New Music from 4/19/2011 - Gorillaz, French Horn Rebellion, Del the Funky Homosapien, and Lanu

Gorillaz The Fall - The animated band co-created by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett release a new album just over a year after Plastic Beach was released.  Albarn and company recorded this album on his iPad while on the American leg of their tour for Beach which is why there are a lot less guest musicians/vocalists making an appearance on this album.  This album was made available as a download to members of the official Gorillaz fan club Sub Division (£29.99/$45.00 for an annual membership) on Christmas last year and is being released to the rest of the world today. 

Several of the songs have the name of a city, state, or other physical location to parallel the band's journey while creating the album.  The album itself opens with the psy ambient (or psybient) "Phoner to Arizona" which is one of several tracks on the disc sans vocals.  It is a simple but catchy enough tune that feels like something Albarn put together to test the different audio effects he could pull off on the iPad. "Revolving Doors" sounds like a throwback Albarn song with jangly acoustic guitars laying down the main rhythm and his distinctive voice being featured more prominently that I enjoyed a great deal.  "Bobby in Phoenix" featuring Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Bobby Womack is one of two songs that have a known guest on it (the other is the less enjoyable "HillBilly Man" featuring former The Clash guitarist Mick Jones) which has a southern blues melody and shows Womack can still deliver the goods.  

The Fall is an interesting release that never overwhelms you but it does sneakily allow you to get sucked in on repeated listens.  Some of the songs sound more like something from a The Good, The Bad & The Ugly release (another Damon Albarn band) than like something from one of the Gorillaz's previous albums.  On this release, the band moves away from the heavy glam/acid sound that was so prevalent on Plastic Beach, not quite back to the sound they exhibited on their first album, but closer to it.  The music you get has a lighter, synth heavy, ambient rock feel that's better suited for an early morning after party than for the party itself.  Beyond the fact that the over half the songs have the name of a physical location in it, the album can be compared to a weekend drive down the coast:  the drive itself is a pleasant enough experience but you'll be hard pressed to remember the specific details of it all years down the road. 

Score: 8/10
Song(s) to Sample:  "Revolving Doors" [sample it below] and "Amarillo"

French Horn Rebellion The Infinite Music of French Horn Rebellion - FHR consists of two brothers, Robert and David Perlick-Molinari, originally from Milwaukee but are now based out of New York.  One of the brothers was actually an accomplished French horn player in college but found that style of making music too rigid and thus formed this electronica heavy synthpop band with his brother.  David also has done some work as a producer as well engineering MGMT's "Time To Pretend" EP.  


If you heard their EP released last year, both songs from that release ("This Moment" and " Last Summer") can be found on this album although you don't get any of the three remixed versions from the EP.  "Up All Night" leads off the album which is a pop song driven by synthesizers and electronic beeps with the vocal levels seeming muted compared to the other sounds featured on the track that I had a hard time getting into.  "This Moment" follows and instantly draws you in with groovy rhythm and catchy hook in a really well written and well executed track that's part OMD and part eurodance.  The guitar rhythm that ends "This Moment" immediately continues and segues into the next track, "Last Summer," which is a more standard and dour pop song reminiscing about "the best summer I could ever have."  While "This Moment" is seemingly unchanged from the version presented on last year's EP, "Last Summer" seems like a cleaner and better version (although, truthfully, I couldn't find my copy of the EP to do a side-by-side comparison).  "What I Want" is a keyboard/synthesizer driven electropop song that starts slowly with just the beat before layering on the other sounds to strongly builds to what becomes a very sweeping song. 


The Infinite Music of French Horn Rebellion is an ambitious and strong debut studio album whose biggest problem is finding consistency over the entire disc.  It's not one specific style or certain tempo of music that consistently sounds better on the album meaning the good and the bad is spread out pretty evenly between the fast and slow songs as well as the more electronica heavy songs and the more pop sounding tracks.  Whether this exhibits a bigger problem in the songwriting or in the production work probably can only be determined with future releases.  However the album has enough positives that the inconsistencies are only a small problem in the long run and the album ends up being enjoyable even with their presence.  

