Cokemachineglow.com

Record Review / Nirvana: Live at Reading

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 06:11:27 -0800

The backstory is there for anyone who wants it: when Kurt Cobain is wheeled onto Reading’s stage, it is mere days after the birth of his daughter, the completion of his latest heroin detox, and the start of an imbroglio with Los Angeles Family Services, who’ve rendered baby Frances Bean away from family Cobain. He had contemplated suicide only the day before (if Michael Azerrad’s account in Come As You Are is to be believed). Renowned journalist Everett True pushes Cobain’s chair, and the gesture is construed as an ironic jab at Cobain’s druggy reputation. He makes a great show of pulling himself up by the mic stand, sings the first line of Bette Midler’s “The Rose,” and then collapses. As shown on Live! Tonight! Sold Out!, the prostrate Cobain then leaps off the floor, in angelic slow-motion, and proceeds to blow the roof off the joint.

It was great theater, even if history would prove that there was more than an element of truth behind the foofaraw. Cobain meant to lampoon his image in order to reclaim his vitality, but in twenty months that too would run out. The band had not played a live show in two months; this could have been an unholy bloodbath. Instead, the night’s set is blistering, funny, and exhilarating, and on stage Cobain asserts control over both his demons and music. “Sliver” may be a raw, heartbreaking distillation of a childhood in divorce, but he refuses to let it overwhelm him, whimsically singing the lyrics at opposite extremes of his range. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” attracted the baser elements of his audience, and did so quickly enough to overwhelm him. The band came to loathe the song, but here he acknowledges the source of its power with a winking, hilariously awful reprise of Boston’s “More Than a Feeling” (sadly this cover, along with Krist Novoselic’s and Dave Grohl’s vocals—one dares not abuse the word “singing”—are omitted from the CD), and intentionally garbles his own song’s guitar solo. They cover “The Money Will Roll Right In,” a self-deprecating nod from the Punk Rock 101. The requisite end-of-show demolition derby is capped off by a taste of, of all things, “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Rather than demolish the guitar, he hands it to an audience member.

But these are the grace notes. Live at Reading proves the corporeal force of the Cobain catalog: no wonder slam-dancing and the band were synonymous. By now it’s clear that the achievement of Nevermind (1991)—and assorted songs from that period, such as “Aneurysm,” “Been a Son,” and the aforementioned “Sliver,” all ecstatically assayed here—was Cobain’s ability to meld Beatle-esque, even twee pop sensibilities with the dynamism inherent in punk, indie, and classic rock. The man himself would tell you the secret was only “loud guitars,” but such a vision would be impossible without a monster rhythm section. Novoselic and Grohl are with him every step of the way at Reading, and the results are blinding: “Come as You Are,” shorn of studio tricks, loses its insularity without any of its tightness; “All Apologies” lacks the lyrical polish of the finished version, but nothing else, and is presented here as a set of waves cresting and crashing; “Lithium,” aided by its crowd sing-along, is nothing less than the promise of rock music fully realized: that for three minutes the right melody over the right chords at the right volume (to hell with the right words, all it takes is a hollered, elongated “yeah,” and the hairs on the back of one’s neck stand at attention; and seriously fuck this dude and his suicide, if his music didn’t help him, it fucking helped ME) can bring transcendence and communion.

It’s tempting to think the band left it all on the stage at Reading. While With the Lights Out (along with the clutch of Outcesticide bootlegs) presents an interesting insight into the band’s creative process, that’s all it is: interesting. The market for The Greatest Rough Drafts of Nirvana directly overlaps with the one for Cobain’s journals, and while there are moments of humor, grace, and brilliance, there are too few glimpses of the band’s viscera. It’s also worth reflecting on Cobain’s digitization in the Guitar Hero video games, a move which caused no small umbrage among the band’s fans and surviving members (and widow). Live at Reading is a corrective to all that, a reminder that nothing so trivial could ever sully music as irreducible as this.

:: myspace.com/nirvana

Keyword Tags: Nirvana

Record Review / Saint Etienne: So Tough

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:11:37 -0800

There is nothing if not a huge number of Saint Etienne products available to the discerning music listener. Over the last eighteen or so years the band has issued seven studio albums, far too many singles compilations, nearly a dozen fanclub-only releases, three EPs, and two original soundtracks, as well as Richard X’s recent track-by-track reworking of debut Foxbase Alpha (1992) into Foxbase Beta. Between the flood of Saint Etienne products out there, and their availability—at the San Francisco Amoeba last July, I saw numerous copies of many of these records and not a whole lot of demand for any of them—it’s difficult to conclude that Saint Etienne reissues are truly necessary.

In spite of this surplus, given their timing, the reissues are almost understandable. Gothenburg-based duo Air France, along with their Sincerely Yours labelmates jj and the Tough Alliance, have found a fair amount of success making music that’s indebted to Saint Etienne’s, and especially to their first two albums. They’ve captured those records’ optimism, warmth, and use of sampled dialogue to build their own musical universes, and it’s not terribly difficult to construct parallels between their aesthetics. Henrik Markstedt of Air France has stated that “there’s a sense of geography and architecture in what they do.” Like Sincerely Yours’ reimagined Sweden as a lightly drugged, lensflare-drenched beach party, Saint Etienne imagines a fantasy version of England—London in particular, perhaps—built less on rain and the high cost of living or whatever actually exists and more on sixties pop culture, which they then filtered through then-contemporary equipment, to sometimes now-dated and sometimes still hugely successful results.

Sixteen years later, So Tough is almost undoubtedly the band’s greatest success. Whereas Foxbase Alpha occasionally veers too close to house music clichés and Tiger Bay (1994) may stray too far from the concepts that Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs formed their band upon, this record possesses a sound that even now feels strikingly theirs—dreamy but not shoegaze, twee without being unbearable, able to borrow from American pop music without sounding nauseatingly derivative—and one that yields the most immediate, approachable music they ever made. “Mario’s Cafe” establishes this from the outset, as even in this slightly-compressed remaster, it’s Sarah’s Cracknell’s vocals, the chorus’ Motown-quoting strings, and every part of the arrangement other than the unchanging drum line that stand out.

From there, the album offers a whole lot of strikingly idiosyncratic production that transcends what does seem slightly dated. “Railway Jam” and “Calico” both suffer slightly from their trip-hop leanings, but Q-Tee’s vocals on “Calico,” especially in contrast to Cracknell’s, render it less generic and more weird. “Avenue” is certainly long at over seven minutes, but its haze and fleeting harpsichord prove far more compelling than they have any valid reason to be. “You’re in a Bad Way,” especially in its original mix, is a nearly perfect palette cleanser—even if the band thought it was inexcusably silly at the time—and easily one of the most straightforward pop songs the band’s ever written. “Hobart Paving” and much of what follows it foreshadows Tiger Bay‘s more grandiose and melodramatic moments, but that album’s Europop leanings don’t manifest themselves here to such an extreme, making it a much easier thing to consume almost twenty years removed.

As a whole, So Tough‘s greatest strength is almost certainly its remarkable cohesion, especially given its cheeseward leanings. “Conchita Martinez” and “Junk the Morgue,” while distinct in their productions and arrangements, blend effortlessly from one to another, more than partially because the sampled dialogue that moves from track to track serves as an anchor, quelling the urge to skip tracks. The expanded edition’s bonus tracks vary in quality and necessity. The band’s cover of “Who Do You Think You Are” was on the original US issue of So Tough, and it’s still quite good. A few moments seem to provide the missing link between New Order and balearic synthpop duo the Embassy, whose albums have proven quite influential amongst their Swedish peers, the Sincerely Yours roster included. There are a fair amount of curiosities, like the vocal version of “Railway Jam”; a bigger, Van Dyke Parks-arranged version of the already-great “Hobart Paving”; experiments, like the remarkably slow “Johnny in the Echo Cafe”; and baffling covers of “Rainy Day Women” and “I’m Too Sexy.”

