Blouse – S/T (2011) [Captured Tracks] // Grade: B+

Soft to the touch, Portland’s very own Blouse is a silky menagerie of lulling vocals and wistful 80’s-inspired frequencies. Every song on their self-titled debut is built up, somewhat, around the singing of female lead, Charlie Hilton, with tones that pronounce, support, and revere her gorgeously forlorn voice. Put it this way, if voices had a thread count, this chick’s would be fine Egyptian cotton.

It goes without saying that the vocals constitute the majority of the album’s pathos but don’t make the mistake of ignoring the elaborate synth that rests in the heart of each track. Whirring transmissions and reclusive dancepop are unraveled and folded neatly into one another as songs carry on. “Firestarter”, the opener, is traditional sounding in the grand scheme of the record. The moping guitar and generic drums are like spotless linens spread over the table, dressing the naked frame of Hilton’s lone words.

The clock ticks, not a single knock. “They Always Fly Away” and “Into Black” share a fleeting optimism that isn’t easily ‘danced off’. Sadness meets resentment as the keyboard whines and buzzes. “Videotapes” and “Roses” play on, echoing through the house as a reminder of this solitary night and all those that came before it. “Fountain in Rewind” is a witching finale that blows the candles out, melty melodies dripping like wax.

Plainly said, this release is as heartbreaking as it is stunningly rhythmic. So nobody showed up to your sweet sixteen? Drop the Leslie Gore routine and put on a Blouse, crybaby.

The whole A$AP Crew horsed around in a Harlem arcade for Pitchfork’s Selector series last week, and found some time in between Lasertag matches to throw down a posse cut freestyle over Nurses‘ “You Lookin’ Twice.” Though Rocky has been, to put it lightly, blowing up, this is really one of the first times we are able to see the whole crew spittin’ rhymes as one. Which is a good thing seeing as, if Rocky’s claims of $3,000,000 recording contract for him and his homies is to be even vaguely believed, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of them.

Spaceghostpurpp we already know and love (SVCK V DICK FXR 2011 is still my song of the summer) but other guys like A$AP Ferg, A$AP Nast, A$AP Twelvy, and of course the 18 year old producer TyBeats, are perhaps less familiar. Special shoutout to Selector creators Mark Zemel and Eavvon O’neal, who also directed our recent short, The Green Monster.

The finale to this week’s Dexter is going to be the raging chasm of debate that’ll spurn on the rest of the season. Either you’re digging the titty-twisting-tweak to the Doomsday Killer storyline or you’re throwing yellow flags and screaming foul on the play. Drunk with Turkey and Gravy and Commerce after this Thanksgiving weekend, you’re either giggling burping sloppy animal juice or you’re slathered in hate and carbohydrates condemning the writers as manipulative hacks.

Well, where do you land?

I spent the last few minutes of the episode bemoaning the concept of Dexter going Fight Club on our asses. Incredulous annoyance was my kneejerk response. A giant “Oh Really?” annoyed at the laziness of the writers. Then I cracked a sideways smile, moderately impressed at how I had been played out the entire season. Rewinding the episode it became clear that Eddie Olmos’ Great Ghost never interacted with Dexter directly. Motherfuckers. Duped! Duped!

As Dexter runs around coming to the conclusion that Schlumpy Sisterlover was the only man behind the Doomsday Machinations, the rest of Miami Metro carries on in their usual manner of dysfunction. There was a lot of movement this week on their plots, so let’s actually pretend we care about them for a bit. Shall we? Doff your Anti-Apathy Caps! It’s on.

LaGuerta is covering up for That Dude Who Runs The Station. Apparently the old wrinkled bastard has been crushing some creamy hooker flaps for a good amount of time, but is about to find himself on the losing end of an accidental overdose. How Things Will Play Out: LaGuerta is a beefy lady with beefy plans for herself. She’s going to eventually side with Deborah on this thing, leaking information about who was behind the cracked sternum. End result? She snags his position.

