Author Archives: happymusicsadmusic
The Best of 2013, Volume 2, Songs
There are album years and song years, and 2013 was without question an album year, but that’s not to say there weren’t some outstanding tracks released as well. Some of these come from albums on our top list, but they can each stand on their own. Let’s take a look:
Honorable Mention:
Drake – “Hold on We’re Going Home”
I had a weird time with Nothing Was the Same, Drake’s critically acclaimed album from this year. It’s not that it’s a bad record, I think I was just so taken with 2011’s Take Care, still the best record in his catalog, that I was ready to be disappointed. Couple this with the fact that the first single was the oh-so-banal “Started from the Bottom” and I really didn’t pay much mind to “Hold on We’re Going Home”. In fact I recall the first time I heard it thinking “Oh, great, Drake’s singing half-hearted love songs again…” But this thing is undeniable. From the very first line as Drake intones “I got my eyes on’a’you” everything is catchy as hell. This one may or may not work its way into my karaoke repertoire in the future (read: this will work its way into my karaoke repertoire in the future).
15. Chvrches – “Now is Not the Time”
This is probably the best song Chvrches released this year (though “Gun” and “Recover” are also outstanding) and it was mysteriously not included on their full-length debut. This track illustrates everything this band does well; male-female vocal harmonies, perfectly selected synths, and Lauren Mayberry’s voice, which falls somewhere between plaintive and sultry.
14. Mariah Carey ft. Miguel – “#Beautiful”
Let’s ignore for a moment the fact that Mariah Carey is old enough to be Miguel’s mother. Let’s also ignore that she’s old enough to be Nick Cannon’s mother, forever. Mariah finds ways to stay relevant, whether it be releasing her own line of perfume, dropping a hit single every few years, or marrying Nick Cannon. This track is a cold cocktail on a firefly-lit summer night. Miguel steals the show here, his sex-oozing coo and inappropriate lyrical tendencies are on full display as Mariah laughs like a creeper at inopportune times in the background. Make sure you play the unedited version of this one, “good lord you’re fuckin’ beautiful” is the best part.
13. Mikky Ekko – “Pull Me Down”
Mikky Ekko hit the producer jackpot when he linked up with Clams Casino to put together “Pull Me Down”. This track is the classic kind of sexy, about a moment when all you need is to feel another person next to you (or underneath you, as the case may be). Clams’ production roils gently beneath Ekko’s impassioned crooning and the whole track has a woozy narcotic smoothness. This song is also important to me because it was featured on the first mix my girlfriend made me this year, and my response was basically “OK, if you insist”…
12. Laura Mvula “She”
Laura Mvula’s star is on the rise. Her debut Sing to the Moon is a thoughtful, sparsely constructed collection of personal tunes. On “She” Mvula paints us the picture of a prostitute (probably) and the pain of the continual. But it’s done in such a delicate way that you’d probably have no idea what the song is about on first listen.
11. Burial – “Come Down to Us”
I’m going to borrow a comment from Stereogum contributor Dr. Gonzo to describe what makes this one (and indeed all of the Rival Dealer EP) so wonderful. “In a tiny London nightclub an inter-dimensional super computer is trapped in a time shift, constantly shifting back and forth from 1980 through to 2050 and back again. Having gained sentience this artificial intelligence attempts to communicate, but is only able to do so by reconfiguring and adapting the sounds it hears. Those sounds are then transmitted in unique new patterns as a low frequency signal. The signals are recorded and released by BBC scientists who were initially attempting to prove the existence of extra-dimensional life, but now release the transmissions as music recordings. As the computer comes to understand emotions such as love and loss the transmissions become more complex, and just as its mysterious creators intended, the computer guides us to a higher plane of spiritual existence. The recordings are released during the holiday season under the name Beatific Universal Recordings Inspiring Astral Love: BURIAL.
At least that’s the most likely explanation anyway…”
10. John Wizards – “Lusaka by Night”
This song absolutely blows my mind. On the surface it bounces with a decidedly African swing, but it’s constructed of elements one would certainly not typically associate with the genre. Plinking synth sounds and cascading rhythmic flourishes give the whole thing a “dub in 2075” feeling. This was the perfect thing to play out on the water off the coast this summer.
