A demonic lit­tle pres­ence took up space in my brain fol­low­ing the release of Chris Clark’s last album Empty The Bones Of You, a mind­bend­ing aural fuck that bur­rowed in from the ear and took up res­i­dence. I have no idea what it does dur­ing the long years between Clark releases, but a cou­ple weeks ago it started rat­tling around, grow­ing and grow­ing in agi­ta­tion. This sig­naled to me that the man had come back to lay claim to the fre­quen­cies of the world. And the man’s name is now just Clark, instead of Chris Clark. Expect large stage shows soon. The result is Body Rid­dle, a decid­ingly more reflec­tive, more organic, live sound­ing opus. Look, in a recent Milk­fac­tory inter­view the man listed Slint as one of the things he has been lis­ten­ing to most recently, ok? From the very first ridicu­lous drum flour­ishes of “Herr Bar” you know some­thing is different…the sound of every­thing is crisp and nat­ural, and by the beau­ti­ful melodic end of the song, you know you are in for a proper treat of an album. “Frau Wav“‘s free jazz and use of strings just go to rein­force that feel­ing. And I swear it has actual live drum­ming on it. This and it’s two fol­lowups, “Spring­time Epi­gram” and “Her­zog,” show an astound­ing range in Clark’s new reper­toire, much more focused on atmos­phere and song mechan­ics than his pre­vi­ous glitch-y efforts. The per­cus­sion isn’t the dri­ving fac­tor of these songs, the melody is. When we get to the happy and upbeat “Ted,” we are in slightly more famil­iar ter­ri­tory, flanged our synths and gritty elec­tronic drums. It seems to be a fan-favorite so far. And it’s cer­tainly impres­sive. The songs like “Vengeance Drools” and “Matthew Unbur­dened,” espe­cially, are where my enthu­si­asm lies the most, though. The drum pro­gram­ming is superb and the struc­ture and sounds of the melodies are sim­ply gor­geous, strik­ing with a clear and more realer than real qual­ity. By the time this rolling jour­ney through sonic mas­tery comes to the closer, “Autum­nal Crush,” we are ready to let this lush epic wash over us to it’s quiet and tex­tural end.

Man, Shadow flips me out. Seri­ously. He pro­duces what is prob­a­bly the best debut album of the last 20 years in Endtro­duc­ing…, fol­lows that up with the ridicu­lously good and pre­scient UNKLE album Psyence Fic­tion. His follow-up solo album, the dif­fi­cult The Pri­vate Press, is much bet­ter than it’s detrac­tors have held it to be. Then he goes and releases the ulti­mate tour live CD/DVD set with In Tune and On Time. After this, we were treated to his var­i­ous remixes and pro­duc­tion work, some of which never saw the light of day prop­erly (his phe­nom­e­nal work for Zack de La Rocha). Finally, news started com­ing of his next album. He’s work­ing with musi­cians, vocal­ists, com­put­ers! Our first taste? The wickedly pumped up and com­pletely unex­pected “3 Freaks,” the non-Bay Area’s intro­duc­tion to Hyphy. What. The. Fuck. Is This? was many fan’s reac­tions, includ­ing mine. But as soon as that insane siren-laden break­down appeared, I was spin­ning. Sure, I love the cin­e­matic sam­ples, the dusty drums, the mys­te­ri­ous spo­ken bits. But a good party track can make you smile just the same. This bring us to the new album The Out­sider. Despite some mis­steps, this is a qual­ity piece of pro­duc­tion and writ­ing, make no mis­takes. How­ever, the mis­steps are cen­tral and make it a very dif­fi­cult album to fall in love with on first lis­ten. It’s a shame, cause there is an Album Of The Year buried within it somewhere.

