04/30 – 05/04:

Electric Six, Heartbeats & Brainwaves

The release of a new Electric Six album is cause for celebration. It is, in fact, the soundtrack to its own celebration. Heartbeats & Brainwaves is a more synth-driven album, taking the dance rock we’ve come to depend on and turning down the “rock” part a little. The result is more akin to 2nd album Senior Smoke than most of their catalog: glorious, bombastic, even catchier than usual. And lyrically, Dick Valentine really brought it this time, delivering some of the Six’s more absurd, delightful songs to date in songs like “Gridlock!,” “It Gets Hot,” and “Food Dog.” Electric Six songs that get really excited about mundane events tend to be homeruns, and “Free Samples” is no exception. It’s about getting free samples. Even moody opener “Psychic Visions” offers plenty of fun. The whole album is a great time from start to finish. The first three Electric Six albums are far and away the best, and a big part of that for me is they all sound different. The first is really rock oriented, the second more dance-based, and the third stretched out and tried some new genres. After that, until last year’s Zodiac, they’d mostly settled into a reliable, Fire-esque, dance rock sound. But Zodiac began and Heartbeats & Brainwaves continues a new era of experimentation, and I am all for it. Electric Six are on top of their game right now.

Electric Six, “It Gets Hot”

Screaming Females, Ugly

Screaming Females are an interesting band. Album after album, they don’t do much to change their style, but they seem to refine and get closer to the heart of that style every time. Each album features tighter playing, more guitar solos, a more confident and elastic vocal approach, and just plain better songs than the last. Their catalog just gets exponentially better as you listen through it, and it starts out pretty strong in the first place. Ugly mostly keeps up the trend, although there are a couple of spots with the most experimentation we’ve heard from the band, most obviously closing ballad “It’s Nice.” That song’s fragile strings and focus on the calmer, more vulnernable end of singer/guitarist Marissa Paternoster’s wonderfully pliable voice is definitely new territory for the band. But for the most part, it’s the no frills, super-fun rock’n’roll you’ve come to expect, only even better than you remember it. Whether light speed attacks like “Tell Me No” or quasi-title track “Something Ugly,” the poppier approach of “Rotten Apple,” the more subdued menace of “Red Hand” or the booming swagger of “Expire” and the oddly hypnotic 7:30 minute epic “Doom 84,” it’s everything you love about the band, but it still manages to sound fresh and exciting. That’s quite a tightrope, but they pull it off every time.

Screaming Females, “Expire”

Big Baby Gandhi, No 1 2 Look Up 2 mixtape

Big Baby Gandhi is the protege of Das Racist’s Heems, and I think he was the first person signed to Heems’ Greedhead label. Gandhi had provided beats and guest verses for DR, and this is his 2nd mixtape on his own. Already he’s showing some growth. His last tape had great production, and his lyricism could be clever, but his delivery was basically just an album-length shrill yell. Gandhi still gets pretty heated most of the time when he’s rapping, but his voice doesn’t get so high, and that might not sound like a big change, but it is. He sounds a lot more controlled and focused here. The production is wide-ranging and versatile. Most of it is provided by others, which is surprising since Gandhi is a talented beatmaker. Guest appearances from the usual suspects of the Greedhead umbrella are present (With Lakutis in particular coming in with a memorable moment). It’s a solid showing, but I think Gandhi’s best material is still ahead of him. You can download the record here.

Big Baby Gandhi with Das Racist, “Blue Magic”

First Serve, First Serve

First Serve is a concept album. Pretty rare in hip hop. It’s more than that, really, it’s like a rapped musical. It’s been compared to Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves in that respect. De La Soul’s Plug One And Plug Two, Posdnous and Dave, play two young rappers on their way to success, and we witness what happens when they find it, and what it does to their friendship. It’s a lively story, maybe not the most original plot line, but well realized. And most importantly, though the record does a great job of telling a story, the songs never suffer from being a part of a larger piece. Very few guest stars provide voices along the way. It’s mostly just Pos & Dave, rapping over production by French DJs Chokolate & Khalid. It’s a fun listen.

First Serve, “Must B The Music”

Lushlife, Plateau Vision

I listen to a lot of music, you may have noticed. And I have this thing... it doesn’t happen too often, but once in awhile... I will listen to a record I’ve had for some time and realize I like it a lot more than I thought I did. It’s hard to articulate, but there comes a moment where I think, “Man, this is really great!” even after many listens. A grower, I guess. Such was the case with Lushlife’s 2011 mixtape, No More Golden Days. It might’ve taken awhile to to go from “good” to “great” in my head, but once it did, I was very impatient for the release of his first proper album, Plateau Vision.

Now it’s here, and... I have mixed feelings. Its 11-track running time features 3 songs I haven’t heard in some form already. Three other tracks are transported as-is from the mixtape. And the remaining 5 songs are all either a beat from the mixtape with new vocals, or vocals from the mixtape with new production, or some other reconfiguration. Even Heems’ guest verse, the appearance of which is what put No More Golden Days on my radar to begin with, is reused (in a truncated form). One song from the mixtape actually appears on Plateau Vision twice, in 2 different configurations. In spite of the release schedule, he material here seems to have come first. Except when it obviously didn’t. “Still I Hear The Word Progress,” for example, features a guest verse from Styles P, but the remixed version featured on last year’s mixtape had a recurring vocal sample that turns out to have come from Styles P’s verse. This is most definitely the “real” version, but when you hear it months and months after the remix... which one is the real version to you? And, on the other hand, there’s the Heems verse. On the mixtape, he appeared on “Adult Goth,” a song based on samples of the Gang Gang Dance song of the same name, something Heems notes in his first line. Here, he’s on a song called “Halle-Bopp Was the Bedouins,” with the reference to Gang Gang Dance excised, and a Lushlife verse from a different song on the mixtape added. The history of these songs seems pretty confusing.

It’s hard for me to render judgement on this thing. The new songs are great. The new production is top-notch. But... the old production and old lyrics and old vocals are good, too, and I know them all-too well. It’s hard to get excited about an album with so few surprises on it. But... it’s a really good album. It’s sort of like this: If you’ve never heard No More Golden Days, you’d love this album. If you have heard No More Golden Days, you will... appreciate this. I don’t regret buying it or anything... No More Golden Days is amazing and it was free, I’d gladly pay for this even if I didn’t like it just out of gratitude, and this does have some new stuff... but ironically, this feels more like a collection of remixes & outtakes, which is what the mixtape was meant to be. Frustrating. Or really good. It depends on you.

Lushlife, “Magnolia”

There you go.

--D