The Heist

“I will not be a statistic, just let me be
No child left behind, that's the American scheme
I make my living off of words
And do what I love for work
And got around 980 on my SATs”

(Macklemore - Ten Thousand Hours)

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The opening track on Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’ new album, The Heist, is titled “Ten Thousand Hours.” The title references Malcolm Gladwell’s theory regarding what makes someone extraordinary in their field, as presented in Outliers. While Gladwell’s theory is not universally accepted, Macklemore’s point is well taken—achieving greatness takes tremendous amounts of work.

Macklemore and Lewis are not your run-of-the-mill rapper/producer duo. The Heist entered the iTunes sales list in 1st place, and the Billboard 200 Chart in 2nd, but instead of idealizing drug use and material wealth, and mocking “faggots,” Macklemore speaks in support of the gay rights movement, critiques consumerism, and speaks openly about his struggles with drug abuse. It’s a fresh breath of air into a genre that has gradually become a parody of itself.

Tracks worthy of particular note are the aforementioned “Ten Thousand Hours;” “Same Love,” in which Macklemore speaks out in support of gay marriage; “Wing$,” a reflection on his childhood obsession with brand name basketball shoes; and “Starting Over,” featuring Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses. The latter gives the listener a candid look into Macklemore’s struggles with drug abuse, his three years of sobriety, and the way in which he felt that he had let himself, his parents, and his fans down when he relapsed. “If I can be an example of getting sober, then I can be an example of starting over,” he repeats, as Bridwell brings the song to an end.

The album is not entirely without potential for improvement. The chorus of “Thrift Shop” sounds like it were written by a fourteen-year old, and ScHoolboy Q, the guest rapper on “White Walls,” reverts to the age-old theme of “white hoes in the backseat snortin’ coke.” With his reflection on homophobia in hip hop, one would think that Macklemore would be more proactive in keeping demeaning descriptions of women—arguably as big of a problem in the genre as is homophobia—off his album.

But we have a tendency to get nitpicky when someone is trying to make a difference.

The Heist takes hip hop in a new direction. Other rappers have tried to do the same, but Macklemore and Lewis are unique in the mainstream success they have gained in doing so. Perhaps the genre is finally ready for this change. The album is filled with more solid tracks than there is room to describe here, and Ryan Lewis’ extraordinary production skills certainly warrant his name’s appearance on the cover alongside Macklemore’s.

Tempest

Bob Dylan’s music has led him to many different types of accomplishments and has left him with nothing to prove, but he still has a lot to say. With his 35th studio album, Tempest, he says a number of these different things in a number of different ways. Like all of the other Dylan albums, Tempest is stuffed with lyric after clever lyric.

Dylan also produced this album by himself (for the most part), something he has been doing consistently since the early 90s. He has reached a point in his musical career where he understands the process so well and knows exactly what he wants that he can do it all, and at his own discretion. His fingerprints are left all over the music’s structure – the way the lyrics flow verse after verse, or the way the instrumentation never staggers too far from home.

The instrumentation on Tempest veers away from that of Dylan’s acoustic folk and more towards traditional blues and jazz. The opening track, “Duquesne Whistle,” begins the album with a free form jazz sound, while “Early Roman Kings” uses the chords from Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy.”

But Dylan’s wordplay still outshines any other aspect of the album. The excess amount of rhymes seem to pour out of him like punctured dam. Verse after verse, he rhymes consistently, while still managing to get his point across clearly. In “Tin Angel” Dylan wastes no time of the nine-minute track, rhyming up a sinister narrative of a double-murder suicide. He then manages to cram an astonishing 45 verses into the 14-minute title-track, “Tempest.” And with this excess of wordplay, little wit is lost. “It’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way,” he croaks on the seven-minute “Narrow Way.” “If I can’t work up to you, you’ll surely have to work down to me someday.”

Even with these songs exceeding seven, eight and nine minutes, Dylan still displays a productive structural handle on each of them. The structure for “Pay In Blood,” for example, is very neat. The entire song follows the same structure throughout: sixteen measures of Dylan’s lyrics per verse, followed by four measures of instrumentation. This continues for all six of Dylan’s verses, which accurately reflects the productive hand Dylan has played in Tempest.

Dylan’s political voice is also present on Tempest. “Night after night, day after day / They strip your useless hopes away / The more I take, the more I give / The more I die, the more I live” he preaches on “Pay In Blood.” But “Scarlet Town” takes the cake for the entire album, hitting all positive aspects already discussed, incorporating them all in one song – clever wordplay, song structure, a variation of generic influences – all while incorporating the strongest political theme on the entire album. “The streets have names you can’t pronounce / Gold is down to a quarter of an ounce / The music starts and the people sway / Everybody says, ‘Are you going my way?’” he sings amidst a slow, somber tone until a Santana-like guitar solo emerges smoothly and quietly.

