What's New(s)?

Andy Warhol directed clip of a 1967 Velvet Underground concert surfaces

Last week was a very good week for the Velvet Underground. First there was the well publicized news that a 1966 acetate of the band's "Scepter Sessions" was going up for auction, and now Spin is reporting (with help from Open Culture) that a 33-minute film of the Velvets performing in Boston in 1967 was posted last Wednesday on YouTube.

Simply entitled The Velvet Underground in Boston, the Andy Warhol directed footage was found by the artist's museum in 2008 and premiered at New York's MOMA in 2010. Since then it was essentially gathering dust until a YouTube account called "John Colon" liberated it from the museum on the 21st. Shot at Boston's Tea Party Club, the clip bursts with sudden pans, zooms, and abrupt edits that are as jarring as the band's lacerating wall of noise. In fact, "noise" or more appropriately "noise rock" is the best way to describe VU's set since nothing is distinguishable behind Warhol's constant knob twiddling. Considering very little complete footage exists of the band, any performance is a complete revelation.

Raekwon debuts new collabo "Call of Duty" with Akon

 

If the Wu-Tang Clan really is forever, then today is one of those days that offers unassailable proof.  This morning saw Ghostface Killah teaming up with BADBADNOTGOOD and Danny Brown for a brilliant round of freewheeling; this afternoon Ghost's frequent Wu-collaborator Raekwon dropped the latest effort from his upcoming sixth LP FILA (Fly International Luxurious Art). 

Entitled "Call of Duty", the track features a riotous hook from R&B singer Akon and Raekwon nimbly recalling "roughed up stones" and "murders by number in Monaco." He even crafts a slight allusion to his recent feud with RZA, saying, "When we go, yo, we go together; whatever is said, it’s still combat boots on the door." Not even internal disputes can bring the Wu down.

(You can listen to "Call of Duty" here and look for FILA to drop later this year.)

 

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

In Revue- 'Oxymoron' (Schoolboy Q)

"My grandma showed me first strap" Schoolboy Q giddily snarls in "Gangsta", the off-balanced banger opening his major label debut. On first listen it's one of millions of gun references that have popped up in hip-hop since Schoolly D "copped his pistols" in '85. If you're an interloper you'd roll your eyes and call it a day. But if you packed it in you'd be missing something most of those millions haven't been able to do, make perilous gangster talk sound uplifting. For the duration of Oxymoron's gut-wrenching hour, that's precisely what the Black Hippy crew-member does.

Of course not every line in Oxymoron possesses familial innocence. The record is replete with tales of casual sex, drug consumption, and gang violence that would make the bravest of souls noxious. Streetwalkers hit the corner regardless of whether or not they have pneumonia. Baseheads take over entire parks and no matter what room you walk into people will be carrying. The only reason Oxymoron doesn't suffocate is because Q's the kind of guy that'll crack a joke when things couldn't be tenser. He'll refer to wilin' out as "going hamhock" and spotlight a jiggling belly as he dodges junkyard dogs in the hypnotic Raekwon feature "Blind Threats." If the tongue was ever sharper than the sword it’s here.

Quite honestly few tongues in rap can twist in as many directions as Schoolboy Q's. In the aforementioned "Gangsta" he: snarls, imitates his mother, elongates "b****" into something almost unpronounceable, and manages about 400 "YAWK YAWKS." Blissful Chromatics sampler "Man of the Year" turns Q's s***-talking to stutters as he can hardly believe the breathing room his career has afforded. "Make mills from a verb" as he succinctly puts it. While the electro slither of "Studio" arrives as a half-baked pop bid, Q fully commits to the premise. He calms down to match the muted drums and chipmunk cries; allowing himself to get caught up in the moment.

Commitment alone doesn't carry Oxymoron to the finish-line though. The record has one of the best collections of beats since Kendrick Lamar unleashed good kid, m.A.A.d city. It's a musical factory where you'll get caught on a hook if you move around enough. Tyler, the Creator's wailing tornado sirens in "The Purge" draw you in, instead of sending you fleeing from the blood-soaked scene. "Los Awesome", Pharrell's clattering effort is the type to appear on a 90s Cash Money production if the budget was in the 7 digits. And even when a song is bare-bones in construction there's top-dollar craftsmanship involved. "Collard Greens" is the ideal of this standard. Dark "chintzy" keys call to mind Lamar's smash-hit "Swimming Pools (Drank)." MPCs are mashed with cement hands and drums bounce harder than Super Balls. It's an endorphin rush of sounds, one that fully energizes both Q and Lamar. School ticks off his drugs of choice like an overeager surveyor while Lamar becomes a whirling dervish of language. He'll steal your girl in Español before adapting a Houston drawl to  "slow it down." On the other side of the tracks, all "Prescription/Oxymoron"'s first half has to offer are stereo-pans, soft whooshes, trilling violins, and sobering handclaps. Still it's enough to pull at heart strings and when School's daughter Joy cuts through the pill-malaise to ask "what's wrong daddy?" dry eyes are an impossibility.

