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Music Reviews - The Fear Issue







KANYE WEST
Graduation
Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam
Yes, this is the best rap album of the year so far. But pitted against ’Ye’s two other joints, it’s (certainly) less conceptual and (slightly) less cohesive. The best analogy would be Tribe’s Beats, Rhymes & Life, compared with Midnight Marauders and Low End Theory. Gone are the chipmunk beats: It’s all melodic keyboard bangers this time, and half of the album’s tracks are courtesy of outside producers. Gone are the guest collabos, too: Homie seriously stepped his rap game up and went for dolo, only enlisting, well, the only rapper worth listening to nowadays—Weezy. That said, Kanye’s never connected with radio, or with the needs and wants of rap’s commercial audience, like this. There’s already like five songs on heavy rotation. And “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” is probably the metrosexual rapper’s most important achievement to date: a massive, certified street anthem. So even though I’d take College Dropout over this joint any day, Mr. West graduates, magna cum laude.

BUSTA NUT


THREE 6 MAFIA
Last 2 Walk
Sony
When these guys’ last album dropped, I ain’t gonna lie, we hopped on the bozak. Since then, they’ve become Hollywood darlings and permanent fixtures at MTV, but most of all, they fired my boy Crunchy Blac. And for some reason, their whole shtick is not as funny anymore.

SMUTTY RUFF





50 CENT
Curtis
G-Unit/Interscope
50’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ is this generation’s The Chronic—let’s put that out there right now. But the Gorilla Unit boss has been falling off ever since. And out of all of his or his team’s albums, this is probably the worst. I mean, can anyone possibly, humanly get more generic? Cam’s video by the pool embodies this whole joint. Except for “I Get Money,” that’s the hardest track out.

MACHO


N.O.R.E.
Noreality
Baby Grande
Now that’s your guest Vice editor right there! Effortlessly combining the grimy and the jiggy (watch that 2001 slang come back, just watch!), N-O comes with a dozen bangers on which he acts outlandish, nonsensical, retarded, and thugged-out, all at once. It’s truly uplifting to see someone who got so jerked by so many labels (and who fell so hard into the reggaeton trap) stay so jolly. Imagine when he starts selling records.

BLAQUE PAK


CHAMILLIONAIRE
Ultimate Victory
Universal
Houston’s played out but I still got love for this dude. Picture him, Hell Rell, and Craig Mack standing next to each other. Yikes!

WHOADIE ALLEN

EINSTÜRZENDE NEUBAUTEN
Alles Wieder Offen
Potomak
I bought Haus der Lüge when it came out because EN was a key band to like if you wanted goth-industrial girls to think you were down with their shit. It took years for me to wrap my head around this stuff for real, and honestly I still don’t know if I get it. What I can say is that Alles Wieder Offen, like Neubauten in general, is cool because it epitomizes engagement, thought, and work on the part of the audience, shunning the passive “fan.” Of course, leave it to Germans to make listening to music another job to get done. Arbeit Macht Frei, dudes.

FECAL STACHE






DEADLINE
8/2/82
Peterbilt

TIME TO ESCAPE
E.P.
Grave Mistake
The world is upside down when one of the best DC hardcore records ever gets remastered to death on a piece-of-shit digipak CD while some sub-average 80s-revival act is immortalized on vinyl. Neither release deserves its fate. Deadline is a classically underrated band that still blows past most of the other Flex Your Head alumni who get name-dropped for whatever reason. It is short and dark bursts of alienated chaos made by pissed-off Reagan-era kids figuring out what the fuck they were doing roughly ten seconds before they did it. Even though the original 12-inch was louder, brighter, and awesomely gross-sounding, it’s still very cool to make this available to thousands of people like me who were eight years old when it was recorded. Time to Escape, however, is a calculated, paint-by-numbers attempt at capturing the spontaneity that made bands like Deadline great, complete with deliberately sloppy songs, disheveled layout, and thoughtlessly trite lyrics. Contrary to Steven Blush’s assertion in his dumb movie, there is still a thriving punk and hardcore scene in the USA. Boring ’82 revivalists do it no favors, though, by pantomiming a bygone era. Hopefully the rehash wave will crash soon so kids can get busy making new stuff instead of regurgitating what happened 20 years ago.

VOMIT DIAPER


PSYCHIC TV/PTV 3
Hell Is Invisible… Heaven Is Her/E
Cargo
You’ll have to excuse us for being a little late on this one, but the degree of “huh?” that had to be surmounted was high even by Psychic TV standards. Fresh from reconvening Throbbing Gristle as some sort of postapocalyptic cabaret act (and transforming into his wife), Genesis has evidently turned PTV into the band from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and they now play songs that either sound like Sex Gang Children, Peter Murphy singing for early U2, or eight-minute nursery rhymes. If I wasn’t terrified of being called out as a closet goth, I’d have been cranking these magical tunes from my car all summer. Pardon, magickal.

