Five Quality Tracks: October 2015

This was a feature that I used to do for the Daily Californian’s Arts & Entertainment blog. I decided to give it life again here. At the end of each month, I’ll post a feature highlighting five quality tracks released during that month.

October will probably remembered as the month that Adele said “Hello”. I thought about including it as one of my five tracks, but the idea of this post is to introduce people to songs that they maybe haven’t heard, or to songs that they can maybe appreciate in a new way. Everyone on the planet knows about “Hello,” so here are five additional songs that ruled my Spotify this month.

1. Grimes: “Flesh Without Blood”

Grimes finally announced her much-anticipated follow-up album to 2012’s Visions (which contained one of the best songs of the decade so far) — Art Angels, which comes out this Friday. Over the last year or so, Grimes has generated a lot of questions about what direction she would take on the new album, the primary question being: how ‘pop’ will it be? Last year, she released the extremely polarizing, intended-for-Rihanna track “Go”, which saw Grimes embracing full-on, drop-heavy, banger pop like never before. Would the new album go further in this direction, or was “Go” just a one-off? The questions only grew when reports came out that she scrapped an entire album because she believed it “sucked”. And it didn’t make her intentions any clearer when she denounced her own songs publicly, saying she hates “Oblivion” (which is ridiculous) and doesn’t like “REALiTi” a demo she posted on YouTube in March that I consider to be one of the best songs this year. If she hates her best songs, then what does she think is good?

ANYWAY, I’m just glad that all the speculation will be put to rest very soon. “Flesh Without Blood” is, without a doubt, another embrace of pop. On first listen, I was slightly disappointed — I thought it wasn’t as imaginative as her best work on Visions. It certainly was catchy, but it seemed a little too basic, too obvious, too simple. It just felt like all she did was provide a slight update to the guitar riff from “Since U Been Gone” — which, don’t get me wrong, is a pop masterpiece, but it’s not weird. The ultimate credit to Grimes — in both her music and her personality — is her innate weirdness. Where was the weirdness?

I was dead wrong though. Nuances and intricacies revealed themselves on repeated listens, and I realized that “Flesh Without Blood” isn’t basic at all. It’s teeming with unexpected sound effects sprinkled throughout, it skillfully adds and takes away elements at just the right time, and the various intersecting melodies are perfect. The lyrics are well-constructed and vivid: “Your voice, it had the perfect flow / It got lost when you gave it up though” and “I don’t see the light I saw in you before.” And did I mention it was catchy? This is a blast-in-the-car type of song. Art Angels looks to be very, very interesting.

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Photos: Outside Lands 2015

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Outside Lands happened in August. It’s now October. But I figured I might as well post some photos from the beautifully situated festival in the heart of San Francisco. I don’t pretend to be a good photographer, but Golden Gate Park is quite photogenic.

Natalie Prass

Natalie Prass

They have

They had a “farmers market” stand with the most refreshing peaches of all time.

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Five Quality Tracks: September 2015

This was a feature that I used to do for the Daily Californian’s Arts & Entertainment blog. I decided to give it life again here. At the end of each month, I’ll post a feature highlighting five quality tracks released during that month.

1. Deerhunter: “Breaker”

Bradford Cox is the face of Deerhunter, known for his stream-of-conscious style of writing and erratic genius, but the band’s secret weapon is Lockett Pundt, guitarist and occasional songwriter. Pundt released a solo album under the moniker Lotus Plaza in 2012 that was very important to me during three months that I spent in Chile. It was a time when, being in a new place, my vulnerabilities were more raw, and thus, the music I was listening to was especially potent and life-affirming. The highlight from that album was “Remember Our Days”, which featured beautiful guitar interplay and a simple but welcoming melody singing “If I don’t see you again, I’m glad that you were my friend, I’ll remember our days.”

Rarely does Pundt emerge from the background on Deerhunter songs, but he shares vocal duties with Cox on “Breaker,” one of two excellent singles released from their forthcoming album Fading Frontier. They harmonize gracefully on the verses, before Pundt takes over on the chorus — and let me just say that the chorus is straight-up amazing. It bursts open with a melody so good (and simple) that I can hear Paul McCartney singing it (which, by the way, is basically the highest compliment you can pay to a melody). “Breaking the waves, I can not, no, I tried, I can’t seem to stem the tide.”

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Poptimism Won 2015, Who Won ‘1989’?

