New Music From Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Talibam!
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
The Kid
(Western Vinyl)
A wise man once passed along a sage piece of advice to this writer, after he had purchased his first multi-effects sound processor years ago: don’t use the presets. This can also be applied to synthesizers—don’t use the pre-configured instruments, and make your own sounds.
Of course, this isn’t a hard and fast rule, but there are so many potentially variable elements to a sound that not taking advantage of these choices can make it harder to be individualistic. Imagine an oil painter being told not to mix colors—it’s not impossible, but it’s certainly limiting.
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith seems to have an instinctual knack for making compelling sounds from synths, such as those of the modular analog variety, like the Buchla 100. Sure, there’s a fair share of bleeps and bloops, but Smith can conjure affecting timbres and tones to great effect, like on her outstanding 2015 album Euclid.
Last year’s full-length Ears demonstrated how Smith was emphasizing her lyrical content more than before and presenting things with a slightly slicker sheen, and her new album, The Kid, continues with that trend. It was designed as a double-LP with four sides, each of which represents a different stage of human life; in line with this, the album’s title represents an artist who recognizes with humility that she is still growing.
Smith’s vocals are often treated with pitch-shift harmonizing, allowing a single vocal track to be duplicated in real-time to create a small, virtual choir, and the album begins with glistening, enticing tones for which Smith has a talent. “In the World” has a beginning fake-out, starting with a more organic, pastoral sound that hearkens back to her earlier recordings, but then it soon gets more busy, less wandering.
Some of the most satisfying numbers appear toward the album’s end, including “Who I Am & Why I Am Where I Am” recorded in one-take with no overdubs on an EMS Synthi 100 and the heavenly final side, enhanced with arrangements for the Stargaze quartet.
For this writer, The Kid has a duality that is a little distracting, going between Smith as a pop artist versus a sound-forward electronic artist, and as she grows as an artist, perhaps she’ll find harmony as both, simultaneously.
Talibam!
Endgame of the Anthropocene
(ESP-Disk’)
The year’s hardly over yet, and the NYC concern Talibam!, centered on the core duo of keyboardist Matt Mottel and drummer Kevin Shea, has just released its third and fourth albums of 2017 on the legendary ESP-Disk’ label like a musical runaway train.
Following the riotous piss-take live album Billy Joel Cover Band with Colin L. and the sci-fi electro album Norris at the Border, there’s Hard Vibe which smashes ‘70s and ‘80s fusion sources with keyboardist Ron Stabinsky and furious free-jazz bumblebee runs from saxophonist Matt Nelson (of Battle Trance and tUnE-yArDs).
Finally, there’s the album at hand—Endgame of the Anthropocene—an instrumental concept album based on a dystopian vision. It’s a twist on the familiar science fiction premise that humanity will eventually have to relocate to another planet because it made this one uninhabitable; the twist is that after Earth is ravished by wars and climate change, Antarctica will be the most desired place on the globe, leading to an international war over its control.
Using ridiculously long track titles (example: “Cost-Effective Drilling Enabled by Pioneering Technologies and Warmer Climates in the Southern Ocean”) and evocative soundtracks, the album tells it’s kinda-serious, kinda-not-serious story. The opening 12-minute doozy sets the futuristic tone with whooshing synths, occasional dance beats and a prog-rock-esque approach to structure and complexity.
“Human Interference and the Failure to Ratify” brings to mind an aggressive electro-clash style with oil-slicked synth vamps, and “Reign of Primordial Tenure on the Ice Shelf” has a driving momentum, bringing to mind video game music.
The underlying dystopian mood is most evident on “The Telegenic Annexation of Territorial Expanse in the West,” with some militaristic elements, and the stylistic jumble of the album’s closing track, “Rise of the Defenders of Antarctica,” sports a hopeful, somewhat triumphant attitude with synth horns and glitchy drums. The struggle for human survival over a catastrophic worldwide crisis has never sounded so good.