Whereas Air France and their other recent followers offer something more compressed, dense, and difficult to pick apart, it’s hard not to be drawn in by the more expansive vision presented here. Warmth, optimism, and some sort of persistent youthfulness win out over much of what should make the record an artifact of a strange crossroads of British indie pop and nineties dance-pop in which the finished product isn’t so much unbearably annoying nor boring as it is completely adorable. The fact that it happened, and that it’s still rewarding, is a welcome surprise.

:: myspace.com/saintetienne

Keyword Tags: Saint Etienne

Record Review / Male Nurse: Everything's Amazing, No One's Happy

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:11:29 -0800

Though widespread binary thinking sets up every work of art or entertainment as either the noble realization of a Singular Artistic Vision or the more problematic siring of market-tested Product, there exist records for which neither sensibility seems a motivating factor. Some records just are; they’re made by friends, for friends, for no reason other than that making music is fun. They aren’t widely promoted or disseminated because, hell, if everyone you know already has a copy, why would you want to go out of your way to force it upon total strangers?

Ottawa’s Male Nurse, whose wonderful My Friends Are All Assholes EP was released on cassette earlier this year, produces thoroughly communal music. He writes simple, manageable material and performs it live, usually by himself but occasionally with friends, in coffee shops and gastropubs across the city. There’s an earnestness to this mentality and approach, quaint but not ironically or nostalgically so, that make his presence in the city genuinely special. Male Nurse is genial, intensely likable, and in his consistency of effort and boundlessness of heart, something close to great. He’s bereft of all buzz and hype, and so his existence here is resoundingly understated—he the opposite of a sensation, but sensationalism was never the point. This project is modest, but it’s executed beautifully.

Everything’s Amazing, No One’s Happy is the second cassette-oriented EP from Male Nurse’s Davey Quesnelle, and, like the previous outing, a digital copy of the record’s been released for free online. Cassette releases often carry with them the stigma of chic nostalgia, as though through deliberate regression an artist can oppose, as a gesture of hip credibility, the deterioration of the “pure” album by the tyranny of digitization (or, uh, something), but I get the sense that Quesnelle’s motivations are lot less loaded, and thus less irksome. Maybe it’s just that cassettes are a neat, cheap way of putting a physical version of this record out for those friends who want something tangible—there’s (presumably) no money to be made in it, it’s not getting blog-hyped and pre-ordered like limited Washed Out tapes, and it’s readily available to download if you just want to hear this shit anyway. Like the music itself, the option’s there for friends: it’s something simple and fun Quesnelle has made for the people he likes and the people who like him.

Though much about Male Nurse remains unchanged since Assholes, minor improvements abound. His folk-rock still has a kind of buoyant looseness and levity, but Quesnelle’s songwriting now tends to favor tightness over the rough, sketch-like qualities of his earlier work, and that, in conjunction with its noticeably higher production values, makes Everything’s Amazing feel more considered, accomplished, and professional. Or at least as professional as one can get in the company of close friends. This is still a predominantly social project, where song titles yet again read like social networks (this time it’s “Tim Ostler,” in which Quesnelle asks for forgiveness after calling Ostler a pussy) and, as on the uncharacteristically but refreshingly pop-oriented “No One’s Happy,” acquaintances drop by to flesh out rock songs with drum fills and vocal harmonies. It all sounds bigger, but the core is still the clique: this, as before, is an album by and for good friends. But that doesn’t mean we can’t hang around and enjoy it secondhand.

:: myspace.com/mailnurse

Keyword Tags: Male Nurse

Record Review / Monsters of Folk: Monsters of Folk

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:11:23 -0800

Hey, look, it’s that album we were all expecting in 2005. Remember? Think way back: Conor Oberst was still playing with Bright Eyes, and they weren’t full-time awful; M. Ward hadn’t yet blown all the good will that accompanied Transfiguration of Vincent (2003); and Jim James was still known by his given name, not “Yim.” (Sigh.) The trio toured together and it was generally very good—or at least their appearance Austin City Limits was, even despite the shit bass playing from Conor on “Golden.” Seems like ages ago now. Would have been a good time to put out an album.

As it happens, it took Ward, Oberst, and James, along with long-time Saddle Creek utility player Mike Mogis, until this year to consummate this relationship. Five years is a long time to wait, and, unfortunately, the declining returns suffered by two of the principals in their own careers have taken their toll. Oberst’s long slide into shittiest-era sub-par Dylan impersonation continues unabated here, with a couple of wincingly poor tracks in the middle of the album (“Man Named Truth,” “Ahead of the Curve”) topped off by the godawful “Map of the World.” Ward, enjoyable one-trick pony that he is, plugs away faithfully on songs that, like many of those on his solo albums, in no way reward repeated listens. Some of his contributions are worse than one would expect of Ward (“Slow Down Jo”), but most are just middling.

This, of course, leaves Yim Yam…nah, can’t do it: Jim James. The My Morning Jacket frontman is the only member of the group (discounting Mogis) who has been on an upward trajectory over the last five years. Z (2005) and Evil Urges (2008) have proven him far more of a weirdo visionary than anyone would have expected given MMJ’s country/folk origins, producing some of the most unlikely and compelling rock-pop this side of Super Furry Animals. Not surprisingly, his contributions are just about the only reason to pick up this album. Opener “Dear God (Sincerely MOF)” is a wonder of crooning falsetto and hazy guitars brought together around a chopped up soul sample (Trevor Dandy’s “Is There Any Love”). Late in the album James steals the show with the straight-ahead rock of “Losin Yo Head” and the silly, pretty “Magic Marker,” before closing things out with stunner “His Master’s Voice.”

There are a few other worthwhile tunes here—Oberst’s “Temazcal” is entirely palatable, and Ward’s “Whole Lotta Losin’” is fun—but for the most part this feels like a missed opportunity. A few more collaborative turns would have helped, no doubt, but maybe it’s just a result of being too late to the game. It’s a counterfactual, of course, but I’ve got to think that Monsters of Folk circa 2005 would have come up with something a bit more substantive than this. All we have, though, is MOF 2009, and that’s not much at all.

:: myspace.com/monstersoffolk

Keyword Tags: Bright Eyes, Conor Oberst, Jim James, Mike Mogis, Monsters Of Folk, M Ward, Yim Yames

Admin / Fantasy Covers Contest (Contests)

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:11:24 -0800

If you’re new to CMG, or just regrettably unaware of our Fantasy Podcasts, here’s the quick run-down before we get to this contest: once a year since 2006 we’ve asked some of our favourite artists to record covers for us, which we then compile into a free mix exclusive to this site. Three times over it has been a giddy success, spawning a hit in Japan, Youtube videos, impromptu sing-alongs with Mexican wrestlers, a Deer Tick live staple, more Youtube videos except without video, and so much more. They’re seriously worth checking out, I guess is what I’m saying.

This time we’re changing things around a little. The next Fantasy Podcast won’t be arriving until early 2010, and, instead of focusing on just the past year, it will be covering material from the entire decade.

Here’s where you, our readers, come in: we want to offer you a spot on what is lining up to be one tremendously epic podcast. Not all of you, obviously; that would be a clusterfuck. Hence this contest, and the idea is simple: to enter, record a cover of a song released in the last ten years, email it in to us, and if we like it more than the rest it’ll appear on the next Fantasy Podcast.

Rules! Regulations! Etc.!

a) All submissions are due by Sunday, January 31st, 2010.

b) The cover has to be of a song (or, if you choose to do a mash-up or remix, songs) released for the first time in the 2000s.

c) It does not have to be professionally recorded/mixed/mastered. This does not mean we want your cover to sound like shit, just that it can.

d) Please, .mp3 or .m4a formats only. Absolutely no .wav or .aif files, those things are fucking huge.

e) Do not send your submission as an e-mail attachment. Either upload the file to a server of your own or use a file uploading site like Sendspace or Yousendit or Mediafire. Send the download link, along with any relevant information (who you are, what you are covering, why you chose the song, etc.), to: contest@cokemachineglow.com

f) We are not looking to claim ownership of any submission. Nor will any be sold. The Fantasy Covers podcast is entirely not-for-profit; no one is paid to record, no one is charged to listen.

