Music of the Weak: The Mid-Year Check-In, Part One

We just hit the mid-way point of 2009, and it turns out that it’s been a pretty phenomenal year for music—if a monumentally shitty year for everything else. We’ve mentioned some of our favorite albums of the year over the course of the last couple of months—Dirty Projectors, DJ Quik & Kurupt, Cymbals Eat Guitars, and if you haven’t grabbed your free copy of Theophilus London’s This Charming Mixtape yet, now’s the time—but here are a handful of albums worth your time that haven’t gotten a whole lot of screen time on TFO. Plus, check in tomorrow as we take a look at our favorite songs of 2009 so far.

Dan Deacon – Bromst

To say that Dan Deacon’s music has matured since 2007’s Spiderman of the Rings is to truly ignore how magnificently immature his music is. Used to be that Deacon merely assembled a clattering racket of abrasive techno, bolted some helium-enriched voices to the top of it, and let the tempo fly. With Bromst, however, Deacon seems to be using the same palate to aim for something that was unfathomable in his early work: emotional impact. And he just about pulls it off. Deacon’s songs have always been overtly joyous, but here his playful spirit is tempered with melancholy, echoing Moby’s Play or LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” without sounding anything like either of them.

Dinosaur Jr. – Farm

DOOM – Born Like This.

Fifty some odd years into rock & roll, and we’ve finally figured out how to do comeback albums. It’s a simple formula, really: Give the people exactly what they want, without becoming a mere shadow of your former identity. In other words, just be perfectly you. DOOM and Dinosaur Jr. both do themselves better than anyone. On Born Like This, MF Doom traffics in breathless raps, dialogue collages and Dan Stuckey references while managing to liquefy the thousand styles he dabbled in before his extended absence into a unified aesthetic and turn J Dilla’s “Lightworks” sketch off of Donuts into an actual song. Dinosaur Jr. churns out a grip of catchy songs tethered by some triumphant guitar work, and make like 1993 never turned grunge into a dirty word.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

It’s increasingly rare, these days, for a band to break through on songs rather than style. While Brooklyn’s The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have plenty of the latter, borrowing liberally from The Cure, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Belle and Sebastian, and just about every late-80’s/early 90’s shoegaze band you could name, it’s with the former that they excel. Each song on the band’s self-titled debut album is tuneful and indelible, which may make it easier to reluctantly get past its twee as fuck song titles—“Young Adult Friction,” “A Teenager in Love,” “This Love is Fucking Right!”—not to mention the ultra-precious band name.

Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

The grooves that flavored their first couple of albums hardened into riffs on their last album, 2006’s incredible It’s Never Been Like That, so it was more than a little ironic that everyone started to call them “the soft-rock Strokes” after that album dropped. Phoenix worked damn hard to find the edge to their dance-influenced pop rock; you’d be hard-pressed to find much that was “soft” about it. Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, on the other hand, lays back in the cut. The rawer sound of It’s Never Been Like That merges with the breeziness of their earlier work—so much that it’s difficult to spot where one ends and the other begins—and the French band’s songwriting kicks up a notch or two.

Ryan Leslie

If you google “Ryan Leslie Obnoxious,” you’ll be directed to a blog post on Leslie’s website where he defends a Facebook status update where he brags about his new credit card. This is the kind of shit we’re dealing with in 2009. Thankfully, though Ryan Leslie’s privileged posturing doesn’t make him the most immediately likable dude in R&B these days, his debut album is packed tight with enough ideas and songs to make his attitude worth putting up with—from classic post-Neptunes, radio-friendly R&B to an AutoTune song that also works as a critique of AutoTune songs.

Wu-Tang Clan – Chamber Music

What the?! Where did this come from? A year and a half after most people presumed 8 Diagrams to be their swan song, the Wu-Tang Clan have stealthily dropped its follow-up. Well, sort-of. Initially touted as a project that would see contributions from all eight living members of the Wu-Tang, in actuality, GZA and Method Man are nowhere to be found on Chamber Music. In their stead, RZA collaborates with a ton of rap legends—Sadat X, Masta Ace, Kool G Rap, M.O.P., AZ, Havoc, and TFO favorite Sean Price. Mostly, though, it’s RZA branding a live band, The Revelations, as the new sound of the Wu-Tang, and alternating rap tracks with instrumental hip-hop. It’s not the burner that their late-period catalogue needs, but it might—emphasis on miiiiight—be a step toward the next chapter.

-Martin Brown, 2009

Comments

[david brothers]

Sean P! should be everybody's favorite. The Ruck Down video was good stuff, exactly the kind of tongue in cheek head crack rap I expect out of Duck Down.

Sincerely yours,
the brokest blogger you know

[Chris Jones]

God, I'm sorry, I can't bring myself to give that third one a chance. I can't even type the name of the band.

[Tucker Stone]

C: I was the same way, the name is horribly off putting. Album isn't bad though. I renamed it Sex Holocaust and retitled all the songs. Still pretty fey, but tolerable.

[Zebtron A. Rama]

The Pains... is probably my favorite album of the year so far. I'm such a sucker for that early Teenage Fanclub sound.

The Wu have a live band!? Really? And it's all right? I'll have to hear it to believe it.

And no love for the new Camera Obscura?

[Marty]

Haven't actually heard the Camera Obscura album yet--but I like the single

Sean Price for life!