Odd Future had to have an equal and opposite reaction, so here it is: Death Grips. The way their album Ex Military (available for free above) has been released so quickly after Goblin seems almost cruel, like they’re only allowing Tyler, the Creator a couple of months on top of the game before snatching his crown. MC Ride isn’t as skilled a rapper as Tyler, and neither can match OFWGKTA’s Ace-in-the-detention-facility Earl Sweatshirt (that kid can fuckin’ rap), but Ride is bellowing like a dying Auroch over what sounds like Wolf Eyes with a beat one minute, Dalek the next and a broken-down, used up Girl Talk on minute three. Death Grips are willing to be much uglier than Odd Future- for all his rape-raps, Tyler can still sign to the same label as Adele, Vampire Weekend and Weezer. We’ll let anyone in to the clubhouse providing they make the requisite gestures towards inauthenticity on one level (the “it’s fucking fiction” disclaimer on Radicals) and pop-psychology on another (Tyler is screwed up because his daddy was never around.) It’s more radical to embrace ugliness because it’s just there, because drugs feel good and violence makes you a big man. One of the more subversive acts I’ve seen on film recently was Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight offerring multiple ‘origin stories’ to explain his scars and his psychopathy- the message being that sometimes there’s no mummy and daddy gunned down in an alley to explain why a crazy person does crazy things. Tyler says that black males need strong role models, Ride says that he won’t share his drugs with anyone but aliens. You can guess who gets the New York Times profile and who gets to wake up every morning to drag himself to work because he didn’t make a cent off one of the best rap albums released this year.
It’s done: a comprehensive survey of the relevant musical recordings of the Jan 2010-Dec 2010 period so that future historians can look back and hear the sounds that had us all shaking our leg-warmers in the disco-clubs.
I didn’t go with a ‘cut’ (or is it ‘joint’? I can never tell. Rap is hard.) from Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It was, as Pitchfork pointed out, a very good record, a career best, but I’m sure that anybody who would appreciate it has heard it already.
The track list is as follows:
Swans – You Fucking People Make Me Sick
Xasthur – Broken Glass Christening
High On Fire – Bastard Samurai
Earl Sweatshirt – Earl
Deerhunter – Desire Lines
The Body – Lathspell I Name You
WU LYF – Heavy Pop
Alcest – Percees de Lumiere
Tennis – Marathon
Zola Jesus – Run Me Out
Das Racist – Ek Shaneesh
Amanda Palmer – Idioteque
Wrnlrd – Death Drive
Gonjasufi – She Gone
Salem – Killer
Agalloch – To Drown
The last song is significant not only in allowing me to close the album with enough grandeur and majesty to reanimate Richard Wagner, but because Agalloch’s The Marrow of the Spirit is my Album of the Year. Yay.
With Marrow Portland Oregon’s Agalloch have pulled off the difficult feat of releasing the greatest album of their career fifteen years after the band formed. Try to envisage MGMT or Vampire Weekend’s magnum opus arriving in 2022 and you’ll see the magnitude of Don Anderson, John Haughm, Jason William Walton and Aesop Dekker’s achievement. It is fitting that a band who are so heavily influenced by nature would obey nature’s rhythms as opposed to those of the music industry. Like the songs on Marrow, the shortest of which is nine minutes and forty seconds if you don’t count the album’s intro, Agalloch have grown and evolved. This is not to say that their first real album, 1999′s Pale Folklore is by any means primitive- Agalloch are not Ulver, who started out as folk-influenced Black Metal and ended up in unclassifiable electronic weirdness by way of a two disc William Blake inspired concept album, or that they have mellowed with age- Into the Painted Grey from Marrow is closer to Black Metal than anything they have recorded previously. Their progression has been, appropriately, organic.
