Best New Tracks - Pitchfork |  |
- Mutual Benefit: "Advanced Falconry"
- David Bowie: "Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy)"
- Danny Brown: "Dope Song"
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Posted: 11 Oct 2013 01:26 PM PDT
Gather round and I'll tell you about these things called "mix CDs": plastic circles that shy, young men and women filled with the words and sounds of others to convey sentiments they couldn't bring themselves to say out loud. Did you receive one of these things during their steady decline from 2002-2004? If you heard a song similar to "Advanced Falconry" on it around that time, there's a 100% chance that person really, really liked you. They still might, since Boston band Mutual Benefit are dealing with the most basic form puppy love here. Jordan Lee has a terrycloth voice that allows him to soak up some gushing avowals about the object of his affection: "To look into her eyes/ Will make a fool of anyone...I won't forget the way she flies."
It lands softly within the arrangements he creates on Mutual Benefit's new album, Love's Crushing Diamond; it's a lush, lo-fi, and proudly analog sound that unified the disparate aims of turn-of-the-millennium auteurs such as the Microphones, Animal Collective, and early Sufjan Stevens (note the sheepish reclamation of the banjo as an indie rock appliance here). Does "Advanced Falconry" sound totally naïve in 2013? Perhaps, but so is sending a hand-written note instead of a text message—and besides, who doesn't want someone to think they're this pretty? Mutual Benefit: "Advanced Falconry" on SoundCloud.  |
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Posted: 11 Oct 2013 08:30 AM PDT
Front page photo by Jimmy King
It's been a minute since one of James Murphy's remixes topped the double-digit mark (not since his days as "The DFA") but it's easy to see why he dug deep in remixing David Bowie, one of his touchstones. Set for release as part of the expanded edition of Bowie's most recent album, The Next Day, the original's lyrics might appear as a more sage take on Murphy's earliest utterances about "Losing my edge," as Bowie sings of "The voice of youth" and "Your fear as old as the world." Murphy's remix explicitly references Steve Reich's "Clapping Music", but it bursts like applause at the end of a Fellini film or a live album, celebrating the artifice of performance with the drama of a farewell. Synth and piano bubble up, and at five minutes, Bowie sings about "Waving goodbye" to another round of clapping. That the remix then swells in its cosmic-disco elegance for another five is deserving of a standing ovation.  |
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Posted: 09 Oct 2013 07:02 AM PDT
The old Danny Brown made dope songs. The old Danny Brown has made his last dope song. The old Danny Brown will continue to make dope songs. The centerpiece of Bruiser's fantastic new LP, Old, "Dope Song" hinges on you understanding the subtle and extremely important distinctions between those three statements. After a mock fanfare, we get the first part—the "old Danny Brown" is actually the younger Danny Brown, relating his days of small-time hustling in Detroit with unflattering detail, figuratively hugging the block and literally hugging female fiends.
The transition to the second part is made explicit early on: "I don't do that shit no mo', this the last time I'mma tell you." And we see things from the perspective of the older Danny Brown, 31 and "sick of all these niggas with they 10-year old stories." So yeah, this is a diss song to rappers and listeners who can't keep up with the older, new Danny Brown for whom "dope" is an adjective rather than a noun in the context of his music—and if you can't figure it out, he pitches his voice up a couple octaves in a mocking tone to impersonate people dumb enough to ask him the difference. And this all gets handled in less than two and a half minutes. In a word, dope.  |
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