Deb seems to be stuck in a retarded amalgam of The Sopranos and Home Improvement. She keeps going to see her shrink who offers her fucking awful advice. She tells Deb to accept Dexter as a chair, and that he can’t be a table. Here’s a therapist telling someone that we shouldn’t expect people to change. Might as well get up out of that fucking chair, Deb. After these fucking odd sessions, Deb walks around like that fucking Douche Tim Allen mangling the advice of her own personal Dr. Melfi. How Things Will Play Out: She falls deeply in love with the decapitated Ice Truck Killer hand that Louis stole. They move away to Guatemala.

Louis, the creepy guy who has wanted to sniff Dexter’s underwear the entire season totally ended up banging Angel’s sister. Pro-Tip: When a guy is creepy you’re not reading the show wrong. He’s going to end up eating someone’s rolled out sphincter like Bubble Tape. Double Pro-Tip: When that same creepy guy is given sixteen seasons in the “Last Week On”, he’s definitely going to end up eating that sphincter. How Things Will Play Out: I’m not really sure. Louis is goddamn crazy, and he’s holding onto Ice Truck Killer’s beautifully amputated hand. Methinks he knows the swerve behind Dexter’s leisure studies. Or he’s just a jock sniffer obsessed with the serial killers that seem to roll up every three months in Miami.

Then there’s Quinn. He continues to spiral to Ultimate Destruction and I’m somewhere between feeling sorry for the dude and wishing Angel gave him a fatal rug burn with his awesome facial hair. There’s three thousand moving parts in the season, we don’t need to see Angel and Quinn scuffle in some dog shit covered patch of shitty Miami grass. How Things Will Play Out: Quinn gets syphilis from a chimpanzee he bangs at a carnival.

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Believe it or not this is the first video off of Danny Brown’s excellent XXX, some three months since it’s dropped. But the biggest surprise ain’t how long Danny’s waited to drop a video from the album, but that it’s directed by A$AP Rocky along with The ICU, who’ll also makes a cameo in it. That’s one talented dude. Well they’re both talented dudes.

What did I say last week B? Killing boring characters is BORING. OK, this one came after Jimmy kind of reconnected with Angela for a second so it came as kind of a shock, but really: we don’t care about her! We want to see Jimmy be a bad ass, not a desperate housewife of Atlantic City. And we know Horvitz’s a beast, so at least give us a maniac kill. How can this be the same man shaking an already pitiful Doyle and then sneaking into the Darmodys’ house after dark? As if that wasn’t uncharacteristic enough, that same man is ready to shoot Jimmy in the nude as he comes out of the shower? That’s just stupid. Anyway, Angela’s dead.

But the whiskey’s here! Fresh off the boat, fine Irish whiskey is being distributed by Owen Sleater straight from the Old Girl’s tit. That’s a big stick in the spokes of Jimmy’s operation, because their hooch is just hooch. Meanwhile, Torrio and Rothstein are keeping watch on Capone and Lucky/Lansky, and they’re not exactly putting up big numbers. However, Meyer Lansky is happy to report that heroin consumers on their test panels are “very enthusiastic.” I hope this heroin plot is going to play out at some point or another because they’ve been milking that one but I can only assume that Jimmy’s going to turn into an addict sooner than later – he’s got some shit to deal with. At the end of the episode we see him entering Princeton, where he enrolled before he enlisted for the Army; I can see him single-handedly keeping the local frats afloat – and maybe keep heroin out of AC by floating it to college students. It wasn’t that long ago that everything seemed to be going his way…

Because the strike’s here! And that’s probably Jimmy’s toughest challenge: a political one. He has no experience at it whatsoever, and I loved to see him call in a meeting with Chalky (and Dunn Purnsley, capo status!) in order to try and solve it. Stuntin’ like his daddy. Chalky wants revenge though, and Jimmy is not ready to deliver, so nothing comes of it for now. Eli on the other hand had a solution that was exactly what you could expect from him: “50 guys with billy clubs,” the ante of which he managed to up by a few goonery points as two of the men had a specific mission to put a beating on his babyfaced deputy. The latter is paying for Esther Randolph’s masterplan to put Nucky in jail but how cunning is this plan! Because it also involves a mock trial with Nelson Van Alden taking the witness stand and giving Randolph’s men enough intel to arrest Eli later that day. Eli is given the choice to tell on Nucky, or go to jail for murdering Margaret’s old old man. Superduh? Van Alden is being petitioned for divorce (whilst listening to his nanny’s sexy stories of trying to breastfeed her little brother when she was 7 years old) so he quite clearly had better things to do.

