Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Todd Osborn: "5thep" |  |
- Todd Osborn: "5thep"
- Woods: "Moving to the Left"
- Jerome LOL: "Fool" [ft. Angelina Lucero]
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Posted: 11 Feb 2014 02:19 PM PST
Ypsilanti, Michigan’s Todd Osborn is one of those mildly chameleonic producers who pops up in different places under different names making different sounds, most of them in the orbit of disco and house. (His “arena metal” project, Musk, is strictly cassette-only.) “5thep” is from the Michigan Dream EP, his first release since last July’s "Hold Up", a pining, mid-tempo collaboration with Hot Chip's Joe Goddard. As is Osborn’s m.o., it’s a shift in tone, from something spare and lonely to something bruising and compact, trading the mellow upper register of Goddard’s voice for a slurry of samples and brash acid-house keyboards. Like Tessela’s addictive “Hackney Parrot”, “5thep” is a recent highlight from the dance/techno world that forgoes smoothness for music that sounds big, blocky and covered in seams—an approach that in 1994 would’ve been a byproduct of software but in 2014 is a decisive choice.
Todd Osborn: "5thep" on SoundCloud.  |
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Posted: 11 Feb 2014 12:55 PM PST
Front page photo by Mike Sniper
Last year was the first year since 2009 without a new record from Woods, so you're forgiven if you assumed that the New York hippie-janglers ran off to join an ashram or something. But they didn't! They have a new album, With Light and With Love, out April 15 via their very own Woodsist label; "Moving to the Left" stretches its legs beyond the five-minute point, but it has more in common with the band's expressly melodic side than their jammier tendencies, as an uncharacteristically tight drumbeat syncs up almost perfectly with lazily strummed acoustic guitar. Frontman Jeremy Earl's distinctively high-pitched vocals are coated in just enough muffling to achieve a perfect balance, as the shuffling prettiness of "Moving to the Left" proves yet again that, at their best, Woods are a band that know their way around a melody just as well as they do around a drum circle. Woods: "Moving to the Left" on SoundCloud.  |
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Posted: 10 Feb 2014 02:36 PM PST
Much of Jerome Potter's output, first as a LOL Boy and now as a solo artist, has been polyamorous and winsome, flirting with an assortment of styles without ever finding a fixed home. Dancehall fritters, grin-inducing early house, chart pop and plenty more have been molten and pooled into different casings to see what worked. That approach reached its logical conclusion on this month's very good Deleted/Fool EP, setting into a lumpen object you could actually grip.
"Fool" is the emotional bedrock of the good four-tracker, a more contemplative turn for the usually happy-go-lucky producer. Potter once again calls upon frequent collaborator Angelina Lucero, this time to express a deep disconnect that appears to weigh heavy on his shoulders: her voice, given a subtly modulated taint, lands wonkily where you'd expect a clean connection. The upper-register harmonies are affixed to a beat with a low centre of gravity that trundles along like a misshapen stone wheel down a dimly-lit street. Make no mistake, this is still the kind of bright cut we've come to expect from him, but the sprinkles of xylophone and clean synth washes feel like fragments of a recently-recalled, closed-off past; the colour, for once, has been muted. Jerome LOL: "Fool" [ft. Angelina Lucero] on SoundCloud.  |
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