Montreal rap ambassador and Posterz graduate Nate Husser released the third installment of his three-song EP series. The series speaks on his relationship to the city and his come-up in an isolated scene. This installment is more introspective than the previous two, with Husser reflecting on his background and his bright future. The tape is thematically narrow and never ventures into deep lyrical waters, but Husser’s voice is infectious in its tonal diversity—moving from high pitched triplets, to auto-tuned crooning, to slow, deep flows. The focus here is on the big, catchy hooks and the slick production from Montreal EDM artist Heartfelt. This is the best sounding EP of the three and, clocking in at nine minutes, is not worth skipping.
I’ll admit it’s hard to imagine this is A$AP Rocky without his signature braids. Photo by Simon New
“I take what’s mine, then take some more”
A$AP Rocky looked like a fly dystopian bass fisherman in a red jumpsuit and yellow hooded Prada vest, with a crash-test dummy mask and Bred Jordan 1’s. Taking stage at Place Bell last Friday on a smiley face at the end of a catwalk, Rocky’s voice was unmistakable when he started rattling off his new hits, starting with his Skepta-starring smash “Praise The Lord.”
They praised the lord. They broke the law. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Photo by Simon New
When Rocky broke in 2011 with the A$AP Mob, he was lauded for his innovative, high fashion wardrobe seen in videos shot on the streets of Harlem. The juxtaposition complimented his rap style that blended pitched-down, Houston-esqe flows with dense, Cam’ron-inspired rhyme schemes. An infallible charisma held him together as someone that was sure to rise out of Harlem and into stadiums. Eight years later, the man, the music and the fashion have evolved, and a new generation of fans has followed. After cracking off the first hits that new supporters were clamoring for, Rocky showed that his live show had grown as well.
An interface was set up between two big drum pads in the shape of toxic waste barrels in the centre of the smiley stage. After finger-drumming the beat for “Distorted Records,” Rocky played the anthemic drum pattern for “A$AP Forever” on the barrels. The stage was adorned with the yellow and white Secchi disk, known as the crash test dummy logo, down to Rocky’s ear monitors. An AI-sounding voice barked commands at the audience and Rocky throughout the set, as if it was some human experimentation, or, TESTING, a concept that manages as a hype tool, but fell a little flat as an overarching theme.
A$AP Rocky, the Prada crash test dummy. Photo by Simon New
Three cars styled in Mad Max decrepitude hovered, suspended from the ceiling while they were lifted and lowered to the beat. Rocky strapped a harness on and ascended stories high on one in the fleet as he rapped some of the bigger cuts from TESTING on its hood. In the din of the crowd and the haze of copious pyrotechnics, this felt like watching a man live out his dream. That wasn’t the end of Rocky and the apocalypse jalopy. He proceeded to get in the driver’s seat to perform “CALLDROPS,” his slow, melancholic track, while a wide-angle camera shot through the driver’s side window and showed us the feed live on the main screen. Phones lit up the arena as Rocky’s serene notes swayed the audience. This moment made a unique atmosphere in a set that had been rich with production.
The fourth quarter of the show had Rocky solo on stage tearing through some of his older smashes. It’s accepted now, especially in stadium shows, but his use of backing vocal tracks during the verses took some of the edge off of the breakneck flows that set Rocky apart in those days. “Fuckin’ Problems” created a divide in the crowd as I looked around to younger fans that didn’t know the 2012 Drake-featuring banger. It was clear that Rocky has been able to continue to evolve and amass fans for the better part of the decade, and has come a long way from his videos of white girls with grills in the streets of Harlem. Even having eked out of his twenties last October, Rocky showed that he isn’t going anywhere, and is evolving as his peers do. He is, however, going to find it hard to top the floating cars.
Shad coiled the mic cord in his hand as the show went on, looking like a stage tech by the end of his set. Photo by Simon New
After a five-year break, Ontario MC is back with his most complete album yet
“If I’m honest, it’s not exactly what I wanted to do, but at the end of the day I have to do the thing that feels like I’m giving people something real. That’s what this was,” said Shadrach Kabango, a rapper known as Shad. He just released A Short Story About A War, his first album since taking five years off of music to host CBC’s flagship arts interview show, Q, then Hip-Hop Evolution, a Netflix docuseries produced by Russell Peters about the growth of today’s most popular genre.
