Champagne Symphony

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...