have been spending some time with a bunch of old no limit stuff lately, especially kane & abel’s first two albums. kane & abel (i think kane is the better one? i wouldn’t be able to say who’s who other than when they say their names) are a bit more polished (internal rhymes, assonances n shit like that) than is usually expected of no limit dudes, particularly on their first album, the 7 sins—which also has some fucking awesome beats, courtesy as usual of beats by the pound. “god and gunz” (above) rolls slow and heavy (and nothing like a well-placed clap to make shit really knock), and i get hype every time when the synths come up for mia on the chorus on “jealous again”—sounds like someone just turned on the lightshow on the stage. speaking of mia, she also fucking kills it on “basement session”: “pop goes the nine millimeters beretta leavin you wetter than april showers followed by your second line in flowers,” “my flow so grand it make the beats say damn / shit jumps back makes you wanna holler / but I sees nothing but dollars / feminist power”. actually, not to slight the twins themselves, but most of my favorite moments on the kane & abel records come from features: big ed’s call-and-response opening and mac’s flurry (“flip em like burger king workers be flippin burgers”), both on “let’s go get em”; any of the soulja slim spots on am i my brother’s keeper.
i'm not actually a worthwhile person, i just play one on the internet.
stuff that's maybe better than the other stuff, autobio, words about words, music stuff, film ask me shit, tell me shit, whateveri forget now how i found this; browsing amazon mp3, i think. anyway, i kinda really like it. really dig the switch from that chunky staircase-y verse riff to the more fluid chorus with its swoon of ‘verbed, multi-tracked “ooooh”s. this was released in 2009 but i think i would’ve put it earlier, if i had been to guess—somewhere between ‘01 and ‘04 maybe? (not sure why.) she used to play guitar for ash, several of whose albums i downloaded a month or so ago ago and have only thus far listened to a little bit of (i like this one, though).
getting really into this album. have been listening to this and “miserabilia” over and over for like two days now. shallow listen notes:
- not that i’ve spent a long time w/either, but this seems like a really big jump from hold on now… sounds like what happens when hold on now…’s cleverness totally ruptures.
- there’s something scrappy in there that reminds me of (my limited listenings of) boyracer.
- it’s funny, i find this album sounds more like a dave newfeld production than hold on now…; similar messy/on the verge of collapse feel, something of a similar shout-it-out emotionalism—although, of course, entangled with this self-consciousness/-loathing. cf. “you gotta shout something out you’d never tell nobody”, maybe??
elevator to hell - “not the least surprised”
“It was so emotional but that’s also where the dope smoking and stuff started going on,” White says of the period. “That’s also when Elevator [to Hell] was formed too, and around when I recorded “Parts 1-3.” When you’re just getting into pot and hash, all these ideas are just falling out of you; that’s when the inspiration is just crazy.”
fittingly, the first time i really “got” this album i was really really high, and i’ve loved it since then. that bit about ideas falling out of you—that’s what i love about it, mostly; every song sounds like its own little stylistic or sonic experiment, many of them quite weird, most of them somehow successful. this song sounds to me kind of like british folk and krautrock blurring together over the course of a few bowls. then that big yell, which feels like that scene in garden state if i didn’t hate basically everything about garden state.
superdrag - “the emotional kind”
from their split with the anniversary (the rest of whose discography i just got and so far so so good). they sound like sloan here, i find.
