Radio Rant: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis ft. Ray Dalton – Can’t Hold Us

Posted on May 7, 2013 by bgibs122

Hello, and welcome to Radio Rants. I’m back!

And so’s this guy. I went on hiatus for Radio Rants (and later everything else) because 1: College took more effort to finish than I thought it would, and 2: pop radio kinda slowed down for a bit. The two biggest hits have been P!nk’s “Just Give Me a Reason”, and Bruno Mars with “When I was Your Man”. They’re both tolerable songs, but they don’t bring anything new. Then there’s “Thrift Shop” by newcomer Macklemore that spent all of February and part of April at the top of the charts (and played no. 2 to one-hit wonder “Harlem Shake”, meaning that you could basically tack March on, too).

A few months and some ten thousand listens later, I’m still ambivalent to “Thrift Shop”. When I get right down to it, the song still sounds like too much of a novelty for me to really like, and the same thing goes for Macklemore. The guy needed a second single; you could see that he was talented with “Thrift Shop”, but dude’s main contribution to the world thus far has been bringing back godawful mink coats. If you listen to his pretty good (and pretty serious) LP The Heist, his goofball pop culture status feels a little weird. For context: the two songs after “Thrift Shop” are a somber look at how being a rapper screws up your relationships, and an earnest call for marriage equality.

The song before it, though, is “Can’t Hold Us”, which has officially become Big Mack’s second hit. For me, the strongest part of the song comes from Ryan Lewis’ stomping drum and stabbing piano beat that never lets up; it keeps the duo’s throwback feel without feeling shameless, and added synths and vocal chants make it one hell of a pump up jam. Much has been made of the duo’s “us against everything” mentality, and the gang vocals and horn breakdown sound like a new challenger stepping up in a glorious corny way.

“Can’t Hold Us” follows the usual pop verse-chorus-verse structure, but does so without sounding like it does. This is done in part due to Mack and Cheese’s extended verses that include a bit of a refrain themselves, but also because the official chorus falls flat. Ray Dalton’s hook was apparently the last thing written for the song, and he kind of came up with it off the cuff as a space filler, and it shows.

“This is the moment/Tonight is night, we’ll fight ’til it’s over/So we put our hands up/Like the ceiling can’t hold us/Like the ceiling can’t hold us” It takes every filler line from other self-empowerment songs and just jams them together. It’s like eating Lucky Charms, except your asshole roommate went through and took all of the marshmallows out already. I’d be a little more on board with this chorus if Dalton didn’t deliver it in one of the most rigid, bored voices possible. The guy sounds more alive when he just riffs towards the end of the song.

On the flip side, Knick Knack Patty Mack himself improves upon “Thrift Shop” tremendously here. His flow is still kind of off-kilter, but he’s a little less jokey this time around (the only “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Lonely Island” dud is “And I’m eating at the beat like you gave a little speed to a great white shark on Shark Week–raw!”, which is less about bad writing and more about Shark Week being unbearable), and a little more of his on the sleeve earnestness shines through.

“I shed my skin and put my bones into everything I record” This might as well be Mack Donald’s mission statement.

“Return of the Mack!” Dude, this is your debut album; you had to be here in the first place to return.

“Thrift shop, pimp strut walking, little bit of humble, little bit of cautious/Somewhere between Rocky and Cosby, sweater gang, nope, nope y’all can’t copy” Hey, fun fact for you: “Can’t Hold Us” is the song before “Thrift Shop” on The Heist, and it was released as a  single before it. Theoretically, he could be referencing something that for all you know hasn’t happened yet. Also, yes, apparently Mack Rushmore really loves thrift shops this much.

“Go hard like I got an 808 in my heart beat” Then have I got the woman for you…

The final verdict? I’d call “Can’t Hold Us” a good song. Weak chorus and one or two misfire lines aside, it’s a strong tune mostly based off of the driving beat and instrumental. The empowerment horse has been flogged to death, but Mack with a side of fries comes across as sincere to a tee, so I don’t mind it. In fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if this wasn’t his last hit.

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New Music: Grown Up Avenger Stuff – Sparkleton

Posted on May 6, 2013 by bgibs122

Sparkleton is out now!A friend of mine created a music nerd-friendly car game: find a phrase that would make a good name for a rock band, and then describe what that band would sound like. During our first outing, we described would-be bands like “Hopeful Future”, “Midas”, and “The Shamblers”. I only mention this, because none of us would have come up with a name like “Grown Up Avenger Stuff”, or what that would even sound like. But around three minutes into Sparkleton opener “Some of Us”, you realize you don’t know what to call what you’re hearing, but you know you want to hear more.

