Funk, soul, brother Isaac

You can sometimes trace a direct lineage from seminal albums through to their modern descendants. Sometimes, though, it’s just a genetic fragment, a heartbeat or a swagger that travels through the generations. When we talk about Can’s lasting influence, we can feel the ur-krautrock’s presence everywhere. When we talk about Isaac Hayes’s Hot Buttered Soul, we have to feel the fabric of modern music between our fingers, and bring it up to our noses to inhale the waft of Hayesian heritage.

The four songs that make up the album are diverting and ingenious. They walk around you, several times, making a mockery of conventional song structure. They are arranged like masterpieces—think of the cinematic interplay between strangled electric guitar and soaring strings on “Walk On By”. They know when to ride sparse, motorik beats, and when to let the piano parts expand to fill the universe of emotions—as on “Hyperbolicsyllablecsesquedalymistic” (see above). Everything is produced in a way that suggests the studio is a living thing—especially on the wandering “By The Time I Get To Phoenix”, with its ambient, barely-there organ drone and Hayes’s “velvet sledgehammer” monologue, which eventually lead into something grander and more significant.

On the face of it, Hot Buttered Soul shouldn’t be so un-derivative. Two of the songs are “covers” (albeit in the loosest possible sense), and the album was pieced together from several recording sessions—a far cry from the deranged-genius-cabin-fever-vibe we associate with most truly original works. But, somehow, it feels vital and inspirational in the correct sense of these words: it gave life to soul as a progressive, expansive genre (consider Curtis Mayfield’s Super Fly, released three years later in 1972); and it provided a rich seam of sounds and textures that artists would tap into in the decades to follow.

Capped with Hayes’s inimitable, husky set of pipes, the album manages to strut and preen, but also to serenade and emote. It’s no wonder the music it sired was, taken as a whole, so schizophrenic.

Whitney Houston — “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay”

If you, like me, were born in 1990, there’s a high probability you were too young to remember I’m Your Baby Tonight at the time of its release, in which case your first introduction to new music by Whitney Houston was probably “It’s Not Right But It’s Okay“.

In this situation, I suppose it’s not right, and it’s not okay either.

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Pareles, J. and Nagourney, A., 11 February 2012, “Whitney Houston, Pop Superstar, Dies at 48“, The New York Times.

Hot Chip — “Crap Kraft Dinner”

“All the people I love are drunk.”

Hot Chip know their way around the tragicomic, which is why “Crap Kraft Dinner” is a different kind of loser’s anthem.

The song doesn’t operate in terms of verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and if it did, it wouldn’t work. The first bit is all purported scene-setting, making the listener believe it’s the guy who’s been dumped. Over melancholy FM bells and the occasional, soothing throb of bass, Alexis Taylor sounds like a down-and-out, glued to the bar stool.

“All you can hear is my refusal,
‘Cos I haven’t got the time for a jerk-off loser.”

But then, as the song enters its second act, the tempo steps up a gear. A lonely, forlorn strum of guitar is another faux amis before the song’s true intentions are laid bare. The 808 starts hitting on the off-beat, second vocalist Joe Goddard copies Taylor’s lyrics but an octave lower, and we realise that it’s the girl, previously the recipient of the titular “crap Kraft dinner”, who’s been dumped. Before you know it, with an ironic smirk, a saxophone straight out of “Careless Whisper” enters the scene, presaging the song’s final section, wherein competing synth lines rotate and murmur over a tricksier beat. Now he’s not so much singing about leaving his girl, as rubbing salt in her wounds, pretending he’s upset and heartbroken in spite of it being his decision. There’s “no more space or time / For a last supper”—though, given his previously explicated culinary skills, maybe that’s no bad thing.

The double irony is, of course, that Hot Chip know they’re geeks, and know that they’re never really the ones doing the dumping, or the salt-rubbing, or the pimping of one’s ride. After all, in another Coming On Strong cut, “Playboy”, Goddard describes “Drivin’ in my Peugeot / 20-inch rims with the chrome now / Blazin’ out Yo La Tengo”, like a particularly sad-sack gangsta from Putney.

