{"id":10362,"date":"2016-03-03T03:28:52","date_gmt":"2016-03-03T06:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/culturedarm.com\/?p=10362"},"modified":"2016-04-20T10:50:30","modified_gmt":"2016-04-20T13:50:30","slug":"culturedarms-songs-of-the-month-january-2016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/culturedarm.com\/staging\/5793\/culturedarms-songs-of-the-month-january-2016\/","title":{"rendered":"Culturedarm’s Songs of the Month (January 2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Aristophanes<\/a><\/p>\n

Laura Gibson – ‘The Cause’<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a string of critically acclaimed albums, If You Come to Greet Me<\/em> and\u00a0Beasts of Seasons<\/em> followed by\u00a0La Grande<\/em>, which was released on Barsuk and City Slang back in 2012, the Oregon-born singer-songwriter Laura Gibson packed up and moved to New York City, planning to complete an MFA in Creative Writing at Hunter College. But\u00a0in the midst of her studies,\u00a0on 26 March 2015, her apartment was one of those that succumbed to the gas explosion on the Lower East Side which killed two, injured nineteen, and destroyed four buildings between East 7th Street and St. Mark’s Place. Laura escaped unharmed, but suffered the loss of\u00a0her belongings, including\u00a0her musical instruments and notebooks.<\/p>\n

Finishing her second semester between friends’ couches and guest rooms, she embarked on Empire Builder<\/em>, an album’s worth of material which takes its name from one of the busiest long-distance trains in the US, its journey from the Pacific Northwest through the Rocky Mountains to Chicago the first leg of Laura’s move to New York. Empire Builder<\/em> is scheduled for release on 1 April, the grand vistas and passenger\u00a0point of view implied by the title entwining with a more personal narrative which bears traces of strife and loss: using the rubble\u00a0as a sort of palimpsest, she\u00a0endeavoured to rewrite lyrics, while having lost her guitar, along with her co-producer John Askew she decided to build structures of songs around scratch tracks from early demos.<\/p>\n

‘The Cause’, the first song from Empire Builder<\/em>, released on 21 January, is the fire pit through\u00a0which Gibson sustains and refigures herself in the face of unrelenting fate. Her limpid voice lilts over the steady rattle and industrial clang of the percussion, as she warns, ‘Won’t you wake up \/ Or trace the plumb line to your death \/ You’re fine, you’ll see \/ What has love done \/ But to drag a dead deer by its horns \/ From the passing lane’, and in the second verse the song really starts to swing before a swirling break. Sustained by strings, Gibson gives herself, her lovers, and her followers up, ‘You belong to the cause’ a gentle invocation in the chorus.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/soundcloud.com\/cityslang\/laura-gibson-the-cause\/<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Kanye West – ‘No More Parties in LA’ (feat. Kendrick Lamar)<\/strong><\/p>\n

At the threshold of January, Kanye counted us into 2016 with ‘FACTS’<\/a>, by the end of the month Swish<\/em> had been retitled Waves<\/em> with 11 February posited as the release date, and as his upcoming album continues to take shape, in between we heard a couple of new songs, the staggered release of ‘Real Friends’<\/a> on 8 January followed just over a week later by a full version of ‘No More Parties in LA’.<\/p>\n

Work on the track\u00a0extends back to the sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy<\/em>, and to a beat put together by Madlib which samples the 1970s funk of Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and Junie Morrison. Over this groove, in their first collaboration, Kanye and Kendrick Lamar unfold a tale of women and riches, contrasting greed, superficiality, and unhealthy habits like pancakes and burgers at 4 am with the need for financial security and the pleasures of increased access to nice things. Kendrick’s winding logic – ‘She said she came out here to find an A-list rapper \/ I said baby spin that round and say the alphabet backwards \/ You’re dealing with malpractise, don’t kill a good nigga’s confidence \/ Just cause he a nerd and you don’t know what a condom is’ – complements Kanye’s declarations of love – ‘I be worried bout my daughter, I be worried bout Kim \/ But Saint is baby Ye, I ain’t worried bout him’, ‘And as far as real\u00a0friends, tell all my cousins I love em \/ Even the one that stole the laptop, you dirty motherfucker’ – and Kanye’s flow has never sounded more confident and composed, while the soulful sound of Junie Morrison’s clipped voice, as from the first line of ‘Suzie Thundertussy’ he sings ‘Los Angeles is a lonely sort of place’, carries just enough of a sense of the Hollywood conjured by Sunset Boulevard<\/em> and Mulholland Drive<\/em>.<\/p>\n