My Morning Jacket | Evil Urges

After releasing 2005's Z, My Morning Jacket entered the mainstream spotlight, ready to inherit the mantle of alternative rock's next big thing. But a funny thing happened. The jam-band scene embraced their supreme live shows - though the group rarely jams - and now they are farther away from the mainstream and closer to being festival gods. Faced with this cognitive dissonance on their latest record Evil Urges, the band simply chooses not to pick a style and justify it. Rather they relish in the contradiction, creating subtle alt-country tunes and space rock excursions.

And they also pause for funk. "Highly Suspicious," easily the most adventurous and hilarious track on the album, is a mix between Southern rock, Prince, and metal-Devo. Jim James sings in a peerless falsetto as drummer Patrick Hallahan does his best Bambaataa beat. A dark, paranoid chant and a guitar solo that would make Skynyrd proud elevate the chorus to postmodern heights. Where this tune incorporates a pastiche of modern pop music, various tracks are sober, country-inspired ditties.

"Thank You Too!," "Sec Walkin'," and "Look At You" are tunes where James's pastoral musings on love and identity are given room to breathe with the earthy arrangements. Carl Broemel's work on the lap steel augments the country atmosphere on the songs and James's exquisite melodies bring the pathos. The closing suite - "Smokin' From Shootin'" and "Touch Me I'm Going To Scream Pt. 2" - package the country and electro tendencies in a sprawling, freewheelin' epic.

"Smokin'" begins gently and slowly intensifies to a soaring bass and guitar harmony. The rumbling drums and lap steel push and pull at each other while the harmony and vocals barely hover above them. "Touch Me Pt. 2," on the other hand, is a space dance number inspired more by Pink Floyd than Daft Punk. Disco drums and short chromatic bass fills propel the rhythm as the keys play the main melody. In the denouement, James's high pitch melodious screams mirror the chord changes in the chorus. And the chorus mirrors how you should feel while listening to this record: "Oh, this feeling it is wonderful/don't you ever turn it off!"

(Photo credit: Laurie Scavo)

N.E.R.D | Seeing Sounds

There are few producers who can both craft bust your shit open beats and wreck havoc on the mic. Dr. Dre is probably the best at doing both, never mind the constant ghostwriting rumors. Timbaland attempted the duties on his recent solo album and the results were lackluster. N.E.R.D, The Neptunes's Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo with their childhood friend Shay Haley, have been the most consistent, though often underwhelming, producers-as-headlining artists. Their latest effort Seeing Sounds continues their proud beat-making tradition (see Clipse's Hell Hath No Fury for evidence) and their ongoing lyrical challenges.

"Everyone Nose," the album's first single, is brilliant and infuriating. The music is a cross between Bomb Squad horn blasts, live drums, and chaotic scratching. But in the middle of this sonic assault, there is an absurd slow keyboard interlude that disrupts the vibe with lyrics such as, "You partied all night in sixth gear/just so you know." The tune's hook is so long and convoluted ("All the girls standing in the line for the bathroom") it barely works as a hook. If if weren't for the spectacular beat, well, you wouldn't have a song.

Hooks that do work, in "Anti-Matter" for example, where a fuzzed guitar lead and funk drums provide a steady bottom for the nonsensical lyrics ("You're so anti don't I matter?"), are bookended by verses that say little. Example: "Life is short in black and white/just like little penguins." True, very often the point of hip-hop and pop is to dance and get funky, not to have meaningful lyrics. I'm not looking for meaning in the lyrics though, I'm looking not to be distracted by silliness. Sometimes silliness is an absolute virtue (Beastie Boys, Del tha Funkee Homosapien), but here it interferes with the flow of the beats and the verses.

Maybe The Neptunse and Shay aren't that good at multitasking. In their critically lauded debut In Search Of... the music was played by power-pop, psychedelic outfit Spymob. Perhaps that freed Pharrell and Chad to write better lyrics. Though the guitarist and drummer from Spymob also contribute to this album, it didn't help the lyrics much. Seeing Sounds is all about club bangers, headphone beat deconstruction, and dancing. Who listens to lyrics on the dancefloor anyway?

(Photo credit: Leslie Kee)

Junot Díaz | The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

A few days ago in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic – where my parents currently live and the place I tend to call home – Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Díaz delivered a speech at my high school alma mater, the Carol Morgan School. Though his first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao had won the prize last month, this was far from an award tour. As an artist in residence at the school, he conducted workshops and worked individually with students. The most anticipated portion of his visit was his speech and reading in the evening, where most members of the audience loudly demonstrated their pride as some parents gasped at the incessant cussing.

As in many of these kinds of talks, the speaker tends to be self-indulgent. It was no different here, except that it was charming. Díaz speaks joyously, with personality and wit, and the intermixed Spanglish pandered to the knowing crowd. The content of his speaking and its style instantly made him personable and familiar, though the reading of his novel and ensuing Q&A was more a lecture than a conversation.

