Arcade Fire: “The Suburbs”
Rock’s greatest evangelists this side of St. Bono, Arcade Fire have been pitching their own feverish big-tent revival for the better part of the last decade. They’re not asking you to come to Jesus, exactly, though there’s no denying the religious fervor that runs through their work. Theirs is a prophetic calling, a calling to sound the alarm and bid listeners to wake up– from apathy, from spiritual and moral lethargy, from a paralyzing sense of “cool.” It’s a call they sound to everyone: Arcade Fire is the direct antithesis to the sense of exclusivity and ambivalence that characterizes the hipster scene. Everyone is asked to participate in their revolution, and one senses that they just won’t quit until the whole world has been brought on board. Given how few bands believe, with this much conviction, that rock and roll can Mean Something, the comparisons to U2 are well-deserved; the charges that they take themselves a little too seriously, not too difficult to understand.
Given the scope of their mission, the breadth of their empathy, it isn’t surprising that they often paint in broad strokes. Their themes are universal, their songs anthems, their emotional palette broad and relatable. Everything is oversized, like they’re stage actors and everyone else in indie rock are stuck on the small screen. For crying out loud, their first album was called Funeral and their second was an LP-length exploration of the toxic intersection of religion, politics, and commerce. And their third album, The Suburbs, blows up the scale even more. Theirs is a sound based on the idea that music itself can be meaningful, even apart from the words, and they’ve built their reputation on stadium-swelling overhaul of U2 by way of Springsteen. Those are familiar sounds, and they touch something inside of us. On the new album, the band introduces some new colors: A touch of 50s doo-wop, Tom Petty’s heartland rock, giddy synth pop, a Sinatra-ish coda. These sounds are signifiers; they take us to certain places in our cultural past, and they immediately communicate to us something of Arcade Fire’s intentions.
If it sounds big, sweeping, sprawling– well, this is Arcade Fire. Of course it is. Still, this is the band’s most ambitious recording yet; on the second song Win Butler sings that he’s “Ready to Start,” and you get the feeling that this is indeed the genesis of a whole new era for the band, one in which even the familiar reveals itself to be far more complex than we previously imagined. Specifically, they’re revisiting the neighborhood they introduced us to on Funeral– only this time, the tunnels that provided escape are a sprawl that cultivates a modern, middle-aged malaise. This isn’t an album about grief and loss, but about something colder, more insidious. It’s about lack of feeling– about the loss of passion, of fervor, of intimacy. It’s about cultural norms that dehumanize us without us knowing. These are broad themes and big ideas, but even when they aren’t subtle, Arcade Fire is always complex.
And so the album is a complicated set of interlocking pieces that mirrors the suburban sprawl Butler sings about. Lyrical motifs and phrases recur in different songs, sometimes in totally different contexts, different puzzle pieces that the band effortlessly move around to fit their vision. The jaunty saloon piano that propels the title track disappears from the song when it is reprised at the album’s end, this time as a strings-and-voice, Wee Small Hours epilogue that uses the same words as at the album’s start, but somehow seems to carry an entirely new, complementary meaning. The songs in between pair off to reveal dichotomies but also connections, and not just in the two-song suites “Half Life” and “Sprawl” but throughout: Sometimes Butler’s lyrics find him returning to the perspective of the kids who raced through Funeral‘s tunnels, but in the very next song he’s singing from the perspective of the parents, weighed down by a cultural numbness, the ravages of time and age, the anxieties of the Neon Bible era.
The music is similarly expansive, similarly interconnected, and as much a part of the story as the lyrics are. Again, they seem to come in pairs: The resignation of the title track and its easy-going gait give way to the more determined, punkish rush of “Ready to Start,” just as the quiet desperation of “Wasted Hours” comes bundled with the raging aggression of “Month of May,” the band’s leanest rocker yet. Make no mistake that what they’re doing here is masterful, and they know it. They practically flaunt their growth as a band, the depth of their vision and the grace in the execution, when they pair a song like “Modern Man”– its spare production standing in stark contrast to the bombast of Neon Bible, just naked emotion with little adornment– with the lavish experimentation of “Rococo.” The interplay of rich strings and guitar tones on “Empty Room” revel in sound, but even moments like this never distract from the importance of song, something emphasized by the song’s quick fade into the ringing guitar rock of “City with No Children”– Hold Steady by way of Tom Petty, and the closest thing here to a “Wake Up”-style anthem.
