Category: Passion

Velocity : Design : Comfort

Sweet Trip

Sweet Trip is an electronics group that helped to revive the glitch pop genre with their seminal release Velocity : Design : Comfort. VDC is the perfect combination of well-produced IDM and melodic pop, and the album cover perfectly reflects this. Not only do they perfectly combine melodic pop and IDM, but they also borrow elements such as guitar walls and blown out drums from shoegaze.

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drukqs

Aphex Twin

Aphex Twin is possibly the most important electronic artist of our lifetime. With every release, he redefines the genre and has inspired many advances in IDM. drukqs is probably Aphex’s most defining release featuring cluttered and chaotic tracks such as “Vordhosbn” and acoustic piano tracks with an emphasis on melody such as “Avril 14th.” The production on this record sounds extremely crisp and precise. Although the flow between each track feels sometimes abrupt, you will hardly notice the transitions as this record puts you in a deep trance.

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Blade Runner

Vangelis

The Blade Runner OST is probably my favorite soundtrack of all time. Each song feels so immersive and atmospheric. Most soundtracks have trouble being relevant outside of the film itself, but the Blade Runner OST could stand strong as its own release. Blade Runner is always praised for being such a realistic depiction of the possible dystopian future: depressive, hopeless, yet still technologically advanced. The soundtrack is a perfect representation of this dystopian nightmare.

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Violator

Depeche Mode

Depeche Mode’s Violator is the antithesis to Sweet Trip’s Velocity : Design : Comfort. While still being glitch-pop, Violator leaks into the darkwave area with its more gloomy atmosphere and somber nature. The tracks found in Violator feel a little more radio-friendly and rely heavily on classical song structure.

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Discovery

Daft Punk

The iconic duo Daft Punk is often credited with bringing the electronic genre to the mainstream. Their seminal album Discovery is one of the most important electronic and house records of this century and still remains highly relevant today, even in the mainstream. Songs like “One More Time,” “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” and “Digital Love” are the peak of the house genre because they nail the energetic and party characteristics so well.

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Selected Ambient Works Volume II

Aphex Twin

Most electronic music is known for being high-energy and upbeat, but Selected Ambient Works Volume II diverges as far from that as possible. Unlike his other albums, Aphex Twin dives full fledge into ambient music and manages to create music that is just as hypnotic yet meditative and melancholic.

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Sufjan Stevens is an artist who never ceases to amaze me. His multi-instrumental ability and talent in creating immense orchestrational pieces are matched by very few. He has released 8 studio albums and has received multiple nominations for academy awards and Grammys.

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Illinois

The fifth studio album from Sufjan Stevens was released in 2005 and quickly grew in popularity, scoring many spots on popular music magazines’ best of the decade list. Considered by most to be Sufjan’s most consistent and put-together release, Illinois is a concept album featuring allusions to people, places, and events relating to the state of Illinois. The album features grand orchestral arrangements and long-winded songs with hilariously long names such as “Come On! Feel the Illinoise! (Part I: The World’s Columbian Exposition – Part II: Carl Sandburg Visits Me in a Dream).” Each song is accompanied by a choir and string quartet to give off this lush and melodic feel. “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”, a high point on the album, tells the story of a serial killer born in Illinois who murdered and sexually assaulted at least 33 young men and hid 26 of the bodies in the crawl space of his home. The chill and pleasant nature of the instrumentals contradicts the grotesque story to create an unsettling and eerie atmosphere.

And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floor boards
For the secrets I have hid

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Carrie & Lowell

Carrie & Lowell was released 10 years later in 2015. Carrie & Lowell is essentially Sufjan’s autobiography depicting his life from childhood while focusing on the relationship with his parents, Carrie and Lowell, specifically his mother Carrie. Sufjan had a difficult relationship with his mother, who neglected Sufjan from a young age and then proceeded to pass away. The album will tear a hole in your heart with its seemingly hopeless and melancholic track list. The record features some of Sufjan’s rawest and emotional songs yet from “Fourth of July” which plays out a conversation between him and his mother as she was dying in the hospital to “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross” which depicts Sufjan’s descent into a self-destructive craze after her death. The ending track, “Blue Bucket of Gold” leaves the listener on a rather open note, mainly because Sufjan did not know how to end such an album. In a way, Carrie & Lowell is Sufjan’s final goodbye to his mother and he sums up his thoughts about the final track by saying “I quit playing piano and vocals and just stopped. I wanted to surrender her to the beyond with noises that sound bigger than just me.”

“Did you get enough love, my little dove?
Why do you cry?
And I’m sorry I left, but it was for the best
Though it never felt right

Nobody knew what the music scene would look like last year due to the unfortunate introduction of Covid-19 and quarantining into our lives, but to a lot of people’s surprise, many artists were able to release full-length albums with no problems. In this post, I will be mentioning some of my favorite records from 2020.

