Can I get a raisin Julius? Longmont Potion Castle

Technically, LPC released an album this year – LP8, but really, I discovered his whole catalogue this year. What is Longmont Potion Castle? The shortest way to describe him is that he’s a prank-caller comedian, but that’s hardly fair. LPC is the Jackson Pollock of his form. Or maybe, he’s the Salvador Dali – or probably both. Instead of just picking at the people he calls, he coaxes them into absurd situations through a combination of scattershot non sequiturs and surreal pranks.

Some of them include complaining about dog gnashing or asking a restaurant manager whether he wants to get lubricated with some good old boys, or threatening people with the vengeance of Dirk Funk – and none of this sounds funny on the surface, but trust me, it’s like Jazz – once you see where LPC is taking these skits, you start to appreciate the skill and style that makes this form of prank calling an art.

Dubstep is reaching singularity and it’s a good thing

If 2011 isn’t the year that dubstep reached its zenith, it’s certainly close. With extreme overexposure in movie trailers, cereal commercials, and pretty much anything signified to be dangerous or cool, dubstep is inching closer to its inevitable supernova. Let’s put this out there – dubstep going kaboom is a good thing because it’s the only way to save dubstep.

Like drum and bass or big beat before it, dubstep is hitting that point of saturation where it’s increasing harder to find evidence of what made the genre popular in the first place. I’d put most of the blame on the bandwagon jumpers – those that don’t really understand the genre, but begin doing dubstep because it’s the hot new kid on the block – as a result, we get music-makers who take the most formulaic elements of dubstep and turn them up to the extreme. Thus, for every Skream, we get ten Skrillex’s.

The bubble’s going to pop – and eventually listeners will tire and move on to the next big trend. I see the implosion as invariably a good thing:

First, the bangwagon jumpers will abandon the genre because it no longer sells – thus taking with them the worst tendencies of the music

Out of that a hardly few purists will remain – and they’ll continue making excellent music by distilling the very best parts of dubstep into its essence – i.e., Kode9, Digital Mystikz etc.

Finally as dubstep disintegrates – there will be musicians who take the genres most compelling parts and refashion them into something new and exciting. We’re already seeing artists working on the fringes – SBTRKT, Sepalcure, Egyptrixx – whose work might not be categorically considered dubstep, but they’re cribbing notes from the genre in interesting ways.

So, yeah...dubstep is dead...long live dubstep!

Music in 2012: The R&B Identity Crisis

R&B gets weirdly, wonderfully introspective – Frank Ocean & The Weeknd

What the hell is R&B in 2011? I don’t know – and I don’t think R&B knows any longer – at least that’s the vibe I get out of the two artists I listened to most this year: Frank Ocean and The Weeknd.

Frank Ocean is probably the more traditional of the two - there’s still plenty of come hither here, but it’s undercut by a willingness to be brutally honest (with himself most of all) and show a rare vulnerability, or even better, a willingness to follow his narrative where his imagination takes him – whether that’s driving an Oldsmobile into the ocean or smoking Novacane-laced drugs and dreaming of Stanley Kubrick.

The Weeknd shares a penchant for honesty, but it’s the cruellest kind. This Toronto outfit deals in empty promises and empty bodies, but buries it under pretty textures and softly cooed R&B tropes. Despite often falling into the familiar R. Kelly trap of boasts and bragging, there’s something unsettlingly sociopathic about it. It's a fascinating case of beautiful people singing songs about other beautiful people being the worst kind of monsters.