Month: June 2013

Kanye West ‘Yeezus’

On By misterstoryIn Album of the Month28 Comments

Hi Guys – this will be a quick intro for a number of reasons, time management being only one of them!

This is the first album that I’ve chosen for a monthly album that I have not heard. I’ve actually not heard a track off it either. I ‘listened’ to the ‘track’ that was premiered on a wall projected for the masses. I couldn’t really hear it or make it out so I thought fuck it, I’ll wait for the album and approach untainted. I’ve not even read the Pitchfork 9.5/10 review (highest this year suggesting this is 2013’s album of the Year-to-Date).

So why have I chosen it? Cause you’ve pretty much got to keep in with Kanye don’t you. For me, it is a love/hate relationship. I’ve been listening to loads of Kanye recently. Loads! and I’ve strengthened my position on him, ‘great producer, not a consistent rapper’. I actually like his (lazy) style … but during the course of his albums I think his writing has gone backwards. He has killer lines, absolutely killer … but he can’t maintain songs or even verses that make sense in their entirety anymore. Is GoldDigger the last track that made sense lyrically from start to finish?

Also we have the ‘tit’ factor. He does seem to be a bit of a tit doesn’t he? … he can’t seem to bite his tongue. He needs someone sitting over him and rapping his knuckles each time he totally contradicts himself or simply says something stupid.

Dark Fantasy was his worst selling album, in my opinion was his best production and possibly his worst lyrics. What will Yeezus be? I literally have no idea but am looking fwd to finding out.

PS – I’ve not even heard the track I’m posting here!

MAY: Modern Vampires of the City by Vampire Weekend

On By David AllisonIn Album of the Month5 Comments

So I thought I was done with Vampire Weekend. I bought and enjoyed the first two albums, but as with many albums I’ve bought in the last decade, they didn’t feel like they sustained my interest and eventually I stopped listening. I was ready to file ‘Oxford Comma’ and ‘A Punk’ under tunes from a certain era, and then move on. And when I first heard new single ‘Diane Young’, it confirmed my waning allegiance. It sounded irritatingly hyperactive, like a throwback to their first album. One trick ponies that got found out, I thought to myself.

And then the reviews started coming in. Huge leap forward, they said. New maturity, they said. Surprisingly introspective, they said. And I listened to the minute long previews on iTunes, and within 5 minutes I’d bought it.

The reviews are right. This is an album that states that Vampire Weekend are not just preppy boys playing Graceland-style pop. It starts off with with the downbeat Obvious Bicycle (still need to work on those titles now and again, boys), with its repeated imploring to ‘listen’, as if the band are insisting we reconsider them. And then we go on really quite an odd journey, that feels both like a crisis of identity set to pop music (Ya Hey, surely one of the album’s highlights, appears to be a bleak exploration of  faith and Jewishness), mixed with beautiful tunes (Step’s brilliant Bach steal, the gorgeous Hannah Hunt – probably my favourite song – and the album’s small, melancholic closer, Young Lion) and in amongst them, some reliable bops from the old school Vampire Weekend – such as Unbelievers and the single, Diane Young. The latter suddenly makes so much more sense in the context of the album as a necessary shot of fizzy sugar in amongst all that wistful existential angst.

And its funny that the band started off with Paul’s Simon’s Graceland as a template, because it’s Simon’s songwriting that most comes to mind – both his late work with Garfunkel and his early (brilliant) solo albums. That’s quite a comparison, but I think the songwriting on this album is that good.

So yes, a great leap forward and a sign that these boys are hear to stay. I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.