I don’t want to say much else about where this story goes, or what conclusions the band reaches; suffice to say that their latest manifesto is a painfully precise excavation of a soul that has been worn down by a most curious modern malaise; that it is neither a political screed nor a religious polemic, yet its themes of affluence and isolation, of sleeping morals and cultural conformity, speak in a very specific way to both the times in which we live and more broadly to the condition of being human, making it political in the most meaningful way and spiritual in the most concrete. What I will say is that, by the time you reach “Sprawl,” the album’s mastery becomes impossible to deny. It’s another two-parter, this one explicitly so; the twin movements couldn’t be more different, and couldn’t compliment each other more. The first half is a bare-bones lamentation from Win at his most desperate and downtrodden. It’s the sound of a man who’s realized he’s been drowning his soul. It’s also a wake-up call; part two is sung by wife Regine, and it’s every bit as exhilarating and cathartic as “Keep the Car Running” or “No Cars Go.” I’m not going to spoil the specifics of its call to arms, but it sounds pretty perfect to me: It’s the sound of the soul finally stirring.
Andrew Peterson: “Counting Stars”
My review of Counting Stars– the new album from a folk singer by the name of Andrew Peterson– is up today at CT. This one’s a little different from what I usually write about, but very much worth investigating.
Reflection Eternal: “Revolutions per Minute”
Any doubts as to Talib Kweli’s skills on the mic were basically put to rest in 2003, when Jay Z himself namechecked the man on his Black Album, holding up Kweli as a sort of lyrical ideal. It seemed a slightly odd collision of worlds then, and it still does so today. Kweli does a bit of namechecking on his new Reflection Eternal album, Revolutions per Minute, and in this case it makes a little more sense; he doesn’t return the favor to Jigga, but he does give a nod to Common, The Roots, and his old Black Star partner Mos Def.
That feels about right. Kweli fits in with that group of hip-hop vets who have, for the most part, resisted the allure of modern rap trends, instead forging their own, personal takes on hip-hop that is socially aware, historically-minded yet still forward-thinking. In fact, Kweli’s artistry may be the purest of them all. He’s one of those MCs who never allows himself to become flashy or trendy enough to really blow up, yet his rhyming– existing totally outside the hip-hop mainstream as it does– seems to represent the culture’s conscience, the purity of its essence, making it feel necessary. Even if we are only occasionally reminded of Kweli’s genius– every few years or so, when he puts out a new record– it is nevertheless comforting to know that it’s always there.
It’s probably unsurprising, then, that his return to recording after a three-year absence is met with relatively little fanfare, least of all from the man himself. He spends little of Revolutions per Minute trumpeting his own return to the game, though his skills on the mic leave little doubt that he could be in the upper ranks of battle MCs if he really wanted to be. He doesn’t pay much mind to current rap trends, either, though there’s a moment here and a moment there that suggest he could light up the clubs were he not so burdened by his own conscience. So he spends pretty much the whole record rapping about politics– be that the politics of Big Oil or the politics of the music industry. He carries the weight of hip-hop’s social awareness dutifully; as one song puts it, he’s got work to do.
His Reflection Eternal partner is Hi-Tek, a producer who may as well be dubbed this generation’s DJ Premier; he borrows from old jazz and soul albums with striking minimalism, creating tracks that are open and leaving his MC plenty of room the breathe. These are not the lavish, luxurious soul-sampling tracks that you’d hear coming from Kanye West. These are spare beats where the samples are integrated seamlessly into the spirit and theme of the lyrics– note the particularly brilliant incorporation of a gospel sample into “In This World.” The duo doesn’t seem too concerned with debunking the old knock that these socially-conscious hip-hop records don’t bump enough for the dancefloor. This is hip-hop for the head, and there’s arguably no one who does it better.