it’s funny; when i first heard fever to tell—i think show your bones might have already been out by that time, but not for long if so—it did nothing for me. actually, it kind of got on my nerves; found the band little more than a slapdash stage for karen o, found her histrionics and tics contrived. a little later i heard show your bones and really really liked it, i think eventually i softened on ftt a little. i was really into show your bones for a year or so, around first year of high school i think. now when i go back to them it’s almost a flip (which is unusual; generally if i found something contrived or pretentious in junior high the impression has only strengthened over time): i still really enjoy fever to tell, show your bones is okay but sounds like a rather calculated manoeuvre to get from, like, buzz band to festival-level “indie” band (which maybe was more of a gap back then?). i mean, i don’t think yeah yeah yeahs were ever a really great band, but they were the kind of band that you could get totally hyped on and want to tell all your friends about when you first heard them. i can still hear the fever to tell i didn’t like the first time—very new york cool, very punk-as-a-fashion—but with the next big thing buzz deflated by retrospect and the dust long since cleared, mostly i just hear a really tight little album with no great ambitions and lots of riffs&chutzpah. i find it sounds like the best (or most fun, anyhow) parts of the post-punk & garage revivals put together, carbonated and shaken up—karen, i suppose, being what happens when you take the cap off. i think i might like at least some of mosquito more than i thought i did at first (every time i listen to “mosquito” i nearly get sucked into “under the earth” again); probably not in a very durable way, but if i give myself up to it it might be good for a couple weeks—and i don’t mean that dismissively. an album i can really dig for a week>an album that is good for years but i only feel like listening to once a year or so, and i hear ten of the latter for one of the former.
listened to mosquito today, out of curiosity more than anything. too much effects; most of the tracks are busy or washed out or both. i like the chorus of the title track. i like “these paths” because it sounds like someone took apart a Washed Out song and reconfigured it into some skeletal futuristic machine, probably in a lab like the one in i robot. “slave” is decently hooky, although it doesn’t much interest me.
i decided to listen to wolf for some reason. it’s not as bad as goblin but nothing about it is particularly good and i’m pretty sure i will never want to listen to any of it again. “rusty” is the least exciting earl verse ever.
have been listening to that new alex calder ep, i guess i like it. he’s got a great sound—reminds me of rainbows in hose-spray mist, or a stoner Real Estate—but the songs (“suki and me” and maybe “light leaves your eyes” excepted) don’t grab me. i’ve listened to it probably 4 times or so end to end and i still can’t remember how the songs go until i hear them.
g.i. joe: retaliation is coming out this week and i can’t fucking wait. i saw rise of cobra out of trainwreck curiosity and/or boredom and ended up loving it, i was really really pissed when this one got pushed back at the last minute. i think i’m going to rewatch rise of cobra with some friends this weekend and then see retaliation on tuesday. i also will probably see the new evil dead, just for the hell of it. the trailers looked kind of meh and the youtube reaction video montage tv spot didn’t give me much faith but i dunno, it might be okay, i’ll give it a chance. i’m going to see if i can find a torrent of spring breakers (there’s no way in hell it’ll play here) because i kind of want to see it but moreso because i want to be able to be in on the internet-wide conversation about it. i hate when people are saying things that look like they could be interesting about things that i haven’t seen/read/heard etc so i can’t really read them properly and then—especially w/tumblr—when/if i finally do see/read/hear/etc the thing i forget who was talking about it or can’t be bothered to dig through archives. i will probably have to torrent place beyond the pines also. from imdb and wikipedia it looks like to the wonder is getting a wide release, which would be cool but then again not a guarantee that we’d get it anyway, sometimes the theatre in sydney doesn’t get even wide release movies.
someday maybe tumblr will make bandcamp embeds work on the dash, but in the meantime click that little box to listen to a really great song by a pop-punk band from the city i used to live in.
- “IANAHB” is kind of a “Bastard” bite, no? I kind of like it though, I like the uneasy vibes. I like “make your bitch root for me like I grew her” but the absolute winner is “and last night I took a transformer / and had a dream that my dick turned to Megatron / but my girl, was sleeping with Decepticons”.
- “I swear to God I ain’t nervous” has kind of a “doth protest too much” effect. I don’t know who Boo is but he sure is bland.
- I like “try to bite my style but my style a jalapeno”. I guess “I go tape worm in that ho” was meant as a brag but it sounds repulsive. I love how 2 Chainz says “froggystyyyyyyyyyle” like it’s a total slam dunk punchline.
- If anybody wants another “political” buzzstorm-in-a-teacup, they could maybe push “fuck a gun law” as the next “I’m a Republican voting for Mitt Romney”? Gudda Gudda is…well I’m not going to say good quite, but surprisingly decent.
