Review of 'Kiss My Super Bowl Ring' by The Garden

Once you get past the very very very lo-fi production, The Garden’s unique blend of grunge/grindcore/jungle/trap/funk is actually quite thrilling.

Review of 'Feet of Clay' by Earl Sweatshirt

What’s up with the creepy artwork? Has Earl embraced black metal? Not quite – although his latest sound is about as inaccessible as black metal.

Review of 'Veteran' by JPEGMAFIA

Experimental hip hop finds its sense of humour thanks to Baltimore rapper/producer JPEGMAFIA.

Double Review: 'Lil Pump' by Lil Pump and '17' by XXXTentacion

Is ‘Soundcloud rap’ hip hop’s glorious punk phase - or a new musical low?

Review of 'Dedicated To Bobby Jameson' by Ariel Pink

The lo-fi loving lunatic’s new LP is a celebration of the obscure.

Review of 'A Crow Looked At Me' by Mount Eerie

This might just be the most powerful record I’ve ever listened to. And trust me, I’ve listened to a lot of records.

INTRODUCING: Cloud Tangle

Meet Cloud Tangle.

Review of 'Here Comes Washer' by Washer

This Brooklyn rock duo don’t do clean. I’m not saying they’ve got a swearing problem. And I’m not implying that the members of Washer don’t wash either. I mean to say that there’s nothing clean about these dudes’ sound, and it’s beautiful.

Review of '100% Electronica' by George Clanton

The title isn’t a lie. This is 100% electronica. But not the bargain bucket house music that the plain title seems to suggest.

Review of 'Cherry Bomb' by Tyler, the Creator

The eccentric rapper’s new album is either the musical equivalent of a Jackson Pollock art piece or the musical equivalent of something the cat threw up. Either way it’s a mess – but depending on how your ears are tuned and how much of a Tyler fanboy you are, it’ll either strike you as an artistic mess or garbage.

Instrumentally, Cherry Bomb sounds like an old warped soul record found in a psychopath’s basement. Beautiful jazzy chord progressions clash violently with noisy, industrial percussion that hints Tyler may have been spending a lot of time listening to Yeezus and Death Grips. The mixing is awful – sometimes clearly deliberate. The title track, ‘Cherry Bomb’, is distorted and overcompressed to fuck, coming across as almost a wall of noise with the vocals buried beneath. At first I dismissed it as cat puke, but slowly I’m leaning more towards Jackson Pollock - this song and similarly produced tracks ‘Pilot’ and ‘Buffalo’ are now some of my favourites on the record. The messiness has an angry, blood-pumping catharsis to it of which my inner maniac is drawn to.

Alternative cover for 'Cherry Bomb'

Sadly, not all tracks have this positive effect. On some songs like ‘Run’, the low mixing on the vocals is just irritating and the beat isn’t noisy enough to warrant how lo-fi it is. Running barely over one minute, the song also feels abruptly short and underdeveloped. Tracks like ‘2Seater’ by contrast don’t know when to end, meandering off until Tyler gets bored and decides to throw in a skit.

Contributing to the messiness is the bad singing from Tyler himself. Some of it is redeemed only by the fact that Tyler knows himself that he can’t sing, as declared at the start of ‘Fucking Young’. There’s a charm to the idea of Tyler doing whatever he wants regardless of what people think, but sometimes the singing is just painful and distracting. Couldn’t he have got somebody else to do it? As proved by features from Kanye and Lil Wayne on this record, Tyler has the connections and could get anyone to croon for him if he wanted.

Part of me thinks that at this point Tyler is simply too at peace with himself to care. After all, there’s no therapist on this record – perhaps Tyler no longer feels the need to spill out his internal troubles. The weird and wonderful multiple personas have also been scrapped – Wolf Haley, Sam, Tron Cat, Ace the Creator, Felicia the Goat, Tiny Tim (I’m making some of them up now) – which is good because I never cared for any of these characters anyway.

Instead, Tyler’s bars are more outward-thinking, straightforward and confident. He marvels the fact that he’s paying a mortgage while his friends are paying tuition. His messages are more positive: ‘spread your wings’. There’s less misanthropy and rape jokes. Saying that, not all the immaturity has faded. His love for the word ‘faggot’ is still present, and the track ‘ Blow my Load’ might be his crassest song to date (were the cunnilingus sound effects really necessary?).

Me during 'Blow my Load'

Overall, the whole album is a bit hit and miss, Tyler’s newfound carefree attitude causing the whole album to feel a bit clumsy. The critics no longer bother him – his cluttered beats, his choice to sing and his choice to rap about going down on the ladies all reflecting this.

His nihilistic outlook is admirable – almost inspirational. The issue is that in not caring about others’ opinions, he’s making music only for himself, and he’s clearly more tolerant of his own bad singing than I am. 

★★★☆☆

TRACK TASTER:

Review of 'The Powers That B' by Death Grips

The Californian experimental hip hoppers continue to push sonic boundaries on their supposedly final album, but is it an explosive enough ending to make up for their unpredictable and action-packed career?

