Four Tet : Twenty Three

Four Tet is Kieran Hebdan, an electronic music artist who crafts ambient-feeling abstracts by melding basic beats with low-key instruments and concrete sounds, prefering to lace his tunes with acoustic guitar and clacking computer keyboards rather than bombastic synths. His works, at least on his early albums, are very relaxed but they refuse to fade into the background.

"Twenty Three" is off what I thought was his first album, but is actually his second. It's a pretty straightforward piece, kicking off with a variety of wind chimes. As the song progresses he adds in bits of sound, layering acoustic guitar, a chiming organ, a nice trumpet and a smooth backbeat. Plus there's the only vocal on the entire album which is just somebody going 'tok tok'. It serves as a rhythmic counterpoint to the beat, but the oddness of it, especially against the otherwise organic and flowing sounds, is really arresting. This juxtaposition is what pulls the piece up from a simple exercise in new wave environmental records to something interesting and worth hearing again and again. I think you could even toss it into mix for a dancefloor crowd.

The whole album is pretty good and is a pleasant listen to late in the evening. You can find "Twenty Three" on Kieran's post-debut album, 2001's Pause.

[You can listen to Four Tet's "Twenty Three" by navigating to the post "Song094" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Daft Punk : Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

So, if you listened to the radio at all in 2007, you heard Kanye West's smash "Stronger". It was a decent rap over a killer vocoder-driven vocal track shouting "harder, better, faster, stronger". "How cool! What a genius!" you probably thought to yourself, at least if you're as square as I am. Well, he is a genius, but mostly a genius at picking out cool but obscure samples.

"Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" is a jam by French electronic duo Daft Punk. It's an exceptionally  funky tune that takes a simple self-empowering chant, wraps it in vocoder splendor and splays it over groove in a most jazzy way. The vocoder is a device that breaks sound, particularly speech, down into composite wave forms. These are then transmitted and decoded resulting in a decidedly robotic tone.
In this case, the tone is also being warped by incredible keyboard work by the duo. In a sense, the vocals are the keyboard sound, not in a digital sampling sense, but in a very analog sense. Listen to the syncopated funk as they chop the lyrics up around 2:20 or the near incomprehensible squeaks in the final solo around the 3:20 mark. I just love the way they break it down, with the vocals becoming less vocal-like and more mechanically instrumental as the song progresses.

Meanwhile, the hook jams underneath, pumping the funk and holding down a solid base for the duo to vamp over. It's like jazz-funk from the '70's that's been shipped via time machine to the new millennium.

You can find "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" on Daft Punk's 2001 release, Discovery. While this song is an amazing tune, and when it's on, it's hard to argue that it's not my favorite tune of all time (the groove is just that good), the rest of the album is more pedestrian dance. There are people who love Daft Punk, but alas, I am not one of them. Except this song. This song is awesome.

[You can listen to Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by navigating to the post "Song091" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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DJ Lobsterdust / Van Halen : Hot for Teacher

Okay, my final selection was chosen to reflect one other trend in mashups: the rock remix. There is a sort of subgenre of the mashup that consists of creating a dancefloor remix of a rock song. Often these are miserable, but sometimes they are awesome. I had a few to choose from, but ultimately chose Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" for a couple of reasons.

First, the original is kinda funky and has that spoken word stuff that really fits over the dance beat. Second, we all know David Lee Roth always wanted to be a disco diva. He never said as much, but you know he did. So one of the things I like about this tune is that DJ Lobsterdust gives him that opportunity to shine.

The beat is apparently from a tune "Ghosts N Stuff" by an artist called Deadmau5 and is apparently electro house. Whatever, not my bag, but it sounds good, especially under David Lee's growling libido. I could totally see this dropping right into the mix at the local nightclub. I know I would have loved it back when I actually did that sort of thing.

There were a couple of other tunes in the running for this category, all of which are great fun:

• Boston's "More Than a Feeling" by Ministry of Mashed Sound
• Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" by Marc Johnce
• Kings of Leon's "Sex On Fire" by Leedm101
• The Pixies' "Monkey Gone to Heaven" also by DJ Lobsterdust

If the idea of dancified versions of any of these songs appeals to you, by all means, search them out on Google.

