The Oakland Independent

Yea Big & Kid Static: Duck Mother Fuckers!

2009-04-01T17:25:00.003-04:00

Yea Big & Kid Static is perhaps one of the few hip-hop groups where the beats get more attention than the rhymes, and that's probably fair. Kid Static's sci-fi narratives and action setpiece plotlines are fun and exciting, and when you compare him with someone like 50 Cent, for example, he's practically a breath of fresh air.

But it's Yea Big's glitchy, paranoid and perpetually in motion back drop that makes Static's lines work. In Duck Mother Fuckers!, Big's nervous soundtrack is driving the song more than any chase sequence Static can manage. While some of the group's other songs switch styles repeatedly during their brief runtimes, Duck's big transformation is introducing a lazy tambourine mid-way through the song, a slight detail that somehow seems to change the energy altogether.

They clearly aren't taking themselves too seriously, but they're serious about their modest ambitions: This is music thats sole, expressed purpose is to be entertaining, to lighten the usually dark environment of modern hip-hop, to make people dance. And that's a goal that's easy to get behind.

Yea Big & Kid Static will be appearing at the Vernors Room this friday, April 3rd. More information at the Crofoot.

Download: Yea Big & Kid Static: Duck Mother Fuckers!

Shannon McArdle: Poison My Cup

2009-03-30T02:46:00.007-04:00

While I could very easily write about every song on the Independent Mixtape I recently posted, I'll spare you all and narrow my thoughts down to one in particular. Shannon McArdle's Poison My Cup is definitely my favorite track in the mix, and quite possibly one of my favorite songs of all time.

Musically, it hits all the right notes. It's slow and quiet, but still catchy, even dancey, in a dimly-lit music hall kind of way. The melody is simple but it evolves in elegant and unexpected ways. And it's lo-fi, but not tinny or hollow-sounding. Instead, this song feels cavernous- the bass drum bouncing off distant walls, the back-up vocals eerily remote.

But what caught me off guard about Poison My Cup initially, and what continues to make me obsess over it even now, are the lyrics, which is rare for me. I seldom favor a song because of lyrical content over musical, but Poison's subject matter is so striking I simply can't get it out of my mind.

There are certainly numerous ways to interpret the lyrics, but the very first time I head it, I knew exactly what it was about. I related to it; hell, I lived it. McArdle is painting herself in the most unflattering way possible. She's a woman hungry, desperate for a physical connection. For once in her life, emotions aren't even considered: she simply needs to feel another person, even if one she doesn't know or like.

While it's never directly spelled out, the subtext suggests McArdle is in love with somebody else, somebody who has abandoned her and who, despite her persistence, is succeeding in forgetting about her altogether. In Posion, then, she's admitting defeat. She's giving up, and settling for an empty, even ugly encounter because she wants to feel something- anything- other than rejection.

The poison the title refers to, of course, is alcohol. But it's to make the situation bearable, not fun. When she says, "Don't open the good round now, baby: just fuck me up," she's admitting there's no chance for romance in this encounter. When she follows that with, "Don't have to tell me you love me, baby: I'll still go down," that's when it gets hard to take. McArdle is such a beautiful women, with such a beautiful voice, but here she is, going down on a stranger because she's so desperate to feel needed, even if it isn't from who she needs herself.

It's such a vulgar, heart-breaking admission that it feels wrong to even hear it. You suddenly become a voyeur, peering into the darkest moments of someone else's life. The kicker, though, is that your voyeurism isn't rewarded with a sense of strange unfamiliarity. Instead, in essence, you're spying on yourself. You're looking into a darkness you've experienced, a devastation you have felt. And while that can certainly be terrifying, it's also comforting, somehow, to know someone else has gone through this too. McArdle is achingly vulnerable and hopelessly alone, but suddenly, having been told all about it- and in excruciating detail- you're no longer as alone and vulnerable as you used to be yourself. You share this shame with her, and perhaps you both come out stronger for it.

