VMP Magazine

Moses Sumney, 26, is only interested in making people feel shit. Frankly, he’s interested in the presence or absence of feelings, and the tensions created by societal norms around which expressions of our feelings are encouraged and silenced throughout time and space. His music is interrogative, soulful, rooted in folk and difficult to define, but feelings and intimacy drive the core. Sumney revels in minimalism; he recorded earlier work on a four-track, focusing heavily on acoustics with choral arrangements centering his otherworldly falsetto into layers upon layers of what sounds like a fallen angel shrieking for help as he falls into an abyss he’s yet to name. It’s the same voice that’s spent the past few years captivating festivals across the country; with a loop pedal and perhaps one other person backing him, Sumney reigns a gentle supreme, facilitating enough exposure of himself and comfort in others to to leave his audiences stunned to silence and moved to tears.

An instinct to impose a flat surface over a multi-dimensional reality has been a source of human error since the beginning of time. Resisting that instinct is where magic happens.

Tennis have had a lot of flat surfaces placed over their reality, basically since they debuted in 2011. And it’s easy to see why; Tennis are easy to romanticize. A beautiful, young married couple that sails around the world in seemingly unattainable luxury, writing dream-worthy indie rock, being madly in love, waking up with perfect hair? It has to be straight out of a 1940s romance. Tennis’ shiny seafoam surface practically breeds easy misconceptions about who they are or what their music is. But to apply neat and tidy storybook tropes to real human beings would be to miss the boat on Tennis completely.

Consider the alternative. Before Puffy inevitably got his way, Biggie demanded to call his debut, The Teflon Don. That original title conjures a tabloid montage of ’94 New York: infamous Mafiosi with blown-dried coifs and loose rectangular suits intimidating juries, incarcerated Scarfaces running the airwaves on Hot 97 and Rudy Giuliani’s cryptkeeper skulk.

“When I’m strong like music / Slow like honey / Heavy with mood.”

For most men, hurting women isn’t a deliberate project. Often, it’s accidental, or even pure carelessness. Yet, I do not know a single woman who has not been hurt by a man. Neither do you. Insidious or thoughtless, it doesn’t really matter. There’s an ache that goes unspoken among all the women I know; the ache of the first male rejection, the initial understanding and loss of power, the wound that bleeds a lesson: The world does not consider you to be fully human. This goes double or even triple for women of color, queer women, and those coping with disabilities, other marginalized identities, and traumatic experiences. Most of us do not have words for it. Somehow, at just 17-years-old, Fiona Apple did. Her stunning debut album, Tidal diluted that ache and mixed it with moonlight, one part per thousand.

“With the possible exception of the Beatles, no band in the history of popular music, and certainly no African American act, has left a more substantial legacy on popular music than the Isley Brothers.” — Bob Gulla, ‘Icons of R&B and Soul’

Fiona Apple's landmark sophomore album, When the Pawn... turns 20 this weekend. To celebrate, we're running this essay, which looks back at the album.

It begins with the opening of gate, an invitation into a private but unhidden world that’s at least a little lovelier than our own. From that first-line summoning of lovestruck summer haze, Feist’s 2004 breakthrough album Let It Die lures you into a more charmed dimension, one that’s alternately soaked in the glow of sunshine-pop, shrouded in folky mystique, lit up in disco-ball glimmer. It’s an album that happens almost entirely in rooms, tiny and sometimes-solitary spaces where the mood is ruled by Feist’s shape-shifting vocals, her finespun melodies that melt all anxieties and heart-numbing guardedness. Through it all Feist reveals herself as a songwriter with a singular power to alter the very texture of your emotional experience, lending purpose to longing and turning heartbreak into something elegant and possibly enviable.

At first it wasn’t even meant to be an album.

Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark studio is a place of hallowed renown. The site where some of the heaviest, strangest and most psychedelic reggae and dub were ever recorded, it was constructed in a converted carport at Perry’s home on the outskirts of Kingston as a projected haven for the Rastafari faithful who faced daily persecution in Jamaica. Similarly, King Tubby’s front-room voicing and mixing facility in the nearby Waterhouse ghetto was home to some of the deepest and most mind-bending dubs ever committed to tape. Yet, the first album to surface from the Black Ark, which was voiced at Tubby’s studio because the Ark had not yet been equipped with adequate microphones, was an unexpected blend of pop and soul cover tunes and love ballads, with a hint of Rasta consciousness and some trance-inducing dub cropping up in unexpected places. Some 35 years after its initial release, the Silvertones’ Silver Bullets can be viewed as an atypical Black Ark classic worthy of deeper investigation, evidencing the complexity of reggae in flux and the diverse pallet of Perry’s musical imagination.

The Silvertones began as the singing duo of Gilmore Grant and Keith Coley, teenaged friends who came to know each other in eastern Kingston shortly after Jamaica achieved its independence from Britain in 1962. Grant was originally from a rural location in the parish of St. Mary in northeast Jamaica and Coley from St. Elizabeth in the far southwest, their countryside upbringing lending rustic qualities to their voices. Nothing much happened for the group until they chanced upon Delroy Denton, a tall, striking lad with a distinctive baritone and good command of the guitar, all of which made him a natural front man. Their debut recording, a ska re-casting of Brook Benton’s “True Confession,” leapt to the top of the Jamaican charts in 1966 and was followed swiftly by a more languorous take on Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour,” refashioned in the emerging rock steady style with Jamaican audiences firmly in mind; the original ballad “It’s Real” was also popular.

Released in America on August 13, 1991, Super Mario World was a launch title for the hotly anticipated Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Super Mario World was — arguably until Super Mario 64 — the best Mario-branded game to be released, a dinosaur-themed escapist masterpiece that allowed players their first opportunity to ride Yoshi, without whom the Mario multiverse would be much different. On the second level of the game’s fourth world, the player encounters multiple mountainous peaks to climb in search of coins and Yoshi Wings, before ending — as all the levels do in Super Mario World — at a giant gate. All told, the level, called Cookie Mountain, is not even in the top 100 things you’d remember from your time playing Super Mario World.

Released in America on September 12, 2006, Return to Cookie Mountain is the second full-length LP from Brooklyn indie rock quintet TV on the Radio. Recorded at guitarist Dave Sitek’s Stay Gold Studios, the album’s 11 songs are nervous, worried, claustrophobic, hopeful, soulful and paranoid. It was heralded upon release by virtually every music publication, including some that don’t even exist anymore. It was named to multiple lists of the Best of the '00s, and it has sold to-date something like 300,000 copies, which seems small, but is vast when you consider it 1) is fundamentally an art rock album and 2) came out in the peak of the illegal download era, before streaming made never owning a physical copy of an album you love less morally bankrupt than it was before.

Before the Clipse could cruise with black Jesus in the back of an old school, there had to be “The Funeral.” As the last millennium wilted, the Thornton brothers donned suits and danced on hearses, amidst burning crosses and canoes, howling mourners, and a second line funeral cortege that threatened to drown itself in the Chesapeake Bay.

It’s one of the greatest debuts in rap history and relatively few heard or witnessed the video’s sepulchral beauty and gothic stress. At the dawn of their half-decade defiance of gravity, “The Funeral” was the rare Neptunes-produced single that failed to scale the charts. It sounds like Mardi Gras on Polaris, where the parade leaders sell strawberry cocaine to a coterie of voodoo priests, who insisted that the brass band reimagine Blood, Sweat and Tears.

“It was written at a time when a few of my friends had died,” Pusha T told Complex several years ago. “We were going to an abnormal amount of funerals all at once. So we decided to make a song eulogizing ourselves.”

“Somebody call 999, Richard Hawley’s been robbed!”