Tempest varies in a number of ways, from the John Lennon tribute of “Roll on John” to the delicate, poetic “Soon After Midnight,” the album displays Dylan’s 71 years of experiences appropriately, and Dylan does so in an experienced way.

The Haunted Man

This week, songwriter Natasha Khan (better known by her stage name Bat for Lashes) released her first studio album since the critically acclaimed 2009 album Two Suns. Natasha had already begun making a name for herself in 2008 when she opened for Radiohead, but it is Two Suns’ hit single Daniel that marked her entrance into the mainstream music scene.

The Haunted Man has been in the making since May 2010, and it is not hard to tell that Khan has been taking her sweet time. The album is filled with solid tracks, and it is masterfully composed, arranged, and produced by none other than Khan herself.

The overall impression of the album is good, but The Haunted Man is not entirely without filler — a general problem in today’s music industry, and one that can perhaps be traced back to the availability of single-track purchases. Khan could have been more liberal in axing the album’s weaker tracks, and boldly released a shorter, but all killer, album.

Although the album has plenty of tracks worth mentioning—such as “Lilies,” “Oh Yeah,” “Winter Fields” and “The Haunted Man”—”All Your Gold,” “Laura,” and “Rest Your Head” are the album’s strongest. “All Your Gold” and “Rest Your Head” both exemplify Natasha’s incorporation of a vast array of instruments to create an experimental and unpredictable, yet rich and cohesive sound.

The album’s lead single, Laura, might be familiar to some. It was first performed in May of this year, and has been a staple of Khan’s repertoire throughout her European summer tour. An intensely quiet track with minimal instrumentation, carried by Khan’s haunting, powerful voice, it perfectly demonstrates that although Khan has mastered the subtleties of composition, arrangement, and productions, she need not depend on these tools to prove herself as a gifted musician.

There is no way of getting around the fact that the distractions of mainstream success often lead to subpar sequels. It is a pleasant surprise, then, that The Haunted Man is a through-and-through well-tailored album, and a suitable follow-up to Two Suns — a nice addition to the indie-loving cobber’s record collection.

The Contrast Between Mainstream and Emerging Female Solo Artists

Female musicians are as prevalent today as they have ever been. Today’s radio charts are littered with female vocals of all kinds -- singer/songwriters, pop stars, country sweethearts. But female pop stars found on today’s top charts have in some way all molded themselves after the same icon, whether they know it or not: the female Pop equivalent to Michael Jackson -- Madonna.

Madonna began branding pop music as her own in the mid 80s, morphing it into a tool used to appeal to an audience by expressing her sexuality very openly and explicitly. Since then, the likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera have followed in her wake, which has cast an overbearing shadow of sexual deviance upon today’s radio-ready music.

Today, artists like Rihanna, Ke$ha and P!nk all use (in their own way) sexuality to sell records. This has misled the focus of music in general greatly. Where the marketing of these artists’ images thrives, their tactical approach to creating music suffers. Often the music by female artists found on mainstream radio stations throughout the nation are indistinguishable from one another. This is the case for a couple of reasons: (1) These artists are more focused on their image and fail to get thoroughly involved in the production of their own music and (2) many of these artists rely on “ghost writers” to write lyrics for them.

A lot of artists who have yet to hit the mainstream (thankfully) don’t have the kind of access to these luxuries as artists like Gaga and others. This forces these artists’ thought process throughout the creation of their music to be much more consistent and fluid overall than that found on the major charts around the U.S.

Artists like the Brooklyn electronic songstress MNDR are involved heavily in the writing and production of their music. Along with that kind of consistency that can be found within her music, MNDR also focuses on her image in the way that Gaga and Ke$ha do. But the overall sound found on the radio today lacks more than just songwriting prowess, it heavily lacks diversity of influence.

Female artists who have just barely grazed Top 40 like M.I.A. were quickly forgotten after she failed to produce a radio-ready hit similar to her 2008 groundbreaker, “Paper Planes.” But what’s truly admirable about M.I.A. is her decision to keep creating music from a list of influences that are important to her and her original audience.

This also brings up the point of how meaningless entire albums have become. Much of this is due to the radio’s relentless thirst for hit singles, causing the majority of the people who “listen” to Lady Gaga or Ke$ha or whoever to only know what’s played over the airwaves and not what is on the rest of these artists’ albums.

But the art of the album is still very much alive, just in a different place. Janelle Monae [the video I’ve linked this to is enough of a testament on its own] is a performer who debuted with an album constructed around a Suite Overture theme, presenting her Motown-inspired sound in a structural and meaningful manner. And even while her music is formatted this way, her live performances are what she is renowned for. Grimes is another artist who is focusing on that balance and relationship between album and live performance, as well as developing her own unique image.

