Summer Release Round-Up
Kesha’s Rainbow is a postmodern pop record full of genre-bending party songs, and ballads that explode into empowering canticles for “kids with no religion.” The Tennessee native incorporates southern musical stylings into the forefront of tracks like “Hunt You Down” and “Bastards,” as well as more alt-synth elements into tracks like “Boots” and “Boogie Feet.” While it’s easy to get high off the energy in premiere hits like “Woman,” some of the more sobering, vulnerable tracks, like “Spaceship” will be what enraptures you years after the rest of the album leaves the Billboard 100.
By Brad Trevenen, Staff Writer
8/29/2017
Kesha - Rainbow
Lorde - Melodrama
Four years after Pure Heroine, Lorde’s comeback album, Melodrama, features submersing driving bass accompanied by vocals that range anywhere from claustrophobically intimate to spaciously ambient. Lorde takes the audience on as a backseat companion to witness her often destructive inner monologue, especially on tracks like “Liability” and “Hard Feelings/Loveless.” Alongside stirring, drugged anthems like “Sober,” the culminating tone isn’t far off from that of Lana Del Rae or The Weeknd. However, unlike her contemporaries, Lorde more compellingly conveys her internalized feelings of isolation within the soundscape. This idea reaches its thematic conclusion on “Perfect Places,” before leaving the audience in somber.
Tyler, The Creator - Flower Boy
Tyler, The Creator’s newest release, Flower Boy, shines a light on his long secretive sexual orientation, and encourages today’s youth to accept themselves the way he finally has. Musically, Tyler seems to have found a warm, happy, California-coast-cruising medium – between his notoriously anarchic moments and his calmer, more transparent ones. His bass sections are sedated but present, complimented by sonorous pianos and stringed instrumentations, which Tyler’s distinct vocal cuts though effortlessly. None of this is to say that same bipolar track composition has now been done away with, rather that Tyler has refined the seamlessness of his transitions between musical soliloquies like “Boredom,” and off-the-wall bumps like “Who Dat Boy” and “I Ain’t Got Time!” A dichotomous musical coexistence that was echoed by the album’s original title, “Scumf*ck/Flower Boy.”
Vince Staples - Big Fish Theory
Long Beach artist Vince Staples, after a bombastic debut and a silver-tongued EP, has resurfaced with Big Fish Theory, a more experimental concoction of Vince’s aphotic nihilism. With production from Christian Rich, GTA, and Flume, the beats take on loosely spastic and disjointed feel, representing Vince’s world through sound far more often than words. Aquatic shimmers on “Alyssa’s Interlude,” drowning sub-bass on “745,” and source-less rapping on “Homage” all contribute to themes of suffocation through celebrity status. While lyrically thinner than his previous EP, of the times he chooses to delve into layered intertextuality, the layers are aplenty, and incorporate a nuanced kind of social consciousness into the album. Oh, and Kendrick Lamar’s feature on “Yeah Right” is welcomed.