Champagne Symphony

The music business has its fair share of complexities, as you would expect from any business with such a long history, and that is, at its core, built upon international law (i.e. copyright). That complexity is almost always hidden from the listening public. However, one piece that is curiously exposed every year when the Grammys come around is the separation between what is a "record" and what is a "song". The second and third most prestigious awards at the Grammys are, respectively, "Song of the Year," and "Record of the Year." What's the difference? Most people, including most musicians, wouldn't be able to tell you. I couldn't either until I took a music industry course in college where someone finally explained it to me: A "song" is melody and lyrics. The best way I have to think if it is, if hear someone play a faithful-to-the-original, acoustic cover, the "song" is what would be the same between the orig...

It's probably been a good half year since I've posted anything here. With work and all, I feel like I barely have enough time to listen to music, let alone indulge in amateurish music criticism. Still, a song just got released that I can't help but write something about: Sia - Chandelier Sia's made a name for herself in the past few years writing slightly odd pop songs for other people (ex. Flo Rida's Wild Ones , David Guetta's Titanium , and Rihanna's Diamonds ). Always interesting, sometimes good. None of that's even came close to preparing me how astoundingly good Chandelier is. I'll admit, overall, the song's not perfect, but that chorus could be the greatest 50 seconds of music ever recorded. It is head and shoulders above everything else I've heard in a long time. It's not even close. It's like comparing Chipotle to every other fast casual tex mex chain out there. People can tell you Chipotle's not the best. That's a...

It's always great when you get a song that's consistently great from beginning to end, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.  Sometimes you get songs where a certain section clearly stands out from the rest. Here's a few from this year: The Chorus of Kanye West's Bound 2 : The soul sample that occupies the rest of the song is soul only in name.  It approximates College Dropout-era Kanye with none of the warmth and, well, soul that made those tracks great.  The chorus is the exact opposite.  It uses the electronic music technique of putting a soulful male voice over a bass-heavy beat to create something emotive and genuinely soulful. The 3rd Minute of Youth Lagoon's Mute : Most of the song is nothing but warm, hazy fuzz, but, for about a minute, Trevor Powers cuts through that fuzz with a soaring, uplifting melody that Bono would be jealous of. The Pre-Chorus of Vampire Weekend's Unbelievers : One of two things this year that absolutely blew me away...

Rating: 6.3 This seems to be the year of great marketing and mediocre music.  Following the example of Justin Timberlake, Daft Punk, and Kanye West, Jay-Z has put out an album that's far more notable for its marketing campaign than for its content. I can't believe Samsung's already paid Jay-Z $5 million for this. He doesn't deserve it. Never mind The Blueprint 3 , this album doesn't even beat out Kingdom Come . Why couldn't Samsung have thrown a few million dollars in Vampire Weekend's direction? I suppose I'll just pretend this is delayed compensation for American Gangster . Anyways, about the actual music: Jay-Z turns in a pretty good rap on "Jay-Z Blue," but, otherwise, he's just cruising along. There's none of the focus and the joy that he brought to almost all his verses on Watch the Throne . The hooks are also pretty uniformly awful. Jay-Z's never been particularly good with writing hooks, and, without Kanye aroun...

Rating: 6.6 Up until now, Kanye's always made music like The Beatles: high quality, palatable, and not particularly emotionally resonant. Yeezus is a completely different beast. It's somewhere between the Sex Pistols and early Nine Inch Nails. It's got brutal, simple electronic sounds and a punk mentality.  Kanye's apparently moved past Common and thrown his lot in with Chief Keef. I don't think he could've done anything more misguided. Look at it this way: Kanye's Strengths: Writing and finding great melodies Layering sound Kanye's Weaknesses: Drum programming Rapping (all of it - lyrics, flow & rhyming) Yet, for some reason, he's roped in Rick Rubin to remove everything that plays to his strengths and focus entirely on his weaknesses. It's like asking a drum 'n bass producer to cut out the low end and make a Brian Eno album. There's no way you're gonna get good results. Now, I will admit that, if you are looking for...

