Chronicle #7: July-August 2020
A promising yet underwhelming comeback, a surprising yet overwhelming debut, and a project no one would have seen coming.
Nío García & Casper Mágico - Now or Never
Surprise of the year? Might as well be. If you’re even somewhat familiar with reggaeton and its presence on mainstream Latin music, you might remember these 2 dorks from 2018’s 7-minute long, biggest and most insufferable smash, “Te Boté”, in which, alongside abuser and hack Darrell, they featured Bad Bunny, Ozuna and Nicky Jam-a tedious, misogynistic reggaeton-laced trap coasting on star power and a kinda catchy hook. These 2 were mainly behind that song’s enterprise, and given how much of a nonpresence they were, it was easy to assume we wouldn’t hear from them ever again. For the most part, that was true, as they barely even registered in 2019’s busy year for reggaeton. And yet, they’ve found a way to make a comeback-Casper Mágico with an Anuel AA feature with “Sóla y Vacía”, Nio García with his own star-studded posse cut “La Jeepeta”. This album seemed mostly designed to coast off those 2 song’s successes, as well as tacking on previous singles like “Te Boté” right at the end to boost streams. By any stretch of the mind, this felt like a bloated throwaway by 2 guys who no one should have ever given a second thought. In return, we got one of the best albums of the year.
Some clarifications must be made, though. The last 3 tracks, which include “Te Boté” and all of them not coincidentally feature Darrell, should be deleted immediately-they’re sour, standard, and feel tacked on because that’s exactly what they are. Once you get past that, you’ll find that there’s not a single skip on this thing, from the first track onwards, it’s unstoppable. Every song paints an overarching picture of 2 men on the run with a lot of friends around who are smarter and more caring than they let on at first. Nio García and Casper Mágico have a very interesting dynamic. Casper is the one who shows off, the one who loves to brag and spend his money, and the one who believes he can get anything and anyone he wants. Nio García, on the other hand, is the shy one, more reserved, kept to himself, in awe of all of his successes. Lyrically, he may brag and boast too, but his tone of voice is flimsy and shaky, like he recognizes he shouldn’t be there. He’s the one who pouts about those who ignored him on the opener “No Me La Daban”, while Casper rides the trap beat detailing every step of his rise to fame. It’s all about attitude, that’s what they demonstrate.
Meanwhile, the songs just don’t stop coming. The beats themselves may not be the most refined or inventive-in fact, they can render the album a tad monotonous, especially throughout the middle. But they get the atmosphere of a crowded club where no one can dance too much, as if everyone within it got to the point as fast as possible. There’s a certain stilted sensuality in songs like “Farandula”, “La Gangster” or “La Jeepeta”, where the delicacies of the production get interrupted by the raunchy percussion; digital flowers meet a pair of tits. This is a sneaky album, in the most literal sense of the word; the songs quickly sneak into vibes of hesitation and spite on the dancefloor that can’t get its story straight. They’re not bombastic about it, or even all that subdued, but they’re lurking, cautiously lurking through the bright spots of the club.
As for the songs themselves, they’re excellent, almost obviously so. Their collaboration with legendary duos Arcangel & De La Ghetto and Jowell & Randy are eye-opening good for entirely different reasons; the former is one of the most sexually charged tracks of the album despite the fact that it’s a kiss-off, due to Arcangel’s sultry delivery, and De La Ghetto’s smooth-skin voice, the kind of perverted angel we don’t often get in reggaeton music; the latter is chaotic as should be expected with Jowell & Randy, with about 5 different hooks and each performer tapping into their oddest tones of voice. Meanwhile, it should be a culture shock how the dembow rhythm clashes with a synthwave groove on “Bandida” and how well these tones fit-this is no “Otra Noche en Miami” by Bad Bunny, this is way rougher. Solo cuts “Hpta” and “Maria” are the spots where each performer gets to unleash their clear issues with women, and because there’s no other performer for them to bounce off of, they come off as more pathetic than anything else. And the closer (in a perfect world) that is “Sóla y Vacía” is marvelous, a technicolor kiss off that features one of the most melodic hooks in Latin music of the year.
