A new month, a new Hallmighty album 😉 Well almost, Hallmighty’s DIsco 6 was back at the end of January – and this is a more contemplative affair with deeper messages and more layering.
Love the Al Pacino Go x 3 starter, with the message and the use of Chemical Brothers, Moby, Bastille and Neyo & Q-Tip. That’s straight into the next podcast, as is the almost-closer Don’t Worry featuring Robin Williams and Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven via the Royal Philarmonic Orchestra.
And the mashup pop gem – and I know Dunproofin agrees with me – is 1985’s UK pop hit evergreen Princess’s Say I’m Your Number One vs Public Enemy in Hallmighty’s Number One – with Pitbull wisely relegated to whistling duties and Whitney Houston and Nelly backing Princess up.
There’s a nice mix of layering here – which I find elsewhere can get too much.
There’s a current trend to cram 5-10+ artists into every track to show how clever you are, and I think that’s unwise. Unless you’re doing a long 10+ minute epic mashups or more plunderphonic or sample work, in traditional multimashes it usually sounds messy and chaotic as a whole. It’s like listening to a radio with someone constantly switching channels and not letting you listen to anything for longer than 30 seconds. Frustrating when you hear a bit that really works and then it’s gone for some random seemingly unconnected vocal that doesn’t work as well. Is this the ghost of Girl Talk?
A pure A vs B is quite hard to find – you reject many ‘good’ combos until you get a great one, or something you emotionally or thematically connect with. I could make 100’s of technically working mashups, but they say nothing about me or my life.
I can hear that Hallmighty knows also this importance of the core thread, the main narrative/musical idea which everything hangs off, but is now extending that into complementing the main combination with other music and spoken word bits, but importantly not losing that core idea. And I am here for it.
So there is a mix of keeping a flow throughout with a mix of A vs B vs C… yet more plunderphonic/narrative-based moody mashing, and stacking of things that doesn’t get in the way and lets the music breathe more. I wish more mashup albums had this core focus like Hallmighty does here, treating the tracks as not a medley or album ‘concept’ but as a thing in itself.
As an aside, I personally think that high-concept mashup albums are quite often lazy, they are avoiding this important fact; that each individual track should really try to stand on it’s own as well. I know it’s not always possible, especially with heavily mix-based albums or the best concept albums like say The Kleptones amazing oevre which happily break (and also follow) this rule but you still want to try to play their tracks regardless because they are so inventive and works in their own right.
But it’s usually the case that ‘it’s a concept album’ is like the old joke when bands are near the end: ‘we’ve always had a dance/pop element to our music….’, my heart sinks when I hear that phrase. Because usually the concept is so vague, that it hides a plethora of ills. I’d rather have 10-12 amazing mashups (or musical tracks) that don’t relate than one so-so concept album anyday.
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