Poison My Cup is available on Shannon McArdle's 2008 album Summer of the Whore. It's also featured on the Oakland Independent Mixtape, along with 19 other songs that are all nearly as interesting.

Mix: 323

2009-03-23T17:24:00.008-04:00

Here's the first official Oakland Independent mixtape. Maybe this is something we'll do periodically? Maybe everyone thinks it's a dumb idea? I don't know, but here it is either way!

Download the Mixtape.

The complete artist rundown looks like this:
Ratatat / George Pringle / Monade / Wisely / Delorean / Tenniscoats / Crystal Antlers / Sinkane / Flying Lotus / Milosh / Cloud Cult / Horse Feathers / Shannon McArdle / Silver Summit / Meredith Bragg / Feral Children / Mount Eerie / Efterklang / High Places / Keegan Dewitt

Ratatat: Cherry

2009-03-19T23:06:00.001-04:00

New York noise-makers Ratatat are actually only two guys with guitars and synthesizers, but they manage to cram more hooks in one song than most full bands can work into an entire album.

Cherry is the closer of the band's self-titled debut, and it's fairly representative of the album as a whole. It's laid-back and breezy, but still capable of causing involuntary movement from anyone within hearing distance. It isn't quite the club-ready beat the band would become known for: instead, it's more likely to soundtrack the after-party on the beach, after all the bars close and the water reflects moonlight.

Ratatat will be appearing this Sunday at the Crofoot Ballroom in Pontiac. More information can be found at the Crofoot.

Download: Ratatat: Cherry

Tokyo Police Club: Nature of the Experiment

2009-03-15T14:13:00.005-04:00

After forming in an Ontario basement in 2005, Tokyo Police Club saw a breakneck rise to fame thanks to nearly constant touring, major festival and television appearances (they recently appeared on Desperate Housewives!) and two solid, fast and frenzied EPs. They now have a debut LP, Elephant Shell, and will be appearing this Thursday, March 19th, at the Crofoot Ballroom in Pontiac.

Nature of the Experiment is a song that played a large part in Tokyo Police Club's eventual success. Coming from their debut EP, A Lesson in Crime, Experiment introduces the four Canadian boys in the most abrupt and uncompromising way possible. The song itself is a mere two minutes long, but it's packed with dancey-hooks and explosive outbursts, all but daring you to sit still while listening to it.

More information on the Tokyo Police Club show can be found at The Crofoot.

Download: Tokyo Police Club: Nature of the Experiment

New Play Control! Pikmin

2009-03-14T21:46:00.009-04:00

I wasn't one of those people lining up outside Best Buy at the end of 2006 to get a Nintendo Wii, but by the time I bought one a few months later, I still had to wake up early and reach my local Target just as it opened to assure I walked away with the popular videogame console. The Wii became a veritable money-printing machine for Nintendo, as well as for all the retailers who attempted (unsuccessfully) to keep them on their shelves.

And it's not hard to see why. For the last decade or so, videogames have been moving farther and farther away from their pick-up-and-play roots. They were being packaged with novel-length instruction books and consoles were stocking their controllers with more buttons than anyone could possibly keep track of. So when Nintendo unveiled their motion-controlled white box- featuring a remote with only two action buttons, just like in their NES heyday- it finally seemed like the revolution Nintendo had been talking about for years.

So what happened? How did the most anticipated videogame console in history die such a slow, disgraced death- and so soon? Well, lack of third party support certainly helped, but even Nintendo's first-party offerings weren't up to task. The new Legend of Zelda was nice, but by-the-numbers to a fault. The new Super Mario Bros. had the opposite problem, largely ignoring the white-knuckle platforming that made their name in favor of bizarre physics and overly-linear level structures.

The motion control was never used as effectively as it was for the very first game released on the system (Wii Sports), and the downloadable Wii Ware service offered a few genuine gems (World of Goo, Mega Man IX) but never became the expansive library it promised to be.