The dark and omi­nous nar­ra­tive intro­duc­tion sets the tone in a cheeky sort of way. A very seri­ous, very epic Mas­ter­piece The­ater voice tells us about The Outsider…by the end of this, you are think­ing “God­damn, this is gonna be the most cin­e­matic atmos­pheric sequel to Endtro­duc­ing ever!” Except, the next track is “This Time,” a sac­cha­rine sweet imi­ta­tion of early 70s soul, com­plete with huge strings and jan­gly gui­tars. The humor of fol­low­ing the intro with this cracks me up every­time. From there we get the hyphy sec­tion, start­ing with “3 Freaks,” and this is where my crit­i­cisms start. The sequenc­ing of this album is ter­ri­ble, an ill-conceived, seg­re­gated, unimag­i­na­tive, and thor­oughly inap­pro­pri­ate struc­ture that com­pletely destroys the cen­tral con­ceit of the album: the pro­ducer loves, and is dab­bling in, all sorts of types of music, and doesn’t see any­thing wrong with the vari­ety. And load­ing up the begin­ning with a straight run-through of your most ener­getic songs just makes the last half really tough to sit through. That said, all the hyphy tracks are fan­tas­tic, from “Turf Dancing“‘s ridicu­lous roller of a cho­rus to the dark hyphy of “Keep Em Close,” Shadow seems very com­fort­able with this music, and it’s among the best stuff on the album, full of detail, wicked pro­gram­ming, and thun­der­ing bass sounds. Not a huge fan of the MCs in this genre, but I can com­pletely under­stand the way this stuff would come across in a club — peo­ple would go out of their minds. In a good way. After the hyphy sec­tion, Shadow delves into south­ern crunk with David Ban­ner, on the timely, thought­ful, and angry “Seein’ Thangs,” fea­tur­ing sig­na­ture Shadow atmos­pheres and melodies, com­bined with a great oper­atic vocal device. Banner’s lyrics are para­noid and angry about his home­town of New Orleans’ destruc­tion, “won­der­ing if the Feds broke the levee,” leadin into a gor­geous down­home gui­tar instru­men­tal called “Bro­ken Levee Blues.” A track meant for Zach de la Rocha sur­faces with “Arti­fact,” but doesn’t grab me in the way that the other 2 pro­duc­tions for him (“March of Death and the spell­bind­ing “Instru­men­tal 3,” both avail­able on-line) made me wish that project hap­pened. How­ever, the best track on the album fol­lows this: “Back­stage Girl” with Phonte of Lit­tle Brother, a rolling, intri­cate, 7 minute blues-hop stom­per. The drums on this song show Shadow still retains the big break skills, gui­tar is some­thing out of Muddy Waters, and Phonte’s tale of a girl after him because of his par­tic­u­lar fame is told with humor and a self-deprecating twist. It cracks me up, espe­cially after sound­ing like a typ­i­cal sex­ual bravado song for part of it. Oh, and the song has a drum solo! “Triplicate/Something Hap­pened That Day” veers clos­est to fami­lar Shadow ter­ri­tory, but in the end gets lost amidst the sequenc­ing dips and dives. The Euro-rock sec­tions starts now, though, with the sort of plod­ding, new-agey “The Tiger,” fea­tur­ing Kasabian and the rol­lick­ing drum work­out of “Erase You,” with Chris James of State­less. Nei­ther of these wow me, espe­cially nes­tled together. We get the pure pop of “You Made It,” and the least lik­able song of the album: “What Have I Done?” fea­tur­ing Christina Carter, a com­pletely over the top proper New Age track that I will never “get.” To close out the album, Shadow gives us two wildly fun and well done party tracks: “Enuff” with Q-tip and Lateef, fea­tur­ing a quirky cho­rus akin to Black­a­li­cious’ “World Of Vibra­tions,” and to close out the adven­ture, we get “Dat’s My Part,” with E-40, show­ing that that is MC is rightly respected in a bom­bas­tic finale.

So, sounds “ok,” right? Well, cou­ple this crazi­ness with the 60 dif­fer­ent ver­sions out there, all com­plete with their own bonus tracks, and you’ve got WORD rip­ping his hair out for weeks try­ing to decide which one to get. Because the bonus tracks all are good and inter­est­ing. “Pur­ple Grapes,” with The Team, has amaz­ing drum pro­gram­ming and makes the case fur­ther that Shadow should have just made a total hyphy album. “Skull­fuck­ery” fea­tur­ing Mal­colm Catto’s Helio­centrics project is a some­times bewil­der­ing beat work­out, and blurs the lines between live instru­ments and Shadow’s own pro­gram­ming acu­men. I think this is the sin­gle track that long­time fans will like the most, which is a shame, because it’s prob­a­bly the least inter­est­ing of tracks, bar­ring “What Have I Done?” “Trip­li­cate 3″ expands upon the pre­vi­ous ver­sion of this music with stronger drums, but stands up in it’s own right. All 3 of these tracks should have been included on the album, as they all serve to fill the album out. And this is where I show my ultra­geek­i­ness about Shadow. As this reviews shows, my biggest com­plaint isn’t the shift in styles Shadow chose to work in, it’s the sequenc­ing. Bog­gles my mind why he said in a recent inter­view that Psyence Fic­tion was badly sequenced and The Out­sider is his best sequenced album. The UNKLE album has exactly what The Out­sider is miss­ing: a smartly thought-out track order that shows that genre doesn’t mean any­thing, it’s about the qual­ity of music. For this rea­son, I re-ordered the tracks, added some bonus tracks, and re-burnt my own CD. After lis­ten­ing to the album in this order -

– I’m really sad, cause mix­ing the gen­res up really makes Shadow’s point bet­ter and makes a more inter­est­ing album to lis­ten to. It shows the par­alles that some­thing like “The Tiger” has with “Turf Danc­ing,” and keeps the non-party, more seri­ous side together in the depths of the album. Shift­ing “You Made It” to an album closer, makes me like the song a lot more, ele­vat­ing it to a glo­ri­ous state­ment of free­dom. If he would have released it in an order closer to what I show above, the album would eas­ily be near the top of my year-end list. As it is, it falls into an unfor­tu­nate near-hit cat­e­gory for me.