Dionne Warwick — “You’re Gonna Need Me”

Knock-out classic from 1973, as used in J Dilla’s masterful “Stop”.

There’s a haunting tone to that guitar twang which sets the scene at the start, which then gets subsumed into Warwick’s lovesick vocals and the soaring string arrangement. Later on, the guitar returns, transformed into a brittle solo instrument, perfectly mirroring the anguish in Warwick’s voice.

The other thing you notice is the drums, which could themselves have appeared on a Dilla track. There is a viscous quality to them, which suggests they might be rolling off the beat when in fact they remain totally in the pocket.

Janelle Monáe – The ArchAndroid

It totally gets people every time I reveal this, but one of my guilty pleasures is really good R&B. Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, even Usher – these are artists who have made some of the most enjoyable music during my lifetime, and I’ve always defended them to the hilt. The best music of this kind looks back – to Michael Jackson, Prince, Motown – yet is unafraid to take cutting-edge stylistic risks: consider how ground-breaking “SexyBack” sounded back in 2006, and how derivative all JT’s slavish impersonators sound by comparison.

And now we have a new inspirational artist on the scene – except this one’s also no slouch when it comes to about a dozen other genres. I have no idea to what extent Janelle Monáe has exploded onto the scene, but a label endorsement from Puff Daddy can’t hinder matters; neither can executive production from Big Boi. More importantly, with an album like The ArchAndroid under her belt, Monáe can practically do no wrong.

This album is epic in every way: over an hour in length; packed with bells, whistles, horns and the sonic trademarks of all her influences; skipping between brassy soul and rollicking funk and pastoral folk. Even better than this wide-eyed ambition is the quality of the songwriting – and frankly, I don’t care how much or little input she had on this front, because the quality never lets up: not in the hooks, not in the beats, not even in the city-scaping, city-aping arrangements. And, best of all, Monáe’s voice is a continual delight, keenly matching the tone of each song, from the wailing Beyoncé-plus of single “Tightrope”, to the dusky husky murmurings on “57821″. Her shape-shifting reminds me of Madonna, in a way, but Monáe’s got a considerably stronger set of pipes, and arguably her stylistic decisions are as honest as they are startling and unexpected.

This album is epic in every way: over an hour in length; packed with bells, whistles, horns and the sonic trademarks of all her influences

And then we come to the lyrics. I’ll admit, she loses me a couple of times with her Afro-futurist references, but there’s no denying that her unique vision shines through. Monáe has talked of the album as being like an amalgam of song, cinema and soundtrack, and throughout she succeeds in reaching this lofty target. Using androids as a metaphor for segregated minorities is pretty clever, mind, but it’s going to take listeners a while to digest her sophisticated, tangential, self-aware phrasing.

In the meantime, we should applaud Monáe for making what is probably the pop album of 2010. It’s catchy as anthrax, and never shies away from experiments, and if she keeps on like this, she could have a Bowie-esque career ahead of her.

Hot Chip – One Life Stand

Themes of marriage and commitment work surprisingly well in music that isn’t rock. In “My Love”, Justin Timberlake asks if his girl would “date him on the regular” and refers to a “ring” that “represents his heart”, over one of the finest R&B tracks in my lifetime. More recently, Beyoncé used “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” to implore young men to make that commitment, in order to prevent the pains of post-breakup jealousy. Conversely, in rock music, similar subjects all-too often fall flat and limp and mawkish. It’s little wonder some of my favourite music is so dark, because an awful lot of empowering music is unavoidably dull and derivative.

