Music & Reviews

Here’s what we know about Iceage: They are four friends, ages 18 and 19, from Denmark. Their debut LP, New Brigade, has actually been out in their home country since January, with a much smaller, limited run coming to the United States earlier this year. These are the essentials. Over the past few months, as New Brigade has been passed back and forth online with increasing enthusiasm, there has been a remarkable amount of chatter, some of it focused on their age, some of it on their music, some of it on faraway mystique.

Not long ago, a Danish daily deemed them “teenage punks full of anger and anxiety,” a line galvanized by bloody post-show photos of smiling audience members published on their blog. Questions like “Are they the saviors of punk music?” have been posed, as though punk music needs saving. They just played their first show in the U.S. this past weekend, in Brooklyn. It sold out. The New York Times and The New Yorker have weighed in. They’re set to return to Roskilde this summer. As you may have already realized, there’s a swirl of information and interest surrounding this band right now, at the heart of which is their music.

And it turns out that New Brigade is a refreshing and extraordinary debut. These four have located a punk-rock sweet spot: mixing the black atmosphere of goth, the wild-limbed whoosh of hardcore, and the clangor of post-punk. It’s a feat made all the more impressive by one very important intangible: energy. While they still have room to grow as songwriters, the energy in every atom of New Brigade‘s charred, sub-25-minute rush is seductive. From the moment “White Rune” starts to quake until those last tangles of guitar conk out on closer “You’re Blessed”, there’s little escape from this record’s grip. Even the foreboding mash and march of “Intro”, its wordless, 46-second pulse of a prelude, is enough to make you feel like you need to fling yourself in the direction of someone else.

That said, despite the typically direct, blunt-object nature of “punk,” much of New Brigade is also impressionistic. Elias Rønnenfelt’s words (sung in English rather than Danish) are largely unintelligible, leaving a lot up to the heart and imagination. Rønnenfelt finds an effective way of sharing just enough room for listeners to fill in the blanks. As if mimicking the motions of his own guitar, he scythes his way through each song, usually to anthemic heights. That you can hear in the gasp of “Collapse” and starry-eyed bounce of “Remember”. Even more so in aforementioned climax “You’re Blessed”, a song that sounds like a more irritable cousin to the poppy, post-hardcore emo that came of age here in the 1990s.

The album’s grit has nothing to do with fidelity. While Iceage employ decidedly abrasive no-wave textures, New Brigade was recorded in a proper studio. The result is a recording whose snare hits and basslines announce themselves with real fury. And though a lot of this music might seem from a distance like a dozen ideas thrown together in the space of a single song, what they’ve done here is deceptively precise and exists on a deeply personal, unfiltered plane. All these lurches and groans and crashes and bangs and stutters and roars come together to form one consistently rousing, emotionally immediate whole. From them to you.

Junior Boys started out making ridiculously complex music that had the intimate feel of a bedroom-based indie project. They’d mastered the intricate rhythmic syncopations of UK garage and Timbaland-style R&B, genres that had turned inventive and impossibly tricky rhythm programming into a game of pop oneupsmanship. Which is hardly the sort of thing that you’d want to hear an amateur’s take on. But JBs’ music was presented as if it were something fragile, homespun, made on a shoestring, full of negative space where the pop fizziness should be. It added an interesting, affecting friction to a sound that had defined glossy marquee pop around the turn of the millennium, like the difference between a love song written to please millions and one aimed at a special someone.

Pretty quickly, though, on 2006’s So This Is Goodbye and especially 2009’s Begone Dull Care, the JBs music started sounding like a million bucks, whatever it cost to make. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. There had always been an element of slick soulful 1980s synth-pop in their sound, and when they jettisoned the new millennium R&B touches, it was shocking and enjoyable to find out they actually had the production chops to mimic that 1980s opulence. But what about that one-on-one intimacy that had originally made them stand out? In that sense, It‘s All True sounds like the album the Junior Boys have been moving toward their whole career. It’s got the same low-key mixtape-from-a-lover charm as Last Exit, but sacrifices none of the appealing slickness of their last few albums.

