Music

Daft Punk
Random Access Memories
Columbia Records

Want to know about the world’s largest living organism? How about the man with the third highest Donkey Kong score? Need the formula for the area of a circle? All of these things and literally every other piece of knowledge can be had with the click of a button. It’s now an age-old adage about the “information age,” a time we seemingly take for granted. But what if you want to know more about Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk? In a time when privacy and anonymity are trivialized, Daft Punk continue to don their masks and create music devoid of desperately appearing as though it was culled from their personal influences.

On Random Access Memories, Daft Punk’s fourth studio album, the Parisian duo turn that formula on its head, trading in their time-tested computer programs for the collected human experience. But it’s still not about their experience; it’s about our experience. When they talk of giving life back to music, it isn’t just about reaching into the past to create the future; it’s about the communal aspects of music: the experience and heartbreak associated with the sounds and its people. Random Access Memories isn’t the album Daft Punk should be making in 2013, and that’s exactly why Daft Punk created it, and why it took eight long years to master. If the series of Creator’s Project videos focusing squarely on the album’s collaborators taught us anything, it’s that the history of music can teach us more about our presence than anything being produced today.

HealeyIsland
On Ponzi Bridge
White Label Music

Frances Fukuyama’s book The End Of History, published in 1992, went directly against Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, predicting the global triumph of Capitalism and of the Spectacle. Greg Healey’s music, as HealeyIsland, is the soundtrack of sprawling shopping complexes and virtual dating sites.

This is the world predicted by Walter Benjamin, in his unfinished Passagenwerken (The Arcades Project): the birth of the pop culture, the beginning of the shopping mall, of commerce, of virtuality. It’s the simulacrum’s smug satisfaction that it is real, that it has it all under control, under wraps. It’s a dustbin museum, full of never-ending card catalogs, everything dated and numbered, and we are told to go pilfer, go explore. But the museum is not real life; Healey remembers the outside, the sunshine and dirty gutters. Healey both pays reverence to and makes a mockery of high-definition, high-gloss early-’90s CGI utopianism in On Ponzi Bridge. Healey loves and hates the spectacle, and fights back with the keenest of British weapons: sarcasm.

Haiku Salut
Tricolore
How Does It Feel To Be Loved? (2013)

Unless you closely follow the little known — but still robust — musical sub-genre of folktronica, Haiku Salut’s Tricolore will likely be unlike anything you’ve heard before. In their full-length debut, Haiku Salut — made up of musicians Gemma Barkerwood, Sophie Barkerwood, and Louise Croft — explores the genre and their place in it, and in doing so, presents us with both an exciting and playful plethora of sounds and a feeling of potential.

The band’s major influences, including Yann Tiersen, Amestub, and early Múm, are prevalent throughout Tricolore, as the purely instrumental album engages various sounds and multicultural elements. Each track features layers upon layers of instrumental dynamism: light and playful piano parts, rhythmic and precise guitar and ukulele fingerpicking, dense accordion arrangements, and the occasional energetic percussion. These various parts ebb and flow across the album, sometimes peaking, sometimes falling, and always working together to give the songs momentum and intrigue.

!!!
Thri!!!er
Warp Records

!!! are by definition FUN. Once you move past the confusion of how you pronounce their band name (it’s “Chk Chk Chk”), you realize that it just adds an extra emphasis on maximum excitement. Their musical goal in life is to get you pumped, get your body moving, and maybe even get you dancing. And this they have achieved, with every one of their previous records; they’ve been shaking booties since 2001, and they don’t plan on stopping now.

Their fifth full-length, Thr!!!er, definitely has a dance rock element similar to the band’s previous releases, but there seems to be a unexpected pop music emphasis to this album. The opening track, “Even When the Water is Cold,” is an odd choice for a start. It sounds off-kilter for !!!, who always struck me as a band who didn’t really care what you think (hell, they don’t care if you can’t figure out their band name) — but now seem to be heading into more mainstream territory. This is a new realm for the band: making normal pop songs, with no synthy dance tangents, or spaced out surreal moments of zen.

FIELDED
Ninety Thirty Thirty
Captcha Records

When composing her second album, Lindsey Anne Powell of FIELDED wanted to make vocals the star, while getting back in touch with her “deepest love for Pop music”. In Ninety Thirty Thirty, the soulful yet edgy singer-songwriter does both those things beautifully, blending the best elements of futuristic, experimental music and retro pop to create her own unique sound.

Ninety Thirty Thirty is a very enjoyable album, and that’s largely due to Powell’s amazing vocal control. Many of the album’s exceptional tracks, including its break-out “Chapel of Lies,” feature powerful vocal modulations by Powell that slip and slide satisfyingly across her wide range while supporting full and edgy emotion. Either framed by precise harmonies or set against the backdrop of heavier instrumentals, Powell’s voice lends sass and personality as the album’s backbone. The combination of captivating vocals with dense layers of samples and instrumental parts creates an interesting wall of sound. In “Gabrielle,” for example, Powell’s vocals both float over and pierce through an industrial-sounding backdrop, while the lush harmonies in “Eternal Hour” are supremely gratifying against the song’s sparse and energetic instrumentation.

When a concert at Portland venue Wonder Ballroom manages to sell out weeks in advance of the show, it can only mean one thing: the most zeitgeisty of artists must be coming to town. And sure enough, when it was announced that James Blake would be making his second appearance in as many years at the magnificent east side venue, tickets went quicker than expected. If nothing else, it proves that James Blake’s new album was a success.

April 24th, 2013 @ Wonder Ballroom – Portland, OR