Eminem is an enigma where over half is output is kind of bad and yet he’s in my greatest Rappers of all time without question. I’ve said before how The Slim Shady LP is the most American Marxist record ever made. Everyone knows how the Marshall Mathers LP is the best “fight music for high school kids” ever made. And maybe less known but Recovery is an incredible album about drug abuse and getting over one’s own dependency.
But Eminem is different now. The Eminem show was bad but you could look past it. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is better than it gets credit for but his Rap God style of fast rapping gets old quickly and doesn’t have a lot of depth. Revival however is a moment. Revival demands that you look at it and think about how Eminem is different now. The only Eminem album I couldn’t finish. I didn’t even finish it. Do you understand how bonkers that sounds to me.
Eminem now is a response to Revival. Kamikaze was a direct response about how he could still make music like the old days. It’s angry and loud in ways that got it comparisons to old Slim, but it didn’t have the pointed nature of those old records. He was mad but not political like ye days of ol’.
“Music to be Murdered By” is political, but only in fits and spurts. It seems like Em is a little jarred by the Ariana Grande shooting and the shooting in Las Vegas a few ?years? Ago (I have lost all sense of time). Unaccommodating mentions the Ariana incident, but Darkness is where it gets really into it. Eminem deals with his loss of fame over the years and his own reactions to this phenomenon. He’s hurt by the small crowd that has gathered to see him perform as compared to the stadium sold out shows of 2003, or even post-Recovery. He gets so mad that he decides to kill them all in an over the top verse in a style that Stan’s should be accustomed to. It’s different this time though as the end of the song becomes a sound collage of a ton of news reports about the shootings in this country. Everything from Vegas to unidentified school shootings that happen almost every day in this god forsaken country. But the album doesn’t know what to do with this. It just drops it and goes back to being about Eminem’s love life or whatever.
There’s also “Yah Yah’ featuring Royce da 5’9”, Q-Tip, and Black Thought, which is a combination that should be primed to make me jump out of my seat and yet...yawn. Like it’s okay, but it’s certainly not as good as all of those ingredients would make you think.
Eminem doesn’t seem to be insisting about skits that call his agent Paul anymore which is great, but there are still skits and they’re still bad in the way skits (almost) always are. Little Engine has the same hook style as his song on the Venom soundtrack and it sounds even more boring the second time.
I’ll probably treat this the same way I treated Kamikaze by listening to it for the next month or so and then never really thinking about again. Catch me in a month listening to Recovery on repeat forever.
KILL JAY Z
FUCK JAY Z
DIE JAY Z
CRY JAY Z
NAH, JAY Z
BYE, JAY Z
KILL JAY Z starts the album out on as close to a banger as this album gets. It’s fun but also sets a tone of sadness that will continue for the rest of the album. However this is the only song that feels as tight as I expect a Jay Z album to be. The rest of the album is mostly airy and feel like demos more than finished tracks. Caught their eyes is kind of fun but I dunno….meh. 4:44 is a worse version of Lemonade from the other perspective that manages to only retread the story told by Beyonce with little to no addition. After this point I am mostly bored and check out until it’s over…
or that’s what I would have said after my first listen.
KILL JAY Z
This is still the best track on the album. It manages to toe the line between old Jay Z and the tone of this new album. It’s a HOV banger in every way except the lack of a chorus.
FUCK JAY Z
The Story of O.J. is the story of blackness. Jay has a Nina sample that is perfect for the tone. The chorus is exactly what needs to be said and manages to have a rhythm to it that feels just right. The verses on this track , however, start to sound like Jay just bragging about his money and isn’t even clever. Smile is still largely airy and boring IMO.
DIE JAY Z
Caught Their Eyes is the first of two reggae tracks on 4:44. This one features Frank Ocean. Jay’s flow on this track is a little rambling, but the beats and the constant interjections of Frank’s sample mean that you can mostly ignore Jay Z for the entirety of the track.
CRY JAY Z
4:44…………………………………….….Let me start over
4:44 is a track dealing with the issues in the Carter marriage as initially brought up on Mrs. Carter’s latest album Lemonade. 4:44 features Hannah Williams giving an incredible intro that immediately slows the album down and forces you to pay attention. This is in tandem with the track being the title of the album. Jay rips himself to pieces. He doesn’t hold back. He seems remorseful, saddened by the event, and willing to move forward.
NAH, JAY Z
Family Feud loses all of the emotional and artistic faith given by 4:44. This track is largely boring. Beyoncè shows up for a moment. Jay talks about their money a bunch and how fighting within the family is bad for the whole family. I guess it’s trying to be the story of the two mending their broken past but if you talk about money over love it can’t really feel genuine.