On the other hand, we have Nucky who has successfully caused some trouble for his enemies but is in no way out of the red. He actually fires his old-timey blunt lawyer in exchange for Rothstein’s young and charming (?) legal counsel. Not sure how he will hold up to Randolph’s smarts, but he got Rothstein out of the Black Sox scandal, so Nuck figures he’s probably worth a try. On that trip to New York, he decided to bring Margaret’s son Teddy so put some weight off of her shoulders. I thought he was doing a pretty good job but that Teddy is a tough cookie – then again, he saw his first father beating him and his mom, and he saw his second father burn his father’s house to the ground. Yeah Nuck, he totally remembers that time you did that.

Margaret is all in shambles because of Emily who is recovering from polio but might remain paralyzed from the waist down, and as Teddy is begging for attention (by pretending to be paralyzed from the waist down) she slaps him in the face big time. She turn to Reverend Brennan, who puts just enough salt on her wounds so that he Catholic guilt would kick in. Praying isn’t enough, Margaret, you need “act of devotion”! So she packs her bling and rain money and off she goes to visit the father for a donation (interrupting him mid-sip); then they can pray for real. And the results are in: Emily will be paralyzed anyway, but Nucky will do his best to help her out when she get home.

There is a nice four-way mirror going on: Margaret’s greasing the paw of the priest to help her daughter’s cause and Eli’s beating the shit out of his deputy to help his own cause (both for naught) versus Nucky and Jimmy opting to talk their way out of their respective situations – with results forthcoming. Sure, they’re both broke right now. BUT! As the doctor points out to Margaret, and as Rothstein points out to Nucky, and as Chalkie points out to Jimmy, and as Manny points out to Doyle, and as God points out to Margaret, and as Randolph points out to Eli, money is not everything. And as Ty Cobb (the “Georgia Peach”) showed to America: you don’t have to be a good guy to be the MVP. The preview montage for the next couple of episodes looks full of excitement. I guess this one was the calm before the storm.

So this is pretty cool. Quintessential post-hardcore record label Dischord (Jawbox, Scream, fucking Nation of Ulysses) has announced a very special project for arguably their flagship artist (and label head’s band), Fugazi. It’s called the Fugazi Live Series, and it will be bringing over 800 Fugazi shows, played between 1987 and 2003 and recorded on high-end equipment by the band’s crew, to the internet to be enjoyed by all. Holy mosh pit Batman!

The service is in beta now, but will be going live to the public on December 1st with an initial lineup of 130 shows. They will be free to listen to online, and also available for download for approximately $5 each. I never saw Fugazi live in the first place, let alone as early as 1987, so I’m understandably excited about this. It’s also just a great idea, and I’d love to see it done for a lot of artists. The internet: winning again.

Black Milk & Danny Brown – Black and Brown (2011) [Fat Beats] // Grade:A

Before I get into this record I gotta go over something somewhat surface/unimportant, but simultaneously inescapable. There’s some wild phasing on the version of this record that I listened to for this review (and also on the stream on Stereogum). There are moments where the tracks (or major elements of the tracks, it’s tough to tell) were shifting back and forth from the right speaker to the left speaker very quickly. On laptop speakers it’s not so noticeable, but on headphones it’s un-ignorable. And it’s super disorienting. Unless you shake your head back and forth left to right in tune with the phasing. And then everything sounds normal. It’s forced vibing. Pierre Schaeefer wished he had it like that, but I’m not sure if it’s because I got a corrupted file — which would mean that the stream on Stereogum was corrupted too — or because it was intentional. But either way it’s there, and it had an affect on how I perceived the record. So, without further #adoo here we go:

So, XXX set the music-consuming-keep-up-with-the-Pitchforkses public on fire. And in that sense, XXX itself was a monstrous, and grotesque blaze burning so intense that it could neither be ignored nor approached. At least, that’s how I felt. I’ve yet to really get into that album. That’s not to say I haven’t appreciated it, because I do that regularly. But, I haven’t been able to take much away except that Danny Brown is dope as fuck and he’s on, and Danny Brown is a real human who has seen some shit. The conceptual space of XXX belongs to Danny Brown. He just let us into the observatory, but it’s very clearly his world while we’re there. On Black and Brown I’m left with an entirely different feeling.