- ahahahahah the crazed yell behind the chorus after the first verse of “No Worries” (also every time Detail says “Mack Maine” I think he’s saying “Batman”)
- “Back To You”…..doesn’t really work. “I miss you in the worst way / ride that dick no speed bumps”
- “Trigger Finger” has a good beat, reminds me a bit of old Three 6 I think? In feel more than sound prob’ly. I definitely do like Soulja Boy’s weird not-really-a-verse.
- I still find that organ-grindery chorus on “Beat The Shit” really really weird; don’t know that I like it much necessarily but every time I hear it I think “how the fuck did they come up with that?” so that’s worth something. Gunplay sounds so fucking great on that beat.
- “Rich As Fuck”: 2nd “all rats gotta die, even _____” of the album—and he named an actual rat this time!
- I wish “Bitches Love Me” was just a Future song. The video is kinda great in a ridiculous sorta way tho.
- I like the murked-out vocal samples in “God Bless Amerika”, the guitar not so much.
- oh no what is “Hello” doing ohh, no…wayne, man—no
okay so, some things: since when is hudson mohawke in a position to be producing weezy tracks? i mean not that i’ve been watching closely, but i thought he was still basically in the brainfeeder;etc circuit. also oh my god what the fuck is this beat doing?! it’s so disorientingly weird, like some James Cameron’s “You Swim” 3D type shit—and then corey gunz somehow knows what to do with it! anyway i am enjoying way more of ianahb2 than i would’ve expected, also, the 2 chainz verse on “days and days” is great: “2 Chainz, my first chain had a twin”!!! soulja boy on “trigger finger” sounds like he was too stoned to write a verse but they put him on anyway and it’s possible that i like it for that reason.
finished sentimental education. struck me late in the book (about when i was beginning part 3) that it reminded me a bunch of this side of paradise. found madame arnoux collapsed at the point where she had her revelation that she loved! frédéric; prior she was at least demurely blank enough to suggest a character unwritten, thereafter she felt like a fantasy. like salammbô, it opens well (though less dramatically)—great scene-setting. (salammbô, at its best, felt like a literary equivalent of some historical epic blockbuster like troy or something.) there are a few lines and passages i really liked in frédéric and rosanette’s vacation near the end.
the new marnie stern album is really great and makes me feel happy about being alive. that little spasm of vowel sounds in “year of the glad” is the best. also realizing, upon googling the lyrics, that the line in “nothing is easy” that sounds like “no one has ever been cool” is actually “no one has ever been caught” with what sounds like a cartoony fake british accent on “caught”. right now i am listening to the gunplay track from i am not a human being 2 and what?? and i might actually kind of like this. gunplay sounds good over that bigass virtualrealitydinosaurstomp beat, anyhow.
have listened to this song like a million times since i downloaded this album around…last winter? spring? still not tired of it. at all. (the first of a killer 1-2-3 punch on putting the days to bed.)
aMINIATURE - “showdowned”
i found aMINIATURE sometime in high school via clicking Trouser Press’s random entry button over and over (or maybe from the book? i borrowed it from the local library once…mecca normal have always stuck in my head from that, though i still haven’t listened to them yet). they’re from san diego, they sound kind of like polvo guitars over a punk band’s rhythm section, they’re awesome. every now and then i go back to depthfiveratesix and always love it, over the summer i listened to the album after that, murk time cruiser, and that’s also really good. this one’s from the former. i try to be a little frugal with my use of “anthemic” but this song is definitely anthemic.
-
there’s also this one girl who is ridiculously smart, not just like, academically but… idk, in just a really real way, and tbh i wish her parents...
-
Its so sad and gloomy and I just want to sleep for eternity.
-
-
ikea factory mix-up shipped spiegelman’s Maus w/ my chair instead of assembly guide & buddy, its been hell dressing the animals with nothing to sit...
-
Today in Myopic White Critics Try To Write About Rap, Richard Roeper writes an incredibly awful, specious and intellectually lazy bit of criticism...
-
-
-
