Erik B & Rakim - Paid in Full

Paid in Full was the third hip hop album I got, after 36 Chambers and Fear of a Black Planet. I immediately thought I made a mistake in buying it. The beats were simplistic and super repetitive, and literally every line of the entire album is about how good Rakim is at rapping. They were also (apparently) one of the first groups to start the obsession of hip hop with materialism - as seen by the cover. Paid in Full is definitely a "true" hip hop album - not a lot of obvious crossover appeal.

There's something to be said for musical shock treatment, because after a couple days of listening to this, I started to really like it. It's completely true that Rakim talks about the same exact thing the whole time, but he's such a good rapper that you don't really care. As for the music, it's full of 80's sounding samples and scratching. That actually gives it a cool atmosphere (at least for someone who's heard only one such album). Erik B was apparently influential and very good at what he did, but I'm not in a great position to judge that. The stuff is pretty memorable though. On certain tracks the beats sound kind of jagged with the scratching and accents not always falling right on beat, which I liked. There are also a couple instrumental tracks on here which are relatively complex.

Ultimately, my experience with Paid in Full is the reason why I like buying albums on the strength of reputation without heavily listening to them first. If I had downloaded it, I probably would have listened to Paid in Full a couple times and then written it off.

One last thing to say about Paid in Full: it reminds me of John Cage.

A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory

Here's another hip hop album to go along with my last post, but this time it's the candidate for my least favorite album I've gotten this year. The Low End Theory is an undisputed hip hop classic. But despite liking a few of the songs a fair amount, I can't seem to make it through the full album without feeling really annoyed and sick of it.

The "beats" on this album (ok, I still really hate that term) are a lot more minimalist and one-dimensional than most of the other hip hop I've listened to so far. For the most part the music just consists of a simple bass line. The album is usually considered "jazzy" by fans, although it's a pretty superficial resemblance. Nothing wrong with minimalism, but in that case the lyrics really have to carry the songs, and for me they just don't.

For one thing, there's the cringe-worthy choruses of a few songs, like "Butter" ("It's like butter baby, it's like butter" etc) or "Jazz (We've Got)" ("We've got the jazz, we've got the jazz" etc), or some terrible R&B style vocals on one of them. 

But besides that, the lyrics themselves just don't sit well with me. I'm not going to pick through it, but I can barely think of a line that stands out as being especially cool or interesting. The overall vibe seems to be that A Tribe Called Quest are normal guys who are good at rapping and successful with women. Whatever. It seems really middle of the road. It's also weird that most of the (few) swears are edited out. As far as I can tell, all versions of the album are like this.

I'd give it the benefit of the doubt that it's a good album and it's just not what I'm looking for right now.

GZA - Liquid Swords

At the beginning of the year I had the intention of blogging about every album I bought. Clearly I'm a little behind, but I think I can catch up. Especially since there are several albums which I have no desire to drone on about.

Exhibit A: Liquid Swords. All I really want to say is that it's probably my current pick for best CD I've gotten in 2012, and the one I've listened to the most. In retrospect 36 Chambers may have hit me so hard just because it was a musical revelation for me. But much of it has a kind of light hearted party atmosphere which isn't my typical aesthetic choice.

On the other hand, Liquid Swords is something I seem to be constantly in the mood for. It's a lot darker, more atmospheric, even sinister in parts. GZA is pretty untouchable throughout, but probably my favorite verse on the whole album is RZA's in "4th Chamber". Really makes me want to check out some of his solo stuff, although I have a feeling it's a lot different.

Basically this album completely rules, and nearly every Wu-Tang member sounds better to me in this context than they do on 36 Chambers. Eg Method Man on "Shadowboxin'". The only downside is that I have to go around like a tool muttering the lines. By this point Justine can easily answer the question: "What do motherfuckers think?".

Napalm Death - Utilitarian

I'm not going to break any records, but I own a decent number of Napalm Death albums. I used to buy everything I could find, despite not having much legitimate interest in some of the EPs or compilations. Most of it is pretty enjoyable, but for their last 5 albums they've been on a streak of consistency bordering on the predictable. So in 2011, for the first time since I became a fan, I didn't even bother to check out their new album, Utilitarian.

Part of that decision was based on the advanced track I heard, "Analysis Paralysis". In retrospect it's one of the less exciting, and I don't know why they chose it. Luckily I came across a youtube link of another song - "The Wolf I Feed". Within an hour I had downloaded the album, and within two more I had ordered it from Amazon.

