Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Mac DeMarco: "Passing Out Pieces" |  |
- Mac DeMarco: "Passing Out Pieces"
- Holly Herndon: "Chorus"
- Sevendeaths: "All Night Graves"
|
Posted: 21 Jan 2014 01:47 PM PST
It's obviously a figure of speech, but my first reaction to learning that Mac DeMarco titled his new album Salad Days was wondering when he last came in contact with lettuce or any vegetable for that matter. For all of his off-the-record geniality and approachability, there's something seriously unhealthy about the world he inhabits as a songwriter, and even on his breakthrough 2, the eerie, trebly production and deadpan vocals on "My Kind of Woman" and "Ode To Viceroy" suggested a guy who showered up only to lounge in his filthy apartment; it wasn't dirty as in "vulgar", just unclean.
"Passing Out Pieces" sounds like DeMarco finally acknowledging his predilection for the wrong crowd, contrasting a bit of self-reckoning with that omnipresent, gap-tooted smile: "Passing out pieces of me/ You know nothing comes free...What ma don't know is starting to take its toll." These are lines that sound unusually plaintive for DeMarco, and yet refuse to reveal what's really going on in express terms. It's a guy who sounds like he's about to share his darkest secrets and then orders another round of shots. Meanwhile, the sneaky melody and chintzy synths evoke Harry Nilsson in his bathrobe, another classicist tunesmith who couldn't shake his natural inclination towards entropy. Mac DeMarco: "Passing Out Pieces" on SoundCloud.  |
|
Posted: 21 Jan 2014 10:37 AM PST
In reviewing electronic music composer Holly Herndon's breakout debut, 2012's Movement, we noted her penchant for "Bending one person's voice into phantasmagorias", which continues on her newest, breath-halting single, "Chorus". While Herndon manipulated her voice on Movement, "Chorus," is augmented with foraged vocal samples from YouTube, Skype, and other audio sources. It's as quicksilver as Oneohtrix Point Never's minced chorales on last year's R Plus Seven, mutating from frenzied to solemn in the span of a breath. Where it truly thrills is when Herndon weds it to a bass-heavy beat, throbbing and whirring like classic electro or the earliest Autechre productions, abstract and visceral at once.
 |
|
Posted: 21 Jan 2014 07:57 AM PST
Rabble-rousing Glaswegian label LuckyMe have hardly lacked in beastly "Oh shit!" moments in recent years—but "All Night Graves", from fellow countryman Steven Shade's Concreté Misery, is a markedly different sort of mauling. Glimpses of twinkling counter-melodies ghost across the opening run, darting ever closer, before all hell breaks loose: a magisterial, fathoms-deep organ riff bodyslams into the frame, as the enormity, density and sheer meanness of this eye-popping wall of sound hit like a slow-motion slug to the gut.
Laser-guided synths and wafered sheets of noise overlay atop one another, compacting the intensity to a point where it becomes grimace-worthy. As searing static continues to gorge the outer fringes of the track, the clean piano paddling in the background becomes increasingly in-focus and abstract. After five minutes of bloodletting, the enveloping drone finally caves under its own weight, leaving no trace other than a crumpled corpse and those familiar plinking ivories once more, a final gulp of frozen air.  |
No comments:
Post a Comment