The Seattle Times: Matson on Music

Friday Favorites: fresh tracks from Past Lives, Champagne Champagne, Animal Collective, Edan

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:43:03 PST

"Hex Takes Hold" by Past Lives

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"Hex Takes Hold" shows what there is to love about Seattle (via the 'burbs) art-rock band Past Lives: Each member is way out on his own limb, running rock 'n' roll run through the wringer. And though the individual elements are baffling, they coalesce into a new musical logic, some kind of compacted, hyperdynamic fracture-funk.

Jordan Blilie howls rhythm, breaking all manner of bad news in his lyrics. Devin Welch's diminished surf-blues guitar is busy and flicky, but his solo is graceful stabs, and adds a whole extra level of melody to the track. Saxophones and whatever bass/guitar hybrid Morgan Henderson's playing chug to the beat, adding an odd cartoon crunch to Mark Gajadhar's punctuational snare drum workouts. It's some next-level stuff.

New Past Lives album "Tapestry of Webs" comes out Feb. 23, 2010 on local label Suicide Squeeze. Old Past Lives EP "Strange Symmetry" broken down and members interviewed here.

"Victim of the Modern Age" by Champagne Champagne feat. Fences

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From my review of Seattle's for-charity download-only scene-spanning local mixtape GIVE, released Tuesday, Nov. 17:

On "Victim of the Modern Age," Champagne Champagne's Thomas Gray and Pearl Dragon rhyme in a spaced-out talk-rap style about Basquiat kids having baby Basquiat kids. It's free-associative without being alienating. Tattooed ex-alcoholic singer-songwriter Chris Mansfield (Fences) handles the hook with a catch in his throat, convincingly emotional and sounding as if he's on the other end of an echo chamber. Mark Gajadhar (aka DJ Gajamagic) takes a break from samplers and drum machines and turns in an exhilarating, athletic performance behind a traditional drum kit, and for those that know Gajadhar's work in Past Lives and Blood Brothers, it's like finally. The man is a hurricane. "Victim of the Modern Age" hits on several levels, and as an exclusive track to "GIVE," is the album's clear standout.

Notice the drummer is the same on the Champagne Champagne song and the Past Lives song. See if you can hear a stylistic similarity.

"Graze" by Animal Collective

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"Graze" is as good or better than anything off Baltimore band Animal Collective's "Merriweather Post Pavillion" album, the release sure to be most commonly listed in critics' best of 2009 lists. The synthesizer iridescence of that album is all over "Graze," but the song's clearly sung vocals cut through it with stand-out confidence, and a bizarre song-ending hoe-down breakdown sounds like 12 pipers piping a psychotic stomp. It's on "Fall Be Kind," which comes out Tuesday, Nov. 24.

Three minutes of "Echo Party" by Edan

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Boston's Edan is one of hiphop's best-kept secrets, an insanely creative pastiche maker, rap encyclopedia, and psychedelic aficionado. His new project "Echo Party" comes out Dec. '09 and is orderable now. It's a gorgeously packaged half-hour mix made with old-school rap records and Edan's own augmentations.The result is a patchwork creation with all types of created feedback, artsy splicings, rhythmic delay tricks, and synthesizer. Edan doesn't just "leave his mark" on other people's records; he eats them and vomits rainbows. The man's been hard to find since 2005 masterpiece "Beauty and the Beat." All hail the return of a true master.

"GIVE" is a snapshot of Seattle's local pop scene in 30 tracks, one of which suggests a more collaborative tomorrow

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:18:08 PST

"Victim of the Modern Age" by Champagne Champagne feat. Fences

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The story behind local mixtape "GIVE" is ethically compelling, no doubt.

Tastemakers at Caffé Vita reach out to area musicians for old and new tracks, then compile a download-only mp3 release that's sold to benefit Arts Corps and food banks? Can't hate that.

But "GIVE" is also an snapshot of the current moment in local pop. That is, if you narrow your focus to three places: downtown labels Sub Pop and scion Hardly Art (nine acts represented), Seattle film/TV director Lynn Shelton's taste (four acts from her upcoming "$5 Cover" MTV show about Seattle music), and new-school hiphop (five acts).

Even though "GIVE" ignores whole genres—electronic music, jazz, heavy-sounding rock, etc.—there's a crash course appeal to it, and as a kind of subplot, the collection shows vocals-focused guitar rock and nontraditional hiphop competing. In the album's best track, they mix, hopefully suggesting a new era of cooperation.