Opener “Itchy Fingers” is actually a bit of bait-and-switch. It’s the most deliriously dense tune on the album– multiple basslines, stuttering R&B breakdowns, Art of Noise vocal stabs, zapping rave riffs, gleaming Japan/Duran-style guitar– a master class in just how much you can squeeze into a track without its seeming cluttered. It recalls the carefully plotted textural overload of UK funky producers like Ill Blu, even if the feel is still more disco-house smooth than frantic Jamaican ragga. But “Itchy Fingers” is more or less an anomaly. It‘s All True mostly dials back the sonic excess in favor of more streamlined grooves. Thankfully, the album also corrects the lack-of-hooks problem that occasionally plagued Begone Dull Care. “Second Chance” is still stuffed with whirling video game noises, and some glorious creamy vocal multi-tracking, but what stands out on first listen is that naggingly catchy bassline. Plus Jeremy Greenspan gives us his best batch of choruses in quite a while, and good thing, too. While this is still headphone music par excellence, all those gleaming little sonic gewgaws and sneaky ear-worm off-beats are often pushed to the back of the mix, meaning the bright lounging-on-the-yacht electro hooks and Greenspan’s voice both have to do a lot more work here.

Greenspan’s singing is the best it’s ever been on It‘s All True, proving the band’s mixing desk skills aren’t the only thing that’s matured over the past eight years. Where he initially sounded wounded and winsome, almost hiding his voice behind the stark beats, here he displays a bouncy, strident sense of playfulness. Just check the ecstatic peak-after-peak outro on “Banana Ripple“. There’s also a new subtlety to his breathy just-out-of-bed tenderness that weirdly reminds me of Sam Prekop, no faint praise considering Prekop is the reigning master of this sort of thing. And speaking of subtle and tender, along with the large helpings of dancefloor joy, some of the album’s most immediately arresting moments are its sparsest and most fragile. “The Reservoir” is an ultra-delicate experiment in seeing how far a rhythm can be stripped back– something that would have fit perfectly on Last Exit, though it sounds far richer here, with Greenspan pulling off a falsetto he never would have been able to in the old days. Despite a few curveballs, like the pinpoint precise homage to Kraftwerk and the bleep techno Kraftwerk inspired on “Kick the Can”, there’s not much “new” here if you’ve been following the Junior Boys’ sound over the last decade. But considering they seem to have perfected that sound here, it’s hard not to feel like they should keep making albums like It‘s All True for a long, long time.

DJ Shadow has been skirting predictability for a good long while. The Outsider might have been a critical and fanbase fiasco, but at least it proved he was trying to engage with the greater hip-hop world and make something that didn’t fit the precedent of Endtroducing…. (And we got a pretty damn good E-40 track out of it.) Shadow could be excused for testing his limits, for reacting to the sounds currently reverberating through the instrumental hip-hop arena he helped build. And it’s tempting to speculate what his next move might be. He could be ricocheting off recent psychedelic L.A. bass music, or trying to see how his beat-building/breakdown technique could spar against UK funky rhythms, or maybe just stripping things back to the point of minimalism. The fact that he’s calling his upcoming album The Less You Know, the Better says something about his M.O., at least.

Then again, the I Gotta Rokk EP contains a few singles drawn from that album, and they suggest a new direction more along the lines of what people expected from him 10 years ago. Any of the three original tracks on this EP would’ve fit well stylistically as follow-ups to the prog-skewing aspirations of The Private Press, representing a gradual evolution from his sample-virtuoso approach. As they stand in 2011, these songs are a bit of a mixed bag, flirting with sounds that could qualify as trendy or forward-thinking in bass music without jumping into the thick of it.

It’s not so much the scattershot styles that register as strange; if there’s anywhere hard rock, psych-folk, and electro-glitch all share a root context, it’s in the scrapyard assemblage of an ecclectic cratedigger like Shadow. It’s more of a structural disconnect, where it’s possible to hear what he’s reaching for but harder to grasp just how he plans to get there. The title track lurches around in a stoner-rock plod, as a creeping armada of metal guitars eventually bleeds through its slow build to a manic false-ending. The hesher trappings are novel enough, but its drums are uniquely Shadow’s: clipped yet heavy-sounding snares, hi-hats, and claps that sound culled from a dozen long-buried sources, but which coalesce into a dense vortex of percussion.

The other two originals debuted last year as a digital single, and if they’re both distinctly Shadow, they also prove how nebulous that descriptor really is. “I’ve Been Trying” leans toward the same vaguely soulful psych-folk that informed “Six Days” and “This Time (I’m Gonna Try It My Way)”, but it sounds less like an actual sample-based construction than a song with overdubs– it’s one of those cuts that might feel more alive if the seams were less concealed. “Def Surrounds Us” is the more intriguing proposition, Shadow loosely toying with dubstep in a somewhat self-aware mode. The Southern-bounce digital snare rolls and hornet-sting synthesizers approach Benga’s more jittery moments, but only until the song takes a left turn into glitchy drum’n’bass. It may be the most manic thing he’s done since the similarly structured “Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain”, and it’s proof positive that he can still do exhilarating, spectacular things with drum breaks.

