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(07/01/11 8:00am)
YACHT is an old moniker—one Jona Bechtolt has recorded under since 2002—but the project didn’t take off until 2009, when Bechtolt added vocalist Claire Evans and released See Mystery Lights. That album marked an important shift, away from Bechtolt’s old beat-centric laptop productions toward a more energetic and poppy sound. And while the duo had clearly caught on to something, especially with fuller tracks like “The Afterlife” and “Summer Song,” they hadn’t quite yet defined their nascent dance-punk style.
(07/01/11 8:00am)
Bon Iver, Bon Iver is a superficially beautiful album. It’s immediate, not so much in the way that good pop music is immediate—which has to do with pleasant confluence of rhythm and melody—as in the way that good paintings are immediate. The piano plink of “Wash.” and the guitar phrases that opens “Holocene” and the contrast of martial drums and Justin Vernon’s falsetto on “Perth”—individual textures, phrases, even lyrics here are arrestingly gorgeous.
(04/21/11 10:47am)
Last Saturday was Record Store Day, which for the uninitiated (everyone but the staff at Pitchfork) is a quaint annual celebration of independent music vendors. It’s a noble concept—numerous acts offer one-day only releases or perform in-store concerts, designed to give record stores at least one profitable day per year. For my part, I stopped by Bull City Records to pick up the Fleet Foxes new 12”, “Helplessness Blues”/”Grown Ocean.”
(04/14/11 8:00am)
The momentum of critical consensus has given Animal Collective and its associated projects a pretty long leash, due in large part to their reputation as something more than the typical hipster-set flavor of the month. The oblique, experimental nature of their compositions belies their popularity and sets up the most onerous of critical tropes: If you don’t like it, you just don’t get it. So ever since the group changed focus from soundscaping to songwriting—an ambiguous paradigm shift that dates back either to Feels or Strawberry Jam—they’ve been lauded at every turn. Frontman Noah Lennox’s solo masterpiece as Panda Bear, Person Pitch, only intensified the perception of AnCo as indie pop’s most innovative luminaries.
(04/07/11 8:00am)
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s self-titled 2009 debut was without reservation an artifact of the ’90s, and drew comparisons to any number of that decade’s indie touchstones. But the fuzzy production often obscured the Pains’ intentions; Ian Cohen described it as “sort of an indie Rorschach,” an apt description for an album that drew comparisons ranging from Belle and Sebastian to the Jesus and Mary Chain. What mattered more than the ambiguous influences, though, was their undeniable songcraft. Clever but not obnoxiously so, endearing without being cloying, the Pains clearly possessed an innate ear for instant-gratification hooks.
(03/24/11 8:00am)
People generally consider the Strokes’ 2003 sophomore effort Room on Fire an inferior follow-up to their relentlessly hyped 2001 debut Is This It; I’m one of the few who disagree. The reputation of the latter always seemed to be shaped as much by the band’s image—their precociously stylish nonchalance—as by their infectious proto-punk songcraft. When Room on Fire appeared two years later, the conversation about the Strokes was so preoccupied with their role in the early-’00s rock revival that few bothered to notice, hey, Nick Valensi had learned some killer guitar leads.
(03/24/11 8:00am)
Recess’ Ross Green met with Your Highness star and screenwriter Danny McBride and David Gordon Green at the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, North Carolina, and discussed the trappings of big-budget filmmaking, their HBO series Eastbound and Down, and their meteoric rise through the comedy world. The two were promoting the film with advance screenings at North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem and North Carolina State University.
(03/17/11 8:00am)
Dissent lurks in the ranks of the Wu-Tang Clan. On 2007’s 8 Diagrams, the last full-ensemble Wu effort, ringleader and producer RZA tinkered considerably with the group’s established formula, pushing their signature sound toward a string-laden, acid-washed funk that Raekwon disavowed as too “hip-hop hippie.” Compounding the directional shift was the release date: RZA scheduled 8 Diagrams to drop just a week after Ghostface Killah’s solo effort Big Doe Rehab. Ghostface was conspicuously absent from the group album, phoning in verses on just two tracks and publicly announcing his displeasure with RZA.
(03/17/11 8:00am)
In light of Lupe Fiasco’s upcoming March 31 performance at Duke, Recess Editor Kevin Lincoln and Music Editor Ross Green discussed Lupe’s recent release, Lasers. To hear the full podcast of their conversation, go to dukechronicle.com/recess. The following talk has been edited for brevity and clarity.