While the entirety of "Prescription" aims to leave a mark, Oxymoron is more impactful when personal details come in sprays. The Alchemist's lateral beat in "Break the Bank" sees Schoolboy Q hopping in a Nissan seconds after tipping his bucket hat to a departed "cuzzo.” Q could've dedicated a whole track to his uncle's worsening drug addiction; instead he tucks it in between Sega Genesis' and N64s in album centerpiece "Hoover Street." In my own life I've idolized uncles I never knew well, so I can't begin to imagine one shriveling up in front of my eyes. "He sweats a lot and is slimming down, I also notice moms be locking doors when he around," Q paints in painstaking detail over a canvas of bass knocks and ominous synth. And that's precisely where Oxymoron and good kid, m.A.A.d city deviate. Kendrick Lamar's game-changer resembled a Hollywood production, albeit one with the vision of Argo or American Hustle. He was a self-professed "good kid" who had to imagine some of the more gnarled elements because he was deliberately being kept away from them. When he asked "if I told you I killed a n**** at 16 would you believe me?" we could comfortably answer no. To its credit, Oxymoron lacks such imagination which is what makes it so uncomfortable. Tales of fallen college football stars and wide-eyed children getting caught up with Crips sound stock, they're not. They're the baggage Q (born Quincy Hanley) carries everywhere. If he ever sheds them and actually gets a "Hollywood ending" to this story, he'll have Oxymoron to thank.

"Man of the Year"

"Break the Bank"

"Enter the Wu-Tang" Turns 20

I've written before about the countless CDs littering my car, about half-cracked cases and fraying cardboard covers I hold on to because of their vitality. I'm unwilling (or unable) to part with them because they all occupy a special place in my cluttered musical brain. Some are recent additions like Yeezus or Wise Up Ghost, while others have been around for a minute; surviving countless scratches and lost cases. Anchoring one of these cluttersome piles in my car is the Wu-Tang Clan's debut 1993 record Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). For me it's the foundation, the enduring anchor. Still in its original case, it's stuck with me like the gum under the table of bulldozing posse-cut "Protect Your Neck". When I first purchased the album, I'd already been orbiting hip-hop writ large, but Enter the Wu-Tang was my entryway into the underground. A ticket to a sideshow of: comic book villainy, wanton violence, and kung-fu flicks. With the record turning 20 over the weekend, I decided it was time to return to the land of Shaolin.

As a gateway into the warped world of the W, "Bring Da Ruckus" decaying drums and deadly-accurate snaps remain an all-time classic. For quotable samples, few in the annals of rap rival "Shaolin shadowboxing and the Wu-Tang sword style...". When two close friends and I pilgrimaged to Chicago's Congress Theatre to see the crew, the whole crowd was in unison repeating the line as it blared out the house speakers. Ghostface Killah's gusto-filled introduction has become mantra in my mind. Self-assured and frenetically paced, his threats "causing terror, quick damage your whole era" were harried, like he had another hit to scurry off to across town. In terms of one-two acts, few in any context can rival the Ghost/Raekwon pairing that sends this track into the stratosphere. Ghost is the rabid attack dog and Raekwon the Mafioso figure holding the muzzle. GZA's warning shot to the world is assassin caliber. His next level internal rhyme-scheme delivered on the promise of the “God MC” Rakim and had the salvo of a bitter veteran whose debut LP met the sound of crickets. And that's just the opening track.

An album spilling this much viscera circa 1993 was almost unthinkable. Sure hip-hop was littered with promises of violence before, though never quite this joyful. When Method Man's dusty voice resolves to "sever the head from the shoulders" over the infernal horns of "Shame On A N****" it’s the by-product of there being nothing good on TV that night. As a marble-mouthed U-God rushes in to announce a shooting outside, Meth is still concerned with a missing tape.  A full two years before Mobb Deep promised to stab brains with nose brain, the Wu was concocting skits focused on banging nuts with spiked bats and force-feeding unwilling participants (assholes sewn shut of course). When hip-hop critics derisively label it "cartoonish violence" this is the album they mean to cite, but never do.

And there is an almost cartoony or comic-like way in which these nine MCs joined together for a hostile takeover. The origin story begins with two cousins, the RZA and the GZA each nursing their own wounds from failed record deals. While GZA put pen to paper and crafted dense tales of "God squad that's mad hard to serve, come fronting hard, then Bernhard Goetz what he deserves", cousin Robert Diggs began scouring the depths of soul/funk samples with the fervor of a gravedigger who loves his job a bit too much. If it were ever possible to hear dirt on a record, RZA made it so. Vocals don't crisply travel through speakers, they float in disembodied fashion. "Can It All Be So Simple" offers its own origin story as told by a ghost. Elsewhere, drums rattle and clank like bones. Guitars, pianos, and keyboards travel in broken loops, decaying in real time. Frequently the group was just shooting the breeze, but fitted atop RZA's atmospheric production even the endearing lines register as threats. Here "the sound of the underground" is more literal than figurative.

