Choice Kiwi Cuts 2020: The Leers - Nightcall

I'm going to take the "cover" route for this one … but what a cover. A decade ago French retro/electro/synthwave dude Kavinsky - also see Daft Punk, Lovefoxxx - released a single that featured on the movie Drive called ‘Nightcall’. All vocoder and gleaming synthpop goodness, it quickly took on a life of its own and became firmly established as a post-millennium classic of its genre, much-loved and all but untouchable … so you’d think it would be something of a risk for a psych-pop band from Aotearoa to take it on and put their own spin on it, right? Step forward The Leers, who did exactly that, including it as the closer on the recent The Only Way Out Is In release. The band breathe new life into the tune, dressing it up in entirely new threads, and I think Matt Bidois’ emotive vocal take is exceptional. Strictly pop.

 

Albums of 2013

So here we are in 2014 already. And a lot of 2013’s baggage has naturally enough, by default and design, managed to transport itself into the New Year. Not least is the small issue of this blog’s perennial failure to come up with its ten “albums of the year” before the metaphorical bells rounded things off so succinctly a few days back …

In past years I’ve done a series of album-by-album posts to highlight the albums I played (and enjoyed) most of all over the previous 12 months, but for 2013 I thought I’d cut to the chase and just list the ten “albums of 2013” in one post … partly because I’m in lazy-sod-holiday mode, but mostly because a few of them have already been reviewed here previously. These albums aren’t necessarily the best of the year, just the best as heard in my house, or in my headspace across 2013. The only prerequisite for inclusion is that I still had my mitts on a copy – in any format – at year’s end:

10. Elvis Costello and The Roots – Wise Up Ghost

Wise Up Ghost wins the prize for most unlikely transatlantic collaboration of the year. But then again, unlikely collaborations have always been one of Costello’s favourite things, and thanks to the huge talent and versatility of The Roots, the quality control factor on this one was always going to be set extremely high. The Roots might just about be the best thing ever to happen to Hip hop, certainly the group rates as the genre’s most authentic live act, and for all that Costello’s words and musings – quite often referencing work from his distant past throughout the album – are crucial to Wise Up Ghost’s success, the music of The Roots is something really quite special. A little bit post-punk, a little bit jazz, a whole lot of Hip hop (though Costello – mercifully – doesn’t rap), and never anything less than 100% funky. Best tracks: ‘Walk Us Uptown’, ‘Tripwire’, and ‘Viceroy’s Row’.

 9. Fat Freddy’s Drop – Blackbird

Speaking of bad rap (or not speaking of it) … these guys get a lot of it from local music scribes (or perhaps that’s “a bad wrap”?) and I’m genuinely at a loss as to fully understanding why that is. When I listen to this hard working local collective all I hear is “home”, a place to be; Wellington, a beach on the Kapiti Coast, or anywhere else specific to Nu Zild. Our accent, our landscape, our multicultural people … and if that’s a little bit too laidback or (apparently) derivative for some, then so be it. It works for me. If they can be knocked for a lack of (perceived) progression style-wise, it’s merely because the band is now very much at ease with who they are and the music they’re making. I happen to think that’s a very good thing. Blackbird was one of just a handful of CD’s I purchased during 2013 (downloading continued as my format of convenience and choice) and my edition came with the eight-track bonus disc. So I thought it was a pretty good score and I played it often. Best tracks: ‘Clean The House’, ‘Silver and Gold’, and ‘Barney Miller’ from the mixed bag bonus disc.

 

8. Foals – Holy Fire

When I reviewed Holy Fire earlier in the year I hadn’t expected it to wind up as one of my albums of the year, but I found myself continually returning to it, and it grew and grew and grew … originally reviewed here.

