Mock Orange - Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse

Cult favorites Mock Orange return with an eighth album that reconciles their later alt-country leanings with their Midwestern emo roots.

"High Octane Punk Mode"

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Mock Orange

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The most recent spate of “Best Emo Albums of All Time” lists makes an admirable attempt to legitimize a style of punk rock that has spent the past two decades derided as something you’re supposed to grow out of. But the inclusions unintentionally serve as the best counterargument: Dear You might be the only time you see a band’s fourth album in there. Nearly of all the classic emo bands either spectacularly implode in their early stages, devolve into sustainable mediocrity or are Fall Out Boy. But after launching some of the leading figures of emo’s 4th wave, Topshelf Records has served as a continuing ed lab for elder statesmen: in 2014, Braid sounded as contemporary and vital as ever on their Will Yip-produced No Coast and also shed some light on the oft-overlooked Jazz June when they released After the Earthquake months later. With their ninth release and first in five years, Mock Orange is in the same place the Velvet Teen were on their 2015 Topshelf comeback All is Illusory: previously unclassifiable to their detriment, they’re now given a new, flattering context in which to be understood.
Looking at it now, Mock Orange’s convoluted trajectory could actually serve as the basis for a tragicomic mockumentary of late-'90s emo. Their first two LPs were produced by Mark Trombino and J. Robbins and released on a label that was destroyed by George Lucas in a copyright infringement suit. After the turn of the century, they evolved into a kind of floral, orchestrated indie rock that the Get Up Kids, the Promise Ring and Saves the Day used to effectively end their commercial peaks. 2004’s sync-friendly Mind is Not Brain somehow found them within reach of MTV2 airplay and major cable shows and fittingly, they toured with Rogue Wave, that era’s definitive “shit luck” band. On their next two albums, they dabbled in literate, NPR-indie and more or less went alt-country. And now, here’s Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse, which was put in jeopardy after a nearly fatal hard drive failure. Seriously, always back things up, kids.
After all that, it’s natural that Mock Orange would spend Put the Kid trying to assess whether the bullshit has been worth it. Single “High Octane Punk Mode” probably would’ve been sarcastic even in their early days, but the lightly chiding tone fits within what is otherwise midtempo, “The O.C.” indie mode. Ryan Grisham relates how his desire to expand his social circle and listening habits even the slightest bit are still seen as betrayals in his community, reflecting on the blinkered view within hardcore that only becomes apparent once you step outside of it: “the safety pin floats way out, but never really goes away.”
As with No Coast, Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse finds itself in an existential and geographic liminal space, between adult responsibility and spiritual upkeep, between major media centers. And yet, while Braid felt marooned even in Chicago, Mock Orange is based out of Evansville, Indiana, a corridor between the Midwest and the South—bordering Kentucky, equidistant from Chicago and Tupelo, Mississippi. Twenty years in, they’ve finally reconciled the strident, universal yearning of their earlier, midwestern emo phase with the twang of 2011's Disguised as Ghosts. Surprisingly, they’ve dropped any vague sense of alt-country for straight-up southern boogie: the blown-out riffs on “Window” and “Too Good Your Dreams Don’t Come True” sound like they are one Dan Auberbach cosign away from KROQ airplay.  
And yet, while this is undoubtedly the greatest eighth album from any band ever tagged as emo, Put the Kid on the Sleepy Horse itself lacks the true standout moments that would explain what earned Mock Orange their cult status to begin with. The most intriguing hook occurs on “Nine Times,” where brash slide guitars and shifty rhythms pivot into a stately march on the chorus. Elsewhere the choruses cruise rather than soar, and Grisham’s lyrics cut your skin but never draw blood. Brief insight into scene politics aside, most of his judgment is directed at himself for his artistic intransigence. Of course, there’s a cheat code for dealing with this, which is to write about writer’s block:  “There was a time when all my lines kept pouring out, now they’ve gone missing,” he sings, lamenting the “dead end verses on my back.” After the self-deprecating “Too Good Your Dreams Don’t Come True,” the final song is titled “Tell Us Your Story” and it's final line is “I fear I’ve stayed too long.” But the song itself is the first time  on the album Mock Orange sound triumphant, so while that might have been his fear, it was worth the past five years to push through it.