アダンの風 (Windswept Adan)

Ichiko Aoba

Windswept Adan is the sixth studio album from female Japanese artist Ichiko Aoba. The album falls heavily on the chamber folk and singer/songwriter genres while bleeding into ambient as well. Each song feels like a deep dive into some unforeseen area of nature. Ichiko’s voice is a blending of lush and ethereal qualities, and the instrumentality compliments it nicely by being extremely minimal and unobtrusive.

Microphones in 2020

The Microphones

The Microphones are probably the best group to have adjusted to the nature of the pandemic media-wise. Microphones in 2020  was released as a live-stream on YouTube with thousands of people tuning in. It was unannounced and appeared out of nowhere. The release isn’t your typical album. It only features one song that’s around 40 minutes long and is accompanied by a video of Phil Elverum, the lead vocalist, flipping through some photos of his life. As is most of their music, the record is melancholic and gloomy. Phil’s worn-out vocals, raw acoustic guitar, and pounding drums create a hypnotic ambiance.

Charmed

DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ

Despite the group’s poor taste in album covers, Charmed is an exceptional House album that perfectly encapsulates the genre. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ is a UK group that focuses on Electronic Dance Music, specifically a genre called House. The album is an insane 3 hours long, but given the right mood and atmosphere, this record will hold you in a deep trance as 3 hours speed by. For me, this album is sort of an eye-roll because a lot of the songs feature samples from the tv show Sabrina the Teenage Witch which is where they get their name from, and the album artwork does not help at all. Due to that, Charmed feels like a record stuck in time from the late 90s to the early 2000s, which in combination with the record’s discoey nature makes for an interesting and fun experience.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Fiona Apple

Despite beginning her music career in 1996, this is only the fifth album to be released from critically acclaimed artist Fiona Apple. Fetch the Bolt Cutters is a hectic dive into the mind of one of Art Pop’s most groundbreaking artists. The album carefully blends scattering percussion, deep and strong vocals, and soft basslines. Due to Fiona’s critically acclaimed nature, many people had very high expectations for Fetch the Boltcutters and were disappointed to find out that the record was not too similar to her previous and more popular releases.

David Bowie is considered by some to be the best solo artist to ever have lived. Up until his death, he had released 27 full-length studio albums. Of those 27, 9 of them received platinum album certifications in the UK and it is estimated that he has sold over 100 million records worldwide during his lifetime. Two days before his death on January 8, 2016, David Bowie released his 27th and final studio album, ★ (Blackstar). The album is a chilling farewell to David Bowie and his extremely influential legacy.

The album diverts away from Bowie’s normal glam rock/pop rock attitude into a much darker and melancholic art rockier area. Bowie uses the darker elements of rock and even jazz to help tell the stories of christianity’s Lazarus on “Lazarus” and explain his emotions during the final months of his life on “I Can’t Give Everything Away”. “Lazarus” was originally written for an eponymous off-Broadway production based on the novel The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. The song explores the themes of mortality and is seen as “a condensation of the human narrative, birth, death, into a single song.” The closing track off the album, “I Can’t Give Everything Away” is Bowie’s final farewell to us.

Seeing more and feeling less
Saying no but meaning yes
This is all I ever meant
That’s the message that I sent

David Bowie’s fight with liver cancer over the years has left him wiser (“seeing more”), yet feeling less as the cancer slowly tears away at him. The last three lines can be interpreted through Bowie’s own perspective as his whole life had been saying no through his characters in the past, such as Ziggy Stardust, when really trying to say something contradictory to the character often aimed at the music industry.

Bowie’s vocals on the record sound worn out and tired, probably due to his ever-growing weakness, but also to show that he knows this is the end and soon he will be gone. The instrumentals and the vocals work much better knowing the context of his years battling cancer and his sad, yet appropriate death following the release of ★. Ultimately, David Bowie was not ready to leave. The chorus on “I Can’t Give Everything Away” shows him constantly repeating “I can’t give everything away” possibly meaning that he regrets not being able to give more music to the world knowing he will soon die. ★ is a fitting farewell to one of the world’s greatest rock stars.

Alternative rock is probably the most popular genre to come out of the 1990s and remains incredibly popular to this day. Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins, and Weezer are a few of the groups that helped lead the alternative rock boom of the 90s. It has remained one of the most influential genres in my music taste and has remained one of my favorite genres to this day. In this post, I am going to describe to you a few of my favorite alternative rock albums.