7. Lord Echo – Curiosities

Multi-instrumentalist Mike Fabulous is one very special talent. Fabulous has been, for a long time, one of the main protagonists behind the international success of Wellington reggae/dub outfit, the Black Seeds. A couple of years back he released his first solo effort under the Lord Echo moniker, and this follow-up, Curiosities, builds on that work to showcase what might prove to be a musical coming of age. Curiosities is a 42-minute ten-track no-filler extravaganza of funk, disco, jazz, and pure unadulterated pop ... plus a few other things besides. So there’s a wide scope of styles on the album and I think that, more than anything else, is what makes it such a persuasive listen. The album made a belated run for this list after I picked up my copy of Curiosities on CD very late in the year, but regular listening through December provided its own reward, and its own reason for being here. Best tracks: ‘Digital Haircut’, ‘Molten Lava’, and the sublime closer ‘Arabesque’.

 

6. The Analogue Fakir – Worlds We Know

A good cyber-friend of everythingsgonegreen, Muhammad Hamzah, a Sufi Muslim based in Manchester by way of Bradford, wears many hats. One of them is the one he dons as Celt Islam, and I’ve blogged about his work a few times already. Less well known is the work he does as The Analogue Fakir, but when he sent me a link for his 2013 release, Worlds We Know, I was completely blown away by the sheer depth and quality on offer. As with Celt Islam’s music, I simply can’t believe that more people aren’t embracing this worldly fusion of Eastern and Western vibes. Where Celt Islam’s stuff tends to be a more dub or dubstep-orientated hybrid of styles, Worlds We Know struck me as being every bit as state-of-the-art, but more indebted to electronic forms like EDM, and it works as a slightly freaky hard-edged variation on global electropop. But there’s so much more to it than any label I can tag it with – it isn’t really “pop” for a start, it’s far too dark in places, and almost post-apocalyptic in parts. A great, challenging, if largely overlooked album. Find out for yourself by downloading at the link below. Best tracks: ‘The Forms’, ‘Moments In Time’, and ‘Annihilation in Allah’.

http://earthcityrecordz1.bandcamp.com/album/worlds-we-know

 

5. The National – Trouble Will Find Me

And by the month of May, “trouble” had most definitely found me. By crook, rather than hook, back in a corner … again. This album was one of my favourites from the first half of the year and while it may not have been as dark and dramatic as High Violet, or as compelling as a couple of the band’s earlier albums, it was still a bunch of beautifully crafted tunes. And that man’s gentle baritone corners me every damn time. Originally reviewed here.

4. Daft Punk – Random Access Memories

Naturally. I’m a disco nut. I’m a history nut. I’m a Nile Rodgers fan from way back. I love some of that early Giorgio Moroder stuff. Combine all of those old school ingredients … stir to boil, and then add a liberal sprinkling of fairy dust in the form of new digital technology and you’ve got an instant everythingsgonegreen favourite. Random Access Memories plays out like some kind of skewed potted history of disco, and it was originally reviewed here.

3. GRiZ – Rebel Era

Rebel Era by GRiZ easily qualifies as my freebie download of the year. A brilliant concoction of old style blues and dubstep, Rebel Era was another one of those safe “go-to” albums on those rare occasions I was stuck for something to listen to. With heavy use of samples and a funk heart at its electro-dubby core, some might consider this throwaway fare, but for a while back there, GRiZ was the biz (sorry – Ed) in my world, and this “solo” album is every bit as good as the work he did with fellow dubstephead Gramatik (released as Grizmatik). Originally (sort of) reviewed here.

2. Public Service Broadcasting – Inform - Educate - Entertain

An almost flawless blend of sepia-tinged nostalgia and modern rock as we know it. But not as we know it. So different from anything else on offer. A journey into another world, another time, another place. Samples and soundbites abound. Originally reviewed here.