If you have questions about any of the above, please contact us at contest@cokemachineglow.com or sreid@cokemachineglow.com.

Keyword Tags: Contest, Fantasy Covers Podcast | 0 comments

Record Review / Ned Collette & Wirewalker: Over the Stones, Under the Stars

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:11:14 -0800

I’m not sure how I came to be CMG’s official voice of commentary on Ned Collette records. Jokes & Trials (2006) sort of emerged fully-formed into our hive-mind’s “favorites” cluster and stuck, and I just sort of ended up writing about it. There is no “why” here. This process of obsequious emergence and gelatinous congealment contains a number of things in common with the manner in which most writers end up sticking around at Cokemachineglow itself, but lest I get off topic, Collette cemented himself in said “favorites” cluster in said hive-mind by then recording not one but two tracks for our ensuing Fantasy Podcast, and then releasing this sophomore record Future Suture (2007) right after that which was just this effortlessly expanded thing with more instruments and sounds and more blissful highs and nuanced lows that still felt as if grown organically from the exact same artist, still sounded hewn from that exact same artist that had created that sanguine debut but still sounded entirely different and new. Which is a fucking difficult and rare thing to do: grow, effortlessly and quickly. I am referring here to the term “sophomore slump.”

Anyway, he’s got a new record, and it’s as good as his other two. By the time you hear “Come Clean,” the fourth track on Over the Stones, Under the Stars, a riffy, Krautrockish affair full of big distorted washes of guitar offset by palm-muted locomotion, the idea of a junior jackoff (this is not an accepted critical term yet) can also be stricken from consideration. He’s three for three. He’s out here pulling AOTY numbers out of CMG like he’s the fucking LeBron James of singer/songwriters, just fucking swooshing rainbows across the wistful<--->sedate spectrum, one melancholy guitar solo (“Mr. Day”) at a time, and clowning atop your Wills Stratton and your Loneys Dear with effortless affability. I find his stuff impossible to dislike.

But I dislike most stuff like this. Here are two other things worth noting about Ned Collette, about me, and about me reviewing Ned Collette in particular. One (1) is that how I became the official voice of appreciation for Ned Collette despite him being pretty much universally liked by our staff is again really weird, because I essentially dislike “songwriting” and “singing” and so my take on Ned Collette, who is essentially a “singer/songwriter,” is probably less than perfect, or less educated than like Scott’s or Peter’s take, and so certainly less eloquent or sentence-length-considerate than their reviews would be. See comments above on given artist’s inherent affability, a confluence of Collette’s Disney-wholesome baritone and lyrical style. And two (2) is that a lot of my tomfoolery here is irrelevant as a few of these tracks are available right now, today, to listen to, including the aforementioned “Come Clean” which is really reason enough to look into any record, as you will learn when you listen to it, beginning now:

Sounds good, right? You see how the chug is gradually stressed by organs and tingles until it explodes, purposefully, like a great Spoon track? And then how also-available “All The Signs” is the exact inverse, is conversely made constantly-stressed by organs, and seems to sort of be constantly exploding, like a fucking Arcade Fire song? Yes: Arcade Fire and Spoon? That’s not a question. I’m harping on these because they’re available, but also because they’ve got some immediate holy-shit to them, and Collette doesn’t frequently indulge in holy-shitness, which brings me to maybe my third point (3) in this review: there is some holy-shitness to this record that is new to Ned Collette.

Collette’s discography is this bafflingly rewarding thing where the subtlest injection of new sonic blood can craft a whole and remarkable new beast that is still, somehow, resonant with the genealogy of the original. And so the unmodified Ned Collette—the root organism—was the debut, which was not eponymous but might as well have been; it seemed entirely of itself and untarnished. And in this manner, it was sort of perfect. It was The Ned Collette Sound that he’s been mutating giddily since then. These past two albums have shown Collette playing mad scientist with the creature, discovering new mutations of that same original artistic vision. With Over the Stones, Under the Stars he seems to be pulling the genealogical makeup to maximum elasticity, till tearing, filling in the open space until it grows into stark, dark, frayed and tensile things. There will come a point when just toying like this will not work; he will have to return to the lab and make something new. But that time is not now. Right now, the scientist has a new creation, and when it lumbers out looking both like the thing it once was and some thundering new monstrosity, leering with pipe organs jutting out of its back, a gentle-faced brooding beast, you will get my enthusiasm.

:: myspace.com/nedcollette

Keyword Tags: Ned Collette, Wirewalker

Record Review / Edward Williams: Life on Earth: Music from the 1979 BBC TV Series

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:11:10 -0800

If your idea of music for evolving is a beast-filled Fat Boy Slim video, you might like to know there was once a time where composers and biologists were synchronised. They both sported side-partings, carried clipboards and Chinagraph Chart pencils, and they were both as scientific as maths. I’m talking specifically about the late 1970s when the boffins first managed to make cameras small enough to slide up the stem of an orchid. At the end of said decade, the BBC’s 1979 doc Life on Earth surmised said synchronicity, a groundbreaking profile of all sorts of organisms with its images set to music unreleased thanks to the lack of a good e-petition. Jump forward thirty years and label boss Johnny Trunk is browsing a charity shop in Surrey, thumbing through shirts of the recently deceased. A mysterious handwritten vinyl in the bric-a-brac basket catches his eye: it turns out composer Edward Williams had himself pressed a scattering of Life on Earth promos for crew members to keep as a memento, one such copy surviving intact and walking out of somebody’s attic. Trunk bought the vinyl and rushed home, shirtless, speed-dialing the BBC Rights Department. Trunk got to work. Trunk did good.

Mr. Williams had been set an extraordinary task at the time, you see—soundtrack existence, chronicling all life—and here, as David Attenborough himself might say, is his opus grande made digital, unfurling like so much celestial clockwork. The fact that Radiohead linked to the Trunk Records webshop the day this disc was released is testament to its quality, and certainly explains some of the group’s mad maturing since they kindly told Parlophone to go jerk themselves.

It’s definitely a sinker-inner, and anyone expecting theremin-heavy library music (hello, ’70s nostalgia) is in for a cold water shock, this being of the old-old school, closer in theme to Disney’s Fantasia than it is to the mellow side of Aphex Twin. In fact, that film’s “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence is succeeded here, spiritually, quite often, most prominently on the concert hall sorcery of “Nile Crocodile Family” where a cartoon plod renders snappy dragons harmless. The spidery chatter and creepy unease honour the rough side of reptile wrangling, though, and when those metallophone whirlpools and ghosts kick in, you realise the true implications of what it must have felt like to take acid under Thatcher. There’s your Life on Earth for you: heartless and insectile in all the right places while in other parts twinkling like Kryptonite.

Aside from the rumbling build-ups/climaxes/gongs/horn brutality, there’s enough on LoE to remind that this is a twentieth century production and not just some overlooked symphony split sixteen ways on FX tracks. In places it’s so emphatically late ’70s you can hear the polyester sparking, crackling in fright, as things tingle in the sea and bloom into sunlight and gore. “Shoals and Loners on the Reef” opens with a doctored William Tell gallop, the same electric fanfare that signalled the Clockwork Orange sex scene eight years before the fish copied it, and “Comb Jellies” has a similar artificial stasis for the sponges, hovering like sea mines. I mean, read through those track titles and take a nature quiz if you need proof—you’ll get more of a biological education therein than you’ll ever get through watching Discovery. The monkey beats of “The Big Mammals” will hold even the thick kids’ (the ones who normally get detention for trying to forge sick notes in crayon) attention. This is the sound of the animals as professionals hear them. Not a chill-out CD in sight.

