Album Review: Raphael Saadiq – Stone Rollin’

Posted on June 5, 2011 by bgibs122

Retroism is nothing new in modern music. In fact, mining the past for ideas has been a major element of the past decade, for both good and bad. Some acts make their intentions less obvious; only nicking a particular sound, or distilling their sound from multiple sources.

Then you’ve got Raphael Saadiq.

Stone Rollin’ doesn’t exactly borrow elements from Motown and 70’s R&B as much as present those sounds in the form of a modern record. The mix might be a bit too clean for true authenticity, but the organic instrumentation of Stone Rollin’ and Jack White style vintage production make it a damn good fake. The bluesy stomp of opener “Heart Attack” gets the album off to a good start, and the string-bedecked “Go to Hell” (a song that sounds much prettier than its name would imply) keep the good vibes going.

But it’s not until the stop-start classic rock ‘n roll “Radio” that the album becomes fantastic. Drums, bass, and guitar (all played by Saadiq) create an absolutely infectious groove with call and response vocals, and Saadiq sounds like he’s having the time of his life on the vocals. That energy stays up on the melancholy “Over You”, which sports an absolutely stellar drum beat. Even though the number of actual people involved on each track might be relatively small, some of these songs sound like full party affairs. The title track features plenty of layered vocals, guitars, and an absolutely kickass bassline; a standout.

But the project would fall apart without Saadiq holding it together. Aside from playing and arranging instruments and whip-smart lyrics, Saadiq’s also a versatile and capable vocalist. He can sound sticky sweet on “Heart Attack”, playful on the Ray Charles-inspired “Day Dream”, and heartbroken on “Good Man”. His level of craft on Stone Rollin’ is also commendable; the arrangements are clever and natural, and each song is incredibly well put together.

The end of the album is propped up by string of three excellent songs. No other song stretches as much musical muscle as “Just Don’t”; intricate guitar riffs, thumping basslines, string sections, and gang vocals bounce around the song’s first half before the listener is treated to an extended outro jam (discounting the silence between “The Answer” and the hidden track). “Good Man” gets a little darker, and the song is much less grounded. Even with a strong beat and a genuinely downtrodden vocal by Saadiq, “Good Man”‘s best quality is the female-sung hook. Continuing on that dark path, “The Answer” finds Saadiq reflecting on his city upbringing, but supported with a marching band drum beat and up and down strings that help the song rise and fall.

But despite the seriousness of those last songs, Stone Rollin’ never feels anything short of a damn good time. The only criticism I can level against it is that it can sound a little too singular at times, but when the music is this good, I’m willing to enjoy a little sameness. And that sameness doesn’t quash the infectious groove of “Radio”, the old school seductiveness on “Stone Rollin'”, or the determination of “The Answer”. Everyone whose ever had the slightest inclination towards Motown will adore Stone Rollin’, 5/5 stars.

tl;dr: Raphael Saadiq makes one of this year’s best records by looking to the past, 5/5.

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Six (Sad) Music Videos (That’ll Ruin Your Day)

Posted on June 1, 2011 by bgibs122

Music videos are times for artists to cut loose and have fun, put on a spectacle, or tell a story.

Or ruin your damn day, like these do.

*Note: Click the clip below the title to watch the video, and there are video spoilers within the write-ups, so watch then read for full effect.

6. The Smashing Pumpkins – Try, Try, Try
WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO. SERIOUSLY.
The video for “Try, Try, Try” was released in the (initial) band’s final days, when the Pumpkins really had no one left to impress. This Jonas Akerlund directed video follows a homeless couple around Sweden. Over the course of the first few minutes, we learn that 1. They’re in love, 2. The woman is very pregnant, and 3. Being homeless doesn’t mean you can’t have an awesome jacket.

“I was able to buy the jacket, but had to skimp in other areas. Like food.”

Why so sad?
Around the two minute mark, we get our first glance at really questionable material when the young pregnant woman prostitutes herself out, and comes back vomiting. Skipping ahead, the two shoot-up heroin, and slip into a daze depicting a “Happy Family”…that ends up breaking out dildos, razorblades, guns, and vomit. Simply because things couldn’t get worse, we cut back to reality where the woman has miscarried in an abandoned subway restroom.

