Stream Amok, the new album from Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace project.
DAS RIGHT

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@ickymusic
Stream Amok, the new album from Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace project.
DAS RIGHT
I could spend a long, long time talking about this track, and even longer about the album. I'll limit myself to simply suggesting that this is very important, relevant music, a definitive statement from an artist who continues to set the standard for modern jazz and instrumental music. Listen to this.
Jazz shouldn't have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that's required to sound like jazz. For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.' The effort to break out of something is worth more than getting an A in syncopation.
Wayne Shorter
What a beat! This is some great stuff, especially those polyrhythms at the beginning. Strikes me as something in between Nicolas Jaar and some of those jazz/dark ambient gurus like Troyka and Craig Taborn. But that beat… CRAZY.
Check it out.
Judge Jury and Executioner - Atoms For Peace
I can’t even deal with how great this song is
2013 is shaping up to be a good year.
This is the second single from Atoms for Peace's forthcoming début LP, Amok—and it is really something. While the first taste of the record, a twitchy little amuse-bouche called "Default," seemed like pretty typical Thom/Radiohead fare (which isn't to say it's not great), this song is a statement, a step out. There's a lot of Hail to the Thief here, to be sure: the clattering percussion out front, the prominent acoustic guitar, the return to traditional song form (a distinct departure from the through-composed slow builds of In Rainbows); the song even shares its name with the oft-omitted subtitle of "Myxomatosis." Yet there's something critically different: this song is bluesy—frankly, unabashedly bluesy, from the lyrics to the music itself. It starts in the very first verse: the first two statements of the melody aren't anything surprising, but halfway through the third phrase it takes an unexpected turn, wilting abruptly and dropping into a melancholic lower register, accompanied by the twanging guitar. The conjunct, shuffling chorus ("I went for my usual walk…") subsequently changes keys, as if trying to resist this fatal descent, but the verse melody charges back in and cuts it off, catapulted into action by the stumbling 7/8 meter.
The disconsolateness at work here is a degree removed from Radiohead's patented cynicism: there's a certain tone of detachment, a sense of removal from the fray. "I'm like the wind," Thom tells us, "and my anger will disperse." The song's far from optimistic, however; if anything, as the titular allusion suggests, it's resigned to the prospect that the world's destiny is out of our control. "When darkness follows / And no tomorrows," Yorke cautions us, and later continues: "It's all been decided." Yet it's that tone of resignation, that embracing of suffering and misery, that gives "Judge Jury and Executioner" its bluesiness, and sets it apart from the Radiohead canon.
This tone is enhanced by the song's distinct self-consciousness. When Yorke petitions in the opening lines (and the closing refrain), "Don't worry, baby / It goes right through me," I'm inclined to wonder about the referent of that "It." Could it be the admonition of preceding line? Could Yorke be suggesting, in other words, that "Don't worry, baby" is precisely what "goes right through [him]": the exhortation to lighten up and shake off his world-weary blues? It's as if Thom and the Atoms gang have recognized their own apocalyptic anxieties, recognized them without disavowing them (as well they shouldn't). Rather than wallowing in doom and damnation, they've opted for the tried and true ethos of the blues, acknowledging the truth ("Just tell it like it is / Tell it like it was") but carrying on singing in spite of it.
The second single from "Anything In Return," the latest from Chaz Bundick, who, under the moniker "Toro Y Moi," has emerged as one of the most distinctive new voices in the musical sphere unsatisfactorily associated with the term "electro-pop." Yet Bundick, one would surmise, is not such a purist with labels. In an interview with Pitchfork.tv, he remarked that he approached the new record as "a pop album," something spontaneous, light, playful:
This record is just me having fun, making music that my girlfriend would dance to. I'd be like, "Babe, come check this out," and she'd be like, "I like it. It's catchy." And then the next thing I know she's like singing it in the house, and I'm like, "That's a good sign. That's a good sign."
At the same time, however, Bundick took care to emphasize the attention he gave to his production as he worked on the new material, "trying to push it further, take it out of the laptop, add real instruments on top."
It seems to have paid off. "Say That" stakes out a remarkable middle ground between the impromptu and the planned, radiating muted complexity. Bundick's sly staccato rides through the song on a tide of samples, synths, and percussion, yet moves with a forthrightness that's absent from much of his earlier work. Where previous Toro Y Moi has been markedly deadpan, this song is seductive and galvanizing; at times, it verges on hip-hop.