The greatest strength of LoE is it’s a long way from dumb celebration—at times it mirrors the harshness of life in ways even Alien wouldn’t go for. The trembling harps and woodwind curiosity of “First Fossils” explores a new planet as sneakily as a snake, everything threatening when hissed at from low, and “The Spiny Leaf Insect Sheds Its Skin” uses floaty bassoons to signal death. Even Big Dave himself gives us all a stern warning on “Man – A Choice for the Future of Life on Earth?” as he grumbles about responsibility and negligence. It turns out he was overreacting all along, of course, because as we all know the world got much cleaner. That’s why every Radiohead album is 100% cheerful and the number of species becoming extinct goes down with every petrol sale. In fact, Thom Yorke and co. went far in acknowledging Williams’ experiments in their Kid A (2000) material: you can feel the same tape programs in its gloom, the wrath of the scientists in its punch-cards. Certainly the gaelictronica scene owes its lifeblood to Life, and those turned on by unearthed time capsules should salute this as a fifty-minute winner. If surgeons insist on hearing Bach while they operate then Williams has made the frog-dissector equivalent, accessible to anyone with a pond and a clasp-knife and a long way from showing signs of age. It flips from a sunny Hitchcock soundtrack to spooky anthem for Atlantis in the time it takes a jellyfish to strike, suddenly re-camouflaging as sci-fi squids and tiny philharmonic phantoms. Who knows what Johnny Trunk will bring back from the charity shop next time he’s feeling the pinch? An army of white china cats, perhaps, or a box of Total Recall videos.

:: myspace.com/jonnytrunk

Keyword Tags: Edward Williams, Sir Attenborough Wildlife

Record Review / DFRNT: Metafiction

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:11:07 -0800

In theory, dubstep is a genre where all the rules are still being written. Barely half a decade old and far from entrenched in the rigid sub-genres and scenes that plague other electronic styles, it’s the first genuinely new dancefloor frontier since the early ‘90s. Dubstep is little more than a rhythmic concept, but despite being a blank musical canvas framed only by that particular beat-skeleton, it has quickly separated into two distinct camps: on one side there’s the downtempo material where experimentation is commonplace; the other side is dancefloor-orientated, now beholden to a clear set of sounds, templates, and rules. It’s exactly the same scenario that occurred in jungle fifteen years ago where an ideological war was waged between progressive junglists experimenting with jazz and “atmospheric” drum ‘n bass and the hardcore massives who took jungle down the militant, aggressive, and ultimately formulaic path.

And just like jungle, the genre has served its time in the underground to, now, explode in popularity and trendiness. (You can buy a burger in Canada and hear dubstep on the radio.) When a genre becomes well known to the point of being ubiquitous, it’s inevitably plagued by bad DJs, so—just like jungle—experiencing dubstep on the floor rapidly descends to wearily counting the bars until that bass sound, that snare, or that breakdown reoccurs. In jungle, despite what ardent genre fans claim, the dancefloor ultimately won: most contemporary drum ‘n bass is dominated by the same bass lines, beat textures, and structures, devoured by devotees and largely ignored by the wider scene. Dubstep’s fate is not sealed yet, but if we’re still to be surprised and engaged by this style five or ten years down the line, we need artists like DFRNT to succeed.

There are times during Metafiction, the Scottish producer’s debut album, where you question whether you’re still listening to dubstep, and, if so, what that even means in 2009. Which is most definitely a good thing. For Alex Cowles, the man behind the moniker, dubstep is less a genre than it is a creative philosophy, one that allows the album’s most ambient pieces to merge seamlessly with its most danceable moments.

As with almost all records like it, Metafiction‘s predominant characteristic is bass, and, from there, the synaesthetic corollary: darkness. Enveloping low-end timbres and subterranean percussive thumps form the bedrock of the album, but what separates it from the other ambient dubstep is how Cowles provides counterpoint to this bleakness with warmer melodies and pads flirting around the mid-range. The tracklist itself provides a metaphor for this internal dichotomy of light and shadow, with a semantic strand of heat and cosiness (“Wake Up”; “...Warmest”; “Lounge”; “Sound Asleep”) that runs alongside another of coldness and desolation (“Landscapes”; “Dark…”; “Winter”; “Decay”). The effect is an album that encapsulates a pitch-black crepuscule viewed from an orange bedroom window; the benefit is a duality that imparts depth and nuance to each listen. The 70 bpm bass thuds that sound achingly sparse on one listen become tranquil heartbeats over the next.

Occasionally Cowles pushes the balance too far and the dulcet topside becomes a little too maudlin for comfort: witness the overly twee flute solo on “Therapy” or the delay-soaked piano motif on “Landscape.” For the most part, however, the album’s problem is one more of structure, or the lack thereof, than cloying tendencies. Metafiction may be intended as an evocative mood piece, but the tracks drift somewhat aimlessly; the tracklist suggests an underlying narrative from “Wake Up” to “Sound Asleep,” but the album doesn’t really go anywhere from start to finish.

Though it looks like a bonus disc on paper, the second CD is the real deal-maker. Through a combination of original productions and third party remixes of album tracks, Cowles finds a middle ground between the airy atmosphere of the first disc and the down-to-earth beats of the clubs. The injection of purposeful rhythm tightens the pieces up immeasurably while enough of the distinctive constitution of the main disc is retained to keep things fresh but familiar, even cohesive. So, while it certainly isn’t perfect and it would probably benefit from being trimmed to a leaner and meaner single disc, Metafiction is another step forward for the genre, deserving of the attention from anyone who thought they had dubstep figured out, and from a whole load of other people besides.

:: myspace.com/dfrntdubstep

Keyword Tags: Dfrnt

Record Review / Pants Yell!: Received Pronunciation

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:11:04 -0800

There’s an undeniable sweetness to any song that facilitates an introductory handshake between its subjects and its listeners. It’s a quality that recalls early Weezer tracks like “Suzanne,” “Jamie,” and “Mykel & Carli”: plaintive, first-name-basis character studies that celebrate things like friendship, brownies, and hanging out in a way that’s sincere and pleasant but never excessively twee. Of course, this subtlety evaporated from Weezer’s songwriting faster than you could say “Raditude” in an alternate universe wherein you could actually bring yourself to say that word aloud. (This is a quality in Weezer’s music that—based upon the most immaculately timed departure in the history of popular music, as well as bright spots on Return of the Rentals [1995]—a lot of people conveniently attribute entirely to Matt Sharp. Seriously, that guy could not have cashed in his chips at a better moment.) These songs’ subject matter might seem slight (though CMG blood has been spilt over the true meaning behind the Dismemberment Plan’s sometimes-bitter, sometimes-wise “Ellen and Ben”), but there’s something refreshing, inviting, and downright friendly about how, in just the span of just three minutes, we feel not only that we’re friends of P., but that we’re so down with his whole crew that we’re totally going to get an invite to his birthday party.

“Frank and Sandy,” the terrific opener on Pants Yell!‘s Received Pronunciation, greets the listener with this exceedingly rare air of cordiality and it sets the tone for an albums’ worth of similarly amiable pop gems. “Thank you Frank and Sandy,” vocalist/guitarist Andrew Churchman begins decorously. “A headache never felt so good / I’m glad I had more gin than candy.” You don’t feel like you’re listening to a description of the death of a delightfully ordinary evening so much as you feel like you’re at the party with them, gathering empty glasses and stacking them in the sink without even being asked and beginning to feel the first tinges of a pliable, benevolent hangover. Musically, the song does nothing do aggravate this delicate feeling; imagine a Lucksmiths song whose jangle has been slowed to half speed. A guitar line noodles lazily in the background, and the cymbals crash so gently it’s as though they’re fluttering in the breeze.

Pants Yell! have made a career of this sort of thing, piecing together scraps of everyday minutiae to create understated indie pop that both winks at and contradicts their eponymous punctuation mark. Whereas Alison Statton (2007) supplemented this formula with the occasional flourish of horns, organs, and other common tools of the iPop trade, Received Pronunciation reduces the band to its most basic elements, and the result is perhaps their tightest record yet. Check “Cold Hands” for such efficiency: Churchman’s guitar chugs commandingly as he spins a tale of longing and moving on that’s as heartfelt as it is succinct (“I was young, that I was selfish, that I was in love, but now I’m over it”).