9. Autre Ne Veut – “Play by Play”
“Don’t ever leave me alone”; much of Anxiety concerns itself with Arthur Ashin’s warring tendencies towards isolation and inclusion. In moments he’s so desperate for connection he takes some fairly trite phrases “Baby, I’m all alone I need you now…” and gives them urgency through the powerful immediacy of his voice. By the time the outro comes along in this one, all bounce-house swirling keys and kaleidoscopic seizures of sidechain compression, you’ve committed never to stray from his side again.
8. Mutual Benefit – “Advanced Falconry”
At the precipice of a great canyon wearing an oversized brown wool sweater as we embraced looking across the expanse, that is where I fell in love with you. The image stays in mind, but this song is also inextricable from Royal Tenenbaums for me, just replace the “Hey Jude” cover with “Advanced Falconry” and extend the scene out to 3 minutes of Mordecai flying around Manhattan, and you’re golden. A beautiful and simple song about love and memory.
7. Phosphorescent – “Song for Zula”
Zula and the singer of this song love each other, still love each other in spite of everything. There has been pain and lethargy and loathing but there’s still love. “I saw love disfigure me, into something I am not recongizing,” sings Matthew Houck, as his lover races across the plains away from him. He know’s they will meet again, or at least he assumes it, in a future where everything is fixed, and everyone is healed.
6. James Blake – “Retrograde”
James Blake makes quiet storm for robots knocking boots. It’s often processed and pared down in a way that feels decidedly modern, but it manages to retain a soul. He’s always been great at playing with volume and dynamics and that’s especially true here, “Retrograde” offers a restrained groove until the chorus hits and the star goes nova and everything becomes pulsing energy. Overgrown will be remembered as a step forward for Blake and “Retrograde” is a perfect example of that progression.
5. Haim – “The Wire”
I caught on to Haim right around the time this song was released, and I’m not sure I would have been as sold on them if this hadn’t been the first track I heard. As it is, “The Wire” is brilliantly economical, there’s not an extraneous guitar sound or over-long buildup to be found. Immediately it sounds like “Rock and Roll pt. 2” by Gary Glitter (the “HEY!” song you’re sick of if you’ve ever attended a hockey game), but from there it blooms. The prechorus is probably the best part, particularly the final instance where everything in the background drops away and we just get the sound of the three sisters caution us “always keep your heart locked tight…”
4. Lorde – “Team”
At some point about a month ago, people stopped talking about Lorde as a flash in the pan, and started talking about her as the future of pop music. The 17-year-old Australian caught everyone off guard with “Royals” but “Team” is really the best song on her debut LP Pure Heroine. “I’m kinda over getting told to throw my hands up in the air, so there…” much of this album is the musical equivalent of sticking your tongue out at pop culture, but doing so tactfully (and not twerking at the same time), it’s an act that will get old faster than, well, Lorde, but for now her capricious precociousness (oh God, I actually just wrote that…) is wonderfully of-the-moment.
3. Vampire Weekend – “Hannah Hunt”
It can sometimes be tricky figuring out one song off a given album to feature in the best songs list. I try to avoid ranking multiple songs from the same record in my top of the year, so it’s important to just choose one. For example, I had a tough time deciding between “Play by Play” and “Gonna Die” from the Autre Ne Veut album. Modern Vampires of the City is obviously packed to gills with great tunes, but this was not a difficult choice for me to make. “Hannah Hunt” is more than the best song on a classic album, it is one of the most effortlessly affecting songs I have ever heard. The story of a cross country make-or-break adventure in the life of a couple, the anxieties of young life and the simultaneous desires to grow up and stay young are central to the story, and central to the story of all of us. Ultimately we just want to find ourselves in someone else “If I can’t trust you than dammit Hannah, there’s no future, there’s no answer.”
2. Deafheaven – “Dream House”
You can’t understand any of what George Clarke is singing on “Dream House”, the first track off Deafheaven’s brilliant Sunbather. This is mostly because he is screaming the entire time, but also because the lyrics themselves are rather obtuse. But the song doesn’t mean any less when you don’t know the lyrics, in fact it seems to mean more. “Dream House” is exhaustingly beautiful. There is so much noise, so much energy, and it makes for the most deceptively melodic song of the year, one that could say anything to anyone.
