Single Spinning Crackling Finns, Acidic Brooklynites, And Billy Joel (Sorta)

Jess Harvell | March 26, 2008 1:00 am
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Whether they’re petroleum-based or digital downloads, singles remain pop’s most fascinating format. Twice a week in Single Spin, a singles-focused twist on Second Spin, we’ll take a look at a song, sound, scene, or star that we think deserves more than two lines and a Rapidshare link — whether it’s CMT country, underground dance, unfriendly noise, or anything else served up one tune at a time. Today we listen to a return to form from a Finnish dub-techno master, a goofy jam from a trio of sloppy New York indie kids, and faux-reggae scourge Sean Kingston warbling through the Billy Joel songbook. Yes, you read that right.

Vladislav Delay – “Recovery IDea” (Semantica)

Delay is of course well-known among bedroom house-ophiles for the diminishing returns of his dancefloor-oriented Luomo project. Luomo began in the year 2000 with the spare, spacey, and brilliant Vocalcity, and continued through a regrettable process of pop-flavored sweetening to arrive at the gauche, neon keyboard noodles of 2006’s Paper Tigers. A songsmith Delay is not; he’s most productive when suspended between ancient house music call-and-response hooks and washes of crackly digital atmosphere. So how fares his most recent return to the instrumental dub-techno that first made waves across various “intelligent dance music” discussion hubs at the tail end of the ’90s, the stuff that was all crackle and no hooks? Wrapped in headphones — the good ones, not the chintz that comes pre-packed with your media player — it’s pretty darn compelling, a squishy symphony of found sound, doors slammed shut by the wind in a parking garage overnight, or feet tramping blindly through the snow. “Recovery IDea” is the sort of Autechre-esque slurp and clang that becomes weirdly affecting when a producer layers an atmospheric hum behind it, as Delay does here, like a murmur of Erik Satie strings tying the stray noises into something almost human. Dancefloor remixes from Andy Stott, Fibla, and others add some drive, but their traditionalist techno rhythms offer the unexpected side-effect of dampening some of the track’s strange magic by tidying up Delay’s trippy timekeeping.

Vladislav Delay [MySpace; Hear the track here]

Blood On The Wall – “Acid Fight” (Social Registry)

Liferz, New York band Blood On The Wall’s album of throwbacks to the bratty murk I sieved from indie-rock zine recommendations while in high school, has been out for a minute. I did enjoy it upon the first few listens before the Times New Viking album made it feel somewhat redundant. It was only after I saw it lurking on Idolator contributor Michaelangelo Matos’ quarter-of-the-year-gone ’round up that I replayed album-closer “Acid Fight” and I’m glad I did. The blogosphere has taken the easy way out in constantly comparing singer Brad Shanks — rightly, more or less — to a pre-maturity Black Francis, but I’m gonna be contrary and say the first thing to come to mind was “Weird Al” Yankovic commissioned by Touch And Go Records to parody the Jesus Lizard’s David Yow. (At least in the first minute, with Shanks panting heavily about something being wrong with his face, it’s a sound that’s launched a thousand Flipper tribute bands.) The song’s mostly a lugubrious goof — in case the non-sequitur title and the invocation of Mr. Yankovic didn’t tip you off — but the grungy riff (in the “less Possum Kingdom, more Slay Tracks” sense) and Mark Ibold-bass seesaw back-and-forth with more of those golden-age indie yuks than you’d find in a mountain of modern folkies.

Blood On The Wall [MySpace]

Mann feat. Sean Kingston – “Ghetto Girl” (Sony/BMG)

The above two reviews were written fairly quickly, spurred by a critic’s delight in discovering unexpectedly good tunes. Then I came upon “Ghetto Girl” and needed a break, because I was rendered momentarily brain-dead by adolescent crooner Sean Kingston’s latest plundering of my childhood vinyl singles collection. It’s so inexplicable, corny, and cringeworthy that it makes you wonder which hoary bit of bubblegum Kingston’s going to into a hook next time out. The Go-Go’s “Vacation”? “Goonies Are Good Enough”? The backing track on “Ghetto Girl” has the kind of tinny, crummier-than-an-actual-ringtone quality that gives good ol’ fashioned, cheap-sounding Southern rap a bad name. Baby-faced L.A. rapper Mann is the bold-faced name offering the girl-crazy rhyming ballast on the verses. But as is turning out typical for 2008’s crop of lazy hook-merchants, the whole point is Kingston’s agonizing interpolation/mutation of Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl,” which had Maura wondering if Kingston’s “father was really a Z100 playlist from 1985.” Shameless producer J.R. Rotem’s borrowing on “Ghetto Girl” is even more crude and blatant than his Ben E. King lift for Kingston’s “Beautiful Girls.” Perhaps not coincidentally, I am 75 percent sure that I already despise this on my fifth play, whereas I didn’t truly loathe “Beautiful Girls” until hearing it for the fiftieth time. (It helped that I found “Beautiful Girls” charming until radio overexposure set my teeth grinding with every “suiiiiicidal.”) Then there’s that niggling 25 percent of my schlock-addled brain that has me playing “Ghetto Girl” yet again, laughing through the wincing. And if the song becomes as inescapable as Kingston’s smash, we can at least console ourselves that no crossover teen hip-hop acts have discovered the ack-ack-ack-ack hook inside Joel’s “Movin’ Out” just yet.

Mann [MySpace]