P.O.S.- We Don't Even Live Here (2012)

Yo ya'll. It has been a hot minute since I did a Ninko post up in here; mostly that is due to the overwhelming amount of amazing math coming from all of our various contributors, and although this is a pretty direct destination for your math rock needs, I feel like spreading a little astray goodness up in these parts.

P.O.S. has just recently caught my attention, as I have read a few "top 20 albums" lists that have cited his 4th release, We Dont Even Live Here, as one of the best of the year. Before these year-end lists, I had seen glowing reviews of this album, but had only until recently checked the singles instead of the whole.

New Years Eve, I was about to head out on a 20 minute drive to a party and wanted some new music for the ride, so I found my way to this album, and I have not stop listening to it since. It meets all my criteria for good hiphop: it is well written, well produced, and smooth as hell. It starts off aggressively with a one-two combo of swaggering intimidation in opening tracks Bumper and its excellent follow up and single, Fuck Your Stuff, but then in comes How We Land, which is what really caught my attention. It reminded me of a combination of Brendan from Gruvis Malt singing over some Outkast rhymes and production. Its full of hooks, great flows, and a very well placed vocal breakdown featuring some dude you might know from Some Band. Check it here:



Do check it. Further listening leads to the other single from the album, Get Down, as well as his 2001 debut in the group Cenospecies: their self titled is Here.

we dont even live here

Dull Blades and Guilty Trades

This is a post for all of those albums of yester-year that creep in and out of your life like old friends. They could be albums you still enjoy but that you feel secret shame or just albums you have thus far in your life out grown. A lot of what we do here is to inform those of the new music that we discover whether through friends, file sharing, music sites, seeing live shoes, ect. But realistically these choices have all been informed by music of our past. I have invited each of our resident swordsmen to partake in this and hopefully we can have some fun.


As a side note to all of our readership: Please feel free to mock and laugh accordingly.

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ACEROLA:
Osker - Idle Will Kill
(Pop-punk with bad vocals. Although isn't that built into the genre? Still surprisingly catchy)

AFI - Black Sails in the Sunset
(Some sort of punk, alt., emo glam beast. All of their records were pretty good.)

Juliana Theory - Love
(Catchy Alt - Prog-lite. Over produced and all the better for it.)

Thursday - Full Collapse
(Sadly one of my first intro's to post-hardcore. uninspired but very loud and dramatic about it. 16 year old me loves this)

Millencolin - Pennybridge Pioneers
(Catchy pop punk. so good)

Green Day - Dookie
(No link? because if your around my age you listened to this enough. my cassette of this broke because I listened to it too many times. true story)
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METAGHOST:
Shootyz Groove - Jammin in Vicious Environments (RAP-METALLLLLLL!!!)
Another Society - S/T (Couldn't find a link. They were like... a Nirvana knockoff from Alabama or something)
self - Subliminal Plastic Motives (Pretty sure this was the first album I bought. Still kinda ok.)
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NINKO:

blink 182- dude ranch (Dammit was the first song i NEEDED to learn)
metallica-..and justice for all (this is where my guitar teacher took me)
barenaked ladies- stunt (i also really dug this in middleschool)
phish-a live one pt1; pt2 (then i smoked pot and wound up here)
blues traveler-four (somewhere in the middle, i heard this)

korn- follow the leader (before smoking pot, i was angst-y)
limp bizkit- three dollar bill ya'll (and i really liked the finger tapping going on in this)

gruvis malt- sound soldiers (and then this happened)
sigur ros-agaetis byrjun (i got really into this at music school)
beastie boys- hello nasty (favorite hip hop of mine in 9th grade)


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FRANKLINDC:

I was all about Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Garage a Trois, Dave Holland, ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead, and a local alt/emo band called Premonition. Actually I should post them soon. The only emo band I know that had a djembe.
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This Music Moment-2010

Its rare in your life to find artists you began listening to at both the beginning of your life in music, but also in the commercial life of an upcoming band. I can only recall my experience with the various works of the people associated with Gruvis Malt; Jonny Classic is a great album, done by Brendan who was on lead vocal in gruvis; ebu gogo, which formed from the culmination of gruvis; and gavin castleton, and his crazy prolific portfolio. After Gruvis' 3rd album, ..With The Spirit of a Traffic Jam, i began to pick up on some solo projects that Gavin was working on outside of Gruvis. It was some nice stuff; although i didnt dig his solo hip hop albums as much as work such as his experimental electro album Hypotenuse, his work ethic and dedication to the world of music pushed all of his capabilities forward, and he started to release EPs such as Hospital Hymns that dove into completely unexpected genres that gavin was apparently very proficient in.

His standout solo effort, Home, came out in 2009, and it was a perfect advancement of his creativity in a large range of fields. Although it is unrelated to what i set out to post, his song Coffee Locks comes to mind as a song i must share. It starts out classic motown, with the awesome arpeggiated guitar work melding into some very well arranged strings and vocals, and it just escalates from there. The vocal enters, harmonies and instrumentation expands, and in typical gavin style, he brings the track into many unique sections that work so beautifully well in arrangement and fluidity.



Beautiful stuff. Knowing him as first the keyboardist/ backup vocalist for Gruvis, it has been an exciting ride to listen along with his musicial progression.

