Looking for new music? DJs at WVAU share their thoughts on a range of recent releases.
Esperanza Spaulding - Radio Music Society
With its title serving as a winking indication, “Radio Music Society” is Esperanza Spalding’s effort at bringing her timeless jazz-influenced work into the mainstream. Perhaps a result of enlisting the production skills of A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip, this album finds Spalding utilizing more accessible grooves and R&B overtones than in her previous work.
Sometimes the album doesn’t quite pull it off; slower tracks like “Vague Suspicions” feel even longer than their six-minute run time. However, when Spalding puts it all together on more upbeat tunes such as “Radio Song” and “Black Gold,” there is a soulfulness that is impossible to resist, even if you’re still bitter over Spalding’s upset Grammy victory over Bieber and Drake. Bonus: there’s a Stevie Wonder cover!
Recommended If You Like: Erykah Badu, The Roots
by Cameron Meindl, “Rhyme and Reason,”
Sundays noon - 2 p.m.
Black Dice - Mr. Impossible
New York-based electronic group Black Dice, here with its sixth full-length studio release, has never been one to make its brand of experimental/noise/psychedelica easy on the listener. It’s as much ambient as it is punk, as much Merzbow as it is MGMT. There are more than a few danceable parts here, but most of the tracks are here just to fry your brain, something I mean entirely as a compliment.
A track or two meanders, but for the most part, the album is something you might here in hell’s hippest nightclub. There isn’t an organic sound on this release, giving it a metallic or robotic feel, but this only adds to the absolutely bonkers futurist aesthetic Black Dice is going for.
If you’re only into music that is straightforward, this is not the release for you. If you dig it when bands go just a bit over the abyss into insanity, you simply cannot go wrong here.
RIYL: Lightning Bolt, Animal Collective, Dan Deacon, Boredoms
by Richard Murphy, “Lionheart James,”
Thursdays 2 - 4 a.m.
OFWGKTA - The OF Tape Vol. 2
This mixtape is a gigantic middle finger to anybody who doubted Odd Future, proving that the entire group is still worth the hype. Star leader Tyler the Creator is content to let everyone (particularly the vastly improved Hodgy Beats and Domo Genesis) share the spotlight, although his dissonant lo-fi beats and perverse melodic genius still frame the production.
Frank Ocean appears here finally feeling like part of the crew, although his high point is solo moment “White,” an existential crisis of spine-chilling beauty (“I’ll forget my first love/like you forget a daydream”). Humor is still very much present in every member’s rhyme, particularly the ever-hilarious Jasper and Taco. And then there’s the smooth masterpiece “Oldie,” the closing posse cut and OFWGKTA’s magnum opus, a song which showcases every group member in top form (including the newly-returned-and-still-better-than-anyone-else Earl Sweatshirt) and ends with a Tyler line that might as well be this album’s thesis: “not only are we talented/we’re rad as f*ck.”
RIYL: Tyler, the Creator, Frank Ocean, MellowHype, Earl Sweatshirt, A$AP Rocky, Danny Brown
by Jesse Paller, “We Like Music,”
Wednesdays 10 p.m. - midnight
Jay Farrar, Will Johnson, Anders Parker, Jim James - New Multitudes
In case you’re unaware, this year is the centennial birthday of folk legend Woody Guthrie, who died at age 55 in 1967. In commemoration, Guthrie’s daughter, Nora Guthrie, commissioned four artists known to be inspired by his music: Jay Farrar of Son Volt, Will Johnson of Centro-Matic and Monsters of Folk, Anders Parker of Space Needle and Jim James of My Morning Jacket.
The results, for the most part, should please both fans of Guthrie’s original material and fans of the collaborators. Each of the 12 tracks are faithful and competent recreations of Guthrie’s folk masterpieces, done in a style that any of the aforementioned bands could easily have done on their own.
All the songs are well done, with the only major complaint being that they don’t really pack the socio-political punch of the original material. So, while these covers may not kill any fascists, any fan of pseudo-country or folk in the slightest should have an excellent time delving into these overall excellent covers.
RIYL: Woody Guthrie (of course), any of the bands of the project collaborators, The Decemberists’ more recent output
by Richard Murphy, “Lionheart James,”
Thursdays 2 - 4 a.m.