As acceptance speeches go, Alex Turner’s request that someone telephone the British version of 911 upon learning he’d just won the 2006 Mercury Prize, will be hard to beat. Witty, clever, inspired, daring and acknowledging its influences – fellow Yorkshire musician Hawley whose record Coles Corner was also up for the same prestigious UK award – the Arctic Monkeys frontman’s off the cuff reaction to the band’s first major honor in many ways captured the spirit of the album they had triumphed with, their irrepressible, eccentric and energetic debut: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.

It starts with a shimmy of percussion, somewhere between a shuffle and a country swing. Then the other instruments—organ, harpsichord, guitar—join the eerie dance. “Hello,” a voice beckons. A question: “Would you cry / If I lied, told a tale?” A tease: “Oh, but your wish is my command…”

“Wedding Bell” is an irresistible invitation to Beach House’s second album. “It’s playful,” is how Victoria Legrand, the Baltimore duo’s singer, lyricist and keyboardist, puts it. “There’s a twinge of lovers playing a game. Or one person playing a game in their own mind, and the other person has no idea.”

Our record of the month this month is Hasabe, a compilation of songs from Ayalew Mesfin, a ’70s Ethiopian funk musician whose music was opressed by a dictatorship, and who only now is reissuing his music, more than 40 years after it was first recorded. This is the first LP release of just Mesfin songs, in a partnership between Now Again and Vinyl Me, Please.

Below, you'll find an excerpt of the Liner Notes booklet that appears with the album. The whole booklet covers the modernization of Ethiopia, it's unique musical history and the political turmoil that prevented Mesfin from reaching the heights he could have.

“Well, I guess you’re the right person to write about this record,” a disembodied voice deadpans from my laptop, “since you’re the only one to give it a good review.”

The voice belongs to the electronic musician Moby, who’s speaking from his current home of Los Angeles (Los Feliz, to be exact), having moved from New York in 2011. We’re reminiscing about his fifth studio album, 1999’s Play – very much a product of Manhattan’s Lower East Side – which I reviewed 17 years ago in the July ’99 issue of SPIN magazine (not currently available in readable Internet form, i.e. you can try and zoom in on this). Gushingly giving the album a 9/10, I petitioned for it to be featured as the June issue’s Lead Review (coinciding with the May 17 release date), but a review of Pavement’s Terror Twilight was already in the can. May wasn’t an option because Blur’s 13 was the Lead pick. How much of a classic ’90s dogpile is that? You can practically smell the Dum-Dum Pops! Thing is, absolutely nobody would’ve predicted that Play would be more influential and far more successful than those other albums combined.

Sorcerer has never quite gotten its due, especially after the fact.

One of the marks of a truly complex artist is that the devoted fan values whichever points of entry into the artist’s work that was most attractive to them in the first place, and judges everything else by that standard. A few of Miles Davis’s records are widely understood as particularly attractive, which in Milesian terms means that they encapsulated a moment in the history of jazz, or in the history of American art, or in the history of 20th-century cool. Those who are attracted to the harmonically ancient elegance of Kind of Blue, or the ensemble counter-intuitions of Live at the Plugged Nickel, or the cinematic unfoldings of Miles Ahead, or the swampy altered-sensorium of Bitches Brew, might not hear enough of any that stuff in Sorcerer and find it lacking. I understand. Those other records are clear; they are markers of something. This one doesn’t work the same way.

We're featuring an exclusive edition of Fred McDowell's Mississippi Delta Blues in our store this month. It's available now. You can read the Liner Notes for the release below.

This month, we're featuring an exclusive edition of Betty Davis'--our July Record of the Month artist--Nasty Gal. You can buy it now in the VMP store. Below, you can read an excerpt of the Liner Notes from the album.

We're releasing a remastered special edition of Willie Nelson's The Words Don't Fit The Picture, one of his last albums at RCA Records before he went Outlaw Country and became the Willie Nelson you know and love. Read our Liner Notes below, and purchase the album here.

