Track of the Week: Glamorous Lifesystle by The Jacka
This week's track is Glamorous Lifestyle by The Jacka, off of Tear Gas. A bit of a departure from the last few weeks of track of the week, this is track straight out of the Bay Area as The Jacka hails from Pittsburg, CA.
Not a ton to say about this track. It's a fun ditty, full of the usual hip hop bravado. The thing that got me hooked on this one is that it's local to the Bay Area, it's pretty catchy (strings + flute = unusual and fun) and has a great hook. If that doesn't make for a hip hop / pop single, I'm not sure what does. The album as a whole is pretty solid hip hop album. Production is pretty low-fi but he's got a good voice and can rhyme over a beat.
Track of the Week: Stylo (Alex Metric Remix) by Gorillaz
This month brings us a hot new Gorillaz track. But track of the week brings the remix to the lead single, Stylo as mixed by Alex Metric. It's a total disco/dance track, four-on-the-floor, laced full of overdub and falsetto. Imagine if the Bee Gees had a Macbook with Serato Scratch and Logic, this is the music they'd be making. Comparing it to the studio/radio version of Stylo it's hard to tell that they're the same song. Alex Metric has taken the hook (which is fairly disco in its own right) and made a dance floor banger out of it.
Track of the Week: Let Me Take You Out by Class Actress
Track of the Week returns after a week hiatus with Let Me Take You Out by Class Actress off of Journal of Ardency. This is a fun little indie song with very retro, synth'ed out production. Elizabeth Harper, the vocalist and songwriter has great vocals that sound feathery except during the hook when she holds the sound. Journal of Ardency is a great little six track EP that is full of songs like this (and a great name for an EP, btw).
Track of the Week: Dry Your Eyes by Wax Tailor
This week's track is Dry Your Eyes featuring Sara Genn, off of Wax Tailor's In The Mood for Life.
I haven't heard much of Wax Tailor until I stumbled upon this album. In the mold of RJD2, he's a French producer/DJ and on his album there are a variety of guest vocalists and a broad variety of hip hop styles.
Dry Your Eyes carries a trip-hop sound, much in the way Mono's Life in Mono was. In many ways the song brings you back to a time when Sneaker Pimps were on the radio. That's a large part of the reason I like the song, as all those trip-hop acts in the late 90s were making their mark on both electronica and hip hop.
Brooding and built in layers of a plucked guitar, a synth and ambient noises of what sounds like a playground, the track wanders through the lyrics. Sara Genn's delivery of the chorus "Dry your eyes, those tears are all you're given / It's no surprise now, your heaven's what you're living in" is haunting (and somewhat depressing) over the strings.
Track of the Week: Fences by Phoenix
This week's track is Fences by Phoenix off of Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. I admit I'm very late to the Phoenix party. By late, I mean a Grammy nomination and about a year late.
I heard this track first mixed in to The Twelves' Essential Mix, where the repetition of "dissident" and "miss it" makes for a great house mix over a dance beat. I'm not totally sure what the track is about -- the the chorus is "Fences in a row / Why are they protecting Rome?" seem to make sense but not really in the context of the rest of the song.
Nonetheless, I've been loving the song for a few weeks. It's a great little indie rock song with a simple 4/4 beat. The super funky bass line it's built on sounds like it's out of the 70s and Thomas Mars' vocals are infectious. If you don't have the album it's worth getting for nearly all of the tracks.
Track of the Week: Revolution by 2Pac
We return to some raw rap for this week's Track of the Week, Revolution by 2Pac, off of the Rap Phenomenon II Mix Tape by DJ Vlad, Dirty Harry, DJ Green Lantern.
It's hard to find any real authoritative information on this mixtape. From what I know, it's a collaboration of DJ Vlad, Dirty Harry and Green Lantern to do a tribute to 2Pac's career. My exposure to the mixtape came via @airlai, who sent it to me in 2007 or so.
It's the second of two mixtapes, the first of which was a tribute to Biggie. While most of the mixtape is good, this track is great. Angry, raw, powerful and mixed masterfully with new vocals by Busta Rhymes, this song as far as I know does not appear anywhere in 2Pac's catalog. It's a composite of spoken word, prior raps and never-before-heard raps from 2Pac.