The book is a coming of age story in which an overweight, sci-fi- and fantasy-obsessed romantic tries to find happiness and acceptance. Doesn’t sound quite earth-shattering, right? But the book’s grip lies in how it describes the Dominican immigrant experience in New Jersey as well as life under the tyrannical Rafael Trujillo regime back on the island. It is less a bildungsroman and more a portrait of the Dominican experience in the 20th century, with Oscar Wao and his family as Díaz’s lenses.

When it was time to begin the Q&A, the audience appeared ready to probe the author’s ideas and purpose for writing the novel. The subject that sucked the air out of the gym was negative hallucination. Díaz said it’s a concept that says that people don’t see themselves as what they are, or in psychoanalytic theory, the "active erasure of a perception." Its clearest example is race in the Dominican Republic, he said. A black Dominican he knew said he wasn’t black, that he was Dominican; Haitians are black, he said; the “other” is black. In a country where people obsessively straighten their hair, where Trujillo powdered his face and ordered the massacre of thousands of Haitians, where the most powerful and wealthiest families are white Dominicans, the subject of race is all but unspoken.

However, when people in the U.S. read or talk about race in other countries, people must remember that the racial construct that applies here doesn’t apply in other places. Different histories, different cultures, different everything. For example, Hispanic only exists in the U.S. Call a Venezuelan Hispanic and they are not going to know what you’re talking about.

Oscar Wao doesn’t examine these issues as much as demonstrate how they’re present in Dominican life at home and abroad while also presenting the resiliency of the human spirit.
(Photo by: Jim McKnight)

Gnarls Barkley | The Odd Couple

There are no two ways around it: Gnarls Barkley would be Two-Face/Harvey Dent’s favorite band. There are transfixing (and ludicrous) non sequiturs, often counterpointed with bright arrangements and lyrical despair. Unlike their debut, Gnarls Barkley’s second album The Odd Couple lives solely in the deep end of the ocean. There is a desolate gloom cast above all the songs. The pall is so great that even the jovial moments are disturbing – an undertaker singing “Whistle While You Work.”

The album opens with “Charity Case,” Danger Mouse layering instrument over instrument, only to let them drop at the beginning of the first verse. Though Cee-Lo’s voice is present almost everywhere on the track, including the background vocals, he feels almost absent. It’s in the tone of his vocals, dark and lost, exhausted, gasping for life. Rather than drain the album of energy, this adopted aura powers songs to become portraits of anguish. Or as Bukowski would say, grooves of ordinary madness.

“Run (I’m a Natural Disaster)” (video above, with Justin Timberlake as a VJ) doesn’t stray far from the distress in other tunes, but bumps the BPMs close to defibrillator levels. In fact, British health officials conducted the epilepsy test on the video and it failed. It has since been edited. (Warning: it’s still funky.) But what are we running from? Cee-Lo says there’s “a beast at bay,” but is the beast him? The ascending chords accost and the rapid hi-hat programming resembles a chase without resolve.

Unanswered questions characterize most of the songs. The cheery psychedelia in “Blind Mary” only serves to underscore how twisted the story is while “Neighbors” confronts identity crisis with Cee-Lo’s wails. Both tunes are stories only halfway told. The lack of resolution only confirms the instability of the narrators, but never of the music. No, there isn’t another “Crazy” hit, but who cares? This is pop music of the highest order, paranoia included.

Erykah Badu | New Amerykah, Pt.1: 4th World War

Erykah Badu’s 2008 album New Amerykah, Pt.1: 4th World War is Sly & the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On on bad weed. Like that predecessor, this album aims to take a snapshot of the times, frankly depicting inner city struggles, drug habits, fights for freedom, and personal observations, while striving to be uplifting. Where Riot answered Marvin Gaye’s question by being lugubriously accessible and musically based on funky psychedelia, this one is dense, bleak, and all about hip-hop. Producers 9th Wonder (of Little Brother fame), Sa-Ra, and Madlib figure large in the sound of this record.

Multitracked vocals and dusky, paranoid beats populate many of the tunes. “The Healer” and “My People” showcase bombass Madlib beats, laidback concoctions chock full of blips, Eastern strings, and echoed keys. In these tunes, Badu sings of the power of hip-hop to heal and delivers the message to “Hold on, my people.”

The message in the music continues on “Master Teacher,” produced by Shafiq Husayn of Sa-Ra. The bass and drums pulse like a living, breathing organism. Most of the song features lead vocals interacting with the background vocals in call and responses. A recurring motif in the song is “I stay woke,” which, given the context of the rest of the lyrics, suggests a person’s ability not to be taken advantage of while in search of “a beautiful world.” Over Curtis Mayfield-inspired strings, Badu asks, “What if there was no niggas only master teachers now?” The coda of the tune is a soul-jazz groove that rides the cymbals and electric keys. When Badu shifts the accents in her phrasing, the rhythmic evenness is chopped and reconfigured.