Now or Never is one of those rare albums where there’s no obvious best song, or an overarching consistent quality to all the songs that all coalesce into one single track-it’s just that every track is about as strong as the next and before it. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it owns just about all of it, and it legitimizes 2 artists that seemed doomed to fail from the start. Barring Bad Bunny (of course), this may well be the best reggaeton of the album of the year-and in this year in particular, that’s no small feat.
Blu & Exile - Miles
The kind of album where it feels like there’s more to it than there actually is. This is rapper Blu and producer Exile’s long-awaited comeback album after their 2007 classic Below the Heavens and 2012’s rather underwhelming and basic Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them. Blu’s always been an insanely charismatic rapper who understands how to treat his own demons and issues with a somewhat lighthearted sense that makes it feel like a therapy-session-turned-into-a-party kind of feel, in the best possible way, and he works very well with Exile’s jazzy instincts that make the songs feel like they’re skipping rocks in the middle of a river, enjoying themselves while also understanding the consequences of slipping up. They’re a good duo, and here, they don’t provide a bad album, but this 90-minute long experience can certainly feel a tad simplistic at its worst.
According to the men themselves, this is essentially a compilation of different tracks assembled and made over the past 3 years, with no real overarching vision as to how this album should flow, and it feels like it. There are no real bad songs here, but, with the exception of a 3-track run in the middle of the album where Blu explores his culture’s African descendance (the best part of the album), every track feels like a coda, like the closing track to a long winded, soulful, introspective album that needs that one final song to simmer down, recollect its thoughts and go somewhere else; the ending to an album that doesn’t exist. So we get long outros, moments of remembrance towards the death, metaphors that could serve as final conclusions, mantras about not losing the feeling or the truth or the importance of music, etc. We’re constantly dealing with what sounds like the end of a train of thought that we don’t have access to, and to feel that for 90 minutes is a hard and not a particularly rewarding task. Especially not when the actual ending we get, “This Is the End”, is darker and more abrasive than anything else on an otherwise pleasant listen. It’s the kind of album where I’d love to hear how we got here, but I only get mild implications; it’s telling instead of showing.
A. G. Cook - 7G
It’s kind of a moot point to suggest that A.G. Cook is a mad man and a visionary, the kind that shows up only to disturb and cause riots within the musical world. Creator of the PC Music label and the main reason why Charli XCX sounds the way she does (as well as an influencer of artists like 100 Gecs), this man has really shaped the possibility of what pop music can sound like in the completely digital era, and his production throughout the years has been nothing short of consistent and spectacular-worlds of color, love and anxiety built around 1s and 0s, dimensions colliding and creating thin galaxies in a space so miniscule that it contains the entire world. It can get ugly sometimes, but that’s somewhat the point-evolution comes with disruption, and that’s what A. G. Cook’s sound has been all about.
Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean that he can make a good album on his own, and 7G, his debut solo project, is less of an album and more of a vomit of music-49 tracks, divided in 7 subcategories, where he focuses on different elements of his music, from the harsh to the tiny to the beautiful, sometimes all in one song. It’s a beast, this thing, and trying to approach it is a task in and of itself. Because on one hand, this man is clearly insanely talented, and the sound he’s been shaping for years shines on many occasions here, and all the different sections do get to create a whole of sorts. But on the other hand, it’s a project that’s over 2 and half hours long, that’s clearly divided into different sections so that we don’t have to sort things out into a playlist, and there’s still a lot of filler, with a lot of music that seems designed to fit the 7-themes 7-songs concept and nothing else. It’s a frustrating listen, but maybe it’s designed to be that way.
Because, at his worst, A. G. Cook can be annoying, repetitive, monotonous and tiring. His ideas can get lost inside his own head and he’s not able to get them back, he can be so impressed by his mind that he doesn’t realize he still needs to communicate his thoughts in a palpable, approachable way. This happens many times across all mini-projects, especially in A. G. Nord and A. G. Spoken Word. The former has many moments where he doesn’t seem to realize the concept that’s meant to unify all these songs, and the tones feel half-assed and plastic, lost in their own obnoxiousness (“Triptych Demon”, “Life Speed” and Taylor Swift’s cover of “The Best Day”). Meanwhile, the latter may have an intriguing cover of The Strokes’ “The End Has No End”, but other than that, it’s essentially pointless; Cook’s worst impulses are when he finds a pretty vocal sample and decides to revolve the whole song around it, tiring the pretty sample in the process (also worth noting that Cook’s vocals aren’t as appealing as he thinks they are).
