Where You (Might) Learn to Dance
Posts tagged album review
Deadmau5 – At Play 3
Aug 2nd
The third compilation from Canadian house produce Deadmau5 is a fairly atmospheric listen, comprised mostly of songs from his album Vexillology. I had never heard of Deadmau5 before this review until my boss recommended him.
Honestly, At Play Vol. 3 doesn’t do much for me. The first two tracks, “Cyclic Redundancy” and “Apply Overnight” were plain boring. They were simply too low key, simple and repetitive. I found myself disappointed with this musician.
Then the third track, “Plus” started playing. It’s a pretty lively track, and it held my attention. While not much more complex than the first two, it is a more fleshed out song, and the beat really hit me.
The fourth track, “Lai,” is even better. Ambient, complex, and surprisingly epic at only five minutes length, it’s easily a track I can listen to over and over again.
The fifth track, “TL7,” is a step back to the boring style of the first two tracks, but fortunately it is followed by the hypnotic “Bounce,” a fairly simple but energetic track that simply makes you want to dance. I especially love how the beat changes, keeping it fresh and increasingly frantic. The following track, “Full Bloom,” keeps the energy up with a hectic, ambient and mesmerizing beat.
“Templar” is a track I should have liked, since it has the same energy I liked in “Bounce” and “Full Bloom,” but the drums grew slightly boring and even irritating after about a minute into the song. the ninth song, “Stereo Fidelity,” is a fun, hectic track. There’s a lot going on, but it creates a fun mood, rather than coming off sloppy or too busy.
This compilation could have ended stronger. The tenth and final track, “Whispers (Remix)” sounds like the stereotypical house track. It’s not bad, it’s just not particularly engaging and a little repetitive.
If you’re a fan of Deadmau5 but don’t have much of his music, At Play 3 is definitely something you’ll want to pick up. If you’re not a fan of Deadmau5 or of house music, you can pass on this. I’ll probably get some heat for this (including from my boss), but I’m not too impressed with Deadmau5. I still think Danger Mouse is the best mouse around.
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Nostalgic Review: Endtroducing…
Jun 30th
This is the first in what will be a series of reviews and reflections of works that were long before How to Dance Techno’s time. For the first “nostalgic review,” let’s take a look back at DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing…
Now some of you who are familiar with this album may think I’m stretching my already loose use of the word “techno,” as this album is often considered a hip-hop classic. But this is an album that truly blurred genres and was a great feat for electronic music. DJ Shadow pushed sampling and electronic music production to it’s limits and made something captivating, epic and undeniably impressive.
First, you should probably know I’m a huge fan of sampling. I think it’s a shame that Kanye West seems to be the only mainstream producer who can afford it, but it’s still a common art form in hip-hop, techno, dance and other forms of electronica. While hip-hop classics like the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique and Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back were vital to establishing sampling as a true and respectable art, neither one reached the level of innovation, uniqueness and experimentation that DJ Shadow manages on this album.
All 13 tracks on Endtroducing… are made up entirely of samples. Layers and layers of samples, to be exact. Just take a look at what is implied to be a partial list of the samples used on this album. Even if this music doesn’t appeal to your personal taste, it’s hard not to be impressed by the amount of hard work, cleverness and hours of crate-digging (sample searching) that went into this album.
The intro itself is a splice of various samples, including portions of a Notorious B.I.G. skit and a Stanley Clarke sample. It’s only appropriate for a collage of samples to introduce an album of samples, after all.
The first track, “Building Steam with a Grain of Salt,” features a haunting piano riff looped while snippets of an interview with drummer George Marsh are dispersed over the song. The song becomes more haunting when a sample of a chorus chanting is brought into the mix, and DJ Shadow plays with completely restructuring the drum loop near the middle of the song, creating an artificial drum solo out of the sample we hear for most of the song. It’s a strong opening for the album to say the least.
The next track, “The Number Song,” is a much busier and hectic track featuring many different soul and funk samples to create a track with an old-school hip-hop flair, though it still retains the experimental and even trance-like elements found throughout the album.
A few songs on the album have a trance-like feel to them, seeming to invite you to close your eyes and let your mind wander. For example, look at “What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)” and, probably the album’s most popular song, “Midnight In a Perfect World.”
While this album is very captivating and the sample-layering is impressive to listen to, it does run a little long. It’s about 63 minutes long, which is still ten minutes shorter than many current albums, but it may bore some listeners since it is a completely instrumental album. Some of the songs really don’t need to be five to six minutes long, although as your appreciation of the album grows it does become easier to listen to the longer tracks.
In the end, this album deserves its status as a classic. It’s an impressive work of art and a magnificent achievement for all forms of electronic music. It may not be for everyone, but Endtroducing… is something everyone should hear, if only to be impressed by the result of the hours of crate-digging DJ Shadow did to create this masterpiece.