Fantano Project №5: 90–83
Hey all, sorry for the extended absence. It’s been a busy few months, but that doesn’t mean that this project has left my sights! In this post, we’ll cover numbers 90 through 83 of Anthony Fantano’s Top 100 Albums of the Decade. It’s the biggest bunch I’ve done in one post so far, since I’m trying to make up for some lost time. So, let’s jump right into it!
90. Prurient — Frozen Niagara Falls
It had to happen, sooner or later. I came into this project knowing that there were gonna be some albums that were gonna be tough to sit through. Any fan of Theneedledrop will tell you that Fantano’s tastes often lean towards the experimental side of things, which is generally quite exciting for me. I enjoy that the albums he reviews are often things that fall outside of the cultural mainstream, things that I never would have found on my own. Up until this point, I would say that the Krallice record has been the most extreme, the one that I would be least likely to play out loud for fear of complaining roommates. But a new king has taken that throne, and it’s Prurient’s Frozen Niagara Falls.
A staggering double album, clocking in at over ninety minutes, Frozen Niagara Falls is a dark, punishing sojourn through the harshest realms of noise, industrial, and electronic music, with elements of metal and drone thrown in there, delivered to the world in 2015 by Prurient, the name under which long-time extreme artist Dominick Fernow performs. So you think you’ve sat through hardcore stuff? Try this one. If it doesn’t leave you with a headache and without a smile, you’re a true champion. Prurient endeavors to create just about the most cold, depressing sonic landscape he can, the sounds of pure agony and brokenness. High pitch frequencies, feedback, and static abound, tying the record together like one long, hour and a half window into a torture chamber in Siberia.
Perhaps I’m overstating things. There are elements of music on this project. Haunting, looping synths flow in and out on the opening track, Myth of Building Bridges, surrounded by ultra-distorted voices, and whines that sound like a jumbo jet in flames careening towards the earth. The next track, “Dragonflies to Sew You Up,” comes in with these booming, lo-fi drums and more screaming metal vocals. Synths fade in to relieve our ears from the pounding drums, followed by ambient sounds of conversation and laughter. The final minute of the track actually resembles a composed track, where the screaming, the synths, and the drums all combine in a meaningful, artful way. The third track, “A Sorrow with a Braid,” is largely just noise of some hyper blown-out feedback and the vaguest presence of low, spoken word.
Some tracks, like “Jester in Agony” or “Shoulders of Summerstones,” are pretty light on the noise and screaming, and focus more on those icy synths and the ambiance they can create if left to their own devices, while others are all about the sheer energy of twisted and warped sounds, noises, and vocals. It’s definitely an experience, one that Fantano himself noted is not for everyone in his review of the record, but one that takes a little bit of getting used to, a little bit of adjustment to, in order to derive emotion and significance from the record. The closing track, an eleven minute odyssey entitled, “Christ Among the Broken Glass,” is undoubtedly my favorite of the two discs. An acoustic guitar leads us through the darkness, with a gentleness that is found nowhere else on the album. Chilling, distorted whispering of more spoken word poetry ends the track, and the album, with beauty and grace, while still maintaining the menacing air of the everything that has come before it. The title of the final song, as well as the spoken word on a lot of the record, brings up a lot of religious themes, hinting that there is more to the songs than the harsh, noisey exteriors let on and that the album may reward subsequent, attentive listens, if you’re up for them.
I’m hard pressed to rate this album. On the one hand, I certainly did not enjoy listening through it’s 90 minute run time all the way through several times. It wasn’t torture so much as it was work to keep my headphones in and to keep my mind focused on the sounds. It’s never music you can sing along to, tap your foot in time with, or even lightly rock your head back and forth as some sonic idea entertains you. That being said, I really do enjoy a lot of the ideas, themes, and moods on the album for their raw, dark power. The closing track, as I’ve said, is genuinely enjoyable and beautiful, and there were moments scattered throughout the rest of the LP that did make my ears perk up, moments of harmony, instrumentation, or discernible lyrics (or poetry?). We’ll go with something in the middle, I guess.
