A-Trak has a theory that, on a long enough timeline, all DJs are fated to become either techno or disco purists.
Return to the origins, pick one.
I’m too much of a silly silly fun boy to get doctrinaire about anything. But I can feel the grip of groovy shit tightening.
Its DNA was always there, lying in wait.
“Uptown Baby” was a Steely Dan sleeper cell.
I still listen to everything, but more and more of my headphone time has been spent ping-ponging between classic loops and new songs that one day could be.
It’s a high-yield moment for the latter. A lot of groups sound like samples now!
We’re in our second decade of Jai Paul, Tame Impala, Khruangbin and their various children and copycats on the festival flyer.
Someone was once described to me as “Mac DeMarkdown.”
Don’t know your tolerance for RC-20 abuse, but having lived through alt-rock radio’s imperial period — my arms are not too short to Candlebox with god — there are worse tropes to build a band upon.
I think the collective appeal is less that this music sounds old, but feels handmade.
Vocals that are heavily processed but not “cleaned up.” Noodling that’s a little out of tune. Drums that almost — but not quite — loop on beat.
Homo sapien messiness.
Mk.gee’s new album Two Star & The Dream Police is wonderfully loose. On a surface level, the record could be lumped into that post-Tame lineage; thankfully, it’s very much on its own trip.
Ideal winter-into-spring stroll music.
I don’t know the path he took from South Jersey teen to LA studio staple (it includes this major Dijon session) but I do know "Are You Looking Up” has stayed on repeat since I first heard it.
It feels like being inside a Walkman while the battery dies.
Delicate FX pedal fingerpicking with raw, yearning vocals. Thought the video was a rear projection thing; turns out he was leaning out of a bus.
(I was working on a project earlier this month with talented director / principled hater Ben Solomon. He noticed a C stand in our frame and instructed the DP to leave it there. “It’s real. Kids like that now.”)
Two Star takes unexpected turns. There’s r&b deconstructions and Phil Collins reverb splashed across the ballads. I think I hear a MIDI saxophone. But what stays with me is the constant sound of a human hand rubbing Jazzmaster strings between notes.
Lewis OfMan’s Cristal Medium Blue strums through throwback signifiers too.
More kitschy (ok, French) with the references.
Another guitar record, but this time like early Cardigans, or some lost Grand Royal sampledelica. There’s fuzzed out Isley Brothers leads on every other song, and a supporting cast of female vocalists giving yé-yé.
Comfort food for sure, but not lazy or cosplay.
A lot of bands who “make disco” really just want to “grow mustaches.”
Cristal is at its best when there’s true juxtaposition going on. The Morricone riffs and Style Wars voiceovers mashed over drum machines on “Caballero” are a funky, galloping hybrid no algorithm would cook up.
Helado Negro plays a more cosmic kind of caballero on PHASOR, a blissed-out record that makes you feel the same way while listening to it.
Alternately lush and stripped down to the core — a falsetto here, a string pluck there, vintage synths slowly oscillating — it’s one of the more deserving Best New Musics in a minute.
To borrow from Julianne’s P4K rave: “There may be a lot of theory, artistic experimentation, and new forms of inquiry on this album, but typical of [his] work, it’s carried by pure beauty, the sort of diaphanous songwriting that makes the noise of everyday life fall away.”
Just as sampling is its own form of time travel, PHASOR is a portal of an album.
How could you not keep this on repeat?
There’s a school of thought that lumps bands and singer-songwriters in with “traditional” cultural values — cowboy hats, baseball, big naturals — whose pop resurgence covertly heralds the rise of a more conservative era.
Happy to indulge that argument over a drink or two, but… I don’t think it’s that deep.
Humans respond to other humans.
What we consider soulful in music is the sound of people people-ing.
Banging a drum, hitting a chord… even the bleepiest, most button-mashing EDM is someone in a studio trying to catch a vibe.
When it works, you catch it too.