Send "Discovery " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 And to think: People considered Vampire Weekend divisive. How about a V-dub spinoff featuring their keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij (the dude who typically looks like he's wearing three keffiyehs to everyone else's one) and Wes Miles from Ra Ra Riot (the dude who looks like...well, until our recent Pitchfork TV shoot with them even we weren't sure what he looked like) making bedroom R&B? It worked for Junior Boys, right? Granted, they pulled it off with precision, style, and disarming observations about heartache. Discovery, true to their name, sound more simply wide-eyed and eager. In fact, the whole thing comes off like one in a line of acts from the Shaggs to Jonathan Richman to Grandmaster Flash to Orange Juice, artists so in love with big, communicative pop that they had to take a shot at making the stuff-- technical, financial, or God-given limitations be damned.So sure, knees are going to jerk just from the description, albeit for questionable reasons. Because there's nothing inherently wrong with the approach here, it's just the execution that can frustrate. The idea that a few eager white kids can't play with contemporary notions of R&B is of course a load of bullshit. See: Dirty Projectors, the E Street Band, the Rolling Stones-- hell, the whole British Invasion. Cringing at some people because they appropriate the textures and sounds of modern black music is a weirdly conservative and territorial reaction that forgets that quite a bit (if not all) of the forward momentum of pop/rock music over the past five decades was due to cultural cross-pollination. Cynics could sneer that pop/rock stopped having forward momentum a few decades ago and they'd have a point, and the sort of wannabe duality that leads people to piss and moan about the mere existence of a group like Discovery is arguably part of the problem and the reason why that momentum arguably halted in the first place....full text |
| Altmusic |
| At the 2008 Grammy Awards ceremony early this year, alt-rock mainstays Death Cab for Cutie showed up wearing light blue ribbons, as a form of protest against "Auto-Tuner abuse," railing against the computerized pitch-shifting software that's overrun pop music. For his latest 'comeback' single, hip-hop kingpin Jay-Z has declared the "D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune)," with, ironically, recent Auto-Tune abuser Kanye West handling Auto-Tune-free production. Into such a storm of anti-Auto-Tune sentiment steps Discovery. Though named after a Daft Punk album, this is not some proggy dance-music act, but, rather, the project of a pair of bonafide indie-poppers: Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend, and Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot. And their debut disc as Discovery, titled simply LP, is a study in Auto-Tune use and abuse; an album of pop-songs fashioned from the blips and bleeps of pure digitalia, with Miles' voice funneled through the omnipresent digitizing software....full text |
| Nme |
| Ha ha ha. The guy from Vampire Weekend has written a hip-hop album that sounds like Prince and Jermaine Dupri! But they’re so preppy?! I know, I know – and white! But white guys can’t get sexy! White guys are aware of their pop music history because they’re nerdy, but they can’t get sexy! That’s why it’s going to be so funny when people hear it! Yes, Vampire Weekend are preppy and one of them, Rostam Batmanglij, has teamed up with Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot to release a record inspired by hip-hop, but no, it’s not that surprising. After all, they’re educated, artistic, Brooklyn hipsters – exactly the kind of people who go bum-crazy over hip-hop beats and R&B melodies....full text |
Discovery lyrics
|
| |||||||