Out of three additional remixes, the one that pulls it off the best ironically has the weakest source material: Various’ take on “I’ve Been Trying” scatters that track’s weedy vocals into lonely dub echoes, bringing out the same sense of isolation with a completely different mood. The other two– Irn Mnky’s Pendulum-style “Swagger Mix” of “I Gotta Rokk” and Rockwell’s twitchy, overstuffed remix of “Def Surrounds Us”– show just how tacky contemporary drum’n’bass bombast can be, weirdly managing to use all the prominent elements of their originals to create remixes that miss all the things that make Shadow’s tracks slice instead of bludgeon. At least the first three tracks prove that Shadow himself still knows how that approach works.

This is not the new Daft Punk album. It’s a score for a Disney franchise film that cost an estimated $200 million to make. As such, there are lots of classical-inspired strings and horns played by an 85-strong orchestra. Most of the soundtrack’s 22 pieces don’t last more than three minutes; only a few could be considered actual songs. And while we knew this was going to be a score since it was first reported nearly two years ago, it’s tough to shake the gloom of blown expectations while listening to the same ominous theme as it repeats in slightly mutated forms across the hour-long soundtrack. The French duo’s current move is almost undeniably disappointing, but it’s also not a surprise.

Daft Punk aren’t the same two guys who made Homework and Discovery. Over the course of the last decade, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter have increasingly relied on images to complement– and sometimes justify– their music. Since their last proper LP, 2005’s Human After All, the pair staged the greatest dance music tour of all time– one that blasted its audience with enough visual stimuli to leave them blinking stars for hours. The pyramid, the gleaming helmets, and the lite-bright leather jackets brought Daft Punk’s greatest hits to a holy, undiscovered realm. Their 2006 art-house indulgence Electroma went even further as it was directed by the twosome yet featured no new music. Daft Punk haven’t even attempted a can’t-miss song in at least five years, and the Tron: Legacy soundtrack keeps that unfortunate streak alive.

The score keeps another trend going, too. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo have flexed their robot obsession for years, but its nature has changed. On Discovery tracks like “Digital Love”, “Something About Us”, and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger”, they employed robotic voice effects to bring out the childlike naïveté of artificial intelligence. And Discovery‘s accompanying animated movie, Interstella 5555, was a bright and fun technicolor cartoon. But their mechanized fantasies have gotten continually darker since then– consider the much more sinister robo effects on Human After All‘s “The Brainwasher” and “Television Rules the Nation”. Electroma‘s two metal-machine leads commit harrowing self-destruct suicides. Most of the robot doomsaying can’t compare with their ebullient side; their apocalyptic visions are hardly Philip K. Dick-worthy, and they’re oftentimes a huge bummer to boot.

Tron: Legacy is rated PG and aimed at igniting the imaginations of 10-year-old boys. When I watched it in IMAX 3D it was easy to revert back to my younger self and just gawk at the exquisite whiz-bang of it all. That said, it’s pretty fucking dark. Most of the movie takes place in a virtual world that doesn’t know sunlight– it’s like a futuristic version of Tolkien’s Mordor. Almost all of the post-Han Solo humor that buoyed the original Tron is replaced by a thunderous seriousness (and blue-black color scheme) more akin to The Dark Knight. And the music follows suit with endless crescendos of pounding timpani drums and monolithic strings. Naturally, the music synchs a hell of a lot better when you’re watching the stunning images it was made to accompany. Daft Punk’s score plays a vital role in making this poorly scripted mega movie seem bigger and more important than it actually is.

Even so, it hems frustratingly close to the sweeping classical film music style pioneered by John Williams (Star Wars) and picked up by Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings) and Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight). The Tron: Legacy score’s supposed innovation is combining an orchestra style with electronics, but the meshing of the two styles is rare and rudimentary. More often than not, each piece is either mostly synth-based (including filter-house also-rans “Derezzed” and “Tron Legacy (End Titles)”) or symphonic (“Nocturne”, “Outlands”). When they pull off the combo– as on the blistering “The Game Has Changed”– it’s thrilling even without an IMAX screen hijacking your senses. And while the classical arrangements mark a new style for Daft Punk, it’s hardly revelatory in the sphere of movie scores at large.

Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but think that this was Daft Punk’s attempt at topping their legendary pyramid tour. Theoretically, by teaming up with Disney and the most high-tech cameras and surround-sound systems and recording facilities known to man, the two could could dive bomb into the minds of millions of people in one immense opening weekend and stay consistent with their man vs. machine ideology– all without leaving the comfort of their own homes. But the tour was phenomenal because they were the central characters– not just a side act– and because it was delusionally fun. Tron: Legacy has flashes of that sort of brilliance, but it’s downright puny compared to the sheer joy that is “One More Time” or “Around the World”. Daft Punk used to be a couple of guys hellbent on making genius dance music who happened to wear goofy robot helmets. Along the way, though, their priorities seem to have changed.

Kanye West’s 35-minute super-video, Runaway, peaks with a parade. Fireworks flash while red hoods march through a field. At the center of the spectacle is a huge, pale, cartoonish rendering of Michael Jackson’s head. My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy‘s gargantuan “All of the Lights” soundtracks the procession, with Kanye pleading, “Something wrong, I hold my head/ MJ gone, our nigga dead.” The tribute marks another chapter in West’s ongoing obsession with the King of Pop.

West’s discography contains innumerable references and allusions to Jackson. His first hit as a producer, Jay-Z’s “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”, sampled the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”. For many, his first memorable lines as a rapper came during 2003’s “Slow Jamz”: “She got a light-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson/ Got a dark-skinned friend look like Michael Jackson.” And when West’s recent interview with Matt Lauer on the “Today” show went awry, he took to Twitter, writing, “I wish Michael Jackson had twitter!!!!!! Maybe Mike could have explained how the media tried to set him up!!! It’s all a fucking set up!!!!” Like most everything else, Kanye may exaggerate the kinship, but it’s real. And it’s never more apparent than on Twisted Fantasy, a blast of surreal pop excess that few artists are capable of creating, or even willing to attempt.

To be clear, Kanye West is not Michael Jackson. As he told MTV last month, “I do have a goal in this lifetime to be the greatest artist of all time, [but] that’s very difficult being that I can’t dance or sing.” He ended the thought with a laugh, but you get the impression he’s not kidding. Unlike Michael, he’s not interested in scrubbing away bits of himself– his blackness, his candidness– to appease the masses. And while Jackson’s own twisted fantasies of paranoia and betrayal eventually consumed him whole, West is still aware of his illusions, though that mindfulness becomes increasingly unmoored with each newspaper-splashing controversy. The balance is tenuous, but right now it’s working to his advantage. On Twisted Fantasy, Kanye is crazy enough to truly believe he’s the greatest out there. And, about a decade into his career, the hardworking perfectionist has gained the talent on the mic and in the control room to make a startlingly strong case for just that.

Kanye’s last album, 2008’s 808s and Heartbreak, was heavy on the Auto-Tune and stark synths, but relatively light on grandiose ideas. It was a necessary detour that expanded his emotional palette; a bloodletting after a harsh breakup and the passing of his mother that manifests itself in Twisted Fantasy‘s harshest lows. But musically, the new album largely continues where 2007’s Graduation left off in its maximalist hip-hop bent, with flashes of The College Dropout‘s comfort-food sampling and Late Registration‘s baroque instrumentation weaved in seamlessly. As a result, the record comes off like a culmination and an instant greatest hits, the ultimate realization of his strongest talents and divisive public persona. And since the nerd-superstar rap archetype he popularized has now become commonplace, he leaves it in the dust, taking his style and drama to previously uncharted locales, far away from typical civilization.

He’s got a lot on his mind, too. After exiling himself for months following last year’s infamous Taylor Swift stage bomb, the rapper made some of his first comeback appearances at the headquarters of Facebook and Twitter in late July. Videos of West standing on a table in tailored GQ duds while gesticulating through new rhymes (sans musical accompaniment) quickly made the rounds. The Silicon Valley visits seemed like a stunt, but they were prophetic. Forever an over-sharer, Kanye was looking for an outlet for his latest mirror-born musings. He found that platform with Twitter, and proceeded to dictate his own narrative in 140 character hits. Whether showing off exotic purchases, defending himself against the press, or going on stream-of-consciousness rants, Kanye finally had the middleman-free, instant-gratification platform he’d always wanted.

Juiced on the direct connection, he began releasing weekly songs for free online, the generosity of which would be moot if the songs didn’t deliver. But they did, over and over, eventually building up the same type of superstar goodwill Radiohead pulled off with their pay-what-you-want In Rainbows release plan and Lil Wayne’s free mixtape barrage leading up to 2008’s Tha Carter III. So while Kanye can’t sing or dance like Michael, he’s making meaningful connections in a fresh, oftentimes (ahem) naked way. “When I used to finish an album I would be so excited for my mom to hear the final – final!” he wrote on November 11. “The final – final is what we used to call the… completed album with all the skits!!! I made songs to please one person… MY MOM!!! I would think… would my my Mom like this song!”

