Tim's overflowing bounty of 2010 pop riches extravaganza thread

This is the facebook group if you want links:

yeah, but you have to have facebook to look at it

"out my mind, just in time" might be erykah's masterpiece

"desiccated" is kind of the last word i'd ever use re: part one though - it's so rich-sounding!

"rigorous consequentiality" - it only has this if you want it to. and why's it a bad thing anyway?

It's not a bad thing, I just don't like it as much personally. Different strokes. But something like "Hip Hop" just doesn't really appeal to me.

i guess you could say that it's just a mood thing -- 'rigorous conseqnetiality' vs the sensuality of part 2... but there's just something about part 2 that always appeals to me more

i don't want to say that it's "warmth" because i think part 1 has that too, but maybe it's more comforting? that sounds kinda twee tho

idk, it's "prettier"

i'm sort of fishing

yeah I'm happy to sub "comforting" and "pretty". I'm a superficial kinda listener in this regard (and most regards).

hah we had a big argument about this on the badu thread right? about how the 1st one is more critic friendly & what the differences between the two were

is that what happened?

i just remember getting pissed for some reason

all i know is that i identify with part 1 pretty much more than any other album i've ever heard. i feel like it's an album about me.

how do you argue against tho

i feel like you should recuse yourself

part 2 is lovely obv

the left brain/right brain characterisation of pt1/pt2 makes sense to a degree (and i know erykah peddled that line too) but i feel the separation between them is being way overstated - it's a bit reductive to imply that pt1 is the one about being Meaningful and Critic-Friendly and Consequential, and pt2 is the one about Soul and Warmth and Feeling - on both sides i think there's a degree to which those signifiers are being used as a priori reasons to prefer one or the other. but the music on both interweaves both sides really skilfully. if there's a reason for my preferring pt1 - and it's not by much, it's being no 1 of the year as opposed to top 5 of the year - it's because more of the songs are tighter, not because it's political or whatever.

I can only go on the fact that I returned to Pt 2 much more readily and try to extrapolate from there.

pt 2 is objectively better.

/obv troll

Wait, did you actually get some sleep?

well, i havent posted in like 7 hrs, so

obv not

anyway i prefer pt 2 also although i remember being surprised tim didnt talk much about 'honey' when that was a single ... it seemed like a great midpt between approaches

"Honey" is def. my favourite tune on pt 1.

post on ilx, eat, sleep, repeat

i like both new amerykah records relatively well (both in top 5-10 area for their given years). part 2's an easier listen, and i've thrown it on more readily. part 1 feels like a "challenging" sorta record that i dont wanna put on too often, but is then immensely rewarding when i do so (see also: the cure - prnogrphy, scott walker - the drift, there are lots of examples...)

i think 'that hump' is my fav off pt. 1

top to bottom

solder
the healer
that hump
me
after that, it's all kinda equal to me

i love "honey" but doesn't feel right to rank it against the other tunes here

soldier* obv.

ok theres a thread for this

^^ banging post imo

anyway, looking fwd to more of tim's favorites!

for those of you who loved the j stalin, ive come around to thinking that 'gas nation' might be the more consistent record ... so many incredible beats. its got less of a dark glossy 80s feel, a bit more of an open record on the whole, more diverse

it also has 'try again tomorrow' which is like alternate-universe popism smash

ok theres a thread for this

that whole sub-genre of post-Dilla scleroto-rap (and by extension scleroto-soul), whose aesthetic valorisation of queasiness is largely lost on my cloth ears.

aww

(i have no idea what you mean but "scleroto-rap" though?)

GIVE ME YAHZARAH OR GIVE ME DEATH TIM

just kidding, it'd be awesome if you love her song as much as I do but I love your selections and the blurbs so far.

"why dontcha call me no more" is still my #1 jam this year. i'm with you here, moka.

Lee Foss - U Got Me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rioaDZtTJYo

This year it felt a bit like the nu-disco moment finally passed into its autumnal phase, symbolised (and certainly assisted) by Aeroplane's catastrophically misguided album, and more generally a certain sense that everything this style can do now has been done, and exhaustively. I'm not ready for this shift though. My favourite moment dancing this year was to a Classixx DJ set a few months ago, on the first hot day of spring, as the sun was setting. Classixx are hardly disproving the suspicion that the strip-mining of the nu-disco aesthetic is completed; it's more like they simultaneously summarise and popularise a perfected aesthetic, seizing on its most unashamedly joyous qualities and then juicing them up further, until the sound is so ridiculously utopian that half the fun of being on the dancefloor is simply acknowledging that you're all participating in a somewhat cheesy reenactment of drug-enhanced bonding (which makes them sort of like the Moonbootica to Aeroplane's Get Physical).

I don't know if Classixx did or didn't play "U Got Me" that day, as I only discovered it about a month later, but it chimes in perfectly with Classixx's vibe of trapped-in-amber ecstatic lassitude: its round-bottomed R&B-disco strut and twinkling sparkle-melody imagining a world where no-one ever saw the point of moving beyond Evelyn King's "Love Come Down" (similarly, the highlight of the Classixx set was a still unknown to me edit of Madonna's "Lucky Star" that seemed to stretch on forever). Ironically,"U Got Me" samples Keith Sweat's "Twisted", which is nineties not eighties, but itself inhabited a pretty syncretic slow-jam soundworld - smoothness, the right kind of smoothness, never sounds out of time or place. As with Mark E's "R&B Drunkie" (whose sample source was similarly younger than it seemed) what "U Got Me" seems to admire in R&B is precisely its lack of concern about being revivalist or not being revivalist, which frees it up to achieve this kind of "the past is the present" endless summer vibe more easily than dance music per se.

