2011's Recap You Might Forget By Its End

The Quickest-Lived Social Music Network: Turntable.fm - Talk about cray (or is it Kray? Who cares!), the excitement behind Turntable.fm came and went quicker than Affion Crockett's show on FOX! Turntable.fm had tremendous potential to be one of the best and longest-lasting social music sites because it put users in a position of popularity through playing themed tunes everyone agreed on. It integrated commonality with competition, which ultimately became its downfall. Thanks a lot, you snarky ass click-happy music lovers. Not to mention the many "Whistle While You Indie" rooms killed the originality behind room creation. It was the summer fling before going off to college - that which is Spotify. Nothing like being social without saying a word or worrying about someone being queued up next to out-popularize your music taste!

The Year of The Indie Award: St. Vincent - This was tough. Plenty of indie artists came out with wonderful music this year, thanks to the GRAMMY's focus beyond album sales. The Weeknd, tUnE-yArDs, Washed Out, Toro Y Moi and The Roots (as usual, though) all had records that had everyone thinking outside the box, mainly to think they are indie music aficionados, but what really matters is how much the artist can shake these jokers up. St. Vincent has been doing that for years, and seems to only get better when looking at her album Strange Mercy. It was the best at showing what indie musicians are all about - being able to create some mainstream pop ish but excelling just as well in their own lane.




The Best 2011 Hiphop Beat: Lil' B "Motivation" (produced by Clams Casino) - This year had a colossal of dope beats, from 9th Wonder's entire Jamla crew to the Watch The Throne production. One producer that stuck out the most was Clams Casino, and it all started with this Lil' B jawn. The mixture of noise with the classic hiphop break and the extra tribal percussion snuffed a new punch to the hiphop scene, one that is highly untechnical and carefree, especially steering clear from in-your-face boom-bap rap.

Clams Casino - 01 Motivation [FLAC] by ClamsCasino

Nostalgia Done Right in 2011: Com Truise - Pick a record, any record, from this guy and you'll hear both originality and a Miami Vice soundtrack. Com Truise has the 80's new wave synthpop sound down to a nostalgic pat where the music sets people in a world stocked with postmodern industrial, futuristic-looking furniture and neon stop lights for the Jetsons flying saucer. Cyanide Sisters and Galactic Melt respectively embodied Com Truise's ability to own his own retro sound that matches what seemed to be dude's interpretation of what he grew up with.

Flightwave by JONEZ

The Sappiest Artist of 2011: Wiz Khalifa - Honestly, this award could've been given to him a long time ago. Don't let Kush and OJ and all his other slightly more machismo, smoker-crazed mixtapes fool you, Wiz is one sappy cat. Recalling "Say Yeah," let alone his extremely thin body, that dude is nowhere near capable of holding down a hardcore mantra. And that's ok - it's just when he wonders off into a "I Roll Up" stupor that pulls his chump card. Does Amber Rose really bring that out of guys?!

Best Flow of 2011: Dream Hampton "Denouement" - Although I speak a lot on music-type music, it doesn't hurt to highlight highlight-worthy spoken word. On one of the best albums of 2011, TiRon and Ayomari A Sucker For Pumps, journalist (and poet too, I guess) Dream drops the deepest piece any woman with a heart will understand. She opens up with:

Romantic love is always inconveniently self-announcing
Despite its unwilling participants. Wounded healers,
Unavailable men in need of constant companionship.
Women whose haunted havens are unsafe.
Love shit.

And throughout the poem, pieces of structured stream-of-consciousnesses that each illustrate a revelation of some love-and-relationship-sort, she places this toosie "though counter intuitive, when you hit a curve in love you should accelerate, not brake," reminding everyone that love is rough but fight through that shit.

The Best Tribute to an Icon in 2011: Bob Dylan at The GRAMMYs - Although all the award shows have become complete snoozefests, this performance/tribute set to "Maggie's Farm" was unforgettable. The two acts, Mumford & Sons and Avett Brothers, pave a folk-like river toward the sea that is Bob Dylan. They come together and perform in this magical fashion, especially hearing all those instruments (specifically Bob Dylan's raspy water-deprived vocals) play under the warm, intimate light - the way folk should always be enjoyed!