To be fair, the album does have one ringtone-ready, club banger– a hot single with Estelle called “Midnight Hour,” which almost sounds like it could be an Amy Winehouse song with its retro soul vibe. It’s a killer track that sticks out like a sore thumb here, but in its own way it underscores how masterful the album is, particularly in its control of mood and tone on all the other tracks. The song also highlights the duo’s firm command of the hi-hop lexicon, how they are able to play with both classic tropes and current trends, alternating between homage and subversion. The album opens with the old classroom intro that’s been done to death on so many hip-hop records, it comes across as the worst of all possible cliches– until the rest of the album unfolds with such a rich sense of history, you begin to think that the intro is a very deliberate tribute to the icons of the past. The rest of the album finds Kweli and Hi-Tek stretching at hip-hop tropes like it’s Silly Putty in their hands, sometimes with real invention (see “Got Work,” a clever, dark inversion of the standard “hip-hop as a woman” metaphor; also, “Just Begun,” a smokin’ hot take on the posse cut that features killer verses from both Jay Electronica and Mos Def) and sometimes with just the right touch of irreverence (there are a couple of interludes that cheekily mock the hardcore gangsta lifestyle, to sincerely funny results).
But to write this off as a stuffy history lesson would be a grave error. In truth, what it is is the sound of two pros who are having a blast remaking hip-hop conventions in their own image; and it really is fun, lofty lyrics or not, whether the duo is channeling their message through outlets of real invention (“Ballad of the Black Gold” is a topical song that happens to sound pretty far removed from anything anyone else is doing in hip-hop right now) or simply getting loose, as one song title puts it. This is sturdy hip-hop, which may not sound particularly exciting, but in reality it’s quite a gem: There’s no flash or gimmick here, just a thoughtful, inventive, and thoroughly playable rap album that’s built to last.
The Like: “Release Me”
Talk about an extreme makeover: On the cover of new album Release Me, the members of The Like are all dolled up like they stepped out of a 1960s vogue shot; as an eye-catcher, it works wonders, but what’s really exciting is the truth in advertising. Yes, the band– now a foursome– is taking some cues from 60s garage rock and girl group harmonies, and they’ve come up with a record that’s infinitely more snappy and striking than their forgettable debut. If that album seemed to bank on the reputations of their famous fathers, this one rides the hot streak of their producer, Mark Ronson. He’s best known for producing Amy Winehouse, and there’s plenty of her soulful sass on display here, but this is hardly a retro soul throwback, sounding more like a cross between Camera Obscura‘s swoon-worthy girl-group harmonies and the garage-rock thump of Foxboro Hot Tubs. And if their exquisite beauty is sure to win over fans of the former band, it’s the latter who provide a more apt comparison, as The Like pulls off the neat trick of working almost entirely with vintage sounds but coming up with something so lively and effervescent, it somehow comes across as an entirely modern production.
Credit Ronson for leading them through all the right touchstones– from Costello-styled melodicism to playful Pretenders poses here and there– but mostly credit the band members for writing such a stellar batch of songs, every one of them a would-be hit single in some wonderful, alternate reality. Opener “Wishing He Was Dead” is a nasty, dark break-up song with spikes of carnival-esque organ that make it feel like a forgotten gem from This Year’s Model; the song goes by in a flash and spirals perfectly into “He’s Not a Boy,” a careening pop/rocker with a perfect hook and a tough-as-nails, sweet-but-snarky attitude to match. The rest of the record flies by in a similar rush of energy and hooks, slowing down only once or twice for breathers like the slinky, sexy 60s soul burner “Narcissus in a Red Dress.” The production here is flawless– neither revivalist nor revisionist, nodding to its 60s roots but not seeking to recreate them wholesale– but it’s the songs that stick, and make Release Me feel, already, like a great lost rock and roll classic.
