The purpose built next generation interstellar Dawn Richard thread

Lol of course there's a VR component to this one.

Like, where does all the money for this shit come from? Surely one failed Danity Kane reunion doesn't bring in the $$$ and these expensive-sounding records don't exactly break even.

maybe sponsored by one of the VR headset companies?

When I interviewed her she said it was easier to find partnerships with companies doing super-new tech like VR that don't necessarily have the capacity to reach bigger acts themselves. The "Not Above That" video was done with VR Playhouse and I assume these were as well. (I don't think I get VR, you need a special headset to actually see it properly, right?) In general I think she's funded her music with side projects in design and animation rather than revenue from the actual music necessarily.

I had trepidation about the album but she really came through, I love that you can't even tell which songs are Machinedrum or Noisecastle on first listen. Everything she did with Kingdom got relegated to that self-contained EP (which like Whiteout is perfectly decent as a curio - Kingdom's beats are as boring as they've been for years but Dawn really came through melody-wise to elevate it). And as much as I love "Not Above That" and "Cali Sun" I think the idea of an album that sounded like Machinedrum ft. Dawn would have been disappointing - when I talked to her she said she was really conscious of that pitfall too. I think the sludgy '90s rock guitars on "Hey Nikki" and "LA" are kind of key in terms of not pandering to any audience, I love them but they're very uncool. Also I love that the most obvious influence of being on a London label is making an honest-to-god grime banger on "Renegades". The break!

Also love that far all the talk of this being a jubilant final chapter, the back half is as gloomy as anything she's ever made.

This is a very me comparison but honestly late '90s Tori Amos is a comparison that keeps springing to mind - in terms of out-there sounds and disparate styles in the service of an artist's idiosyncratic internal logic and self-contained universe, obviously, and also in the way she pushes her vocal range (digitally and otherwise) and also in the way she mangles enunciation (I heard this without a lyric booklet for a month or so and got so many lyrics completely wrong).

Lol of course there's a VR component to this one.

Like, where does all the money for this shit come from? Surely one failed Danity Kane reunion doesn't bring in the $$$ and these expensive-sounding records don't exactly break even.

Lol of course there's a VR component to this one.

Like, where does all the money for this shit come from? Surely one failed Danity Kane reunion doesn't bring in the $$$ and these expensive-sounding records don't exactly break even.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/17/dawn-richard-r-and-b-dance-music-danity-kane?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

This didn't make it into the Guardian piece but I asked her about the bloody triangle and she was like I JUST WANTED PEOPLE TO STOP MANGLING MY SURNAME

great piece

Woke up early this morning so decided to blitz through the entire trilogy in order. I honestly think Redemption is the best of the three, even if the songs are relatively sketchy affairs - the tracks that are badged as interludes like "Vines" and "Lilies" are as fully fleshed out as, say, "Tyrants" and "The Louvre" (my two favourites right now).

Outtakes - or bonus tracks if you prefer:

https://soundcloud.com/dawn_richard/dwn-they-think-they-know

https://soundcloud.com/dawn_richard/dawn-stars

This record delivers in every way, so good.

I like it a lot, I need to listen some more because it's so fragmentary that I haven't really formed a cohesive sense of it. Songs are over just as they're starting to get going.

been revisiting the trilogy and i think i wore myself out on blackheart last year but jesus christ what an album

lex mentioning choirgirl reminds me that the percussion in "goliath" has always reminded me of "liquid diamonds"

this is beautiful

I would like to sink deeper into this album but I'm in danger of just playing "Love Under Lights" on repeat for the rest of the day

I burned out a couple projects ago—they began to sound very monotonous and dreary—but this one brought me back in. It's her best since Armour On imo

would argue that blackheart is extremely nonmonotonous

only song on the new one i'm unconvinced by is "tyrants" bc i'm not sure what it wants to do melodically. everything else bangs.

lotta lyrics about light and expansion

She seems comfortable with the house/EDM production on this one in a way she didn't w/ some of the previous ones. Before she always sounded slightly of out of place, and some of their power and intrigue came from that juxtaposition. Here the sounds fit her so well and she seems so cozy though. The whole feel is much more inviting than Blackheart and Goldenheart.

Perhaps this is an odd parallel but I'm reminded of Kelis' "Flesh Tone" album in terms of the artist expressing joy and exuberance.

ay flesh tone is an extremely good parallel

fav moment on the album at the moment is the video game death sound in the middle of "lazarus"

my fav song of hers this year is "baptize" from her EP with kingdom. the rest of that is kinda bad but that song is awesome.

Dawn places third on Time's top ten songs list:
http://time.com/4575319/top-10-best-songs-2016/

She seems comfortable with the house/EDM production on this one in a way she didn't w/ some of the previous ones. Before she always sounded slightly of out of place, and some of their power and intrigue came from that juxtaposition.

This feels markedly different from the last few in that, even as far back as Black Lipstick, the beats have only mattered when they've been working in the service of the songs. This is the first one where it feels like the beats are the point, especially during the first half. I dunno if that's just down to weaker songwriting or just the effect of the general sensory overload here.

I like this a lot but it doesn't have much that's up there with Blackheart's sublime middle section.

I'd have said Blackheart was way more of a crazy beats showcase than this, but the songwriting on Redemption isn't so much weaker - in terms of immediate hooks and straightforward melody it's her best album yet - as pared-down. When you look at the lyrics it's actually surprising how few of them there are - much of it is way more incantatory than narrative or even poetic (eg "Black Crimes" going to another level when she abandons actual words, "LA" being such an epic even though the structure is just chorus-verse-chorus-repeat central lines til end). Her Tori-like enunciation adds to this feel too, even on more narrative songs like "Hey Nikki".

could not disagree w/ matt more... this album (key final chapter of the unified triptych more accurately) is literally all in the songwriting

I've never cared or paid much attention to the unifying concept of the trilogy but there are fewer vocal hooks or lines sticking in my head than any of the previous albums, and when there are they're mostly in the closing stretch. I've listened to this six or seven times now and maybe there are subtleties that the production is currently overwhelming.