Personally, I haven't touched my Wii in ages, instead turning to the PlayStation 2 to scratch my gaming itch. So it was, then, that, on a whim, I picked up the recently released New Play Control! Pikmin, a revamp of the GameCube hit specifically for the Wii. I was hoping Pikmin would help me get back into the Wii; cleanse my guilty conscious for letting such a potentially amazing piece of hardware gather dust. Instead, it made me realize that, maybe, the Wii just isn't for me.

To be fair, I never played the original Pikmin and didn't know anything about it when I came home with this new version. I was expecting a fun, quirky puzzle game in the vein of Lemmings or The Lost Vikings, and to some extent that's what I got. The player controls the titular creatures indirectly, by ordering them to follow your avatar or, more to the point, by throwing them wherever or at whatever you want them to work on. Like the previously mentioned games, there are different kinds of Pikmin with different abilities: Red Pikmin are immune to fire, the yellow can carry bombs, and the blue Pikmin can wade through water. In addition, you're required to "harvest" new Pikmin by having the already existing creatures bring supplies back to their home base, and the amount of time they spend in the ground determines their strength and agility when you literally pluck them up to join your team.

The reason you're growing these obedient little aliens is to help you find and piece together the scattered remains of your beloved spaceship, having crash landed on the Pikmin's planet following a meteor strike. On paper, it sounds pretty good, and sometimes it is, but Pikmin frequently ends up frustrating rather than pleasing.

For one thing, the Pikmin's planet is over-run with oversized insects whose sole purpose in life is to give you a hard time. Some of them will take away the items your Pikmin are carrying, but others will just feast on your little alien friends until they're all gone, if you let them. The Pikmin can fight, but they can't fight very well, and it feels cruel to make them do it at all. Shoe-horning combat into what should have been a laid-back puzzle game isn't fair to the Pikmin and it sure isn't fair to the player, who is frequently interrupted from the main task because a ladybug had just eaten half of his workers.

Perhaps even more intruding is the appearance of a time-limit. The story claims the spaceman only has 30 days to reassemble his ship before the oxygen supplies run out, and he isn't allowed to work during the night. That means if the sun sets while your Pikmin are diligently working to bring back another piece of the ship, not only do they lose the ship, you lose your Pikmin as well.

Presumably, the timelimit was added to give the puzzles a sense of urgency and to make it more difficult to complete the entire game in one go, but it feels like a cop-out: completely inappropriate for what should be a relaxed, lazy puzzler. Relaxed and lazy, incidentally, are two words that simply can't be used to describe Pikmin in any way. And that's probably the way it should be for most videogames, where the main characters are grizzled action heroes or legendary knight-errants. But in a game where the heroes are submissive, mute miniature aliens, you expect to have the time to experiment with their strengths and weaknesses without constantly being called back to the ship because the sky got dark.

The newly added motion controls work great. So much so, in fact, it's hard to imagine playing the game with just the GameCube control sticks after being able to simply point to the screen to command the Pikmin. But while the controls are intuitive, the game itself isn't. It never leads to that satisfying feeling of a particularly challenging puzzle completed like Lemmings or Lost Vikings offered in abundance. Instead, you're left with the feeling of disappointment when you're forced to start the mission over because you just lost the majority of your camp to a few gluttonous beetles again.

Ultimately, my plan to reinvigorate the Wii backfired in a big way. Instead of making me excited at the prospect of a new wave of Wii games, I've instead decided to put my Wii up on eBay, where they still bring in upwards of $250, the original retail value. I'd still like to think the Wii renaissance is just around the corner, but I'm simply too tired of waiting for it to come to see if I'm right.

Cotton Jones: Blood Red Sentimental Blues

2009-02-24T16:04:00.009-05:00

Country- and especially modern country- gets a bit of a bum-rap these days largely because of what the most visible artists of the genre are doing to it. Of course, the same thing is happening with rock and hip-hop too- that is, the boring, predictable (and often genuinely terrible) is what gets played on corporate radio, and thus, becomes what people associate with the music as a whole. That doesn't mean there isn't still great country being made, because for every Brooks & Dunn there's also a Cotton Jones, silently toiling away without any expectation or desire for a CMA award.

