will probably be losing their shit over this record for the next three months, come September they will be as forgotten as the thrift store shades you left at some house party. Buzz bands come and go, they make us dance and make us happy for a few months and are out of our lives. If you’ve been looking for the next mold-breaking band, you won’t find it here. If you’ve come to dance, however, let me throw Treats on for you. Call your friends, bring some drinks and let’s start this party.
Overall: 4/5, but doomed with brief longevity.
Legends: Van Dyke Parks - The All Golden
This is a followup to my last post. For those of you who have never heard of Van Dyke Parks before, I’d like to provide a bit of an introduction:
Parks was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and raised in Lake Charles, Louisiana, the youngest of four boys. He showed an affinity for music from an early age that would later be developed at the Carnegie Institute, where he majored in piano. By 1964 he’d found a job at MGM records before moving over to Warner Brothers, where he would be called upon by Brian Wilson to put together songs for the upcoming Beach Boys album, SMiLE. After numerous struggles within the band and the deteriorating psychological state of Wilson, Parks ceased contributing to the album and focused on his solo career, as well as arrangements and compositions for other artists and scoring for films. In his almost 50 years of work in the music industry he has collaborated with artists as varied as Keith Moon, Black Francis, Joanna Newsom and Harry Nilsson. Recently he has collaborated with Brian Wilson on projects like 1995’s Orange Crate Art and 2008’s That Lucky Old Sun, both well-received by critics and fans alike.
It is, however, Parks’ early solo career that this song is taken from—an excerpt from his first album, Song Cycle. This track, much like the rest of the album is not one for people who are impatient, especially if you’ve never been exposed to the unusual arrangement and composition of the songs on this record. The first time I listened to “The All Golden” I was appalled. It sounded like noise; there were too many layers to process, the reverb of Parks’ warbly voice seemed tacky and the motley orchestra that moved the piece along felt constantly out of place.
This is when the repeated listenings begin to pay off. VDP’s ode to outlaw country singer Steve Young is a complex pastiche of Americana, moving through different styles of American music. There are swinging saxophones, pompous horns, lazy fiddles and honky tonk pianos that blend into rich ritardandos. Parks’ compositions encompass hymns (the melody in the middle of the song takes directly from the famous “Battle Hymn of the Republic”), Appalachian folk, country western, jazz, marching bands and the nascent influences of chamber pop that were beginning to take shape in the mid-late 60s.
To listen to all of these genres converge in this song, as well as the others presented on the record, (pardon the trite definition) is to enjoy something uniquely American, a celebration of the diverse and rich musical culture that particularly now goes unnoticed in an ocean of electric guitars and sequencers. While American music is now largely dominated by the spheres of rock, pop and hip-hop, the more delicate tendencies of orchestral pop music remain alive through younger artists that look to the genius of men like Van Dyke Parks for inspiration. If you want to hear something completely different from anything you’re likely to have heard, look no further than Song Cycle.
News: Van Dyke Parks to do small Midwest/East Coast/European tour in summer/fall
Brooklyn Vegan reports that one of my most beloved artists and composers, Van Dyke Parks, will be performing several tour dates with Brooklyn pop band Clare & the Reasons (Clare, maiden name Muldaur, is long-time session guitarist Geoff Muldaur’s daughter and a good friend of Parks).
I had the privilege to see VDP perform with Clare and the Reasons at McCabe’s guitar shop in Santa Monica a few months back, an experience I’ll never forget. If you are at all fans of orchestral pop in the vein of Brian Wilson’s pinnacle era or just love beautifully crafted songs done by a charismatic little man who plays the piano like a monster, these shows are impossible to miss out on. Please please please, if you are out anywhere near where these shows will be, do your best to make it out there. You will not be disappointed, I promise you.
Van Dyke Parks - 2010 Tour Dates
EUROPE
May 29 Primavera Sound Festival Barcelona, Barcelona, ES
Jun 18 Queen Elisabeth Hall~Meltdown Festivals LONDON, London and, UK
Jun 24 Handelsbeurs~ Gent Belgium Gent, Belgium, BELGIUM
Jun 25 Paradiso Amsterdam Amsterdam, Netherland, NETHERLANDS
MIDWEST/EAST COAST
Thu 09/23/10 Blue Wisp Jazz Club Cincinnati OH
Fri 09/24/10 Wexner Center Columbus OH
Sat 09/25/10 Ladies Literary Club Grand Rapids MI
Sun 09/26/10 Schubas Tavern Chicago IL
Tue 09/28/10 Andy Warhol Museum Pittsburgh PA
Thu 09/30/10 Ukrainian Federation Montreal QC
Fri 10/01/10 Iron Horse Northampton MA
Sat 10/02/10 The Bell House Brooklyn NY
Sun 10/03/10 World Cafe Philadelphia PA
Monster Soul: Marlena Shaw - California Soul
For those of you unfamiliar with the ridiculous talent of Marlena Shaw, I would like to introduce you to one of the best psych-soul jams ever. “California Soul” was originally written by Motown legends Ashford and Simpson for The Fifth Dimension (Whom I will write about at length at a later time, as some of their work rivals the pinnacle of Beatles and Beach Boys pop music, and no, that’s not a stretch to say) and was eventually picked up by Shaw on her 1969 album, The Spice of Life. Though the song is 40 years old now, the drum beats are so sick it could have been conjured up on a sequencer. The (Chess Records subsidiary) Cadet Records session musicians own on the backing instrumentation.
If my lobbying in favor of the song and Shaw’s knockout vocals aren’t enough to sway you, perhaps the fact that the song has been remixed and sampled by numerous artists, including Diplo and Gang Starr, will. But really, after listening to this track, I doubt you’ll need any more convincing. Give Marlena a try. If you like her, check out her other songs from that record, including the power track, ”Woman of the Ghetto”.
If you’re reading this, you’ve made it to the first post of this blog! This means either you visited this blog in its very early stages, or you really really like reading everything I write. Either way, that’s cool!
rumblefuzz will be covering music releases new and old in a mix of short blurbs and longer, in-depth articles. Album reviews, concert reviews and current goings-on in music news, (particularly in the Los Angeles area) will also be part of the regular content as well as anything else I decide to throw on here. In advance, thank you to any and all of my followers as well as all of the artists that make this blog possible and our lives livable. Without music, we would most certainly be lost forever.
-Ian