In a quiet, unassuming neighborhood in Van Nuys, California, in September, down the street from a Burger King, Annie Clark was busy rehearsing for the Fear the Future tour for her new album, Masseduction. In less than a month, she would leave on an international tour, and befitting the songs on the new album, she’s crafting a performance she calls “emotionally brutal.” For Clark, a good performance demands the adrenaline from pushing herself to “that point.” On her Digital Witness tour for her 2014 self-titled album, she expended herself physically. “I wanted to dance myself to death,” Clark said, referencing Pina Bausch’s The Rite Of Spring, noting the permanent physical scars she acquired during the tour. But her newest album is more of a psychological death. Masseduction won’t require her dance herself to death; the songs will do it for her.

Today, we're selling the first vinyl pressing of UGK's 2007 album, Underground Kingz. Here are Liner Notes about the album, which is a 3LP on wood grain vinyl.

Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angelic

orders? And even if one of them

took me suddenly to his heart: I would die from his

potent Being. For the Beautiful is nothing

but the onset of the Terror we can scarcely endure,

and we are fascinated because it calmly disdains

to obliterate us. Every angel is terrifying.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The First Elegy (trans. Leslie Norris and Alan Keele)

These excerpted Liner Notes appeared for the first time on Light in the Attic’s reissue of Betty Davis in 2007.

“They found him in the living room, crumpled up on the mottled carpet. The police did. Sniffing a fetid odor, a neighbor had called 911. The apartment was in north-central Queens, in an unassertive building on 79th Street in Jackson Heights. The apartment belonged to a George Bell. He lived alone. Thus the presumption was that the corpse also belonged to George Bell. It was a plausible supposition, but it remained just that, for the puffy body on the floor was decomposed and unrecognizable. Clearly the man had not died on July 12, the Saturday last year when he was discovered, nor the day before nor the day before that. He had lain there for a while, nothing to announce his departure to the world, while the hyperkinetic city around him hurried on with its business.”-- ”The Lonely Death Of George Bell,” New York Times, October 17, 2015.

“Ain’t got no friend, in a world so big / Ain’t got no family, ain’t got no kin / Where do you go / Oh, when you die? / Is it pretty and slow? / Is it up real high?”--Kevin Morby, “Come to Me Now”

"Have you noticed?" WIRED magazine asks, in one of those encomia of progress that becomes sunnily unreal once it falls into the past. "Everywhere you look, pop culture has been digitized, resequenced, and reassembled." The year is 2005, and the magazine, whose news beat is the future, is running a special issue on the "age of the remix." The vision offered is utopian, as such visions usually are at first, celebrating the many cultural triumphs that have arrived as disparate forces hurtling toward each other in the information age. The lead example is Gorillaz, a multimedia music and art project spearheaded by Blur frontman Damon Albarn and Tank Girl illustrator Jamie Hewlett. Their own impression of the present climate, though, is a little more conflicted.

I don’t believe in “real hip-hop,” but I do believe in barbecues. Some say that the Fifth Element of hip-hop is knowledge. Others claim that it’s complaining. I’d personally make the case for the cookout as a more sacrosanct rite of hip-hop tradition.

Can you remember the exact moment you first thought of yourself as an adult? Maybe you said goodbye to your youth when you said goodbye to a parent or loved one, someone taken from you too soon; maybe you took a confident step out of adolescence when you walked up to the altar and said “I do” or watched your child come screaming into the world. Most people can’t point to that kind of definite break. I left my youth behind the way a tree sheds its leaves: in bits and pieces, until I woke up one morning and realized that I’d raked up all of the responsibilities and anxieties I associate with my mother and father. I can only assume the back pain is on the horizon.

"Blues had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." – Langston Hughes

Our Album of the Month for November is the Books' The Lemon of Pink. In these original liner notes, Jeremy D. Larson writes about the transformative patience the record brings to bear on listeners, who are rewarded for unpacking its multitude of charms.