Steve Reich - Four Organs / Phase Pattern

Four Organs and Phase Patterns come from a time when minimalist composer Steve Reich was in an obsessively scientific mode. They establish a new language, while arguing for their very right to exist.

Unlike some other famous works by the minimalist pioneer Steve Reich, Four Organs is not the least bit soothing. It doesn’t murmur or churn; it squawks, sort of, digging into your nerves like a throbbing hangnail: “Stop, stop, I confess,” someone reportedly wailed at the work’s premiere. A concertgoer apparently also rapped her shoe on the stage at the same performance, like Khrushchev at the 1960 United Nations General Assembly. Reich described the scene years later with evident pleasure as a “riot.”

As a result, it acquired a reputation in Steve Reich’s canon. It is unloved, the black-sheep son with the doleful countenance that will never reap the adulation and love of Music for 18 Musicians or Different Trains. But the thing is, Reich designed it for discomfort. The whole piece consists of four Farfisa organs, hardly peaceful instruments, leaning on one long dominant eleventh chord. This chord, the dominant eleventh, is a “home” chord with bits and notes of other places lingering in it. It is an inherently uneasy chord, rooted to the spot with one eye over its shoulder. Even if you’ve never looked at a page of written music in your life, you can just feel the tendons pulling in its harmonic makeup. Listening to this piece in headphones, with multiple Farfisas pulling at this one chord like dogs fighting over a sock, I sometimes had to remind myself to unclench my jaw.

This record, reissued by the San Francisco-based label Superior Viaduct, was originally released in 1970 by Shandar, a small French label that made an outsized impact on American musical modernism: in its decade-long existence, the imprint managed to release works by Albert Ayler, La Monte Young, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, and many others. Like any good champions of the musical avant-garde, they were eventually punished by fate: in 1979, a flood destroyed most of their original vinyl stock, effectively ending the enterprise.

But for a while, places like Shandar were safe harbor for then-misfits like Reich. The two pieces here, Four Organs and Phase Patterns, come from an era of Reich’s work when he was still in an obsessively scientific mode, boring down on a single capital-I Idea to extract from it whatever secrets might be unlocked from it. The Idea here was his first big one, and the one that he remains most associated with: If you took two tones, set them apart from each other, and then moved them in and out of frequency incrementally, you could push open a gate of perception. The idea began with tape loops, but Reich soon moved it into live instrumentation, and then pushed its way into larger forces, where that original idea could be heard more as a whisper more than a shriek. Here, it is the work of four monomaniacally focused musicians: The Farfisas are played by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, joined by Arthur “Art” Bixler Murphy and Steve Chambers, while Jon Gibson supplies the steady maraca shakes. 

These early works have a fierceness, a pointed urgency to them, the way that early works in new styles tend to: They are not only establishing a new language but also arguing for their very right to exist in the same breath. “Phase Patterns,” the second composition on this recording, has a similar feel: To layman ears, it might sound like the beginning of a long Ray Manzarek organ solo that caught a snag in a tree branch mid-ascent. It also might sound, to digital-age music fans, like an intentionally corrupted recording, something that had been spliced on a laptop. But that’s where the dizzy energy of these recordings come from: Behind these odd, irregular shapes are four furiously intent musicians, counting measures and beats as if their lives depended on it.

All of this makes the piece sound like torture, which. of course, it is not — it is a sensory challenge, the same way a deep massage can be. When the masseuse leans their elbow into the soft tissue under your shoulder blade, you groan but you don’t yelp; you trust that when they are done you will feel the benefits of the discomfort. So it is with your ears and mind and Four Organs. It is good to have your patience stretched, your senses tugged. Minimalism was often thought of as smooth churn, something to help regulate your breathing and help you zone out. But that’s only one function it serves; it can also tunnel deep into areas of your nervous system that other music doesn’t think to aim for.

Gold Panda - Good Luck and Do Your Best

Gold Panda's warm and exuberant new album sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.