To be fair, it could be argued that Cotton Jones isn't pure country, but when's the last time you've heard a rock song untainted by punk or hip-hop or new-wave? No, this is what country sounds like today, and it sounds fantastic. From the opening guitar strums paired with a distant and melancholy organ chord, Blood Red Sentimental Blues gives off an atmosphere of dimly lit dancehalls and smokey dive bars. When Michael Nau and Whitney McGraw harmonize, you can almost smell the stale beer and unfiltered cigarette smoke. Country has always been more about ambience than anything else, and Blues has ambience to spare. God only knows what those two are signing about, but they could be selling used cars and it wouldn't make the music any less beautiful.

This comes from Cotton Jones' debut full-length, Paranoid Cocoon, released earlier this month.

Download: Cotton Jones: Blood Red Sentimental Blues

Rihanna: Winning Women

2009-02-20T11:55:00.005-05:00

TMZ has just released photos of Rihanna's injuries after the pre-Grammy fight with boyfriend (presumably, now ex-boyfriend) Chris "Bobby" Brown. I'm not going to link to them so you'll have to find them for yourself if your morbid curiosity so inclines you. Instead, i'm going to post a recent song from Rihanna and Nicole Scherzinger, who Google just now told me is apparently a Pussycat Doll.

Winning Women is illustrative of why Rihanna is arguably the most interesting pop singer around today. An up-tempo back beat introduces this song and when the harsh synths come in during the first verse, everybody that hears it thinks they know what to expect from the rest of this song. Instead, the chorus bucks those expectations and settles into a dreamy wave of warm synths in lieu of the big club-ready explosion you knew was coming next.

The news involving Rihanna disturbed a lot of people and rightly so because, besides being one of the most exciting pop singers in recent memory, it's also relevant that she's one of of the most adorable. That this happened to such a beautiful and talented woman is very hard to handle, but take some solace in the fact that- if there's any justice in the world- Brown is going to have to deal with everybody in Rihanna's sizable list of friends and collaborators from here on out.

Download: Rihanna: Winning Women

Feist & Ben Gibbard: Train Song

2009-02-19T11:56:00.006-05:00

Red Hot Organization has been churning out compilation albums for AIDs awareness and relief for literally decades now, and each generation gets the music they deserve. 1993's No Alternative, for example, is filled with covers and originals by 90's mainstays like Soul Asylum, Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden. Today, though, the "alternative" movement has been replaced by something more ambiguous but much more rewarding. Most people seem to have settled on the term "indie", even though a lot of so-called indie-bands are on major labels. What ties these bands together is less about rebelling against anything in particular and more about producing excellent music. It's a movement easier to get behind because there's no pseudo-political ideology holding it together, not to mention significantly less flannel.

Red Hot's latest compilation, Dark Was the Night, has just been released and it features a modern music lover's veritable wet-dream, not only because of the list of artists but because of those artists co-mingling with each other. Everyone from recent favorites Bon Iver and Grizzly Bear to the still essential Yo La Tengo and David Byrne are included on the two discs, and many of them collaborating with each other.

This track is an example sure to make the hipsters swoon. The venerable Feist teams up with the poster-boy for the indie scene, Deathcab for Cutie and Postal Service frontman Ben Gibbard, for a mournful, melancholy take on Vashti Bunyan's Train Song. To top it all off, it's for a good cause.

Download: Feist & Ben Gibbard: Train Song

Talking Heads: Naive Melody (This Must be the Place)

2009-02-19T11:40:00.013-05:00

Every mp3 blog should start with a mission statement: a definitive declaration of what's to follow, not necessarily in genre or time or place, but in character, in spirit, or, if nothing else, in quality. So it is, then, that the first track to be posted on the Oakland Independent is the undisputed greatest song ever written by the inarguable greatest band of all time, the Talking Heads.

There's not much that needs to be said, here, so i'll instead let the music speak for itself. Important to note, however, is that this song comes form the Head's Speaking in Tongues, their fifth studio album released in 1983.

Download: Talking Heads: This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)