Score:  7.5/10
Song(s) to Sample:  "This Moment" [sample it below] and "What I Want"

Del the Funky Homosapien Golden Era - Del is a hip-hop artist from Oakland that released the critic's darling 2000 album Deltron 3030.  I thought it was fitting to review his new album being released this week because Del had a hand in a past hit for another band that is releasing an album this week, Gorillaz, providing vocals on the best known song from their first album, "Clint Eastwood."  Golden Era is a 10-track release but if you purchase the CD version of the album it comes bundled with two unreleased albums (each on their own CD) not previously available on disc for a whopping 24 bonus songs giving you 34 songs in total--all for the cost of a single CD!  What a bargain!  This review only covers the 10-track main disc and not the bonus discs. 


The funk heavy "Break the Bank" wisely opens the album with a melody that's part P-Funk and part Marden Hill with a solid, albeit somewhat monotone, rap by Del that helps add atmosphere but isn't able to match the catchiness of the Nu-funk melody.  "Double Barrel" is a hard rocking rap song that intelligently fuses electronic guitars and a real drummer to create a song that is slightly more raprock than rapcore and helps elevate the album by incorporating more varied styles than your standard hip-hop album.  "One Out of a Million" has a more robust sound by integrating string instruments for a baroque touch combined with more modern hip-hop mixing techniques and synthesizers to create one of the album's lusher tracks.  "Raw," as the name implies, has a rougher sound with more primitive scratching noises heard first heard on rap records from the 90's but the accompanying rap is one of the best on the album.


Golden Era has a number of tracks that are enjoyable but the album as a whole suffers from inconsistency problems.  Del, who is the cousin of Ice Cube and began his career writing songs for one of Cube's earliest bands (Cube also gets a shout out on the track "One Out of a Million"), has grown over the years and you can find a greater variety in the type of music presented on this album.  Not all of those styles work equally well though with the tracks that incorporate other genres of music having more depth (the funky side of "Break the Bank" and the hard electric guitars of "Double Barrel" being two examples) than the songs that are more strictly hip-hop/rap songs. 


Score:  6.5/10
Song(s) to Sample:  "Break the Bank" [sample it below] and "Double Barrel" 

Lanu Her 12 Faces - Lanu is the stage name for Bamboo frontman Lance Ferguson's "solo" act.  I put the word "solo" in quotes because vocals are predominantly provided by gifted Australian singer and rising star Megan Washington (she's credited on about half the songs of the 13-track disc and a couple of the remaining tracks have no lead vocals on them).  This is Lanu's second studio album with his first being released in 2007 although I hadn't heard of this solo act until recently.  The music presented on this album is a mixture of very laid back indie/space age pop that has a French-sounding twist at times. 

The album opens with the jangly and catchy "Beautiful Trash" which has French sounding guitar work at the beginning and is just a fun song with a clever hook and a generally free feeling as typified by the breezy whistling integrated into the track.  "Let Me Down" is a slower tempo lounge song, again with a French-sounding twist, with a slightly darker overtone speaking about how her lover always lets her down.  "Der Hotel Blume" is jaunty song without any lead vocals but the smooth melody and engaging hook won't make you miss the lack of lead vocals any (there are backup singers singing "la-la-la" on the track).  The album ends with a French cover of Roxy Music's "More Than This" which is the second excellent non-standard cover of a Roxy Music song I've heard and mentioned in the past month (the other being Carla Gugino's and Oscar Isaac's cover of "Love is the Drug" off the Sucker Punch soundtrack).  

Her 12 Faces is an enchanting album from beginning to end with no let down in the middle.  The tracks sans vocals are all very good ("1988" and "Jean Paul" are two other standout instrumental tracks) but it is commonly the songs with Megan Washington providing the vocals that are elevated to mesmerizing and memorable levels.  Truthfully, I was only going to review three albums this week but I ended up liking this album so much just from a cursory listening that I had to include it in this week's reviews.  It's perfect lazy day music that would also wonderfully accompany a hip dinner party. 

Score:  9/10
Song(s) to Sample:  "Beautiful Trash" [sample it below] and "Let Me Down"

New Music from 11/23/2010 - Kanye West, Smashing Pumpkins, and French Horn Rebellion

Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy - Polarizing hip-hop artist Kanye West releases his fifth full-length album and first since 2008's 808s & Heartbreak.  West has cited Maya Angelou, Gil Scott-Heron and Nina Simone as his musical inspirations for this album.  No offense to Kanye, who is a wonderful musician and producer of music, but the original version of the album cover he was planning on using was absolutely horrible and the relatively vanilla cover you see to the right is a marked improvement over his "WTF?!?" original. 

