I ate sooooo well. I thank the Thompson family for this profusely. I ate really damn well. I also did another thing a lot, and it was better than it is at Oberlin. I won’t get more specific than that. I also found hard copies of Pinetop Seven albums (my two favorites to be exact), which had previously been mysteriously erased from my hard drive. A quick look at my favorite albums ever will tell you that my two favorite Pinetop Seven albums are two of my favorite albums ever. This was important. I can not tell you how surprised I was to find these CDs (used! someone else has listened to this band!) in a store in Dallas. Thank you, Dallas.
I also got a chance in Dallas to do a lot of listening to music, so I’m all set for a little while as far as subject matter for the blog goes. First up is a CD that’s been growing on me steadily for a few weeks, after I got my hands on it much earlier(it was then ignored for a long while). It’s called Los Angeles and it’s by this guy who calls himself Flying Lotus, which sounds both like an emo poem and a karate technique. But neither of the two have much to do with the music, which is kind of like dubstep (a genre that I touched upon in this review, in which I linked to this Wikipedia article that attemps to explain it), but since no one really wants to come out and just call it dubstep, I don’t think I’ll rock the boat. I think it may be that this album has a little brighter feel than the generally overpowering dread that powers dubstep. It’s instrumental hip-hop at its core, I guess.
A quick way to decide whether or not you will enjoy this album is to think to yourself: do I mind almost constant, sometimes-subtle, sometimes-not static as an instrument in music? Because it’s used basically the whole way through, and if you’re going to be annoyed by something like this, small as it is, then it’s best you skip it and ignore what’s going to be a positive review from me.
Of course, that’s only a first test. If you don’t mind static, then the rest of the music is still left. Like all instrumental hip-hop, it’s focused on the beat, which goes beyond just drums. As far as I know, the drumbeats here are all drum machine or samples, which is fine. But there’s also the prominent sub-bass, which is what makes me think it’s a lot like dubstep, and some auxiliary percussion like the bells in “Camel”. That means that to get the full effect of this music, don’t listen to it on crappy laptop speakers. These beats are simple and cool, and they subtly progress in each track like a good little instrumental track should. But the tight packaging of each track, as opposed to painfully long techno songs, make this a very accessible record for the electronoob.
Above the beats, all bets are off, as the (electronic) instrumentation is different on each track and is always super-cool, though there’s a very strong common thread throughout the record. That’s how I would describe this whole album – just plain cool.
To get a little bit more specific, a few of my favorite tracks are “Comet Course,” a bit more uptempo than the rest of the album, and a bit more cosmic, as the title suggests, but still in the overall milieu and an awesome beat, “GNG BNG,” which has two separate and completely awesome beats which I always bounce too, and “RobertaFlack,” which seems a lot like just an electronic version of a cool jazz track. Very mellow, very groove-oriented, and with some wispy female vocals snuck in there (that happens more often as it gets towards the end of the album – still, we call it instrumental because the voice is just part of the mix – wholly an instrument as opposed to that term being lauded upon just a great singer, ahem Fleet Foxes).
P.S. – Did I mention that Flying Lotus, real name Steven Ellison, is Alice Coltrane’s great nephew? Alice Coltrane was John Coltrane’s wife, don’tcha know.
P.P.S. – Thanks to the one person who voted in my last post’s poll. I know it’s only been a couple of days, but really, guys? I thought somebody read this blog. I guess it’s just a little more masturbatory than I thought.
I Ate My DVD Collection 