Rapping on Black Milk’s beats, sandwiched between Black Milk’s lush, and enveloping interludes Danny Brown seemed to take on a different light. XXX literally stands in a class unto only itself. You can call it a rap record, but it’s a Danny Brown record. Black and Brown, on the other hand, is a rap record. A lot of that could have to do with the length as well. XXX was more than twice as long, and didn’t have any instrumental interludes. That alone reduces the intensity greatly. But Black and Brown is also less divulgent on the whole. Although, we’re still getting explicit documentarian accounts of some aspects of his life we’re not afforded any vistas from the self-revealing heights of a track like “Fields.” Black Milk checks in for one verse on the titular “Black and Brown” and he plays a great counter to Brown. He comes out buckin and it’s obvious that the bang in this tune was felt in the studio.

There is nothing lacking here, and the balance between Brown’s hyper-potent and punctuated raps, and Black’s more atmospheric rolling beats is striking. There is a dynamic between the two that is founded on a very minute distinction, but also a firm departure from the status quo. Quite simply, it isn’t common for a rapper to take the backseat to this much instrumental space on a record. Of course there are exceptions (cLOUDDEAD, Themselves, Buck 65, Mystik Journeymen) but, the dominant trend is still to rap on the majority of a record. That’s because most rappers who are rapping on the majority of a record shouldn’t be rapping in the first place though. I know, that’s an odd equation to balance out, but you have to figure it’s all above a denominator of egotism, and self-aggrandizement standing in for skill. There aren’t many rappers who could pull this off because there aren’t many rappers who are good enough at rapping to pull this off, to just show up for some of the record and still have the audience feeling like whoa (no black rob doe). It’s Danny Brown’s skill and intensity that allows him to do this. He can back off because he fits so much into so little space. This record is fuckin’ dope.

Little known fact: the first Мишка product I ever bought was actually one of our pom-hats, so I’ll always have a special place in my heart for our cranially oriented knitwear. This being Holiday (and what’s shaping up to be a chill one at that) we’ve got a plentiful bounty of knit hats n’ beanies for your dome piece. First we got the Keep Watch New Era Beanie, perfect for looking like you have a third eye your forehead.

There’s also the Death Adders New Era Beanie, with some traditional striping and both Black and Cream colorways. If you like a little more ‘tude in you headwear, there’s my beloved Heatseeker New Era Pom Beanie, in all kinds of fun colors and mulitcolor poms that look like evil koosh balls. Finally, there’s the luxury option, yes folks, I’m speaking about the Scout Cable Knit New Era Beanie, an elegant and chunky cable knit pattern in Burgundy and Black. You lose 30% of your heat through your head. Let Мишка help you with that.

Мишка
350 Broadway
Brooklyn, NY
718-388-1725
—
Мишка LA
1547 Echo Park Ave
Los Angeles, CA
213-536-4234

May you live on in an altered state old chap! Woke up to the sad news today that Ken Russell, film director extraordinaire, had passed away at the age of 84. Though highly regarded in the UK (in part due to his longtime collaborations with the BBC) Russell was perhaps not as well known in the US, despite being responsible for some of the most iconoclastic works of the past 50 years.

He is, of course, the man who brought The Who’s Tommy to the big screen,  and was also responsible for two of my favorites, the William Hurt psychedelic classic Altered States and the highly controversial The Devils (one of MP†C’s favorites). His oeuvre extends far beyond even those, and exhibits the talents of a man who stood in glorious opposition to the hallmarks of British realism to create wild, imaginative, hallucinatory and gorgeous works.

