tracks: lil b - various tracks

via space age hustle

Lil B has been blowing up lately, but honestly it's a strange sort of success he's enjoying.  I've been a fan of Lil B since his days in The Pack, and a few of his latest tracks (especially the ones on this mix) I think are some of the best rap tracks being produced today.  Despite that, the fact remains that by almost any criteria you might want to use, Lil B is a terrible, terrible rapper.  In fact, one of the first things that made me a fan of Lil B is that he is so bad at rapping.  It's a debatable point I suppose, but if you look for cleverness, complexity, and actually rhyming in rap, Lil B is definitely awful.  So what's with all of the hype then?  Lil B's inability to construct actual raps are part of his larger persona, which is that of unpredictable weirdness.  Its impossible to guess what Lil B will do or say next, much less guess if he's going to bother to construct a rhyme at the end of a verse, and that is what critics and fans love about him.  That definitely makes it seem like the majority of the attention he is getting is from non-rap fans ironically enjoying a rapper for being strange, rather than for his music.  Of course, the nature of hip-hop is such that persona is always at the forefront, so it's hard to be too disappointed in people focusing on the rapper and not on the rap, but I can't help but imagine this probably grates fans of actual rap music the wrong way.  Personally I tend to focus more on production in rap than on actual mic skills, so it doesn't bother me much.  And Lil B's persona is really entertaining, especially his goofy motivational self-help positivity side .  But what I like best about Lil B is that he chooses to rap over unusual beats that you might not hear more conventional rappers utilize.  The "Illusions of Grandeur (Remix)" at the top of this post is a great example of this; Lil B says virtually nothing of interest on the track but its got such a huge vibe that it succeeds in spite of his shortcomings as an MC.

Lil B-Base For Your Face (Ft. Jean Grae & Phonte) by EverythingSwagBased

This Lil B track on the other hand, produced by 9th Wonder and featuring talented word twisters Jean Grae and Phonte, takes the wrong tact.  That's not to say it's a bad song, but there's pretty much no reason that Lil B should be on this track.  It's a bad fit, and makes it seem as if the established rap world hasn't really figured out how to approach Lil B yet.  Personally, I'm hoping that Lil B sticks with the more far-out style of beats.... and that some label or producer manages to step in and do some quality control so that we can get one really good Lil B album rather than dozens of mediocre ones.

Extra: A ridiculous and hilarious track-by-track review of the 676(!!!!!!) tracks Lil B has released over dozens of myspace pages.... it's EPIC.

track review: moon duo - "mazes" (from mazes (2011))

Moon Duo - Mazes by souterraintransmissions
One of my favorite San Francisco groups, Moon Duo, announced their newest release (and full-length debut) Mazes today.  Like the bizarrely warm weather we've been experiencing here, this news makes me excited for the end of winter and the beginning of long months of sun- Moon Duo's previous EP releases of mellow-yet-propulsive hazy psych were the perfect jamming soundtrack for last summer (Mazes comes out just before the sunny season, on April 18th).  The title track, released today as part of the announcement, promises that Mazes will mostly be the same Moon Duo we know and love.  It features the same motorik beat, the sustained keyboards, the rising and falling outer-space guitar that carries the music through the cosmos.... but in a more energized form than Moon Duo's previous releases.  The chords are a little brighter, a little more upbeat; the vocals are more clear, less hidden by reverb, than older Moon Duo tracks.  However, these slight differences do not fundamentally change the overall vibe- I think this bodes well for their debut.

track review: neon indian - sleep paralysist

This new Neon Indian track was released today via "Green Label Sound", some kind Mountain Dew cross-marketing bullshit music label.  In addition to being released in conjunction with the marketing arm of a soft drink corporation, the song is conspicuously hi-fidelity.  One of the things that always struck me about the rush of music websites to christen the terms "glo-fi" or "chillwave" or what-have-you is that there was never anything (geography, touring, labels) that connected the various groups that got saddled with these labels; rather it was just an attempt to lump somewhat-similar-sounding yet otherwise unrelated acts together.  The problem I had with that is that there really wasn't any indication that the second albums from these bands would be in the same vein, making the creation of these new genre labels kind of premature.  And sure enough, why call this new Neon Indian track "glo-fi" when it actually has high production values?  Personally the lo-fi nature of Psychic Chasms played a large part in what I liked about it, but I came away from seeing Neon Indian at the Echoplex with the impression that they really were ambitious and interested in bigger and better things.  So, I'm not surprised that Sleep Paralysist is slick and soda-affiliated: its basically what I expected from this guy.  However, that doesn't mean that I'm not still kind of disappointed.  Apart from the Terry Riley-esque keyboard squiggles that open and close the song, there's nothing about this that is particularly interesting to me.  I think free of the haze and murk that the lo-fi production of Psychic Chasms provided, the heavy-synth pop sound is too garish and clubby.  It wouldn't matter that much if the song was good, but again there's not much memorable about it.  One of the guys from Grizzly Bear co-wrote this, but you'd never know just from listening.  It's not a terrible misstep by any sense, but it doesn't really raise my expections for Neon Indian's next album, either.