Oh, and Jonas Akerlund, the director? You might have seen some his more recent work.

5. P!nk – Fuckin’ Perfect
WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO. AGAIN.  Less than “Try, Try, Try” but still.
The video for P!nk’s latest affirmation for flawed/weird girls everywhere begins just like every other one of P!nk’s affirmations for flawed/weird girls everywhere; tomboyish behavior, angry looks not quite at the camera, a sense of “Screw y’all, I’m gonna be me“…nothing she hasn’t done before.

Why so sad?
The main distinction between “Fuckin’ Perfect”‘s video and the usual “Gosh, teenager girls have it rough” video shows up when it cuts to an anorexic girl on a scale, and the video officially leaves “Beautiful” in the dust once it jumps to the same girl in a bathtub dilluted with her own blood and “Perfect” carved in her arm. The rest of the video shows that things got better for her, but what makes “Fuckin’ Perfect” stay with you is how realistically they play the entire scene. It’s not  like”Firework”, where everyone (even the Littlest Cancer Patient) is pretty and stand-out gorgeous; “Fuckin’ Perfect” is almost uncomfortably realistic.

4. Radiohead – All I Need
We can’t have a list of “music that makes you an emotional wreck” without mentioning Radiohead. Unlike the previous entries, which hid their sadness for a minute or two, “All I Need” gets right to business. Through split-screen, we follow the day of two boys; one affluent in a first world country, the other is a hemisphere away in less ideal conditions. The split works very effectively; we see the affluent boy wake up leisurely, have breakfast, and a full day at school while the Asian boy is kicked awake, splashes his face, and goes to work in a sweatshop. The affluent boy has a full lunch, his counterpart sips from a bowl. But just you wait.

Why so sad?
Oh, by the way, the video was made for MTV’s “EXIT: End Exploitation and Trafficking” campaign. The video zooms in to show that all this time, the Asian boy has been making shoes. After playing soccer, the affluent boy takes his shoes off, and we’re given this image.

Anyone who’s ever bought clothing ever officially feels bad.

3. Eminem – Stan
First of all, I’m sorry that half the song got censored out, so click here for some lyrics. The video begins with the titular Stan showing the Bieliebers a thing or two about fan obsession by bleaching his hair to look more like his idol, Eminem, and lashing out at his girlfriend when she calls him by his name. We then find out that Stan’s basement is plastered with more pictures of his favorite artist than a 16 year old’s Tumblr as Stan writes Eminem a letter.

Why so sad?
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this one turns creepy (ok, considering that smile Stan has when he sees the success of his blond-job, creepier) , but the Angry Man-Child Face that Stan makes around 3:22 (seen above) is just as good a place as any. There’s a shot of blood on a magazine as Stan says “Sometimes I even cut myself to see how much it bleeds”, and then he tapes a picture of Slim over his girlfriend in a photo of theirs.

The video officially freaks out as Stan raps the last verse while driving drunk on a bridge while his girlfriend is tied up in the trunk. There’s interspersed footage of him outright demolishing his Shrine to Shady, before the car crashes over a cliff. The last verse of the song plays as we watch the aftermath of the incident, but there’s really two eerie moments. First off, we see that Stan bleached his younger brother’s hair, too. A little unsettling in itself, but the way it’s revealed and the sheer surprise of it are what put it into “Holy shit, get this guy help” territory. Then this is one of the last shots in the video.

“Surprise!”

2. Johnny Cash – Hurt
There’s no real way to lead into why this one’s sad. Shot seven months before Cash’s death, the video for “Hurt” has become Cash’s epitaph. There’s no tricks to this video, and that’s what makes it so haunting; no split-screen, no emotional sucker punch in the last minute, just Cash. Cash in his frail last days, his invincible youth, and his legacy empire of dirt.

Why so sad?
Aside from everything else just mentioned above, the video for “Hurt” is sad because Cash looks and acts like a man who knows his end is near. With the life he led, it’s a small wonder that Cash even made it as far as he did, and he knows that. I’ve tried to separate the videos from the music  for most of this list, but here, it’s impossible to have one without the other, especially because of how they both build in their final moments.