In clos­ing, I’d like to say some­thing a lit­tle off-topic from a straight album review. A lot of hate­ful low shit has been thrown Shadow’s way over this album, and I always find it very sim­i­lar to the reac­tion of peo­ple over George Lucas and his updat­ing of the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­ogy. For many, includ­ing myself, those movies rep­re­sent a very spe­cific time and place, some­thing spe­cial and life-changing. Endtro­duc­ing is the same thing. I’ve read count­less sto­ries about people’s first encoun­ters with it, and how it very deeply effected them, and often changed the entire zeit­geist of their musi­cal life. It can be can argued that all of the peo­ple mak­ing emo­tional instru­men­tal hip hop influ­enced music are all chil­dren of that album, in one form or another. Sure, things were headed that way from many other tal­ented artists at the time, but Shadow really encap­su­lated and brought it to it’s per­fect height. No other per­son was wrench­ing that much atmos­phere, scope, scale, emo­tion, impact out of it until he changed the game in ’96. To say it’s one of the most impor­tant albums of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury is not giv­ing it too much credit. So when long­time fans hear some­thing that in some way shat­ters their pre­con­ceived impres­sion of him and his music, it’s very dis­turb­ing, lead­ing to a lot of unfounded and slan­der­ous com­men­tary. Lucas has dealt with this for years, ever since he started tin­ker­ing with his orig­i­nal tril­ogy. In both peo­ple, the thing that you have to respect and under­stand is that they are true artists and are fol­low­ing a vision they see clearly in their minds. A clear sense of pur­pose is what sets an artist apart from the pack, and these two peo­ple fit that bill. If you don’t like it, that’s fine, but don’t make it a per­sonal vendetta against some­one for rap­ing your child­hood nos­tal­gia. They aren’t ruin­ing your mem­o­ries, they aren’t chang­ing the expe­ri­ence you first had, they are sim­ply doing what they think is right. The Out­sider doesn’t change the spe­cial­ness of Endtro­duc­ing… any­more than the new ver­sions of Star Wars can ever take away the rush of excite­ment and enjoy­ment you got from your first expo­sure to the Tan­tive IV chased by that huge Star Destroyer. And any­one who crit­i­cizes this album by mak­ing a joke based on a cer­tain short humor­ous track from Endtro­duc­ing… auto­mat­i­cally gets banned from WORD blog’s good graces for the rest of his­tory. Yeah, DUH, we get it. It’s hard not to, when every idiot says it like they just invented irony.

I’ll say this: the albums pro­vokes dis­cus­sion, and a non-passive reac­tion to music is good.

I wasn’t a big fan of Ryan Teague’s pre­vi­ous Type release, Six Pre­ludes, despite get­ting it dur­ing a very heavy bout of orches­tral music lis­ten­ing. There was some­thing too abstract about much of it for me. How­ever, when news started leak­ing of his new album, with Teague employ­ing a full orches­tra for some parts, I became inter­ested in check­ing him out again. I’m glad I gave him a sec­ond chance, as Coins & Crosses is a glo­ri­ously beau­ti­ful album of strings and elec­tron­ics. Many of the songs sneak up on the lis­tener until your head is full of lovely atmos­pheres and melodies. Teague took his inspi­ra­tion from sacred music, and this def­i­nitely has a wash of mys­ti­cism about it. The apex of the album comes on the ambi­tious all-string epic “Fan­ta­sia For String Orches­tra,” but some of the most allur­ing tracks are when Teague mixes tra­di­tional instru­men­ta­tion with his elec­tronic tex­tures, such as on “Seven Keys.” Fans of clas­si­cal, ambi­ent, elec­tron­ics take note: Ryan Teague is here. Get it at Bent Crayon or Boomkat.

