Somewhat Unfinished Track

I've been holding off on posting this because I never finished it to my satisfaction. I've played it out once to a decent response, and it has a few plays and downloads on SoundCloud. I mashed up Lady Gaga's "Telephone" with "Beeper" by The Count & Sinden, which has some great phone type sound effects and additional rhythm, then added an interlude from "The Telephone Hour" in the musical Bye Bye Birdie. Let me know what you think!

Show Review: Zola Jesus

Every once in a while, Messiah gets an "important" artist to grace our stage for B-sides. For the last show of his two year reign as B-sides maestro, Ryan Faus got us such a show. Zola Jesus is an operatically trained princess of minimalist goth pop whose government name is Nika Danilova. Lady Gaga cites her as an inspiration, and Pitchfork and NME give her rave reviews, comparing her music to Fever Ray and Florence + the Machine. Equal parts music and performance art, her live shows have sold out legendary venues like The Bowery Ballroom, and yet we got to see her for free.

Before we could feast on this audio-visual experience, however, we were subjected to an endurance test: an opening set by Australia's Naked on the Vague. As Pitchfork put it:

Naked on the Vague churn out stripped-down and monotonous post-punk. The rhythms are primitive; the most animated songs rely on little more than the incessant thud of a bass drum. Likewise, any pretense of harmony is chucked out the window.

Somehow Pitchfork turned that into a positive thing, but I've seen noise rock, minimal, and virtually everything else I could construe them as done drastically better. The majority of the audience missed out on Zola Jesus because they were unaware that there was an opener and thought the entire show would be similarly abrasive.

To those who did miss out: I am truly sorry. Danilova and her band took the stage and immediately commanded attention with intricate sound textures emanating from not one but three synthesizers, whose churning was soon joined by pounding drumbeats. After a brief instrumental introduction, she began singing in a kneeling position, face still covered in a flowing red hood. Once the hood was removed, she stalked about the stage, compelling all eyes to follow with vocal power and sheer emotional force. For once, the echoing chamber that is the Student Union seemed suited to the stadium size of an artist's stage presence. Climbing up on trashcans, examining the screen of one student foolish enough to be doing homework, dancing and thrashing about on the floor in front of the stage-nothing is beyond the theatrical performances of Zola Jesus. At show's end, she rushed off the stage, seemingly in anger, only to return moments later to affably interact with all and sundry. In short, Zola Jesus was even better than the hype led me to expect.

photo courtesy of The Guardian

Grammy Rundown

For anyone who didn't watch the 53rd Grammy Awards this year, here's a quick recap of the show with commentary by yours truly:

Yolanda Adams, Jennifer Hudson, Martina McBride, Christina Aguilera, and Florence Welch of Florence & the Machine kicked things off with a tribute to Aretha Franklin, who was present via video in drastically slimmed-down post-surgery shape. Christina sang her heart out, no doubt to make up for her Super Bowl lyric-forgetting fiasco, and managed to distract me from the fact that Florence Welch always looks like a transvestite for the majority of the performance.

Lady Gaga underwhelmed with the premiere of her latest song "Born This Way", which she would later gush that she imagined Whitney Houston singing it while writing because it was too good for her. False body modifications just don't cut it for over-the-top after the public spectacle she has been for the past couple years.

Justin Bieber amazingly did not ruin Usher's performance of "OMG" with what appeared to be their overly-complex secret handshake, singing less than Mr. Raymond got to on the same number at the Super Bowl. Fortunately the tween idol didn't win anything, so we all owe a deep debt of gratitude to Esperanza Spalding for having awesome hair, an awesome voice, playing upright bass, and being able to do all three at once. Katy Perry held it down with a ballad before hit "Teenage Dream", and Norah Jones, Keith Urban, and John Mayer did a wonderful version of "Jolene". Eminem's much-hyped performance with Dr. Dre and Rihanna was augmented by backing vocals from Adam Levine of Maroon 5 and Skylar Grey (who you may remember as Holly Brook from "Where'd You Go", but apparently wrote "Love the Way You Lie" and is featured on "Coming Home"). The hip-hop party took a break for the escapees from the old-folks home to do their thing, then came back with a vengeance as Drake tried his best to leer at and hump Rihanna in convincing fashion for anti-Chris-Brown benefit.

Country outfit Lady Antebellum gathered a ton of awards for "Need You Now", an inexplicably romantic-sounding ode to booty calls that has been all over the airwaves. Song of the Year, Record of the Year, Country Song of the Year, Country Album of the Year... all I'm thinking is that we better watch out for a swell in the number of redneck children born 9 months from now.

All this, however, was merely a distraction from the fact that this was the year of the hipster at the Grammys, with Arcade Fire performing twice and taking home Album of the Year, performances by Mumford & Sons and The Avett Brothers with Bob Dylan, who could not have cared less how hip they were when the accordion failed to cut off at his gesture. The trio of Janelle Monae [show review here], B.O.B., and Bruno Mars ensured that the more urban-oriented American Apparel shoppers would enjoy it all too, as did Muse for the rockers, and Cee-Lo Green outdid Gaga at her own game. They've arrived, ladies and gentlemen. And judging by Danger Mouse's win for Producer of the Year, they aren't going anywhere, either.

The LA Beat [Accessible Remix]: Skrillex and Glitch Mob

Now that I'm temporarily based on the West Coast, perhaps it's appropriate for me to post on the "next big thing" in dance music. Snoop Dogg and Britney Spears have done dubstep [here] and [here], so there has to be something new, and there is, thanks to the clubbing-obsessed beautiful people of Southern California. Blending electro, dubstep, and glitch in an often hip-hop-oriented style, this stuff is, as The Hound and I like to call it, squelchy.

Props to Kolstrom, my old dancing buddy Matt Pfeiffer, the baristas at Viento y Agua, and Messiah's favorite hipster-in-residence Josh Rayner for putting me up on the leading artists in this movement. I should have heard them before, since one was once the frontman of From First to Last and the other is a member of Nasty Ways, the remixers whose take on Lil' Wayne's "Lollipop" provided a substantial basis for my own.

The former is now a solo artist called Skrillex, whose first EP attracted the attention of Deadmau5, who promptly signed him to his label and released a second. Word on the street is that a full-length is in the works. Personally, I'm more of a fan of his remix work, as in his takes on Lady Gaga and the Black Eyed Peas:

The latter is actually a collective, composed of edIT, Ooah, and Boreta (of Nasty Ways), who foreground the hip-hop aspects of the LA sound. Mixtapes dropping ADD-inducing rap samples over their own electronic beats force one to wonder what would happen if these dudes started doing beats for Jeezy, or at least a more dance-music oriented dude like Kid Cudi. Now that I've heard Busta Rhymes officially appear on a record produced by Diplo and Tiesto, anything can happen. Check out the mixtape version of standout track "Drive It Like You Stole It" for a sampling of what these cats do:

Both of these artists have a more accessible, dance-oriented take on the underground stuff going on with Flying Lotus and Gaslamp Killer over at Low End Theory, and are poised to do big things in 2011 for exactly that reason. Get familiar.