"White Bronco", which kicks off the record after one of the computer-generated spoken word introductions that have become something of a Ferraro trademark–this one featuring a pair babbling about gated communities and "burning Priuses on the highway" and conducting a transaction for an iced latte–slows a slow-jam groove down even slower until it sounds eerily narcotized and its minimalist synth bass riff takes on a menacing aspect. While Hell 3:00 AM sounded like a nightmare version of contemporary R&B, Skid Row does something similar with L.A.'s native funk styles, which have recently been revived in less bleak ways by the likes of Flying Lotus and Kendrick Lamar.įerraro's take on funk strips away all of its organic sensuality and joy, leaving a creepy husk that's still fascinating to inspect. His urban pessimism remains undulled–as does his passion for oppressively ugly recording techniques–but Ferraro's switched up some of his musical approach. is a dystopian vision stitched together from its drought-stricken everyone's-a-reality-show present and the bad old '90s, where the riots, the OJ trial, and the LAPD's corrupt culture blurred together to cast an ominous shadow on the city's carefully cultivated image.
in his portrait, no bohemian Brooklyn expats chillaxing in a pleasant new climate. album is short on sunshine and mellow vibes, and long on looming existential dread. It's a place where you can stand in the window of a multimillion dollar loft downtown and gaze out over an ephemeral shanty town that blooms and evaporates daily, cocktail in hand, feeling like nothing so much as a sci-fi villain.Īfter producing a convincingly jittery, grimy portrait of late-Bloomberg New York on 2013's NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, James Ferraro has accomplished a similar likeness of his adopted hometown Los Angeles with its follow-up, Skid Row. does have a substantial dark side–a populace dealing with PTSD after years of gang violence compounded by police violence, the reactionary paranoia wafting in from Orange County, its ongoing ecological disaster. To a nearly surreal extent, every meaningful aspect of living in New York is inverted there, like some kind of Gulliver's Travels opposite-land paradise–a place of endless cars and infinite residential square footage, where generalized anxiety is something to be worked on rather than bragged about and people seem to enjoy going to bed at a reasonable hour.ĭespite all the breathless endorsements from transplants that swear that they've never felt so good before, L.A. Even before the ongoing coast-to-coast exodus, Los Angeles has always held a mythic allure to New Yorkers.
0 kommentar(er)