Favorite Track: Christ Among the Broken Glass, Greenpoint
Least Favorite Track: Poinsettia Pills
5/10
89. Nicolas Jaar — Space Is Only Noise
The debut album from Chilean-American Electronic artist Nicolas Jaar, who has another album farther up this list under the name Against All Logic, is hard to describe in familiar musical terms. Its most adjacent musical genre would probably be House music, but Space is Only Noise is far from your typical rave fare. The opening track, Être, signals this pretty clearly, featuring sounds of small waves lapping against a shore and various vocal samples, in French and English, fading in and out, followed by little bits of clicks, vocal syllables, ambient sounds of children crying and playing, etc. It’s understated, hypnotic, and atmospheric, a slow introduction into what will be more understated, hypnotic, and atmospheric music. The next track, Colomb, features space-y synths, ASMR-type percussion sounds, and distorted French vocals. Thus, eight minutes into the project, we’ve had something quite beautiful, haunting, but nothing with very much shape or form that one might expect from anything tagged with the label “Electronic.” It’s not until the fourth song, Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust, that we get anything with a clear groove, as the low-key, doubled vocals chants more enigmatic lyrics. Strings weave in and out as the song builds into something just faster than a funeral march, making us feel like we’re finally going somewhere.
Keep Me There takes that momentum and brings us into more familiar territory, as drums, keys, and more haunting, droning vocals all function as different layers, things that can be brought in and out at will, combined with each other any which way. Halfway through the song, a chopped and flipped saxophone sample adds a new sense of dynamism, a new color to the table, which subsequently gets played over itself again and again, duplicating, cutting, creating some controlled chaos. The effect is all very hypnotic and you finish the five minute song without realizing that you’re almost twenty minutes into an album whose tempo has never risen above 90 BPM.
The record is, as a whole, dark and bleak, but that’s not to say that there’s nothing head-bopping on here. The title track, after Jaar’s signature mumbling, Jim Morrison-esque vocal starts it off, features fat-sounding percussion, self-assured grooves, and textures that morph, stretch, and distort all over the place. Within the drifts of atmosphere and noise, there are pockets of recognizable beats that sound quite amazing as they emerge from a sea of dark ambiance. It’s always just enough to keep you entertained among the washes of heady atmosphere that would otherwise become mind-numbingly boring. Over its forty five minute run time, Space is Only Noise covers a lot of ground while also feeling unified, somewhat static. Overall, it’s hard to come away from the project feeling like you quite grasped what it was going for; you’re intrigued to give it another shot so you do, and then you finish with the same feeling as the last time. Its elusiveness may come across as lack of artistic clarity or as something simply too ethereal and mysterious to be tied down. Either way, there’s no denying the dark beauty and subtly infectious grooves that Jaar pulls off among the vast soundscapes of this airy, moody project. In this day and age where moody synth and percussion loops form the basis of the Internet’s favorite genre of background music (Lo-Fi hip-hop), Space is Only Noise may seem at once commonplace and pretentious, but remembering that the project came out in 2011, well before the studying anime girls and Vaporwave memes took over, is a testament that the experiments heard here led the way to one of the future, major musical trends of the decade.
Favorite Tracks: Colomb, Space is Only Noise If You Can See, Balance Her In Between Your Eyes, Specters of the Future, Etre (closing track)
Least Favorite: Too Many Kids Finding Rain in the Dust
8/10
88. Travis Scott — Rodeo
Ah, yes, the birth of a star. In case you’ve been living under a rock, there is perhaps no better embodiment of this last decade’s popular musical trends than Mr. Travis Scott (he’s even Kylie Jenner’s baby daddy and currently has his own McDonald’s Happy Meal promotion). One of the driving forces behind the mainstream-ing of trap music in hip-hop, combined with woozy, autotuned vocals, and the ad-libs between lines that have become staples of our vernacular (he is largely credited with popularizing the term “it’s lit,” as you will hear in just about any one of his songs), I would argue that there is no better synecdoche for 2010’s hip-hop than Travis Scott. His massive hit from a later record, Sicko Mode, is something of an anthem for my generation.