1. Daft Punk – “Get Lucky”
Here’s a playlist of this year’s selections (minus Burial because it hasn’t hit Spotify yet…)
Stay tuned for the best of 2013 Playlist, coming soon!
James Blake, House of Blues Boston, 5/8/13
In Kenmore Square there’s no consistency or patterns in the way people walk. I often wonder what this would look like from fifty feet overheard, dots fluidly passing through each other, clumped in some places, in others separated, the random motion of parts of a whole. I wove my way through, crossing the Pike onto Lansdowne, making a game of “guess who’s going to the Sox and who’s going to the concert”. At every turn the mass of people around me enclosed and withdrew as I wound in and out of whatever opening I could find.
James Blake’s sound is all about negative space, about moments that are emphasized through the emptiness preceding them.
The crowd inside the house of blues began to thicken as the unremarkable opening DJ finished his set. James came out shortly thereafter and launched gently into “Air and Lack Thereof”, the track that first brought him attention and singled him out of the mass of UK dubstep producers desperately trying to get through the gates before first pitch.
From there the show unfurled hypnotically, with James often finishing one song and beginning the next without even a glance out into the crowd. I noticed a few things about his band. For one, they were a three piece; James handling almost all the keys, a guitarist/keyboard player, and a drummer. I use the word “drummer” loosely because this guy had a traditional kit save a pad set up on his snare with what seemed to be four different sounds, one in each corner. These sounds changed from song to song as the sound guy piped in which “kit” he’d be using. I happened to be standing right next to the soundboard and watching James’s stoically self-assured middle-aged sound runner move confidently from knob to peddle to slider was almost as fun as watching what was happening on stage.
He played several of my favorites: “Lindisfarne”, “Unluck”, “CMYK” (which he had chopped and screwed but retained its pulsing sensuality). More importantly, he played a lot of the new album, and in a live setting it sounded better than the old songs. There’s nothing particularly “catchy” about this music in a traditional sense, but when the bass dropped out at the start of “Voyeur” I was surrounded by closed eyes, reclined heads, and goosebumps.
On a sidewalk as crowded as indie rock, standing out is sometimes as simple as standing still. James Blake isn’t going to win any charisma contests, but that doesn’t mean his music is afraid to look you in the face, and if that makes you feel uncomfortable, you’re in the wrong neighborhood.
Stream Vampire Weekend’s forthcoming LP, Modern Vampires of the City
Ohhhhh boy…. this is a big one. Vampire Weekend have, thus far in their career, created two diamonds of modern pop, 2008’s self-titled debut, and 2010’s maybe-even-better Contra. Now they’re set to return next week with their third LP Modern Vampires of the City. I’ve only had the chance to give this a couple of listens, but I can already tell you it’s good, if not great, if not incredible. Now let’s hope Daft Punk delivers this hard, it’s going to be a hell of a summer…
Stream the album by clicking the link below.
http://grooveshark.com/playlist/Vampire+Weekend+Modern+Vampires+Of+The+City/86332250
One Very Large Springtime Playlist
Howdy friends. It’s been a busy few weeks but I wanted to give you something to chew on for the Spring. Below you will find a massive mix comprised of a bunch of other smaller mixes I recently made for a certain special lady friend. They’re all cobbled together in this giant playlist which is, unequivocally, the greatest playlist in existence.
I hope you enjoy it, happy Spring!
Boards of Canada, Mystery Codes, and the Perfect Tease
Time stamp: This article was completed at approximately 9am, 4/29/13, hours before news of the album broke.
by Raptor Jesus
Boards of Canada are Michael Sandison and Marcus Eoin, two Glasgow natives who released Music Has the Right to Children, the definitive and unassailable statement of an influential genre known at the time as Intelligence Dance Music (IDM). On that album, and over the course of their other releases, they created a sonic world that was alternately soothing and treacherous, crafting electronic music that was textural in a new way. They were also (unlike so many of their peers) unafraid of silence, and their production style feels anything but dated in 2013.