Utilitarian isn't a radical departure from the last couple albums, but to my ears it's the most inspired they've been in years, and there are just enough surprises to keep things fresh. "The Wolf I Feed" remains one of my favorite tracks, containing a Fear Factory esque chorus and some manic vocals from Mitch (who also appears on "Orders of Magnitude", not coincidentally, another of my favorites). Another highlight is John Zorn lending a couple squealing sax solos to "Everyday Pox".

I wouldn't say Napalm Death is pushing any boundaries here, but everyone is on top of their game, the production sounds great, and the songwriting is as strong as it's been since the early days of the band. It's kind of heartwarming seeing these guys blast so hard into their 30th year as a band.

I will make one qualifying statement: in preparation for this album, I spent a few days getting reacquainted with 2009's Time Waits for No Slave. It turns out it's pretty damn solid as well. So maybe I'm going to feel equally indifferent by the time 2013 or 2014 rolls around and another ND album is on the way.

Anyway, as it stands right now I would put this on the shortlist of essential albums spanning Napalm's career:

Scum

Utopia Banished

Fear Emptiness Despair

Utilitarian

I'm sure it's blasphemy to leave Harmony Corruption off, but Utopia Banished covers their short-lived pure death metal phase well enough, and I've always preferred it.

John Cage - In a Landscape

(This post has been a draft for a couple months. I thought I had posted it already and I was assuming that context for the Stockhausen blog.)

Aside from the occasional reference to 4'33", John Cage first came into my consciousness a couple years ago through this video. I really liked the ideas he was talking about. Enough, anyway, to mention the video to several people - although not enough to actually listen to any of his music. But it was bound to happen eventually. And, as the dedicated scientist that I am, the impetus to finally take the plunge came during my recent trip to the Materials Research Society conference in Boston. I was "at the conference" for a few days, and naturally a few hours of that were spent in the Newbury Comics a block away, trying to ward off all the powerpoint presentations with an impulse purchase. Thankfully I had a lot of time to kill, because I don't think John Cage came into my head until I had aimlessly flipped through the rock and jazz sections, twice.

 

I ended up with a collection of keyboard works entitled In a Landscape. Among them are works for acoustic and electronic piano, toy piano, and "prepared piano" - Cage's innovation of sticking things like bolts and insulating foam against the strings inside the instrument.

The music is a lot less glaringly avante-garde than I was expecting, although I'm sure part of this is my lack of reference point for what was going on in the 40's. But even the prepared piano used in these pieces sounds largely like a normal piano, with a bit of rattling or a complete lack of resonance on certain keys.


What is striking about this music is Cage's bold presentation of childlike, almost amateur sounding melodies. Naked in their simplicity, often repetitious. Cage famously said "if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. It still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all". I don't agree with the letter of that, but it certainly illuminates some of the pieces here.


Cynically, to hear "Suite for Toy Piano" is to heat an average person play an awkward and rudimentary piece on a toy instrument, and pass it off to others with a highly inflated notion of its quality. Indeed, I spent the first few listens wondering whether to think of Cage as the emperor with no clothes; an opportunist with a gimmick.


But then I couldn't stop listening to this, and I started to really like it. So what if a melody or musical idea is simple? Cage's music can be dissonant or jarring here, and I'm no stranger to that in general. What I am a stranger to is the presentation of jarring ideas against a minimalist background. It takes a visionary to present us with a collection of sounds, and stubbornly demand that we reexamine them. Or maybe it takes a delusional eccentric, but in either case I'm glad somebody did.


Check out the thundering synthesizer tone of "Souvenir", followed by a ditty that sounds straight out of Ocarina of Time. It's ripe for the perennial criticism of the abstract art world - "anyone could have written that". But they didn't, and it sounds great to me.


Interestingly enough, the closest point of reference I have for some of this stuff in my CD collection is Burzum. The repetition of unabashedly simple melodies, and the way it encourages the listener to sonically reinterpret and listen for emergent structure in the resonances and distortion. Who knew black metal was just what I needed to start appreciating Cage?


I'll stress the "start" in that last sentence, since I briefly listened to Music of Changes and it makes this sound like The Beatles.