Rating: 8.2 As comebacks go, this is about as brilliant and joyous as they get.  It's not U2's All That You Can't Leave Behind , but it's not too far off.  At this point, over 40 years since Bowie hit the big time with "Space Oddity", all of his contemporaries have essentially become tribute bands to themselves. Yet here we have the Thin White Duke, at the age of 66, making music that is strikingly modern. Sure, it doesn't push any boundaries, but it slots comfortably alongside TV on the Radio and St. Vincent's recent releases. The sound is classic New York: elegant, cerebral, nervy, and reserved. It's well played and well recorded from beginning to end. The recording of the drums is nothing short of phenomenal.  The quality definitely drops off about halfway through, but, by then, there's already enough top notch material to make this the best Bowie album of all time. (I know, I know, that's sort of blasphemous, with Hunky Dory , Zi...

Rating: 8.9 The National have made a career writing knotty songs about the realities of leaving youth behind and settling down. On first listen, all of their albums sound similar, but further listens reveal that each one has a unique mood and personality. I see their albums as a progression through the stages of grief. Alligator is denial. Its songs have a drunken energy that the band has never recaptured. It is unique in having songs with conspicuous hope ("Lit Up", "Mr. November") and warm romance ("The Geese of Beverly Road", "Looking for Astronauts"). This is an album about knowing that you're not as young as you used to be, but going out and drowning that knowledge in alcohol and ephemeral love. Boxer is anger. There is a focused aggression here, thanks in large part to Bryan Devendorf's drumming, which is is absolutely brilliant throughout and a clear notch above his work anywhere else. It lashes out against the realities ad...

Rating: 9.5 A year and a half after Drake released the phenomenal Take Care , we finally get another brilliant album. If you don't already know, Vampire Weekend are a group of four Columbia grads who got famous making the follow-up to Graceland that Paul Simon never got around to. (In less obscure terms, they made joyous, literate, moderately complex music with a clear African influence.) Here, on their third album, they've continued to move away from those roots and expand their sonic palette to great results. The drums maintain the simple, joyous bounce they've always had, but the instrumentation layered on top is now much more varied and emotive. The band still has a tendency to shoot for the mind rather than the heart. A lot of times, they will create something interesting and pretty without zeroing in on a clear emotional goal (ex. the obnoxious background vocals on the chorus of "Ya Hey").  However, on songs like "Don't Lie" and "H...

Rating: 6.7 Seven years after gracing us with two of the greatest pop singles of all time ( My Love & What Goes Around...Comes Around ), Justin Timberlake's finally put out some new music. Thank god too. I was pretty tired of having Justin Bieber as the sole claimant to the now permanently vacated throne for the King of Pop .  If nothing else, the marketing blitz that's being put on for this album has been something to behold.  Music publications everywhere are tracking his every move, and he seems to be appearing on every single TV show, all at once. Now for the music.  It's certainly interesting.  The average song is 7 minutes long, and the song structure is all over the place.  However, it feels more like lazy editing than grand ambition.  Most of the songs don't even have enough good melodic ideas to fill out a standard 4 minute track, let alone the 7 minute behemoths here.  Just as an example, the chorus to "Let the Groove Get In" is sun...

I wrote most of the post a month ago, and then promptly forgot about it.  It's a bit late now, but I figured I might as well give it a touch up and post it. Anyways, 2012 has been an astonishingly bad year for good songwriting.  You'd have to go back more than a decade to find a year that had as little good music.  The good news is that, despite the lack of quality songwriting, music continues to move forward: After almost a decade, R&B has finally stopped trying to sound like Usher's Confessions .  Drake , Frank Ocean , The Weeknd , Miguel , and others have been experimenting with personal lyrics, electronic textures, and warm sounds with very compelling results. Electronic music has gone on a maximalist bent with artists like Rustie and TNGHT . With electronic music moving forward, Pop music has happily stepped in and claimed dubstep as it own .  Also, there's been a lot of very compelling pop music that blurs the line between mainstream and indie ...

