Saturday, February 26, 2011

Daft Punk - Tron Legacy Soundtrack

Daft Punk - Tron Legacy Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Published in 2010

One - iPod

So, yeah, this is going to be a weird one. I was going to do a different soundtrack for this one, but a bus ride with my limited iPod has somewhat forced me to choose this one, because I had it and couldn't sleep.

Let's talk about soundtracks for a second. Soundtracks exist in a strange place between music and movies. Some movies are enhanced by their soundtracks, while others are completely dated by them. Dirty Work, dates itself completely by featuring two of the ninetiesist nineties songs to ever ninties ever in it's first couple of minutes. However, there are the iconic ones that will never leave your head. The End, by the Doors, playing over the end of Apocolypse Now (that whole soundtrack captures something ineffable about the time and place of the movie.) the Pixies at the end of Fight Club. Steeler's Wheel in Reservoir Dogs. These are songs that have been repurpsed to fit a particular moment, making it have a heightened resonence.

The other side of this is the orchestral score, or the music composed for the film. Imagine Star Wars without the music by John Williams. Or for that matter Jurassic Park, ET, Jaws, Indiana Jones. How would all those French horn players make any money? Or The Social Network without the bizarrely intense Trent Reznor score. Or a musical like Nightmare Before Christmas.

The distinction that I am making is that movie soundtracks generally fall into an either or proposiion. Either it is used by the movie because it is a pop culture song, or it is made for the movie. In general, the latter fit better than the former. Mainly because when you are hearing the song of last summer for the thirtieth time in a movie that year, it has a certain distracting quality to it that our friend Mr. Bale knows quite well. (Two year old pop culture ephemera joke? Sign me up!)

Tron: Legacy dealt with the soundtrack issue very well. They brought in two of the most talented digital associated artists and seemingly gave them carte blanche to do whatever they wanted to. What you get is actually a quite impressive mixture of the two kinds of music that normally accompany movies.

Daft Punk is an enigmatic group, performing sampled and created music from behind a dj booth. Their albums in general are consistantly good. They have super dance party music. They make thinking people's electronic music.

However, on this album, I think it is their more orchestral prices that stand out for me. They have a different flavor than just the pure electronic ones, and I think that gives them a texture that your average daft punk song lacks, or at least isn't striving for.

This is a fucking cool album. It's maybe not particularly repeat listenable, but it has some really moving and amazing parts. The highlight is of course the scenes from the bar in the movie, just because that plays to their strengths so much, but the rest of the soundtrack sounds good. It also fits well with the tone of the franchise, for better or worse.

Now, because I have to, let's talk about the movie. I appreciated what they did with it, and I actually quite enjoyed it, but I can see the flaws. I just took those flaws as hearkening back to the insanity that was the first movie. Also, any movie with Jeff Bridges acting in two roles is somewhat cool, although CLU was a monster deep in the uncanny valley if you looked at him.

However, give me the moment where Renzler slams into CLU saying "I fight for the users" any day of any given period of time, and I will be completely psyched. I don't care how silly it sounds, it was spectacular just to see that little bit.

Never mind the fact that they threw a bunch of mythology away to make this, it was quite fun.

A good soundtrack doesn't get in the way of the images on screen. A great soundtrack adds feeling and depth to those images, creating pathos and feeling behind the images. By this standard, Tron succeeds incredibly. If you have an ear for music, you can pick out whose music cues are whose, and you can hear the movies universe going by. And who wouldn't want to spend more time in a universe where lightcyfles exist and programs are made to fight?

Thanks for bearing with me through this one. I hope you could give a couple of tracks a spin. I particularly like End of Line.

Next week - KANYE

There is only one way to end this one.
"I fight for the users!"
Matt

PS. Hey Kids! Give Phil Five! OR BURN! IN HELL! FOREVER! Also, comment below, and I'll Give Phil Five for you, cause I am buying my way to heaven five dollars at a time.

PPS. We're done with May at this point, so suggest some more damn albums so I can stop doing ones that I love.  It's really hard to be critical of shit that I suggest myself.

Saturday, February 19, 2011

Death From Above 1979 - You're a Woman, I'm a Machine

Death From Above 1979 - You're a Woman, I'm a Machine
Published in 2004

Subsection a. iPod dammit.

This is a pretty spectacular album, and if you have never heard it, I think it would be in your best interest to rectify that oversight as soon as humanly possible. The reasons I think this are threefold.

First, you're never going to hear an album as focused and well exectuted. The songs are simple and well performed. This is not to say that there is no depth to the music, but that the music is there on display for you. The music is composed of three parts. Vocals, drums and bass. That's it. It's got the same stripped down kind of sound that the Black Keys did so well, but instead of the blues, they take on a metal band.

