Check out what the CL Music Team is jamming to rocket launch the work week. Click here to check out previous entries.
Ray – Kanye West, Yeezus (Def Jam, 2013)
For anyone event remotely interested in pop culture and the way that it's a bedfellow with music at large, the new album from Kimye, err I mean Kanye, is required listening.
Not because Mr. West is a genius (or a God as he proclaims on one track from his latest full-length), but because Yeezy himself is just as interested at mining and borrowing the past as the rest of us. He's just about a million times better at sonically sampling it (and he probably has better taste) than the rest of us. I mean the dude summoned Brenda Russell, The Marvelettes, Tupac, and Biggie for some of the breats on Jay-Z's The Blueprint 2, for heaven's sake.
I was immediately grabbed by the Nina Simone sample on "Blood On The Leaves," and while I'm more familiar with Billy Holiday's performance from a late 1930's recording, West managed to take one of the most important songs about racism and violence in America and make it into a haunting, yet still poignant banger (yes, I wrote "banger").
I don't really care about all the artistic interpretations surrounding Yeezy's work. I don't care how polarizing or dumb he may or may not be for impregnating a Kardashian (face palm), but I love the idea of him listening and hearing stacks and stacks of songs, then somehow picking the best parts and making them new.
Deborah – The Appleseed Cast, Illumination Ritual (2013, Graveface)
Since its release in May, I keep returning to this album as my go-to background music. There’s certainly nothing that strikes me as groundbreaking from The Appleseed Cast's first full-length since since 2009, but it's simply a comfortable mix of their more recent post-rock instrumentals and early emo-tinged lyrics. The problem is that Low Level Owl was such a great album because of its ambition, and Illumination Ritual feels somewhat … settled. There’s still a complex and intricate interplay between the guitar and drums; according to Appleseed Cast’s website, each member of the band was given time to riff in the studio, then the spontaneous contributions were captured and cut together. I’m just not sure how this will translate to their upcoming set at Crowbar on Tue., July 16. Definitely still worth checking out. "Great Lake Derelict" after the jump, along with the rest of this week's entries…
This article appears in Jun 20-26, 2013.