Sheryl Crow: “100 Miles from Memphis”
Two years after the quirky, idiosyncratic pop of Detours– an aptly-named collection of side trips down back alleys and into weird new directions– Sheryl Crow returns with an album that sounds, on paper, like it might be the thematically focused, sonically unified antithesis to that record. And in some ways it is. 100 Miles from Memphis is Crow’s much talked-about Southern soul album, a collection of blue-eyed belters done in the classic Hi style that identifies itself by its very title as a kissing cousin to Dusty in Memphis. But Detours was not just a detour, and Crow remains an artist whose muse is too restless to do a straight genre homage. The record, of course, is much better for it.
If anything, 100 Miles is a sort of spiritual tribute to the Memphis soul and R&B Crow grew up with in the 70s, an album that conveys much of the sensibility and the mindset of those albums without painting itself into the corner of strict emulation. It’s clear from the outset that Crow considers this to be a vital extension of her own art– not, to return to the Detours metaphor, a side trip– and that the album is as much about exploration as it is winning radio hits. Opener “Our Love is Fading” is a thumping, horn-drenched rave that positively drips with Southern sassiness and crosses well over the six-minute mark; in this declaration of sound and intent, Crow is willing to take her time and ride the groove until it exhausts itself. But the very next song shows just how loosely she’s taking this Memphis soul thing: “Eye to Eye,” with guest guitar work from Keith Richards, is a genial reggae groove, basically unrelated to the 70s Memphis sound yet capturing its light, easy-going vibe. Sonically it shouldn’t work, but Crow folds it into the project nicely simply by virtue of the fact that this album is more about capturing an era’s spirit, not the specifics of its sound.
And yet, when she wants to, she captures that sound ably; give much of the credit to Doyle Bramhall II and Justin Stanley, who produced the set along with Crow and prove themselves more than capable of bringing vintage sounds into a modern context. They can emulate the Willie Mitchell sound with spot-on results, as on the album’s third song, a pleading, spiritual love song in the classic Al Green vein; that the song is a cover of Terrence Trent D’Arby’s “Sign Your Name,” recorded in the late 80s, and features the thoroughly-modern Justin Timberlake on harmony vocals, is a fun wrinkle that lends added depth to this project’s very nature.
And there are more wrinkles along the way, Crow and her producers never straying from their fundamental palette yet ensuring that the proceedings are more about inspiration than outright homage. Even amidst the brassy Memphis horns and lilting grooves, the sun-kissed harmonies and the soulful swelling of strings, the songs are flavored with gospel overtones and pop instincts, hippie sing-alongs and organ-drenched funk workouts. The songs, particularly the ballads, often dabble in nostalgia, but the album is an act of synthesis, not historical recreation, something that isn’t restricted to the sound but is part of the actual writing, as Crow not only brings different styles together under her unifying aesthetic but captures a sort of overarching worldview, as well– one that’s rooted in a sort of positivism that makes the breakup tunes warmly melancholy instead of out-and-out depressing, and finds a couple of the songs reaching into social awareness. These songs aren’t about politics per se, but are instead positive-thinking odes to activism, and if they’re not as specific or as hard-hitting as, say, a Marvin Gaye song, they harken to the same era, where soul music went hand-in-hand with street-level social upheaval, songs of activism with songs of love and heartache.
And to say that they’re not particularly heavy or profound is to miss the point, by the way. This is a soulful pop album for summer, an album that’s more about feeling good than delivering a grand message, and on that level it works exceedingly well. Nowhere is it clearer than on the album’s final track, a deliriously enthusiastic cover of the Jackson 5′s “I Want You Back.” Crow delivers it in the same way she delivers most of the album– not with an emulation of classic soul singing but with her own girlish energy and enthusiasm, as though she’s reconnecting to a particular shade of joy she remembers from her youth. It’s what makes the song a cheerful rush of wonder and emotion, and the album itself a feel-good paean to sunny vibes and sweet, sweet soul.