This inherited lack of concern with timeliness ends up being a positive in my book, if only as a point of contrast: at a time of obsessive pointillist sound design and intricate vocal cut ups, it's refreshing and even charming to hear a tune so heavily invested in the densely smeared dazzle of French House: the yearning sampled vocals of "U Got Me" wrap around your ears like fairy floss, light as a feather but voluptuously thick as molasses. Moreover, the hint of R&B boogie in Foss' straight-jacketed slo-mo house groove provides such a useful short-cut to sexiness: whereas much otherwise very similar nu-disco can end up jetissonning sex in favour of pure loved up vibes, "U Got Me" treads the line perfectly, as happy to soundtrack a risque champagne-fuelled pool party as it a packed dancefloor in a field at sunset.

I'm into this ^

A+++++++++++++

and yeah classixx sense of like, revivalism should never be joyless & hidebound & generic & liberarianesque is exactly why they're so good. They handle music like pop DJs

also yeah 'love come down' is a really good exemplar of where this style is coming frmo!

last post then im headed out for real -- i need to do this 'holding back on my hottest secret jams till y-e' thing haha

Yeah it occurred to me this thread might look like that at times! It's more a case of me not tending to hang out much on rolling threads other than funky house sceptics...

that is dope imo

yes "u got me"! glad someone else loved it, it got tumbleweeds when i posted it on the house/techno thread (apart from some cunty vahid snark). love the b-side "happen for a reason" too - j-hud sample!

lee foss himself is pretty hott too

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Ak20vFIRM5U/Sxeknr1PhoI/AAAAAAAAAHg/bbqZaRfKllA/s320/LeeFoss.jpg

Wish he IS hot...

the sound is so ridiculously utopian that half the fun of being on the dancefloor is simply acknowledging that you're all participating in a somewhat cheesy reenactment of drug-enhanced bonding

This is a perfect way of putting it, some of my best 2010 dancefloor memories (or yacht deck memories, to ratchet up the cheese factor that little bit more) have come from exactly this feeling.

Been jamming that Lee Foss EP for a week solid. Enjoy these roundup threads Tim!

Naughty Raver - Tease Me (After Dark Mix)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwsPtmMJtY4

"I love you so much... I'm feeling so hot... You got me goin'... You know ya hit the spot..." Like a lot of the classic early vocal (but only tenuously songful) 2-step garage, "Tease Me" seems rather ambivalent about its own desire, the diva's throaty declarations sounding pavlovian and probably drug-fuelled in their compulsive repetition - this quality was itself picked up from early house I expect, but if so then secretly and mostly unwittingly, a phenotype thrown forward several generations to emerge in a particularly attractive black sheep. The relationship between 2-step and UK funky is rather more straightforward, and I've grown used to stumbling across at least a couple of tunes each year that resurrect the former's capacity for jittery 3am amyl nitrate vibes, tracks whose sexiness and darkness aren't merely co-existent but actually interchangeable. In that regard this tune could easily sit next to Steve Gurley's remix of Lenny Fontana's "Spirit of the Sun" or DJ Klasse & Richie Boy's "Madness on the Streets", which is about as high praise as I can think of.

Naughty Raver's productions are almost always characterised by his gorgeously textured beats, which clutter and stretch out with a rolling fluency that's almost unparalleled, so naturalist that even though the drums here almost entirely follow a two-bar loop I slip into thinking they're playing in real time, alternating between fluttery bongo patterns and hard-hitting snares filled with marvelous fractional hesitations, as if the rhythm itself is suddenly profoundly uncertain about its own amorous adventures (see also, if you can find them, his rather harder percussive work-outs "Drama" and "Sticks & Stones", for the same vibe flipped from druggy-lust to panic and mania respectively). Naughty Raver's drums capture so much of what I love about funky's approach to rhythm, the way they walk this tightrope between organic fluidity and total alienness, beyond which they can achieve a sort of tumbling inevitability, the beats always pulling you forward into themselves with a logic of its own, as if the producer himself couldn't interrupt the groove if he wanted to.

On the After Dark mix of "Tease Me" (his sexiest tune, and certainly his most successful vocal tune by some distance), he adds an unsettling xylobass riff that's warped to sound as if the tune's heaviness has already busted your speakers. The first time I heard it I actually wondered if something was wrong with my copy. This general trick, which is so cosmically boring (by virtue of over-iteration) in drum & bass or dubstep now, magically regains its effectiveness in such a sexually charged setting, the seduction of "Tease Me" creating a context in which breaking the machine is once again an enticing concept. Rather than simply build on a monolithic insistence on punishing hardness, it becomes another weave in the tune's so-wrong-it's-right lust-overdrive, the sonic heavy petting turning claustrophobic, sucking the air out of your lungs.

Haha I didn't like Fuckpony that much either.

O_o

Children of Love is pretty amazing FYI.

My favourite house albums of this year have been Steffi, Robag Wruhme and Frivolous and they're obviously looking in a different direction entirely to the Art Department etc.

you can probably triangulate frivolous/nicolas jaar/art department if you squint - frivolous def way out in front there though. that and tom trago are the two house albums i think are real keepers this year, above stuff which is just very good (kurtel, wruhme, jaar, steffi, audiofly) and stuff which is not that good (art department)

If you squint very hard indeed.

Matt can you listen to this please:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-ke1Q0hnN0

Cheers Tal for the heads-up!

hey Tim! any chance of a zip of the dancehall tracks from yr column this week?

wait, waht column??? details/link please

link? it's in local freebie papers

I'll try to organise something.

Don't worry Paul I basically cribbed it from stuff i'd already written on here/facebook about my favourite dancehall tracks of this year.