Songwriting genius usually lasts only a few years.  Take the greatest songwriters of all time, Paul McCartney and John Lennon. They couldn't write a bad song from 1965-1969.  Afterwards, they couldn't even manage another half dozen. Or Eminem. He had the greatest run in rap history from 1999-2002.  Since then, his music output has been almost entirely crap. There are some exceptions.  For example, Bono of U2 wrote great songs at a steady clip from 1984 all the way to 2004.  Unfortunately, Taylor Swift is not one of them.  Over the past half decade, she's had the best run in country music history.  That run ends here.  That's not so say Red is a bad album.  It's not. It's a very good adult pop album. It's just that the genius isn't there anymore. There's no " Teardrops on My Guitar ," no " Love Story ," no " Back to December ."  The best we get is "Begin Again" and "The Lucky One."  Both of them are ...

Music's been pretty disappointing recently, so, I figure, why not take a look back.  I recently put together a playlist of songs that I feel are absolutely essential.  I'm gonna put that playlist on shuffle, list the 10 songs that come up, and write a sentence or so on each song just for a bit of background.  Maybe I'll turn this into a regular thing if it ends up being interesting. The Smashing Pumpkins - 1979 - The greatest song by one of the great 90's bands.  A sweet, unpretentious bit of nostalgia, very much like The Beatles' In My Life. Jay-Z - Dead Presidents II - This is the standout track on Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt, the album that he built his reputation on.  His lyrics have never been more literate and complex than they are here. Mylo - Sunworshipper - This song's a forgotten classic.  It's the sonic equivalent of a perfect, peaceful sunrise. Tyler, The Creator - Yonkers - A brilliant beat with some very interesting rapping.  The vi...

So Taylor Swift's just put out the title track from her upcoming album Red.  It's a generic dance pop number that sounds like a limp version of Mariah Carey's Obsessed .  It makes the cute but ultimately mediocre We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together Again sound like a masterstroke.  Why would she resort to doing songs like this? She clearly hasn't lost her touch. Ronan , which she put out a few weeks ago, is absolutely brilliant. Hiring outside writers to make dance pop songs is just wrong for so many reasons. She's already one of the greatest songwriters of our time.  Sure, she's not the best, but I can count on one hand the number of people better than her (Drake, Kanye West, Kele Okereke of Bloc Party, Caleb Followill of Kings of Leon, and Matt Berninger of The National). There's no reason to hire help when you're already so damn good at what you do. Dance pop is completely saturated. There's Kesha, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Rihanna, Ellie...

This is an old song that I finally finagled into sounding good. The track uses Neon Indian's Fallout and was inspired by Frank Ocean's Strawberry Swing .  As with that song, I stripped the song of its original vocals and used the title as a starting point to craft a story of my own.  Hope you like it. http://www.mediafire.com/?bqv9d7821m7nn7m (I tried posting to SoundCloud, but the fact that I pretty much used a copyrighted track in its entirety did not make them very happy.) Lyrics: [Verse 1] Falling, falling out of control Away we will go To make love, oh how sweet Warm night, city breeze Not so sweet nothings and furtive stares Not the answer to my prayers, but Stagger, stumble through the door Bet tomorrow that’ll make you sore [Chorus] And we’re falling in and falling out of control And we’re falling in and falling out of control [Verse 2] Turn on the night light, not too bright Just enough to set things right, it Won’t go over w...

As of about a week ago, with this eloquent note , Frank Ocean became the first major urban artist to come out of the closet. Luther Vandross would be proud. This bit of news, quite justifiably, got the guy a ton of media coverage. To capitalize, his label has just rush released his major label debut, channel ORANGE, on iTunes.  Unfortunately, the album sucks. His earlier mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra , was full of interesting songs that were well written and soulfully sung. Here, the music is still intriguing and soulful, but there's little quality or focus. At least 2/3 of the album sounds like an extended interlude, and the other 1/3 is not particularly memorable either. I like Thinking of You, Lost, and Forrest Gump, but three good songs out of 17 is not particularly good. tl;dr: The first major openly gay urban artist releases his debut to great media fanfare. Too bad it sucks. Go and listen to his old mixtape instead, that shit was off the chain.

