What we're listening to this week
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
Isaiah Rashad | Perfect Pussy | Vermont | Christina Vantzou
Isaiah Rashad | B
On his bad days it’s all “Bitches ain’t shit/ cops ain’t neither.” But on his good days he’ll enlist fellow TDE newbie SZA and it’s all “I got love for my niggas, my killers/ my dealers, my trickers, my bros/ I got love for my sister, my women/ my bitches, my strippers, my hos.” Which means he’s not just talented and bright, he’s real, which means he’s got soul, which means if Cilvia Demo (Top Dawg Entertainment) is the first time you hear Isaiah Rashad, you may come to care about what haunts his dreams.
—Dotun Akintoye
Perfect Pussy | B+
After not being able to penetrate it, I wanted to write off Say Yes to Love (Captured Tracks) as no new noise under the sun. Then, of all the things to hook me on a record, where trying to make out the words is usually an act of masochism, it was this line: “When did we all decide to give up? Since when do we say yes to love?” Suddenly their punk sound and fury and concision began to signify something more.
—Dotun Akintoye
Vermont | B-
What sort of strange, foreign images might the name Vermont evoke for the couple of urban German clubheads — Danilo Plessow and Marcus Worgull — who chose it to title their eponymous collaborative debut on Kompakt? In comparison to both producers’ typical house and techno output, this LP constitutes a substantial vacation, a sort of homespun pastoral exotica; full of twinkly synthesizer meanderings and modest maple-sugar melodies; gentle and beatless, but not quite ambient.
—K. Ross Hoffman
Christina Vantzou | B
It’s odd to think of drones as “efficient,” but that’s the case with Christina Vantzou’s hauntingly cinematic No. 2 (Kranky). It’s less an album, more a classical composition — scored for strings, woodwinds, synthesizer, piano and, almost imperceptibly, voice — that functions similarly to the work of her best-known collaborator, Stars of the Lid’s Adam Wiltzie (who mixes here), only in miniature. Vantzou manages just as much emotional resonance and considerably more subtle harmonic movement and coloration in a fraction of the time.
—K. Ross Hoffman