A Short Story About A War is a concept album that was birthed from a poem Shad wrote about societal inequality. It’s a war metaphor in which snipers represent merciless capitalists, stone-throwers are everyday people, and the central character, the fool, doesn’t believe in the power of bullets. The violence in war stands for social inequality. “What do our governments and corporations do, here and abroad? Violence, really,” Shad said. The album was inspired by his time in Vancouver, where he got a master’s degree in liberal studies from Simon Fraser University. The city has the highest percentage of low-income households in Canada, while the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is the highest in the country, rising above $3,000, about $1,000 more than Toronto, the next highest city. “That’s where that story came from. My subconscious mind trying to grapple with what does it mean to live well in a place like this,” Shad said.
Shad interspersed heavier cuts from his new album with his classic, lighthearted tracks. Photo by Simon New
The album presents a bleak depiction of this war, concluding that fear is at the heart of the conflict. The main character defies this conflict. “There’s many different ways to participate in the violence and the tension that you’re feeling. And there’s an alternative, but it’s very difficult; this fool character,” Shad said. The fool comes to realize that violence stems from fear, and although the album is at times dark, this character leads the listener to look within themselves to find hope. It is a sprawling message packed tightly into a metaphor that is the perfect backbone to A Short Story About A War.
On Friday night, Shad put on a show that was exuberant as often as it was somber and reflective, mixing his new, heavy cuts with the material that got him to where he is. Thoughtful, slick and technically sharp rap that is all too often given the dreaded, trite label of “conscious.” “The bigger part of me loves entertaining people, loves giving people a certain style that they’ve come to know and enjoy with my music,” Shad said. That was certainly apparent when he brought freestyles, call-and-response and quick banter to Le Ministère.
Shad has won a number of awards including an Emmy and a Peabody Award for Hip-Hop Evolution, and snatched the 2011 Juno for Rap Recording of the Year from none other than Drake. As decorated as he is, Shad values consistency over any specific prize, particularly after his 2013 album, the last before his five-year break. “When I finished Flying Colours and that album was well received, for some reason that was significant to me. Because it felt like I wasn’t a fluke,” he said. With A Short Story About A War, he handles complex topics with succinct clarity, all while delivering top-shelf punchlines and metaphors inside of five-star flows. Shad is certainly not a fluke.
Dr. Dre protege and neo-soul-rap alchemist Anderson .Paak is at his most ambitious and vigorous on this vibrant portrait of southern California. His hyper-masculine energy bursts through Dr. Dre’s massive drums and synths to create a tape that trades the smooth, meditated crooning of his previous Malibu for wild, boisterous charisma. Weaving sometimes thin, political musings and Los Angeles colour commentary into his tight braggadocio, .Paak’s character is solidified. His formidable confidence makes his message convincing, even if it can be superficial at times. It is so easy to get lost in his world, and accompanied by a trophy case of features from Pusha T to Snoop Dogg, .Paak is on fire.
8/10
Trial Track: “6 Summers”
Star Bar: Trump’s got a love child and I hope that bitch is buckwild
I hope she sip Mezcal, I hope she kiss senoritas and black gals – Anderson .Paak on “6 Summers”
Playground switched between a drum pad, her laptop and her guitar, singing the whole way through. Photo by Simon New
Montreal DJ’s new album shows her pop-punk roots
“Now I’m at peace with it. It took me a year, but now I am,” said Geneviève Ryan Martel, known as RYAN Playground. After finishing her newest album, 16/17 in March of last year, she ended up losing relationships that were central to the lyrics and message of the album. “The plan was to release it August 2017, and then just shit happens,” she said. Now, 16/17 comes from a place of acceptance. Playground is a DJ, but on her latest record, she lets her voice shine as well as her production, stripping back some of the dense sounds of her previous work. She then delivers lyrics that take on new meanings a year later.
When Playground took the stage at Théâtre Fairmount on Oct. 27, she was solo with just a guitar and a controller, but with the quiet confidence of a full band. As she interspersed cuts from her older material with her new tape, her new voice was apparent. She’s influenced by the pop-punk bands of her youth. “New Found Glory, Yellowcard, all of that,” said Playground. “I felt like I was going back to my old influences. I started to listen back again and realized that I will forever like it.” The result is beautiful, airy vocals with a pop-punk edge over production that’s intimate and, at times, vigorous. Her use of vocal samples as more of a percussive element than a melodic one is refreshing. It’s part Sum 41, part Aphex Twin, with a hint of Montreal flavour.
When she’s not speaking to the crowd or drawing them in with her lyrics, Playground speaks with her production. “It’s definitely very explicit,” she said. “There’s no bullshit when I do music. I like to say what I want to say.” The proof is in the dynamic, evocative beats she played live from a drum pad.