At the risk of over-valuing genre labels, I feel compelled to offer that this project marks Bundick's definitive graduation from chillwave; he is, by all rights, no longer merely one of several exemplars of a "sound," but a musical force of his own.
Sufjan Stevens - Sister Winter @ Bowery Ballroom, NYC (12/21/2012)
Click through to LysWantTwo’s channel to watch a ton more videos from last night!
Pure love.
Somewhere in the cerebral fringes of so-called "baroque pop" lurks Owen Pallett, composer and multi-instrumentalist, formerly known as Final Fantasy (yes, like the video game). Though perhaps out-competed for a corner of the indie market by peers like Andrew Bird and Rufus Wainwright, Pallett writes powerfully original stuff, music easily on a par with either of these better-known contemporaries. His songs are blithely sinister, buoyantly demented excursions that cobble together a great miscellany of precedents and influences, apposing bright Sufjan Stevens-esque horn arrangements to black-and-blue dissonances à la pre-Bitte Orca Dirty Projectors.
"Lewis Takes Action" unfolds with a nodding, off-kilter plod, punctuated by winds, brass, strings, and snare drum, and rounded out by gentle wails from a couple of happy choristers. The lyrics are surreal, delightful ciphers laced with a subdued violence ("I took a no-face by the beak and broke his jaw. He'll never speak again"), the unsettling effect of which is heightened by Pallett's sunny, operatic tenor. He bites off his consonants, belts out his vowels, soaring confidently for a time over clamorous whirlpools of horns, percussion, and backup vocals, yet falls away in the final moments of the song, as if surrendering to its murky instrumental undercurrents. In all, it's a shrewd, intelligent earworm, one that firmly establishes Pallett's uncommon ability to craft winsome, nigh-danceable music that also disturbs and interrogates the conventions of genre and mood.
"I'm the Christmas Unicorn! It's all right, I love you!"
“How Long Have You Known (Moons 美愛.version)” by DIIV // How Long Have You Known (Online Single) (2012)
Atlanta’s Moons have taken one of the highlights of DIIV’s “Oshin” and reworked it’s jangly dream pop sound into a deconstructed, spaced out, ethereal dream. Naturally, the most striking shift is the addition of new backing vocals (sung in Japanese) by 美愛. The rest of the song has been shifted and changed in many ways, but DIIV’s wonderful original is still recognizable underneath all of those new wave synths and spaced atmospherics. The track is an exclusive of GorillaVsBear, and you can download it from them. Highly recommended.
A remarkable writing-through of DIIV's indolent, sun-soaked jam. It's one of the most original and perceptive remixes I've heard in a long time, maybe since Four Tet's 2010 rework of "VCR." Moons strike right to the heart of the original cut, then ditch most of it in exchange for a dizzyingly exotic bouquet of sounds and textures. Crisp, snapping drum hits reverberate and clatter in the interstices between synths, drums, and voices. An insurgency of minced Japanese-language vocal samples rises up against singer Zachary Cole Smith, whose slow-mo strains fall increasingly into the background as the song unfolds. (I can't help but draw a comparison to Chairlift's recent reworking of their own "I Belong In Your Arms" into Japanese.) The production achieves a simultaneous fogginess and exactitude, evoking a loose sway underpinned by a sixteenth-note cadence in the synths. This is engaging, intelligent music, an astute marriage of several distinct aesthetics into one vertiginous whole.
Let me begin by conceding that I feel very unqualified to write anything about this song, or anything else on Ys. I acknowledge that, particularly coming late to this music as I am, I ought to wait and see if its charisma will stand the test of time. But I don't want to wait. I need no more time than the length of the album to affirm that this is a phenomenal work of music. I have no reservations about saying that Ys is among the most affecting, stunning, and unprecedented albums I have ever heard—and I don't anticipate eating my words any time soon.
This song, the album's centerpiece, stands alone as the single track that features just Newsom, voice and harp, without the support of Van Dyke Parks' orchestral arrangements. Parks' strings do anything but get in the way of Newsom's—rather, they complement her splendidly—but there's a confessional intensity to hearing our heroine alone, plucking, squawking, and yelping away—doing, in other words, what she does best. The decision to situate this track at the heart of the album was itself a choice of genius; if Ys is a portrait of Newsom's psyche, this song represents the most vulnerable, most intimate center of that psyche, and the contrast with its fleshier neighbors sharply emphasizes this tenderness.