The Quickest and Tastiest Flavor of 2011: KING - How can you have the shortest EP that draws the biggest buzz only to never follow up? Though folks can stare at Jay Electronica for his once-a-year single releases, this L.A. trio falls guilty to that same strategy. KING released one of the best EPs this year titled The Story, and in three songs charmed their way into the R&B elite. Folks still talk about The Story, but shift the focus on what's next for KING. No one knows the answer though!

KING-The Story EP by weareKINGworldwide

Album Review: How to Dress Well - Love Remains

Wonderful, creative, extreme, I love it!!! Love Remains is arguably THE MOST creative album of the year brought to you by Tom Krell's How to Dress Well.

It is extremely difficult to classify this artist, if you are unaware of the culture of noise music (don't sleep on Wikipedia!!!). I went to a noise concert back in my college days (like that was a long time ago, but anyways) up in good ol' Athens, Ohio. I must say it forces you to open your mind of how technical difficulties merge well with unexpressed feelings. And often times it's the deep, dark feelings that don't want to have the same energy or delivery as other deep, dark music (i.e. heavy metal, metal core, etc). How to Dress Well is often put into this category because by nature the ears will call it noise, but they bring a-whole-nother aspect to original noise and lo-fi (even no-fi) music, which is blues.

So How to Dress Well’s official debut album Love Remains is an album packed full of emotions that are easy to express if sung on an R&B record or blues or even hiphop. Unfortunately, he is not an R&B, blues or hiphop artist. He doesn't have that talent, per se, but he wants that same emotion. So instead of going auto-tune to make an R&B album, they take what they do best and add those sounds to their record. And he becomes successful at doing it!

Blending the noise, lo-fi sound with a blues ballad, some R&B and hiphop tracks, and a mean falsetto makes this album one that has been totally slept on for the entire year! For example, "Ready for the World" capture one of the most exciting moments whenever an R&B artist performs their music. He cries out towards the end of the song, after many dings and distorted loops, "let me hear you say 'yeahhh'" with a call-and-respond effort that is commonly seen in urban music, but not in the noise culture. Another aspect he brings is their heavy sampling of R&B songs, and it's not like he's sampling the usual James Brown records that many artists from all genres try to cover. Krell tells Pitchfork in a Q&A "I really love 90s R&B. It's not a joke to me. "Twisted" by Keith Sweat is a fucking masterpiece." Although I didn't catch a direct Keith Sweat sample, I did peep the "Candy Rain" instrumental loop in Endless Rain.

Beyond all of the copy-catting in this album, the lyrical content in Love Remains is phenomenal. If How to Dress Well wanted to bring out a blues-esque emotion, he most certainly did with his constant falsetto-like vocalism. Plus, making his voice evaporate by the distortion causes an unforeseen emotion that most people can't catch in R&B, and it's a technical one. With turning up the bass and turning down the treble (or whichever way it's supposed to go), his vocals give a sound of struggle, like he's crying and sad, but also appearing to have trouble singing the song. To some that may seem annoying or irritating, but it's an emotion that needs to be expressed too.

At one point How to Dress Well tries to make a fast-paced, perhaps a club banger, but it just bangs. The distortion is nothing somebody wants to dance to, or even think of bumping at a party. Although the stomping noise as the bass is very creative in "Walking This Dumb," the up-tempo it creates for the hand claps and the mumbling-bumbling he does just doesn't blend well. At all.

So when it comes to this album, imagine cloudy and distorted Maxwell (circa late 90s, early 00s) vocals blended with the fainting sound of a guitar and piano mashed together at the hands of a noise artist. As effed up as it may sound (like a lot of noise) he gets his point across of what the title of the album means, making him one creative being. He successfully creates a piece that crosses genres, and ultimately bends genres, in a quest to seek out the emotion of one specific genre. That calls for talent! How to Dress Well may not hold much weight, but his talent is unmatched in the entire music industry.


Star's Grade: A+


POW!