on the pulse - 2020 - week 11 - how i'm feeling after hours

This was an odd week - feels a little quieter than it actually was, mostly because I couldn’t quite catch up on everything I wanted, but hey, it’s trying times, we’re doing the best we can here. So, for what we have, this is On the Pulse!

R.A.P. Ferreria - purple moonlight pages - I’ve had people asking about why I haven’t gotten to this one yet - seriously, folks, you think I’m capable of rushing out a review for milo now known as R.A.P. Ferreria, one of the more thoughtful and abstract indie rappers out today? I wanted to give this some deeper attention and scrutiny, especially given how his last album budding ornithologists are weary of tired analogies didn’t quite connect as deeply as I was hoping. Granted, my issue last time was the more I untangled his content the less I liked him, so maybe heightened scrutiny isn’t the answer, but he’s also recruiting Kenny Segal and the Jefferson Park Boys to amplify that jazzy side that I was lukewarm on last times, so maybe this would hit stronger? Well, in parts it certainly does - unlike most people, I’m very much on the fence how much the jazz rap side works for R.A.P. Ferreira in comparison with glitchier electronics, and while his flows and delivery certainly have more energy, there’s an increasingly exaggerated theatricatlity which when combined with his usual tangled wordplay does get distracting. It gives off the impression he thinks his artistry puts him on a different tier of insight and wisdom as his peers… and I’m not sure it does. Yeah, the vocabulary is rich as all hell and it’s certainly clever in its density, but I also look as Aesop Rock or Homeboy Sandman or Open Mike Eagle who can be just as convoluted and dense but never try to put themselves above their audience and in recent years have embraced more accessibility. R.A.P. Ferreira seems dismissive of acts who get off on confessional prose poems, but that’s because there’s an emotional core in that music, even if the craftsmanship is rougher, and that’s just as valid. Now to some extent that’s antithetical to the point he’s making: that the pure craft is oft disrespected or devalued, especially when it becomes less about the craft itself and more about systemic barriers and privilege, especially when the sheer magnificence of his wordplay should be elevated, and yet he finds some form of restless peace in his craft, and maybe that’s enough… except for the constant desire to be understood in this form, which is a really potent form of tension… except when he ends the album with the equivalent of a shrug and ‘the creator has a master plan’, which screams of a copout, and an album that won’t be more disruptive. Which is absolutely fine, it’s not really trying to be, but he’s once again manufacturing his own distance. Still, when R.A.P. Ferreira slides into an off-kilter vibe between vintage Native Tongues and Digable Planets with mixes that are more spacious and textured, it does click, and can lead to enough lonely greatness to resonate - great late night walk album, if you can get out. light 8/10

Conan Gray - Kid Krow - This is probably the most requested album I’ve gotten across social media in recent memory, and I’ll admit to being a little shocked by that. For those of you who don’t know, he was a vlogger but also a pretty serious musician in his own right - he’s opened for Panic! At The Disco, he’s built a following and a pretty rabid fanbase, so I was hoping this would be a short but interesting listen. And… look, I’m not all that impressed. What it reminds me of a weird mishmash of 80s-inspired and quasi-theatrical Gen Z pop, some of Billie Eilish’s cadences and hushed delivery, and a lingering whiff of fuckboi rap… minus the actual rapping. Now part of this is just an immediate distaste for his voice - a very willowy timbre that just doesn’t have much intensity, made all the more blatant when he’s expected to sell more loud dramatic moments and he’s mixed with a filter in a way to disguise how he can’t really do it - but it also comes in the content: he’s not really an active participant in most of his stories, and when he is he’s not that likable - there’s a petulance that creeps through that just sets my teeth on edge. His response to exes potentially spreading lies about him or acting crazy is to take the high ground… and then double down on the same pettiness, and when you have an album with so much of it, the sourness not conveyed well becomes a big problem; it’s not the petty melodrama in and of itself, it’s how it’s delivered. And while I have issues with the production too - for the bedroom pop formula it’s pretty far from subtle or textured while still having a lot of sloppy and cheap-sounding percussion, and the bass presence is really inconsistent - by the time we get to the cut ‘Affluenza’, where the framing is less calling out the bullshit of the term and more playing sympathetic to overprivileged Hollywood kids, I tap out HARD. The little league song was kind of cute, though - 4/10, can’t recommend it.