When friends, family members and random elderly strangers in the street ask me why I like Death Grips, my response is usually something illogical and vague like ‘because they’re nuts’. The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself as to why I love Death Grips. Their music is largely unmusical. Vocalist MC Ride sounds like a hobo whose stubbed his toe and even with a lyric sheet, it’s hard to make out whether he’s spurting out dense poetry or simply nonsense.

'I'm epiphanic amnesia! I'm in Jimmy Page's castle! I'm off the planet!' - MC Ride

In many ways, it is simply the mystery of not understanding Death Grips that is the appeal – that and the fact that their raw aggression is so primal and thrilling.

Last year, scrawled apathetically on the back of a napkin as is their style, the band announced their breakup, stating: ‘We are now at our best and so Death Grips is over’. Assuming it’s not just another publicity stunt, The Powers that B is the group’s final album.

Essentially it’s two records disguised as a double album. The first half, N****s on the Moon, was released before the band’s breakup and I rambled briefly about it on this blog. Having listened to it a few times, I’ve grown to appreciate it. It’s the band’s most proggy album yet, consisting of complex songs with changing time signatures, interspersed with random chopped-up Bjork vocals. MC Ride’s voice meanwhile is at its most clearest, whilst his lyrics are some of his most impenetrable: ‘melanin pewter cellophane/ arms as long as their legs/ even the greys can’t/ voila’.

The second part of The Powers that B was released a couple weeks ago and is titled Jenny Death. Unlike its counterpart, there’s less progginess, less word salad and less chopped-up Bjork vocals. In fact, the glitchy Bjork vocals have been traded in completely for a new motif – guitars. Many of the songs contain distorted hardcore punk riffs – namely ‘Turned Off’ and ‘Why a Bitch Got A Lie’. Whilst N****s on the Moon is the band’s proggiest release, Jenny Death can be viewed as their most punky.  

Prog and punk are essentially ying and yang musically – one celebrating depth and complexity, the other celebrating rawness and simplicity. Consequently, the two halves of The Powers That B don’t feel very cohesive as a whole. Maybe it was Death Grips’ intention to show how schizophrenic they can be stylistically. Personally, I feel I’m tempted to listen to one at a time rather than both as a whole, suggesting they should be two separate albums.

The album is certainly their most extreme work to date by all definitions of the word, which is something Death Grips have always tried to achieve with each release and hence would imply that this is a suitable finale to their career. The title track, ‘The Powers that B’, is their loudest and most abrasive banger since the opener to Government Plates.  ‘On GP’ meanwhile is their most depressive, containing some explicitly suicidal lyrics and ending rather powerfully on the line: ‘I’d be a liar if I sat here claiming I’d exit in a minute/ but I can’t say I wouldn’t have my limits.’. This itself is a heavy statement to end the band’s career on, and is further explored in the closing instrumental proceeding it entitled ‘Death Grips 2.0’. This closing track is the group’s fastest and most sinister sounding track so far and the ‘2.0’ in the title helps to end the album with an air of mystery – are Death Grips going to one day reform as more advanced version of themselves? Or have they reached their ‘limits’.

Most of these standout moments happen in the second half, Jenny Death, which leaves the first half, N****s on the Moon, feeling a bit redundant as part of the climax. That being said, the first half is still enjoyable and flows better than Jenny Death. The topic of sex is also explored more deeply on N****s on the Moon than any previous release, with tracks like ‘Fuck me out’ and the hilariously titled ‘Have a Sad Cum’ painting it as a depressive subject. It has always been Death Grips mission to turn hip hop clichés on their head, and this itself seems like an attack on sexual braggadocio. Arguably, Jenny Death contains the most blatant example – ‘Pss Pss’ being a charming trap-flavoured number about pissing on a girl’s face.

Overall, The Powers That B succeeds at doing what all Death Grips albums have done before it – it raises more questions than answers. Death Grips could never give us an explosive ending as this would require destroying the air of mystery that is so essential to their appeal. They’d have to reveal some major plot twist – ‘Death Grips were One Direction in disguise all along’ or something along those lines. Sadly, I don’t think the band have anything nearly as impressive to reveal, no dark hidden secrets, no grand plot to overthrow the music industry. However, I do believe there is more to their music than simply spontaneous noise for the sake of being noisy, and the desire to decipher this is what makes Death Grips so engaging. 

★★★★☆

TRACK TASTER:

Review of 'Pom Pom' by Ariel Pink

This album is essentially a dude rambling sleazy nonsense over a bunch of lo-fi instrumentals that sound like they’re straight from eighties TV commercials. It’s cheesy. It’s silly. It's, for the most part, terribly uncool. It’s also among one of the best records I’ve heard all year.

Review of 'True That' by Michael Cera

Hollywood actor, Michael Cera, shows off his musical side, serving up a selection of strange jazz and folk instrumentals. It’s a creative little album, I’ll give him that. Unfortunately, the whole thing sounds like it was recorded with a potato.