In Revue- 'Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress' (Godspeed You! Black Emperor)

You're face-to-face with gods within the first 20 seconds of Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, anarchistic post-rockers Godspeed You! Black Emperor's fifth LP and their first collection of new material since their 2010 reformation. These are magisterial figures descending from a cloudy mountaintop to impart riff-heavy wisdom. Imagine Zoroastrian deity Ahura Mazda drowning in a tar pit or Egyptian serpent Apep constricting Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi and you're close to the divinely sludgy sound GY!BE lets loose for the first several minutes of opener "Peasantry or 'Light! Inside of Light!'" It isn't just the guitars; Aidan Girt's drums heavily stumble like Rick Ross off of 50 lagers. The bass rumbles could drown out the noise of a misfiring train engine. Few bands understand the grandeur of noise this well.

The way they dedicate a good deal of time to quietly trembling drones, instead of knee-shaking guitar solos, is arguably the most impressive (at times frustrating) thing about Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress. It's still impressively orchestrated noise, but the kind that requires you to focus on nuanced ebbs and flows. "Peasantry…" hits you with two balled-up fists; fuzzy, scraping twins "Lambs Breath" and "Asunder Sweet" finger walk down the back of your neck. You can hear organs and keyboards coughing up blood because there isn't anything fighting for sonic space. There’s a particular pin-drop moment, near the coda of "Lambs Breath," when you witness post-Apocalyptic Earth once all of the detritus has been swept away. I was walking through a crowded university parking garage the first time I heard it, but I felt completely alone. The rows of cars represented those who didn't make it out. Even an eerie radiator hum is cause for celebration in this desolate world. Noise comes at premium.

Which can test your patience if you're expecting the skyward Godspeed You! Black Emperor of Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. Nearly half of the album's 41 minute run time is given over to the aforementioned void of noise. There is the occasional Middle-Eastern violin in "Asunder, Sweet" and brain scrambling horn sound, but nothing seems to last for long. I anxiously tapped my right foot during the mid-section because it was so unsettling. We live in disconcerting times though and a "political" outfit like GY!BE understands that. Terrorist groups dominant international headlines. Co-pilots are crashing planes in the French Alps after endlessly researching suicide methods on the dank recesses of the Internet. The bad news can pile up so much that a Kenyan school massacre resulting in 147 dead is pushed aside. How the hell can you have hope when those are the headlines? If it's true that music is a reflection of that society that makes it, then we really are "trapped in the belly of this horrible machine" as “the machine is bleeding to death."

The funny thing about humanity though is that it is blessed/cursed with immutable hope. Godspeed You! Black Emperor isn’t any different. For all of the agony they and their audience endure on Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress, GY!BE end with the defiant Sturm und Drang of "Piss Crowns Are Trebled." The closer lets the damns loose and hits some of the highest highs that I've ever heard from the collective. That initial earthquake of a riff comes back, but now it's empowering rather than fear mongering. Sophie Trudeau's violin here should score a person's entire life being rewound, it's that affirming. The drums stop stumbling and lock into focus. After 27 minutes of horror, we're given a reprieve. The kind that can lift you up out of the bowels of hell if you need it to. That will make the world seem brighter. Gods, saviors or superheroes don't come down from on-high when you want them to, they show up when you need them to.

Death Grips release instrumental album 'Fashion Week'

Early January is usually a quiet time for music releases, so it shouldn't necessarily come as any surprise that the corpse of Death Grips has reanimated to deliver an unholy racket entirely unprompted. At this point, the only thing we were expecting from the now expired band was jenny death, the second half of the powers that b.

The instrumental album Fashion Week then is a complete and total curveball that no one saw coming. The chaotic electropunk that Death Grips always cultivated is in full-effect, though MC Ride's voice never cuts through the chatter. Nevermind that exclusion because its thoroughly enjoyable from what I've heard, and actually goofy in the case of "Runway N."

Speaking of jenny death it looks like we can expect a physical release of the powers that b featuring both n***** on the moon and jenny death on February 10. If that sounds like an eternity from now, you have Fashion Week to keep you company and the knowledge that Death Grips love a surprise digital release.

(You can download Fashion Week through the band's website or Soundcloud and listen to it all on a YouTube playlist. It is worth pointing out that the song titles of Fashion Week spell out JENNYDEATHWHEN, so there's one more thing to tease you with.)

In Revue- 'Ultraviolence' (Lana Del Rey)

"He used to call me DN, that stood for Deadly Nightshade, cause I was filled with poison, but blessed with beauty and rage. Jim told me that. He hit me and it felt like a kiss. Jim brought me back, reminded me of when we were kids"

Those depressive lines exhaled by Lana Del Rey in the opening of "Ultraviolence" contain details rarely heard from the late night siren. On her still divisive first album, Born to Die, listeners were privy to similar stories of hopeless female characters and the seedy men they sought, but names typically weren't afforded. What you were left with were sordid tales that while compelling, were bizarrely unrelatable because they skimped on specifics. 