Built to Spill’s Perfect From Now On is alternative rock in its truest sense. The guitars dominate every other instrument on this record with their power chords, buzz and fuzz, and crackling riffs. The vocals compliment the guitar with its slightly off-tune nature and wavering pitch. Six of the eight tracks on this record are over six minutes long, so each song puts a heavy emphasis on its instrumentals and even steps into the post-rock genre. Whereas most alternative rock groups put a heavy emphasis on melodies and lighter lyrics like Pavement, Built to Spill puts more emphasis on their chord changes and gloomier lyrics.

The Strokes have probably capitalized the most on the indie rock boom at the beginning of the 2000s. Their debut album Is This It, has reached high status and songs like “Someday” and “Last Nite” are still played on the radio today. The New York group released their record in the U.S. during the aftermath of 9/11 and now their sound is a reminiscence of the despair and lost hope that the people of New York recently attained despite their general uplifting and hopeful sound. The Strokes were the band for the underdog. Almost no one thought that an indie rock group would go gold in 2000 and went it did, the teenagers and young kids of that era felt as if they had someone to represent them.

Radiohead’s The Bends is possibly their most defining album and helped to revive alternative rock from its gloomy days after the death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Coming off of their slightly disappointing, yet still popular debut album Pablo Honey, Radiohead finally began to come into their sound with The Bends. Most people consider The Bends to be just another stepping stone in the release of OK Computer and Kid A, but a lot of their songs such as “Fake Plastic Trees” and “High and Dry” gave Radiohead a proper name in the musical world.

Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most important concept albums in music history. Dark Side is the eight studio album from the British rock band released on March 1, 1973. The album focuses on the themes of greed, time, and death.

The theme of greed is seen on the track “Money”. The song talks about the lengths that people will go for money and how they believe that all of their desires can be found through money. We see how people can be hypocrites when they say that they think money should be donated to charity or that money should be given to help others and not live a materialistic lifestyle through the words “Money, it’s a crime. Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie.” The group members have seen the music industry inside out and have seen how money is basically the driving force of the music industry.

The theme of time comes from the song “Time,” but is present throughout the entirety of the album. “Time” is about how time can quickly slip by without any realization until it’s too late.

“And you run, and you run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking. Racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way, but you’re older. Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death.”

This lyric describes the constant struggle it is to keep up with time, and although it might seem like you’ve finally caught up with it, it takes over you again only to keep you chasing it. The band found themselves in a sort of rhythm releasing album after album and having to constantly jump through the hoops to make it work, that they forgot that time was passing them by.

The theme of death comes from the second to last song off the album, “Brain Damage.” It is on this song that we hear the title of the album sung in the lines “And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes. I’ll see you on the dark side of the moon.” The dark side of the moon is a metaphor for death or the destruction of all positive emotions. If the band you’re in “starts playing different tunes,” you might begin to think that the good times are gone and that something you once knew so well is changing, dying. The members of Pink Floyd saw a previous bandmate of theirs slowly slip away as he turned to the dark side of the moon.

The Dark Side of the Moon is the fourth best-selling album of all time and will be cemented in history forever.

 

Turn On the Bright Lights is the debut album from the New York group Interpol released on August 20, 2002. One of the first albums to come out of the post-punk revival, Turn On the Bright Lights is a melancholic dive into the mind of members Paul Banks and Daniel Kessler. It is a revolutionary record that helped to shape indie rock for the coming decades and inspired many artists such as The National.

Turn On the Bright Lights is an album about loss and regret. The rolling bass and artificial strings on “Untitled,” the album’s opening track, kicks off the rest of the anxious and bittersweet 46 minutes. Paul Banks is promising to his loved one that he will make a change for the better eventually when he says “Oh, I will surprise you sometime, I’ll come around. When you’re down.” The following track, Obstacle 1, is probably Interpol’s defining song and is where they get their many comparisons to Joy Division. Although the song is open to interpretation, Obstacle 1 was said to be written after the group saw a report of a model who committed suicide by stabbing herself in the neck. The song warns of the harm of obsessions over physical appearance and what can happen mentally when you age and start to look less like you did when you were young. The horrific lyrics combined with aggressive and gripping vocals, rolling base, and explosive guitars leave the listeners uneasy yet craving more.

The two dark previous tracks set the mood for the third song on the record, NYC, which sets out to depict New York City post 9/11. It is in this song where we hear the lyrics “It is up to me now, turn on the bright lights.” Paul Banks has a deep admiration for the city and hopes it will eventually rebuild itself, but also believes that his fate is ultimately decided by himself and it’s up to him to “Turn On the Bright Lights.”

Although the group managed to release a somewhat enjoyable record following Turn On the Bright Lights, most fans were disappointed with how quickly Interpol fell off the tracks and like to think that if Interpol had remained in the underground, they would have continued to release records on the same level as this one.