1. Darkside – Psychic

It seems appropriate – given that the vast majority of my music listening is via headphones – that my 'Fones album of the year and the blog’s overall album of the year is Darkside’s Psychic. I could – and did, more than once – completely lose myself in this album. Immerse myself in it. Use it to shut out everything else around me. Not always an easy listen, Psychic is an absorbing mix of production FX, vocal distortions, and ambient soundscaping, but it also leans heavily towards classic rock, with more than a few old fashioned blues signature moments buried deep within its sonic mash. It’s such a hybrid of musical styles and production techniques it’s (thankfully) impossible to damn it with one singular/solitary genre label. Hell, the first couple of minutes on the 11-minute opening opus amount to little more than a pulse, and it’s a full five minutes in before we get anything resembling a meaningful beat. So it requires patience, and the impression is that the album was designed to be listened to as a whole, not as individual pieces within that whole. But oh how that patience is rewarded. Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington also collaborated as Daftside, and hopefully we’ll hear more from this duo. Best tracks: ‘Heart’, ‘Paper Trails’, and ‘Freak, Go Home’.

Honourable mentions: Atoms For Peace – Amok, Panda Dub – Psychotic Symphony, Primal Scream – More Light, DU3normal – Flow Frequency, and London Grammar – If You Wait.

Reissue of the year – I can’t decide between The Breeders’ (Last Splash deluxe) LSXX, or the Tears For Fears reissue of The Hurting. So I choose both. Two reissues of the year – my blog, my rules!

Compilation of the year – I can’t say I downloaded or purchased too many compilation releases during 2013 (an unusual development for me) but this sampler release from the aptly titled Earth City Recordz label – reviewed here – opened up a whole new world of sound possibilities for me.

New Zealand album of the year – obviously Lord Echo (see above), closely pushed by Fat Freddy’s Drop, and two other Wellington-based-band releases: Black City Lights with Another Life, and the relatively low profile Bikini Roulette’s otherwise gripping Erotik Fiction. For all that Lorde’s Pure Heroine “made the grade” internationally and wasn’t too bad at all for a debut release, I can’t hand-on-heart say it rates as highly as many other blog and mainstream media year-end lists tend to suggest. I make no excuses for the very obvious Wellington bias in my picks, I really should have expanded my “local” music horizons a little further than I did, and I know I missed far too much good stuff through the year, something I hope to rectify (again!) in 2014.

So that’s that. Obligatory annual list completed.

Comment below if you agree or disagree (fat chance – Ed) … or maybe you just want to call me naughty names again … I’m clearly not all that fussy.

 

Random 30 2013: Kavinsky - Nightcall (featuring Lovefoxx)

French electronic producer Vincent Belorgey is better known as Kavinsky, and his collaboration with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo on ‘Nightcall’ (featuring Lovefoxx) was originally released on EP back in 2010.

After being included on the soundtrack for the movie Drive in 2012, the track received another fresh burst of life in early 2013 when Kavinsky included it on his debut album OutRun. In a further surprise twist, London Grammar also covered it on its own full-length debut effort.

The Daft Punk influence on the original is hugely obvious, and ‘Nightcall’ has to rate as one of the best electro tracks of the year.

 

Random 30 2013: Daftside - Get Lucky

Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington collaborate as Darkside, and the duo’s album, Psychic, is one of the more experimental/avant-garde, spaced out pieces of work you’ll hear all year. The pair also collaborated as “Daftside” in order to dissect and reconfigure Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories album in their own indomitable style. That brought mixed results (for me) but I thought they nailed it on the re-work of ‘Get Lucky’ – one of the tracks of 2013 in its original form. Have a listen:

 

 

 

 

 

Album Review: Daft Punk – Random Access Memories (2013)

Back in 1997, when my now 15-year-old daughter was still in the womb, I used to play Daft Punk’s breakthrough hit ‘Da Funk’ so often, and so loudly, I was quite convinced she would be born with either a bassline-induced nervous twitch or a fully blown funky afro … quite possibly both.