(02/24/11 10:00am)
The beginning of Trinity ’07 alumnus Anteneh “Anthem” Addisu’s narrative sounds familiar: Duke graduate leaves behind the Gothic wonderland for a lucrative position on the sales and trading floor of one of America’s biggest banks. But Addisu soon flipped the script, taking a sharp left turn off Wall Street to pursue his longtime ambition of working as a recording rap artist.
(02/10/11 10:00am)
Cut Copy’s dazzling sophomore LP, In Ghost Colours, performed an impressive tightrope act—capturing all the euphoria and all the irresistible kinetic energy of new-wave dance rock without any of the kitsch of the ’80s. It is a feat few contemporaries could match, made all the more remarkable by the straight-faced execution. Ironic signifiers and notions of cool aloofness be damned—Cut Copy just wanted to dance.
(02/03/11 11:00am)
Rush can be a stressful time. No one wants to end up like that kid who didn’t get a bid to Slytherin and ended up going Ravenclaw, then couldn’t kick his nasty smokeless tobacco-and-black tar heroin habit.
(01/27/11 10:00am)
Sam Beam moved to Warner Brothers in last October, which makes Kiss Each Other Clean his first major-label release. That’s traditionally been an important line of artistic demarcation for indie acts benefitting from newfound studio bells and whistles, but not so here.
(12/02/10 10:00am)
For rap aficionados, Twitter enthusiasts and those with more than a passing interest in pop culture, Christmas came early this year—last Tuesday, to be precise, when Kanye’s newest masterwork My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy dropped to a chorus of five-star reviews and general acclaim. In fact, West and his G.O.O.D Music family have accelerated the whole holiday season; not content with the one-off gratification of an album release, Yeezy has been releasing a new track every Friday since a remixed version of “Power,” featuring a new Jay-Z verse and the obligatory Snap! sample, dropped Aug. 20. In total, the so-called Good Fridays series spanned 14 tracks and almost 30 collaborators, a grandiose companion offering worthy of the main event.
(11/11/10 4:06pm)
It’s pretty clear, in the midst of Runaway’s most extravagantly overblown moment—CGI fireworks, red-hooded disciples with a papier-mache Michael Jackson parade float, soon-to-be album centerpiece “All of the Lights”—that we are witnessing a Kanye West Moment. We’ve seen them before (“George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” “Taylor, I’mma let you finish…”), an amorphous collection of instances when West’s superego is simply overwhelmed by a tidal wave of his own ambitions, delusions, whatever. In the end, the rest of us can’t help being swept along too.
(11/11/10 10:00am)
Kid Cudi’s much-anticipated second album casts him as a vulnerable loner, struggling with newfound fame and his own persistent neuroses. Sound familiar? It should. Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager purports to be a sequel to Cudi’s debut Man on the Moon: The End of Day, but in reality it’s more like a retake.
(09/23/10 8:00am)
When, in 20 years, we look back on the Walkmen, Lisbon will probably occupy something of a holding pattern in their discography.
(07/01/10 8:00am)
“Sorrow found me when I was young,” the National frontman Matt Berninger sings on “Sorrow,” High Violet’s second track. “Sorrow waited, sorrow won.”
(04/22/10 8:00am)
Murs and 9th Wonder are accomplished hip-hop veterans—guys with well-established niches and lengthy discographies, including a few listenable and entertaining collaborations. ForNever, despite 9th’s insistence that it would be the pair’s best record to date, picks up pretty much exactly where their previous work left off, a breezy affair that never strays from either artists’ comfort zone. The album never surpasses Murs 3:16—to date Murs’ and 9th’s gold standard—in large part because it’s so clearly cut from the same cloth.
(04/15/10 8:00am)
Dance is one of the more ubiquitous terms in pop music today, applied to bands as stylistically disparate as Major Lazer and Franz Ferdinand. Panda Force is certainly closer to the latter on the spectrum of dance-influenced music, but the group further reinforces the breadth of the term. Comprised of students David Munoz, Navid Nafissi, Matt Feinman and Aidan Stallworth, Panda Force uses the opaque label of “post-rock dance” to describe their sound on their Myspace, but a single listen sheds light on what this means.