Though the album ends with “Telephone,” a haunting requiem for friend, collaborator, and influential producer J Dilla, its 9th Wonder-produced hidden track, “Honey,” almost operates as a saboteur. Why would Badu make “Honey” the first single? Sure, it’s an infectious, bubbly ditty that says nothing (“Honey you so sweet/sugar got a long way to catch you”) compared to the dark, introverted jams that say a lot. But hey, maybe that’s exactly why.
(Photo credit: Marc Baptiste)

Bill Evans | Conversations with Myself

Bill Evans’s Conversations with Myself defies an unspoken Jazz Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Overdub. Evans overdubbed three pianos, one in the left channel, another in the right, and the last sharing both channels. The result is exhilarating; a master musician solely collaborating with himself, crafting moving, often brilliant, performances.

Like most post-bop pianists, Evans was influenced by Thelonius Monk, who created memorable melodies while articulating notes and chords in offbeat blocks. Evans covers two Monk tunes on this set, “‘Round Midnight” and “Blue Monk.” (A third, “Bemsha Swing,” is included as a bonus cut in the album’s reissue.) The melody in “‘Round Midnight” is carried by the left and center pianos, while the right piano hits the chord changes and comps. In the latter part of the tune, the “conversation” the album title refers to becomes clear. The melody is started by the piano in the left channel and completed in the right, and then the pattern is reversed. Knowing that Evans planned and played one piano part at a time sheds significant light on his ability to rearrange and improvise. Hearing this on headphones is nothing short of awing.

Where the Monk tunes display a robust Evans, the greatest song in the album, “Love Theme From 'Spartacus,'” shows Evans at his most fragile. The song begins with sweeping cascades of notes, flowing from the middle piano to the right. The frail three-note melody is played in the right, though throughout the rest of the tune the melody is shared among all three and, as in “‘Round Midnight,” is also started by one and completed by another. Similar cascades of notes end the song, though unlike the beginning where the notes moved from the middle to the right, the notes move from right to left, in effect encircling the listener. The left piano plays the three-note melody in rapid succession across high registers before the tune ends in a sigh.

“NYC’s No Lark” is darker and more aggressive than the pensive “Spartacus.” The song is a lament for and an anagram of one of Evans’s close friends, fellow pianist and heroin addict Sonny Clark. (Evans used anagrams often. His “Re: Person I Knew” is an anagram of Portrait in Jazz and Explorations producer Orrin Keepnews.) The right piano’s dirge chord phrasing is a sturdy bottom for the left’s dissonant, offbeat notes. When the middle piano rises from silence to utter pathos, it clashes with the left piano as the right follows the chord progression.

To experience this album is sometimes overwhelming. After all, one Bill Evans was often heartbreaking, but now there are three. Where Evans’s natural extension of himself was the piano-bass-drums trio, here he individually embodies the trio with three pianos. Though the songs on this album aren’t the first or the last jazz tunes to use overdubbing, they are Evans’s extraordinary feats of emotion, planning, execution, and performance.

Cormac McCarthy | Blood Meridian

It took me about four days to read past the following sentence: “Outside lie dark turned fields with rags of snow and darker woods beyond that harbor yet a few last wolves.” The sentence is located in the first paragraph of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. There is so much packed into that statement: the image of the darkest darkness, the threat of danger or violence, the dichotomy between outside and inside, all with McCarthy’s precise and impeccable diction. After I continued past the first paragraph, I found myself consumed by the novel’s carnage-obsessed journey through nightmare landscapes.

The story, based on accounts of the Glanton Gang, follows The Kid, a young man who joins a group of scalphunters in the West of the late 1800s. Judge Holden is Glanton’s right-hand beast: an albino, almost seven foot man, with not a hair on his body, who says all life on Earth exists without his permission until his classification. Much has been written about Holden’s spiritual kinship with Captain Ahab and Iago. Unlike those characters, Holden is indestructible. He appears to exist beyond human limitations in intellect and physical power. His ruthless, violent behavior doesn’t cause his demise. Instead, he flourishes at others’ expense and thrives with every casualty committed.

Holden sets the example for the rest of Glanton’s Gang. They roam the West like a band of ghosts, satiated only by blood. The novel is supremely violent and graphic, but it doesn’t cause revulsion because it is artfully written; terse, unapologetic, and lucid. The descriptions of events and locations, notably the Comanche warrior attack near the beginning of the novel, are visceral assaults on the senses. In Blood Meridian, McCarthy has created a classic of American literature, which chronicles the myths that propelled the nation forward while demystifying its history.
(Photo credit: James W. Minette)