Sparkleton, the newest offering from the Charlotte, North Carolina group, shines. It benefits from being the group’s third release since 2010; their sound is fully formed, and polished without losing any of its punch. The chemistry between the members is another high point; not only is everyone solid on their instruments, they know how to work together to make music that doesn’t quite sound like anyone else. Their sound could be described as high-concept garage rock; even with fairly intricate arrangements and dynamic guitar-bass-drum instrumentation, it always sounds like three people playing without a lot of studio interference.

And then there is the band’s biggest weapon: vocalist Deirdre Kroener. Her stage presence even on record is powerful (see: the coda for “Pins”), she can belt it out, work out some innovative phrasing, or straight up howl depending on what the moment calls for. And yes, “moment” is the operative word there; just like the rest of the band, Kroener can snap from contained to chaotic as a particular song rises and falls. Her no matter how she’s singing, she comes across as playfully taunting, and like she’s having fun–quite reminiscent of Karen O. during Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ early years (Fever to Tell and earlier; that early).

The YYYs’ comparison is an easy one to make for GUAS, but the art-punks never played as big as Sparkleton gets. The lumbering title track is the slowest of the bunch, but goes for anthem instead of malaise, and still changes shape enough that it never slows down. Grown Up Avenger Stuff’ rhythm section consists of bassist Hunter Thomsen and drummer Tyler Thomsen, and the steady basslines and rapid-fire drumming carry the momentum forward on every song. Their most interesting take comes on “The Beat”, which packs more energy than a pep band. The vamp comes straight from a drumline, but then takes a hard left into a guitar-induced freakout with Kroener teasing “The beat!” over it. Her mile a minute vocals in the verses come out cheerleader-style before returning to a slower style over the song’s extended outro. “The Beat” is a great entry point for anyone looking to taste what GUAS is capable of.

There’s something about the pulsing bass and propulsive drumming on “Pins” that makes it sound like a single as well. Boasting one of the album’s catchiest melodies for it’s first section, some of Kroener’s most impassioned singing in the second, and some truly unrestrained instrument work for the outro, “Pins” is a definite highlight. A little darker and more focused, “The Man” exists as an effective cooldown between “Pins” and “Too Cool”, the longest track on Sparkleton. It starts fairly light with some blues-tinged guitar and bass and the requisite dynamic shifts, but the extended break of “You’re too cool, too cool, too cool for me” involves some pretty guitar work, even with distortion. And then, the song finishes with a furious minute of sheer punk aggression.

“Do Ya”, the album closer, can’t help but sound slight after “Too Cool”‘s onslaught, and for the once, the band’s build doesn’t build to much beyond a Queens of the Stone Age-esque riff session to close the song and album out. It’s not a bad song, but a baffling end to an album that ventured all over.

Sparkleton‘s only seven songs, but it still feels fully formed. The band’s alt rock status isn’t made by cherrypicking their own record collections, but from the music that they love to make. None of the songs feel like filler, or too similar to each other, and they’re fun to revisit on their own, or as part of the whole album–there’s always something new to find. Grown Up Avenger Stuff is on album number three, and I hope there’s plenty more where that came from.

Like GUAS on Facebook here, and stream/buy Sparkleton from the group’s BandCamp here!

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New Music: Allison Weiss – Say What You Mean

Posted on April 16, 2013 by bgibs122

Say What You Mean is out now through No Sleep Records!It’s shaping up to be a surprising year for music, and nothing has been a more pleasant surprise than Allison Weiss’s Say What You Mean. After years of online buzz, a self-released LP, a stint in Lou Reed’s touring band, and tours of her own, the album can’t help but feel like a coronation; it’s her first album for reputed label No Sleep Records. If there was ever a time to cash in the chips and make something big, it’s now.

Thankfully, Weiss didn’t just make something big, she made one of the best albums so far of the year. That’s the short way of saying she made an album that’s energetic, catchy as all get out, heartfelt, skillfully made, fun, and consistent. Say What You Mean doesn’t concern itself with transcendental meaning or high concepts to blow you away–it’s just impeccably great, and rewarding in new ways with every listen. Even from the album opener and first released song “Making It Up”, one of the appealing things about Weiss was that she doesn’t neatly fall into Spot the Influence.