Ryan Adams, Taylor Swift, and ‘Peak Poptimism’

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For those who don’t obsessively peruse music blogs, “poptimism” is a strain of music criticism that celebrates top-40 pop music and the mega-stars that bring the hits to life. Music magazines, websites, and publications such as Pitchfork and SPIN rose to prominence through their celebration of punk, indie, underground rap, and other genres far from the mainstream, dissing the vapidity of chart-topping hits along the way. But over time, pop has overcome its stigma. “Poptimism” has thoroughly permeated the ends of the blogosphere, to the point that praise for the likes of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Carly Rae Jepsen has become the modus operandi of most music criticism (see the links on each name for examples). The fact that Pitchfork bestowed its #1 song of 2013 to “Hold On, We’re Going Home” by Drake, perhaps today’s biggest pop juggernaut, would have been unheard of a few years ago. It’s no longer an embarrassing display of naiveté to love “Call Me Maybe” or “Teenage Dream” — it’s a sign that you’re an impartial judge.

With the release of Ryan Adams’s cover of Taylor Swift’s behemoth of an album, 1989, we have officially reached “peak poptimism.” We are now in a society where there is no such thing as a guilty pleasure. If someone like Ryan Adams had covered a Kelly Clarkson album ten years ago, I guarantee it would have been a completely ironic exercise. The culture was just not one where the critically acclaimed underground mixed with the pop stars. But today, in an age where poptimism reigns supreme, Adams can talk about 1989 in an interview and say, with total honesty: “These songs are incredible. You break them down from what they are to this raw element, and they’re just super powerful and they can tear you up.”

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Five Quality Tracks: August 2015

This was a feature that I used to do for the Daily Californian’s Arts & Entertainment blog. I decided to give it life again here. At the end of each month, I’ll post a feature highlighting five quality tracks released during that month.

1. Beirut: “Gibraltar”

It’s been far too long since Zach Condon of Beirut graced us with The Rip Tide four years ago — I’ve been missing his pleasing style of sparkling indie pop. “Gibraltar” furthers the more minimal blueprint of The Rip Tide, largely foregoing the “world music” that Beirut became known for originally. There are no horns or strings to be found here, but there’s still plenty to keep us interested. The piano is bright and the melody sweet, but the percussion is what makes the song, with its combination of bongos, shakers, and well-placed handclaps. It’s a light, airy, and delightful song.

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President Obama’s Summer Playlists are Pretty Much Perfect

This morning, President Obama dropped his summer playlists on the world via a @POTUS tweet, and our BBQs will officially never be the same.

By now you know that we revere summer playlists here at D-Brad Music. Well, I’m going to need to up my game after looking at his “day” and “night” playlists.

Obama’s “day” playlist is full of sunny classics, including one of the greatest summer songs of all time, Sly & the Family Stone’s “Hot Fun in the Summertime”, and the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” (a good election theme song, I might add). We have the awesomely epic and foreboding “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones, as well as relatively deep cuts from Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, Aretha Franklin, and Stevie Wonder. For a modern touch, Obama puts in John Legend’s criminally under-appreciated “Green Light” featuring Andre 3000, and Florence + the Machine’s “Shake it Out” (here’s wondering if Obama would have pandered enough to include Taylor Swift’s song with almost the same name if it hadn’t been scrubbed from Spotify). My favorite surprise selection though is Justin Timberlake’s eight-minute jam from The 20/20 Experience, “Pusher Love Girl”.

The “night” mix is just as impressive — these tracks, with their laid-back tempo and feel, perfectly set the mood for relaxing in the backyard as the sun sets. He opens it with John Coltrane’s jazzy take on “My Favorite Things”, eases us in with Queen Beyoncé featuring Frank Ocean on “Superpower”, and then drops the nighttime wedding classic, “Moondance” by Van Morrison. It’s just a murderer’s row from there — Al Green, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Lauryn Hill, Joni Mitchell, Otis Redding, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis… it goes on and on. My favorite surprise selection: the chill hip-hop of “UMI Says” by Mos Def.

One thing is for certain — these playlists are LOADS better than Hillary Clinton’s official 2016 campaign playlist, which is mostly hot garbage. Did we really need two American Authors songs?

Now, if only we can get Barack to change his mind and force Kanye to release his forthcoming album, which he originally promised for this summer. Then he would even further solidify his already firm standing as king of summer music.

Five Quality Tracks: July 2015

This was a feature that I used to do for the Daily Californian’s Arts & Entertainment blog. I decided to give it life again here. At the end of each month, I’ll post a feature highlighting five quality tracks released during that month.

1. Albert Hammond, Jr.: “Born Slippy”

For those that don’t know, Albert Hammond, Jr. made his name as the curly-haired guitarist for a little band called the Strokes. His smattering of solo material over the years has served as a showcase for his tightly-knit riffs and keen sense of melody (check out “GfC” and “Hard to Live in the City”). It’s clear that he was an important influence over the Strokes’ successfully catchy sound. “Born Slippy” is a delectable slice of guitar pop, complete with an earworm of a melody that’s guaranteed to stay in your head.

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