“Montreal is for sure going to be my home forever,” said Playground. It’s no doubt that her style and her work in the DJ scene is interwoven with the city at this point, but her inspirations come from elsewhere as well. This summer, she was in Seoul for a vacation and a few shows. “If I had no one here and nothing to do with my life, I would move there for sure,” she said. “I just felt super welcome. I felt like there, there was the perfect amount of everything. People were very welcoming, very open-minded. I just felt welcome.”
In Korea, Playground was working on dance music that skewed more toward her previous work. Then her hard drive died and she lost five of seven songs on a new project. She grieved, but found two silver linings. “My favourite track on there is still existing,” she said, “and I did a bunch of new music that is very stripped-down vocal guitar.”
As Playground moves her sound forward by pulling back on production and bringing her voice to the forefront, she sees a pull from external forces. Something tells her that a sudden change will work out in the end. “I guess life is sending me a message, like, ‘Okay, maybe you should focus on this kind of music.’”
As of late, collab tapes between two rappers are known to be more about quantity than quality, MC’s often deploying the B-team of hooks and flows for a product that floats by without catching the ear. This is absolutely not the case with Fetti. The tape has Freddie Gibbs and Curren$y bringing top-notch flows over some of The Alchemist’s most polished soul-sampled grooves in recent memory. While sometimes thematically limited and rhythmically repetitive, this is a case of three hip hop heavy-hitters punching in the echelon of both MCs’s finest: Gibbs’s Piñata or Curren$y’s Pilot Talk.
Trial Track: “The Blow”
Star Bar: “Bout to take a trip I got coke and dope on my grocery list
Oxycontin pack I be switchin’ rackets like Djokovic.” – Freddie Gibbs
Indie hip hop messiah Open Mike Eagle may have perfected his esoteric, self-dissecting style of nerd-rhyme on this new album. Eagle is for people who keep meticulous agendas and wish rap had more lines like, “I don’t wear a monocle, I don’t know which sequels are truly canonical.” Beneath the wordiness are plenty of clever, quaint meditations on the self that are a joy to hear. The beats are quirky, electric bounces that, while ear-catching, often come off as thin. They generally lack a certain punch that would be exciting to hear Eagle take hold of. This is Open Mike Eagle at his most potent, over production that is less so.
Former third of irreverent alt-rap trio Das Racist, Kool A.D. is a funhouse mirror pointed at hip-hop’s different forms on NADA MANE. A.D.’s flow is a stream of consciousness that is as incoherent as it is well-read. He rides the line of satire, veering into mocking territory, as he attacks tropes of the traditional hip-hop MC. A.D. spits vaguely conscious, blatantly incongruous epigrams with intentionally laptop-mic-sounding vocal quality. He’s a struggle rapper that doesn’t take himself seriously. The result is a cult flick that fans of the genre will get a kick out of, and that casual listeners will likely want to turn off immediately.
Phony Ppl’s new album is the perfect music for those times when you’re wrapped in a golden blanket, magically floating over an idyllic beach at sunset. Sometimes luxuriously crooning over mellow synths, others spitting lay-you-down bars over bouncy percussion, the Brooklyn quintet melds bitter nostalgia with exuberant comfort. The writing is clever, the musicality is fantastically adept. The visuals that dropped with mō’zā-ik. match the bouncy, pastel sounds that permeate the tape. As is all too common in the Spotify age, the songs do begin to blur together by the end of this joyride of a listen.
JPEGMAFIA came with raw, visceral energy to the Belmont last Thursday. Photo by Simon New
The lowdown on shows at POP Montreal
Goodbye Honolulu
POP Montreal
By Ana Lucia Londono Flores, Contributor
Have you ever heard of Goodbye Honolulu?
It’s the boyband that will make your head nod all night long. That’s right, nothing better than
listening to rock music on a school night. The Toronto-based group composed of Fox Martindale, Jacob Switzer, Emmett Webb and Max Bornstein played at the back of Barfly, a small bar on St-Laurent Blvd. This was their first performance at POP Montreal. In the bar, the lights were low, creating a calm and chill ambiance. The people were ready to hear them, and so was I. As the band arrived on stage, I felt like they owned the place. Goodbye Honolulu made sure everybody was feeling the music. Frequent eye contact was their way of connecting with the crowd at Barfly. While the music was playing, I felt like the audience was attracted to the melodies. Even the smallest sound problems added to the band’s charm. In between songs, they conversed with the audience and made fun of each other. They were very comfortable and very friendly. Just the type of band you would want to see on a school night.
