Beat Connection

Anonymous asked: Where'd you go? can't live without that beat(connection)

Glad to know you can’t live without it! I’ve unfortunately been really busy lately, between being a full time student, playing in a band, and trying to find both an internship and part time job for the summer. I haven’t been very active on here with album reviews lately but you can read show reviews and occasional album reviews I’ve written at www.transmissionentertainment.com and if you want to hear me mumble and play music, I DJ on Saturdays from 1-3 on 91.7 KVRX Austin and you can listen to that online at www.kvrx.org thanks!

Anonymous asked: how are you? and where are you from? also, age.

I’m fine, I’m from your hometown, and “also age”? I’m old enough to be your dad

Grimes - Visions

In a world in which a person can define themselves by the content of others all too easily over the internet, it has of course altered the way new artists can define themselves. An artist can become attached to a stigma or niche simply by presenting himself or herself in a certain way and as a result, can be embraced almost as equally as they can be cast out of certain defined groups. For Montreal’s Claire Boucher, her output as Grimes has come to be defined by certain internet trends. Assembling her music using the featherweight production capabilities of Garageband, Grimes’ earliest material was categorized under the dubious flag of witch house for perhaps longer than the artist would care to acknowledge. Combining beats with dark sampling, airy keyboard, and piles of haunting vocal loops, Grimes’s first two self released cassettes Geidi Primes (2010) and Halfaxa(2010) garnered the attention of fringe blogs in a time when groups like Salem and oOoOO were initially making waves and Grimes’ embrace of the upside down cross and triangle imagery of witch house brought her even closer into that fold. Darkbloom (2011), the split LP Grimes released with D’eon last year, pointed towards a more accessible direction and revealed a greater range of influences than those found in the group Boucher was lumped in with. The sophisticated knowledge of R&B, dance rock, and K-pop displayed on Grimes’ side of that LP pointed towards the direction of her newest LP Visions (2012), her first for major indie label 4AD. Boucher has said that Visions feels like her first LP and the clearer production and greater focus on darkwave electronic pop aesthetics she has taken on the album makes this feel like an almost entirely different Grimes, subsequently making Visions Boucher’s strongest offering to date.

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Chairlift - Something

Up to this point in their career, Chairlift is known mostly for writing one great pop song, that being their 2008 fringe hit “Bruises” from their debut album Does You Inspire You (2008), which made its way onto one of Apple’s more memorable iPod commercials. The song almost sounds as if it were written with the nonthreatening and carefree creativity Apple portrays as an entity in mind, with its twinkling synths and wide eyed professions of love and devotion, making Chairlift feel like one of many electro-pop groups amongst a sea of Brooklynites with MicroKorgs and drum machines with those same ideologies in mind. But after shrinking down to a duo of singer Caroline Polachek and multi-instumentalist Patrick Wemberly and working with Das Racist on several cuts from their Sit Down, Man (2010) mixtape, Chairlift feels like a more developed band on their sophomore recordSomething (2011), taking a more mature approach to their themes and musical ideas instead of going at everything with such youthful naivete. And while a sense of wonderment in music is certainly not a bad thing and hasn’t been completely abandoned by Chairlift, the band sounds more effective now dealing in harder edged 1980s inspired dance pop and offering bits of wit and wisdom instead of focusing on trying to write a single catchy electro-pop song. Something is a major aesthetic improvement on the sound and style Chairlift first employed on their debut, coming off as smarter, deeper, and more expertly refined.

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Cloud Nothings - Attack on Memory

Memories shape our perspectives and ideas about the world around us. They are the images and ideas that create identities and personalities and the basis of a great deal of general knowledge. Memories can often be a source of comfort, warm nostalgia, and can often leave us feeling good about the world around us but on Cleveland outfit Cloud Nothings’ sophomore LP, that comfort is exactly what the band is out to destroy. The album’s title Attack on Memory (2012) of course could not be better suited for such a mission statement, but with perhaps a nod to bare bones producer Steve Albini, being anything other than direct would be pandering to the audience. The band’s debut LP, the self titled Cloud Nothings (2011), was recorded in full by singer/songwriter Dylan Baldi, a young artist from humble beginnings who recorded the earliest Cloud Nothings material in his parents’ basement. Filled with sugary sweet hooks and a mid level production quality, Cloud Nothings was a pop record’s pop record, easy to digest and to make sense of. From the onset, Attack on Memory seeks to completely dismantle that view of Cloud Nothings as a band. The album is substantially rougher, rawer, and louder than the group’s debut as the simple three chord pop song no longer seems to be on Baldi’s mind. Nodding to late 80s indie rock, post-hardcore, no wave, and noise rock, Attack on Memory thoroughly manages to distance itself from the perception Cloud Nothings previously were characterized by without totally abandoning the pop intuition that made the band’s debut so appealing. Attack on Memory comes as a mature and powerful record that hits like a ton of bricks but knows just when to offer slices of pop sweetness to offset the hard rock sour.

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