Thankfully, artists like this can still be found in more popular areas of music, too. Artists like Beyonce and Florence Welch use sheer talent to express emotion and energy throughout their music.

This creative process that is supposed to be the crux of the music we listen to is more underwhelming on the radio today than it’s ever been. And while this in and of itself is a disappointment, the fact that there is also music out there that is more unique and more creative and diverse than anything that’s ever been listened to before is something that ought to get your ears’ attention.

Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!

Does your band include a projectionist as a full time band member?

Didn’t think so... Godspeed You! Black Emperor, however, does. And if you’re wondering what kind of a name that is, you’re not alone.

The nine-member instrumental anti-government post-rock ensemble from Montreal were on hiatus between 2003 and 2010, and Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! is their first release since then. It is probably best described as a solemn and intense sound landscape from a post-apocalyptic world—picture the scene from 28 Days Later in which the protagonist walks through the empty, ravaged streets of London, and you’ll have a fairly good idea of what Godspeed You! sounds like.

Mostly because that scene is actually set to a GY!BE track.

The use of the term “sound landscape” is deliberate, because referring to the tracks on Ascend! as anything else would be misleading. There are melodies and patterns to be made out, but it’s not until four minutes into the first song that anything even remotely resemblant of a chord progression shows up. And even then, one would be hard stretched to really call it a melody. Ascend! has plenty of interesting riffs and progressions, but the emphasis is more on producing a mood in the listener than on creating memorable melodies. And it works.

The first track, “Mladic,” is twenty minutes long, and named after a Bosnian Serb military leader currently under trial for crimes against humanity. The first six minutes are a slow, slow crescendo of feedback and effects, eventually growing into a concoction of eastern-inspired riffs. At about 12 minutes the track develops into a more traditional, powerful and deliberate prog-rock pattern, before it ends with a folk-inspired rhythm section reminiscent of the last few minutes of Rage Against the Machine’s “Aerials.”

“We Drift Like Worried Power,” which is another twenty-minuter, is built around a repeating, eerie, echoed, repetitive clean electric guitar theme. In fact, even when this theme gives way a good eight minutes in, the piece remains religiously committed to the two chords on which the initial theme was based until its sixteenth minute. However, Godspeed You! somehow manage to pull it off. The gradual buildup makes the track extremely powerful, and each new layer adds so much depth that one forgets that the piece is essentially a repetition on two chords.

These two core tracks on Allelujah! both use crescendo ingeniously to create an intensely estranged atmosphere, and are in themselves enough to make the record one you wouldn’t want to miss— which is good, because the two shorter tracks aren’t worth the vinyl they’re printed on. Fortunately, the vinyl release of the album is packaged as a 12” A record with “Mladic” and “We Drift,” and a 7” B record with “Helicopters” and “Strung,” making it easy to pretend that the latter two tracks were never there in the first place.

All in all, Allelujah! Don’t Bend! Ascend! is a solid impressionistic album definitely worth checking out for anyone who is into progressive music, or who enjoys the post-apocalyptic aesthetic. And if you’re lucky, maybe a recycling station near you will take your B record.

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If you want, you can check the album out before you buy it on Constellation Records’ Soundcloud.

Joe the Juggler

It began in 7th grade. After his laptop failed him, he found himself bored and decided to experiment with juggling by self-teaching himself. Beginning simply with only three balls in the air, Joe Anderson, a junior at Concordia College, dialed into his true talent. In his eight and a half years of practicing the skill, Joe has discovered his juggling abilities have gotten him to as many as seven balls the air at one time and beyond that, a multitude of different experiences.

Joe has found himself performing for audiences of all different sorts: a sophisticated older women’s Bunco party, the Northwest Art and Air Festival for a group of small children, the incoming class of freshman at the Welcome Show this fall, as well as numerous other appearances in some of Concordia’s showcases, and even a try-out on America’s Got Talent in the spring of 2011. His favorite though is a two person juggling, comedy routine that he does with a friend back home in Oregon. The dynamic duo pass a series of objects back and forth, tell a round of audience appealing jokes, and do occasional mind reading. It’s a crowd pleaser. His claim to fame when he came to Concordia was when he appeared on stage performing juggling tricks that were far from ordinary while decked out in a pair of brightly colored crazy socks, instantly charming the audience.

Interestingly enough, Joe argues that juggling, as it stands right now, is a controversial thing. “It’s gone from a mediocre side talent to something of big talent.” The controversy began when Jason Garfield started the World Juggling Federation in 2000 with the intent of sparking greater interest into juggling to make it an actual sport. Garfield was not happy with the reputation of circus acts and flaming tricks that juggling was associated with, so he created real sport competitions that recognized juggling as a true skill. Because of this and the heavy instructional component of juggling, it has become common to watch an amateur juggler go from a couple of balls to seven in a matter of months. The world’s first juggling competition aired live on ESPN 3 in 2011 and was held again this past August. Despite the push for a socially accepted athletic event, Joe claims that people would still rather go watch someone juggle three objects while eating an apple (which could be taught in a week) than watch someone juggle a large number of objects, which requires a whole lot more skill.

