{FAY} Music + Art

(Photo: Royal Baths)

New Year’s Eve is one of the biggest party nights of the year, but it’s also a battle. Can you manage all the expectations? Can you get that kiss you really want? If you don’t, will the combination of substances turn your stomach into a fiery cauldron and send you home early? Maybe it’s that “anything could happen” attitude that makes the night so exciting, and that’s what we’ve attempted to capture in our New Year’s Eve playlists.

Including everything from…

San Francisco indie-electronic band The Limousines, formed of multi-instrumentalist/producer Giovanni Giusti and songwriter/vocalist Eric Victorino, is known for its fun, dancey tracks as seen on last year’s debut Get Sharp. Now the band is offering its take on the Paul Simon classic “Call Me Al,” and while that’s definitely well-trodden territory, I find this rendition fairly imaginative and infused with new life. Simon probably didn’t realize his potential to pen dance tracks!

(Photo: The War On Drugs)

Perhaps we’ll remember 2011 as the year we returned to “the song.” Yes, I know, music is almost always based around songs, but those elusive mysteries with actual choruses, verses, bridges (remember those?) and emotions seemed kind of rare for awhile. Whether in the loose slacker forms of Kurt Vile, the Petty-meets-experimental vibe of The War On Drugs, Drake making the club sound like some hellish, inescapable monster, Cass McCombs turning even further into…

(Photo: Katy B)

Dance this year was all about getting low, getting high, freaking out, hooking up and sweating into delirium. Oh, wait. That’s what every year in dance is. Oh well. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. House, club, R&B-laden vibrations, garage, drum’n’bass, bangers, dubstep and a smattering of cruelly-labeled microgenres that we can’t even wrap our feeble minds around (dubstream, ravetune, etc.) dominate this list, as do floor-slayers CREEP, L-Vis 1990, Girl Unit, Dillon…

(Photo: Curren$y)

Diversity was the key concept in 2011 rap music. While new MCs bubbled-up from all corners of the country and used blogs to gain equal footing with rappers from major media centers, a diversity of sound gave us everything from the spacey minimalism of Drake and The Weeknd to The Throne’s maximalist stunting to Maybach Music Group’s by-the-numbers street bangers.

Craftsmen like Curren$y and Big K.R.I.T. built their unique underground movements to new heights, while…

Ah, 2011. It’s almost over, and in the spirit of music media protocol, we’ve decided to give you our editorial picks for the best tracks of the year by both person and genre. Relive music’s sonic glories or just discovery a ton of new tracks that we think are really good. Stay tuned all week for playlists galore on both RCRD LBL and Spotify. Up first, our Creative Director Elliot Aronow.

I’m no music critic. And so I’d like for you, my audience and friends, to think of this more as…

As we conclude our recovery from last night’s Diplo show, we also look back at yet another great week of music. Check out our weekend playlist for new selections from Miike Snow, Royal Baths, Matthew Dear, Kid Sister, Lee Fields and much more. Also, be sure to come back next week as we begin a robust end-of-year series featuring playlists from all of our editors and genres on both RCRD LBL and Spotify. Enjoy your holiday parties and we’ll see you ‘round the bend!

(Photo: Noah Kalina)

Off-kilter Anticon popster Raleigh Moncrief collides with queen-of-ghoulish-things Chelsea Wolfe on the White Horse remix of his track “Lament For Morning.” It must be about all the bad things you did last night with those disembodied voices raining down in melodic bubbles like some oddball sonic acupuncture. It’s like the original’s ping-pong effect got rubbed over with sandpaper.

Raleigh Moncrief - Lament For Morning (White Horse Remix feat. Chelsea Wolfe)