Someone has put Darth Vader’s
Imperial March in a major key and it no longer sounds foreboding and evil but
foreboding and triumphant! A little transposition when Vader made his entrance
and those Star Wars films may have been totally different.
4.untitled unmastered –
Kendrick Lamar
i can’t think of one
particular track off kendrick’s new album to spotlight here. that’s what
happens if you don’t title your tracks people don’t remember which is which. in
fact trying to think back over it i can’t recall much about the album at all. i
remember in the middle of a track near the end of the album kendrick sounds
like he’s in his basement with some other guy or guys and someone is strumming
listlessly on a guitar and kendrick talks about doing a 15 minute jam. i
remember ‘pimp pimp hooray!’ because that reminds me of the title of his last
album. is it that titles help a lot with remembering music by giving you something
to associate the music with? do they signpost what an album was about? i do like
this album i just can’t remember much about it
‘I get a little bit Genghis
Khan / I don’t want you to get it on with nobody else but me’ It’s a great
line, but isn’t it a tad over the top? Genghis Khan massacred whole populations
after all; the singer may be jealous, but is he really thinking of committing
mass murder? Maybe a little bit Othello instead? ‘I get a little bit Othello /
I don’t want you to get it on with another fellow’. Now that is a better
metaphor, don’t you think?
The website Kill
Screen
alerted me to this beauty. PUP have put together a bunch of snippets from old
video games but have replaced the original text with lyrics from their song. So
you get scenes like Super Mario saying ‘I DON’T GIVE A SHIT’, and the Dark
Queen from Battletoads ruing that ‘3 BEERS AND I’M SO MESSED UP’. It would be
mainly a novelty if the tune wasn’t so damn catchy. That ‘WOOOOOOOO-OOOOO-OOOO’
in the chorus is fantastic, and the ‘she says that I need to grow up’ at the
end just tops it off. This is a perfect track for people in their 30s who
remember what it was like when they were 11 – perhaps because they still act
like it.
Lucius have finally
achieved Brooklyn goodness on their new album ‘Good Grief’. There are many
strong tracks, but opening track ‘Madness’ feels like the one that kicked off
this new and better era of Lucius for me as it was also the first tune I heard
from the new album. In keeping with its title ‘Madness’ is a slightly twisted
song where the lyrics make the narrator sound a little not herself: ‘You were
standing there with a gun up to my head,’ says the first verse, ‘I cannot lie,
there is a tingling down my spine …’ The madness theme is continued later on
the album with ‘Going Insane’, in which both singers repeat those words over
and over again, trying their best to sound like they are going off the deep
end. On ‘Madness’ though the crazies are kept at bay, and it has beautiful orchestration,
which brings the piece to a satisfying and theatrical conclusion.
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