Now, like Sarah McLaughlin, only not completely terrible, Boards of Canada are building a mystery.
On April 20th when thousands of music fans rummaged through racks of vinyl in record stores around the world, a few chosen individuals discovered a rabbit hole. Shaped like a vinyl record, when played, a static transmission emanated and a voice uttered the following six numbers: 9 3 6 5 5 7
This is the record cover that has infested my brain:
Five sets of six hyphens separated by forward slashes and after the third forward slash a set of six X’s. It seemed to make sense that the X’s represented the numbers recited on the recording. It started to make more sense when variations of this logo were echoed as follows:
- Monday: The BoC YouTube page updated and sent devout fans through different links that ended with another transmission. A new set of numbers and a similar image as the record cover flashed on the screen. This time the X’s were in the 3rd slot.
- Tuesday: BBC radio broadcasted another transmission, again with new numbers. The video description had the hyphen/X’s pattern, but this time the X’s were in the 6th slot.
- The same day as the BBC broadcast, NPR played a transmission with new numbers. However, no image or description was provided. The numbers were set aside and left out of the sequence.
- Later: The BoC YouTube page was updated with a new image and a Twoism video was placed at the top of the playlist. Fans found their way to a BoC fan page with a new banner. The banner was investigated (in other words, the source coding) and contained information for two audio samples. When combined, another transmission was uncovered with a new set of numbers. Hints from the audio files and information in the banner led genius fans to discover another image. Once again, a set of hyphens and X’s but in a new position. Another key to the puzzle had been found in an extraordinary manner.
- Thursday evening there was a buzz at Rough Trade East in London. Images were projected onto the windows and a flash of the all too familiar image of BoC with hyphens / X’s appeared. The X’s were in a new place and many devout fans recorded a transmission coming from within the building. Upon closer analysis, the numbers were the same as the NPR numbers broadcast earlier. Except now they had a placement.
- Over the past weekend, a commercial aired on [adult swim] containing images seen on Rough Trade East days earlier, along with the transmission audio and mystery sequence image. Once again, the NPR numbers were repeated, but now as a crystal clear message.
Now, if you go to any finger-on-the-pulse BoC fan site, you will see an image with the following number combination:
699742 / 628315 / 717228 / 936557 / —— / 519225
So you see, we have ourselves a mathematical mystery. Six sets of numbers, each set containing six digits. Personally, the mystery took me over mid week as more numbers were revealed. I decided to go to what appeared to be the best source of new information: r/boardsofcanada. Leave it to reddit to be on top of this mystery with breaking updates of any new findings and all sorts of speculation.
The first thing I noticed was some speculation on the numbers that sent me to wikipedia searching for “The Conet Project”. This led me to click on “numbers stations” that has the lead-in description as follows:
“A numbers station is a type of shortwave radio station characterized by their unusual broadcasts, which consist of spoken words, but mostly numbers, often created by artificially generated voices reading streams of numbers, words, letters, tunes or Morse code.”
Talk about hitting the nail on the head! Reading on I found numbers stations were used to send coded messages to soldiers. They’d interpret the messages with a “one-time pad” that acted as a key to interpret the broadcasts. So even though it seems Boards of Canada are relaying this number sequence via “unusual broadcasts,” we still don’t have a key to interpret the numbers.
What do we know? There are six sets of six numbers a piece. The number six! It came as a revelation to me, so much so I created an account on reddit identifying Boards of Canada’s obsession with the number six.
Crazy, right? Regardless of its importance to the overall message, I started to use that information to predict a date. The general consensus is that a new album is on the horizon, so these numbers may hold the key to a release date. If you ask me, that date is in the month of June, June being the sixth month of the year and also right around the corner.
If you read down in the comments on that reddit article, I reference Supreme Mathematics as taught to me by The Wu-Tang Clan.
5 Fingers + 5 Fingers – 2 thumbs + 1 thumb + 1 thumb = Shaolin
Long story short, any number larger than a single digit is added together until it is simplified to a number between one and nine. For instance the year 2013: 2+0+1+3 = 6. Each number represents something different. The number six represents equality. Keep that in mind.