I’m not sure which song he’s talking about. Because, between July and November, West seemingly decided to make My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy less mom-friendly and more of a hedonistic exploration into a rich and famous American id. At Facebook, he rapped the first verse of what would become album closer “Lost in the World”, at one point changing Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” refrain to, “Mama-say mama-sah Mama Donda’s son,” referring to his late mother. The familial allusion was left off the album. Another Facebook tune– a brutally oedipal account called “Mama’s Boyfriend”– was also deleted, along with the vintage-Kanye-sounding “See Me Now”. Such exclusions speak to the album’s sharp focus– to move everything forward while constantly tipping on the brink of frantic instability.

This isn’t the same resourceful prodigy who made The College Dropout or even the wounded soul behind 808s and Heartbreak. Instead, Kanye’s Twisted Fantasy incarnation cherry-picks little things from his previous work and blows them up into something less than sane. The expansive, all-encompassing nature of the album is borne out in its staggering guest list which includes mentors Jay-Z, RZA, and No ID, along with new charges like Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross, Kid Cudi, and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon. The inclusion of Minaj (who contributes the schizoid verse of her life on “Monster”), Ross (a guy known for making up his own reality as he goes), and Cudi (who’s probably even more wildly self-destructive than Kanye) especially adds to the hallucinatory tone. By the time Chris Rock shows up to provide comic relief during one of the album’s bleakest moments, it begins to feel as if Kanye is stage-managing his own award show with enough starpower, shock, and dynamism to flatten the Grammys, the VMAs, and the rest all at once.

Over the past few months, Kanye has intermittently tried to flush away his rep as a boorish egoist in interviews and on Twitter, which is, fortunately, impossible. Because without his exploding self-worth– itself a cyclical reaction to the self-doubt so much of his music explores– there would be no Twisted Fantasy. “Every superhero needs his theme music,” he says on “POWER”, and though he’s far from the virtuous paragons of comic book lore, he’s no less complex. In his public life, he exhibits vulnerability and invincibility in equal measure, but he’s just as apt at villainy– especially here.

With “Runaway”, he rousingly highlights his own douchebaggery, turning it into a rallying cry for all humanity. Like many of his greatest songs, it’s funny, sad, and perversely relatable. And while the royal horns and martial drums of “All of the Lights” make it sound like the ideal outlet for the most over-the-top boasts imaginable, West instead inhabits the role of an abusive deadbeat desperate to make good on a million blown promises. “Hell of a Life” attempts to bend its central credo– “no more drugs for me, pussy and religion is all I need”– into a noble pursuit. As a woofer-mulching synth line lurks, Kanye justifies his dreams of not sleeping with but marrying a porn star, peaking with the combative taunt, “How can you say they live they life wrong/ When you never fuck with the lights on.” Inspired by his two-year relationship with salacious model Amber Rose, the song blurs the line between fantasy and reality, sex and romance, love and religion, until no lines exist at all. It’s a zonked nirvana with demons underneath; a fragile state that can’t help but break apart on the very next song.

The haunted, Aphex Twin-sampling “Blame Game” bottoms out with a verse in which Kanye’s voice is sped up, slowed down and stretched out. The effect is almost psychotic, suggesting three or four inner monologues fighting over smashed emotions. It’s one of many moments on the record where West manipulates his vocals. Whether funneling some of his best-ever rhymes through a tinny, Strokes-like filter on “Gorgeous” or making himself wail like a dying cyborg in the final minutes of “Runaway”, he uses studio wizardry to draw out his multitudes. Tellingly, though, he doesn’t get the last word on the album. That distinction goes to the sobering tones of Gil Scott-Heron’s 1970 spoken-word piece “Comment #1”, a stark take on the American fable. “All I want is a good home and a wife and children and some food to feed them every night,” says Scott-Heron, bringing the fantasy to a close.

On “POWER”, Kanye raps, “My childlike creativity, purity, and honesty is honestly being crowded by these grown thoughts/ Reality is catching up with me, taking my inner child, I’m fighting for custody.” The lines nail another commonality between the rapper and his hero. Like Michael, Kanye’s behavior– from the poorly planned outbursts to the musical brilliance– is wide-eyed in a way that most 33 year olds have long left behind. That naivety is routinely battered on Twisted Fantasy, yet it survives, better for the wear. With his music and persona both marked by a flawed honesty, Kanye’s man-myth dichotomy is at once modern and truly classic. “I can’t be everybody’s hero and villain, savior and sinner, Christian and anti Christ!” he wrote earlier this month. That may be true, but he’s more willing than anyone else to try.