Four Tet - Sixteen Oceans - So this was another opportunity for me to go on a deep dive of an electronic artist I was only familiar with in passing, and going back through this back catalog… I kind of wish I felt more than lukewarm on this. Part of it is the feeling that his sound has shifted away from the jazzier, organic crackle of his earliest projects like Dialogue and Pause that had a bit more of an R&B vibe for something more slivered and cool and downtempo, where the consistent dabblings with acoustic folk get more brittle and sharp… which I can appreciate, I guess, but it doesn’t grip as strongly as the electronic music I’ve come to love - melodically developed and very well mixed, but a little distant. And unfortunately that’s kind of true with this project as well - a little pluckier, the keyboards feel a little more spare and glassy, the percussion is a bit more reserved, we get smatterings of field recordings and vocal samples and ambient touches to enhance a more meditative, downtempo vibe… but it’s also not all that interesting with few distinctive highlights. At least for me I prefer my downtempo electronic music to have a core of texture or flow or at least warmth that Sixteen Oceans doesn’t quite have - it’s more meandering and scattered, and while it’s pleasant it really doesn’t stick with me, and yet not quite as alien or crystalline in the Visible Cloaks lane to really wow me there either, not helped by vocal fragments surely here to accentuate humanity but just wind up feeling all the more out of place. It’s also not helped by small clusters of track fragments that don’t add to anything - more interludes, but they don’t really build or enhance the flow of the project, or feel well-positioned. Overall, it’s fine, and I think the long-time fans will like it okay, but if I want downtempo electronica in 2020, I’m sticking iwth Spunkshine. 6/10

Lauv - ~how i’m feeling~ - I heard about the backlash to this project before I even heard it - that the extended drip-feed of singles had underwhelmed everybody and had led to a project that was way too long and way too basic for its own good. And I’m sitting back here with the obsevation “yeah, that’s been true about Lauv since he started” - I put him in a similar category as Bazzi and even a fair few of the current generation of bedroom pop acts with the homegrown, kind of ramshackle monogenre approach to pop where the twee smallness, #basic content, and shaky construction is kind of the point, for better and for worse. So for the sophomore album to follow in that lane doesn’t surprise me - and honestly, it’s not that far removed from what we got on I met you when I was 18. Now it’s hard not to notice how some of the problems are magnified here - we have twenty one songs, over an hour, and where the last Lauv album alleviated this with songs that picked up brighter melodies or slightly more propulsive grooves, this is a project that’s sliding towards minimal restraint with increasingly spare and pseudo-lo-fi arrangements, which start to run together and lose their lustre when you have nearly two dozen of them and not a lot of variation. Which is kind of a shame, because Lauv’s quavering wistfulness in the vein of Shawn Mendes isn’t a bad fit for his slightly more detailed - albeit the definition of ‘basic’ - style of writing, and he can write decent hooks. And hell, the homegrown, messy situations of anxiety, drug abuse, longing for closeness in a real relationship and existential emptiness where even the online experience isn’t working, there’s a decent core there, especially with way too much self-awareness and framing that’s not about to treat him like much of a protagonist. But this circles back to my larger issue with the project as a whole: we have a lot of skeletons of short but potent songs that are really dependent on producers to elevate them to greatness, which when you have Jon Bellion or Mike Elizondo on production or guest stars like Alessia Cara or BTS, you get bright moments… but they’re few and pretty far between on a lot of clumsily mixed tracks with The Monsters & Strangerz with tinny pickups and underweight melodies. Still, those moments are just good enough to push this to an extremely light 6/10… and man, that’s generous indeed.

Kelsea Ballerini - kelsea - It feels weird that I’ve been quietly in Kelsea Ballerini’s corner since she started putting out projects, never quite loving her strain of pop country but there have been measurable improvements and there’s been a streak of sharper insight that’s run just below the surface and is seldom praised. So again, I actually had expectations that she’d continue the upward trajectory from Unapologectically… and sadly, that didn’t quite happen, because kelsea is all over the damn place. Because on the one hand it has some the more detail-rich songwriting and warmer tones I liked from her country side, which are the easy highlights for me… placed along side the clunky trap-pop tunes that either sound imported from the mid-2000s, feel like a lesser version of Lucy Hale songs from 2014, or hit a weird point of discomfort with being pop songs. She doesn’t want to go to the club, she’s got a weird relationship with L.A., she plays ‘the other girl’ opposite Halsey even as they try to make 2020’s ‘Does He Love You’, it’s putting forward an image that she wants to peel back, it was the throughline of her lead-off single ‘homecoming queen?’ - even as the music is reinforcing the image. It’s odd because this album does have a comfort zone in country and I’d argue that Kelsea has an emotional intelligence in her songwriting that has always punched above her weight class, and that makes me question how much the label was pushing for the pure pop pivot in sound thanks to her collaborations, or playing in the same territory as Maren Morris - all the more painfully ironic because with the Highwomen Morris is making the best music of her career! But honestly, I wouldn’t have minded the pop pivot if it didn’t feel like across the entire album the percussion is increasingly overmixed and programmed - this isn’t Joey Moi production, you don’t need to pull cues from him - and all of this leads to the frustrating feeling that for trying to find a sound to call her own on a self-titled project, Kelsea Ballerini took a step back with this. Strong 6/10, but I’ll admit I expected more.