Second, the album works incredibly well for a few specific purposes that are very important. You can get pumped up and bang your head to it. You can drive to it. You can rock out to it. You cannot play it over your head like a Peter Gabriel song to get a girl, unless she was a pretty singular girl, and she had some remakably tolerant parents. (In that movie, by the way, why the fuck didn't they call the fucking cops on him? I get that it is romantic or whatever, but that is some stalker ass chain you up in the basement shit here, and not in the fun kinky way, but in the it puts the lotion on the skin or else it gets the hose again way. [The Album Project - Only the best in Say Anything based music criticism. {Can you tell that I like nested asides. }])

Thirdly, nested asides aside (Boom.), this is a great album for setting memories to. Like, for instance, going on a roadtrip very much like the one that I wrote about some weeks ago. Actually, when I first conceived of writing about this one, it was as part of a trio of albums that I really got to know and listened to a shit ton because of that roadtrip. The third one has become hard to find, so it will have to wait, but enough about that shit.

This album is a hard driving, methodical earbound ass kicking. I would not hesitate to say that it is fucking awesome, and also that it drips fucking sex. The album is made to continually make you stop thinking, and the lyrics are more often than not about fucking.

The bass is distorted and awesome, the drums are driving and the music is superior. This is an album that must be filed in the not optional file. It's time for you to discover this band, and to rediscover it if you already know them.

Unfortunately, we didn't jump on their bandwagon soon enough, and we must live knowing that the band broke up and we will not be getting any more. This is part of the reason to hold desperately to the artifacts we do have from them.

Part of the reason I started this project was to discover new bands that I didn't appreciate before and to find a wider audience for the ones that I already loved. This is definately in the latter catagory. Please, give this album a listen, and if you like it, let's talk about it, because I don't really know exactly what it is.

Thanks are in order for three gentlemen and one lady, you know who you are, since I linked you on facebook.

"There you go again, giving a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck. "
Matt

PS.  Hey!  I just wanted to direct you to some new features on The Album Project.  First off, just to recall the geocities of our youth, there is a counter for page views at the bottom of the page.  Secondly, I've changed some of the stuff around to be more me, so you might find jokes where there weren't ones before.  I'm taking suggestions, by the way, for how the site should look, so if you want me to add some sparkles, or keep it clean, like it is now, give me some ideas.

Third, and most important, I've got some interesting stuff up on the top right of the page, several blogs that I read, one major website, and most importantly Give Phil Five.  Give Phil Five is a charity set up by my friend Phil to combat the scourge of humanity, heart disease.  He is raising money to run from the South of New Zealand to the North, and he could use every little bit of help that he could.  I'd really appreciate it, as a future (hopefully not) sufferer of heart disease if you could help him out at all.  Also, for every 100 comments on The Album Project, I'll Give Phil Five, and for every 5 pounds of weight that I lose, I'm going to Give Phil Five.

Saturday, February 12, 2011

Gorillaz - Gorillaz

Gorillaz - Gorillaz
Published in 1998

Danger, Danger Will Rohinson! I'm writing this on an iPod on a bus on my way from Chaing Mai to Bangkok, so the crazy finger detection of the iPod will not allow me to he my normal verbose and inttelligent self. I've noticed how much my wriong suffers when I do album projects on here, and I can tell you why. It's a lot harder on this little piece of shit keyboard for me to do things like subclauses and precision writing, because fucking commas and such are on a hunt and peck-riffic second keyboard. Anyway, consider yourself warned, you piece of putrid, pugnatious prattle! (Why the fuck are old Lost in space quotes rattling around in here?)

Dear Austin G,

I was shocked, shocked at your accusation about me not having written about this album. It would seem to me that had someone earlier made it more of a priority to inform me about his desire to see this album completed and stuffed upon these digital walls, it would have been done earlier.

There is a good reason for my reticence in this matter. One, this is one of my favorite albums, and thus, it is difficult for me to unabashedly write a pure love letter to it without seeming too sucrose sweet. The second is that I have already expressed my desire to do this album justice, which will be difficult. The third reason is that, of course, it is much easier to write about albums that I know, so keeping a classic like this  in my back pocket means that when I'm feeling a bit thin, I can bust out a couple of hundred words and call it a project.

Of course, upon seeing your well phrased and gracious request, I was obliged to respond with this album project, presented post haste to you, but one fortnight anon.

Your friend, the honorable Baron of Albumsberry, Matteus Butlererer. Or as we'd say in the old country, fuck you, fine, I'll write the album up.