But here, Mr. Fantano has taken us to the origin of this cultural phenom, to the debut album, Rodeo. While Scott’s sound is immediately recognizable to me, I must admit that I pulled up the tracklist and had never heard a single song off of this record. While Rodeo isn’t Travis Scott’s very first appearance in the music industry — he put out a couple of mixtapes prior — there is certainly the feeling that we’re watching a star being born on this album. The opening track, Pornography, begins with a brief spoken word introduction that slides right into the psychedelic trap vibes that Scott has popularized. It’s a hazy, drug-induced stagger through the “fantasies” and “menageries” of the life of a rap star, that straightens up a little with Travis Scott’s flow on the first proper rap verse becoming punchy and articulate. The next song, Oh My Dis Side, features another distinctive voice of the last decade, that of Quavo from the rap group Migos. The autotuned crooning and ad-libbing of Travis Scott and Quavo are sometimes almost indistinguishable from one another, the two voices melding into a sound that has become one of the most dominant elements of contemporary rap. But once again, the track shifts into a B section, featuring Scott and Quavo delivering bars, but still backed by a slippery beat of pianos, voices, and drum machines.
The rest of the album follows this general pattern of longer tracks (in the five minute range) that are more progressive than one might expect from mainstream rap, with the songs generally alternating between trippy crooning and tight, triplet-driven flows. The features look like a Greatest Hits list for the decade: Quavo, Future, 2 Chainz, Juicy J, The Weeknd, Kanye West, Swae Lee, Chief Keef, Justin Bieber, Young Thug, Schoolboy Q, and Toro y Moi. It’s hard to fathom how a debut album could feature such an extensive list of some of the biggest names in popular music, but it further reinforces the case for Rodeo as an incredible historical document of our generation’s moment in music. And yet, such an inundation of popular names and trends doesn’t hold the album back whatsoever. Instead, it adds to the ambition of Travis Scott as an artist who is here not afraid to take risks, get artistic. There are plenty of straightforward bangers on here, but there’s an equal measure of depth, curveballs, and surprises over the record’s entirety. It’s this artistry that makes the New Atlanta trap sounds into something that can be sustained over several extended cuts and make the record a rewarding experience. (Surprisingly enough, his track with Kanye is the shortest and the weakest track on here.) While it’s a little overlong and perhaps demands a certain mood to get through the whole thing in one go, there’s no denying that the production, the guest contributions, the more straightforward rap flows, the songwriting, it’s all really fantastic in a way that’s surprising coming from such a popular, commercial figure.
Favorite Tracks: Antidote, Wasted, Oh My Dis Side
Least Favorite: Piss On Your Grave
8/10
87. Haru Nemuri — Haru To Shura
Did I expect to find myself listening to Japanese Punk Rock during this journey? Not exactly. Am I mad about it? Of course not. This album, from Japanese singer-songwriter Haru Nemuri, takes elements of J-pop, rock, punk, rap, and electronic dance music, and throws them all together in one furious, potent blend. On display within the album is a wide range of emotion. Don’t be fooled by the fast tempos and hurried rap vocal delivery, Nemuri is pouring her soul out over these tracks. Looking over the translations of her lyrics, themes of heartbreak and loneliness are woven into just about every track. The fusion of those lyrics, whose power can be felt whether you understand them or not, with the energy of the music makes for such a refreshing listen. If only the Western pop-rock scene sounded this fresh, vibrant, and versatile. It’s a quick listen at under 40 minutes and while it may not be everyone’s cup of tea for a number of reasons, I found this unique record quite worthwhile.
Favorite Tracks: Let’s Dream, Haru to Shura, Nineteen,
Least Favorite: Rock n’ Roll Never Dies
7/10
86. MGMT — Little Dark Age
OK, promise me you won’t judge, but my knowledge concerning MGMT prior to listening to this record was limited to that rather annoying hit they had, Kids, with its fittingly infantile synth riff and what I thought to be a pretty underwhelming chorus. I had heard a couple other songs from the group, but nothing much and certainly nothing I thought much of. This album seems to have flown pretty under the radar, with no singles that gained much traction or any conversations around the album’s release. At least, none that I had heard. Which was probably a good thing, allowing me to set aside the MGMT I had had contact with in the mainstream and just focus on the music.