They aren’t just getting this accolade for releasing a career best album- Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest is their finest recording to date, Malefic closed the books on his Xasthur project and said goodbye to metal with a record that will be hard to top no matter which genre he uses next. The Marrow of the Spirit would be the best album released this year if it was a debut by a previously unknown cadre of mountain-men who had just wandered down from the Cascades covered in mud and deer gibbets. As with any great piece of art its greatness is multi-dimensional, but I would like to venture something: part of what makes it great is that it is accessible. This term is almost prejorative when discussing music, one step away from ‘pandering’, and there is often an undertone of dissapointment when a beloved band release an album that could be described as ‘accessible’. Imagine if Radiohead’s next album was written primarily as a jumping-on point for teenagers who missed out on The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. Marrow will appeal to many people who wouldn’t normally listen to Black Metal, though I doubt your kid sister is going to make the jump from Ke$ha based on the mournful minor-key acoustic strumming in The Watcher’s Monolith.
There are people out there for whom The Marrow of the Spirit will be the first Black Metal album that they will hear. Looking through the rest of the Black Metal genre they will find genuine progress being made by a few outsiders and a deluge of Mayhem cover bands staffed by fascist lunkheads. The few of them who start bands will bring what they learned from Agalloch with them whether their musical is explicitly metal or another genre (indie-rock is in serious need of blackening). Music will get a little bit better for The Marrow of the Spirit being made.
End Of Play 2010: A Hip-Hop State Of The Art Report
Evil unchecked. That’s what’s maddening. Critics scared of irrelevance without realising that kind of ‘irrelevance’ is entirely irrelevant. The biz and the press that cheerleads it is even more stuffed with hobbyists for whom hip-hop is purely exotic; tourism; never a political truth that’s close to home. Don’t get me wrong, part of hip-hop’s early appeal was the notion that you were visiting a world more dramatic and desperate than your own – but when that drama itself becomes a 2-d prosaism, just more post-watershed gun-play and witlessness, what’s the point of celebrating that monomania? I can’t figure out why a lot of rap’s defenders actually love it the more clichéd it gets, get snotty & suspicious if anyone dares to question it, mistake the tired repetition of old motifs as somehow ‘keeping it real’ and wouldn’t dare slag off much mainstream rap for fear of being called backpackers. As with rockcrit, there’s a fatal synonymising of ‘the facts’ with ‘the truth’ at the moment in rap, the laziness of thinking that if ‘the kids’ (whomever the fuck they be) love it you needn’t bother having a critical opinion, just assume the default position of prone reportage.
That unwillingness to try and find a way round/through/above/against the grisly shitpile we’re dealing with when we listen to mainstream rap (coupled with the instant ease we all now have in hiding in our own personal playlists & undergrounds) has left us with nowt but an amused chortling; an ongoing dialogue of condescension/ironic-hyperbole with the lowest-common-denominator of rap, whilst the underground keeps flaming on unheralded. Cos hey, why bother talking about what’s good and why it’s good and why certain things are bad when you can snigger about what’s mediocre and pretend it’s all equally godlike? Fuckin hipster cunts fucking it all up for everyone forever: not to piss on your parade pricks, this rag-mag bullshit’s fine if your life is spent giggling about pop, but for those of us who need it to make life worth living it’s simply not good enough. Too many writers aware of where pop should be fitted/filed on your ipod but utterly unaware of how pop fits with poverty, exhaustion, insecurity, fear, everyday life out here beyond NW1/BN1, where parents don’t pay for everything, where music & life have to battle. Critics believing all those commentards. The inability for writers to change the world they write about has meant they all accept that limitation in their ever-apologetic writing.
Terror and Fabulous are two words that sound unreasonably good when put together, so there's no reason that they should be monopolised by an acclaimed 90s Dancehall DJ and can't be used as the title of a blog by Gareth Watkins of near to London, England.
There's no theme.
Okay, there's a theme: Things Are Not Okay, but this site will ignore the way things are and promote the work of artists and intellectuals who show us hints of how things could be.
I post MP3s. I do this to promote awareness of certain artists and to encourage critical engagement with their music. If you are an artist whose work I have featured or the owner of any copyrighted material that appears on this site then your first step should be to consider how I've advertised your product for free and how sending me further .mp3s to feature would be good business sense, or to send an email to terror.fabulous(at)gmail.com requesting the removal of specific songs from the site, which I will respond to as quickly as I am able.