True to singer-songwriter roots, Weiss makes the music she wants to make, and she doesn’t fall into a narrow category with it. A broad classification would label her somewhere between indie rock and pop-punk, but that still feels like it’s missing something. Underneath  the garage rock guitars, indie production, and punky energy, Say What You Mean is a set of 10 sharply crafted pop songs that get stuck in your head for days on end. And while Weiss sticks with her own sound, she dabbles in different sub-genres across the record. “Making It Up” smacks of Weezer-y power pop, whereas “I Was an Island” has an amped-up doo-wop vibe, to The Strokes’ crunch of “Hole in Your Heart”, and the rockabilly bounce to “How To Be Alone”‘s two-chord riff and rapid-fire drum beat. Say What You Mean strikes a great balance of variety and cohesion.

That cohesion and a relatively brief 34 minute runtime make picking highlights somewhat challenging. Track to track favorites change based on mood, but the mid-album trio of “How To Be Alone”, “Don’t Go”, and “Wait For Me” is the most varied and consistently enjoyable stretch. “How To Be Alone” is outright danceable in it’s tom-heavy beat and twangy riff, and “Don’t Go” features Weiss at her most freewheeling (not to mention an arresting final chorus). After two of the most upbeat moments on the album comes “Wait For Me”, a string and acoustic guitar ballad that pushes Weiss’s vulnerability to the forefront, and is surprisingly affecting.

Don’t let the shiny, poppy songs throw you off; Say What You Mean is a emotionally raw album. Stripped of the catchy guitar and synth riffs, “Tell me you remember/the way you used to call me your own/Tell me that I’m making it up/And I’ll leave you alone” freaking hurts, and that’s only on the first song. The album’s lyrics center around romantic struggle and heartbreak, and she has been compared to Taylor Swift, a comparison unfair to Weiss. Swift’s songs for good and bad, always feel like carefully narrated stories; Weiss doesn’t do as much censoring. Over the course of the album, you hear her plead, you hear her determined, you hear her desperate, and you realize that you’re rooting for her because you’ve been there, too.

The last two cuts on Say What You Mean–the title track and “I’ll Be Okay”, bluster less than the rest of the album. “Say What You Mean” sticks the landing as a power-pop ballad, whereas “I’ll Be Okay” is a slow building, acoustic to full band and textured guitar epic that was made to close shows. They’re a great mirror to the one-two opening of “Making It Up” and “One Way Love”, and show some potential avenues for Weiss to pursue on future albums.

And with Weiss, people are eager to hear more. Say What You Mean does a lot, and more importantly does it well. The arrangements are meticulous, the hooks are powerful, and the album has a rush to it that never burns itself out. As a singer and songwriter, Weiss is whipsmart and immediately likable, knowing how to find inventive melodies while still inviting everyone to sing along. Her approach is relatable: anyone who’s ever thought “life sucks sometimes, but this is all I’ve got, dammit, and it’s going to work” will find something that gets them here. Allison Weiss says what she means, and I hope she says more.

Want to stay up on Allison Weiss? Like her on Facebook, and stream Say What You Mean  on AOL here.

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Feedback: +44 – When Your Heart Stops Beating

Posted on April 1, 2013 by bgibs122

The alternate version of With this month being the one year anniversary of Feedbacks, and this being the tenth edition of the feature, I thought I’d revisit where this feature started. Sort of. The first Feedback looked at blink-182’s self-titled album, which was their last release before going on hiatus for a few years. Today, we’re looking at one of the albums that happened during that hiatus: +44’s lone album When Your Heart Stops Beating.

By the time they broke up in 2005, Blink-182 had become a surprisingly major act. By then, bassist Mark Hoppus and guitarist Tom DeLonge had been playing together for 13 years, and drummer Travis Barker had been with them for the last 7. They’d transcended the pop-punk scene, and competed with bubblegum pop acts and cultural zeitgeists like late 90s Eminem on the Total Request Live circuit. Even the darkness around their 2004 album couldn’t wipe away the affable, joke loving, dude-bro image they’d built up. Arguably, that image made the very public break-up worse, especially for Hoppus and DeLonge; with mentions of jealousy, betrayal, and shutting each other out, the hiatus felt like watching two best friends ditch each other.

But, even apart, the two couldn’t stop making music. A few months after Blink’s hiatus, Hoppus announced that he was starting a new electronic project with Barker and vocalist Carol Heller. This ended up being a false start–after a few demos and “Make You Smile”, Heller left the group, and Hoppus enlisted guitarists Shane Gallagher and Craig Fairbaugh for the finalized line-up that hunkered down and recorded When Your Heart Stops Beating.