Gorillaz are one of the few bands in the world who I will buy every one of their records without hesitation. I owned Plastic Beach the day it came out, as chronicalled here, and I truly love their stuff. They are a contradiction of sorts, a supposedly fictional band, constructed as characters with full backstories, who have never and will never exist. Their backstory, which is long, complicated, and really fun to read, is pretty enjoyable, and their videos are some of the best ever.

Let's break this project down a bit. Three catagories: Songs you know, Songs you don't but should, and Songs that you don't need to know. (This list is for people completely new to Gorillaz, however, it is entirely my opinion, and the fact that I love this album should be taken into account.)

Songs You Know

Clint Eastwood
19-2000
5/4
Tomorrow Comes Today

Songs You Don't Know, But Should

Rock The House
Everything Else

Songs you don't need to know:

None. The albums weaker songs are still fucking awesome, and give you the keys to why I love them.

Okay, if you pressed me, I'd tell you that the intro to m1a1 is far too long for the payoff, that Que Pasa Contigo took me a while to appreciate, and Double Bass is a bt of a cast away track, that kind of got away from them, however this is one of the few albums on here that I think is actually an album, and therefore should not be divided.

I think that Gorillaz is a origin story for a world, not just an album. The reason I think this, is because the songs are themeatic and seem to occupy the same sound space. There is no track that is especially out of place, and the issues in each song seem to be interrelated. The world is one on the brink of collapse, and the music reflects this.

Lyrically, Mr. Albarn and company are incredibly solid, making the album fun to sing along to, and fun to figure out. Of course, the voice that launched a thousand rap rock collaborations deserves particular mention.

Del tha Funkee Homosapien knocks his two tracks out of the fucking park. Clint Eastwood's spaghetti western beat is lit the fuck up by the monsterous verses that Mr. Del brings to the table. The lyrics are tight, the character is clear, and it is just an incredible vocal feat.

This is not to say that Clint Eastwood is the best track with Del on it on the album, because Rock the House, his other contribution is perhaps an even finer piece of work, a fantastic bit of beat production, and a spectacular dance jam. (From memory) "Gravitational pull, I have you making a fool of yourself on the dance floor, doing backspins, running man and more" Too good.

If I can impress anything upon you with this silly little blog of mine, I must impress this, that even albums that sound childish in concept or execution can sometimes create masterpeices. The thing to remember is that human beings, when given a blank slate, create bloated, overworked monstrosities, but given a small group of core rules, will create brilliant, fun, and yes even a little silly things.

It is only when we lose focus from these small goals and try to make something too big for us that we see it as a failure. The failure is only due to our expectations being so high, and the product being impossible for the group to live up to. The perfect example of this is not from music, although "Democracy, Chinese" proves it to an almost rediculous amount, so much so that it should be ashamed of it's unliging self, but in film. The curse if the sequel is well known, because the problem with most sequels is that the script seemed to be "just like the first one, but more. (gimmick)".  If you don't pick the right thing, the rules go all out of whack, and you get Spiderman 3. (Whose gimmick was "unlikeable characters"? "Villians neither adaquitely explained or utilized"?  "Emo haircut dance numbers"? Mr. Raimi, however redeemed himself with Drag Me To Hell, a fun, tight, rule filled movie.)

Gorillaz has consistantly put out these kinds of albums, that are small tight and thematic. Oh, and fun to listen to, interesting, and that you can listen to. Their sequel formula seems to be something like "like the first one but completely different. Which is as it should be, an exprimental fictional band creating really amazing real music. I just hope we'll all keep listening.

Next week - Something I have more to say about because I don't think it is perfect.

Thanks again, Austin, I'm pretty sure this one deserves another couple of rewrites, so maybe I'll update it with more.

Are you a new reader? Or someone who hasn't subscribed yet?  Please do, so I have a reason to keep on living! Also suggest albums, because if you don't I'll write things about my favorite shit, which is no fun for anyone who has different taste than me, or people who don't like to hear me figure out how to say listen to this shit, goddamnit, in new and exciting and more desperate ways.

"Somebody call Kenny Loggins, cause you're in the Danger Zone."
Matt

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Radiohead - Pablo Honey and The Bends

Acknowledgements: I'd like to thank Stacy Sherman for suggesting one of these albums to me. I'd also like to thank Sam Porter for his great insight into the band and his willingness to talk music while we lived together.