Photo by Adam Ross

Queens, New York Hip Hop group Children Of The Night began as just two guys: the art school friends Nasty Nigel (f.k.a Versa) and Lanksy doing joke raps. Later, they got more serious and linked with friend-of-a-friend Remy Banks as well as five other vocalists to form the original, eight person COTN. The group has since slimmed down to just Nigel, Lanksy and Remy although they are still a member of the larger Worlds Fair family along with fellow Queens rappers Cody B. Ware, Prince SAMO and Jeff Donna.

After two mixtapes (“100%” and “Where The Wild Things Are”) and the EP Yes/No COTN are prepping their first official album Queens Revisited.

A few weeks ago I met with Nasty Nigel for pizza in Corona Plaza, Queens, the neighborhood where he grew up. Over some slices at Dream Pizzeria, Nigel and I talked about his and Children Of The Night’s connection to Queens, storytelling, the group’s upcoming album, Blade comics, being “DIY” and more…

I feel like the Children Of The Night is kind of “oldschool” and I would actually use the word “hip hop” to describe your music. It has that classic sound to me. Is that something you guys really try to go for?

Nasty Nigel: It’s something that we’re familiar with so we can easily go to that. But, it’s definitely hip hop and then we just try to give it a fresh sound to it so the way we go about our lyrics and the whole delivery is really new. If you tell somebody else about it and you compare it to other shit I mean it doesn’t really go hand in hand with anything that we’ve come across. It has its own weird sound to it.

Speaking of beats, how have you been getting them? Do you guys produce your own music?

NN: The first two projects, 100% and Where The Wild Things Are, were completely jacked beats. We came across a couple Madlib tapes and we used one J Dilla Beat. A lot of Flying Lotus some RZA beats. Some Q-Tip. We were trying to show other people what we want and what we sound really good on. Once we got to Yes/No that was produced by our friend Johnny GoFigure.

He’s on Yes/No a bunch, too.

NN: Yeah he sings all over it. He produced that whole tape.

Yes/No is a really interesting project. It’s kinda daring for 3 dudes rapping to make an entire love album. What I think is cool about it is how Yes/No isn’t corny, though. How did you guys decide to make that?

NN: It was a time when we were being recognized. People would always say “it’s cool you have these mixtapes but we need original shit.” I was like “yo, let’s do a fucking Valentine’s Day album. Let’s make it us at the same time. So we’re not coping out like ‘oh these guys turned soft.’” If you listen to it we’re talking about drinking in school and having sex with these girls. It’s very realistic. It’s not like “Oh, I looooove you and all this shit.”

After Yes/No we dropped a couple of singles. We put some on Bandcamp. That was like the doors opening toward having original material that we could do whatever we want with. As opposed to some stuff we can’t even sell because it’s not our beat.

Speaking of “realistic” lyrics. I think all three of you having great storytelling. Especially on the Wild Things track which is kinda focused on you: “Versa’s Ransom.“

NN: Yeah. Versa used to be my rap name.

Right. Is storytelling something you guys focus on a lot in songwriting?

NN: It started off in 100% where we did this song called “Virgin” over a Raekwon beat. Raekwon and Ghostface are always telling weird fucking stories. We were like “yo, let’s do a song about me having sex with a virgin who happens to be somebody’s girlfriend and it’ll make a whole drama.” So, “Versa’s Ransom” is like a continuation of that story.

I think the details in “Versa’s Ransom” are excellent. I love when Remy and Lanksy are talking about their burnt burger. I think you guys really nailed that song, that story.

NN: Thank you. And our boy D-Black is the guy who kidnaps me. He has this really deep, sinister voice. It’s perfect.

Do you think storytelling is dead in hip hop now? I don’t think that Wu-Tang style storytelling is around really anymore.

NN: It’s a lost form. A couple people can do it. It’s so easy to jump from topic to topic like “Yo, I’m eating pizza I got a fly ass jacket” and that’s cool but maybe tell a fucking story about how you came across the pizza and how you obtained the jacket. I’m not saying it’s easy for us to tell stories. I think Versa’s ransom took me like 3 days to completely nail down. I wanted to point out these random things. Storytelling is kind of about randomly describing this one thing. Like describing a smell. It’s definitely something that people don’t do as much nowadays.

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