This is as close as music comes to a perfect rendering of emotion. From the very first chord, all aspects of the performance work in tandem: the harp strikes, Newsom's frayed warble follows, and the song rocks back and forth between them like the slow, imperfect antiphony of a tolling bell and silence. And indeed, as soon as Newsom introduces a bell in the second stanza of her lyrics—an image that persists throughout the song—its presence in the music, in the high-low alternation of the vocal melody and chords, becomes unmistakable. "Hear it fall forevermore," Newsom intones, then repeats, her voice breaking on "fall" and wilting as the line descends to its conclusion. The song does not wallow in melancholy, however; before it even has time to resonate, the falling bell is swept up in a roil of arpeggios from the harp. The tide has come in: "Drop a bell off the dock," Newsom proclaims, half narrating, half pleading. "Blot it out in the sea." Such tone painting surges between the music and text for the entirety of the song, but it never takes over or becomes tasteless.
The mastery of Newsom's songwriting lies in its simultaneous stability and weightlessness, its equipoise of emotional outpouring and structural discipline. Every voice-crack and rhyme has a place in the logic of the song, but somehow nothing feels calculated. Much has been made of her long and laborious process in creating this album, and these efforts are evident in the intricacy, elaborateness, and sheer scope of the compositions. Yet what truly shines through, and what makes Ys so extraordinary, is its wisdom. "Sawdust & Diamonds" overflows with suffering and trauma—
And though my wrists and my waist seemed so easy to break Still, my dear, I'd have walked you to the edge of the water. And they will recognize all the lines of your face In the face of the daughter, of the daughter, of my daughter. Darling, we will be fine, but what was yours and mine Appears to me a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes. But if it's all just the same, then will you say my name, Say my name in the morning, so that I know when the wave breaks?
—yet it allows for beauty and consolation as well. Newsom doesn't belittle her pain, she hasn't transcended or surpassed it, but she is able to get outside of it and render it, magnificently and perceptively, in music. She isn't the first to do so, but she is doubtlessly among the most skillful. Ultimately, there is little to do other than admire, applaud, and take pleasure in what she has created.
The xx - Angels
Joanna Newsom
That is all.
I can think of no single track from Fiona Apple's renaissance of a third album, The Idler Wheel…, that is best-suited to stand on its own and represent all the others, for the very simple reason that each the songs is remarkable, distinct, and indispensable to the work as a whole. "Werewolf" was the first to reach my ears, however, and for that reason has made the deepest impression on me. While its counterparts draw on Joni Mitchell-tinged confessional writing and tantalizing rag/jazz piano work, "Werewolf" steps forward with an andante piano intro so simple and bare it's unnerving. Apple's equally reticent vocal melody weaves itself into and over this bassline, creating a wide-eyed, folksy lilt that wouldn't be out of place in a Regina Spektor song. Her lyrics, meanwhile, are a succession of quirky, fey similes, as if the song's speaker is still trying to work out her feelings as she's explaining them.
The gestalt moment comes in the chorus, when the music and text snap open together: the piano breaks off its ostinato chiming, and the lyrics come finally to their painful conclusion. "We are like a wishing well and a bolt of electricity," Apple explains, a grim certainty in her voice: "We can still support each other; all we have to do's avoid each other." This line, with its mixture of offbeat imagery and fateful import, is the cornerstone of the song: like all devastating pronouncements, it seems almost like a joke before its meaning sinks in. By the time a din of screaming children enters, unbidden, near the end of the song, Apple has already spanned what seems like an entire life's worth of emotions, turning on a dime from childhood humor to adult heartbreak. The screams are surprising, but by no means out of place; they come as a token of the backstories the speaker is unable or unwilling to broach. The focus, and the genius, of "Werewolf" is not these backstories, but the struggle to come to terms with them; not what is told, but the act of telling itself.
So good I can hardly stand it. That there is singing.
A harrowing performance of Frederic Rzewski's wild yet economical Les Mountons de Panurge. The score presents performers—any number of trained as well as untrained musicians—with a sixty-five-note numbered melodic line, which they are instructed to execute in a simple increasing algorithm (1, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, and so on) at an accelerating piece. These strict parameters might lend the piece the character of an etude or exercise, but as the music unfolds, more voices enter, and the boundaries of the original phrase become frayed and inscrutable, any technical sterility or dryness evaporates. What emerges instead is a Philip Glass-esque quality of hypnosis and fascination, a listening experience akin to being immersed in a river: it's impossible to take stock of everything, but small glimpses and discrete perceptions rise to the surface as you're swept along.
Check out the score here.