Musical commentary

Ayan Vijaypurkar, Sam Rubinstein, and Joshua Loo

№1, Volume V

The best début albums of 2017

Ayan Vijaypurkar

The most interesting albums to listen to are début albums. To the music critic, début albums highlight the changes in the industry throughout the year. Along with this, they are great ways to track which artists may become prominent in the next year. Below are the top four début albums in 2017, these albums are selected for their uniqueness and popular appeal and their respective artists show great potential for a successful 2018.

Khalid

‘American Teen’

54:37

Khalid Donnell Robinson is an American R&B artist who recently came to fame after his hit song ‘Location’. The singer/songwriter then went on to release ‘Saved’ and ‘Young, Dumb and Broke’, which hit the top of the charts incredibly quickly. His début album contains prominent acoustic and vocally-driven melodies with a very distinctive Atlanta Trap flavour to it. His lyrics paint powerful and fond memories of his teenage years that are nostalgic and pair well with his uplifting voice. This début album was not the last we heard in 2017 and further collaboration with the pop/dance artist Marshmallow with their hit song ‘Silence’ suggests that this is not the last of Khalid.

XXXtentacion

‘17’

22:01

Jahseh Dwayne Onfroy (or XXXtentacion) was a prominent Soundcloud rapper with a cult following. His abrasive ‘Look At Me!’ was drawn to the internet’s attention after hitting ten million listens on Soundcloud and his single flooded the internet. Despite his controversial arrest, he was able to release a début album that was unlike any other of this year. It showcases XXXtentacion’s extremely innovative and diverse style with short one minute songs of different forms of hip-hop. Unlike other rap artists, XXXtentacion paints these one minute songs with no regard to conventional song structure is one of the many things critics commend him for. He demonstrates proficiency in multiple forms of music. He recently demonstrated his ability to incorporate particularly chilling vocals in ‘Jocelyn Flores’ and ‘Again’¹

Mura Masa

‘Mura Masa’

45:17

Mura Masa or Alex Crossan is one of the most talented musicians on the charts. Every since his mixtapes, fans have been anticipating his début showcase. The Album brings the biggest names in their fields: Charli XCX for pop, Desiigner for Trap, A$AP Rocky for Brooklyn Flow, and NAO for future bass. The album contains many well fleshed-out genres including pop, hip-hop, funk, trap, bubblegum, and electronic sub-genres, such as ambient, disco, dubstep, house and tropical house. Listening to his shows him proudly showcasing something that no other artist alive or dead will ever be able to rival. Love$ick reached number one on the BBC Radio 1XTRA charts where it stayed for 2 more weeks. What If I Go? is also song that received large amounts of success after being relentlessly promoted by Vevo and having large amounts of views on youtube.

Sampha

‘Process’

40:17

Sampha is possibly the most inspiring vocalist that has ever come from south London and he has quickly built up an incredibly network of features. He was featured in Drake’s song ‘4422’ which I think is the best example of ambient R&B ever. He was also featured in ‘Saint Pablo’ in Kanye West’s Life of Pablo. His début album redefined the power of the voice and his powerhouse vocals fill the song with complementary sharp bells and percussion. The album features stories of sweet sorrow that he draws from his childhood. Many of his songs tell the story of his mother’s fluctuating health as he was starting to become a prominent artist. He dreamed of her seeing him as a successful musician but his début album reached two years too late (his mother , Binty Sisay, died in 2015). His earlier collaborations with SBTRKT, such as Trials Of The Past, use time as an enemy and show sampha wounded and depressed. However, Process (the début album) is a sign of recovery with songs like No One Knows Me Like The Piano which are far calmer and embracing of his sorrow. It also features many SBTRKT inspired songs like Plastic 100 which is a very minimalist song but seems to feel incredibly heated and intense during the chorus.

Richter’s ‘Memoryhouse’

Sam Rubinstein

Max Richter

‘Memoryhouse’

55:34

Max Richter’s ‘Memoryhouse’ is one of the best things to happen to music in the Century. The German-born composer’s début opens with the harsh pitter-patter of rain, but the storm is quickly overwhelmed by the serenely beautiful violins and piano in ‘Europe’. Even for those who are not generally affected by art of any sort—those for whom music is not an emotional affair capable of bringing one to tears—must concede that Europe, in its ethereal beauty, comes devastatingly close.

The opener gently gives way to ‘Maria’, in which the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva recites one of her works over a relentless and tidal orchestra. She is not the only poet Richter eruditely samples; a prophetic John Cage (known primarily as the iconoclastic composer behind ‘4’33"’) vividly describes his ‘garden of technology’ in ‘Garden (1973) / Interior’, for example.

The operatic ‘Sarajevo’ begins with a faint and echoing whisper: ‘My dear love’. The main melody of this piece hearkens back to the album’s opener, while foreshadowing its centrepiece, the monumental ‘November’. Rightly one of Richter’s most acclaimed and recognisable pieces, it also starts with the belligerent thud of rain, this time complemented by the distant roar of thunder, but once more the violins prevail. It’s harrowingly beautiful on its own, and it is even better within the context of the album.

The penultimate piece, ‘Last Days’, is as apocalyptic as its title suggests. It is one of the most conventional compositions on the album, a gentle crescendo that reaches a filmic dénouement. But allowing it to conclude the album would give the listener a sense of closure; a sense which Richter cruelly (but brilliantly) snatches away in his final piece, the eerie and disconcerting ‘Quartet Fragment (1908)’. This concludes the album perfectly, leaving the listener drowning in a pool of emotions.

Lurking behind the album are the omnipresent spirits of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but to suggest that Richter is just the next in a long line of minimalist composers doesn’t quite do him justice. His work is clearly inspired by non-classical genres—there are echoes of Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk in his compositions, leading ‘Memoryhouse’, in foraying into territories usually unfamiliar to the classical or minimalist composer, to be frequently regarded as a vanguard of the ‘post-’ or ‘indie-’ classical genre. ‘Memoryhouse’, and ‘November’ in particular, is testament to Richter’s originality and genius, and even now, more than fifteen years after he released his first and best album, recent works such as ‘Sleep’ prove him to be one of the most exciting and brilliant figures in contemporary music.

It is baffling that ‘Memoryhouse’ is not hailed as one of the finest musical accomplishments of our time. This review, therefore, was written in the hope of popularising an album that sorely deserves more widespread acclaim. ‘Memoryhouse’ an unambiguous masterpiece that’s too often overlooked.

Benedict Randall Shaw’s Algorithmic Music

Joshua Loo

Benedict Randall Shaw

Piano Sonata 1 in C

1:08:26

One listener described this piece as ‘beautiful as a sewage plant is beautiful’. Though this comment was hastily followed with a reference to some (broadly) beautiful relics of the Victorian era of investment in infrastructure, the future, and other such alien things, it is certainly true that the sonata is somewhat disjointed. This is to be expected, as the sonata was programmatically generated. The quality of the music is already surprisingly high, especially given that it was generated not by, for example, a computationally well-endowed neural network, but ‘conventionally’, that is, with reasonably well-defined and comprehensible pseudo-random generation of musical passages. Once functionality for harmony, resolution, and other such features broadly common to music in the past few millennia is implemented, which should be relatively trivial, the music will cease to be comparable to sewage plants in those whose narrow horizons, revealed by their ignorance of the splendour of Victorian infrastructure, also preclude enjoyment of such algorithmically generated music.