The closest the record comes to a shout is the standout track “Marble Staircase.” Lead by a blistering riff that’s quickly buried in a flurry of cymbals, the song agilely slips into a mid-tempo swoon before being propelled forward again by a bustle of handclaps building to an enthralling crescendo. Even the following track, the languishing “Not Wrong,” is a bit of an unwelcome yawn in comparison. But Received Pronunciation regains its momentum in its final moments with the closer “To Take,” which boasts a lively instrumental conclusion. “What’s the point of all this working? / Working’s all I ever do,” Churchman dolefully observes. With less of the occasional childlike charm their previous releases dabbled in, Received Pronunciation is a record grounded in the disappointments of adulthood and the brief, sublime moments when they disappear.

Pants Yell! claim Received Pronunciation will be their last record. And pending that they don’t go all H.O.V.A. on our asses, it makes for a fittingly modest swan song. The band’s always had humble ambitions; they’ve never aspired to create bombastic pop anthems, and none of the songs on this record soar to the heights that a great, anthemic power pop song can hit when given a long runway. Pants Yell! aren’t interested in that. But they’re also not interested in writing a “Beverly Hills,” either, and when you look at it that way you really start to see how slightness can be a virtue.

:: myspace.com/pantsyellmusic

Keyword Tags: Pants Yell

Podcast / LXVII

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:11:35 -0800

Enjoy feeling better about your paraskevidekatriaphobia to the sounds of: OOIOO, Tyondai Braxton, CFCF, Bear in Heaven, St Etienne, On Fillmore, Themselves, diskJokke...

Keyword Tags: Air France, A Sunny Day In Glasgow, Bear In Heaven, Califone, Cfcf, Diskjokke, Distance, Ernest Gonzalez, Florence And The Machine, Lykki Li, On Fillmore, Ooioo, Saint Etienne, Skream, Themselves, Tyondai Braxton, Volcano Choir, Xx

Track Reviews / Anduin: "Our Future is a Debt" (Stream/Video)

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:11:58 -0800

With two candles already in its economy birthday cake, the global financial crisis is now in its teething stage, its regulators exhausted and covered in piss. And while musically, the best response to a monetary downturn is obviously going to be busking (mortgage advisers sent on harmonica modules, it’s only a matter of time), the more experimental ditherers out there can add their own twist to proceedings, creating a kind of real-time soundtrack as they gradually pawn off their synthesizers. So step forward Richmond’s Jonathan Lee, whose second release as the ambient Anduin finds him devising a cure for his debt-addled conscience—except here, where he lies down and surrenders to piggy-bank nightmares, his vision swimming with chequebooks. The lion’s share of his new LP Abandoned in Sleep might be a delicious and pulse-steadying sleep aid but this one’s the chili chocolate, the wolf in sheep fatigues with dispensation to keep you from dreaming. It’s notions like these that jab you awake when your catalogue habit turns vicious, erasing your memory of loved ones’ phone numbers and replacing them with special offer product codes.

To Lee, banker’s insomnia is a very real condition. It must be—those bonuses are worth their weight in coke, after all. “Our Future is a Debt” manifests the feeling as a brittle destroyer of sleep: you’re obviously a fuckwit if you work in finance at anywhere other than support level, but if profit and loss is your only calling, here’s what you feel as the numbers stop sliding and you hallucinate an army of creditors. Creeping machines and rotor distortion coil round an ominous beat, a balking drone in place of a drum roll to announce the arrival of The Liquidator. That’s right, dicknosh—you brought down the FTSE; you get to speak to the demigod. A little mellow it may be, but don’t let that fool you: its under-the-radar grinding is more gung-ho than the airport takedown from Modern Warfare 2, more unreasonable than a bailiff. When things are still bleak in another three months and the papers publish more forged expenses, this is the sound MI5 will resort to when interrogating the cashier who squealed. Please don’t hit the preview tab if you’re due at your desk in the morning. Sweet dreams aren’t made of this.

Keyword Tags: Ambient, Anduin, Drone | 2 comments

Record Review / Lil Wayne: No Ceilings

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:11:40 -0800

Lil Wayne returns like a corrupted friend from college—having joined a lousy frat, acquired a ridiculous sense of arrogance, and engaged in general douchebaggery (ahem: Auto-tune experiments)—ultimately regaining past form in erstwhile surroundings. I speak of Wayne in terms normally reserved for second selves because he is, to an embarrassing extent, that artist for me. My best friend has charted every dimple upon the visage of Conor Oberst’s oeuvre, my ex-roommate was always listening to Springsteen, and I know a handful of obsessive Beatles fans; what goes into these strange, personal relationships with artists is a sense of ownership due to a dizzying matrix of thought and consumption of their music, interviews, everything. It probably sounds preposterous, feeling a genuine affinity for high-status strangers, but any Lakers fan will tell you they will defend to the death: a) their family; b) their significant other; and c) one Kobe Bryant. And I have enough peers who completely lost their shit (like, “tears of joy”) in Grant Park during election night. Maybe it’s a comment on our society’s vices or a plangent example of a lack of intimacy in all our lives—something, something, grad school thesis—but I’m unconcerned. The rapper who has consumed more of my time and mental exertion than any family member, significant other or pretty barista has ever returned, and I just wanna talk about how fucking weird and great an event this is.

Concurrent to his swelling stature in hip hop, Wayne has been, if not deteriorating, morphing into something barely corporeal. In 2006, riding the momentum of Dedication and Tha Carter II, Weezy was perhaps the game’s most potent punchline rapper, an endless stream of shit-talking and off-the-wall pop culture references presumably culled from hours spent burning kush and brain cells in front of cable movie marathons and VH1 clip shows. His performances were reminiscent of a solid stand-up routine in which a comic bangs out a series of good-to-great one-liners without much concern for cohesion or narrative; he was, at the time, more assassin than artist.

And then came Drought 3 (2007), the point at which Wayne finally seemed able to assemble his abundant talents, allow them to congeal, by paradoxically deconstructing the mechanics of his emceeing. Weezy’s flow became more nimble with less discipline, him croaking, mumbling, squealing, and cackling his way through productions thieved from the singles of his lesser peers. He threw the kitchen sink at these beats—tossed-off puns, grotesquerie, poop jokes—and verses coalesced like glistening spit from the corner of a baby’s mouth, beautiful swaths of pure gibbering motif articulating a broad, ready, perverse grasp of the English language.

No Ceilings is Wayne’s next bold stride, not forward or backward, but inward; he ventures further into his ego like so much unexplored rainforest underbrush manifest outside through the knotted vines that adorn his skull. His now-infamous claim that he really is “It” seems more prophecy than delusion as he attacks each beat like a nymphomaniac leafing through the Kama Sutra. He is noticeably looser, perhaps on an atomic level, purging himself of everything un-Wayne in a quest more compulsive than determined to develop a distillation of himself, his music becoming an unhinged exercise in, maybe even balance between, wordplay and hubris.

It’s at once glorious and unnerving. Because what perhaps gets lost in all this hyperbole—indeed, we Martians are an insufferable, over-excitable bunch—is the reminder that a distillation of Wayne isn’t by any stretch ideal. He charms the fuck out of us, all “Young Money run this / Towns, countries / I still eat rappers / Mmm, scrumptious / My goons tote thumpers / They pump ‘em like crumpers / Anybody beat, I’m gon’ go Archie Bunkers,” and then minutes later he’s screaming all sortsa misogyny over a god-awful hook and (wretch) bouncing along to a Black Eyed Peas track. As confused and exhilarating and manic-depressive as Lil Wayne has ever been, Wayne throughout No Ceilings makes post-“Prom Queen” fears of the possibility of his performing victory laps until he reverses the Earth’s rotation seem facile. Of fucking course he’s going to sprint until his lungs gasp. This lap has giddy proclamations and Aaron Brooks metaphors.

