Blank Banshee - “Mega”
Label: Independent Release (Vaporwave/Trap) (32:40)
Highlights: “Frozen Flame,” “Gunshots,” “Sandclock,” “Meteor Blade”
Feel free to call out my designation for this record, but in my defense, no one knows where this record belongs. Blank Banshee obstructs any attempts at being placed into a category by carefully crafting a cacophony of chaos.
These sounds that should have never been spliced together... but it leaves the listener dumbfounded. It becomes habitual to come back and hear again just how he does it.
I’m pretty sure I heard the Intel commercial theme in the chorus of “My Machine.” Also, in “Web Ring” there’s a really cool sample from the “Metal Gear” games, I think? And a sample of the video game “Earthbound” in track 3: “Frozen Flame.”
“Mega” feels like a blurry dream of noises that always has something new each time you listen to it. It’s a constant overflow of weird, spacey dance sounds, packed to the brim with groovy kick drums or snare hits to fill in spots of potential silence, and keep rolling on.
The lore behind the record is worth mentioning too: A year-long story line was crafted for this album’s hype regarding an alien comet crashing into earth and a group of vaporwave-y protagonists stopping its attempt at doing so.
It’s extraordinary, thematic and makes you want to dance – it’s the best of three different things. It’s really good.
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Death Grips - “Bottomless Pit”
Label: Harvest Records (Experimental Abrasive) (39:20)
Highlights: “Spikes,” “Bubbles Buried in This Jungle,” “Houdini,” “BB Poison”
I was torn between putting up this album versus Benn Jordan’s “Planet Nine,” but after revisiting the turbulent and deranged horror show that is “Bottomless Pit” I figured we could do without another ambient piece.
Also this is probably more fit for hip-hop than electronic, but for all intents and purposes... whatever. “Bottomless Pit” is a teething, bloodthirsty attempt at solidifying Death Grips’ position in electronic hell-hop, and by God I think they’ve done it. Nothing on this album is edible for the mainstream.
MC Ride vomits verses in all directions and Zach Hill destroys almost, if not all, traces of cohesion that aren’t put in place by wild drum beats. I suppose the chorus of “Ring a Bell” is pretty tame, but you have to venture through a pestilence to get there.
Death Grips is so good at obliterating the sonic landscape. There are very few artists that can adequately heave all this noise together and make it sound so, so awesome. The chorus of “Spikes” will rip your head off with Ride literally screaming the word itself four times, and then again with a text-to-speech app off of Satan’s Macbook.
This isn’t elevator music, this is start-a-revolution-let’s-light-cities-on-fire kind of music. “Bottomless Pit” is a beautiful addition to the Death Grips discography because in many was it is their “10,000 Days” or “In Rainbows.”
It’s so polished, so intrinsically... them — a luscious combination of everything they’ve been doing in the past seven years. If you’re having a hard time getting into this record, I suggest looking up footage of the band playing live. I remember watching a Coachella live-stream on YouTube a few years ago and realizing, “Huh, I get Death Grips now.”
Solar Fields - “Mirror’s Edge Catalyst” (Original Soundtrack)
Label: EA Records (Progressive Glitch/Ambient) (5+ hours)
Highlights: “Anchor District,” “Benefactor,” “Kingdom,” “Sanctuary,” “Family Matters,” “Catalyst”
A symphony of powerful ambient and glitch music that adds a touch of espionage to any situation in one’s daily life. It’s really more than just background music to a video game; it’s a breathing atmosphere illustrated by a Swedish dude’s minimalism space-brush.
I haven’t played “Mirror’s Edge Catalyst,” but I already have a solid understanding of the game’s intended persona. Solar Fields is as good as he’s ever been. The first “Mirror’s Edge” is a landmark in video game music, often swept under the rug and hardly seen as the significant, niche sub-genre masterpiece that it truly is.
If nothing else I hope this OST can at least prove a few people otherwise. Solar Fields has been in the game (like, also with the series) so long that he’s just showing off now.
These dark, driving and most importantly, dynamic, electro-prog tracks, are so flavorful — it’s an endless well of really good music. “Catalyst” will spice up any moment in life and make it so much cooler. It’ll make you want to parkour across the freeway to get to school. It’ll inspire you to free-climb the Sandias and backflip 5,000 feet into someone’s pool.
Don’t do that, but definitely listen to it.
KAYTRANADA – “99.9%”
Label: XL Recordings (Electronic Hip-Hop) (59:08)
Highlights: “Drive Me Crazy,” “Glowed Up,” “Bus Ride"
“99.9%” sounds like how the album art looks: groovy, and a trip, but really just fanatically groovy.
The drums are programmed with such finesse and every hit is sharp and mixed so well with each other, it acts as a water slide for the melody and raps to glide over. KAYTRANADA is hooking the genre of rap to a defibrillator and shocking some juice back into; not even the genre, just the act of rhyming over a beat.
Perhaps that is why the album puts beats first. The lyrics and the melody come second, though with no-less polish and shine. Almost every track has a feature, but in contrast to how Flume did it on “Skin” released last May, on “99.9%” it sounds like they’re supposed to be there. They fit and compliment KAYTRANADA’s music.
Vic Mensa’s flow paired over the beat in “Drive Me Crazy” is wild; it sounds like he’s jumping from cloud to cloud over a snake pit of wispy, arpeggiated melodies.
Something odd I noticed reminded me of Justin Timberlake’s “The 20/20 Experience” (2013), in that songs often have two parts in them. It’s like a progressive style — the song remains thematically intact but switches up either the tempo or the key or... something, I don’t know.
But just how Timberlake’s last album was “prog-pop” in a way, it’s a joy to hear some songs on “99.9%” refusing to end. Like a steezy Energizer bunny.
Machinedrum – “Human Energy”
Label: Ninja Tune (IDM) (42:04)
Highlights: “Morphogene,” “Do It 4 U,” “Spectrum Sequence,” “Dos Puertas,” “Color Communicator”
Something about “Human Energy” is a little... wrong. Most tracks — smoothly laced with bright, poppy synths and drums — always has like some kind of little timing inconsistency with it.
I’ve grown completely infatuated with this record because of how very slightly messed up everything sounds. Synth melodies feel like they shouldn’t fit into the meters that the drums lay down, and yet they still do anyway.
The more I come back to “Human Energy,” the more I’m starting to understand all the weird time changes and beat structures, most exemplified on tracks like “Tell U” and “Color Communicator”. “Human Energy” is a celebration of intricate synth-pop song structures that acts as a surprisingly lovely follow up to 2012’s “Vapor City.”
The environment is very illuminated and shiny now, at times motivating and inspiring. “Vapor City” showcased this dark, diseased, fast paced world — like what Nicolas Jaar would sound like if he wasn’t so shy with it.
“Human Energy,” on the other hand, is the yin to “Vapor City’s” yang. Thematically, it’s about bettering the self by accessing that human part of our circuitry, the part we can all relate to by being the strange little techno-monkeys we happen to be.
That’s my take at least; there are only a few lyrics from guest performers here to make sense of the circumstance.
If you like the sound of this record, check out Dawn Richard’s track “Not Above That,” which was produced by Machinedrum during the “Human Energy” sessions. Richard also makes a righteous appearance on the album’s sixth track, “Do it 4 U.”
Audrin Baghaie is the music editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be reached on Twitter @AudrinTheOdd.