Now, when A. G. Cook is merely competent and gets his hand on a good tune and a fine musical idea, he can be quite engaging. The first “disc”, A. G. Drums, is proof of it-he has a real perception of rhythm and cadence that not a lot of producers nowadays do. You get to hear his twisted take on nu jack swing on “Nu Crush” that turns into something more sneaky and dangerous, or a chopped up Hannah Diamond on “Acid Angel” that ends up losing her senses while being sliced over and over; or you can become a metallic blackbird in “Gemstone Break”, losing itself in the middle of the night while losing itself in the middle of an endless flock, all inside a CD-ROM. Or, for a more intimate feeling, you can find “Car Keys” on A. G. Supersaw that seems to be inspired by the Cars’ “Magic” and rides alongside the blinded city into a sunset it’ll never reach-and having that immediately followed by “Dust”, in its wailing, waving glory, like lying in a bed made of air, reaching purple euphoria, and then slowly going down into a grey abyss, that’s just a tease. Or, even on the aforementioned A. G. Nord, you can find a wonderful cover of Charli XCX’s “Official”-one of her most underrated songs-that’s sung and produced like it was performed within a confined space, like a little whisper into the night-bedroom pop at its most literal.
Now, when A. G. Cook gets into his own zone, there’s nothing stopping him. A sensitive, eager-minded creature that shapeshifts and waits for you to say “come on” to anything and generates his own worlds just by walking. A song like “Silver” on A. G. Drums, the first proper pop song on the album, quietly twirls as it expects less than it can get; it shuts itself off, unfortunately for it, but he tries. A. G. Guitar is an entire experiment on trying to open up and come off as more natural, and just about the entire arc is heartbreaking-it’s a fractured wannabe e-boy that’s an unwanted extra in a coming-of-age movie, the kid who goes home empty handed, while it second guesses its decisions as others go into victory. “Gold Leaf” and “Undying” in particular are heartbreaking, in their wordless melody that invoke the most generic of 90s dream pop and create something better out of it. He proves himself to be little else than a dork who knows how to work a music program, but that’s how he eventually wins us all over.
But the final project, A. G. Extreme Vocals, is one of the most inspired pieces of music of the year. Mainly consisting of covers, it’s the breakthrough moment for Cook as an artist, as he allows other voices to enter his visions, and through the compositions of others, alongside his, he can come out a stronger, more complete man. He revisits once again his old composition with Life Sim, “IDL” (a long time fascination of his) and gives permission to Caroline Polachek, one of his muses, to take over its simple melody and ride it somewhere different, more intimate in its synthetic warmth. He harkens back to PC Music’s early stages with the help of Cecile Believe on “Show Me What” and combines it with the dark tones of his current work. His 3 covers are jawdroppingly good; he taps into the innocence of “Crimson and Clover” as he combines his acoustic and electronic elements carried throughout the album and clashes them, to see what comes out of it; “Today” by the Smashing Pumpkins stays closest to the original, but replacing the bee swarm of guitars by trance synths, the repressed feelings of the chord progression surface and add a different kind of melancholy to the song; and “Chandelier” is a challenge in and of itself, but this is something else-changing keys like it was nothing, mumbling the lyrics, spare percussion that sounds like early 80s drums with bleach inside them, it’s something else. “Help me, I’m holding on for dear life” has never sounded this immediate-a long term problem turned into a short term chaos.
And the final song, “Alright”, is not a highlight, not exactly a fantastic song, but it’s a wonderful victory lap. He gets together 3 of his biggest muses, Hannah Diamond, Caroline Polachek and Tommy Cash, to create a tune that goes around young love being questioned and reassured all at once as rotten neon navigates the skyline. Tommy Cash channels the spirit of Cook’s entire discography: “Things are always alright on the radio”. He may not make music for the radio, but he keeps that populist spirit in mind, realizing that when something can become universal, nothing is out of reach. 7G may be too much, but it also showcases an artist willing to put his talents out into the world with unabashed glory. And given that he’s putting out another album next month (this time a regular one, 10 tracks, 40 minutes), that might be his chance to create a full-length project that can be approached all at once. In the meantime, though, the digital can sound so close to home.