And, let’s keep in mind, the most famous rapper on the planet just put out a free mixtape for the fuck of it. One of the oddest aspects of Wayne’s career might be that he now occupies the vacuum Jigga left in his first retirement, puzzlingly because he possesses nary an ounce of Jay’s savvy. While the elder Mr. Carter gave us this year’s most calculated, trend-hopping rap record, so smug and market-tested it felt like a giant advertisement, Young Carter’s just an hyper-competitive weirdo who takes immense amounts of glee in devouring shit he hears on the radio. He even punctuates a rendition of “D.O.A” with Jay’s condescension, undoubtedly sucking on a blunt, cackling about it later. For all his dicking around and craziness, the world seems a lot simpler place when Wayne is just crushing it.

So: the Strangest Rapper Alive is both back and so fucking gone. (If this invokes nostalgia, it’s because “Prom Queen” was so fucking terrible.) Still threatening to bend light with his solipsism, Weezy does what he does and will always do: careen around the squishy folds of his brain, ingest shitloads of intoxicants, and rap. But more than ever, his penchant for conceding to his most excessive tendencies seems at once his greatest asset and the force that will destroy him, both mortally and creatively; everything here is so amplified and severe. Wayne may no longer exist, even tangentially, to reality—he occasionally sounds wracked with the bitterness of someone who just found out the world is indeed flat—and he may soon chortle violently into that good night of lunacy and self-indulgence to which he’s always threatened to capitulate.

The trailer for what seems like a painfully candid documentary about the making of Tha Carter III popped up all over blogs this past week, and while I will dutifully consume it when the time comes, it feels at once redundant and invasive. Bereft of poetry and wit, Wayne is an egomaniac on death’s doorstep, and while that’s morbidly fascinating on its own terms, perhaps Dwayne Carter, like Michael Jackson, should forever be tethered to his music like mother to a fragile fetus…and I’m not sure which entity is which in that analogy. Others and myself editorialize because there’s so much to editorialize about, but Wayne probably hates that—he just records. All other shit is gossip.

:: myspace.com/lilwayne

Keyword Tags: Gudda Gudda, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Shanell, Short Dawg, Tyga

Record Review / Weezer: Raditude

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:11:36 -0800

Raditude is Weezer’s Answer to Cancer; it’s their big essay on Religion. It is a History of God where the Original Sin is Weezer (2001), and like a true carrier of sin, Rivers Cuomo has chosen to pass this venereal disease he calls music down generations, and through his outfits, into Snuggies and out of wedlock into a final incest: a cataclysmic disdain of good-taste that got topped off with last year’s Weezer (2008).

Back then Clay and I thought it was the end. Customarily or not, Rivers had given four songwriting credits for the first time to people who were not Rivers. He was dressed in a gay cowboy hat. As if finally learning how to breathe, he decided to say “cunt.” We thought this was the end of Weezer, which in a way was true. What we didn’t barter on was that it was going to be the beginning of: Weezer. Raditude is a one-stop information system kitted out to give you a track-by-track pitch on why not to listen to this band…again. If almost everyone hates his/her job, it sounds like Cuomo actually sort of likes it; he only hates himself and his fans. He doesn’t just hate Weezer, he hates Rock and Roll in toto! But he loves Jacknife Lee.

Raditude is about as relevant to good music as a Lithuanian McDonalds is relevant to fine cuisine. There are no songs, let alone good ones. There are sound effects and guitar patches. Instead of struggling with the bitter truths about being a bespectacled balding loser in a paper rock band (i.e. Pinkerton: The Sequel!), Rivers Cuomo in continuing with his project to say “cunt.” There is a song here called “Love Is the Answer” that is so bad, so poorly written, and so devoid of good-taste as to makes its four minutes of Rivers Cuomo calling upon his “brothers and sisters,” set to sitar music, basically unlistenable. Who makes frickin’ sitar music unlistenable?! Rivers Cuomo does. What is Raditude if not the truly unlistenable album, the album that is apparently in every untalented music hack’s reach, but then again, isn’t: people have taste, they avoid the fatwa. But here is Rivers with his budget, with Jermaine Dupri and Dr. Luke and Jackknife Lee and Polow Da Don. I don’t think he needed them all; I think he had it in him, regardless, to do this. But it’s here, anyhow, fifteen years and seven records down the line: an unlistenable shitfeast, sustained 33 minutes. On the dot.

Raditude is a bottomless pit, with a bottom. Its bottom is situated perhaps in inverse proportion to how long, or how deep, your love for this band did run. Many fans will be dead many times over before they reach the tomb. For the degenerate, there is everything else: Lil Wayne somnambulating a verse in “Can’t Stop Partying”; a Pat Wilson original (“In the Mall”); and in its final track (“I Don’t Want to Let You Go”) what sounds like Rivers joshing around his Casio presets as he intones like a dead man, “I will be your slave to you until the bitter end.” This shit is worse than Iggy Pop getting old.

Man, I wanted this band to go places in middle-age. Now will someone just give Rivers Cuomo an umbrella, and then impale him with it when he’s not looking? Raditude is thoroughly extraneous. It is Weezer’s worst album. It is a misery of some of my favourite ingredients: big chunky guitar chords, bass-end heft, a whiny dude in glasses with a penchant for self-deprecation and Japanese girls! In the hands of this man, it all becomes an unorganised vocabulary: nothing works, nothing wants to work well. It is not a half-assed record, it is a record with no ass, the solemn unhappy pursuit of cheap toilet paper at a deathly hyperfluoresced hour. I hope you never get to hear what that sounds like.

Keyword Tags: Lil Wayne, Weezer

Record Review / Pearl Jam: Backspacer

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:11:33 -0800

Give Pearl Jam this: though far removed from their quadruple-Platinum salad days, Backspacer at least proves that they’re not phoning it in. It’s their ninth full-length album and their first entirely self-released, the fact of which recently led bassist Jeff Ament to bellyache in SPIN about the newfound stress of self-promotion, lest Pearl Jam fans fail to realize that Backspacer exists. To which this admitted Pearl Jam apologist says, C’mon now, son! No intensified amount of promotion nor lack thereof is going to alter the fact that Backspacer, like every Pearl Jam release post-Yield (1998), will quietly go Gold before being reduced to placeholder status, a footnote to supplement the three-hour Caucasian bro-hug that comprises their live shows. Even Backspacer single “The Fixer” was recently splashed all over the FOX broadcast of the 2009 World Series alongside broadcaster/major tool Joe Buck’s declaration of “I got that new Pearl Jam, and it’s fantastic!” No matter. Everyone who is going to own Backspacer probably already does, provided they’re within driving distance of a Target.

So it’s to their credit that Backspacer is still far better than it has to be and a heck of a lot more fun than 2002 career nadir Riot Act. It’s a bratty little brother to their 2006 self-titled disc (overrated by me, but still holds up) where they found their grungy footing again, and pretty enjoyable for at least twenty-eight of its thirty-seven minutes. Shit, based on Backspacer‘s first three songs alone, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Eddie V and co. may have accidentally stumbled onto some late career mojo. Said triptych blasts out of the box with “Gonna See My Friend,” which, despite being one of their textbook “We’re so punk rock!!!” moves a la “Spin the Black Circle” and “Lukin,” is extremely catchy, splashed with plenty of the Vedder vocal cord shredding that fanboys crave. “Got Some” is similarly frantic, though of a more paranoid ilk, Eddie straight-facedly asking, “Are you dropping bombs / Have you heard of diplomatic resolve?! YEAH!” These two are rounded out by the victory lap of “The Fixer,” a brightly produced (Brendan O’Brien back in the house, y’all!), Grohl-esque pop-rocker where Fixer Ed wants to “fight to get it back again!!” and the listener would do well to join the fray. It’s their best single in recent memory and a nice finish to a very satisfying ten minutes.