In the end, thankfully, it was neither, but I had to repress a wry smile recently when – completely unprompted – she blurted out … “so Dad, have you got any Daft Punk?” …

It’s great watching her discover new “old” music. She’s come through a chamber music programme over the course of nearly a decade now, and is relatively proficient with at least three instruments. She understands the basics of composition to the extent she is starting to experiment with software to make her own stuff. I’m proud of her achievements, and so pleased she loves music as much as I do. But she knows what she likes, and her reason for asking was not because she thinks her old man has exceptional taste (he does!), but more to do with the fact that she knows he’s a serial music hoarder, and would more than likely have a copy of the duo’s latest work, Random Access Memories.

 

Which, of course, I did.

And so I tell her a little history, including the afro story, we talk a bit about disco, and I tell her a little of what I know about Daft Punk. In the course of doing that, I think I pretty much determined – in my own mind at least – that Random Access Memories is a disco tribute album. Not necessarily the most state-of-the-art or populist album Daft Punk could have made, but one that was near and dear to its collective heart.

Perversely, that commitment to making an album they’d love to listen to themselves, with scant regard for the latest trends in dance music, Daft Punk have succeeded in making an album that looks likely to not only make all of those critical end-of-year lists, but likely to top a fair few of them. An album that will just as likely now be considered “state-of-the-art” and “populist” … which in itself is quite some achievement in 2013 terms, for what I loosely describe as a “disco tribute album”.



But what else is it, if not exactly that?

Step forward, Nile Rodgers, rhythm guitarist extraordinaire and the main man behind many a disco classic – think the entire back catalogues of Chic, Sister Sledge, some Diana Ross, and collaborations with a multitude of others. He’s been a producer, an in-demand session musician, a solo artist, and just about everything in between. And from what I gather via social media, he seems like a helluva lovely guy. 2013 has been huge for Rodgers after some years of struggle (health), live gigging with the latest version of Chic, including an appearance at that most unlikely of venues, Glastonbury, and this, a star turn on Random Access Memories.

 

It’s probably a moot point and a discussion for another day, but it begs the question: Has Daft Punk revived the career of Nile Rodgers, or is it the other way around?

 

If Rodgers is the disco God of the Eighties – and I think you could argue that he is – then Giorgio Moroder was that guy in the Seventies. And if Rodgers plays tribute to himself on the album, then the otherwise faceless French duo of Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter, aka Daft Punk, seem equally determined to acknowledge Moroder’s wider influence. So much so, ‘Giorgio By Moroder’, which includes a voiceover from the man himself, rates as one of the album’s best moments.

 

There’s also ‘Get Lucky’, earworm of the year for those who wouldn’t normally pay attention to the otherwise much maligned genre that is disco. Pharrell Williams provides the vocal for that smash, and also another fine moment on ‘Lose Yourself To Dance’ … but the cameos are not confined to Nile, Giorgio, and Pharrell; there’s Panda Bear (of Animal Collective fame and considerable hipster cred) on ‘Doin’ It Right’, Julian Casablancas (of The Strokes) on ‘Instant Crush’, and well kent Los Angeles producer Todd Edwards (on ‘Fragments of Time’).

Usually I’d have serious reservations about an album which employs so much vocoder, but Daft Punk is one of the few outfits to do it this well, and curiously, in the same way these guys have unwittingly managed to turn the form book on its head, what is often unpalatable for me in any other form, seems to be perfectly tolerable here. It works.

And so it all works. A disco tribute album in the year 2013. Who’da thunk it?

A genre that isn’t exactly known for its capacity to produce classic albums, might just have produced one of the very best of its year. A full 35 years or more after the very same genre supposedly died a grizzly death. If someone had suggested such a notion as little as 12 months ago, the padded vans containing men in white coats would have been queuing up at the front door. If Daft Punk, Nile, Giorgio, and the rest prove anything on Random Access Memories, it’s to always expect the unexpected where music is concerned. And never write off the infectious delights of disco!

I thought this clip was quite amusing - an excerpt from Soul Train, apparently this is Stevie Wonder's 'Superstition', but it could just as well be Daft Punk's 'Lose Yourself To Dance'. You decide: