Epic Magazine

Remember back in the day when Mark Ronson was the ‘New York Cool Guy’ back when ‘New York Cool Guy’ was all Kangol hats and shit like that? And he put out a really bad album called ‘The Fuzz’ and nobody really liked it and it sucked more balls than Hungry Hungry Hippos?

Then came Amy Winehouse. Then Lily Allen. Then people really started digging ‘Mark Ronson: The Cool Guy Who Wears Suits!’. And the rest of us were all like “three years ago that guy was wearing Kangol hats and Adidas tracksuit tops”. Then Amy Winehouse flamed out and Lily Allen found happiness in dudes twice her age. And through all this, Mark Ronson stayed quiet and impeccably, well, ‘cool’. The dude rocks Gucci sneakers.

What I’m saying is that Mark Ronson has a knack for making you forget about the more questionable moments in his, and others, careers. His new album ‘Record Collection’ does indeed sound like a record collection - in that not only does he wear his influences on his sleeve but that there are more than a few rather embarrassing moments on this CD (almost all of them involve trying to fuse an 80’s new wave synth over his now signature 60’s crisp drum sound). Where it falters, the album maintains a sense of how good the song idea looked on paper (“You Gave Me Nothing” combines spy guitar with giant rave synths), and where it succeeds (the lead single “Bang Bang Bang” and the final song on the album “The Night Last Night”) it does so exponentially better than some of the filler songs in the middle. Of which there are quite a few. But ideally, this is playing at a fancy loft party and you’re too coked up to care.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a bad album: Mark does “cool” the way Stevie Wonder does “soul”. When he slows it down (as on ‘Introducing The Business International’) it works beautifully, making you wonder what he’d sound like producing straight hip hop. Everything about this album seems almost too perfect, though, too shiny and removed, like the man himself in his near ubiquitous presence in mens fashion magazines, and it’s when Mark lets his guests sink or swim that things fall apart (as per the albums low point, the gospel-rave-soul-dubstep ‘Glass Mountain Trust’, where D’angelo sounds not disimilar to Donald Duck). Ronson seems to be playing this Gatsby role in the album: never quite getting too involved and standing back, letting his guests wreck the place. Sadly, this works against him when people like Ghostface Killah and newcomer Rose Elinor Dougall really shine on the album - Ronson seems too far removed to enjoy it.

Lil-B ‘Rain In England’
3/5

… And out of nowhere, one of the guys behind the somewhat popular 2006 Bay Area rap song “Vans” (I got my Vans on but they look like snee-kers) comes out with this INSANE album that is part spoken word, part improv, and part ambient album. Quelle fuck, indeed. Where most rappers might float like a butterfly and sting like a bee, this instead opts for an entirely different realm altogether: that of an aggressive yoga instructor rambling philosophical over bizarre, childish keyboard melodies. This shouldn’t work. This is bacon and marmalade with arugula: it shouldn’t go together, but it does*.

On ‘Rain In England’ Lil B - born Brandon McCartney - owes less to Andre 3000 than he does to Xiu Xiu and Laurie Anderson**. What seems to work is his bizarre spoken word that ranges from a six minute song possibly about global warming, or depression (‘Earth’s Medicine’) to electric piano laments of loneliness. It’s not pretty. In some places, it doesn’t even feel ‘right’, like you’re stuck at a bus stop with a crazy person who wants you to look into his magic bag (an extended take on Perez Hilton and the cuture of celebrity just doesn’t work nearly as well as he’d like to think it would). At other times, he seems to be preaching some serious poetry. A minute after an inexcusable ramble about Britney Spears the next song begins and its close to genius, a phrase that could be used at various points throughout this entire album. And then a minute later he fucks up the piano and second guesses his own lyrics; at one point he trails off mid sentence before a few seconds later deadpanning “I continuously beat myself up” with no sense of irony nor tongue-in-cheek. But it works, simply (and only) because he’s not self aware in the slightest.

And that is what is important: he never seems to break character. The keyboard just keeps playing the same chords and he just plows right into the next song. There is no percussion. Just him and the keyboard. He constantly makes mistakes despite playing the same chord progression (regression?) over and over again. He may, possibly, and I’m only alleging, may be on a little of the drugs***. But this becomes oddly charming for the two thirds of the album. And it is An Album - this is meant to be heard in one sitting. Which is precisely where it shouldn’t work, because this is essentially spoken word over 14 nearly identical tracks of what sounds like someone dicking around in the keyboard section of a Guitar Center****. But Lil B makes it his mission to make it work. His cadence falls somewhere between Southern Baptist preacher and flight attendant and it’s only when the constant build doesn’t actually go anywhere does this album fail - interestingly enough like so many other freak-flag-flyers - when you merely accept it for the sum of its parts. In short: this is not a party album. This is an insanely personal performance piece that is clearly not for everybody or even anybody BUT Brandon ‘Lil B’ McCartney, but I think that there is an audience who can look past the sheer absurdity of it and and appreciate it for the outside music that it really is. With this sort of raw, unformed talent I’d be interested to see what he’d be like with actual songs and some editing. As it stands, this is a very interesting freeform that doesn’t seem to want to fit into any genre*****.

He seems to want to give everything to the listener but keep nothing for himself - which might go over extremely well in the über-open world of blogs, Twitter, Facebook status updates, and the Livejournals of stoners under 25, but ultimately won’t make sense to the mainstream unless Justin Beiber suddenly drops acid and gets into Bill Hicks and early Brian Eno******. Still, if you’re interested, Lil B has an array of mixtapes, a staggering amount of free mp3’s, and even a self help book written in the form of text messages and emails to his fans. Clearly he feels he’s on the right path, although I’m not quite sure if even he himself knows where it’s leading quite yet *******.

It would be easy to write Lil B off as a freak of the industry, but there is definitely something here that cannot be ignored. Something maybe not quite finished, maybe something that is best left unfinished. For some reason this album hits the right nerves. Maybe with some serious production (Flying Lotus would be a natural fit) and some self-editing he could be Next Big Thing but for now he seems content with being the Next Big Bay Area Weirdo.
______




* It’s clear that Lil B is the product of the time (the openness to the world and ultimately self that social media lends you) and of his surroundings (the Bay Area); something that might turn off most listeners.  From the Beat poets through to the Hyphy scene of the early 2000’s, artistic and cultural movements from  the Bay Area are steeped in the counter-culture mentality, that weird is better and often best. You… did read ‘On The Road’, right? All the crazies end up here.

** Large parts of ‘Rain In England’ sound like a callback to Laurie’s “O Superman”. Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s just the last thing you’d expect when you’re handed a CD where the cover looks like something painted hastily on the wall of a bodega.

*** Allow me to go out on a limb here and say that he may be on a lot of the drugs, because unless this is Siddhartha I doubt anyone can say the things he says over the course of this album without being even the slightest bit self-aware. Hell, maybe he’s got it all figured out. I’m not one to say. Maybe he’s on some Bjork level of artistic freedom that us mere mortals cannot comprehend. Maybe he just has some really good weed.

**** Real Talk: I kept expecting to hear someone murder Stairway To Heaven.

*****Except ‘Based’, which is the genre name that Lil B coined for his own music. He refers to himself as the ‘Based God’. There are Youtube clips of him in an American Apparel hoodie extolling the virtues of Arcade Fire and others of him sampling Elliott Smith while holding a gun to his head. The mind reels as to where he’s going with this.

****** One can only hope. SOMEBODY MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

******* Non album tracks ‘Birth Of Rap’ and ‘Death Of Rap’ suggest something great. Or maybe it’s just some really strong weed. Or maybe he really is a genius.

NO AGE “EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN”
4/5

It’d be easy to run a Garrison Keillor filter over the last few years of music - making the emergence of “indie” as a “thing” in the “mainstream” seem as rose-tinted and wonderous as the first brown leaves of autumn in a Minnesota forest or the morning dew on fresh grass.

Or something. To be honest, for every “Fleet Foxes on SNL” moment, it’s been an uphill fucking struggle with a lot of work put in behind the scenes by some very talented bands. And for what? So some cunt like Owl City can hog all the limelight? I hate to break it to you Johnny Come-Lately’s who just bought your first flannel but this whole thing has been going on for twenty-plus years. Why, in MY day, we had to walk uphill in the snow - both ways, too! - just to get our hands on half a Grandaddy single.

To be fair, No Age deserve this album. They’ve put a lot of hours in and deserve the promotion. After graduating from downtown Los Angeles all-ages venue / near-infamous scene haunt The Smell (pictured on the front of their debut album ‘Weirdo Rippers’), they’ve since opened for Sonic Youth & Pavement, and have achieved a lot of success for a band whose first two outputs were sonically brilliant yet (for the most part) melodically challenged.

Around 2006, The Smell’s scene was quickly pounced upon like seagulls on a chicken wing. Glossy mags like GQ and Esquire as ‘the place to be’, quickly sucking the life out of the venue, which still functions, but nowhere quite near those heady days of yesteryear that seem so far away. I’m assuming that since you’re reading this website you already know that these things build and then break. That’s just the cycle. Yes, little Timmy: one day you too will die. But the rapid success happened mindfuckingly fast for that little pocket of cool and it kind of fucked up what could’ve been a fun natural progression. None of the bands really got to advance their sounds. Mika Miko broke up. Abe Vigoda just got more squirrelly. The new reality is that cultural movements begin and end in the space of a few months; where you used to have to save up a hundred dollars to buy a coffee table book to figure out what Mick Jagger wore in the summer of ‘72 you can now just Google it. You don’t even have to try anymore.

Which is a good way to describe how this album sounds: they’re not trying. More importantly: they don’t have to try. MOST importantly: they don’t have to try because this is the sound of a band that has been ramping up to this sound for some time now while at the same time they’ve had the chance to explore what they’ve wanted to, and have kept what works. On ‘Sorts’ they keep the almost tribal feedback from their ‘Nouns’ album, yet on the very next track (‘Dusted’, if you’re keeping score) they almost come across as montage music from a particularly deep episode of The OC (Editors note: there is nothing, I repeat, nothing wrong with season 1 of The OC). And if I may use another cheap analogy: It’s almost as if they’d made three separate albums and had Tim Gunn come in and say “Make it work”.  It darts around the room like a bored yet hurried ambulance before taking all the pills in the medicine cabinet, almost falls asleep for a second, and then jumps back up for a highly melodic round two. No Age’s use their two best weapons - warm melody and harsh dissonance - to create an album that lives up to it’s name. ‘Everything In Between’ sounds exactly like everything in between. Quite simply: it works, and amazingly so. It’s good. It’s really fucking good. It would be a stretch to call it ‘great’, but this is as close to great as this already highly interesting band has ever been.

The downside of the hyperactivity of these scenes is you now are constantly of the moment, which may keep a record company’s bottom line in order but confuses the  norms and values that keeps punk punk; as there’s nothing worse than a band that sounds like they’ve read their own reviews. No Age is - gloriously so - are not one of those bands. You’d be hard pressed to find an album this year that sounds so self aware that its of it’s time yet so very confident about it. It simply doesn’t care. All systems go. Full steam ahead. There’s no room to look back now.

Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need ‘roads’.