While nothing else on Backspacer quite captures the adrenaline surge translated above, enough chestnuts for the faithful remain, primarily in the guise of “Unthought Known” and “Amongst the Waves.” The former, a surging anthem with a deftly placed chord change at the peak of the bridge, is a less shambolic version of Riot Act‘s “Loveboat Captain.” “Waves” is a welcome “Alive”-style slow burn that explodes into Mike McCready guitar pyrotechnics and is generally the type of song that Pearl Jam doesn’t seem interested in doing anymore, replete with Eddie’s latest batch of surfing metaphors. It should be a welcome addition to the live show. The mindless fun of “Supersonic” is OK too, despite Stone Gossard using the exact same chord progression he forged on the No Code (1996) deep track “Mankind.”

Backspacer wouldn’t qualify as a latter day Pearl Jam record without some egregious filler tacked on at the end, so it’s of little surprise that “Speed of Sound,” “Force of Nature,” and “The End” are less than hot. These songs come off as ridiculously lazy, even from the same dudes responsible for such modern day catastrophes as “Bushleaguer” and “1/2 Full.” A trio of overproduced shoulder shrugs suffering from way too much B. O’B., Backspacer‘s final songs serve minimal purpose aside from pushing the listener back to “Gonna See My Friend” that much quicker. Pearl Jam kind of lurched to a finish too, alright, but at least it ended with the considerable awesomeness of “Inside Job.” Granted, Eddie probably realizes these songs suck; even the titles are odious (“Speed of Sound”; really dude? Ever heard of Coldplay?).

Pearl Jam fans have sort of come to expect mediocrity from the latter halves of their heroes’ albums, but Backspacer demonstrates that Eddie and the boyz are still capable of enjoying themselves in the studio. And in a few instances, they sound positively carefree, likely the product of an Obama-era in which Ed no longer feels compelled to waste valuable stage time (justifiably) demolishing a Dubya mask with his mic stand. A little more effort at the end would have been appreciated, but so long as you’re content with paying full price for what’s essentially twenty-eight minutes of listenable music, Backspacer works as a fun little rock n’roll record.

:: myspace.com/tenclub

Keyword Tags: Pearl Jam

Record Review / Soap & Skin: Lovetune for Vacuum

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:11:29 -0800

Between this, Bat for Lashes’ Two Suns, and Antony & the Johnson’s The Crying Light, an alternative history of indie rock circa 2009 might be written, one not dominated completely by hazy, narcotized lo-fi. All three share a belief in experimentation-as-heightened-drama, manifesting itself through numerous forms of instrumentation and production techniques but always, ultimately, in vivid cinemascope. Which isn’t even just about masculinity or femininity—though there’s a whole essay here somewhere about how irony, detachment, and layers of under-produced fuzz all tend to displace the anxiety of damaged male pride—but it is about sexuality in general. It’s also about youth: the youth of bands like Wavves (boredom, malaise, frustration) and the youth of 18-year-old Austrian Anja Plaschg, which provides a temporary, borderline-paranoid escape from that frustration.

Granted, there’s awkwardness here: the seemingly unintentional sensuality in her use of the word “butt” on “Spiracles,” the sudden scream which gets sucked back into silence just as quickly (the same effect that makes “vacuum” such an apt description, that made it absolutely necessary for Plaschg to pose on a neutral grey background for the cover, all Tess of the D’Ubervilles and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), and, alright, pretty much everything about that song, are among the most squirm-inducing things you’ll hear this year. But this is awkwardness with the ultimate aim of transcendence. On Soap & Skin’s website, Plaschg stares out behind smeared eye-shadow, lingering after-images occasionally blurring and dimming her face. It’s confrontational, but also kind of oblivious, like she’s looking right through you. Who are you writing love songs to in a vacuum, anyway?

Lovetune for Vacuum is getting noticed for its eclecticism, and I get that, although what seems more surprising is the way in which all these styles—Tori Amos piano balladry, jerky IDM flourishes, Scandinavian experimental folk, Nico everything—come off like various shades of grey. Not that it all sounds the same, but more that all the experimentation mostly serves to accentuate Plashg’s personality. Occasionally the arrangements fill out—the cocoon warmth of “Cry Wolf,” wherein she correctly mines the element that makes the Fonal and Locust labels so consistently rewarding—but mostly this is an album of broad strokes. Other standouts are the bleak, gothic monoliths like “Thanatos,” which stews around in the lower keys of the piano to brilliant effect, and “Marche Funebre,” all glitch, orchestral doom, a cinematic cut-and-paste by way of DJ Shadow reduced to a death march. What’s really impressive about these two is that, even at such a tender age, she seems on her way to conquering the two quite separate worlds of classical arrangement (she’s a hell of a pianist, for what it’s worth) and electronic production.

If there is a good contemporary comparison on a more conceptual level, it’s Xiu Xiu. Like Jamie Stewart, Plaschg’s every gesture seems to stem from a desire to express herself in the most unfiltered way possible. And for both artists, the desire to communicate with an audience becomes secondary, as if at times they seem to be involved in a project of personal therapy, where process is more important than the end-result. Then again, I’m somewhat convinced there may even be some development to come in her voice: she still sounds fairly raw for such eloquent music, and on attempts at quieter ballads like “Extinguish Me” and “Brother of Sleep,” she has to settle for hovering low in the mix. The tactic might work in other scenarios, but you can tell these songs are so close to her that it just seems natural that her voice would take command of them instead of getting relegated to Plashg-light fringes.

:: myspace.com/soapandskin

Keyword Tags: Soap And Skin

Blog / Lady Gaga is a tool of the Illuminati (Elsewhere)

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:11:32 -0800

There are times in the annals of criticism when an object is so dense with meaning that the only proper action is to present it without comment:

http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=1676

http://vigilantcitizen.com/?p=2614

(Thanks to my friend Meghan.)

Keyword Tags: Butterfly Symbolism, Illuminati, Lady Gaga | 4 comments

Track Reviews / Brendan Benson: "Eyes on the Horizon" (Stream/Video)

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:11:27 -0800

The latter half of this decade has seen the revival, or at least the re-emergence, of a couple generations of power pop artists. Guys (for whatever reason, this is a male-dominated field) from the ’70s (Nick Lowe, Big Star), the ’80s (Richard X. Heyman, Mitch Easter, Tommy Keene, Marshall Crenshaw), and the ’90s (Jason Falkner, Roger Joseph Manning Jr., Matthew Sweet, the Shazam) have released generally well-reviewed comeback albums to a giant yawn from everyone who doesn’t frequent power pop blogs or dowdy discussion boards for boomer rock fans. (Benson solved the obscurity problem by hitching up with Jack White for their recent Raconteurs project; his new CD, My Old, Familiar Friend, hit the Billboard Top 200. The question of whether his music is actually more relevant than, say, Crenshaw’s Jaggedland [2009] or Sweet’s Sunshine Lies [2008] is a topic for another day.) Some of these men seem to have mellowed with age, opting for rootsy, stripped down updates of their classic material with slower tempos and huskier vocals. Others have gone all in, as if they’ve certifiably earned it, finding inspiration in ELO-style effulgence at the occasional expense of good taste.

My Old, Familiar Friend, Benson’s shiniest release yet, exemplifies the latter. The album’s title is taken from its best track, “Eyes on the Horizon,” a chilling first-person narrative that’s a mix of tirade, accusation, and hallucination. At first the lyrics seem like nonsense—“I sit and watch as the world takes shape / In streaks of color and fields of rape / Until the lions are burned at the stake”—but the fantastic images gain gravity as it becomes obvious that the raconteur (sorry) is psychotic, not just loopy. Chirping “nowheres” echo the lead vocal during the chorus while a barely audible low moan accompanies raving diatribes about blinding suns and thunder and lightning; the expansive backing track sticks to a minor key before shifting into a sing-song I-IV-I progression for the sections with the creepiest lyrics. By the final verse, a chorus of vocals reinforces the narrator’s charge that his interlocutor, his real or imagined “old and familiar friend,” wears a tracking device and that a man is following them everywhere. You can hear the voices in his head and they are singing along.