Here is the plan:

Over the past 25 years there has been no band that has remained a part of the culture of the English speaking world as much as Radiohead. To look at their career is to look at two things: first is to see a frozen representation of a moment in time. The second is to see a band pushing against that time, making strides forward musically and culturally. I believe that by looking carefully at the music of Radiohead, great insight can be gained about the culture prevelant at that time.

If you'd like to know more about Radiohead, wikipedia has a pretty good article. Also, the bands website gives a good impression of heir aesthetic.

In these album projects, you will be getting my thoughts on these albums. Pablo Honey and The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, and In Rainbows. It is going to be very important that you listen to the albums, if not for my point to become clear, then for the sheer fact that you need to hear them.

Over the next couple of months, I hope to lay out my general understanding of Radiohead's importance and why they might be my favorite band ever. I hope that you'll join me on this trip.



Radiohead - Pablo Honey and The Bends
Published in 1993 and 1995
Wikipedia - Pablo Honey and The Bends


Part I - Pablo Honey and The Bends

Let's put these albums into context. These are two of the formative albums by Radiohead. They are also their weakest efforts, by the incredily high standards of their later albums. They give great insight into where the band is going to end up, and the moments of genius are fantastic.

No work about these two albums could be considered complete without talking about Creep, so let's use that as a starting point. As the second track off of the album Planet Telex, it is the track that defines the early sound of Radiohead. It continues to be one of their most popular songs, and if there is one Radiohead song that everyone knows, it is Creep.

The first time I heard Creep, that I can remember, was in my fathers 1989ish Toyota Celica. Needless to say, it was kind of a peice of crap car, but it had a pretty good radio, and we would listen to it constantly. I'm sure I had heard the song before, but this was the first time I really remember listening to the lyrics and understanding them, in a naive way. It was a song that I fell in love with, as so many did, because of the open display of hurt and longing that was on display. The mixture of a soft whispering verse and a screaming chorus was exactly what I needed from a song at that time.

As I grew up, I realized more and more that the song was not just about hurt, but also about the appearence of the singer through anothers eyes. The fear of inadiquacy is the through line of the whole song, but the more it is listened to, the more it becomes apparent that he has never expressed these feelings to the 'you' of the song. This alienation is a theme of Radiohead's music, and will come back in the future.

While I quite enjoy the rest of Planet Telex, for the most part, it is just pretty generic rock. Thome Yorke has an amazing voice, Johnny Greenwood plays a great guitar, and the bass and drum parts are solid. Anyone Can Play Guitar is a great example of the band doing it's best to sound like U2.  This is not a problem, but it doesn't really do all that much for me.

This was the state of music when Radiohead made it's debut. Guitar, bass, drums, vocalist, playing loud and emotional songs to what sounds like a huge stadium. Everyone wanted to be U2 and sell out huge stadiums. However, as Creep is evidence of, there was a backlash coming, and soon, it would no longer be about pure volume, but about closeness and the use of space.

I think the best way to think about Planet Telex is to think about it as a baseline for Radiohead. They could have continued down this path of solid rock, but they went a different direction.

The Bends is a different beast, but is a child of Planet Telex.  The first track is a testiment to that, not just in the fact that it is named after the album, but also because it takes what that album did and moves it up a notch. The band has added the piano that will be important moving forward, and we start to hear the distortion that will become increasingly important to Radiohead.

The second track, The Bends, the albums title track, is a lot more like the original album.  An interesting thing to consider is the direction that radiohead would have gone if it hadn't gone the route that they had. I have a feeling that they would have occilated between Planet Telex style experimentation and something like this. One thing that I must emphisize is exactly how much I like this album. I think that it is well made and well produced, but, in the scheme of where they progressed, it's tough to love at the same level.



High and Dry is one of those songs, and the third on the album. It's a song that just screams wandering around in A cold and indifferent city to watch the sun rise in an indie movie because it is too good. It is musically well done, the lyrics are clear, and the ideas are well executed. It's maybe the perfect song of it's time.

Speaking of timeless songs, have you ever seen something sad in a movie or tv show with a budget? Then you have heard the next track on the album. Fake Plastic Trees is a masterpeice that has become so connected with crappy movies, that it makes me sad to listen to it. It's so well made, heartwrenching and beautiful that my heart hurts when I have to think about how it's been taken from his album.

(Side note: I know I am kind of harping on this commercialization thing, and that deserves some explination. I am the kind of person who associates things easily. So, let's say someone takes a song and puts it into a movie.  I will then store that in my memory as a moment that defined the song and the movie. Sometimes, this is an amazing pairing, like (most obvious example in history) Steeler's Wheel in Resivoir Dogs, a moment that would be less if one subtracted any part of it. This is why the Radiohead thing bugs me, because they never use them well, especially this album. To prove my point about how obvious the uses are: Entourage. Convinced? You should be. Now back to writing about music.)

Fake Plastic Trees sounds a lot like Creep to me, in that it deals with the minor heartbreaks and deaths tha
are experienced every day. The beginning ofthe song evokes a lonelyness expressed so well that it is still effecting me after three listens in a row. Following High and Dry is also a stroke of genius. The song sounds so different that it creates a tension on the record that holds for the rest of it. We are now on the hit parade.

Bones is a retrn to a more classic song, which could be a U2 song. However, for a complete education on radiohead, it's important, because it has some distortion, and Thom Yorke is starting to experiment a lot with the fallseto that becomes more important.

(Nice Dreams) is a great song, which follows the heavy distortion of Bones with a quiet and delicate sounding acoustic riff. There are a bunch of layers in this song, giving time to a beautiful violin part and some wonderful backgrounds. The voice is firmly in the middle distance, with contrastig lyrics giving different sentiments, and just a lovely song, all together. (just a lovely song).

We switch back to more of a rock vibe with Just, a pretty great song. It's a very sing alongy song for me, and it is a very excellent rock song. I think the hit song aspect makes it a little easier to get into, and the solos, if basic, are perfectly okay.

We go back to the more weird with My Iron Lung, a very delicate and well composed song.  The title is somewhat interesting to me, just because it is the first indication of the man and machine theme that rules OK Computer, but mostly this is a basic Bends era Radiohead song. Consistantly good, but it doesn't seem to be reaching for much more than basic compitence. The distorted sections are good and rock and roll, but it's somewhat tame overall. Fun to listen to though.

Bulletproof ( I wish I was) is a great example of where we are going in the Radiohead pantheon. It's suprisingly subtle, quiet and looming. The guitar parts are simple, but the sounds are beautiful and they completely make the song for me. It's not the best rock song on the album, but it is obviously the one that no one expected from them. It's almost a candidate for being the frontrunner for emo, but Coldplay is probably a better comparison.

Black star, for all of it's bland structure and boring lyrics has one of my favorite sing along verses from this album. The hook is really really good, and I love a good hook. The lyrics are delicate and intricate if a bit bland. The instrumentation is good, but nothing to write home about. It's just consistant.

Take that last paragraph and repeat it for Sulk. There is more ambient sounds and there are more interesting little touches, but it's just a good song.

(I know, another aside. I realize that I'm complaining a lot about "just good" songs, but it's dificult to seperate the good from the truly excellent with a band this good one comes to expect more.)

Street Spirit (Fade Out) however, is a truly excellent song it's a slowly developing, well constructed, quietly powerful song. The flourishes seem completely needed, and it just holds up really well. It's a fitting end to an album that played with both sides of a truly great band.

I've delved a lot into the individual songs in this album, and we talked about Creep, so let's step back and look at the big picture. Radiohead as an entity is at an interesting point. They have already had unimaginable success with a grunge influenced song that has become an instant classic. Their great contribution to music may very well be that song, and their second album shows glimpses of genius in two different directions.

Imagine if the band had gone down the other path. Radiohead writes another three or four albums of grunge inspired rock, trying to remain relevent in the oughts, but slowly being overtaken by young, nu-metal groups. Their more mature sound relegates them outside the polite company of radio and they slowly fade out of relevance.

This would have been a sad fate for them, and everyone would have listened to Creep and thought, "hey, whatever happened to these guys.

As it turned ot though, well, that's the next part of the Catalog Project: Radiohead.

That's what we call a cliffhanger, ladies and more feminine ladies. These are probably going to come once a month or two, but if you'd like them to come faster or slower, please leave a comment.

In other housekeeping news, we have almost reached 1000 hits on the site, and when we do, I'll add some stats to the next album project, so you can see where everyone else who reads tap is from, and we can figure ot together who is reading from the really weird ones. January, by the way, has been by far our most successful month ever, and I would like to thank you for that. Every time I check the blog and see the counter turned over, it warms my cold monster heart. Te next update will be next Saturday, same bat time, same bat channel. If you'd like, you can subscribe to the blog, spread the word, or even suggest an album. Also, and this would be crazy, if you wanted to write an album project, we can always use more insight.

For the future, I have a list of things I'd like to do, including an audio commentary of an album, a group chat about the album as an art form, and the Eppys or Albys for epic or interesting suggestions.

Okay, housekeeping over, go back to your lives or leave a comment or something, or tell me what you think about these albums.

"You like monkey?" "Sure, I like monkeys." "I hate monkey."
Matt