Lately, I’ve backed away from a lot of detailed speculation in hopes of finding a simpler message. I felt the urge to contribute, but now I feel like observing and pondering. I now have two new hypotheses (dreamed up yesterday while suffering through a screening of Oblivion):
- The numbers are a URL extension. When we get the final number, maybe you can go to a web site, type in the sequence of numbers after the address and it will take you to new music. I say this because when dealing with what we’ve been given, the forward slashes seem important. Since all of this is going down on the Internet, it doesn’t seem farfetched that these numbers are simply an address.
- Boards of Canada are teaching us a valuable lesson on equality. In this Internet age we live in where very little needs to be left to the imagination, isn’t it impressive that NOBODY knows what the hell these numbers mean? If I want to know just about anything about anyone, I can search the Internet and find the answer to my query. Not the case here. By creating a mystery with sets of numbers, they’ve effectively stirred 2013’s indie music community into a frenzy. All the while revealing nothing at all. Whether or not that was their intention, it is definitely an element of this whole game that should be remembered and discussed once we have a resolution.
That is all I can figure at the moment. I’m trying not to over think this; as with most things in life, the answer is probably incredibly simple. When the final number set in the sequence is revealed, I plan on running the mean, median, mode, range, etc. of all the numbers in various forms. Why? Because I’m a huge math nerd and Boards of Canada are giving me one of the greatest toys any math nerd could ask for: random numbers. I’m almost too embarrassed to detail how many math functions I’ve run these numbers through (Cosecant being one of them, to no avail).
Finally, these numbers have done something amazing in my brain. They’ve made me analyze everything I’ve loved about Boards of Canada, but also everything number related in my life (so basically everything). These numbers have given me a temporary purpose, something to look forward to and something to ponder. When studying Plato in college, I learned that one step below “The Forms” was mathematics. Meaning mathematics was the closest you could get to fully understanding this life (short of forever pondering “The Forms” in heaven). Socrates often drew shapes in the dirt to demonstrate how even poor men see the same thing rich men see when viewing numbers. Numbers are an equalizer.
I leave you with a quote from my favorite movie Blue Velvet.
“I’m seeing something that was always hidden. I’m in the middle of a mystery and it’s all secret.”
Basically, I’m ready to hop inside of a closet inside Hexagon Sun Studios and observe. Because, just like David Lynch, I love a good mystery.
Raptor Jesus eats demon babies for breakfast.
A New Track from Baths – "Ironworks"
There’s something effortless and cosmic about Will Wiesenfeld’s 2010 debut Cerulean. It’s a record you can float around inside of, drifting from window to window to look out onto scenes washed in blue. The follow up, Obsidian (released next week), already feels darker, but no less alluring. Check out the second track he’s released, “Ironworks” below. Reference…?
Daft Punk and a New Kind of Album Anticipation
Last night there appeared on the Huffington Post’s website an article with the following headline: “Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ Leaked as Full Song With Pharrell Williams Appears Online”. I clicked over to the link immediately and had my my brains blown out of the back of my head. “Get Lucky” is a masterpiece. It’s the kind of groove that comes along once in a generation. Niles Rodgers‘ guitar figures are clean, percussive and funky as all hell. Pharrell gives a vocal performance perfectly smooth and sexy. The mix is impeccable; everything in its right place, at the right volume. All-in-all it’s the best song I’ve heard this year.
But I’m not even sure it’s the real song.
My trepidation is founded. That original HuffPo article was amended quickly to include the following disclaimer: “There is no official confirmation that this is the album version of the song. A radio station posted an earlier, loop-only version of the song and said it sounded ‘pretty damn close’ to the official version. The version below has more instrumentation and added vocals, the latter of which some have said seem unmixed and flat.” As of this writing a search for “Get Lucky Daft Punk” on Youtube yields 553,000 results, and like hot buttered snowflakes, no two versions are quite the same.