Prince: “20ten”
Almost thirty years ago, Prince released an album called Controversy; the album was split between tough-talking protest songs and lascivious sex songs, and the title of the record has served the Purple One well ever since. But if Prince once courted controversy through his actual music, his rabble-rousing and hell-raising in 2010 is strictly in the province of his extra-musical stances and his stodgy refusal to play by the typical record label political games. In other words, people aren’t making a fuss about the content of his music anymore, just the context, something that’s perhaps never been truer than it is with 20ten– an album that arrives just days after Prince announced the Internet to be a passing fad, and is available neither in digital form nor via conventional distribution methods, coming only as a freebie nestled inside copies of various European newspapers and music rags. (Those who prefer to get their music on iTunes– or who live in the United States– are out of luck, at least for now.)
And if you think Prince is becoming something of a curmudgeon, what with his Luddite griping about technology and his stubborn refusal to play by the now-accepted rules of the game, well, just wait. The new album is called 20ten, and if the title is meant to suggest that this is how Prince views life and music in this infant decade, he’s even more out of touch than any of us could have believed. Never before has Prince sounded so stuck in the past, not only because the music here never varies from the strengths of his most famous work, but because the very sound of the album sounds like it was designed to emulate the production techniques of mid-80s Prince classics. But even on those albums, Prince often had a dynamite band like the Revolution to back him up, which means that those albums still sound fresh and full even though they may also sound a bit dated; 20ten, with its heavy reliance on synthesizers and programming, sounds like it’s basically all Prince, and he’s never sounded stodgier.
It is, admittedly, a stronger work than last year’s LotusFlow3r/MPLSound twofer, if only because it’s a concise ten songs rather than a sprawling, conceptually rigid experiment. In that sense, 20ten is something of a companion to lean, classicist Prince albums like Musicology and 3121, but where those albums impressed due to the artist’s still-sharp sense of craft, 20ten sounds like the work of a Prince who is just going through the motions, lacking anything resembling real inspiration. That’s not to say that his sense of craft has left him, something that’s made evident by finely-layered slow jams like “Beginning Endlessly” and “Future Soul Song”– which are, compositionally, some of the sturdiest Prince constructions of the last ten years or so. But where that sense of craft was once vital and thriving, here it simply sounds mechanical.
Actually, what it sounds like is precisely what it is– the work of a 52 year-old Jehovah’s Witness who just can’t live on the edge the way he used to. That certainly extends to the music here, which is at times painfully dated. The opening funk/rock song, “Compassion,” might have been a classic Prince party-starter were it not for the tinny beat and processed horns that keep the music from ever really popping the way it should. “Walk in Sand” is a falsetto ballad in the grand Prince tradition, only instead of sounding sexy, it sounds like adult contemporary schmaltz, closer to easy listening than to R&B. And “Sticky Like Glue,” with another awkwardly dull drum beat and the most embarrassingly cliched synthesizers to be heard anywhere in 2010– along with an ill-advised B-boy rap break– would have made for a fine 1980s sitcom theme, but here it only makes the once-funky one sound like he’s woefully out of touch.
But if his inspiration as a record-maker is running low, his songwriting potency must be totally empty. There was a time when Prince wrote wonderfully edgy songs that balanced the sacred and the profane, the solemn and the frivolous; here, his sex songs don’t come any hotter than tunes about kissing in the back row of the movies and going for a walk, hand-in-hand, on the beach. His religious imagery is largely absent here, save for one song that likens social activism to an “Act of God,” and as for politics, he peppers the album with vague, dumb asides about “greedy fat bankers” that don’t really sound indignant, simply duty-bound. He also has some choice words for George Bush regarding the decision to go to war with Iraq. In 2010!
I suppose he means us to take 20ten as an ironic title– as though nothing’s really changed since then, that this is the same old Prince we all grew up with. But the greater irony is that something has changed– that for as hard as the album tries to emulate the sound of classic Prince records, it ultimately fails to match even strong latter-day albums like 3121, instead sounding like the work of a man who’s out of ideas, out of passion, lost his edge. That’s not the same Prince, the one who, once upon a time, might have matched his bold marketing strategy with an equally bold piece of music. This is a Prince who’s stuck in the past, and as such it’s hard to imagine this record lingering any longer than this morning’s headlines.