Björk, pronounced bee-yerk, is an artist who has constantly defied expectation. Björk is a female artist who was born and raised in the capital of Iceland. Having been obsessed with music since a very young age, she released her first album when she only just 11. Over the span of her 40-year career, she released 9 studio albums, been nominated for 15 Grammy’s, and been a primary influence for the art pop genre. Very few solo female artists have been able to accomplish what Björk has.

Her most accomplished album, Vespertine, is a beautiful combination of art pop and electronics used to create a sensual, ethereal, and bittersweet album that depicts the universe that is within every person. Björk herself is extremely introverted, so to her, Vespertine is a very internal, intimate, and personal album. The most notable song off the album, “Pagan Poetry”, is about Björk’s journey in discovering her emotional and physical desires as a human. As the song progresses, Björk hesitates when she is proposed to by her significant other because, like all other humans, her desires are complicated and cannot easily be understood even by herself. The song reaches a climax when her significant other is unable to help her understand her own desires and emotions because it is an understanding that must come from within herself. The song ends with Björk attempting to convince herself that she loves her significant other, but clearly not knowing if that’s actually what she wants.

An album released by her four years earlier, Homogenic, is in direct contradiction to “Pagan Poetry”. Homogenic is an album about rushing “headlong into a life lived to the fullest—an unbridled yearning for the sublime.” Whereas Vespertine felt a little warmer and more personal, Homogenic feels rather cold and anxious. The opening track off of Homogenic, “Hunter,” describes Björk’s newfound fame and popularity as the biggest name to come out of Iceland and how it has pushed her into wanting to take what’s hers, becoming a hunter. Homogenic feels more like an album about someone who knows what they want and who they are, but Vespertine feels like an album about someone who is uncertain of who they are, or who they want to become.

Although Björk has not released any new music that meets the level of Vespertine or Homogenic, she continues to release music today and hopes to continue into the future.

 

Since I Left You, from a duo named The Avalanches, was released on November 27, 2000 and might seem like a normal instrumental hip-hop/dance album at first, but this record had actually been put together entirely out of samples from other songs and sounds. The genre named Plunderphonics, a term invented by John Oswald, refers to  “the compositional technique of utilizing and manipulating one or more pre-existing audio sources to create a new composition.” Although it might seem to some that this would be much easier than creating the actual sounds, having to create music that still holds rhythm, melody, and a beat is extremely hard when you are taking samples from hundreds of different songs.

The album consists of 3,500 samples, or 200 samples per song on average, and people are still finding different samples 20 years later. There is much debate surrounding the use of samples and whether it is deemed plagiarism, but in The Avalanche’s case, the original samples are very hard to distinguish from the samples used in Since I Left You, it’s almost a moot point arguing plagiarism. Longtime music connoisseur Nick Hornby compared the argument to accusing plagiarism of “a writer whose books contain words that other writers have used before.”

Although most of their samples consist of music from previous decades, The Avalanches even managed to incorporate wacky and quirky sounds into their album such as a horse neighing and dialogues from old western films. The entire idea of Since I Left You is very chaotic and mismatched, but it sounds fresh and raw. The album has inspired the sampling in songs heard today and has even lowered the stigma surrounding sampling. The impact that Since I Left You has had on 21st-century music is matched only by a handful of other albums.

If you’ve ever heard Jónsi, the lead vocalist for the Icelandic group Sigur Rós, sing, you probably wouldn’t have understood a word of what he’s saying, and you would have probably thought “well, of course, I don’t know what he’s saying. I don’t speak Icelandic.” At least, that’s what I thought at first. But even if you speak fluent Icelandic, then you still won’t have any clue what Jónsi is saying,because he’s singing in a language that he made up.

He calls it “hopelandic,” in English or “Volenska” in Icelandic. Hopelandic completely lacks any form of syntax, grammar, meaning, or even words. Instead, it usually consists of whatever sound Jónsi can produce that will as close as possible resemble the melody and rhythm of the music. It’s very similar to scat singing in jazz where performers would sing “wordless vocables, nonsense syllables or without words at all.” It works really well too. The group is able to create very harmonious sounds and an extremely ethereal atmosphere with their fictional language.

This isn’t the first time a group has become popular by singing nonsense. Although she can’t be credited with the invention of a new language, Elizabeth Frazer of the Cocteau Twins often sings complete nonsense at loud volumes to create very emotional music.

You might also think that to a native Icelandic, this group probably sounds terrible because their singing sounds very close to Icelandic, but also seems entirely off, but they are the crown jewel of Iceland when it comes to music and loved by music critics all over the world as well.