Posted on November 20th, 2009 by Marc Ruxin. Filed under music.
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To say Dirty Projectors is an acquired taste would be both a probable understatement and disrespectful to the band. This is the kind of music that only happens when a kid from Yale with a big vocabulary, great taste in music and a broad musical education decides to make indie rock records. The result is mash-up of well appointed classical strings, unusual choral and vocal timings, synth-based electronic beats, and incredibly diverse guitar lines. This is art rock for those with a pop sensibility.
“Bitte Orca” is one part Jeff Buckley, one part “Graceland,” and part ’77 era Talking Heads. Any attempt to describe what happens over the course of the album’s nine songs could be seen as misleading: broadly dance music, but nothing I would know how to dance too, but then something way more precious and chamber music-like, best relegated to a drawing room, and then vocal gymnastics not really definable at all. The only real thread for me is that all directions initiated within these songs lead to and start from somewhere I can comfortably call brilliant.
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Posted on November 13th, 2009 by Marc Ruxin. Filed under music.
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Inevitably every year I fall hard for a record that manages to further reinvent that hazy, melodic Brian Wilson mid-60’s California glow. This year the debut from San Francisco’s “Girls” rips that page up, and then reassembles it into a glorious, grungy scrapbook of freedom and loss. The band is the primary brainchild of Christopher Owens who, as a child he survived an itinerant drifting as part of a bizarre cult only to run away from home only to reemerge years later as the author of one of the most emotive and uplifting albums of the years. There is a beautifully ragged, druggy, innocence dripping from every note.
But “Album” is an adventure in texture. It lives somewhere between rock and pop, psychedelic and lo-fi, happy and sad. A song like “Hellhole Ratrace,” my vote for the finest song of 2009, is an epic meditation on “love and affection” that starts innocently enough with a gentle guitar that builds into a wall of emotion cycling through a few repeated chorus’ for seven blissful minutes. Other songs stay closer to the Wilson ethos of the instruments just kind of echoing the crashing of waves on the pacific and the wind through the palms i.e. “Headache.” This album is wonderfully warm place to escape and dream weird thoughts.
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Posted on April 6th, 2009 by Marc Ruxin. Filed under music, music - live performances.
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Neko Case is a true force of nature. Her voice is among the most confident and controlled in music today. It has been for the past decade as she has continually honed her craft somewhere between country and pop, both as a solo artist and the occasional “soul” behind the super group the New Pornographers. In general my bias for her will always drift towards her pop sensibilities rather than her purer country inclinations, but like Joni Mitchell, who always had a kind of cool groove to her early and middle records, Neko Case carries the songs on her back leading them with her voice, leading the music instead of merely following or conforming to it.
“Middle Cyclone” is another lovely record, but like most of her solo work it is filled with hugely perfect moments (“People Got a Lot of Nerve” and “This Tornado Loves You”) and a few that tend to miss a little. But in the end it is hard for me to name more than a few female vocalists that have combined both the chops and songwriting abilities over the past bunch of years – Beth Orton, Cat Power, PJ Harvey. Neko Case is very much the real deal.
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(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
(2 votes, average: 4.50 out of 5)