On March 2nd, an unexpected “teaser ad” appeared on Saturday Night Live containing approximately 15 seconds of (ostensibly) a new Daft Punk song, accompanied with a stylized drawing of the band’s famous robot heads and the title “Random Access Memories”. Then the next week another 15-second snippet appeared in a similar ad. To say these two snippets were enticing would be a huge understatement. The idiosyncratic Daft Punk groove was there, but the sound was richer, more organic, everything popped and glistened.
Since then there have been thousands of homemade “remixes” cropping up on Youtube. These remixes usually contain a portion of one of the snippets, looped out and augmented with some flange or reverb. Many of them sound great and even further whet the appetite for the real thing.
Then at Coachella last weekend the band debuted an extended 1:40 video for a portion of the song, which shows Daft Punk’s two members (in especially-shiny robot regalia) performing the song on a sound stage with collaborator Niles Rodgers and a theretofore unannounced collaborator, vocalist Pharrell Williams. The clip included a portion of Pharrell’s verse along with a prechorus and refrain of “we’re up all night to get lucky”. The snippet was promising, though Pharrell’s vocals did sound a bit undermixed and flat (hmmm….) and there wasn’t a real sense of song structure or continuity yet.
Yesterday a Dutch radio program claimed to have the “real, leaked version of the song”, and the internet vomited on itself in excitement.
And for good reason. This “full” version contained structured verses and choruses, along with an outro and some tip-top production flourishes. When I sent the song to a recording engineer friend of mine (during the course of sending it to literally everyone I know) he responded “I’m listening in my control room… even the MP3 stream sounds better than 99% of records that have come out in the last ten years. It’s like a warm bath for your ears.” Needless to say the song sounded great. It’s everything I was hoping it would be and more, and hearing it was accompanied by a sense of pure cathartic joy I haven’t experienced since the first time I heard “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” a decade ago.
But here the plot thickens.
When MTV tried to contact Columbia Records to confirm the song’s authenticity, they got a “no comment”. Not a denial, not a confirmation, not a “hey, where the hell did you get this? give it back!”, just a “no comment”. It seems odd that Columbia wouldn’t swiftly dismiss the claim out of hand. But that’s part of the mystique, and I’m fairly confident that Daft Punk are in on it the whole way.
In 2013, one can grab a snippet of audio, loop it out, mix it down, add in some effects, alter tonality, adjust the balance and more. And one can do all this on a website found by typing “music editing” into Google. Daft Punk knew what they were doing when they released those teaser snippets. They knew the clips would be snatched up by a hungry audience and chewed on with abandon until something bigger and tastier came along. They knew when they released the Coachella video that people would be encouraged but not blown away. They knew that the “full version” that was “leaked” yesterday was great enough that even if its authenticity came into question nobody would love it any less.
They knew all this when they announced this morning that a truly “official” version of the song would be released and available for download tonight at midnight, cutting through all the noise and shining a spotlight on a hatch that will open in approximately 8 hours. It’s a move that takes all the disparate strands of anticipation flapping in the wind and collects them into a kite string we’re all holding together. I haven’t been this excited for an album release. That’s not a sentence fragment. I have never been this excited and anticipatory of a record coming out, and the actual album doesn’t come out for another 5 weeks.
“The Robots”, as even their close collaborators refer to them, are utilizing this moment in technological and musical history to create a new kind of album anticipation, one that feels compulsorily modern and wonderfully nostalgic all at the same time. Just like “Get Lucky”. Just like the sound of the music they’re creating.
As I write this I discover that the original flash file on the HuffPo site is now listed as a “file not found”. The white whale slips away again.
Update: It WAS the real version!
Daft Punk and a New Kind of Album Anticipation
Last night there appeared on the Huffington Post’s website an article with the following headline: “Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’ Leaked as Full Song With Pharrell Williams Appears Online”. I clicked over to the link immediately and had my my brains blown out of the back of my head. “Get Lucky” is a masterpiece. It’s the kind of groove that comes along once in a generation. Niles Rodgers‘ guitar figures are clean, percussive and funky as all hell. Pharrell gives a vocal performance perfectly smooth and sexy. The mix is impeccable; everything in its right place, at the right volume. All-in-all it’s the best song I’ve heard this year.
But I’m not even sure it’s the real song.