What’s the difference between +44 and blink-182 (besides +/-138)? The short answer is that +44 is even more alternative/indie rock than even blink’s late period experiments, with only a trio of songs (“Lycanthrope”, “When Your Heart Stops Beating”, and “Cliffdiving”) getting close to pop-punk. The electronic brainstorming that birthed “Make You Smile” is still present, as well: there are a few drum loops and synth flourishes tucked away throughout the album, and Barker plays with a hip-hop beat on “Weatherman”. While there are some immediate tracks, more of the emphasis falls on texture instead of hooks, and guitar melodies are used more to accent a chorus than lead the way, such as on “Little Deaths”. Even on the more straight ahead numbers, such as the title track, there’s a sophistication here that there never was on a blink tune like, say, “The Rock Show”.

While “Make You Smile”, built on a simple piano accompaniment with textured guitars and electronic drums, is an interesting “what could have been” for +44, it’s hard to not be thankful that the project went the way it did. It’s a gorgeous track, but I think an album of similar songs would be too much. Besides, one of “Make You Smile”‘s strengths is that is a singular song; if I wanted to listen to The Postal Service, I’d listen to The Postal Service.

As with any Second Band, there’s plenty of speculation as to what’s about the old group (case in point: every other Foo Fighters song until 2004 was “maybe” about Kurt Cobain, if the internet is to be believed), but for this album, the answer seems to be “most of it”. Even if some of these songs aren’t immediately about The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show, they still come from the same personal and uncomfortable area that the more direct songs do. The warmest moment aside from “Make You Smile” comes from the chorus of “Cliffdiving”, which can only bring “The promise of summer”, and not summer itself, the way that “Feelin’ This” could. “When Your Heart Stops Beating” keeps things fairly self-contained, and “Baby, Come On” still sounds inspired by Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind more than anything else. “Lycanthrope” can mostly be seen as being about werewolves, although it does start the album with the lyric “I wake up at the end of a long, dark, lonely year/It’s bringing out the worst in me”.

Elsewhere, things get much darker, and much more personal. Hoppus is generally considered the more thoughtful of blink’s songwriters (“thoughtful” being a relative term) who could always crack a smile in the bleakest setting, so seeing him go all-in on this album is disarming. “No, It Isn’t”,  titled to answer “Is this about Tom Delonge?” with Hoppus eventually admitted “Yes, It Is”, is the bluntest of the bunch with an opening salvo of “Please understand, this isn’t just goodbye/This is I can’t stand you”. It comes towards the end of the album, which is especially moody, and almost lightens things a bit–at least the song is looking back at the bad relationship. Meanwhile, “Weatherman” might be the darkest, bleakest song that Hoppus has written. It doesn’t even come with the clarity and attitude of “Thank God that’s done” from “No, It Isn’t”. Heavy, distorted bass, and stomping drums plunge the mid-tempo number into despair from the start, and lyrics like “I’m dying/I’m trying to leave” and closing line “I’m barely holding on” paint an excruciating picture of what life had to be like towards the end of blink’s run.

A favorite tactic in 2006 (and admittedly one I considered) is to contrast When Your Heart Stops Beating and Angles & Airwaves’ We Don’t Need to Whisper, but the two have more in common than most think. Aside from both being born from blink’s ashes, both projects are self-consciously artier than their predecessor, and both are less democratic. Each one tries to be serious, and both have moments of “try too hard to gain too little”. Critics were kinder to +44 than they were to Angels & Airwaves, although “kinder” here means “Shrugged at instead of laughed at”, but Heart Stops Beating got left behind more than any of AvA’s records have. The band had been in pre-production for Heart‘s follow-up, but Barker’s plane crash/blink’s reunion seems to have nixed any talk of a second album.

Calling it anything past “pretty good” is a stretch, but When Your Heart Stops Beating is robust and well-crafted enough with a bit of focus that it handily beats Neighborhoods in my book. I get why it’s overlooked as a hiatus stop-gap: a pop record, it ain’t, and it’s unfriendly to boot, but there’s substance here. Now that their main group isn’t as big on the dick jokes, +44’s album might be seen as more fan-friendly now, too. In this age of oversharing, we rarely get work that’s this personal and this honest, and When Your Heart Stops Beating shows that maybe we’re missing something because of it.

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