Hot Chip fall neatly into this marital R&B turf, boasting an array of catchy hooks and melodies that would function just as well were they not to be serviced by an arsenal of squelching synths and chart-reflecting beats. Their music veers exceptionally close to soul, and also to the idiosyncratic songwriting of Robert Wyatt and Paul McCartney, albeit with a modern instrumental bent. Following the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach taken on 2008′s Made In The Dark, the band has toured relentlessly, refocused, and emerged with a triumphantly mature new record, entitled One Life Stand. No more a bachelor, and now encumbered by the responsibilities of fatherhood, frontman Alexis Taylor has helped forge an album that is considerably more pruned down, and lacking the quirky excesses that previously plagued some of their weaker material.

One Life Stand is… solid. In places, as on the New Order-ish opener, “Thieves In The Night”, it is inspired. Elsewhere, it sees the band knuckle down and write richly melodic and warming songs about the joys of companionship and brotherhood. The album’s opening quartet of songs recall various eras of dance music – synth pop, disco, house, piano-stomping Motown. To the band’s credit, it never sounds too well-trodden, and, in the title track, they re-earn the truly great electro-pop crown previously bestowed upon “Ready For The Floor” and “Over And Over”.

Then, the band tones thing down for a middle section that some will find… slushy (sorry!), but other will cherish for its broad and smile-inducing balladry. Of particular interest is the afore-referenced “Slush”, which emerges from a bizarre vocal warm-up exercise and takes a while to get going. But when it does, it is properly good, and fashioned from a very McCartney II-esque mould. Four minutes in, a beautifully subtle brass arrangement combines with almost tear-jerking steel drum, creating a final two-and-half minutes of downbeat, melancholy yet utterly compelling music which defies genre. As the song is swallowed up by a foetal fog of atmosphere dust, you would be a cold-hearted creature not to be touched by it in some way.

The final three tracks see a return to Hot Chip’s preoccupation with electronic music. “We Have Love” is shadowy and danceable, and unfolds like a less crazy version of the last album’s “Don’t Dance”; “Keep Quiet” is sinister and rides along vaguely tropical percussion and synth glows that would not have gone amiss on the Fever Ray album. Finally, we are left with the triumphant house of “Take It In”, which performs the band’s great trick of shifting suddenly from a faintly worrying minor-key verse to an anthemic major-key chorus, with precision-honed perfection.

One Life Stand will probably bore a lot of listeners. It doesn’t radically alter the landscape of quasi-dance music; it doesn’t permit the band to indulge in their more insane electronic compositions. Instead, favouring a more subtle strategy of writing more-than-competent pop songs, the band’s new focus and concision pays great dividends. Never messy or sprawling, One Life Stand is a well-sequenced work that never outstays its welcome, and I think Hot Chip have finally created an album-lover’s album.

Spoon – Transference

It was perhaps inevitable, given Spoon’s stubbornly indie ways, that their follow-up to follow 2007′s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is willfully ragged, challenging and melody-free. Transference is hardly a krautrock behemoth; nonetheless, from the first wavering organ drone of “Before Destruction”, over which Britt Daniel growls like a spectator to the end of days, to the atonal tape loops that cut through the closer, “Nobody Gets Me But You”, this is a deliberately difficult work.

That’s not to say that Transference is a bad album – in fact, it’s a very good album. Self-produced, and often committed to tape from home recordings and demo tracks, the album veers between acoustic laments targeting primal emotions (“Goodnight Laura”, “Out Go The Lights”), and shuffling, dubby funk (“Who Makes Your Money”), in which Daniel’s sparse vocals are further obscured by the kind of playful production trickery the band has become known for. In-studio chatter is prevalent in the interstitial few seconds between tracks; on several occasions, songs either end abruptly, or suddenly isolate one instrument which peters out in a disconcerting fashion.

It’s not all shunt and groove, luckily – that would have been somewhat monotonous and overly gloomy. Spoon may have pruned their brand of minimalist art pop down to the bare essentials, but they’re still apt to throw a wobbly now and again, as on the barreling, piano-thrashing R&B (in a fifties sense, not à la Beyoncé) of “Written In Reverse” which recalls the grander moments of Gimme Fiction, or indeed the scratchy lo-fi of “Trouble Comes Running”, where the drums and guitars are entirely panned to opposing channels in a defiantly Pavement-esque style reminiscent of 1998′s A Series of Sneaks.

