By Ian Cory
To say that this winter was a rough one would be like
describing the sun as “kind of big.” Not only did it drag on forever, but the
cold seemed to cut deeper and linger longer in every bone of my body. Maybe it
was just good timing, or maybe it was confirmation bias on my part, but most of
the music I spent time with this quarter was perfectly suited to long nights
spent alone huddled under as many blankets as I could find. 2014 has already had
a string of songwriters opening up and creating a brutally honest space for
their listeners. Against Me! roared out of the gate with Transgender Dysphoria Blues, a self produced record and their best
by far. After treading water with listenable but overly produced major label
releases, Transgender Dysphoria Blues
found the band revitalized and hungry to prove those that thought the band had
lost their edge wrong. But more important than any leaps made musically was the
album’s focus on singer Laura Jane Grace’s struggles coming out as
transgender. It would be difficult to overstate how powerful her lyrics are
on this record. Equal parts heartbreaking and empowering, Grace set the bar
high for the rest of the year.
While few
albums released in this quarter reached the same heights as these two, plenty
of others found their own way to help me through the cold, some through escapism
and others through bringing the inherent bleakness of winter to the forefront.
Marissa Nadler’s July was a mournful
ode to romance and summers' past, while Alcest’s Shelter was a wistful and bright-eyed dream of sunny days yet to
come. Both records are soothing and hang just outside of reach, much the like
the seasons they evoke. Eventually escapism proved to be inadequate and I had
to face the polar vortex head on. Luckily I had Have A Nice Life’s The Unnatural World and Indian’s From All Purity to help me channel the
dark vibes productively. The Unnatural
World isn’t the life changer that many Have A Nice Life fans were hoping
for, but it more than proved that the duo has cornered the market on unsettling
and spooky lo-fi music. From All Purity
is more skull crushing then scary, but its sludgy tones and ritualistic
dissonance make it a perfect fit for trudging through sleet and snow*.
Not
everything heavy released in these three months was so dour however. Blood Maker, the debut EP from the Washington
three-piece Wild Thrones was a maddeningly giddy take on progressive metal.
Each of the three tracks jump from section to section with reckless abandon,
always finding new ways to twist the momentum and rhythm just before the
listener expects it to happen. Equally exciting, but on a very different
wavelength was the debut full length from Issues. I’ve already spoken at length
about how important the album is as a harbinger of the coming nu-metal revival,
but I might have neglected to mention how good Issues are at blending the rush
of heavy music with the comfort food pleasures of pop music. Often if I have a
pop song stuck in my head I’ll imagine the instrumentation switching to a
metalcore breakdown or harsh vocals accenting the chorus. At its best, Issues sounds exactly like that, and for
that alone it’ll be stuck in my rotation for a long time to come.
As to be
expected for a genre built around major releases in the second half of the year,
things have been a bit slow for hip-hop. The year’s first major blockbuster
release, Rick Ross’s Mastermind, was
eclipsed both in sales and cultural clout by Schoolboy Q’s Oxymoron. Schoolboy Q along with recent signee Isaiah Rashad are
the first two of Top Dawg Entertainment’s six album plan for 2014. The latter’s
debut Cilvia Demo shows that Rashad
has as sharp a wit and strong of an ear for beats as his new label mates but
still has some ways to go in establishing his own voice. Q on the other hand
has really struck a chord with this one, both in the sense that he has garnered
some real radio play from the record, and that he has crafted a style with
enough confidence to pull him out of the shadow of Kendrick Lamar. Lamar’s
forthcoming full length is an easy pick for the most hotly anticipated album of
the year, but it already has some serious competition from Freddie Gibbs and
Madlib’s Piñata, a record that
combines Gibbs’s golden flow and delivery with Madlib’s unfathomably deep
sampling library. It wasn’t a combo that I expected to work when it first
announced, but it quickly proved to be my favorite release from either artist
and a definite entry into my year-end list.
Now the
weather is starting to get nicer. Birds are chirping. Good movies are starting
to show up in theaters. The only thing keeping us from fully embracing spring
is the emergence of some real pop jams. Hopefully we’ll get to those and more
in our next quarterly update. Until then, I’m going to go back to blasting
Young Thug’s “Stoner” on repeat.
*Both albums are also a great soundtrack for researching the
yellow king and the relative flatness/circular nature of time, if I do say so
myself
Image via NPR
light bulbs are good for lighting the home but stay away from incandescent lamps because they generate so much heat* go movies
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