THELDON BOIS


RAIN
La Vache Qui Rit
Peterbilt
Ah, the late-80s “post-hardcore” scene! ’Twas a time whence noble intentions and a vulnerable heart on one’s sleeve bore forth all manner of boring music and thrust it upon thousands of newly adult punkers suddenly bewildered by their own emotions and a false sense of maturity. File this rediscovered gem alongside those treasured LPs from Verbal Assault, Jawbox, Cringer, and the rest, then finish crying, climb out of your time machine, and sell that shit on eBay. Nostalgia is for people who have no friends.

ARTIE PHILIE


ABE VIGODA
Self-titled 7-inch
PPM/Mosher Hall Records
I can’t admit to liking this, because if I do, I will officially be jealous of Los Angeles, and that would flip the world on its head. If I were a less proud man, however, I’d tell you that Abe Vigoda are fantastic, this 7-inch is their best work, and I hate Dean Spunt for doing this to me.

THE PEET



GOVERNMENT WARNING
Arrested
Grave Mistake
“Arrested” as in arrested development, like when you dumb down your songs into the same old entry-level punk mantras of “I hate rednecks, nuclear war sucks, cops are jerks, MRR is too PC” and so on. Figure as long as you have one or two halfway-decent riffs behind it you can sell a few thousand 7-inches, but at the end of the day you’re either pretending to be retarded as an affectation of nihilistic hardcore-ness or a real-life honest-to-God moron. In either case, you’re wasting my time since plenty of bands play the same stuff tighter, faster, and way, way smarter. Next please.

VICTOR VON DOUCHE


HIGH ON FIRE
Death Is This Communion
Relapse
I was all excited to review this and be like, “Quit with the Matt Pike/Lemmy comparisons, this is totally mega!” Then I actually listen-listened to the record and it’s about as interesting as being over 35, being addicted to speed, and never outliving your first band. And THEN I thought, fuck it, missing septums and Bill-Paxton-face could be totally sweet! Fuck yeah!

SMOKEY ROBINSNIFF


CLOCKCLEANER
Babylon Rules
Load
Lost in all the message-board name-calling and cold saddies that pervades any discussion about Clockcleaner is that, oh btw, they happen to be one of the best bands in the world right now. Babylon Rules is the record that means we can finally stop rehashing the goddamn pee story and start talking about how Bad Wizard should be honored by having Clockcleaner urine anywhere near their shit show.

CY KOUFAX




DON ZIENTARA
Clocks & Watches
Northern Liberties
Skip ahead to a song called “Darfur.” It’s about Darfur. I assume it is, anyway, even though the lyrics are mostly nonsense rambling hippie bullshit threaded under semituned guitar throbs. At one point there’s the Peter Frampton thing where the guitar talks, or he talks through the guitar, or something. Who cares? Not once do we hear the word “Darfur” in the song. That’s understandable, though, since the only thing I can think of that rhymes with “Darfur” is “on tour,” and if this dude went on tour over there, his band would probably break up, or maybe even die.

SASSY SUGARPACKETS


CASS McCOMBS
Dropping the Writ
Domino
Yay, a new Cass McCombs record! This album has little flecks of every pretty, dreamy jangle-pop album we liked in high school, and reminds us often times of a certain sullen and bespectacled lad from Manchester who we used to love until the cool kids claimed him as their own and beat us over the head with it until we threw up our hands and said fuck it, you can have him. But this they can’t have yet. This is still ours for now. Did we mention that it’s really pretty?

KELLY AMES


SCOUT NIBLETT
This Fool Can Die Now
Too Pure
God, this is slow. SO slow and SO serious. She sounds like old Cat Power except, sorry, she can’t sing. I’m being harsh, but everyone loves her so who cares. The only thing on here that’s OK is the duet she does with Will Oldham that makes him sound like Steve Perry in comparison to her shrieks. I swear, the first time I heard her go for the high note, I had to yank my headphones off in a panic, like there was suddenly an angry bee in my ear. How does nobody else hear that? Is she singing in some specific torture frequency that only affects me? Ugh. You know what, I too have oodles of “charged emotions from yearning and grief to resignation and acceptance,” but that still doesn’t make me want to listen to this self-important and miserable warbling.

SALLY FORTH


DEVENDRA BANHART
Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon
XL
There’s a hilarious YouTube video of Devendra, clad in velvet cloaks and sparkle eye shadow, playing live on some French TV channel while a long-haired dude in silk boxers does interpretative dance behind him, like the weird little mystery gnome who pops up in the doorway in Julian Lennon’s “Too Late for Goodbyes” video (seriously, YouTube them both now). The thing about this guy is that his music is OK, it’s pleasant, sure, why not—but the fact that he claims to have never heard of Marc Bolan means that we can never ever like him. Even if he genuinely is such an unwitting ripper-offer, he should have gone and listened to a few T. Rex records and then said, “Why, yes, I enjoy his music very much and I am pleased to be compared to such a legend, thank you.” We would happily applaud a polite young man like that.