On "Victim of the Modern Age," Champagne Champagne's Thomas Gray and Pearl Dragon rhyme in a spaced-out talk-rap style about Basquiat kids having baby Basquiat kids. It's free-associative without being alienating. Tattooed ex-alcoholic singer-songwriter Chris Mansfield (Fences) handles the hook with a catch in his throat, convincingly emotional and sounding as if he's on the other end of an echo chamber. Mark Gajadhar (aka DJ Gajamagic) takes a break from samplers and drum machines and turns in an exhilarating, athletic performance behind a traditional drum kit, and for those that know Gajadhar's work in Past Lives and Blood Brothers, it's like finally. The man is a hurricane. "Victim of the Modern Age" hits on several levels, and as an exclusive track to "GIVE," is the album's clear standout.

Mad Rad's jokey "Love in a Strange World" is British-accented Euro-pop rap, a weird invention. Fresh Espresso's "Gettin' Money" is music to drive really fast to, a distinctly melodic variant of hyped-up, smoothed-out synth-rap. "Go" may be the last song we ever hear from The Saturday Knights (the group has sadly broken up), pulling off the trick of bringing Soca, punk, and rap together. In general, the hiphop songs on "GIVE" push for sonic newness more than the rock ones.

Seattle's soft-rock mini-movement is summed up by Arthur & Yu and Grand Archives, who bring slow-core and posi-core Prozac to "GIVE." Fleet Foxes' song "Mykonos" shows up from 2008. Named after Greece's party island, the song sounds pivotal in retrospect, an early elucidation of the Foxes' ambition to mix classic rock with a medieval feel. The Blakes show up and sound British, scrappy, poppy.

Pearly Gate Music's "Big Escape" takes cues from The Beach Boys circa "Wild Honey" (the LSD years), with Zach Tillman (brother of Fleet Foxes drummer J. Tillman, also in Pearly Gate Music, also on "GIVE" with a solo track) singing just like Carl Wilson. The screeching noise-guitar solo at the end of the track brings welcome chaos.

"Big Escape" by Pearly Gate Music

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The dialogue between hiphop and rock on "GIVE" might appear a little differently when promised tracks materialize from Ben Gibbard, David Bazan, The Dutchess and The Duke, The Long Winters, Throw Me The Statue, and Unnatural Helpers. If you buy "GIVE" now at www.giveseattle.org, you'll eventually get an email explaining how to get those. But for now we have what we have, and it's 30 local tracks for $7. A lot of them are good. Some are great. Some, like Champagne Champange and Fences', might be the future.

Note: I originally had the Mad Rad and Champagne Champagne song titles oppositely assigned for the whole article. "Love in a Strange World" and "Victim of the Modern Age": similar, no? Anyways, it's my fault, and the error is fixed now. Rather than mar the copy with strike-throughs, I thought I'd add this note.

New song from Sub Pop band Beach House: "Norway"

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:10:03 PST

"Norway"

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Brand new beautifulness from Baltimore's Beach House. The way the guitar soothes but keeps gently going out of tune recalls Pavement's "Zurich is Stained," which I love, but the shoegaze-y heavy breathing vocals and overall shimmer-haze of "Norway" make it an obvious Beach House song.

Photo by Jason Nocito

Concert preview: Seattle's Foscil combines synths and horns/woodwinds, plays from "Residential" at The Crocodile

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:37:03 PST

Adam Swan (R) and Tyler Swan (L) with Foscil at BLVD Gallery

"Filfy"

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"Ran"

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Wildly inventive Seattle band Foscil works in a style that may or may not be commercially viable—sci-fi-sounding, movie soundtrack-y jazz-rock fusion—but the band doesn't care about that. It's all about the music, man.

Foscil plays songs from its upcoming December release "Residential" Saturday at The Crocodile. Three members will sit, one will stand, everyone will look like they're in a regular band even though they aren't.

Other things Foscil doesn't care about: appealing to hipsters, worrying about occasionally dipping into avant-elevator jazz, or sounding anything like Truckasauras, the popular electro/dance/hiphop concern three of its four members are also in. (Ryan Trudell and brothers Adam and Tyler Swan are in Truckasauras; Anthony Moore plays in local Gypsy swing/'60s rock group Raggedy Anns). Adam Swan calls Foscil "kinda self-indulgent."

"That's the luxury of Foscil," Swan says on the phone. "There's no press to do anything. It's all really comfortable and natural and doesn't feel like a job."

The members are all in their late-20s/early-30s, all from Kirkland, all purple kangaroos (the mascot of Lake Washington High School), and Foscil will probably never break up because nobody plans on stopping being friends.

"Residential" is named after Foscil's half-year-long residency at Belltown's now-closed BLVD Gallery in 2008, where the band forced experiments on itself in an urban contemporary art environment. One concert was played using only electronic instruments and samplers, another with traditional instruments, another with a rapper, and so on. Each made flexible use of material co-written by the group in a Greenlake house.

