Quick Hots, Vol. 106 (Moving Panoramas, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Wara from the NBHD, Lil Durk)

Bonnaroo scored U2 for one of their headliner slots and I am intensely jealous.  I wonder what it would take to talk the wife into letting me disappear to a foul campground in Tennessee for a weekend.  The full lineup will be announced on Wednesday.  In smaller festival news, Panorama (in NYC) just announced and scored some good stuff - Tame Impala, Nine Inch Nails, A Tribe Called Quest are awesome headliners (and Frank Ocean and Solange are fine, I'd try them out, I guess), with Spoon, Girl Talk, and Vince Staples lower down on the poster.  Starting to get excited about what ACL might have to offer us!

Moving Panoramas - One.  You don't listen to the title song of this album without just getting lifted out of your spot and floating away to someplace better.  The lead singer's voice reminds me of Harriett Wheeler from the Sundays, both soft and strong, maintaining a beautiful, dreamy, harmonic sound throughout the whole album.  They are an Austin band, which is cool, and which is also how I guess I found them, from repeatedly hearing "One" on KUTX.  They were also on the bill for Sound on Sound Fest, although I missed their day of the Fest.  Here is that first hit, that has 138k spins on Spotify so far, but will have many more by the time I am through with it.

Lovely track, fully endearing video.  I actually got to meet the lead singer from the band the other night, and I'm afraid I might have over-gushed about how beautiful I thought her voice was.  She was perfectly gracious about it, telling me something along the lines of how singers are actually self-conscious about how they sound and so praise is always welcome. Well, I'll keep praising her voice and this album, this is really fine music.

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity.  You know, it is a pretty rare occurrence for a band's name to perfectly match up to its sound.  Well, maybe metal bands do this a lot, like Black Sabbath and BabyMetal and Metallica.  You know what you are getting when you hear those band names.  But so many - Fleet Foxes, Oasis, Nirvana, Joseph - leave you without any understanding of what you'll be hearing and don't closely correlate to any imagined sound.  Well, these dudes hit it right on the damn nose.  When I hear the band name "King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard," then I expect to hear some trippy, frenetic, sludgy, dripping, fuzzy, psych rock freakouts.  And this album somehow delivers all of those things and more.  Weird stuff, and hard to believe it is a 2016 album and not something from the 70's, but it is a sincerely cool album of grooves and grime (I think I'm trying to use as many descriptive words as possible in this entry).  The top track on the album is "Gamma Knife," with just over a million streams on Spotify.

SHIT YEAH!  Two drummers?  Two drummers.  Three guitars?  Three guitars.  The United Colors of Benetton monk guys with knives ready to stab their way into another dimension and create a mega-egg?  YOU DAMN RIGHT!  The more I've heard this album, the more I want to hear it and play it louder while I drive in a demolition derby car with double flamethrower hood ornaments.  "Robot Stop" makes me want to thrash all of my limbs out of socket, but it just tears straight into "Big Fig Wasp," which likewise makes me want to run through glass doors, head-first, which then morphs straight into "Gamma Knife."  It is relentless until "Mr. Beat."  And I say bring it.

Wara from the NBHD - If Guns Could Speak PSA.  I recall listening to one of this guy's older albums too, back in one of my very first few reviews on the blog.  Ha!  I mentioned Pharrell in that post too, which is only funny because I had just written the following note about this one: "If Pharrell isn't on "Nobodies Home," then he needs to file a trademark suit for infringement of the sound of his voice."  
Apparently the NBHD portion of his name stands for "neighborhood," which is not nearly as cool as other things it could have stood for, like No Big Hairy Deal or Never Burn Human Dicks or Newcastle Brown Hammers Darkly or Nipples Burn Hotly Dude.  Any of those would make perfect sense here.  The most popular track from this album is, not very popular in the slightest.  "Shotclock" clocks in at 2,370 streams so far (and at least 8 of those are from me) and only 4,370 YouTube views.  So maybe I'm all alone in listening to this album.

Its pretty clever, and I like some of the other songs wordplay even better, but I won't likely keep any of this around for future listening.

Lil Durk - Lil Durk 2X.  Blah blah blah.  More of this new rap that sounds cool as hell, tight clicking trap and deep bouncing bass combined for a menacing track (see the Future-assisted track "Hated On Me") but the lyrics are just mad lib garbage.  Here is the chorus and first verse of that track:
"I be tired of these niggas tryna ride da fucking wave
I done put some niggas on they feet around da way
I done put some millions in the traps around the way
I done did so much I make 'em feel some type a way
I want it all, I want it all
For me and my dogs, so we can ball
You see this drip, it's dripping on me
You see this clip, it's hanging on me
Pour up the lean, they hated on me
Pour up the lean, they hated on me

I run the check through machines now
I ride around with machine guns
I put a check on a ching chong
Hold up lil nigga I'm King Kong
I go to sleep with the hammer
Fuck watching the TV I'm watching the camera
I'm paranoid high than a hawk
You broke and it ain't my fault
I need it all, I told ya dog, I been running atlas
I'm gutta forever, I fuck on a thot then go fuck an actress
Then I find out you been lying about all the shit you say in your raps
I put the hood on the map, I put the hood on the map
My young nigga just caught a double, they tryna give him the chair
They tryna give him the chair."
Yep.  That is some insightful shit right there.  Shocker that he is rapping about being filthy rich and high and armed while everyone else is jenky.  Yaaawwwwwnnnnnnn.  And the chorus, I mean, how in the world could he have figured out that "me" rhymes so well with "me," or "way" really matches up well to "way."  I mean, this is graduate school level rhyme creation here.  Amazing.  His most popular track is "My Beyonce," which has 13 million streams (likely because people try it when they are hoping that Spotify has some new Beyonce), and is slightly better, just because I'd rather hear a love song than bling boasts, but still...

Nope.  Now, I'm not saying this isn't good mindless stuff to bump and bob your head to and feel all tough about jamming, but you get nothing out of it at all.  Unless you find lyrics about paying "bands" for your watch to be the height of Western Civilization, no need to go here. Just listen to that last Future disc and you'll get the same feel. I'm good without this stuff.