(Now I realize the reason I thought I posted this - because I apparently summarized it in the Hate Eternal post. Guess I'm just comparing John Cage to every metal band on here.)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Helikopter-Streichquartett

Everyone's heard of Stockhausen but my impetus to start listening came from a sort of strange event. I have Amazon Prime which my family loves to use for free shipping, to the point where my Dad was buying my own Christmas presents using my account. You know I can see that, right? Granted it was mainly CD's from a list which I had previously furnished - with the exception of one collection of Stockhausen pieces that I saw had been placed into my cart and later removed.

Well, Christmas came and went and no one had any recollection of even considering purchasing that album for me. My suspicion is that my Dad made a wrong turn in the series of tubes. I took it as a sign from the fates that I needed to start listening to Stockhausen, so I bought that collection. It's full of pieces like Zykus (unstructured random sounding percussion), Spiral (unstructured short wave radio signals and obscure electronic synthesizer), Wach (unstructured piece whose only score is a bit of text along the lines of "penetrate into the other players' notes. Let them penetrate your note"), and In Freundschaft (a collection of short fragmented melodies for solo trumpet).

It was all pretty confounding. Kind of interesting to listen to in the right mood. I ultimately determined that if I picked a couple more of his better known pieces, maybe I would start to get an idea of what the "big picture" was.

The upshot of all that: I soon became the proud owner of Helikopter-Streichquartett. I won't try to do the concept justice here, but essentially it's a piece which consists of a string quartet, each member of which flies in a separate helicopter while the sounds of the four rotors are mixed in with the music and piped to an audience down below. Seemed like a no-brainer addition to my CD collection.

Listening to this now, it's roughly what you might expect. The helicopter noises mix innocuously enough with the strings. The actual music is a sort of abstract meandering piece where the strings try to imitate the cadences and sonorities of a helicopter rotor, or something. 

I guess it's safe to say I haven't been blown away by this CD. I haven't spent much time listening to it after the initial week when I bought it 6 months ago. Sonically, the mixture of strings and mechanical noises isn't too radical. Lots of experimental or industrial artists outside of classical might have some conventional instrumentation layered with some samples or found sound. In those contexts (or even just sitting in my lab) it's relatively easy for me to focus on the subtleties of mechanical noises and get some enjoyment out of it. The thing that's different about Helikopter-Streichquartett is that the rotors are SO familiar from everyday life. It's very hard to listen to it and try to perceive an interaction with the strings. Your brain says "I know what a helicopter sounds like" and overwhelmingly perceives it as some string music with helicopters in the background.

To try to experience this piece as if you never heard the sound of a helicopter before requires a lot of effort and is kind of a nice exercise. After all, the sound of the rotors is fairly dynamic and the interaction with the strings should logically give rise to a lot of interesting sound combinations. Nonetheless I don't readily hear anything other than background noise in the helicopters. If this piece eventually got me to penetrate some mental block that I've developed over years of hearing helicopters fly by, it seems like that would valuable for the further emancipation of my ears.

Successful or not in practice, as a concept the whole thing sets pretty well with me - until you get to sections of the piece in which the performers count audibly together in German(?), in very silly voices. I'm sure there's a high-art justification for Stockhausen's choice here, but it's in stark opposition to the perspective from which I'm attempting to engage with the piece: where the helicopter loses its familiarity and functions as a disembodied source of complex sounds. The human voices do the opposite - violently return you to the reality of the performers sitting in the helicopters, and whatever prestige, pretention, intellect, and spectacle comes along with that. 

Interestingly, while I would attempt to experience this piece in a vacuum, most listeners apparently agree that the concept very much IS the piece. In fact there was a lot of criticism of this recording because it's not a document of one of the performances - it's a studio recording mixed with some canned helicopters. From my perspective, that doesn't matter at all. You wouldn't be able to tell that this was the case unless someone told you, so how can it possibly influence your enjoyment? It's like morons who won't eat hot dogs.

Ultimately I think I'm approaching this whole thing from a philosophy akin to that other emperor, John Cage.  I'm still not sure what to think about Stockhausen. Hearing this hasn't helped me connect any further with any of his other pieces. Then again, several years ago I was listening to Today is the Day and Sunn 0))) and feeling curious but not really getting anything out of it. Now those are two of my favorite bands. So I'm patient about letting Stockhausen's music sit with me over time.

It's kind of conflicting when you're walking around outside listening to this and another aircraft flies overheard. Is that supposed to enhance the piece? John Cage would probably say yes. What would Stockhausen think?