Two years ago Gold Panda made a series of trips across Japan with the photographer Laura Lewis to gather visuals and field recordings for what was supposed to be “a sight and sound documentary,” perhaps not unlike Chris Marker’s quiet and thoughtful film essays. So far the documentary hasn’t been made, but the impressions of the trips during the fall and spring of 2014 led to his first album in three years, Good Luck and Do Your Best. Apparently the moment of inspiration and the album’s title came from a chance interaction with a taxi driver who wished them luck, saying those very words as they exited the cab. He wrote the album in Chelmsford, using Laura's photos, their colors and experiences, as catalysts for the album’s 11 tracks.
 It is decidedly brighter, more low-key, and less dance-oriented than his previous outing Half of Where You Live. Instead this newest album seems to fit more into the structure and mood of his debut Lucky Shiner. The same spirit of nostalgia, pleasantly handmade feel (which comes from his expert use of MPCs), and wistful joy pervades Good Luck and Do Your Best. It sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.
The best tracks capture the short-lived exuberance of the photographer's golden hour. When the sun is on the cusp of setting, if you’re lucky, streetscapes will be awash in an exceedingly warm golden light. It makes whatever you photograph seem more buoyant, colorful, and evanescent. The bright drum-pad meditation of “In My Car” and the understated string arrangements in “Time Eater” all speak to this kind of feeling. Gold Panda is at his best making lush and ambulatory compositions, and the relaxed itinerancy of a vacation is most evident in his more minimal sound studies, like “Unthank” and “I Am Real Punk” which rely on just a few elements, like the repetition of plucked strings or a single synth looped.
Those songs in particular reminded me of the producer Suzanne Craft, or the compositions by the Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita. They have same ability to create a grand feeling atmosphere out of minimal ingredients. This album only doesn’t work when it gestures towards faster paces. “Song for a Dead Friend” stands out as a one of the album’s true missteps, a seemingly juke-inspired track that twists an ankle and falls flat. 
In terms of samples used, the Japanese inspiration seemed to come mostly from the use of string instruments, but otherwise it’s more muted than the story suggests. Two music videos were released in advance of the album (for “Pink & Green” and “Time Eater”) and the videos try to give an idea of what the documentary might have been. In “Pink & Green” in particular we find Gold Panda and Laura in the midst of the vacation. They walk the streets, gaze at the sights, eat at McDonalds. They take the train and laugh at dinner and sing karaoke, as tourists must feel compelled to do in Japan. There’s a kernel in the visual aesthetic and silent narrative that might not mean to point to Lost in Translation, but it’s hard to avoid. How can you appreciate a vacation in a foreign place, thoughtfully and gracefully? Missteps seem inevitable.
Listening to this album, I wondered if Gold Panda set out to explore some of these thoughts from the pads of an MPC. Does archiving a vacation in sounds or pictures, making art of it, do justice to the essential passing of things? Is nostalgia destructive or generative? At the end of it all, the music escapes the expectations its creators imbue it with. As its title suggests Good Luck and Do Your Best is a modest and heartfelt attempt to celebrate a memory and place that you continue to love even at a distance.

Ariana Grande - Dangerous Woman

Ariana Grande's third album finds the 22-year-old pop star embracing a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego, with the help of Future, Nicki Minaj, Macy Gray, and others.