Which was, overall, pretty excellent. It’s a trim album, coming at 45 minutes, and delivers dark, hooky alt-rock jams that are so much more fun than anything I had heard from the band before. Here’s something you should know about me: one of my least favorite things in the world is kitsch. I hate everything about it, from the hipsters who embrace it as a personal aesthetic to the word itself (it’s great for Scrabble, though). And MGMT comes pretty close to kitsch on this record, which is part of why I have not previously enjoyed their music, like on the opening track, She Works Out Too Much, which tells of a man who is tired with his girlfriend, who is, as you might imagine, obsessed with working out. On paper, the sarcasm and tongue-in-cheek-ness of the song should kindle the fires of my dislike. And those things do keep me from loving this opening track (the female vocal, spoken word thing is really insufferable), but the groove of the synths, the bass (really carries the track here), the drums, some horns near the end, make it danceable and fun.
The title track is more representative of what I love about this record, with its darker tone, more evocative lyrics, and the same infectious groove of the opener. I can do the whole 80’s throwback thing, as long as I feel like it’s being embraced in good faith (i.e. not kitsch) and that’s what I get from Little Dark Age. We get a loveletter to 80’s ballads on Me & Michael, which is catchy enough to escape the kitsch curse. I was disappointed upon arriving at the track that bore my name, “James,” to find that I was not done justice. In fact, I think it’s the weakest track on the record. The sleepy, uninspired vocal performance combines with a rather generic instrumental backing, never rising to anything worthy of the name. We also get TSLAMP, which stands for Time Spent Looking At My Phone, a song which has no pretense beyond its title. I’m normally pretty skeptical about anything that gets caught up in decrying the detrimental effects of social media and smartphones on society, but MGMT make it work here with sincere songwriting and more catchy hooks.
The closer, Hand It Over, makes up for the irritating When You’re Small, with a track straight out of the Tame Impala playbook, with psychedelic effects thrown all over it. There’s not that much more I have to say about this one. I like it, but I feel like it peaks early with the title track and the project as a whole is a little too hit-or-miss for me to really love it and want to listen to it again and again.
Favorite Tracks: Little Dark Age, Me and Michael, TSLAMP, Hand It Over
Least Favorite Track: James
6/10
85. Destroyer — Kaputt
Went into this one totally blind and came out of it with fairly mixed feelings. Kaputt is full of lush instrumentation, open sonic spaces, and vibes. It’s another love letter to a bygone era and we are edging dangerously close to kitsch for my taste, but I think Destroyer pulls it off, thanks in large part to the saxophone and trumpets that are undeniably beautiful wherever they appear on the record. The sounds on the record are a little unconventional and it can come off a little too smooth at times, a little too corny, but it’s usually grounded by the density of the lyrics and songwriting. There’s a lot to unpack on Kaputt, so much so that writing this review has loomed over me for months. But the bottom line is that Kaputt possesses a strong aesthetic core, whether it jives with your taste or not, that make it a formidable record.
There’s also a lot of personality coming through from the frontman, Dan Kejar, as he sings these smooth (maybe too smooth) songs, spinning tales about people, places, and times past. It’s another thing that keeps me engaged throughout the project: just spending time with this persona, since Kejar’s voice and affect can be more than a little off-putting, a little bit of an acquired taste, but there’s enough substance behind it to make me keep coming back. I could never call this album bland, even when it is at its cheesiest. It’s a trip into the past, a flight of fantasy, a kind of nostalgia that isn’t willy-nilly but requiring a bit of dedication and immersion. Nevertheless, I found it rewarding, mostly because of the instrumentation and soundscapes that Destroyer composes throughout the project. I can take or leave the narratives in the lyrics and Kejar’s crooning, but there is pure, airy musicality, even on the leaner tracks like Poor in Love, that makes the plunge worth it. If you want to feel like you’re in an end credits sequence, driving through LA at sunset with the top down, Kaputt is the album you want.
Favorite Tracks: Kaputt, Downtown, Chinatown,
Least Favorite: Blue Eyes
6/10
84. Billy Woods — History Will Absolve Me
This is another intimidating project to write about. I came in with some surface-level familiarity with Billy Woods’s most recent project, Hiding Places, which I quite enjoyed on the passing listens I gave it last year. And jumping into this one, at first, I felt quite at home. Gritty, underground hip-hop is right in my wheelhouse and History Will Absolve Me sounds like a project that walked so that Run the Jewels could run. Experimental production and staggering, non-stop hardcore delivery from Woods that sounds like a mix of Killer Mike, MF Doom, and MC Ride. I think the project is best encapsulated in a song like The Man Who Would Be King, with its scathing, erudite, political commentary coming through both lyricism and kaleidoscopic sampling.