When you look at the lyrics it's actually surprising how few of them there are - much of it is way more incantatory than narrative

This makes more sense to me right now.

Yeah I don't think the "beats are the point" here, it's more just that Machinedrum's production style tends to build up and then showcase the beats during what either are or (but for Dawn's intervention) could have been instrumental choruses, whereas Dawn's work with Druski, with some exceptions, would largely set up the beat and let it run through the track, and her work with Noisecastle III tends to be all over the place (ironically, "Black Crimes" tries exceptionally hard to fit in seamlessly with Machinedrum's sound).

Dawn is sufficiently flexible as a songwriter that she can work with and around these disparate sonic structures, and I think this tends to result in Redemption's songs being more sinuous and lithe, certainly less full-bore/full-tilt than Goldenheart, and also less wired than Blackheart.

But the other aspect of it is simply that these songs are already much more reflective to begin with, even something like "Love Under Lights" is pretty ambiguous about what kind of emotion she's wanting to broadcast or evoke. So whereas on Goldenheart it always felt like Dawn was out ahead of the production, here it's like the production sets up the mise en scene and then she's in the middle of it in a sort of negotiator's role. Our we celebrating? Mournful? Nostalgic? The fact that (I suspect) she's also chosen to place her voice a bit further back in the mix only adds to this vibe. I'd readily concede that there's nothing here that knocks me sideways like the "Sold" component of "Aderall/Sold" - rather, the songs-as-construct approach you head on while it's now Dawn's character and narrative that approach from the sides. I think this is a strength of the songwriting rather than a weakness; as if Dawn thought she needed Machinedrum's relative obviousness production-wise as a counterweight to her own increasing nuance.

Anyway if I had to choose the pick of the bunch it'd probably be BlackHeart by a whisker (or Armor On, if that's an option), but that wouldn't be because of any weakness in Redemption's songwriting.

haha post with r|t|c I guess.

lol rtc

I've been assuming that Dawn has had A LOT of input into the beats here, like I have no real idea which bits are Machinedrum-produced and which aren't.

I wouldn't suggest that she doesn't, but a lot of these beats bear heavy resemblance to the recent Machinedrum album, to the point where I tend to assume that Dawn quite deliberately brought in his "sound" on several tracks.

but yeah the actual production credits don't necessarily breakdown the way I might expect.

I'm not sure I've heard anything recently like "The Louvre." It's part of a chain of songs by women in which her character wanders landscapes while other people do their routines and she loses her mind (Suzanne Vega's "In Liverpool," Aimee Mann's "Fourth of July"), but the arrangement – wow. Those violins: lightness and dread.

I don't think there's that much resemblance between Redemption and solo Machinedrum - not compared to "Not Above That" and "Wake Up", certainly

Well yeah the difference is that Redemption is like actual songs

That's not fair: "Not Above That" is a perfectly decent real song, but it feels very distant from the rest of Dawn's solo work. Hearing Dawn be an R&B "siren" is weird.

I'm not sure I've heard anything recently like "The Louvre." It's part of a chain of songs by women in which her character wanders landscapes while other people do their routines and she loses her mind (Suzanne Vega's "In Liverpool," Aimee Mann's "Fourth of July"), but the arrangement – wow. Those violins: lightness and dread.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, November 29, 2016 12:20 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's a pretty unique inversion of both the trad r&b bedroom jam and the art gallery crossover experiment: it sounds like she's wandering the Louvre but the actual narrative takes place in private; it's in lieu of putting her lover on display that Dawn arranges the song as if she had. And it brings it back to the devotional songs on Armor On, "Heaven" and "Scripture", where she's kneeling to this idea of love that's equivalent to religious faith or artistic rapture.

(I love how you can group Dawn songs by thematic or sonic connection through her albums, as well as in the albums themselves, kind of like her discography works on two axes. Like how "Billie Jean" and "Hey Nikki" are obviously a pair but you could expand that to "James Dean" as well etc etc)

(The other great thing about Dawn's character songs like those three is that she might retell modern myths from different perspectives but it's never the straightforward or expected one - not inversions but subtle shifts in angle. Like "Hey Nikki" could've so easily just been "Darling Nikki"...but from HER PERSPECTIVE!!!111 - but it's just fleshing her out by approaching her with more awe and reverence)

something i wrote in my review but that got cut is the way the chorus of "hey nikki" sounds kind of submerged makes it feel like it's "darling nikki" actively bleeding into her song

That's not fair: "Not Above That" is a perfectly decent real song, but it feels very distant from the rest of Dawn's solo work. Hearing Dawn be an R&B "siren" is weird.

― Tim F, 29. november 2016 12:34 (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, Maya Vik of Young Michael Douglas fame wrote it, and it feels very much like a Maya Vik song to me, at least.

Currently digging the Kate Bush vamping on "Lillies." This album does so many things in such a short span.

tryna figure out where the songs are, nothing's sticking with me.

http://thetalkhouse.com/talkhouse-playlist-dawn-richard/

it makes lots of sense that "little earthquakes" is her tori amos pick!

What a lovely and telling playlist!

After half a dozen listens this album is beginning to surpass Blackheart for me and rise to near the top of my favourites this year. I love everything about it and her. Such energy!

it made my top ten

wow I did not see that Rachel Syme interviewed her (for p4k): http://pitchfork.com/features/interview/9795-the-indivisible-dwn/

love that she gives a shout-out to girlpool

Has she ever listened to Nona Hendryx's Skindiver?

I was always a nerd