“You need a bad girl to blow your mind,” Ariana Grande taunted us in 2014 on “Bang Bang,” her smash-hit collaboration with Jessie J, and Nicki Minaj. In that crowd, Grande didn't really seem like the bad girl; maybe she knew one she could fix you up with? As she told Complex the year before,“I don’t see myself as sexy and I’m not comfortable being sexy and dressing sexy. I don’t see myself ever becoming a sex symbol.” But she seems to have taken the “Bang Bang” lyric as a mood-board inspiration for her third album Dangerous Woman, which finds the 22-year-old trading in the mini-skirts, go-go boots, and cat ears for a Sasha Fierce-like alter ego. As a result, Grande spends most of Dangerous Woman coyly flirting with desire, “bad decisions,” and independence.“Something about you makes me feel like a dangerous woman,” she sings on the chorus to the slow-burning title track, which is a few qualifications away from actual danger. There's something about the whole album that feels a bit like Sandy in her skintight leather outfit at the end of Grease, only in Ari’s case, it’s a latex bunny mask.
At this point, there’s no question that Grande is a powerhouse vocalist, having earned her comparisons to Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, and Christina Aguilera circa Back to Basics. (Among her spot-on impersonations of those singers, Grande does an absolutely insane Aguilera impression, solidifying her spot as the diva’s millennial incarnation). Grande’s four-octave range, impeccable control, and penchant for belting assures that no matter the lyrics or production, her music will always be strong in that regard. And as in her previous album My Everything, which was chock-full of bangers like the Zedd-produced “Break Free,” the production on her new Dangerous Woman is enormous, full of flirty pop eruptions and slinky dancefloor seductions. "Into You," produced and co-written by Max Martin and Alexander Kronlund, who helped pen some of Robyn's best songs, might be Grande's best single since "Love Me Harder." 
So then where does Dangerous Woman struggle? In a rather forthcoming interview with Billboard, Grande described the album as “a 22-year-old girl comes into her own trying to balance growing up, love, and a lot of other bullshit along the way.” However, the listener comes away from Dangerous Woman feeling like they still don’t know much about the ponytailed lady peeping out from behind the mask. Grande has never touted herself as a Swiftian friend to all fans, but her slight reserve means that Dangerous Woman, paradoxically, feels safe, which acts in contradiction to the at least 19 times she sings a variation of “danger” or “dangerous” on the record.
Dangerous Woman opens with “Moonlight,” which was originally the title of the record and thusly should perhaps be viewed as a prologue. “Moonlight” offers the album’s closest thing to a ballad, all celestial romance and melismas. But it’s serenity is quickly steamrolled over by “Dangerous Woman,” the real introduction to the record. “Dangerous Woman” is a slinky, empowered, Bond theme of a belter; you can practically picture her sauntering down a grand staircase in a floor-length gown and fur on the way to seduce and destroy a lover. After the quake of “Dangerous Woman,” “Be Alright” and “Into You” are appropriately both cool, snappy little thumpers.
In the middle of this 15-track record, Dangerous Woman’s guest features feel underused and lackluster. Nicki Minaj’s verse on “Side to Side” is a far cry from the duo’s Pinkprint collaboration “Get on Your Knees” which found both women returning to the personalities of “Bang Bang,” Ariana as a doe-eyed vixen, Nicki as the tough-as-nails Queen. That chemistry is absent here and instead Minaj’s bored, reggae-tinged verse compliments neither women. Although Minaj once again relies on the sexual wordplay her last name provides, the verse feels rather PG. Lil Wayne’s appearance on “Let Me Love You” was one of Dangerous Woman’s more surprising features, yet perhaps predictably, Weezy seems sleepy. He manages to throw out the cringe-worthy line “She grinding on this Grande, oh lord,” and not even the obligatory “moolah baby!” saves him from sounding half-hearted.
Perhaps the most unsatisfying collaborator is Future. A majority of his contribution is repeating the song’s title, “Everyday,” making him Dangerous Woman’s more minimalist version of Big Sean on “Problem.” If Future’s sexual-devotion-filled verse was taken away, it would be immediately obvious that “Everyday” is constructed atop a pile of hot fluff. The only exception to this is Macy Gray’s “Leave Me Lonely,” which sets Gray’s raspy pipes against Grande’s flawless vocals, adding a welcome change of consistency. Smack in the middle of all these features is “Greedy,” a romp that announces that Grande truly shines when she is given center stage.
The second half of the record lacks the energy of the first. She continues to sing of growth and maturity from a former self (“I used to let some people tell me how to live and what to be but if I can’t be me then fucks the point?”) with the point being that she is now free in thought and action. As Minaj says on “Side to Side,” “young Ariana run pop.” This is indeed evident on Dangerous Woman, even if the results are uneven at times. Grande does not need to force any sort of spirit, she is full of it already. She just needs to find the Dangerous Woman within herself and let her break free.