Lydia Képinski
POP Montreal
By Olivier Du Ruisseau, Contributor
The 25-year-old Montreal singer pulled off a remarkable performance and mise en scène at the notorious Cinéma L’Amour last Wednesday.
Toward the end of the night, when her sadistic-themed show had turned the movie theatre into a dance floor, Képinski said: “This is the kind of concert all your friends will be jealous they didn’t go to.” And she was right; it was quite an experience.
The venue itself was a big part of what made this opening show of POP Montreal so special. As the audience entered the theatre, a drunk clown was waiting to greet them with directions to the bar. Just before Képinski’s arrival, a medieval pornographic film was projected on the movie screen behind the stage. The screen was used throughout the concert, playing some of the singer’s creative video clips, custom-made for the show. She also added two musicians to her band, which allowed for a more rock experience and refined some of her songs.
Despite the one-hour delay, the mediocre sound quality and the singer’s voice cracking from time to time, Képinski still accomplished her most grandiose and extravagant performance yet, enjoyed by a mixed crowd of anglophones and francophones, proving that good music transcends language barriers.
JPEGMAFIA
POP Montreal
By Simon New, Music Editor
JPEGMAFIA, who affectionately refers to himself as Peggy, came out on stage at the Belmont like a lightning bolt striking an angry internet comment section, manifested in a man with top-notch rap skills. During the opening of his set on Thursday, Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks started a chant of “Fuck you Peggy,” which the crowd ravenously carried.
Having released his indie hit album, Veteran, about a year ago, it was easy to see the effect it had on the crowd. The album is a mix of the Baltimore street culture where Hendricks was born, and the internet culture in which he was raised. “This album is for the internet,” he said on Twitter prior to the release.
He holds nothing back in his lyrical tirades against everything from Morrissey to alt-right Twitter trolls, with bars as hilariously caustic as “AR built like Lena Dunham / When I shoot I don’t miss.” Fans at the Belmont yelled the lyrics like they were screaming about JPEGMAFIA for the first time outside of the comments, and it was glorious.
Hendricks fed on the crowd’s voltaic energy, throwing himself off the stage and rapping through the crowd, all without missing a line. The Belmont was buzzing that night, and the crowd caught a glimpse of the lightning rod that is JPEGMAFIA.
English post-punk outfit leave life and lyrics on the line at Théâtre Fairmount
Frontman Joe Talbot gives Fairmount all of his energy. Photo by Simon New.
“It’s not up to me whether you love yourself, it was a period in my life where I had to do it,” said Joe Talbot, lead vocalist of Idles. The five piece band from England is touring North America and Europe with their new album, Joy as an Act of Resistance. They broke out last year with Brutalism, which put the punks on the map for their sardonic polemics on nationalist English politics over unfiltered, blaring guitars and percussion.
For their second album, the pressure was on to feed the flame first fanned with Brutalism.
Ultimately, they tried to make the first record again. The band felt frustrated in attempting to capitalize on hype, and finally scrapped the project. “We were in a downward spiral; we had to learn to enjoy ourselves, for ourselves,” said Talbot. His mother passed away during the creation of Brutalism and, in February, he stopped drinking after struggling with alcoholism. Joy as an Act of Resistance shows joy as resistant to different things, one being turbulence in the band members’s own lives.
At the depths of Talbot’s depression, he found joy through vulnerability in therapy. “I carried so much weight of turmoil and insecurities all my life. As soon as I started becoming vulnerable, exchanging vulnerability with my partner and my friends, a weight was lifted,” he said.
The idea of vulnerability is fuel for the joy expressed throughout the album. Each song is a detonation of ego, masculinity, xenophobia and other topics that Talbot and the gang gun down one by one. When explaining the project to me, Talbot retained that same humility and honesty, making no attempt to oversell his recent indie smash. While technically robust and more polished than ever, Idles’s sound alone was never their defining feature. “I think being derivative is a dirty word in cool bands,” Talbot admitted.
Guitarist Lee Kiernan lets the crowd know what’s on the menu. Photo by Simon New.
The tone is raucous, but the lyrics are dead-simple. After Brutalism, Talbot resisted overcomplicating the next record. “I just wanted to make an album that was as naive as possible,” he said. He explained that on the track “Danny Nedelko,” a pro-immigration anthem about Talbot’s best friend, a Ukrainian immigrant to Bristol, Talbot’s simple thesis is “why would you want to kick someone out who’s a nice person?” Talbot said he wants to make people dance and think at the same time. “Obviously, there’s a huge weight behind what I’m saying. If you sit me down with some other pseudo-intellectual we could sit there and ponder on the importance of immigration,” he laughed.