The sound of History Will Absolve Me is aggressive, but never too “in your face,” with wobbling synthesizers and old-school boom bap drum beats that let Billy Woods deliver decimating, alliterative lines. A less talented lyricist would come across as silly or cringey, but Woods is deft enough with his words and delivery to sell the enigmatic avenger persona. It’s easy enough to just sit back and let Woods spin literary webs around track after track, but there is a point at which this album becomes a little repetitive, a little too one note. The constancy of his energy is impressive, but the effect is exhausting; track after track batters the listener with the same vicious flows and dark production. The album runs just over an hour and never really lets up, changes gears, or explores territory that isn’t traversed in the first twenty minutes. I think if I spent months returning to the album, I would grow to appreciate its individual parts and finer points, but as of right now, it remains somewhat impenetrable to me.
Which leaves me in a difficult position. I really like any given song off this project and I’m all about every aspect of its aesthetic. The production is awesome, the lyricism is great, and there isn’t a distinguishable gap of quality from one track to another that could leave me with a clear set of songs to return to or leave behind. It would be easy if the album was mostly hits with a few glaring weak spots. Instead, History Will Absolve Me hits like a wave of impenetrable underground rap: a solid, unified mass that is difficult to dissect or compartmentalize and I can’t help but feel that that’s exactly how Billy Woods intended it. It’s kinda like the guy who walks into a casual political debate on social media and slaps down a dissertation that systematically dismembers every contender in the comments section, exposing them for the lightweights they are. How do you respond to that? Where do you even begin? I think Billy Woods’s talent is a double-edged sword here: he excels at what he does, but that excellence gives him no reason to diversify or expand. Of the six full length LP’s he put out as a solo artist in the last decade, this one is the longest, his magnum opus, if you will. Years from now, when rappers of every shape, sound, and size have come and gone, Billy Woods will still be there on his subterranean soapbox, a monument to the void that swallows each of us up, reminding us that the apocalypse has already come, that hell is already here.
Favorite Tracks: Pompeii (those Shining samples tho), The Man Who Would Be King, Crocodile Tears, The Foreigner, Human Resources
Least Favorite: Blue Dream
8/10
83. Sons of Kemet — Your Queen is a Reptile
I’ll just cut to the chase on this one: this album rocks. Arriving here with some of the tightest and most exciting jazz in recent history, Sons of Kemet are alchemists, making engaging out of relatively bare components (this is at the other end of the spectrum from Kamasi Washington’s cosmic, spiritual sound). With just infectious Afro-Caribbean rhythms and stripped down instrumentation consisting of saxophone, tuba, percussion, and the occasional spoken word guest, Your Queen is a Reptile gets you grooving from end to end. While it’s relatively small in its scope, there is always something there keeping you interested, making the project more accessible to those less familiar with the genre, whose extended solos can be intimidating or off-putting. Instead of doing gymnastic stunts up and down every scale under the sun, Sons of Kemet relies on simplicity and chemistry between the musicians to keep you engaged. The melodic and rhythmic hooks are always clear, always keeping your head moving in time with the beat, whether fast or slow.
It’s hard to say much more than that I enjoy this album front to back. It’s fresh, entertaining, exciting, and gloriously simple. It’s maybe one track too long, as the simplicity of the group’s instrumentation and sound doesn’t yield much in the way of variety, but it’s hardly a substantial critique of these explosive, robust performances. On top of everything musically that I love, the album presents a somehow understated political message, with its tribute to various females from Black history in the title of each track, in opposition to the project’s title. It’s all pretty brilliant and while I would love to see Sons of Kemet lean a little bit more into the softer tracks and cover just a bit more ground, such a wish might miss the generous artistic contribution offered here.
Favorite Tracks: My Queen is Harriet Tubman, My Quen is Nanny Of The Maroons, My Queen is Yaa Asantewaa, My Queen is Ada Eastman, My Queen is Albertina Sisulu
Least Favorite: My Queen is Anna Julia Cooper
9/10
Tran-
-sition. All right everyone, that’s it for me… for now. I hope to have another post up on this project before the end of the year, but we’ll see. Until then, stay safe!