BYE, JAY Z
It turns out…if you mash up “Bam Bam” by Sister Nancy, Damian Marley and Jay-Z you get a track that feels really good to Rand Schille. Who knew? Bam Bam is such a fucking song…shit….ANYWAY…..”GANGSTA NO LIVE IN A TENEMENT YARD.” I was wrong earlier actually. KILL JAY Z is a kick ass track but this is the banger.
Moonlight is a fun airy ride through Jay’s thoughts on the current culture and it’s relationship with blackness.
Marcy Me…I have nothing to say about Marcy me. It’s fine.
DIE JAY Z
BYE JAY Z
“Daddy what’s a will?” says Blue Ivy Carter speaking on her fathers track Legacy. Jay writes out his will in the following lines. “Take those moneys and spread ‘cross families…the rest to B for whatever she wants to do.” And with that Sean Carter says goodbye.
Renaissance is certainly not the best album I’ve heard this year. It’s certainly not the most revolutionary or groundbreaking or artfully produced. That title would probably go to Richard Dawson’s “Peasant” or Loyle Carner’s “Yesterday’s Gone,” but Renaissance is still most likely my Album of the Year (AOTY). Renaissance is not a particularly deep album,
“The desert eagle will thread the needle, let's get the cash
I'm smoking good gas, writing next Sunday's mass
I treat the booth like the pulpit but I'm preaching facts”
But they are meaningful enough, and politically align with me enough that I can feel like I’m listening to meaningful insight.
“What's the discrepancy, raising up the youth on command
Like open sesame, don't discriminate
I don't split up the people separately
Different flavors working together to make the recipe”
And that’s the true genius of this album, you can check in and out of the lyrics as you please. There’s no concept holding you to a story, there’s no great song-wide story being told. If you listen to three or four lines you can have a laugh or hear something “insightful” and then check out again for a while. It’s a fun album, almost pop rap at times, but without the overplayed trap beats and nyquil verses. AKTHESAVIOR and Issa Gold trade the mic back and forth but there’s never any Tribe Called Quest play between the two voices. I couldn’t even tell you who is who.
If Lorde's "Pure Heroine" was drum and bass the album than this is group chanting the album. It is high energy almost the entire way, with a few short, but necessary breathing sections.
Starting off the album we are just going to set the energy level. I have no idea what this song is about, but it sets up how the album is going to go from here. There are loud fast sections that seem to fuel the album forward, broken by slower sections that let it breathe. We set up the multiple voices that will continue through the album on almost every song.
This song has rythm that is easy to follow and sing along with. I think that this is the perfect driving and singing along type of song. There's a story (Road trippin with an ex?), but it's not obvious what the whole picture is. A mad man is telling you a story, but doesn't realize he's skipping around.
Chanting! We have chanting! Chanting's the best! Who doesn't like chanting? Weird metaphors? We've got those too! "It was beautifully done, like trying to save an icecube from the cold." Again this song is easy to just have fun with. We haven't gotten to the hard hitters yet, we're just making sure everyone can follow along.
It's a song about hating Florida. Who doesn't love that? This is the shortest song so far, but I think it has the most complete story. A man went to Florida and hated all of it, but realizes that it was indeed worth it in the end. I can relate to this personally, because fuck Florida, it's shit, but some of the coolest stuff in my life has taken place in Florida, 12 Hours of Sebring, Senior Field Trip.
HERE WE GO! This is it! This is the song, love it or hate it this where Modest Mouse lives. There's a partial story that you can understand and follow, but it's going to take a while to get there so let me break it down for you. It's about a boss, a shitty boss, but not the worst boss ever. I have this boss. "If you say what to do I know what not to stop." We already know what were doing, but you seem to tell us anyway. During these lyrics you can hear in the background other people echoing some previous lyrics as if in quiter agreement with the narrator. The song is building, slowly but surely to a release point. The voices in the background grow louder, the drums fire on all cylinders until finally it breaks and the narrator loses it. "Someday you will die somehow and somethings gonna steal your carbon." Boss, you are just another set of carbon, you do not fill this high horse you have put yourself on. You are nothing, just as the rest of us are nothing. Musically this release builds just as the rest of the song did, however this time it's just chanting, glorious chanting. The background voices have now completely joined in and everyone is echoing the opinion of the narrator. This song is the reason Modest Mouse is great in my opinion.
Looking back and remembering the good times and how we can never go back to them. This isn't a new theme in music, but I think this an interesting take on it. He shows all the ways that they went wrong. They show how they took things to far, ignored the red flags. They use cool and interesting metaphors that I have not heard elsewhere. Energy levels are coming back down from the high of Parting of the Sensory, we need to breathe and take a step back before diving in, in the next song.
