Rantings, reviews and lists from a person who structures half his life around obsessing over music.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Quasimoto - The Unseen (2000)

4.0 ★/8.0 - 8.9

It's a shame that your imagination never really matches the rampant power it contains when you're a kid. Before you've learned everything you can about the world and before you develop any clear definition of reality, your hyper-sensitive mind is capable of running wild with creativity. That's why so many toddlers have imaginary friends. Most will decry it as an adolescent obsession with fantasy, but I see it as more of an exhibition of the true creativity kids have before they grow old, mature and lose that essential spark of inventiveness.

The origin of Madlib's imaginary friend and moniker, a pig nosed yellow hippo named Quasimoto, is probably attributed to the fact that he (supposedly) recorded this album in the midst of a week-long binge on shrooms. But the true drug of choice is weed; The Unseen is the most blunted haze of an album since Cypress Hill's glory days. The lyrical content is abundant with stoner jargon and sentiments while Quasimoto's helium-induced delivery is as bored and listless as potheads get. Plus the lines themselves are pretty sluggish and weak on their own - it sounds like one too many spliffs have been smoked. Meanwhile, Madlib's beats are deliberately subdued and disorienting, filled with faint loops and understated touches that usually reveal themselves when listened to in altered states of mind, and the nature of the tracks cater directly to ADD patients, running extremely short and abruptly cutting out or changing completely. All cannabis culture nods aside though, Madlib and his demented alter ego have crafted a twinkling collection of smooth jazz-rap beats; sort of a twisted update of A Tribe Called Quest. Yes, there's plenty of druggy "what-the-fuck?" excursions ("Astro Travellin" and "Come On Feet", which has Madlib and Quas lazily struggling to encourage their feet to not fall asleep), but there's also sublimely soulful ballads ("MHBs"), chill elevator music grooves ("Axe Puzzles", "The Unseen"), tributes to Madlib's obscure Jazz record collection ("Jazz Cats Pt.1", "Return Of The Loop Digga"), hard hitting faux-battle raps ("Put A Curse On You", "Boom Music") and, in true Q-Tip and Phife Dawg fashion, countless down to earth criticisms of accepted hip hop stereotypes ("Real Eyes", "Bluffin").

The Unseen is so impressive because by reverting to his inner-childish self, Madlib has released a plethora of surging creativity; a collage of ideas spanning in all sorts of directions, overlapping and colliding with the attention span of gas molecules. For that same reason it can be a strange listen, with nothing really pulling the jarring samples, off-kilter rhymes and fragments together into a cohesive whole. However, the best way to understand Quasimoto is to listen to him through the perception of his creator. In other words, as Madlib kindly suggests on "Return Of The Loop Digga," "Throw this record on, pack a bowl, take a hit." Read more...

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Battles - Mirrored (2007)

4.0 ★/8.0 - 8.9

When trying to describe Battles, I've been driven towards all sorts of interesting analogies I thought I'd never in my life be able to use. A high speed scooter joyride through an industrial nuclear power plant. Alvin and the chipmunks trapped in a strobe-lit high-tech laboratory with King Crimson's Discipline playing on repeat. A carnival freakshow goes post rock. Transformers. Glitch rock. Saturday morning cartoons with steroids. These descriptions alone are going to get a lot of people giving the album a listen, but are they enough to establish Mirrored as album of the year? No, even though everyone will undoubtedly cite it's uniqueness as an attraction point. The first song they'll let all their friends listen to is the alien-like single, "Atlas" where Marilyn Manson style industrial filth is married to a club friendly beat, circus music guitars and the vocal stylings of hundreds of hardworking underground dwarves. Or they might point to the first half of "Rainbows," a teetering prog-rock implosion waiting to happen Animaniacs style - hammer bonks and goofy cartoon chases through rabbit holes and winding tunnels. These are spectacular songs, but what makes Mirrored one of the best albums of 2007, is when you can sense that the band is doing so much more than novelty. It's revolutionary. They're not just messing around; the constructs of this music is a complex fusion of man and machine and the end product is serious driving rock. The impenetrable King Crimson influenced jam sessions are invigorating enough, but when the band is also tinkering and experimenting with computers and loops as if they were simply another instrument, the process is refreshing in ways that haven't been done by any rock band yet. "Tonto" has a somber progression that's driven by a restless guitar line and cpu induced voices that resemble wild forest animals. "Bad Trails" is a tense tribal soundscape cluttered with dense digital effects and "Tij" takes off from samples of wheezes and heaves into a sinister slice of chaos with ricochet guitars and kinetic keyboards.

The majority of people who go into Battles unprepared could very well reduce them to the kind of thing you let your friends listen to almost as a joke. When I heard the head scratching "Ddiamondd," composed of whistles, techno breakdowns, and Mickey Mouse on speed, I thought the same thing. But it would be one of this decade's greatest tragedies if that's all Mirrored was known for. Sit through the off-kilter oddities and you'll find at the end of the day that Battles are not fucking around. You'll have your ass kicked in every direction at once and then served to you on a platter. And you'll see that this band has delivered the future of rock music, whether or not we're able to comprehend it as such. Read more...

Wednesday, November 7, 2007

King Crimson - In The Wake of Poseidon (1970)

2.5 ★/5.0 - 5.9

Don't get me wrong: if a band has a distinctive sound that works, then chances are it's a better choice for them to drive that sound into the ground with slight variation, rather than move on, attempt something radically different and fail miserably. But this is too much. This is the kind of bullshit you'd expect Nickelback to come up with, but not freaking King Crimson! Yet lo and behold: most of the follow up to In The Court Of The Crimson King is practically a carbon copy of that critically acclaimed classic. Sometimes this translates into very good things. "Pictures Of A City" isn't nearly as immediately impressive as "21'st Century Schizoid Man," but it still has invigorating twists and turns that keep you glued to your seat for the lengthy solo section. And "Cadence And Cascade" is every bit as stunningly beautiful as "I Talk To The Wind." Unfortunately, the bloated title track falls flat on it's face by trying to over-dramatically emulate "Epitaph," which wasn't a very interesting song in the first place. And if "The Devil's Triangle" was gonna play the part of "Moonchild" it could at the very least have some of the beautiful balladry that offsetted the aimless unrestrained wankery that followed. Instead it packs as much pointlessness as it possibly can in 11 minutes. The epic conceptual textures can't take away from the fact that it goes absolutely nowhere. What makes it even more frustrating is that the few new things they try are just as worthless. "Cat Food" is a head-scratcher that sounds totally out of place and the "Peace" interludes are all pleasant enough but ultimately add nothing to the album. But hey, Robert Fripp has has rarely ever kept King Crimson in one place for an extended period of time. Their musical style has shifted and changed about as much as their members have, so the occasional redundant blunder such as this is probably forgivable. Read more...
"How many times must a man look up
before he can see the sky?"