The Innocence Mission: “My Room in the Trees”
My review of the new Innocence Mission, the charmingly titled My Room in the Trees, is posted at CT.
The Innocence Mission is a band that I have loved for a long time. I first became aware of them with 1999′s Birds of My Neighborhood, an album that I still regard as a masterpiece of purity and poetry. From there I worked backward in their catalog and came to cherish many of their earlier records– particularly the more pop-oriented Glow and the atmospheric Umbrella– and also Befriended, their very fine, meditative work from 2003. From there, I found their music to lose some steam; the couple of albums they released after Befriended both sounded like the work of a band running out of ideas and inspiration. But with My Room in the Trees, I feel excited about them again: It doesn’t have a lot of new ideas in it, I’ll grant, but its execution is so graceful and lovely that I can’t help but be won over by the album’s strong songwriting, its heartfelt poetry, and its sheer beauty.
The Films of 2010: Favorites So Far
I fear that I’ve given the wrong impression about the crop of films that have released so far in 2010. Readers of this blog are no doubt aware that I’ve written fewer film-related posts than ever before in the past six months, but that’s hardly a reflection on what’s been going on at the movies. It has, in fact, been a very good year for film, if not in terms of the sheer number of great new releases than at least in terms of the quality of them. That I haven’t said much about them speaks only to the general busyness of my own life, and to the level of focus I’ve put into reviewing new music releases (which is, of course, this blog’s primary focus).
But there have been enough fine films to engage my head and my heart that I should pause to celebrate them, if only briefly. Here is a list of my five favorites of 2010 so far– with the acknowledgment that I have not seen many of the year’s most celebrated arthouse releases. That said, all five of these films could very easily end up on my year-end list this December, with three of them representing the work of master filmmakers (or in one case, a collective of filmmakers) at the peak of their powers, and the other two showcasing relatively new talents who have made very strong grabs for my attention.
As always, these are simply my personal favorites– the films that have meant the most to me.
01. Toy Story 3 (Dir. Lee Unkrich)
In a way, this was my most-anticipated movie of 2010, and yet it took me a couple of weeks to work up the courage to go and see it. I have nothing but resolute faith in the wizards at Pixar– their movies are uniformly high in quality, and most of them end up ranking very high on my year-end best-of lists– but the Toy Story films are particularly special to me: I grew up with this franchise, with these characters and stories, and they are as beloved by me as any big-screen characters I can think of. The thought of seeing them again for a final send-off was exciting and melancholy at the same time– much like the film itself.
But oh, what a joy. Pixar continues to exhibit astonishing levels of mastery, and this could very well be their finest film– or at least a solid contender. It’s a rich extension of the characters and themes of the first two movies, which means that, as with those first two, there is both deep characterization, a focus on storytelling, and a host of complex, existential questions that make Toy Story much more than typical kids’ fare. And like those first two movies, this one is almost old-timey in how it mingles slapstick comedy and cheerful humor with undercurrents of deep sadness; what it amounts to is a work of infectious joy that arises from tough scenes and real grief. It’s a supremely special movie, and it leaves me with no doubt in my mind that this is the finest, most consistently brilliant film trilogy of all time.
02. Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese)
Scorsese’s Hitchcock homage is also a horrific portrait of men made so desperate by the world’s madness, they escape into a madness of their own making. The film speaks to manhood, to living in uncertain times, to coping with loss and anger– but what makes it not only profound but truly masterful is Scorsese’s sure command of cinematic vocabulary, how the movie evokes films and eras past to convey its complicated emotions and its solemn themes.
03. The Ghost Writer (Roman Polanski)
The Ghost Writer arrived at a time when Polanski’s future– as a filmmaker and as a free man– was in question, but there’s nothing uncertain about this film, an edgy, angry, and altogether engrossing political thriller that finds the director in top, mischievous form. Everything about its construction speaks to a master of his his craft, but what I love most about it is how it captures an era of moral ambivalence and rampant paranoia with a sense of outrage and indignity, but also with careful balance and compassion.