Some will argue that Spoon’s relentless infatuation with sparseness and economy has turned to parody on Transference. I would argue that the singleness of vision displayed on this album result in a subtle, vaguely creepy sense of cohesion that lend it an understated appeal that resembles a more low-key variant on the midnight ruminations of Spoon’s 2002 magnum opus, Kill The Moonlight.

Vampire Weekend – Contra (Mk. II)

Yes, I’m back. I couldn’t really keep away from this intriguing little album for much longer. In fact, I’ll probably end up writing a third (and final!) review of Contra as a kind of blog-exclusive. The micro-review below is to be printed in next week’s PartB culture supplement of my university newspaper, The Beaver. Enjoy!

What I really loved about Vampire Weekend was its fusing of catchy pop music, subtle world influences, and some seriously smart lyrics about “college” life. It was the great unifying soundtrack to my first year at university, depicting the perfect, globe-trotting lives of four Ivy Leaguers while I stumbled drunkenly around rainy, gloomy London. That their critiques of privileged youth appropriating distant cultural trends were misinterpreted as somehow endorsing colonialism was bizarre – as anyone who listened properly to “Oxford Comma” would know, Ezra Koenig wasn’t so much flaunting his knowledge of punctuation as criticising that kind of pedant.
Anyway, now they’re back, with the knowingly titled Contra – a wink and a nod to The Clash, and we’re off, with the starry-eyed vocals and thumb piano of “Horchata”, a song that rhymes aforesaid milky drink with “balaclava” and “aranciata”. Cheeky bugger. The next song, “White Sky”, melds the chirpiness of the band’s debut with a new-found love of synthesiser bleeps and beats, no doubt informed by producer-at-large Rostam Batmanglij’s side-project Discovery.

At this point, the most noticeable change in direction exhibited on Contra must be brought to the fore – namely, the sense of sadness and regret that tinges large swathes of the album. This is not such an upbeat album as even a song like “Holiday” would suggest: where cheeky verses once practically fell into rousing choruses, now the default setting is slightly detuned synths and pitter-patter beats. It’s certainly less baroque, as the AutoTuned dancehall of “California English” and the ambitious, sample-heavy “Diplomat’s Son” will testify.

The second noteworthy progression on Contra is, unsurprisingly, in the lyrics. Vampire Weekend was very much an album about campus life; Contra is all about this same set of Ivy League types graduating, inheriting the earth, and now re-evaluating their place in society. So, relationships crumble, and tales of distant shores are nostalgic and wistful. Which, all told, is probably a good thing, because I don’t think another thirty-six minutes of cold professors studying romances, and Blake, with his new face, would have washed with Vampire Weekend’s more astute listeners. Contra is a subtle, limbering creature; less catchy and celebratory; more reflective and critical in its aesthetic and lyrical bent.

Albums of 2009 – Lis(z)tomania!

UPDATE: Grab a convenient playlist featuring two key tracks from (almost) all of the albums featured here.

2009 has been a year when I’ve taken stock of a fair bit of older music – thank Spotify for that! – which might explain my profligacy in terms of listening to some really highly-regarded new albums. Nonetheless, in the last few weeks I’ve clawed back lost ground and taken the opportunity to investigate the hype surrounding some of this year’s gems.

In the interests of economy, I’m only listing my fifteen favourite albums; there were plenty of others that I enjoyed, but couldn’t justify adding to this list. So, as well as the albums listed below, do please go and have a listen to wonderful albums like Doves‘ triumphant Kingdom Of Rust, The Cribs‘ Johnny Marr-enhanced Ignore The Ignorant, and Atlas Sound‘s mesmerising Logos. But without further ado, and a bit more explanation where necessary, here are my offerings: