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JOSH REYNOLDS FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE
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Depending on who you talk to, trap music is either the next big thing — poised to pick up where dubstep left off in mainstream club popularity — or it’s already on the way out. Possibly both. That’s commonly the case with any genre of electronic music by the time it enters the wider culture, especially those that are hard to define. It’s for that reason that the members of M|O|D, an exciting young collective of producers based in Boston, are both readily influenced by the origins of trap, and wary of getting pigeonholed by it.
In broad terms, trap is a form of hip-hop that traces its origins to the ’90s with the likes of UGK and Three 6 Mafia. It experienced a resurgence when rappers like Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy started constructing tracks around an 808 drum machine with accentuated snare hits, ominous minor chord synth leads, slowed down vocals, skittering percussion, and the type of booming bass meant to be played from the back of a rattling trunk while selling mixtapes.
In more recent years, as was the case when US electronic dance music producers transformed dubstep from its more “authentic” British origins into something more aggressive and palatable for a wider audience, trap (or trapstep) has become the genre of choice for enterprising club producers like M|O|D. Read the rest at the Boston Globe.
Smoked out cocktails, literary classics get burnt, CMJ highlights, new record reviews + more after the thing:
There comes a time in every drinking career when the nuances of a well-made cocktail — the subtle botanical notes, for instance — just don't cut it anymore. You need a more intense experience. For me lately, that's come from the smokier spirits: peaty scotches and super-smoky mezcals, which, as luck would have it, are seasonally appropriate for fall. Love the smell of burning leaves or a campfire? Try putting it in a glass.
I've been asking bartenders to cook up the smokiest recipes imaginable. The results ranged from the burnt-grapefruit-off-the-grill flavors of a creation by Eastern Standard's Bob McCoy, made with Lagavulin, Vida mezcal, grapefruit, agave nectar, cinnamon syrup, and Angostura and grapefruit bitters, to the intensely bitter smoke of a mezcal, rye, Zucca, and Gran Classico eye-opener from Craigie on Main's Jared Sadoian, to the slightly more approachable mix of Laphroaig, maraschino, celery bitters, lime zest, and absinthe from Shōjō's Markus Yiao. Read the rest at the Boston Phoenix. Read the rest at the Boston Phoenix.
New Highway Hymnal's "Whispers" review.
It’s never easy to directly translate the experience of a band’s live show to record, particularly one with such a viscerally pulverizing grind of noise as Haverhill’s psych-punk act The New Highway Hymnal. But the band comes close on its debut full-length, “Whispers.” Read the rest at the Globe.
These Scathing Reviews of Literary Classics Are Actually Kind of Spot On
The Atlantic has a very entertaining and enlightening slideshow up right now, which is probably the only time I will ever describe an internet slideshow with those words. It takes a look back at some of the harshest reviews given to some of the greatest literature of all time. I suspect the takeaway here for a lot of people is going to be something like “even the greats received their fair share of criticism so go pursue your dreams no matter what anyone says.” (Don’t do that.) Read the rest at Bullet
Get
Long before he became something of a shorthand for all those amazing jokes about emo and Myspace and Florida, basically the holy trinity of early 2kz troll game, that we were all telling a few years back, Chris Carrabba, aka Dashboard Confessional, was a member of one of the most influential post-hardcore bands of the turn of the millennium, Further Seems Forever. He would depart the band just before their seminal 2001 album The Moon Is Down would come out, changing the course of how a huge subsection of the nation’s mopey teenagers would mope around teenagerly for the rest of decade. The band went on to record a couple more records with two other frontmen, Jason Gleason for 2003′s How To Start a Fire, and Jon Bunch for Hide Nothing in 2004 both of which had some memorable high points, but nothing that ever matched the original magic of the first record. Read the rest at Bullett.
New Highway Hymnal's "Whispers" review.
It’s never easy to directly translate the experience of a band’s live show to record, particularly one with such a viscerally pulverizing grind of noise as Haverhill’s psych-punk act The New Highway Hymnal. But the band comes close on its debut full-length, “Whispers.” Read the rest at the Globe.
These Scathing Reviews of Literary Classics Are Actually Kind of Spot On
The Atlantic has a very entertaining and enlightening slideshow up right now, which is probably the only time I will ever describe an internet slideshow with those words. It takes a look back at some of the harshest reviews given to some of the greatest literature of all time. I suspect the takeaway here for a lot of people is going to be something like “even the greats received their fair share of criticism so go pursue your dreams no matter what anyone says.” (Don’t do that.) Read the rest at Bullet
Get
Long before he became something of a shorthand for all those amazing jokes about emo and Myspace and Florida, basically the holy trinity of early 2kz troll game, that we were all telling a few years back, Chris Carrabba, aka Dashboard Confessional, was a member of one of the most influential post-hardcore bands of the turn of the millennium, Further Seems Forever. He would depart the band just before their seminal 2001 album The Moon Is Down would come out, changing the course of how a huge subsection of the nation’s mopey teenagers would mope around teenagerly for the rest of decade. The band went on to record a couple more records with two other frontmen, Jason Gleason for 2003′s How To Start a Fire, and Jon Bunch for Hide Nothing in 2004 both of which had some memorable high points, but nothing that ever matched the original magic of the first record. Read the rest at Bullett.
Highlights from CMJ:
TOPS Super crushing out on TOPS right now, a breezy Canadian four piece who run the gamut from light-jazzy indie pop on tracks like “Turn Your Love Around” to skewed Grimes-y synth weirdness on “She’s So Bad.” Makes sense, they share her label, Arbutus Records. They’ve got a slew of performances this week, including one today with labelmates Blue Hawaii at the Portals showcase at Pianos. Check out the Arbutus CMJ sampler here.
SKY FERREIRA We posted about this video “Everything Is Embarrassing” from Sky Ferreira when it came out a couple weeks back, but oh my god you guys, if anything, having some time to sit with it, aka watch it 100 times in a row) since then has somehow made us fall even more in love with her—I mean it, the song. OK, fine, both. You can do the same at a handful of shows this week, including tonight at Union Hall in Brooklyn, as well as shows at Bowery Ballroom, Pianos, Santos Party House, and 92Y Tribeca this week (details here.) Read the rest at Bullett.
You ever notice the the songs that make you want to dance the most are the ones where they sing about dancing? That seems like kind of cheating on some subliminal shit, don’t you think? That’s true even if the song is about not dancing, or as is the case in this electrifying three minute cut from NYC’s Skaters, wanting to dance, but not knowing how. Something tells me that’s false modesty here, anyone who can write a song that picks you up by the scruff of your neck and tosses you out into the middle of the floor like this one must at least have a step or two at their disposal. Then again, I’ve seen Skaters utility man Dan Burke (also of Viva Viva) up in the club, and he’s not exactly a young John Travolta (no offense pal). Read the rest at Bullett.
I CAN CHASE DRAGONS Look, I’m going to be honest here, the only reason I checked out I Can Chase Dragons is because I was going down the list of names on today’s schedule, and it jumped out at me. This is either going to be awful or just cute enough to work, I thought. So let that be a lesson to all bands out there, keep picking attention-grabbing names, because it actually works. Read the rest at Bullett.
SAN CISCO The problem with festivals like CMJ is that there’s such an overabundance of shows that you want to check out, all going on at roughly the same time at clubs throughout the city, that it somehow ends up being impossible to do any of them. I’m the CMJ game Hamlet over here, frozen with indecision. Better off not planning to do anything and hope you accidentally stumble across something you didn’t know you wanted to see and avoid disappointment. That’s what happened last night, after I’d taken my third cab in a row across the city to find a line so long that I wouldn’t have waited in it even if it were to see my mom filling in on tambourine with Kurt Cobain’s skeleton—I wandered around, harrumphing at guest list windmills, until I remembered that the Bowery Ballroom exists. Inside I found an Australian band called San Cisco playing, and against all odds, their breezy indie charms—something of a cross between Vampire Weekend and Arctic Monkeys, put the first smile on my face of the night. Read the rest at Bullett.
Typically an indie rock band has to choose between one of two poles when constructing their musical brand—either aim for the pop hooks and reap the popular rewards, or fly closer to the weird sun and pull from the obscurantist crowd for sustenance... Read the rest at Bullett.
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