CLARA BOWIE

JENS LEKMAN
Night Falls Over Kortedala
Secretly Canadian
A poor man’s—and by poor man’s I mean Swedish faggot’s—Tom Jones. The only thing gayer would be to put a homo getting a haircut on the cover.

WILT RUSSELL


FIGURINES
When the Deer Wore Blue
The Control Group
Danish pop with lyrics either embarrassingly earnest or betraying a slight discomfort with the English language. It’s hard not to get a teensy chill when the singer tells you to “open your mi-iiii-ind” and lays a couple “dum-do-do-ooos” on you. I mean, what do you need from music? Do you need to be “challenged” by your earbuds while you stare at an Excel grid wishing you were making out with that girl you met last night? No. You need to pretend you’re still making out with her, like, right now. In Denmark.

PRIME MINISTER RASMUSSEN


CHARALANBIDES
Likeness
Kranky
Here’s a little chin-rubber: Is it too much to ask for all our “good music” to do more than just not suck? Honestly, I think I’d rather ball my fist involuntarily every time a car drives past blaring that damn Mexican trumpet song than submit myself to this lilting amnesia ray.

BIFF CRANKHANGER


MV & EE WITH THE GOLDEN ROAD
Gettin’ Gone
Ecstatic Peace
OK, I know it’s probably just a gimmick or some sort of cutesy studio in-joke, but I really would like to know how MV & EE’s dog Zuma contributed bells to this album as credited in the liner notes. Please tell me that they rigged up some kind of pedal that he sat dutifully behind until his cue, then pressed down with one paw, because that would officially give the whole of the internet a run for its cute money. Anyways, this is loose Neil Young-y sort of business guest-starring basically every good musician in Western Mass. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

DAWSON KIRK


MÚM
Go Go Smear the Poison Ivy
Fat Cat
Mmm, yes, now that you mention it, I HAVE had a rough day and I would very much like to be gently rocked to sleep by a gaggle of fluffy Icelandic elf-ponies whispering softly to me about marmalade while playing teeny-tiny toy accordions and assorted plinky things for my general amusement. That will do nicely, thanks.

EDNA PLINY





OLD TIME RELIJUN
Catharsis In Crisis
K
Old Time Relijun, with what is one of the worst band names since Anne Frank’s Diarrhea, has returned after two years to pummel the kids with something that they won’t understand. If you’ve never heard this band, they are not what the name would indicate. Meaning, they are not another bunch of scenester carpetbaggers plucking away at Slummer-Grass or “traditional, indigenous folk.” They are, perhaps, a marriage of the Fall and Sun City Girls. I say not bad, and that’s coming from someone who’s allergic to anything that hails from the Pacific Northwest, especially Olympia, where it’s easy to accuse the rest of the world of racism when you live in a white bubble of Whole Foods and the continuing astonishment that some of your friends make their own clothes! Wow!! Hey, give me five minutes, and I can slice and dice your book collection too.

ANDREW EARLES


BLACK DICE
Load Blown
Paw Tracks
It’s funny how electro and experimental music have basically swapped with each other. For all the “dance mixes” I’ve heard lately that are glitched almost to the point of Merzbow, it’s nice to hear Black Dice getting so organic and rhythmic they sound like the subterranean dirt rave I was convinced I was missing the time I took so many shrooms that I tried to burrow into the ground. Only time I’ve ever barfed grass.

TERRY MELKS


WHITE RAINBOW
Prism of the Eternal Now
Kranky
I want to be clear about something. This is not just another urban-dwelling guitar-rock dickhead brushing off some really “next level shit” just because it blips and beeps and uses “ambient sound.” I don’t “not get it,” guys. Trust me, I follow. I can do different drugs. Don’t even mind trees. But this is really just too fucking much. This fruitcake makes “vibe huts,” and this seriously has more in common with yoga than it does with music.

RUSTY OCEAN


SUNBURNED HAND OF THE MAN.
Fire Escape
Ecstatic Peace
Meanwhile, I like how all the woodsier experimental bands have started picking up the electronics and adding some well-tempered bloops and squorches in with the spooky twanging and drones. It’s like driving from the suburbs into the city back when it was still a little dingy and creepy instead of one big 3 AM bodega PJ party. PS: Be careful with weed around this guy. There’s a sudden sax part about halfway through that may or may not be the voice of the devil.

TERRY MELKS


YELLOW SWANS
At All Ends
Load
If there’s one thing I genuinely admire about noise musicians of this sort, it’s their stick-to-it-ness. Or maybe I mean their patience. Is that the same thing? Anyways, all I know is, if it was me up onstage behind all those dials making minute distortions to a continuous wall of droning fuzz, by minute three I’d have cashed in my drink tickets and begun crooning “Sister Christian” over the grumbling. Half these jams are ten minutes or longer, and for that level of dedication I say hats off, nerds.

EDWARD FIRKLE


4 years ago

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