04. How to Train Your Dragon (Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders)
Never before has a Dreamworks animated film come so close to emulating Pixar levels of excellence. Robust storytelling, characters we care about, heart and sincerity without a single pop culture reference or throwaway gag to be found– now there‘s a welcome development.
05. Please Give (Nicole Holofcener)
I’ve seen Holofcener compared to Woody Allen in more than one review, but her films bear comparison only to the most heartfelt and compassionate, least neurotic films in Allen’s canon. This is a film so rare it takes you a while to realize just how special it is; it’s a simple story about well-intentioned but mistake-prone, grown-up individuals trying to do the right thing in a world where doing the right thing can be tough. It’s hilarious, but also full of heart.
Big Boi: “Sir Luscious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty”
What’s in a name? Quite a bit, evidently– enough that the first proper solo album from the Outkast camp comes with three of them adorned on the front cover: There’s Big Boi, Sir Luscious Left Foot, and the Son of Chico Dusty. Flip the album over and you’ll find a couple more on the back– Daddy Fat Sax and General Patton. They are, of course, all one man– Antwon Patton, who most commonly goes by the Big Boi label– and their presence scrawled over the CD artwork and tracklisting isn’t evidence of multiple personalities so much as a man who thinks (and rhymes) about himself enough to have collected such a wide array of nicknames. Not too surprisingly, this same man has decided to make his first full-fledged solo statement one that’s all about himself; Sir Luscious Left Foot, despite a not unimpressive cadre of guest artists and producers, is all Big Boi all the time, a reflection of its auteur’s busy and brilliant mind and an outpouring of his ego, his id, his interior monologues and his carefully-guarded persona.
And that’s okay, because Big Boi is not a character, a cardboard cut-out, or a cliche: He’s a complex and contradictory man who has been put into a fightin’ mood due to several years of record label turmoil and long delays on the true beginning of his solo career. This, after all, is one of the minds behind a now-classic hip-hop album that juxtaposed the tough-talking brutality of “Gangsta Shit” with the tenderness and sensitivity of “Ms. Jackson,” and Sir Luscious is borne of many the same contradictions. And yet, an extension of his Outkast work this is not: Though there are a few familiar stylistic hallmarks along the way– like on the thick Southern drawl and bizzaro funk of “You Ain’t No DJ,” not surprisingly the one song here to feature Andre 3000 at the helm– this isn’t an album about gangsta shit or “Ms. Jackson” pathos so much as it is the sound of a grown man at play– an artist with both the skills and experience to be running the rap game, but who prefers to assert his domination not through brute force or sheer aggression so much as through dizzying displays of alarming virtuosity.
And so Sir Luscious is not a Southern-fried, P-funk quoting and feedback-drenched manifesto on the state of the world, the rap game, of Outkast or of Big Boi himself– it’s not, in other words, an album descended from Stankonia or Aquemini. But nor either is it another Speakerboxx; while that album sought to reclaim the wild ambitions of hip-hop’s golden age through its freewheeling energy and its bounty of ideas, Sir Luscious is a sleek, modern production. Big Boi riffs on seemingly every trend that’s hot in rap circa 2010, but he’s hardly cashing in: This isn’t a concession to modern commercial concerns so much as a glorious upheaval of them, with Sir Luscious turning the ubiquitous vocoder from an instrument of dancefloor sterility into a gloriously oddball rumble on the album’s champion single, an oddball club banger that seeks to bring back the “Shutterbugg.” The song, like the rest of the album, is steeped in synthetic tones that point back to 1980s electro-funk, but it isn’t evidence of nostalgia so much as a giddy jumbling of sounds and styles, eras and icons, with General Patton moving the pieces on the board with such effortless style and easy mastery that it’s hard to tell whether he’s showing off or simply having fun– or perhaps both.
