Ghostface Killah
The Big Doe Rehab
Def Jam
originally published January 23, 2008
There were once nine equally lyrical, potent emcees in the Wu-Tang Clan, but nowadays there appears to be only one. Ghostface Killah, he of many absurd aliases, continues his solo career revival with the fluid, soulful The Big Doe Rehab. 2006's Fishscale received the highest critical acclaim of his career, but he rushed out a disappointing sequel in More Fish. The Big Doe Rehab gets back to that Fishscale level of quality that fans have come to expect.
The Big Doe Rehab is particularly exciting for its brevity. Tony Starks forgoes meaningless skits and filler tracks for lush, soul-based production and his trademark hyper-real narratives, over in 45 minutes. The cornerstone is single "We Celebrate," which samples Rare Earth's classic "I Just Want to Celebrate" and produced by the hitmakers LV & Sean C. "Walk Around" finds the Wally Champ in a fit of Taxi Driver violence, reflecting on the man he just killed in distinctive detail. "I just feel like I'm lost, reality, man" he says. The aftermath of Fishscale's stunning opener is continued in "Shakey Dog Starring Lolita," trading couplets with Wu-Tang partner Raekwon. It's not the best work of his career; in fact, he's beginning to plateau, but that's not a slight given his consistently striking wordplay.
It's unfortunate that Ghostface continues to lug around his Theodore Unit crew, giving them multiple guest spots and sometimes solo tracks, as there really isn't anything worth hearing from them.
The Big Doe Rehab is a return to greatness that proves Ghostface as one of hip-hop's current best lyricists, and will soon mark him as one of the genre's greats. It would be nice if future efforts reached higher than what his audience has come to expect.
Wolves in the Throne Room
Two Hunters
Southern Lord
originally published January 23, 2008
Black metal is silly because it's hard to take seriously, what with its extreme sound blended with anti-Christian ideology. And it's stupid because on the rare occasion that it is taken seriously, it's usually for disturbing reasons. But there honestly is some brilliant music being made if one has the patience to dig through the shit.
That's a difficult sales pitch, and all that's packed into the barrel is to blame. Naïve 20-year-olds aside, the most impressive black metal ditches the bullshit politics and Satanism and burrows inward to the heart of the music. This usually results in atmosphere and ambience, where the instruments bleed together into a cold blurry fog. Bands like Velvet Cacoon and Striborg have thrived by melting black metal into droning ambient music, capturing the essence of the genre while the other 98 percent fail miserably or churn out the same old 1994-style "kult" dreck.
Wolves in the Throne Room - remember that name. The Olympia, WA trio lurks in the Pacific Northwest forests and has made black metal EPIC! without sacrificing any of the coldness or blur. Two Hunters improves vastly upon the remarkable debut Diadem of 12 Stars. Four tracks of post-rock dynamics and lush ambience swirl into one long harrowingly gorgeous suite. From the drift building into gloom of opener "Dia Artio" to the 18-minute Godspeed You! Black Metal Emperor of "I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Stones," the album soars to heights never imagined within the genre. Lovely female vocals wind around Rick Dahlin's gray shrieks while pummeling blast beats trade spit with acoustic breakdowns and majestic crescendos. It all clicks into an absolute monster of a record: joy and sorrow fucking beneath the moonlight.
This is simply the best indie-friendly black metal record in the last several years (probably ever? And that's including the high-water mark Sunn O)))'s Black One). These explosions from the northern sky are essential.
The Caribbean
Populations
Hometapes
originally published January 23, 2008
It probably isn't good that my favorite thing about Washington, D.C.-area band The Caribbean is its web site, www.thecaribbeanisaband.com. However, that avowal is perhaps more a testament to the chuckle factor of the site than it is an indictment of the band's pop sound. The site is designed to resemble a typical corporate site, complete with mission statement and staff profiles. As the band-cum-corporate entity proudly proclaims: "There are two key aspects to the Caribbean's past and future success: its vision of pop music and the values by which we live, every day, as a company."
The Caribbean's vision of pop music is somewhat lackadaisical (though inoffensive). The songs on Populations, the band's fourth full-length album, are relatively poppy, and well produced. However, the lyrics play like whimsical diary entries, wry observations that would not be out of place in a Seinfeld monologue. The album's opening track begins, "I took to Wayne Lee because we both loved The Who. His father was Jehovah's Witness." Certainly not the most auspicious start to an album. Not to draw too much from the band's faux-corporate site, but it strikes me that some of the songs on Populations bear all the elements of solid pop songs, and yet somehow are missing something. While listening to the album, I'm reminded of the feeling I get when I see vintage Rolling Stone concert T-shirts on sale at Wal-Mart.
In terms that would fit right in on The Caribbean's site, I give the band credit for adopting best practices in the composition of its music, but, synergistically, it misses the opportunity for value-added nesting, and I recommend that it refine its core values and learn to think outside the box on subsequent releases.
Wire
Read And Burn 03 EP
Pink Flag
originally published January 23, 2008
This third installment of Wire's Read And Burn series of EPs arrived five years after the first two and more than four years since the band's last proper full length (2003's Send). As such, it seems to stand alone. It's less frantic than Volumes 1 and 2 - less agitated. It's also less immediately satisfying.
Case in point: opening track "23 Years Too Late" winds around from a dark keyboard opening and Colin Newman's spoken/sung lyrics through several rounds of four-chord guitar pop before winding down via repetitive, nigh-krautrock sections. While neither horrible nor even unpleasant, it's much more museum quality than I enjoy from Wire. Each section of the track would easily work as separate songs, but together they seem to emphasize a point I'm not catching nor can even articulate.
The second track "Our Time," however, is brilliantly executed. The slow, throbby rhythm would likely degenerate into a simple sex theme in the hands of lesser artists, but Wire causes each note to sound as if it's fighting through ice. Similarly, "No Warning Given" delivers a cold shoulder before heading headlong into the most solidly tuneful part of the whole EP. The chorus is glimmering without being sparkling and recalls the rare instances of mid-1980's Wire that neared perfection. The main difference here, though, is that 1980's-era Wire never seemed very comfortable with idtself. It seemed to consciously push and change its sound in order to retain either its own interest or the artistic credibility of the band. Toward the end of the decade, it had lost both. On the Read And Burn series it fits its skin.
"Desert Diving" closes the four-song EP, and there's a resolution present in the simple, full-chord, downbeat-then-upswing structure. Easily the track here that is most stereotypically Wire, when placed at the end it doesn't sound lazy. Instead, it sounds familiar, and that's not the same thing as sounding monotonous.
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