Ultraviolence scrawls those forgotten notes in blood red lipstick across every page. The aforementioned verse purportedly deals with Del Rey's time in a cult-like offshoot of Alcoholics Anonymous called Atlantic Group. Whoever "Jim" was, he held enough sway to make blind fury seem beautiful. On the mournful piano ballad "Old Money" she mentions her father, Robert Grant, whose love and support inspired her to push through trying times. She also alights on her "mother's glamor" a figure rarely heard from in Del Rey's work. Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach's narcotized surf-rock effort "West Coast" has Del Rey keenly observing a Parliament cigarette’s dull flicker, as she sings Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen" on a beachfront balcony. With the picture Del Rey paints, you can see the waves crashing in her rear-view mirror as she pulls out of a sand covered parking lot. These yarns are no less gloomy than those on Born to Die, but the rich details she weaves in make it feel that way.

Which is part of what makes the push in the music blogosphere to heap praise on Ultraviolence extremely frustrating. Pitchfork readily declared the new record "gorgeous and rich" whereas Born to Die had tracks like "Carmen" and "Diet Mountain Dew" that were "trifles." In Stereogum's "Premature Evaluation", Tom Breihan (a writer I enjoy tremendously) argues the difference between Born to Die and Ultraviolence is "vast" while noting "it’s just as euphorically fake as Born to Die was. It’s just that LDR fakes it realer now." If he means Lizzy Grant's carefully curated personae as Lana Del Rey is "realer" because her narrative bent has grown, then he's right. Nowhere in the piece though does he praise Del Rey's eagle eye for detail. So what we're left to assume is Del Rey is more laudable now because she's stuck to the glum, romantic wanderlust Born to Die was reviled for.

Logically this revaluation makes as much sense as the imbecilic criticism the Miami Heat's LeBron James has faced over the past four years. In that span, he won two championships and nabbed two MVPs, though those achievements were dwarfed in conversation by his "shortcomings. " Supposedly, he didn't take game-winning shots or come up big in the clutch. Listening to anyone of a certain age tell it, Michael Jordan was God incarnate deity and James was some schlub from Akron. When Del Rey's Born to Die was minted in January 2012, writers lambasted it for sounding samey and being devoid of "human emotion." Never mind anchoring tracks "Video Games" and "National Anthem" captured an emotional desperation uncommon in Top 40 flavored pop. No, "Video Games" had grown stale since its 2011 premiere and "National Anthem" was no different than a "faked orgasm." Her image was "manufactured" in the mind of NME, who conveniently forgot about artists from Bob Dylan to David Bowie and Beyoncé who have profited greatly from an image far removed from reality. 

In recent times, the artist most comparable to Del Rey is rapper Rick Ross. While he now receives plaudits for his kingpin character, he didn't with 2006's Port of Miami or Trilla in 2008. Then he was a "generic gangster" who had zero personality. But in July 2008 word broke he'd been a correction's officer and instead of cashing in his chips on the drug-lord alias, he doubled down. Not accounting for an increased lushness in production, his virtually unassailable 2012 tape Rich Forever isn't a far cry from Trilla, just as: Born to Die, Paradise, and Ultraviolence are of a similar cut.

And like Ross, the actual difference between Del Rey's newly praised work and her old loathed material is production. In place of Born to Die's tinny orchestras and canned strings are bluesy guitars, gut punching drums, clearly ringing piano and limpid violins. "Pretty When You Cry" has producer Dan Auerbach playing a sooty, reverberating guitar that makes "all the special times" Del Rey spent with an ex distant memories. It'd be a better fit for David Lynch's noirish nightmare Blue Velvet than Del Rey's own cover of the Bobby Vinton tune. Bearing ready-made comparisons to a James Bond theme, the alluring "Shades of Cool" languishes at a slow waltzing pace. Granted most waltzes don't incorporate wah-wahing guitar and to my knowledge Bond songs are bereft of references to men who could love drugs more than any woman. 

When Ultraviolence moves out of a 60s psych-blues feel, it's no less successful. "Money Power Glory"'s stagnated drum machine claps and a deceptively calm synthesizer only magnify Del Rey's devilish seduction routine. "I'm gonna take them for all that they've got," she ensures. Tasteful gulps of tenor saxophone and bending pedal steel in Nina Simone cover "The Other Woman" end the album on a dour note. Del Rey's pained warble conveys the lonely image of a woman waiting for her secret lover to come to her. Despite her "French perfume" and manicured nails, she can't keep him around. That's not how "love" works.  Hoping and wishing don't transfer into adoration. It has to be mutual to last and if it’s not, it gradually becomes indistinguishable from obsession.