As loyal view­ers of Space­balls know, it’s all about mer­chan­dis­ing! So, with that spirit, I’ve worked up some fresh prod­uct designs to sup­port and spread the WORD! Two dif­fer­ent color shirts, and even a mug for when you wake up every morn­ing and check the blog. Be sure to check out the backs of the shirts, too. I’m only tak­ing a small per­cent­age of the price to help pay the monthly band­width and host­ing fees for this site. And even if you don’t like the shirts, thanks for read­ing and check­ing out the music!
Click here:

“Eas­ier,” the open­ing track on Griz­zly Bear’s new Warp Records album Yel­low House, has per­haps 10 dif­fer­ent fully formed song ideas within it’s 3:43 run­ning time, which is more than can be said of most mod­ern “rock” albums. That they achieve in weav­ing these ideas into one gor­geous tapes­try shows that this is a band that means busi­ness. And their busi­ness is song­writ­ing craft. The 4 piece rock band dynamic has not held much inter­est for me for a num­ber of years (prob­a­bly since Wowee Zowee), sim­ply due to the impres­sion that noth­ing new was being done with the sound cre­ated from singer/guitar/bass/drums efforts. That might sound flip­pant, but one of the things I love most about music is the promise of some­thing fresh and unique, a new per­spec­tive that shows us an aspect of music we have never con­sid­ered before. The intri­cate and dense songs on Yel­low House, by and large, ful­fill this promise. This is akin to lis­ten­ing to Spi­der­land for the first time. “Knife“‘s gen­tly undu­lat­ing cho­rus gives way to Bonham-big dis­torted drums, before coast­ing out on a sooth­ing lo-fi piano denoue­ment. The lib­eral banjo use through­out this album leaves you with the impres­sion that this album came out of some for­lorn small town in some indis­tinct time period. In fact, the entire album has a strik­ingly time­less qual­ity, like the best music. In clos­ing, I’d like to men­tion the art­work, gor­geous desat­u­rated pho­tos of the tit­u­lar house the album was recorded in. The still­ness of these images cou­pled with the almost-there color per­fectly mar­ries the sounds, and never over­steps it’s way into pre­ten­tious ter­ri­tory. Avail­able from Bent Crayon, Warp Mart, and dig­i­tally from Bleep.

The won­der­ful peo­ple at Nearworlds.org bring us a live record­ing of the show in Mon­treal that Damo Suzuki recently played with a num­ber of artists, includ­ing WORD favorite Six­too. Damo, of course, was one of the lead singers of Ger­man Krautrock greats CAN, another WORD favorite…nigh, WORD Heroes. Over top of Sixtoo’s beats, Damo freestyles his way through 40 min­utes of sheer great­ness. The other artist range in exper­i­men­tal to post-rock-ish stylings, but Six­too is where my focus is. And, to top it off, a lot of Six’s stuff is new in progress stuff for his next album…all of which is sound­ing spec­tac­u­lar. Check it out! Big up to Nearworlds.org for record­ing this show and shar­ing it with the worlder­net.
Damo Suzuki Vs. Six­too, AIDS Wolf, and Feu Therese — Live in Mon­treal 08.23.06 (ZIP full show download)

What a mar­velous con­cept for a sam­ple based producer’s album: solely use sample’s from one respected songwriter’s back cat­a­logue. In this case, it’s Oh No enter­ing into a part­ner­ship with Galt McDer­mont, most famous for com­pos­ing the musi­cal “HAIR.” He has been sam­pled many times over the years, and seems quite amenable to hear­ing his music used in hip-hop. Cou­pled with Oh No’s con­stantly evolv­ing pro­duc­tion tal­ent and a host of MC guests like Buck­shot, Wordsworth, AG, LMNO, Vast Aire, Pos­d­nuos, MED, etc., this album has a fan­tas­ti­cally con­sis­tent qual­ity. From the rolling state­ment of own­er­ship on Buckshot’s “Get Mines” to LMNO’s story of a “Hank,” you get a great and fun vibe from using this pro­duc­ers music as the basis for Oh No’s beats. One of my favorite tracks include Aloe Blacc on “Sec­ond Chance,” a first per­son story of a man get­ting in his car late one night, tired, nar­rat­ing his way through a car crash and the after­math. With Galt’s mourn­ful strings cut up to cre­ate a more epic sound­scape, this song sticks out for it’s deep sub­ject mat­ter and dis­tinct sound. Else­where, Pos­d­nuos from De La Soul (no, the other guy.…noooo, the other guy…yeah, that one) turns in one of the most uplift­ing tracks with “Smile A Lil Bit,” encour­ag­ing us all to have a bit of a bet­ter out­look. Murs beats his chest proudly and defi­antly, with rea­son, on “In This,” with great cuts and tri­umphant sam­ples back­ing him up. Out on Stones Throw, this album should be avail­able every­where, is well worth the effort to check it out. Enjoy!