Keyword Tags: Brendan Benson, Jack White, Raconteurs | 0 comments

Track Reviews / Solange: "Stillness is the Move" (MP3 Download + Stream)

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 01:11:31 -0800

The thing that’s dopest about Solange covering the Dirty Projectors is that in the end she hasn’t created some sort of indie-R&B lovechild—it’s that this sounds like fucking D’Angelo, straight up: late-‘90s High Art boom-bap synched over fucking smooth multitracking and, almost incidentally in light of the aesthetic virtuosity on display, it’s a great song!, all hook-y and lyrically interesting and stuff. She’s got her sister’s pipes but the outro here assures us once again that Solange will use her powers for good, not histrionics.

To be fair, though, in addition to all this, “Stillness is the Move” is a subtler unification measure than dragging Big’s Brother to a Grizz show, which probably won’t happen again though because he acted so corny about it afterward. But the thing about Solange at her best (which: this is) is that these twin channels of influence—pop and indie—seem to channel themselves so naturally through her oversized personality, their crossed streams feeling less like a daring business merger than, like, the shit she felt like doing that afternoon. In what has the air of an afternoon toss-off, she hereby negates or at least outdoes the high-budget astrological alignment of Jigga rapping alongside Empire of the Sun or the high-profile WTF of Weezy ripping up a Lady Gaga track or pretty much all of Kid CuDi’s quick, cute little career. If I know Solange, which I do not, I feel like she finds this really funny.

:: Download mp3

Keyword Tags: Dirty Projectors, Solange | 1 comments

Record Review / Dirt Dress: Perdido en la Suciedad, 2

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:11:35 -0800

So, Dirt Dress are releasing a tripartite series of EPs this year called Perdido en la Suciedad (“Lost in the Dirt”) and this is the second. I’ve already shared my thoughts on the excellent first one; between that and 2008’s NBHed Theme Songs I can say that it is imperative that you start listening to and enjoying the hell out of this band. Do it now because now is when the band is taking us, five songs at a time, along with them on the journey that is a completely awesome new indie rock band working out their identity. Start with those records, though; don’t start with this one. And—before anyone gets the wrong idea—this is a good EP. I mean, on Perdido en la Suciedad, 2 there are no fundamentally flawed deviations from course. I still love this band and have no doubt in the continued quality of their work. It’s just that this particular EP contains songs that I don’t love as much as the songs on their other EPs. If I had to pinpoint why, exactly (which I sort of do being the critic in this scenario), I think it’s because most of these tracks feel a little more like half-finished sketches—yeah, that’s part of the band’s charm, but their past songs at least had some shading to add depth and weight. Here we have more of a segue than a song in “Some Velvet Morning,” two other tracks that don’t crack three minutes, and the six minutes of “Conversation” are diced up by at least a minute of what sounds like a reprise of the goofy, “Untitled” experimenting from the first installment of the series.

I think this has something to do with Dirt Dress doing a little deconstructing of Dirt Dress, which is a good idea in terms of solidifying their philosophy and figuring out how exactly to move forward, but not the greatest thing for the songs themselves—this band’s great songs are great because they encompass a lot through a very minimal approach. So instead of everything being brought together in the intoxicating way it was on those two previous EPs, “Conversation” and “Stray Cats” have most of the band’s guttural riffing and lo-fi wankery, “Some Velvet Morning” has most of their obfuscation, “Sonic Death” has most of their surf guitar, and “Sonic Boom” has most of their melody. And a lion’s share of their sublimity, too.

Actually, “Sonic Boom” is perhaps the greatest departure to date for Dirt Dress from their established aesthetic. Which doesn’t mean a whole lot because it still sounds like Dirt Dress, which still sounds like this fantastic reduction of intense passion for music vs. jaded disaffection that makes up the classic indie rock of bands like the Velvet Underground, the Violent Femmes, and Pavement. This particular song sounds clean, though, the melody fore-fronted, the chorus quite content to repeat itself until, hey, it just turns out to be the rest of the song; BGVs and lead guitar enter later to push the song quite casually over the edge from cool to indelible. It’s a moment of clarity, perhaps, a stylistic echo of the song’s content since Noah insists, “It hit me like a sonic boom.” It’s a good one, for sure, and this EP’s highlight; however, compared to the propulsive flow and distanced largesse of past highlights like “Transmissions” and “Junk,” it sounds a tad quaint.

And that’s pretty much the final say as far as part deux of Perdido en la Suciedad goes. It’s really pretty good and there’s a lot of reasons to recommend it and it’s a worthwhile stop for a band on the road to self-discovery…but by somewhat fracturing the stuffs of which Dirt Dress is made the individual tracks end up, yeah, a tad quaint. That just makes me want to hear the third EP even more; in fact, it might not be until that point that I can even properly judge what’s present on this release. I look forward to the hindsight.

:: myspace.com/dirtdress

Keyword Tags: Dirt Dress, Pavement, Velvet Underground

Record Review / Slaraffenland: We’re on Your Side

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:11:28 -0800

Hard to admit that We’re on Your Side is a step down for this great band, if only because it’s at least as technically adept and effortlessly listenable as their Private Cinema—an album that, two years after its release, continues to cause the involuntary wetting of one’s pants. But it seems something’s happened in the meantime: 2007 was a thematic flashpoint, a crystallization of theretofore-unexplored paranoia and agitation, and Private Cinema was one of that year’s best for it. Then came an EP with covers of both “Paranoid Android” and “Take on Me,” and a sort of foreshadowing of dark to light we could have never predicted; the band now resorts to a sort of banal positivity, lyrics better associated with the kind of poisoned neo-hippie movements whose modus operandi is non-engagement. (Think Broken Social Scene—no matter how appealing their music they never seem to be singing about anything except being Broken Social Scene.) We’re on Your Side is about, it turns out, the band being on your side. While it at least confesses that there’s a reason for the band to state it’s on your side—an admission of bad things in the face of a strong insistence that art not harsh anyone’s mellow—the album acts as a sort of side step to those bad things rather than a head-on address. Music this consistently gorgeous deserves a little better.

Insofar as that gorgeousness drives the record aesthetically, “Long Gone” and “Meet and Greet” are about as rhythmically inventive and attractively arranged as anything Slaraffenland have ever done. But therein is revealed another trend tied to the band’s newfound optimism: the band-wide chant. Once used to great effect by Arcade Fire and during Modest Mouse’s brief flirtation with mainstream success, it’s since been used beyond the point at which it succeeds to sweep up or arouse. Slaraffenland don’t overdepend on the tactic, but coupled with the aforementioned buoyancy of the record it sounds as if the band is attempting to tap into a just stale trend of epic catharsis. It’s not enough to dilute the graceful bridge of “Meet and Greet”—or its knowing half-time breakdown, both among reasons why it’s the best song in the band’s catalogue—but the overplayed context is unforgiving. (I suspect the song will stand, and perhaps be exposed to less harsh exposition, with time.) Ditto the discordant shuddering in the bridge to “Too Late to Think,” which is among those products of the band’s collective vision that makes the listener wonder if Slaraffenland have in them an OK Computer (1997). It wouldn’t surprise me.

The record’s strongest traits—its highly creative drumming; the mellifluous use of horns, never used as decoration; the spot-on production—are only somewhat mitigated by its lyrical missteps. There’s nothing offensively pandering, but lines like “Hate has made us go wrong” can’t even be misconstrued as insightful. It is the band’s uncomplicated starting point, not one so obvious as to ruin the aesthetic, but this conscious simplification eliminates what made Private Cinema so bracing. “All You Need is Love” hardly breaks down barriers any more, and in fact seems downright neutered next to the concept of an engaged, thematically inspired band fully cognizant of the complexity and urgency of the times in which we write. Who knows why Slaraffenland thought articulating the obvious for the umpteenth time was necessary for We’re on Your Side. Here’s hoping next time they relocate the ideological purpose to match their obvious technical talent.

:: myspace.com/slaraffenland

Keyword Tags: Slaraffenland