My trepidation is founded. That original HuffPo article was amended quickly to include the following disclaimer: “There is no official confirmation that this is the album version of the song. A radio station posted an earlier, loop-only version of the song and said it sounded ‘pretty damn close’ to the official version. The version below has more instrumentation and added vocals, the latter of which some have said seem unmixed and flat.” As of this writing a search for “Get Lucky Daft Punk” on Youtube yields 553,000 results, and like hot buttered snowflakes, no two versions are quite the same.
On March 2nd, an unexpected “teaser ad” appeared on Saturday Night Live containing approximately 15 seconds of (ostensibly) a new Daft Punk song, accompanied with a stylized drawing of the band’s famous robot heads and the title “Random Access Memories”. Then the next week another 15-second snippet appeared in a similar ad. To say these two snippets were enticing would be a huge understatement. The idiosyncratic Daft Punk groove was there, but the sound was richer, more organic, everything popped and glistened.
Since then there have been thousands of homemade “remixes” cropping up on Youtube. These remixes usually contain a portion of one of the snippets, looped out and augmented with some flange or reverb. Many of them sound great and even further whet the appetite for the real thing.
Then at Coachella last weekend the band debuted an extended 1:40 video for a portion of the song, which shows Daft Punk’s two members (in especially-shiny robot regalia) performing the song on a sound stage with collaborator Niles Rodgers and a theretofore unannounced collaborator, vocalist Pharrell Williams. The clip included a portion of Pharrell’s verse along with a prechorus and refrain of “we’re up all night to get lucky”. The snippet was promising, though Pharrell’s vocals did sound a bit undermixed and flat (hmmm….) and there wasn’t a real sense of song structure or continuity yet.
Yesterday a Dutch radio program claimed to have the “real, leaked version of the song”, and the internet vomited on itself in excitement.
And for good reason. This “full” version contained structured verses and choruses, along with an outro and some tip-top production flourishes. When I sent the song to a recording engineer friend of mine (during the course of sending it to literally everyone I know) he responded “I’m listening in my control room… even the MP3 stream sounds better than 99% of records that have come out in the last ten years. It’s like a warm bath for your ears.” Needless to say the song sounded great. It’s everything I was hoping it would be and more, and hearing it was accompanied by a sense of pure cathartic joy I haven’t experienced since the first time I heard “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” a decade ago.
But here the plot thickens.
When MTV tried to contact Columbia Records to confirm the song’s authenticity, they got a “no comment”. Not a denial, not a confirmation, not a “hey, where the hell did you get this? give it back!”, just a “no comment”. It seems odd that Columbia wouldn’t swiftly dismiss the claim out of hand. But that’s part of the mystique, and I’m fairly confident that Daft Punk are in on it the whole way.
In 2013, one can grab a snippet of audio, loop it out, mix it down, add in some effects, alter tonality, adjust the balance and more. And one can do all this on a website found by typing “music editing” into Google. Daft Punk knew what they were doing when they released those teaser snippets. They knew the clips would be snatched up by a hungry audience and chewed on with abandon until something bigger and tastier came along. They knew when they released the Coachella video that people would be encouraged but not blown away. They knew that the “full version” that was “leaked” yesterday was great enough that even if its authenticity came into question nobody would love it any less.
They knew all this when they announced this morning that a truly “official” version of the song would be released and available for download tonight at midnight, cutting through all the noise and shining a spotlight on a hatch that will open in approximately 8 hours. It’s a move that takes all the disparate strands of anticipation flapping in the wind and collects them into a kite string we’re all holding together. I haven’t been this excited for an album release. That’s not a sentence fragment. I have never been this excited and anticipatory of a record coming out, and the actual album doesn’t come out for another 5 weeks.
“The Robots”, as even their close collaborators refer to them, are utilizing this moment in technological and musical history to create a new kind of album anticipation, one that feels compulsorily modern and wonderfully nostalgic all at the same time. Just like “Get Lucky”. Just like the sound of the music they’re creating.
As I write this I discover that the original flash file on the HuffPo site is now listed as a “file not found”. The white whale slips away again.
Update: It WAS the real version!
Happy Music Sad Music 