The album opens with "Dark Fantasy" which has a complex, orchestral opening with angelic singing that transitions to a really catchy rap as the bridge to the song.  It does a good job of presenting the complicated blending of styles that West is so adept at.  "All Of The Lights" will definitely be a future single with horn playing similar to what you might hear in a Basement Jaxx song but with more classic hip-hop sensibilities in the actual formation of the song.  Also, the female vocals (it sounds like a Rihanna clone but I couldn't find who actually performed the singing) add an extra layer to the song and make it a likely song you'll hear in a club in the not-too-distant future.  My favorite song is "Runaway" which has a very simple four note piano opening that slowly builds into a really elaborate and beautiful song as West quickly layers on the other instruments and vocals as the song builds to a muted but poignant crescendo.  "Blame Game" (feat. John Legend) starts off with a slow tempo piano opening that gracefully segues to Legend's always welcome singing although the spoken word part at the end makes it a tough single to add to your MP3 player. 

Overall, it's another well produced and well performed album by Kanye West.  The arrangement of the music, as usual, is extremely complex without being over-produced.  Hardcore fans of West will be slightly upset though because of the thirteen tracks, about half had already been released on West's website as part of his G.O.O.D. Fridays music series throughout the past year and two of the tracks are basically interludes that last between 60~90 seconds.  However, no matter what other craziness West has going on in his life, he sure hasn't lost his ability to write and compose damn catchy music.  I probably like his Graduation Day and Late Registration albums better than this one but Kanye, even when he's not at the absolutely top of his game, still manages to put out an album that's better than 98% of what else is currently on the market. 

Score:  9/10
Song(s) to Sample:  "Runaway" and "Dark Fantasy"

Smashing Pumpkins Teagarden by Kaleidyscope Vol. 2: The Solstice Bare - An EP by the off-and-on again band from Chicago still being fronted by Billy Corgan.  The overall concept for the Teagarden by Kaleidyscope opus is a total of 44 songs released sporadically over time.  The first volume collected the first four songs released plus a bonus track if you bought the vinyl album.  This volume follows the same pattern with four tracks in total plus a bonus track if you buy the full box set album.

The EP opens with "The Fellowship," a mainstream rock song that has hard sounding guitar and keyboard work.  The melody (especially the part done on synthesizer/keyboard) remind me of an early Muse song although Corgan's warble-y singing voice isn't as good a match as Matt Bellamy's to this type of song.  "Freak" is a much better match to the Smashing Pumpkin style with heavy guitar playing and a catchy bridge and refrain.  "Tom Tom" employs an acoustic guitar and a more ballad-like feel, at least initially.  The song then introduces harder pounding drums and moodier vocal work to make a more complex rock song.  "Spangled" has a more alternative feel with a jangly melody and a more somber tempo.  I felt this was the most control the band exhibited on the four tracks and the subdued vocal work a better fit for the now older Mr. Corgan.

The overall concept is a very interesting idea but the music Smashing Pumpkins give us today just doesn't sound as fresh or as relevant as it did when they were in their prime.  Billy Corgan's vocal work, while still sounding familiar, doesn't have the same punch as it used to.  It'll be interesting when they finally string all 44 songs into a completed mega album to see if they can form a cohesive piece of work from the individual pieces but it's not worth getting the individual pieces alone if these are the best songs the band can come up with today.

Score:  5/10
Song(s) to Sample: "Spangled"

 French Horn Rebellion This Moment - The band consists of two brothers originally from Milwaukee but now performing primarily in New York.  One of the brothers was actually a French horn player for the Northwestern University Symphony Orchestra but decided that way of playing music was too rigid for him so they decided to form this band instead.  The band has a heavy synth-pop sound with some electronic influences.  Vocals are prominent on every song (so it's not a strict electronica album) although the band doesn't shy away from synthesizing them.  

Okay, this EP is five tracks long and from those five tracks we only get two different songs.  You get the original "This Moment" plus three remixed versions of the song and you get a song titled "Last Summer."  "This Moment" is actually a very catchy song that begins with a fast tempo synthesized sound.  The hook and the chorus will both sweep you along and get you caught up in the song.  "Last Summer" is a slower tempo song with less vibrant singing.  It's not a total downer song but there isn't much interesting in it either, at least until the song goes on a complete tangent with a circus-like melody.

"This Moment" is a very good song and is deserving of its own single.  The remixed versions are above average although only Kap 10Kurt remix really bringing anything new to the song.  "Last Summer" is more awkward than good and sounds like a poor B-side to "This Moment".

Score: 7/10
Song(s) to Sample:  "This Moment"