1. Modest Mouse – Little Motel
“Little Motel”‘s video actually begins very cutely with a mom tucking her small child into bed at a motel. It’s not until around fifty seconds in that the video reveals itself to be shot in reverse, but even then it’s pretty monotonous: the mom checks into the hotel, drives around with the sleeping child, gets gas…hell, it’s almost kinda sweet.

Why so sad?
The exact moment where shit starts going south is when the camera looks at a plate of pancakes arranged like a smiling monkey.

Then goes to this.

The mother looks like she’s about to lose it, and pretty soon so will you. We cut to a flashback (still shown in reverse) of the mother and child playing happily in a park. The video then jumps back to the present, where the mom is running out of a hospital while carrying the child.

The rest of the video’s pretty stacked from there, but the definitive rip-your-heart-out moment is when the child’s heart monitor goes from flatlined to active and you remember that this video is in reverse. Even though it’s revealed to be because she pulled his monitors off, the next images of a tear rolling up the mother’s cheek, and her making a crayon drawing don’t help. The kid was sick and probably dying, so instead of leaving the child in a cold hospital bed, she tucked him in one last time.

Have a good day!

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Radio Rant: LMFAO – Party Rock Anthem

Posted on May 30, 2011 by bgibs122

Ah, Radio Rant time. Toss the single art down there, who’s it gonna be today?

…right then. LFMOA. Wait, that’s not right. MLOAF. Shit, not that. LMFAO (Oh God, I have to type that a lot?) is an “electroduo”, a description that I’ve learned to avoid based on the existence of 3OH!3. Wait, LMFAO, why does that sound familiar…?

…oh, hell no. I am not doing this. I am not dealing with the guys who wrote “Shots”. I talk about hating a lot of songs, but I can’t think of a single song I’d wipe off the Earth faster than “Shots”, a song I hate so much that I can’t even rage at it properly over the internet. Well, “Party Rock Anthem” clawed its way to number 8 on the Hot 100, and I assume most of you out there have working ears and brains, so maybe it’ll be better. Please, God.

“Party Anthem Rock” starts wi–ok, this is stupid. “Party Rock Anthem”. Really, guys, this is what you’re going to call your song? A name so mockingly generic it could pass for a fake song in a Simpsons episode? Seriously, “Party Rock Anthem” doesn’t sound like what you’d name a real song; it sounds like the premise for a bad, pre-Lonely Island SNL skit involving a rock with some confetti glued on. Between that and the bad band name, part of me thinks LMFAO are from the Ke$ha/3Oh!3 crowd of “We know we make incredibly dumb music, but screw it, we’re making more money than we can spend” music. Well, let’s jump in.

First of all, kudos to LMFAO for not having some intro announcing who they are. Actually, this beat’s kinda nice. Nothing I haven’t heard before, but enjoyable. Kind of retro, too; I wouldn’t believe this as a 2011 hit. Then there’s the main synth hook, and…what? Why do I like this?! These synths sound like a tin can, I’m fairly sure that they’re a little more than inspired by Dynamite, and the vocal hook is generic beyond belief. But I can’t not dance to this, especially once the claps come in. Hell, the whole first minute of this song is great.

My enthusiasm wanes as we hit the synth that sounds like a cricket got caught in the band’s workstation, and now we come to the verses. As it turns out, LMFAO are not good rappers, and we don’t need to waste time dealing with a verse where the highlights are “Half black half white, domino” (mixed represent!) and “No lead in our zeppelins”. Other than that, we get the usual cliches; “rock and roll” being invoked in a song that neither rocks nor rolls, girls, drinks, etc.

After another round of “Pump you up” chorus, we get a half verse before a bridge with a female vocal. “Get up, get down, put your hands up to the sound” is all that gets repeated while the backing music swells up like one of my all-time favorite dance songs “Sandstorm“. The built up is, to be honest, freakin’ sweet, but the payoff is an exact copy paste of the chorus, and ends up being kind of disappointing. From there, the song goes back to the intro beat, and finally ends.