Donald Glover - 3.15.20 - I didn’t expect this to get a full-length public release, because Donald Glover is the sort of artist who’ll just leak something abstract or weird in a place and then yank it from distribution just because he can, especially as he’s retired his Childish Gambino moniker… but it looks like his label wanted something to be accessible, so after he put the entire album on his website last weekend, it’s finally hit streaming sites and that means I can talk about it… and in a way, I kind of get why Glover wanted this away from the Childish Gambino name, because that might have set expectations that this album absolutely doesn’t reach. Forget the fact that he’s not rapping much or that this clearly doesn’t have the ambition or swell of “Awaken, My Love!” or Because The Internet, even by the standards of meandering vibe albums where this project clearly resides, what this reminded me most of was the Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment project from 2015 Surf, where all the loose, offbeat sloppiness got a pass and eventually wound up as a lot less than the sum of its parts. And it’s not because the central idea behind many of these parts is bad, in showing a juxtaposition of existential emptiness in the black experience and some of the horrible things people have to do to survive and still find some vestige of happiness, and the larger question of predetermination has him wondering if folks even have a choice, and it can lead to some stark and subtle moments. Shame the production is a complete mess - I had issues with the vocal filters back on the last album and now not only are they back, they sound more tinny and canned than ever, as do any of the acoustic guitars. Yeah, there are some stabs at funk and shuddering, glitchy electronics - that feel incredibly stiff and lacking texture and featuring transitions and outros that go on way too long and fracture the vibe; for a project like this you’d think there’d be more organic warmth or subtle grit if only to round the sharper edges, but since this production has been an issue with Gambino for years now, I have to repeat myself: it’s really damn clunky. And yes, as much as that clash is part of the point even for showing the constant niggling disruption of the vibe, it sacrifices flow that arguably feels more valuable, and exposes this as more undercooked and underwritten b-sides cobbled together with a loose idea that feels increasingly tenuous… all of which hit way harder with ‘This Is America’ two years ago, which is when the first ‘single’ from this project was released on ‘Feels Like Summer’… which is still probably the best cut here. Strong 5/10.

The Weeknd - After Hours - There’s a part of me that feels weird reviewing albums by The Weeknd - I tend to be really positive on the singles or a few scattered deep cuts… but I’d argue he hasn’t made a fully great project since Thursday and Echoes of Silence, and thus when I saw the avalanche of hype for the newest project riding some of his best lead-off singles to date, I was excited but I knew to temper my expectations. And that might have been the right idea because while this album is probably his most cohesive to date in terms of flow and it doesn’t seem to have any obvious duds in the same way previous projects did, why do I have the strange feeling that this should be hitting me harder than it is? I know The Weeknd got criticized on his last two albums about going too ‘pop’, but at least it provided him an incentive to structure tighter hooks and sharper structures; where I took issue was falling towards lethargic, softer sounds that could get tedious. This is not that for the most part, but that’s because The Weeknd is embracing a suffocating, flagrantly 80s-inspired synthwave palette that often feels cranked to the most massive size possible… not always to the album’s benefit, I should add, when the cheaper trap drum machines are mixed just as tightly to the front, and that’s not even touching on how many swampy layers The Weeknd is drowning in. It sounds expensive, but it’s also overmixed to be a lot at once, and I can’t deny that it doesn’t quite have the same bite as the rickety, darker atmospherics I’ve preferred from him. More than ever it is a project that wants to envelop every corner of the experience with The Weeknd’s fractured, reckless angst, with no guests or other voices in the room as he claws his way through a bad relapse and the brutal conflict between his rapacious urges and the fragments of better judgement to let this girl move on with her life, especially when he knows just how much of a hall of mirrors he’s wallowing in. And in the moments of shameless excess like the lead-off singles and ‘Faith’ and even the heel-turn of ‘Escape From LA’, if enough structure is there to support the atmosphere it works incredibly well… but let’s not ignore how this is not an unfamiliar arc for The Weeknd, nor is the writing as detailed or flagrant - which can make sense in the numbness of an overdose but it means chunks of this album run together fast. At the end, The Weeknd would prefer to tear away this relationship for good even if it leaves him bleeding out - a moment of self-sacrifice that doesn’t feel earned after the gaslighting on ‘Repeat After Me’, but it makes sense on a project drowning in its own ego, and even if that’s the point on the project that’s probably his best since Trilogy, it reminds me a bit of Phantoms by Marianas Trench as a coda to a story that should have ended sooner, and even if that’s the point too, for me it doesn’t quite make for a transcendent experience. Good, not quite great yet. 7/10