  

Hate Eternal - Fury and Flames

My first exposure to Hate Eternal came during the first half of high school. Me and my friend Jimmy were exchanging death metal CD's for Christmas - I gave him Deicide's Legion and he got me Suffocation's Effigy of the Forgotten. I think I gave him a second CD as well. I had also planned to give him the newest release by Hate Eternal, King of All Kings. But once I realized that the exchange would be uneven, I jettisoned the Christmas spirit and kept it for myself. Despite only sort of liking the album, when I, Monarch came out I impulsively bought it as well. Although I thought that the guitar work was relatively interesting, the constant blast beats throughout both CD's eventually convinced me that it was boring one-dimensional music, and I sold them off a few years back.

In retrospect, I think my previous opposition to the blasting style of the albums was a little dogmatic. For sure, it's not the type of thing you want to listen to all the time. But in my high school frame of mind, the adoption of blastbeats throughout an entire album was an indication that the band lacked creativity. These days I'm a lot more sympathetic to singularity of vision.

It may seem like a strange comparison to make, but I'm reminded of my first exposure to John Cage's music, which came in the form of the piano collection "In a Landscape" which I bought last fall. Much of the album consists of repetitive piano lines which are simplistic to the point of sounding amateurish or childlike. At first it was easy to see Cage as a cynical opportunist in an "Emperor's New Clothes" scenario, but I soon came to appreciate the stubborn commitment to simple, elemental melodies. To force the listener to reevaluate musical dictums, It takes a musician with a single-minded focus and a willingness to offend our sensibilities.

I guess that's a really pretentious way to say that I love blastbeats and I can listen to them for 40 minutes straight.

In all seriousness, the adoption of the blastbeat as the primary rhythmic backbone is a natural progression for extreme metal, and it's something that happened a lot sooner in black metal because of the de-emphasis on rhythm and the ability to treat the blasting drums as an atmospheric element. But in death metal, I don't think there's anyone who competently explored the idea until Erik Rutan. Revisiting I, Monarch with this perspective, I can finally appreciate the layering of Derek Roddy's steady blasting with delicate cymbal work as a musical subversion of positive and negative space.

That said, on Fury and Flames, newcomer Jade Simonetto's playing is somewhat more varied than Roddy's anyway. But along with the dense layering of three or more guitar tracks at once, the album becomes nothing short of a wall of sound. Apparently it has received criticism in the metal world for that very reason, but in my view such an aesthetic is completely in keeping with the tenants of death metal. Close listening reveals rich compositions with polyphonic guitar and bass lines, and an ear for melody and dissonance which has always characterized Rutan's work.  But on the whole it's aggressive and nearly impenetrable by design.  

The relentless technicality, oppressive atmosphere, and general disdain for subtlety and restraint make Hate Eternal unquestionably a band of the 2000's. Particularly in the drumming category, the music-as-athletics approach simply didn't exist in the old school days. But despite all of this, Rutan's playing and writing style retains a connection to traditional death metal that many modern bands don't. I think the thrash leanings of Rutan's early career in Ripping Corpse are still with the band to an extent. While percussive rhythms and intentionally amelodic note choice dominate much of the material from bands like Origin and Nile, Rutan's riffs seem largely informed by his unique melodic inclinations.

On a more aesthetic level, I'm a huge fan of the sound on this album. For one thing, Fury and Flames has one of the most prominent bass sounds I've heard on a death metal album. Although it apparently goes against common practice, sacrificing a little bulk in the guitar tone to give more presence to the bass adds a whole level of sonic depth in my view. That's a big part of a reason why I'm such a big fan of the early Cryptopsy albums. In addition, the guitar tone may not be as sharp and punchy as is typical, but it gives an almost doomy flavor to a lot of the low register, backing guitar lines.

For such an unrelentingly dense album, the songs are impressively diverse. There's the melodic thrashing of "Whom Gods May Destroy:", the dissonant trudging of "Fury Within", or the staccato rhythms of "Thus Salvation". The emotionally tinged playing of "Tombeau (Le Tombeau de la Fureur et des Flammes)" is particularly noteworthy - Rutan's tribute to a deceased bandmate and friend displays a vulnerability rarely heard in this genre.

In short, I'm completely blown away by this album and it's driven me to re-purchase those two Hate Eternal albums that I discarded a few years back. I was always attracted to Rutan's guitar work, but I've finally warmed up to his challenging and dense take on the genre as a whole. It's risky to make broad statements after owning an album for a week, but I feel fairly certain that Fury and Flames has joined the ranks of my favorite post-2000 metal albums.