Slowly the seven other crew members gathered together, "forming like Voltron". Rap groups were commonplace when the Wu began, but never this unwieldy or spirited. There was: "Genius" GZA, spliff-puffing/s***-talking Method Man (whose rugged amiability guaranteed he'd be the first with a solo record), Raekwon weighing grams in the backroom with a fierce scowl, Ghostface's full-speed ahead delivery. U-God's leaden voice only appeared on the drunken double-dutch of "Da Mystery of Chessboxin" (he was incarcerated for much of the recording), but his sole verse packed a mighty wallop. The criminally underrated Inspectah Deck made up for a less-than-stellar personality through an eagle-eyed rap perspective. Few hard knock tales have ever expressed as much anguish as Deck's legendary second verse in "C.R.E.A.M." where jail bids are served at 15 and stray bullets become commonplace. Masta Killa's ferocious turn on aforementioned "Chessboxin" corroborates the now mythic-story he stayed up all-night writing to gain entrance into the group. And then there's the Ol' Dirty Bastard, named so because "there ain't no father to his style". In an alternate write-up, I'd spend its entire length and breadth fawning about the now-deceased ODB. In a group bursting at the seams with oversized personalities, his looms largest. The man known as Russell Jones' rap "style" has been described as everything from "drunken" to "seesawing" and "sing-song". More frequently he stumbles, composing himself only to bark out a threat or recount the time he got burnt by gonorrhea. More than a feral animal anthropomorphized and taught to rap, he was the group’s irregular heartbeat.

All those stray elements and fragments coalesce into the alien Enter the Wu-Tang. Debut albums have rarely come as insular as this. Not sure what "jakes" are? Then you're out of luck. Never seen a kung-fu film or B-movie schlock; this fraught world will make no sense to you. And yet here we are celebrating its 20th anniversary as it’s routinely heralded as one of the greatest hip-hop records released. Wu-Tang didn't kowtow to the prevailing wisdom of the era (innovators rarely do). We met them on their own terms. Two decades later and they still "ain't nothing to f*** with". If Wu-Tang really is forever (and recent in-house fighting calls that into question), this was the album that ensured their eternality.

What's New(s)?

Arctic Monkeys unveil more tour dates

In support of their excellent fifth LP AM, Arctic Monkeys are heading stateside starting December 3 in Seattle. As if the initial run weren't enough though, the Sheffield mainstays have recently announced an additional slew of dates in January and February of next year. Frontman Alex Turner and crew will trek down south, before hitting up the Eastern shore on a pair of tour dates with the shapeshifting Deerhunter (who will open).

All the scheduled stops can be found below, and after the jump you can find the video for the sobering late-night cut "Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High" below. 

12/3 Seattle, WA - Key Arena
12/4 Portland, OR - Roseland Theater
12/6 Oakland, CA - Oracle Arena
12/7 Los Angeles, CA - Shrine Auditorium
12/8 San Diego, CA - Valley View Casino Center
12/09 Tempe, AZ - The Marquee
12/11 Tulsa, OK - Cain's Ballroom
12/12 Columbia, MO - The Blue Note
12/13 Milwaukee, WI - The Rave
12/14 Kansas City, MO - Midland Theatre
1/30 Miami, FL - The Fillmore
1/31 Orlando, FL - Hard Rock Live
2/1 St. Petersburg, FL - Jaanus Live
2/3 Charlotte, NC - The Fillmore
2/4 Richmond, VA - The National
2/6 Boston, MA - Agganis Arena (w Deerhunter)
2/7 Portland, ME - State Theatre
2/8 New York, NY - Madison Square Garden (w Deerhunter)
2/10 Covington, KY - Madison Theater
2/11 Columbus, OH - LC Indoor Pavillion
2/12 Detroit, MI - The Fillmore
2/14 Minneapolis, MN - First Avenue 

"Why'd You Only Call Me When You're High?"

Raekwon remixes "Royals"

Following the Weeknd's and Rick Ross' remixes of Lorde's impossibly infectious "Royals", the Wu-Tang Clan's resident chef has offered his own take on the New Zealand pop singer's track. Coasting atop the booming beat, Raekwon stays in his lane of "stoves and Range Rovers", and kicking back in some of NYC's finest dining experiences. Lorde's wide-eyed desire to be "royals" reflects the street-wizened vet's constant state of mind, to get the respect a near 20 years in the rap game commands. Raekwon's kept the "Cuban links" on, but he's still craving the crown. 

In addition to sharing his own take on "Royals", Raekwon has dropped the EPMD-indebted "It's My Thing" which may or may not be appearing on his forthcoming F.I.L.A. (Fly International Luxurious Art) release.

Check back in tomorrow for more of the newest in new(s), and visit the AllFreshSounds Twitter account throughout the day for news updates.