The reissue of Vex’s ‘Sanctuary’ collects the punk band’s entire recorded output — all eight songs of it.
There’s often a unifying quality with some of my favorite record labels that tells me, “Yeah, this will be good.” At best, a label’s feel for musical curation — or sometimes, even a logo or design aesthetic — helps gives some idea of what to expect. This has certainly been the case with Sacred Bones — the Brooklyn label with a roster that includes The Men, Zola Jesus, Crystal Stilts, and Destruction Unit, among many others. Seemingly from its start, Sacred Bones’ “sound” — a bit of gothy electronic pop, some reverby garage rock, a lot of scorching noisy punk all come to mind — established a personality that carries through its entire lineup.
All too often, bands you’re dying to check out — especially new ones — play shortened sets due to only having like ten songs to pull from — and you tend to walk away feeling a tad unsatisfied. I’ve always thought this is the perfect excuse to work up a cover song: It not only fleshes out the set, but, in many ways, introduces the audience to a band’s influences and own songs, and ultimately wins over fans. If a young band pulls out a great cover song, it actually makes me want to delve into its original music more. Go figure. So yeah, I love a well-chosen cover song, and especially one pulled off live in concert.
And this year, I was lucky enough to hear a bunch of them. Here’s a few:
I listen to A LOT of records each year — for work and to appease that nagging obsessive compulsive desire to hear everything and discover new things. One of the side-benefits of all that listening is seeing a lot of album artwork, and when you see enough of it, you start see some trends forming in terms of design, photography, layout, typography, and so on.
If last year brought me back into the fold of regular comics reading again, 2013 was a year where I actively broadened my horizons and sampled new things. And for the first time, I truly felt I had so many more options for how to buy and read comics — single monthly issues, digital issues on iPad, trade collections — that I actually had to choose my method for which comics.
Shot a snippet of video while photographing Anna Calvi in concert at Music Hall Of Williamsburg in Brooklyn back in November. Thought it would be a good way to experiment with making concert GIF portraits. Here’s my first attempt. Not terrible, right?
Many Beyonce fans woke up to a surprise new album, dropped to iTunes without any pre-release promotions, an outlier in 2013. (Nick Farrell/Courtesy of the artist)
The Internet awoke last Friday to find that Beyoncé had airdropped an entire new album onto iTunes. For most fans, the “visual album” was a total surprise and an instant success (it sold some 828,773 copies in the first three days — an iTunes record), despite a complete lack of advanced marketing, television appearances, or even a lead-up radio single. Granted, a pop artist of Beyoncé’s stature is clearly able to generate massive interest just by being, well, Beyoncé.
Still, Beyoncé’s model almost seems like an outlier, especially at a time where long, drawn-out hype cycles are now commonly expected — not just with artists of this magnitude much smaller indie bands as well.
All year, albums from pop music’s biggest names — and many mid-level and indie artists — were released after calculated, creative, and even mysterious marketing plans to help inspire fan interest, re-instill some fun in new music, and hopefully boost sales. Here’s a rundown of some of the year’s most notable.
For those who went to bed at a sensible hour last night — with your “Best of 2013” listicles locked and loaded — you likely awoke this Friday the 13th morning to a discover a strange, unfamiliar new world where a new Beyoncé album exists.
Simply titled Beyoncé, the so-called “visual album (her fifth LP as a solo artist, dropped overnight exclusively on iTunes to the surprise of practically everyone, and consists of 14 new songs coupled with 17 new music videos directed by a wide variety of directors, among them Hype Williams, Terry Richardson and LILINTERNET.
As these megapop albums tend to go, Beyoncé includes a bunch of big-name guest spots from her husband Jay Z (“Drunk In Love”), Frank Ocean (“Superpower”), Drake (“Mine”), and Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (“***Flawless”). And despite Beyoncé’s sleek, almost-restrained electronic template to these songs, the record actually showcases a small battery producers: Pharrell, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Noah “40” Shebib, The-Dream, Hit Boy, Terius Nash, Boots, and Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek on “No Angel.” Even Blue Ivy — Beyoncé and Jay Z’s now two-year-old daughter — makes a “featured artist” appearance on the song “Blue.”
Needless to say, people are pretty geeked-out by the sudden pre-Christmas gift: new jams from Beyoncé.
But the most surprising part of Beyoncé, is not how it was so suddenly unleashed, but its cohesion. Typically these towering monolithic albums from enormous megastars tend to feel a little all over the place from song to song — if not within the same song (looking at you, “Countdown”) — often as a result of patching together a bunch of tracks with the fingerprints of a billion different producers and guest verses. So, considering how many producers are attached to Beyoncé, the album shows admirable restraint.
So singular is the musical vision — focusing mostly on Bey’s voice over relatively minimal production built around icy keyboards and chopped-up sequencers, serrated electronic dance beats, and a deep, gut-rumbling sub-bass. The record explores one dark, alluring mood and remarkably sticks with it throughout all 14 songs. This is not another collection of songs but a true album, a full statement, a masterpiece. Which is why I love it so much.
In fact, every song is so strong it’s actually difficult to locate the true “hit single” — although you could certainly make your case for the big time Jay Z-starring “Drunk In Love.”
Or the synth pop anthem “Pretty Hurts,” or the sexy electronic gospel ballad “Haunted,” or the slinky 90’s R&B jam “Blow” or the feminist anthem “***Flawless.”
But if you’re still searching for that next feel-good song, look no further than the arena-full-of-fans shout-along track, “XO.”
It all adds up to what is sure to be one of the biggest records to be released in 2013, and one sure to dominate in 2014.
Douglas Keith’s upcoming album ‘Pony’ is out now. (Jennifer Arborn/Courtesy of the artist)
It’s always illuminating to discover the music of a longtime sideman when left to their own devices. At best, it’s an opportunity to hear what songwriting choices they make, what style and voice they inhabit, and hear a musician often relegated to an accompaniment role come into their own.
Such is the case with Doug Keith, an accomplished New York-based songwriter and solo artist in his own right, but one many people — including myself — first came to know as the guitarist and bassist behind singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten. Keith’s collaborated and toured alongside Van Etten since 2009, and his fantastically versatile playing added new textural depth and a more epic scope to her intimate songs in concert; on stage, there’s a true musical kinship.
Even in a crowded field of hip-hop megastars, there’s no denying Danny Brown is a straight-up original. Recording since his teens, the dynamic young rapper burst out of Detroit’s underground hip-hop scene — first with his self-released 2010 record The Hybrid, and again with the highly-praised XXX in 2011, an album that pushed Brown to hip-hop’s top shelf thanks to his skillfully concise lyrical voice, a hypnotic flow, and sharp humor.
In 1997, Kathleen Hanna — the no-holds-barred frontwoman of the influential ’90s band Bikini Kill and later of the band Le Tigre in the early 2000s — released a solo album under the moniker Julie Ruin. The self-titled album was a lo-fi but fierce collection of bedroom ballads and socially-charged songs that touched on feminism and politics, all in Hanna’s distinctive ecstatic voice.
Now, 16 years after that album — and seven years away from music dealing with a long-undiagnosed case of Lyme disease — Hanna is back with a new record. This time, what was once a pseudonymous side-project is a full-fledged band — The Julie Ruin.
