Oliver (Oligee & U-Tern) are back with another fantastic remix. This time they’ve taken on actor/rapper Childish Gambino aka Donald Glover’s “Heartbeat” song and really turned it something quite sexy. Basically they took the best part of “Heartbeat”, the chorus, and just worked the whole production around it. I wasn’t a fan of the original track, but this, this I can definitely vibe out to.
Review by Sandy Wei
Camp is, quite simply put: Drumline meets Boyz in da Hood meets your community gospel choir with a dash of Michael Cera and Milhouse Van Houten doing it in a treehouse. What?
Albeit Camp exhibits a wide range of sounds there is a unified cohesiveness with the way Donald Glover’s badass falsetto voice is paired with the hard bass bound together by many choral and orchestral elements.
Whether it is a soft fluffy melody coupled with raw Tourett-like lyrics, such as “Kids (Keep Up)”, or a sensitive personal topic meshed with hard-hitting rough beats, like “Sunrise”, there is a display of balance when it comes to Childish Gambino. This musical equilibrium is often a difficult quality to master which makes Glover a man of talent and the subject of my sexual fantasies.
Camp dances around many of the same themes as Childish Gambino’s previous releases: family, the industry, Asian chicks and the biggest one being race. Specifically, the expectations of being black and the tension that comes with not fitting the stereotype in both black and white communities. It is clear Glover’s childhood involved a web of conflicts between what he was versus what he was supposed to be. The battle of racial boundaries follows him even into adulthood. Camp reflects on Glover’s career and how being black meant criticisms for not suiting the media’s mold or not being “hood” enough. There is a strong sense of feeling alone, being held down and the longing for acceptance. Nonetheless, Camp is a story of a man who pushes through with hope and perseverance with the belief that he just has to stay true to himself.
My top songs on Camp are: “Outside”, “All the Shine”, “Sunrise”, and “Heartbeat”. Choosing a favorite song on this album is like choosing a favorite child (the cutest one, of course). So I’d have to say the cutest child is “Heartbeat “. It contains a variation in sound and in pace. An electro-hiphop feel to go with a storyline regarding a stupid bitch. I mean, girl.
The last song, “That Power”, is also worth noting, however. It includes an anecdote about how a young Glover may or may not have met a girl at camp and confessed his like to her but other kids made fun of him for it. The lesson he learned is to just say what he has to say to everyone and to cut out the people in between. To me, this short story explains why Glover is so honest in his songs, why he cuts out the middle man and why he makes his albums free to download. He allows himself to be the source of his truth. When we were younger we often got in shit for speaking too freely and too honestly without filters; kids are always honest. This is why Camp is just Childish.
So, my answer is: yes, Camp is worth listening to. And, yes, I’ll have his baby, too, for good measure. Werd. *Troy and Abed handshake*.
Two Door Cinema Club has been on the rise since their inception back in 2009, granted not everyone may be familiar with the band, but they would recognize their songs as they’ve made appearances in countless commercials and television shows. Personally I remember receiving their EP from Kitsuné back in January of ’09, not giving it much thought I gave it a quick scan and was thoroughly impressed with the initial offering and since then they’ve remained on my radar. Spending the past year or so touring and especially putting in a ton of work in the North American market in support of the album Tourist History, we were lucky enough to get an opportunity to chat with TDCC.
Here’s how that conversation went…
What’s difference between touring North America and the rest of the world
When we first started touring America obviously it’s was not as good as everywhere else for us. But now we’ve been to most places around the world and doing the small shows and building it up slowly, which is something we’ve always been very passionate about doing, starting small in every territory. So I guess there are some places still where we’re not very well known asides from Dublin and London. But we’ve been to some cool places, like our show in Rio for example, it was our first time there and it was just crazy, one of the best shows we’ve ever been to. The crowd there just went nuts.
What’s the music scene like back home, is it much different than say in North America?
Yeah I think we have a really strong music scene, there are loads of bands that we grew up with over here that kinda only did well in Belfast and Ireland. So we were lucky in that we had a lot of extra different bands that the world didn’t know about. I think the trouble is being from Ireland it’s still kind of remote, like it’s still separate from the UK so a lot of bands still don’t get noticed by the industry in London, only if they really move over and do lots of tours in the UK , so it’s real unfortunate that a lot more bands don’t get discovered. With the Internet though, it’s hard for people to ignore the music scene.
Yeah, I’m sure that Vancouver will be excited for you guys though because we have a pretty big indie scene here and we basically love anybody from anywhere.
[laughs] Yeah, we’ve never been to Vancouver, which is ridiculous. I didn’t realize how close it was to Seattle until recently because we’ve been to Seattle a couple of times, but we’ve never made it as far as Vancouver. I always just assumed that it was a lot further away.
So I know Tourist History came out officially last April, but can you give me a bit of background on it?
We formed the band when we were 17 and we started recording the music for that album when we were 19 or 20, so we had a few years to get good first before we came up with those songs. We had about 30 songs in that space of time that we could choose from, I guess that’s the good thing about your first album is that you have so many songs to choose from. We’re super happy with the 10 that made the album, we felt they all could’ve been singles, which is what we really wanted. With the recording, we did it in London with a guy by the name of Elliott James. Then we got the tracks and got had them mixed by Phillipe Zadar. We’re super happy that we got to work with those guys and we wouldn’t change anything about the album.
Yeah, with the amount time that you guys had to create this album, what sort of things were you guys able to take away to apply to the next project?
Yeah, I think it’s good to go into the studio with your songs ready and we weren’t just ready. We had just recorded our demos ourselves in the bedroom. But that was a necessity at that time because we didn’t have much money based on studio time, so whenever we were going in the studio, we had to know exactly where we wanted to go with the songs. I think that’s something we’ll always do because it’s good to get a bearing on your song before someone else does.
