Barry Gibb passed away before I had really begun Soul Sides so I never paid due respect to the Bee Gees. As a ’70s baby, some of my earliest memories of music revolved around hearing The Bee Gees – who were inescapable in the late ’70s – on the radio, at malls, etc. A bit milquetoast and cheesy? Sure. But I still love listening to this ballad in particular.

Robin Gibb, who passed away today, is that high falsetto you hear. Thanks for all the music.

The biggest release this week for indie music lovers probably comes down to a battle between Beach House and Best Coast – both of which are male-female duos, and have thematically similar band names. However, their sound and style are totally different. On their new single, “Myth,” Baltimore daydream pop masters Beach House deliver more [...]

Read more, get songs or stream the entire mix on Indie Rock Cafe

The Emotions’ “Blind Alley” is one of my favorite Stax/Volt songs of all time and it’s been nearly eight years since I’ve written about it. I’ve been meaning to revisit it and do up something more elaborate after seeing how it got reissued in that Never To Be Forgotten boxset I just wrote about.

It’s been ages since I had done a post over at Soul Sides/Sliced and I decided to put “Blind Alley” through the treatment, joined by Matthew Africa.

Check it out: “Breaking Down ‘Blind Alley’”

In Part 2, Africa and I will come back to talk about how “Blind Alley” has been sampled.

Grimes “Circumambient”

Grimes is very big on splitting her voice into multiple harmonic parts that simulate the feeling of fractured thoughts that overlap, collide into one another, and sometimes totally contradict themselves. I’ve heard this before in different ways in other songs, but part of what makes her music interesting and powerful is in the way she seems to delight in this, and the most euphoric moments in her songs embrace this indecisive delirium. “Circumambient” is especially remarkable, with verses that form clear thoughts about a relationship in which neither side can move forward without addressing issues and a chorus that starts a thought that cannot be completed.

Buy it from Amazon.

I made you a quick little mix: http://www.mediafire.com/?75qzva0wh7b8db6

El-P “Drones Over Bkyln”

El-P has been specializing in heavy, discordant rap tracks for over a decade now, but his compositions on his new record Cancer For Cure and Killer Mike’s R.A.P. Music are a new high water mark for art. There’s something desperate and hungry at the core of this stuff; each beat broadcasts an angry restlessness. El-P owes a lot of his style to the innovations of the Bomb Squad and the RZA during their peak periods – the rhythms seem jagged and harsh, instrumental riffs are fashioned from scraps of recognizable instrumentation and shards of noise. El-P’s production is a beat more lean, but just as purposeful, with a blunt aggression that seems connected, at least in spirit, to punk. “Drones Over Bkyln” gets its musical hook from a lifted piano part, but its soul lies in rattling cymbal hits and electronic buzz pulse that stands in for a bass line. It sounds like the aftermath of a disaster, and El-P’s rap comes off like a guy surveying the wreckage.

Buy it from Amazon.

Kitty Pryde “Okay Cupid”

Rap is a genre that rarely aims for or achieves an intimate sound, but that’s been changing slowly thanks in large part to Drake, who has popularized a mode of drunk-dial-confession rapping that allows a context for vulnerability that happens to have a built-in layer of mediation. Kitty Pryde’s breakthrough track “Okay Cupid” is a song in this mold – she raps as though she’s a bit groggy late at night, as if she’s spilling her guts to a crush who should be inches away, but is in fact nowhere to be found. Some people have qualms about this song because it’s a young girl romanticizing and accepting the behavior of a dude who is awful to her and stringing her along emotionally, and I totally get that from a “ugh, I hate when this happens to people” perspective, but the truth is that this happens to people all the time and the words and inflections in this song sound so true and lived-in that I wince at some points. There’s a lot of emotional complexity here, and certainly the sense that Kitty is aware that she’s being self-destructive and shouldn’t tolerate any of this, but can’t help herself. It’s hormones, it’s insecurity, it’s youth. And it’s so much more compelling than Drake could ever be - he’s always rapping from some position of power even when he’s presenting himself as weak, but Kitty is coming from the opposite end of the power dynamic and it’s fascinating and tragic to hear her try to assert some control over her emotions and the situation in her performance.

Buy it from Bandcamp.