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Articles by Dom Saad
Let the record show that Rory Graham, a.k.a. Rag’n’Bone Man, has a gifted voice. The BRITS 2017 Critics’ Choice Award winner’s debut LP Human is studded with moments that demonstrate this. But albums aren’t built on voice alone. Human occasionally gets it right. The title track has a dark, warm sound, fortified with gospel vocals and driven by a cucumber-cool bassline. The catchy chorus of ‘Arrow’ revels in jangling percussion and rich instrumentation.
Dom Saad pulls apart the intricacies of The xx’s third album, I See You The dislocated voices of the Alessi Brothers croon “before it slips away…” in a sample plucked from their 1976 song ‘Do You Feel It?’. Pitched-up amidst a pattering of crystalline piano, this opens ‘Say Something Loving’, the second single from the xx’s third album, I See You. Within seconds, the sample trips over itself.
What’s in a name? Matt Sweeney of Chavez once claimed the term “math rock” was coined by a friend as a derogatory summary of one of Sweeney’s past projects, Wilder. After listening stony-faced to a Wilder track, Sweeney’s friend would punch numbers into a calculator to try to figure out how good the song was.
I didn’t count the number of times the phrase “Run the jewels”, “RTJ” or some equivalent finds its way into Run the Jewels 3, the third full-length release (if you exclude 2015’s hilarious Meow the Jewels) from Killer Mike and El-P, but I can confirm it’s dropped pretty frequently.
Nobody likes working in the vac, especially around Christmas when distractions are at an all-time high. If, like me, your productivity outside Oxford plummets to the point where you struggle to remember what subject you do or what a collection is, a bit of music to help you power through coursework, reading or revision (or if you’re lucky, all three) might be just what you need.
2016 saw a wealth of excellent music spanning all genres. Distilling this down into ten tracks proved an exercise in tough decision-making – but here are my personal favourite songs released this year. All the tracks have also been compiled into a playlist embedded below.
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