Finished in Fall 2008, "Residential" sat for a year while Truckasauras became the best band in Seattle. It'll be released on 7-inch records in an accordion-style book by boutique New York outfit Journal of Popular Noise—only 300 copies—and on iTunes.

Perhaps the most creatively sourced sound on "Residential" is the first one on the album, a bell-like tone used for a super-slow hook on "Danger." It comes from an old music box the Swan brothers grew up with in Kirkland. They took it apart, figured out how to slow it down, and isolated individual notes which they recorded and sampled. In the background of the track, slow suspense comes from a synthesizer, fading to the foreground; glockenspiel and marimba decorate the space and brassy trumpet notes arc over the whole thing (Anthony Moore has a degree in jazz trumpet). The song sounds like waking up in a planetarium.

"Filfy" is another oddity, a loose, instrumental cover of a song by Filthy Rich, a beyond-obscure local rapper. Foscil found out about Filthy Rich through old-school Seattle abstract-rapper Specs One, a Foscil collaborator who has a large collection of rap CD-Rs that never made it out into the world. When "Filfy" drops bass clarinets over a Tyler Swan breakbeat (he's a beast on drums), it's a warm, triumphant hit.

Foscil indulges in unnecessary moments sometimes. When Adam Swan's Radiohead/Tortoise-style guitar lines mix with Moore adopting a neo-mariachi trumpeting style, it's a bad combination from good chefs. On some songs, like the Mark Mothersbaugh-esque "Roy The Barber," the band sounds cutesy. Not its strong suit.

"Ran" is Foscil at its best, unhurried through a gorgeous rainy-night electro/acoustic song. Synths are used for depth, melodica for lightness, and Moore's trumpet/clarinet for overall lift-off. The arrangement is weird, but doesn't call attention to its own weirdness. It's mellow, sad, perfect.

Anthony Moore (L) and Tyler Swan (R) at BLVD Gallery

Live photos by Martin Collette, product shot by Jeremy Balderson

Catching up with Seattle superproducer Jake One as he works with Freeway, Dr. Dre, Brother Ali, Fatal Lucciauno

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:14:03 PST

"Heart Throbs" by Freeway and Jake One

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Seattle superproducer Jake One recently released 40 minutes of hiphop with rapper Freeway, one of the most original voices in rap, on a free downloadable mixtape called "The Beat Made Me Do It." Get it here.

The compositions are simple: looped samples of funk and soul records Jake likes from the late '70s and early '80s. He made the whole thing in three or four hours, he estimates.

"I just grabbed some records and looped 'em up. [Freeway] wanted to do a mixtape and I didn't want to do what everyone else does, rap on 'A Milli' or whatever beat is hot at the moment."

Has anyone else seen "Rappin'," the rap movie musical from 1985?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:03:04 PST

Over the weekend, I went to Scarecrow Video and discovered "Rappin'," a musical movie made in 1985.

Directed by Joel Silberg—who also directed "Breakin'," a 1984 musical about breakdancing—"Rappin'" stars Mario Van Peebles as John Hood. Home from jail, Hood reconnects with his family and merry men (two of which are Eriq La Salle and Kadeem Hardison, of "ER" and "A Different World" fame) to find no small amount of drama in his beloved inner-city Pittsburgh.

The movie feels like it was made by tons of people, each of whom thought they were making a different movie, none of whom had ever actually listened to rap music.

Bad things about "Rappin'":

1. The acting. Pornographic movies have better acting than "Rappin'."

2. The overdubbing. All the dialogue is added post-production, none of it matches with anybody's mouth.

3. The raps. Everyone is off beat, which is crazy because they're rapping the simplest raps ever rapped.

4. The plot. IMDb says: "An ex-con and break-dancer helps save a neighborhood from a greedy developer while trying to win a rap contest." Throw in a romance and a gang war and you're almost there. It's a confuse-a-thon.

5. The sexual politics/misogyny. Eriq La Salle calls somebody "fag." Hood's love interest talks like she hurt her head in a car crash. All the other women are hysterically emotional or hooker-ish or wide-eyed in love with Hood. There's a rap called "Lady Alcohol" wherein alcohol is personified as an evil lady. She'll getcha.

6. The characters. Characters in musicals are allowed to be a little flat, but when you put a fat guy in a sweatshirt that says "I Love Food" and name him "Fats," that's going too far.

7. The age-inappropriateness of one of the kids' songs. "Golly Gee" by Tuff, Inc., a group of children in "Rappin'" for no apparent reason, is weirdly adult. It features a long spoken word section where a boy pleads for a girl to drop the zero and get with the hero. The whole thing has a latent sexual energy that feels like it came from some creepy old man songwriter/choreographer.

"Rappin'" is a spectacular disaster on every artistic level. The day I rented it, I watched it twice. If you like laughing and are in the mood for some good ol' brainlessness, definitely check it out.