Stylistic Smoke Breaks

Donning a Blindfold

Musicians always have a style, regardless of how versatile they are genre-wise. It seems to have become a cliché that, at some point, an artist will put out an album, usually immediately following a success, with such a drastic change in style that they lose more fans than they gain. I find it more interesting to discover subtle stylistic similarities between wholly different songs by one artist than to discover similarities between the tracks on, say, one album. The elements that make an album speak as one concept or idea are usually conscious choices by the artist, whereas the basic style that only the artist has are only known to the listener or audience. Known to everyone BUT the artist. One can never truly know how they sound, or even seem to other people without actually being everyone else.

Geffen Melts Icarus' Wings

I always like when an artist moves in a more electronic direction, as it’s where my own musical tastes seem to lean. My buddies seem to be able to be more objective, and give bands props if the direction, regardless of genre, is one of progress. Of musical/songwriting maturity. The stubborn parts of me feel like putting down a drum machine for a guitar or live bassist means you never had the right to use it in the first place, but that’s just me. Neil Young put out three albums in the 80s that were all quite uncharacteristic of his usual folk sound. While Re-ac-tor and Everybody’s Rockin’ were definitely ventures into different waters (the latter is basically considered a rockabilly album), my favorite was Trans; a mostly electronic album that was “un-Neil” enough to get him sued by Geffen Records for not sounding enough like himself. “Unrepresentative” music. His lyrics, typically nature and earth based, became more of a Daft Punk-ish (Kraftwerk-ish, at the time) meditation on a binary, robot driven world where a more perfect human being isn’t tied down by romantic emotions. Apparently, Young felt that speaking through a vocoder helped him communicate better with his cerebral-palsy stricken son. Better living through circuitry.

Neil Young - Transformer Man

Post-post-bop

Herbie Hancock turned some heads with “Rockit” in ‘83, but he’d been playing around with electronic music as early as the late 70s. The bridge between jazz and electronic music can be most easily seen when theory and composition play a heavy part in the song’s creation. Fucking Berklee kids. Squarepusher married the two quite nicely in his shit, and I’m even tempted to cite “Budakhan Mindphone” as another example of an artist taking a departure, but that was a side project. The Postal Service was a side project. I may as well spend paragraphs illustrating the progression from rock to electronics in bands like The Faint, Joy Division (well, sans Ian Curtis), and even dance music pioneers like Underworld (Underneath the Radar and Change the Weather, remember?)! Hancock went back to his usual business soon enough, which is why it’s especially fun for me to listen to Feets, Don't Fail Me Now, an album of his with plenty of vocoding going down. This track has ithe main vocals mixed so loudly, it's like bot-karaoke over disco.

Herbie Hancock - You Bet Your Love

My Departure

My friend Brendan had the urge to stay up late about a week ago and make a neat Casio song. I woke up with the a capella and some individual trackings in my inbox, along with the original and some words encouraging a remix. I decided to take a bit of a smoke break from my usual four-to-the-floor Llove stuff and play with some instruments in my studio. A bit sloppy, but the human element is there. Upon showing him a few hours after receiving his e-mail, Brendan said not to change it so much as to take away from the “au naturale” aspect. Whilst getting evicted from 3 Steeple last year, I took mushrooms to try and see a bigger picture and get perspective. Something else happened, which is a whole ‘nother entry for a wholly different blog, but I ended up writing, in my head, a sort of bohemian-triumph song. Almost a year later, this song is the closest I’ve come to the kind of positivity that possessed my mind that night. Maybe y’all can find similarities in style between my dance stuff and this, considering the obvious differences. For resaons stated earlier, there’s no way I can tell.

Brendan Britton - Genius Strikes

Brendan Britton - Genius Strikes (Martin van Etten re-work)