Usher - Looking 4 You :   Usher tries to go electro.  To make sure he succeeds, an all star production cast, including Swedish House Mafia, are brought in.  Too bad they forgot to write good songs.  Well, with the exception of " Climax" , which is absolutely phenomenal Justin Bieber - Believe : Believe will certainly make all the Beliebers scream.  Then again, an album of white noise would probably do the same, so that's not saying much.  Most of the album is forgettable pop mush, and there's nothing as stellar as Baby to save it all.  "As Long As You Love Me" (not a cover of the classic Backstreet Boys song) comes close though. Linkin Park - Living Things : I have no idea what happened to Linkin Park.  Everyone in my generation grew up on the first two Linkin Park albums; both albums are near perfect.  "In the End" and "Numb" are stone cold classics.  Then, they went and released the mediocre Minutes to Midnight and the abominable ...

So a little while ago, I found this low quality video of some teenage girl rapping via a random Reddit link.  I think I clicked on it because whoever posted it insisted that the girl was a good rapper, and I just wanted to laugh at how wrong the they were.  Turns out I was wrong.  This girl is phenomenal.  The rhyming is on par with the best there ever was, and the lyrics are entirely unique.  I literally haven't heard a rap verse this good since Eminem in his prime.  If I were the head of a record label, the first thing I'd do is lock this girl down.  She's something special.  I've posted the lyrics that I can parse out below.  The first two stanzas have some highlighting just to show where all the rhymes are.  Again, it's pretty fucking impressive. Lyrics: You could be much creep ier I’m pleased with your Chees y words and your feel ings Regarding my cheeks creas ing E ven though I’m greas ier than pizz a More twe...

I was talking to someone about writing a rap, and their response was, "oh, sure, why not, everyone can rap."  It kills me to hear comments like that.  It's the equivalent of saying, "oh, everyone can play the piano, you just hit the keys."  It's not as simple as that.  There's so much to rap both rhythmically and lyrically that people don't pay attention to.  Let's just deal with rhyming.  Take the chorus to Eminem's Without Me, for example. Now this looks like a job for me So everybo dy , just follow me Cause we need a little, controver sy Cause it feels so emp ty , without me There was a comment on a reddit thread deriding this chorus for being incredibly rudimentary, rhyming "me" with itself twice.  Now, that's true, but it completely misses the big picture.  The three "me"'s also rhyme with "everybody," "controversy," and "empty."  On top of that, he throws in ...

Demo of a song I just finished about graduating.  Thanks to Alec Leverette for the guitar solo.  Someday I'll actually learn how to play that damn instrument myself... http://soundcloud.com/felix-lin/boring-life Lyrics: [Verse 1] Camel lights on your breath and mine Talking ‘bout spring break this time Memories made in dim lit bars Troubles lost in speeding cars Hearken back to halcyon days When we had time to go astray Heady times for dashing thoughts ‘Fore our souls could all be bought [Chorus] Oh I long for the time when life could be boring Now we’re all being blown from our moorings Adrift for now Setting out searching for El Dorado ’94 Camry, no wheel, no throttle No wonder there’s doubt [Verse 2] The doomsday clock is counting down Striking fear without a sound Three more months till that day when From childhood we must wake The caps and gowns they’ll come in June Childhood gone away too soon Cheers in hop...

A decade ago, the U.S. experienced a dance pop renaissance.  The Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, *NSYNC and Christina Aguilera broke big and sold records on a scale today's teen idols can only dream of.  They had good looks, MTV-ready personalities, and flashy, choreography-heavy music videos, but, above all, they had great tunes.  Take Britney Spears.  Each of her first two albums had three classic pop songs.  Her first had ...Baby One More Time, Crazy, and Sometimes, and her second had Oops!...I Did It Again, Lucky, and Stronger.  You might still be embarrassed that you know these songs, but you have to admit they are all very good at what they were meant to do. Today's teen pop stars have no such luck.  They're lucky to get even one good song.  Justin Bieber has Baby and Miley Cyrus has Party in the U.S.A.  Luckily, the Koreans have been working hard over the past couple years to plug the gap.  If the U.S.'s teen pop e...