Can't buy it, but the original Van Halen track is from their eternally classic 1984. Deadmau5's track can be found on his 2009 release, For Lack of a Better Name.

* My favorite line from David's Wiki page: "Roth has an uncle Dave who is a brain surgeon, an uncle Marty who is an orthopedic surgeon, and a grandfather who was a surgeon".  Uncle Marty would be a great band name.

[You can listen to DJ Lobsterdust's remix of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" by navigating to the post "Song089" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Wax Audio / The Beatles : Come Together

At its most basic, the mashup is slapping one song's lyrics on another song's music.  But at its most creative, the mashup is a full-on remix, taking elements of both songs and creating something truly new, unique and interesting.

The Beatles have been done to death, by radio, by covers and certainly by mashups.  The most famous is probably Danger Mouse's mash of Jay-Z's The Black Album with The Beatles' self-titled 'white album' and there are a couple other entries worth checking into, another one of which will likely make its way to these pages in the next week or so.  But this one is by far the best.

Wax Audio has taken a great piece of rocking electronica, Justice's "Waters of Nazareth" and laid it underneath one of the best rock songs of all time, "Come Together" by the Beatles.  But, in doing so, he's altered the pacing and flow of Lennon's masterpiece, cutting it apart and repiecing it together, reinventing both songs.  At first, the interplay is pretty straightforward, but towards the end, Wax Audio plays with the dynamics, adding some echo and a nifty breakdown.  Notice also how he introduces the organ from "Nazareth" into the second part of the song.  And I especially love at the end when he gets John to throw down the shout-outs, a sort of digest version of the whole song.  This thing is composed, folks.

Unfortunately the only version he's got up on his site is the cheesy one where he added samples from Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. speeches.  Fortunately, I'm here for you kiddies, bringing you the unadulterated version.  You can't buy this mash anywhere, but you can get the original "Come Together" on the Beatles' classic Abbey Road and the backing track was generated from Justice's excellent LP, Cross.

[You can listen to Wax Audio's mash of The Beatles' "Come Together" by navigating to the post "Song083" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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Does It Offend You, Yeah? : Epic Last Song/We Are Rockstars

Does It Offend You, Yeah? is a band with some issues. First of all, their name is crazy. It's got five words, two pieces of punctuation, and is a complete sentence on its own. This means it's very difficult, up to the point of embarrassment, to discuss the band with anyone who doesn't already know about them, which is pretty much everyone I've ever met.

Second, they can't seem to decide what kind of band they want to be. On the one hand, half the album sounds like rock-based electronica, along the lines of Justice, and the other half sounds exactly like an 80's revival act, like an upbeat Modern English maybe, or even a little like early U2. So I kind of wanted to explore this dichotomy and post two songs by them, one from each of their sides.

"Epic Last Song" is, appropriately enough, the final song on their album, and while not spectacular, it is a thoroughly enjoyable slab of pop. It somehow manages to sound really, really familiar, and yet I can't figure out who it sounds like. Maybe you can let me know your thoughts in the comments. In any case, there are a few other straight-up pop songs like this on the album.

"We Are Rockstars" is a more dance-oriented tune. It kicks off with a straight-up four-on-the-floor beat snazzed out with some really nice cowbell and slaps you right in the face with some super-intense synth riffs. It hammers on the beat for a while, but then drops into a calm breakdown that sounds like it's straight off an A Flock of Seagulls record, with some vocoder thrown in to really set that 80's mood. That lasts a little while, then it's back to the thrashing synth and rhythm. This switches up a couple more times through the song, until finally the monsoon of sound ends, tossing you up onto the beach in blissful silence.

Basically, whichever side of the road the band feels like traveling, it's a solid record all the way through. Both of these songs can be found on their 2008 release, You Have No Idea What You're Getting Yourself Into.

Also, since I've promised a song a day, this post will cover the next 2 days. Enjoy!

PS: In case you weren't sure about their 80's leanings, one of the songs on their new album is called "Home Is Where The Heart Is (A Song For John Hughes)".

[You can listen to Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s "Epic Last Song" by navigating to the post "Song066" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

[You can listen to Does It Offend You, Yeah?'s "We Are Rockstars" by navigating to the post "Song067" and clicking or right-clicking on the title or the link.]

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