Kiernan gets some close praise from an exuberant fan. Photo by Simon New.
Talbot writes in simple, childlike syntax on this album as an intentional subversion of hype from Idles’s last album. “What I wanted to do is make an album that joyfully resists the trope of ‘this pseudo-intellectual band that are gonna do something clever with the second album, like they did that rudimentary first album,’” he said. “So I was like alright, I’m going to make something that sounds childlike. I’m going to write lyrics that a 10-year-old could write,” he said.
“It’s also something that I thought would be a vulnerable act, is to be naive, because critics don’t like naivety,” said Talbot. Indeed, Pitchfork’s review panned the latest record for painting with too broad a stroke.
The direct nature of the lyrics and the explosive energy of Idles’s sound makes for a wildfire of a live show. The boys played Théâtre Fairmount on Tuesday, Sept. 18. As they opened with “Colossus,” a booming, slowburn of an album opener on Joy as an Act of Resistance, you could see that the crowd had been waiting for this moment for months. All of the visceral, focused chaos that comes across in Idles’s sound was there in the live show. Explosive, animated performances from all five members left the crowd teaming with energy, boiling over into moshes that made you check your ego at the door. And for a time, there was nothing to resist, just pure, unmitigated joy.
Every instrument, sound effect, and vocal track felt perfectly distinct and clear as air.
$75,000 makes you think about your audio setup
It’s a Sunday evening, you’re scrolling through Instagram and you find out your favourite artist just dropped a surprise album. It’s go time. You text your friends to make sure they know you heard of it first and you post on your story to let your people know of the drop. It’s time to listen. What do you turn to? Do you turn off all the lights and crank your system? Do you grab your favourite set of headphones? Do your headphones come encased in carrera marble and cost $70,000? The Sennheiser HE 1 does. It’s known to be the greatest headphone system ever created, and on Monday, September 10th I got to try it.
Sennheiser opens up a new office in Dollard-des-Ormeaux as a hub for their Canadian operations. There’s an inaugural celebration with sound demos, a live band, and ostentatious seafood. Co-CEO Andreas Sennheiser flies out from Germany to cut the ceremonial red ribbon. It’s a party celebrating sound. Me and my co-editor are then ushered into a small, ambient room filled with nine zealous journalists, all waiting to have their minds blown by this marble slab. At the back of the room, I see it. The HE 1. In between a blissed-out tech writer and a guide from Sennheiser, was a refined block of marble that has made people on the internet cry with joy. It is finally my turn and with my glass of single malt scotch in hand, I sit down to listen. The guide explains that there are four songs that Sennheiser wants to demo for me, and I can then pick one of my own. I put the headphones on and they feel imperceptible. $75,000 CAD gets you comfort, that is unquestionable.
I’m handed a sleek, hefty aluminum slab of a remote to adjust the volume, and the guide takes me from Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” to a heavy Elvis deep-cut, to a sprawling orchestral piece from the soundtrack to Assassin’s Creed. Each song highlights a different aspect of the headphones: Presley’s deep, resonant voice, Simon’s panning, shifting backing vocals.
I hadn’t heard any of the tracks beforehand, save for Simon’s. What struck me initially was the sound separation. Every instrument, sound effect, and vocal track felt perfectly distinct and clear as air. This is as much a testament to the headphones as it is to the engineers of the songs themselves. I close my eyes and forget where I am. I am engulfed by the sound. Thoroughly impressed by what is the best audio reproduction I’ve ever heard, but the urge to cry is absent. I feel like I am taking part in a tech demo.
These headphones look comically large on my already comically large head. Photo by Immanuel Matthews
This is when the fourth song comes to a close and I am given my choice among Tidal’s entire library. I choose Kamasi Washington’s rendition of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” from Washington’s stunning 2015 album, The Epic. The track starts and I stop breathing. I’ve come back to this song over and over since it came out, to the point where it is almost the musical backbone to those years of my life. Despite being purely instrumental, I revere this track for how lyrical it is. This time, the song speaks to me. As trite as that sounds, the technology we listen to music with changes our experience. If grabbing your Apple earbuds is like stuffing a dry sandwich into your mouth while sprinting into class, this is like sharing a perfect home-cooked meal and a bottle of champagne with your sweetheart. Whether that feeling is worth the ludicrous price tag depends simply on how much you are willing to spend. As tech reporter Séamus Bellamy said, “Listening to them feels like a treat, owning a set of them would feel like hedonism, it’s just so much. It’s too much.”