The range of ideas here goes far beyond club-ready rumblers– witness the vulgar, bluesy grooves of “Tangerine,” or how “Turns Me On” flirts with both Chick Corea-style electric piano tones and a zoot suit breakdown that briefly harkens back to the old-timey affectations of Idlewild– but Sir Luscious is united under the many names that it bears, and the one man who conjures them all with such interchangeable ease. As an MC, Big Boi is an unusual character: He clearly has one foot in the old school, with most of these songs essentially being battle raps that trumpet his own (unimpeachable) skills on the mic, but in these modern settings he never allows his rhymes to drift too close to the streets, instead filling every bar with weird turns of phrase and non-sequiters, with spectacularly bawdy jokes and come-ons, with lyrics that hint at politics but mostly deal with sex and the rap game. He threatens other MCs with true aggression and he pumps his pick-up lines with more testosterone than you’ll find on any single ‘Kast album, but he never takes any of it too seriously: He tends to back off quickly, not because he doesn’t have the skills to back up his boasts but precisely because he does, and those skills speak for themselves– his rhyming is borderline preternatural, staying completely on top of ridiculous cadences with perfect vocal dexterity, sometimes weaving outside of the rhymes just to prove that he can.
As a major-label rap album of such sprawling vision and eccentricity, Sir Luscious is largely without precedent– it reaches farther than any Lil’ Wayne album, and it packs more fun and pure joy per minute than any of Kanye’s records– and it stands impressively on its own, a fine complement to Outkast’s albums that never threatens their own stature as classics, but does enforce Big Boi’s own legacy, both within and without the group. (Indeed: Andre may be known as the group’s more eccentric member, but Sir Luscious packs far more ideas into its running time than The Love Below did; it’s way more bangin’, too.) For a more interesting comparison, though, one might note that Daddy Fat Sax released his album– finally!– mere weeks after The Roots released their masterful How I Got Over. The two albums couldn’t be more different– one emphasizes sprawl, the other economy; one is utterly modern, one completely out of time; one an album of carefree boasting and good-times exuberance, one a contemplative work about growing up and acting responsibly– and yet, taken together, the two records represent the best of where hip-hop is and where it can go next in 2010. The Roots, for their part, have seemingly reacted to the genre’s excesses with an album that’s artful and succinct; Big Boi, meanwhile, revels in them, and what he’s made feels less like a stand-alone album than an extension of the artist himself– a self-expression, an unstoppable force of imagination.
Half-Time Report: Favorite Albums of the Year (So Far)
It has been, in my opinion, a very rich and fruitful year for new music. I could come up with a very fine Top 10 or 15 list right now– and we still have six months ago. So naturally, compiling my list of favorites so far is tough; I can only imagine what kinds of agonizing decisions I’m going to have to make when it comes time for the year-end list in December.
As with my “best of the first quarter” list from earlier this year, I’m only counting albums that have already released as of the end of June 2010; thus, such excellent records from the “coming soon” department, including (but not limited to) Big Boi, Ray Lamontagne, Robert Plant, The Innocence Mission, and others, are not considered here. And speaking of that “best of the first quarter” list, let it be noted that, from that list, only two albums return for this top ten, which goes to show just how many terrific recordings have come out in the spring and early summer.
So, with no further explanation, here are the ten albums that have moved me, entertained me, rewarded me, and inspired me the most in the first half of 2010– and yes, all or most of them could very well end up on my year-end-list come December.
01. The Roots
How I Got Over (review)
02. Elizabeth Cook
Welder (review)
03. Anais Mitchell
Hadestown (review)
04. Gorillaz
Plastic Beach (review)
05. The Black Keys
Brothers (review)
06. Robert Randolph and the Family Band
We Walk This Road (review)
07. Trombone Shorty
Backatown (review)
08. The Tallest Man on Earth
The Wild Hunt (review)
09. Alejandro Escovedo
Street Songs of Love (review)
10. Josh Ritter
So Runs the World Away (review)
Some Honorable Mentions: Paul Weller– Wake Up the Nation; Spoon– Transference; Elizabeth Shepherd– Heavy Falls the Night; Peter Gabriel– Scratch My Back; Peter Wolf– Midnight Souvenirs; Gil Scott-Heron– I’m New Here; Mary Gauthier– The Foundling