That brings me to his rendition of Sledgehammer, by Peter Gabriel. This is a video to watch both with headphones and also fullscreened. Gavin began working with live looping at some point in his musical madness, and as a keyboardist with a modern laptop and recording program, gavin had found ways to patch in all the instruments needed to create a fully orchestrated pop song, and on top of those elements, add in his skills at beatboxing and building rhythm sections. His abilities to play incredible, mathematically complicated keyboard lines while singing is unheard of; this is a video of flawless execution. I get lost in that small frame in the upper right hand of the video, that lists all of the loops he is adding, or effects being applied, all with preassigned foot switches and looping tracks. Everything about this is perfect, and i still have not witnessed an equal demonstration of precision and execution that one man utilizes alone.

Funky/Awesome Drummer Challenge - Da Purdie Shuffle

Something of a rite of passage when it comes to developing your chops and demonstrating competency with tasteful grooves and shifting subdivisions, the so-called "Purdie Shuffle" is one of the defining rhythms in modern music since the 70's, when Bernard Purdie was laying down the law for Steely Dan. All y'all drummers out there can surely attest to the fiendish subtleties that make this rhythm so smooth, so rich, so fulfilling; certainly it can't be mastered in a day or even a year. But anyway, as a sub-challenge to this Drummer Challenge, I want anyone to post their favorite example of this famous beat.

To start us off we got:

Grüvis Malt - Simon - Water Closet by Carved in Clouds

Oooof. So sick, keeping that shuffle time while nailing the bass punctuation with rack-tom accents. A wonderfully dynamic recording of one of my favorite drummers, Scott Mcphail, who sadly isn't working in music anymore to my knowledge.

As a bonus:

Battling The Years by Carved in Clouds

Reign of Kindo's Stephen Padin just dominating the kit per usual.

metaghostin' Vol. 1 - "Akachashu"

Akachashu - 47'20"
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1 - "彩-SAI-" (ACIDMAN / Equal / 2004)

ACIDMAN is one of the various Japanese rock groups dabbling in elements of what is generally considered Post-Rock, elongated compositions that emphasize texture and atmosphere over traditional pop structures. Like many of their Japanese contemporaries, they're technically proficient to an extreme, easily obscuring the fact that they're a three-piece. They can be somewhat dull, as the songs all end up sounding very similar to one another, but that one song they write time and time again has its place. They also get bonus points for being a Japanese group that primarily sings in Japanese, rather than ramshackle Engrish.

2 - "Shikaku Maru Ten" (CAN / Tago Mago B-Side / 1971)

I know the proprietor of this here blog is not the greatest fan of these Krautrock legends, but it's hard to deny the undeniable groove monster that was Jaki Liebezeit. He killed every track like a trap-kit assassin. As with most songs from their golden era with Damo Suzuki, they set up a pulse and just ride out into the sunset, all while Damo jabbers about whateverthefuck. I think this one is something about his favorite shapes.

3 - "Terra" (Caetano Veloso / Muito / 1978)

I don't really know anything about the man, nor do I know much about Brazilian music in general, but I love this song.

4 - "We're Strangers Now" (Happy Body Slow Brain / Dreams of Water / 2010)

Recent years have brought a rebirth in the use of unvarnished 80's synth patches, presumably because they can be paired so effortlessly with auto-tuned vocals. Here we have some dudes, two of whom used to mine mopey teenage pussy while touring with Taking Back Sunday, freaking some chunky pop-rock over Moog washes and sick sick sick drumming. Lesson learned: everything's better with some sick sick sick drumming.

5 - "Hilo" (Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra / Security / 2007)

New-school Afrobeat gurus who recently took their shit to Broadway in order bring the sound of Fela Kuti to the masses. Though that Afrobeat sound is obviously present, they keep it modern by letting the songs maintain some semblance of pop structures with vocal hooks and a more concise approach.

6 - "Low-Concept, High Maintenance" (Grüvis Malt / Backout Smiling / 2000)

One of my all-time favorite bands, managing to evolve out of the stifling musical culture of late 90's frat-rock and rap-metal, of which their first full-length has a number of similarities to. At some point they were approached by Sony and recorded a 3-song EP of material that would later appear on "...With the Spirit of a Traffic Jam" in slightly different form. The vocal cadence here still carries an air of their origins as heirs to the throne of 311, but the band had started to move away from the PBR party sound and embrace their talents (and weirdness) to flex on DnB rhythms, distorted metal licks, and dissonant brass harmonies.

7 - "Guider Tells of Silent Airborne Machine" (Henry Cow / Henry Cow Box / 197X)

By the sound of it, this was a loose composition from the Unrest-era, as the outro uses some piano motifs from "Half Awake, Half Asleep". Even at their most free they maintain this strange vibe that keeps me locked in. Not their best work by any means, but an interesting piece by a unique group.

8 - "Andy Warhol" (David Bowie / Hunky Dory / 1971)

I've always wondered if he actually recorded this in one take as the intro seems to be suggesting. A great song on a great album.

9 - "A Bao A Qu" (Boris / Mabuta no Ura / 2005)

Wrap it up, B! Fuzzed out trashy anthems, Boris does it best. Blow out yr speakers!