The song is mixed over Puff Daddy's Victory (the first line of the melody is Biggie rapping "one, one two, check me out right here") and opens with 2Pac speaking about gangs in America and the government's involvement in distributing crack to the ghettos. The content of the raps is most centrally themed about life in the ghetto and wanting a revolution to make things better. 2Pac admonishes his peers for living a "cartoon life". He closes his raps with this spoken verse:
"Now if we do want to live a thug life and a gansta life, and all of that, ok. So stop being cowards and let's have a revolution. But we don't wanna do that, dudes just wanna live of character / they wanna be cartoons."
As I listen through the song, it's one of the most powerful, makes-you-want-to-break-doors-down anger fueling 2Pac tracks (or mixes) I've ever heard. Chris Rock had commented on the album, "It's ultimate fighting music. You will kill somebody listening to this sh*t."
Track of the Week: 1 Thing by Amerie
Going back to 2005, Amerie's hit single 1 Thing is this week's track of the week. I loved this song when it came out, and recently stumbled back on to it when my friend Ben shared with me TheRoot's Top 10 Hip Hop / R&B Songs from the '00s.
There's not much to say about the song that's not already been said, but a few words never hurt. Amerie's vocals soar on the track; nearly every line is delivered at the top of her range, but never above it. You keep wondering what "this one thing" is, and what keeps her coming back for it. The song's production, for me, is the standout. The stripped down funk percussive beat holds the song down, while the guitar on top simply adds to the sound. Most often it's Amerie's vocals that give the song the melodic glue, generating a hit song.
Track of the Week: Tik Tok by Ke$ha
To kick off this new year, the track of this week is smack dab in the middle of main-stream-Top-40, it's Tik Tok by Ke$ha (yes, with the dollar sign in the spelling).
Couple of things about this track deserve mention. First of all, it's insanely catchy. The techo-pop melody in the beat sounds vaguely reminiscent of something David Guetta might put together. The first few seconds of the song, when it's just singing and the melody line and before the drums, is the most apparent part of the song where the French-house influence on the production is seen. It's a great example of how mainstream music is moving to be more dance / electro inspired.
Second, the Ke$ha's delivery outside the autotuned hooks about all night dancing and drinking sound fantastic. Her carefree opening "Waking up in the morning feeling like P. Ditty" sets the stage for the rest of the song, especially when credibility is delivered to the song by the two lines by P. Ditty: "Hey what up girl / Let's go". Her raps (if you can call them that) remind me of Uffie, if you want to find more that's more in that style.
The song is fun, catchy and largely disposable much in the way that Lady Gaga's Just Dance was.
Remember Playback Position
Maybe everybody knew this before, but I just found this in iTunes.
If you go to a track, right click, Get Info, Options, you can tell iTunes to remember the playback position for a track. As you can see from the image above, this track is nearly two hours long, so if you're listening to something long (like The Twelves' on Radio 1's Essential Mix) it's great that you don't have to restart the track if you're picking up from where you left off.
Track of the Week: Salt Peanuts by Dizzy Gillespie
As the year winds down, a little Salt Peanuts by Dizzy Gillespie is in order. The recording I have is by "The Quinent", the collection of Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach performing Live at Massy Hall in Toronto. The reason I'd picked this recording up in the first place was Mingus' involvement in the performance (my obsession for Mingus' recordings continues).
Salt Peanuts is a bit unusual in that it features Gillespie vocalizing the phrase "salt peanuts" multiple times while taking breaks from his racing trumpeting. It's a solid bop sound, with a pretty standard bop structure. Given the luminarys that are on the recording, the song is without a doubt Gillespie's. The crowd cheers any time he takes a break from his horn, which takes center stage. Roach holds the song together on the drums and makes Powell's solid piano solo come alive by rimming on his snares. What I love the most of live jazz recordings is how the musicians (for lack of a better word) cheer each other on during solos. Anybody who has been to a live jazz show knows how when somebody is jamming, everybody else drops their head and cat calls in approval. This recording of Salt Peanuts captures that quite well during a few of the solos.
Recently, I shared the album with @emalasky at the office a few months ago and he repeated the phrase "salt peanuts" a few times to me afterwards (to me, a strange affirmation of how catchy the odd phrase still is). I also heard it at Shady Lady in Sacramento last weekend. It's a bit anachronistic given that Shady Lady is suppose to be a speak easy, I'll take it any time I hear some Gillespie at a bar.