Exotic Fruits – Where’s Ur Phone At?
Similar artists: Of Montreal, LCD Soundsystem, Tune Yards, Hot Chip
Genre: Post-Punk, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
It’s hard to tell exactly when the position of “rock star” began being less unviable than it had been throughout rock music’s long, strange journey.
Maybe it had something to do with the inherent arrogance of the rock stars. After all, this was what they’d been told they had to do. Just lean over their motorcycles, hide behind their guitars, or toss whiskey bottles against the wall. Why would they need to engage with their audience? Surely, they were not on the same level.
Rock stars may have believed that no great party could be thrown without them being present. But, there were other musicians who were about to become the party architects. They didn’t behave, look, or sound like rock stars. The folks in bands like LCD Soundsystem looked like people who organise illegal parties that even the rock stars might need to scramble to get into.
Exotic Fruits’ Where’s Ur Phone At? makes no pretense about advancing the art of moody, poetic art-rock. It just asks you if you want to party. It’s hard for folks that manage to do this not to gain a lot of popularity. Rock stars after all forgot how to entertain an audience like this a long time ago. Not only that, but this is music that sounds like it could keep playing from the stage as the band members run over to the bar for shots and a toke. This party guerrilla is definitely more fun than people who are pretending to be Jim Morrison.
Damion – Company Man
Genre: 80s Rock, Psychedelic Rock, Indie Rock
Talk about being born at the wrong time. Back in the 1970s, the likes of Lindsey Buckingham and Todd Rundgren were ready to bankrupt any record company that will let them in order to create flawlessly recorded records. It was, after all, the only way to honor the promise of celestial rock that Brian Wilson had suggested through his works.
What were the tools required for such an endeavor to be successful? A state-of-the-art recording studio, naturally. You also needed excellent, expensive gear. It had to be played to perfection, on tape, by well-drilled, talented musicians. Once the recording was done, it was up to a producer to do all the work of piecing those tapes together. Finally, the public would receive the work on a big slab of plastic. And, unless a few million decided that they liked it enough to spend their dough on it, the record company would, indeed, collapse into bankruptcy.
Times have changed. There are still some searching for sonic perfection, such is the case with Damion’s Company Man. And, while some of the newer artists still embrace the part of the strategies used in the past, such as analog recordings, modern recording techniques, and distribution strategies that allow them a lot more freedom.
This is pop music made the click track of the galaxies themselves, a teenage dance track made to appease the gods. And, it probably could have been recorded on a 2-kilo laptop. Buckingham and Rundgren might feel short-changed, but just imagine what the record companies that bankrolled them must feel.