Even though it goes against my higher brain functions (and even some of the lower ones), I can’t help but like this song. It takes the most common themes of the lowest common denominators of pop music and mashes them together, it’s probably the 12th Top 10 “I’m at club, you’re at a club, we’re all at a club having fun” hit of the year, and it’s not even a really good song. The best comparison that comes to mind is that “Party Rock Anthem” reminds me of “I Gotta Feeling”: a fun and simple song that’s amazingly danceable despite some morons with the mic. I am in no way sold on thinking LMFAO are any more than smirking d-bags (they are, after all, the guys that made “Shots”), but everyone gets lucky sometimes, right?

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“They Sold Out, Man” …Did They?

Posted on May 29, 2011 by bgibs122

The term “selling out” has been in music since the first Band You’ve Never Heard Of played to a crowd of six people instead of four. We hear it all the time nowadays; “Muse sold out”, “Rage Against the Machine sold out”, “Metallica sold out”, “Arcade Fire sold out”, “Green Day sold out”. If Green Day sold out every time people said they have, shit, that band would be worth more than Apple.

Truth of the matter is that selling out is lot rarer and harder than most message border users would think. To sell out, you have to change your end goal from “make music for personal enjoyment and expression” to “make music in a matter fit for maximum profit”. This is why it’s almost impossible to accuse KISS of selling out; from the get-go, they were all about being as over the top as possible, and unafraid to make a brand out of their name.

By similar token, it’s hard to call Muse a bunch of sell outs. Pretentious? Possibly. Overdramatic? You bet. Ridiculous, even, but not sell outs. The first Muse album I ever listened to end to end was The Resistance, which turned a lot of fans off. A few months ago, I finally snagged a copy of Origins of Symmetry, which is generally said to be their “best” album, and give that a few listens. Maybe it’s hindsight, but both feel equally Muse; both have that mix of hard rock and classical music, the emphasis just shifted. As for the whole Twilight thing, I can understand “sell out” being sort of legitimate, but at the same time, the author of the books was kind of sort of obsessed with them, and Muse’s naturally over the top and melodramatic music fits the series perfectly already. Although that’s probably not something you want to tell Muse fans.

Other times, artists get called sell outs for the inexcusable crime of people noticing their talent, or for improving. Arcade Fire comitted two major “sins” with The Suburbs; it debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200, and won the Grammy for Album of the year. Getting angry because a super popular indie band sold lots and lots of records in one week is just silly when you think about it (“Dammit, I knew I should have pirated it!”), as is getting mad when people acknowledge an album for being good (“How dare you be rewarded for you hard work!”).

The claim is often slapped on bands that join a major label, but the only constant change from an indie label to a major one is production values. Green Day’s first major label album Dookie sounds almost exactly like their earlier work, only mixed/produced with the idea that people actually want to hear the music, label status never affected Sonic Youth, who put out some of their best material while on a major label.

Experimenting with new sounds or ideas doesn’t equate selling out, either. It may shock some people, but musicians are actual people, and can’t keep carrying on when they hit middle age like they did when they were young adults (not without looking very sad). So Green Day want to write a rock opera about dissatisfaction in America instead of songs about jerking it off, or Metallica might not want to do 9 minute long progressive rock numbers, fine. As long as they make the music they want to make, and the quality stays high, good for them.

One of the more baffling accusations I’ve seen of selling out was leveled against political rock rap outfit Rage Against the Machine. An underground success, RATM’s fans accused the group of selling out by being on a major label. In a surprisingly poignant explanation for a guy in a group called Rage Against the Machine, guitarist Tom Morello explained the band’s choice by saying, “Would Noam Chomsky object to his works being sold at Barnes & Noble? No, because that’s where people buy their books. We’re not interested in preaching to just the converted. It’s great to play abandoned squats run by anarchists, but it’s also great to be able to reach people with a revolutionary message, people from Granada Hills to Stuttgart.”

But possibly the most idiotic reason to call an artist a sellout (especially an up and coming one) is at the end of the day, you’ve got to pay bills. Someone comes along and tells you that they’ve heard your music, they like it, and they want to get you out there, no strings attached. Shit, who wouldn’t take that?

Sell-outs still exist; there are plenty of minions out there looking to use music as a get rich quick scheme, or who are all too eager to change their sound just to make a dollar (will.I.am comes to mind), but they are far fewer than you’d think.

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