Immediately this song is louder and has a lot more kick than the last. And we've got a point to make. There are no more unknowns in the world, or at least we think so, and that's a damn shame. Right before the chorus there's a really cool bit, that I think transitions the slow-ish verses to the group sound of the chorus. The end of this song is layers that I love oh so much. Different groups singing different parts that still manage to sync together.
That intro. The fly buzzing through the air, the piano, I love it. The deep throaty voice is here to stay. It's not quite a metal voice, but it gives the song a tone. Guitars build and release repeatedly throughout the song in sort of the same way someone would whistle. I have no idea what this song is about.
This song is really showing off that weird vocal range that we have. We go from the high pitched to the near metal voice. This song has something to say about education, but I'm not 100% what it is. "Call it education all those books I didn't read, sitting on my shelf, looking much smarter than me" seems to be the main idea, but how that fits in with the rest of the song is beyond me. As always Modest Mouse lyrics seem to have a story, but told by a mad man that doesn't know what he's saying.
Alright let's slow way down for a bit. Don't worry the energy will be back soon. But this is kind of a lullabye. High pitched vocals with accompaniment come to the front while everything else takes a back seat.
Here we go! What Modest Mouse is pt. 2. We're afraid of technology, we think that milk should come from cows and humans should know what that looks like. The chorus seems like gibberish, but if you get the lyrics you can see that there is some neat stuff in there. Even from what's obvious you can get "I was born in the factory, far from the milk and teat, oh what's the use!" I think that the introduction to the chorus each time is super cool. then when we fall out of the chorus, especially the second time around we get real quiet and we can hear the narrator but like he's far off behind the amps not important, or out of breath. Now we're going to get some more metaphors about why the robots are bad. "like a rickshaw getting pulled around by another rickshaw." That's just dumb, but that's where the robots are taking us. The highs and lows of the song make it really interesting. The high energy sections are so high that on the first listens I found it completely offputting and impossible to follow, but it is now one of my favorites. I think that this is one of the ways that Modest Mouse shines. You can't get it all in one go. You have to listen over and over again to get into some of it. I loved Parting of the Sensory the first time through, but it wasn't until the 15th that I thought this song was any good at all. Looking up the lyrics can speed up that process a little bit but you can still have a hard time figuring out how they fit in the song. I think that's awesome.
What if we made a folk song? That would be cool right? Yea, sure okay let's do it. This song might define me, and you too to a certain degree. "The opinion I won't give is the opinion I ain't got." 1/3rd of the way through we go back to being full on Modest Mouse. We get louder we get chanty, we repeat lyrics again and again, before spewing lyrics out faster than can be understood. But this doesn't last for too terribly long before we go back to the folk song. This rotation goes on a few more times making this song a total of 8 min which in my opinion is about 4 min too long. We get a somewhat boring horn interlude in the middle, but I think that it's pretty weak. I like this song in the same way I like Immigrant Song or Caroulsembra, it's great for a little while, but it just needs to end.
This song is the most normal, I guess. I could imagine a world in which an indie rock group created this song. It's not bad, but it doesn't have the Modest Mouse logo pasted all over it like most of this album.
We couldn't end the album on 2 low notes so lets turn up the jams. We're bringing back the rhythmic chanting and guitar work from the 2nd 1/3rd of the album. It's still nothing special and I think the album could've just ended after the first 1/2 of Spitting Venom, but it's an okay addition to what's already here.
Overall I think this album is a solid 9/10. There is some fantastic stuff in here, but it goes on a little long. It's an entire hour and I think that some of the songs at the end grind on for a little too long. This album is my favorite of the past 3 or 4 years though. I keep going back to it over and over again. I think that's it's highly quotable in a many spots and although everyone else seems to hate on it and Modest Mouse in general I just can't get it out of my head.
I love concept albums, Soul Mining, SGT. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, Skylarking, some of my favorites of all time. Skylarking and to some degree Sgt. Peppers have songs that meld together where the tracks are hard to distinguish and that's really neat. So when I heard about a concept album where tracks are non existant and even the beginning and end of the album are meaningless I was pretty excited.
Let me introduce you to Nonagon Infinity by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Nonagon meaning 9 sided, infinity meaning never ending this album has 9 tracks but never ends. Each track slides into the next. Tempo and chords change but slowly and not always at the fringes of tracks. There are definitely songs, but sometimes the chorus of one will exist in another. The album begins with a chorus that exists in every track for example. If you play the album on a loop even the beginning is hard to distinguish when it comes around.
I don't think the music here is fantastic, but the idea is cool enough that I'm obsessed with this album and I think it deserves a listen.