Danny Brown, Grouper, Arca
Pitchfork #63 - 61
#63 Danny Brown, XXX (2011)
Rating: 2
Danny Brown was a Detroit kid, born in March 1981 (right around Hill Street Blues S1 E10). His dad was a house DJ, so he grew up with records everywhere, and says he wanted to be a rapper from kindergarten on.
He ended up doing some prison time for dealing weed. He says that experience inspired him to kick off his music career.
This album is Brown’s second, released as a free download from the start by his new label. It has a boatload of named producers. Brown claims the purpose of this record is to “push listeners,” and it is kinda crude. Also witty and provocative.
The album title XXX has double meaning, both as Brown’s turning thirty and all the explicit sex stuff. The first track is “XXX” and the last is “30.”
We need to talk about the voice. He chooses to rap mostly with a novelty voice. It’s like Pee Wee Herman sort of. It’s a silly voice, rapping about some not at all silly stuff. If you just hang in there, you can get through it. He does change up the flow style quite a bit, and he’s serious with all the comedy. It’s a persona, you have to buy in. E.g.: “Adderall Admiral.”
He’s absolutely not boring.
The record has two distinct halves - the first half is an extremely raunchy party, with lots of sex and drugs so life is fun; the second half ALSO has lots of sex and drugs, but life kind of sucks and is serious. There’s a lot of Adderall, a lot of weed, and descriptions of such.
BTW, it’s obvious from the sheer amount of oral sex in his verses across tracks, that he’s either a) not getting any, or (b) getting way TOO much. The track “I Will” is entirely about his enthusiasm for providing it.
Honestly, the music is just OK, clearly only a vehicle to deliver Brown’s rapping. A couple of exceptions: “Pac Blood” has a SoCal soul groove and is Brown’s vision of an alternative world where rap were as revered as Shakespeare. And I can get some jazz vibes out of “DNA,” which is also a little break from Pee Wee.
This record unlocked a career for Brown. It got lots of attention - it’s different. It’s Detroit, it’s real. I’m not sure who you “play this for.”
Pitchfork writers:
When he broke through in 2011, Danny Brown seemed to be running backwards at us, howling from about five years into the future. He was a Ghostface-level narrator with an asymmetrical haircut, tight jeans, gap teeth, and an imagination so vivid it seemed to frighten even him. Brown rapped in an astonished yelp and treated verses like advanced Pac-Man levels, gobbling up as much of his surroundings as he could before the timer buzzed.
#62 Grouper, Ruins (2014)
Rating: 3
This album has only four instruments - an upright piano, a chorus of bullfrogs, some crickets, and on three tracks, a faint whisper of a human voice. It’s beautiful, but it’s tenuous. It feels less like a performance, instead that you’ve stumbled on someone practicing late at night on your high school’s piano in the band room. And you really don’t want to disturb her.
Grouper is Liz Harris, now 41. The Grouper moniker isn’t about the fish, it’s a reference to her childhood, raised within a “Fourth Way” commune in the Bay Area called The Group. They believed in self-development, enlightenment, something something. Always healthy.
“Holding” is particularly beautiful. A long, mournful, pensive meditation on a dissolving romantic relationship.
I hear you calling and I want to come
Run straight into the valleys of your arms and disappear there
But I know my love could fail you
Because in a clearing when the sunlight comes
Exposing all the shadows of/in our intricate behavior
I see/feel a sort of fading
We build our own unfolding
She recorded this album in Portugal, presumably where she also recorded all the ambient animal and weather noises. “Holding” ends with a thunderstorm. The last track, “Made of Air” is an exception, recorded in her mother’s house 7 years earlier.
Not much else to say on the music - it’s beautiful, melancholy, ambient, one-take solo piano loops in a dreamy state.
Pitchfork writers:
Recorded during a stint on the coast of Portugal, it’s just Harris alone at the piano, her voice unadorned, singing with unnerving candor about heartbreak and confusion. The only reverb is that of the piano’s sustain pedal; her only accompaniment is the occasional sound of crickets, frogs, a passing thunderstorm. Toward the end of “Labyrinth,” a microwave beeps when the power flashes back on after a blackout—a strange and startling reminder that there is a world outside this terrifying, irresistibly beautiful loneliness
#61 Arca, Arca (2017)
Rating: 1
This is an album that gets incredibly positive reviews and thinky-pieces, and I just don’t really get it. It’s dark and haunted. It’s also in Spanish, but I really think that doesn’t matter.
It violates two specific rules. To be clear, this is just my personal taste. 1) I don’t like certain kinds of direct electronic vocal manipulation. When a vocal track sounds mostly like a voice, but just not quite. Do you guys like “Anoche?” ; 2) I don’t like when production is so over-manipulated, like there was a track here to start with, but it got so chopped and delayed and pitched up and down, it becomes unrecognizable, and certainly unretainable in memory. Maybe that’s just traditional “structure?” The song “Desafio” almost has structure, but I get the feeling that’s satirical.
Sometimes I feel like music is created to be unsettling - to be “difficult.” The album cover illustration may itself be a signal. I love experimentation - but do I need to be unsettled? Startled? Nauseated by flanging sounds? No. I don’t. Try “Castration.”
Here’s The Guardian in an EXTREMELY positive review:
“Exquisite opener “Piel” captures the interplay between poise and prostration that has made Catholic ritual such a rich artistic seam, while arch humour is provided by Whip--hyper-real lashing accompanied by the sound of a powering-down robot--”
Spin Magazine praised the album as the “most engaging, emotionally draining and confrontational album to date.” Maybe this is totally true, and I’m just not in the mood for draining, confrontational music right now.
How to describe? It’s electronic, yes. It has the occasional prayerful and tone-warped voice of Arca’s namesake, Venezuelan producer Alejandra Gherson. There are plenty of clips and crashes and startles. There is no key and no time signature.
I wish I had the insight to understand why I like the music of Gherson’s friend and collaborator, Bjork, but not Arca’s. Bjork is also experimental, but still rides some sort of structural train through much of her music.
Arca creates some very genuine art that is sort of music-like on the surface (i.e. it is sound recorded for playing back), but just strays so far afield of what I’ve experienced as the most common purpose of music. Gherson is thinking, and she’s expressing and sharing. And lots of fancy music writers are getting something out of it.
She’s also produced records for several very popular and more “mainstream” artists like The Weeknd, Bjork, FKA Twigs, and Kanye.
Pitchfork writers:
She built Arca around her singing voice, its ragged edges tracing stories of death, and yearning, and change. If Xen and its 2015 follow-up, Mutant, flourished in cerebral space, then Arca aims straight for the beautiful tumult of the body. It's a delicate and stormy album about shedding skin and growing it anew, about the pain of nursing a wound and the celebration of watching the body stitch itself back together whole.