Though Ultraviolence's through-line is intense longing blurring into obsession, there's room for other material on the LP. "F***ed My Way to the Top"'s title is betrayed by Del Rey's insistence "Life is awesome, I confess. What I do, I do best. You got nothing, I got tested. And I passed, yes." In an interview with Grazia Del Rey admitted: 

"It’s about a singer who first sneered about my allegedly not authentic style but later she stole and copied it. And now she’s acting like I am the art project and she the true super artist. My God and people actually believe her, she’s successful! I shouldn’t continue ranting, it doesn’t get anywhere."

So what scans as an account of sexual conquests rapidly mutates into a Rakim sized boast of artistic prowess. "Brooklyn Baby", arguably Ultraviolence's centerpiece, is a satirical embrace of every posh sensibility Del Rey's been accused of having. "Well my boyfriend's in the band, he plays guitar while I sing Lou Reed. I've got feathers in my hair. I get down to Beat poetry. And my jazz collection's rare, I can play most anything," she jokes over a sumptuous blend of Mellotron and acoustic guitar. Even with her tongue firmly in cheek, there's bite in Del Rey's words. This is what brought her notoriety and she's not changing. She's defying audiences to like her and in the case of Ultraviolence, overwhelmingly succeeding.

What's New(s)?

Ticket prices for Beyoncé/Jay Z "On the Run" have dropped

 
While speculation continues to run rampant about the Knowles/Carter family elevator incident, Forbes is reporting that resale ticket prices for their massive summer tour have fallen since the footage was first released by TMZ. Culling from TiqIq, Forbes' Jess Lawrence writes that "average price across all "On the Run" tour dates was $306.22, behind only Justin Timberlake and Paul McCartney for the most expensive tour of the summer on the secondary market." Since last Monday, that $306.22 price tag has dipped to $264.73, which still sits in the top 5 for summer tours, but represents a 13.5% decrease in just over a week's time.

That decline comes despite a pubic statement intended to quash the story and a recent promo video which features everyone from Sean Penn to Don Cheadle and Rashida Jones. While the statement has seen mixed success at best, the fake trailer promo has been popular enough that fans are asking for the married couple to make it into an actual movie. So yet again, Ann Perkins maybe the one who saves the day after all.

(The tour kicks off June 25 and tour dates can be found below, along with the "Run" video.)

Tour Dates:
6/25 Miami, FL- Sun Life Stadium
6/28 Cincinnati, OH- Great American Ballpark
7/1 Foxborough, MA- Gillette Stadium
7/5 Philadelphia, PA- Citizen's Bank Park 
7/7 Baltimore, MD- M&T Bank Stadium
7/9 Toronto, ON- Rogers Centre
7/11 East Rutherford, NJ- Met Life Stadium
7/15 Atlanta, GA- Georgia Dome
7/18 Houston, TX- Minute Maid Park
7/20 New Orleans, LA- Mercedez-Benz Superdome
7/22  Dallas, TX- AT&T Stadium
7/24 Chicago, IL- Soldier Field
7/27- Winnipeg, MB- Investors Group Field
7/30 Seattle, WA- Safeco Field
8/2-8/3 Los Angeles, CA- Rose Bowl
8/5-8/6 San Francisco, CA- AT&T Park

Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis set to release a new solo album

 




 
 




 

Nearly three years have passed since Dinosaur Jr. guitarist J Mascis released his gorgeous debut solo album Several Shades of Why, and now fans of the LP have follow-up Tied To A Star to look forward to. While guesting on Late Night with Seth Myers, the traditionally reserved Mascis let Myers break the news that the new LP would be "out this summer" on Sub-Pop. Other than that small bit of info and the above album cover, there isn't much known about the album, but Mascis' week-long stint with Late Night bandleader Fred Armisen and the 8G Band may lead to more details. 

As for Dinosaur Jr., the indie rock guitar gods will be headlining New York's 4 Knots Festival on July 12, as a replacement for the Julie Ruin whose lead singer Kathleen Hanna is currently battling Lyme's Disease. Dates for the trio can be seen below and you can watch the Late Night clip here (Mascis begins near the 4:40 mark).

Tour Dates:
5/28 New York City, NY- Music Hall of Williamsburg
5/30 Nelsonville, OH- Nelsonville Music Festival
7/12 New York City, NY- 4 Knots Festival
7/18-7/20 Pemberton, BC- Pemberton Music Festival
11/7-11/9 Austin, TX- Fun Fun Fun Fest


Check back tomorrow for more of the newest in new(s) and follow AllFreshSounds on Twitter for updates throughout the day.