At this point in his life, Joe doesn’t practice on a daily basis. When he is feeling stressed, he collects seven of his favorite juggling balls and heads to Olsen to release tension in a competition of personal progress. His inspiration: siblings Vova and Olga Galchenko from Russia, two of the best jugglers in the world who make juggling “very cool.” To put it into perspective, Joe comments, “They’re like to juggling what Michael Phelps is to swimming.”

Joe’s draw to juggling is how he finds it relating to his own life. “Juggling creates foundations that are similar for life. In juggling you need to build a strong base of skills and once mastered, need to be built upon. There is always another level; you can always add another ball. There are thousands of trick combinations that can be performed, an infinite amount of possibilities.” While Joe doesn’t specifically see a future as a juggler, his future career ambitions include becoming some sort of a public speaker. With this, Joe wants to incorporate his juggling skills. When tosses balls up into the air, he plans to not only catch the descending objects, but also the attention of his audience. Joe believes that with this tactic he will be able to make a special connection with the crowd and leave a lasting message.

Joe’s juggling abilities should never be underestimated. Anyone who has seen him perform knows that it’s easy to become mesmerized when he begins to juggle. He exerts great confidence and ease when channeling his energy into something he clearly loves to do. He makes it look all too easy. When Joe is juggling you’ll find yourself labeling the skill as downright “cool” and wonder where you can buy a pair of juggling balls like his so you too can start to become a master juggler. While Joe has no upcoming performances, his juggling career at Concordia is far from over. Be on the lookout for the man dazzling you with the number of balls he can juggle and of course, the crazy colored socks.

Mike Marth + ecce gallery

“I think of inspiration as a two-way channel. I think you have to start with an inspired mind and be positively charged and engaged in the environment around you. If we pass through time with a receptive and alert attitude, everything becomes a possible external source of inspiration. Maybe that explains some of my desire to work in so many materials, everything out there is at least interesting, it seems to me.” –Mike Marth

Anyone who has walked past Anderson Commons is most likely familiar with the work of Mike Marth without even knowing it. Marth, local mixed-media artist and art instructor at Concordia is the creator of the gigantic, coffee-cup-and-silverware laden piece that hangs above the staircase near dining services. He is also the current featured artist at ecce gallery in downtown Fargo.

When you first walk into ecce, the first thing you notice, besides all the art on the walls, is how perfect of a gallery space it is. Poured concrete floors, exposed brick, bare white walls, and the low pulse of ambient music create a clean, sparse atmosphere that is more Manhattan than Midwest. Thankfully, such a pared down atmosphere ensures that all the attention is on the art, and there’s a lot to focus on in Mike Marth’s pieces. Rich in color and visual texture, the multi-layered pieces have a raw, organic feel to them, and compel the viewer to linger a moment to take it all in. Stand close, and you’ll be able to see the careful layered brushwork, the different media used, and the subtle 3D dimension that the media give the piece. Stand back, and everything blends together into a cohesive whole. Many of his pieces use textural objects, such as screen, chains, and rope that he mimics with paint and brushwork, so it’s difficult to tell what’s 3D, and what is just an illusion. Additionally, most of his pieces also include everyday objects—coffee cups, belts, electrical cords, doorknobs—that he manipulates and assembles in a way that makes the viewer think twice about their common use, and instead see them reduced to their visual and artistic elements.

Despite the hodgepodge of materials that Marth uses in his work, the pieces themselves are extremely unified, cohesive, and throw off a vibe of being carefully and meticulously constructed. During a recent conversation, Mark Weiler, founder and owner of ecce, said that he believes “what makes Mike so good is that he’s able to be objective about his own work, which is a tough thing to do, especially when you put so much of yourself into a piece. Not a lot of artists are able to be objective like that.” Indeed, it’s evident by viewing the collection that Marth holds the highest of standards for himself, and the art he produces, even when creating is an uphill battle: “It's pretty cool when a piece finally emerges resolved after a period of struggle and uncertainty, when it even seemed to actively resist my creative efforts,” Marth says. However, to him, the struggle is worth it. “It's a very rewarding experience when a former student, friend, colleague, even a stranger, takes a moment to look at my work and comment that they have seen and appreciate what I do. It's an honor, really.”

Marth’s show, which is at ecce until November 5th, is a must-see for anyone looking to appreciate the local art scene, and support an outstanding member of Concordia’s own faculty.