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Robert is a nervous, uncomfortable guy, and that could translate into seeming a bit creepy. That much is clear in the first few measures of “I Which I, Robert,” before the vocals come in. The song kinda lurches and skulks around with an odd grace. You can picture the guy’s body language as an ugly awkwardness so lived-in that it appears natural, almost beautiful in a way. The lyrics add dimension to the character, and makes him rather sympathetic, but so much of this is in the way they sketch out this person and his interior life with instrumental parts that work much like the gestural lines of a cartoonist.
I’m not sure if there are many pop songs that I would describe as rational, generous, and thrilling in equal measures, but that’s pretty much what is going on in “Thieves In The Night”, on on Hot Chip’s new album in general. They’ve always toyed with presenting warm emotions with a chilly affect, and though that sometimes results in merely lukewarm results, their gems have a wonderful balance and tension to them that is more nuanced and human than flat and robotic. “Thieves In The Night” is one of the band’s finest compositions to date, a steadily building opener that has the bright tonality and calculated precision of Kraftwerk, but the warm soul of a polite gentleman. It’s basically a song about the blurry line separating needs and wants, and the difficulty of going through life without finding satisfaction, or knowing what path may lead to real happiness. There’s nothing smug or condescending about the sentiment. Joe Goddard sings “happiness is what we all want / may it be that we don’t always want” on the chorus, and he couldn’t sound more genuine in wanting the best for us all. Coming back to that chorus after a surprisingly excellent guitar solo, the song seems to glow in pulsing waves, like some kind of beacon of hope and goodwill. It keeps moving forwards, as if to sweep the listener up and carry them along to some better, happier point in the future.
Well, these two sound awfully cheerful for a couple of people singing about abandoning their hopes and dreams! Still, as much as they’re expressing frustration with unrequited love and loneliness, it’s very apparent that they’re having a lot of fun with the drama of it all. Why else would this song sound like such an unironic thrill? On the face of it, Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor are shouting “That does it, I quit!”, but it’s obvious to anyone that they’re actually sweetly proclaiming “I’m ready! Love me! Love me!” The best moment in the song comes when Rebecca sings “I’ve been tired and hopeful for far too long now” on the bridge to the chorus, and despite the negativity in her words, she couldn’t sound more forthright and optimistic. This isn’t really about being sad and desperate, it’s about having a lot of love to give and getting impatient waiting for someone who deserves it all.
The Brewis brothers of Field Music excel at crafting neat, orderly songs that come across like character studies of mild-mannered, repressed men struggling to deal with stress and anxiety like some kind of mature adult. Some of their compositions deal with faint conflicts rendered in tight yet essentially breezy music, but the most affecting numbers, like “In The Mirror”, foreground nervous tensions without letting them entirely crack through the song’s highly polished surface. In this track, the steady trebly ringing of a piano is contrasted with rock instrumentation so mannered that it plays almost like classical music, like a bit of loose scrawl on a rigid grid. The lyrics are subtly gutting: “I wish I could change and make new rules, and love myself better,” delivered plaintively, but rather matter-of-fact. It’s like a struggle to contain earnest, potent emotion, and to attempt to rationalize every problem. Some music works for us because it allows us to indulge in thoughts and feelings we can’t really allow ourselves to freely express. This has a different function, either giving us insight into someone else, or serving as a mirror for our own repressed anxieties.
I wonder if anyone can listen to this song without the phantom sensation of smelling smoke or imagining men with big bushy mustaches. Malachai’s music is a skewed kind of retro, sounding just enough like lost records from the ’60s and ’70s while allowing for just enough room for modern touches that their aesthetic scare-quotes are apparent to the listener. This could be tedious if the band didn’t have any real songs, but cuts like “Snowflake” have big, burly déjà vu-inducing hooks that grind their way into your skull just as well as the “real” thing. The vocals are notable for their full commitment and slightly odd resonance: This guy sings most of the song with a macho growl that’s more peevish and perturbed than alpha-male commanding.
This remix doesn’t sound a great deal like the original recording by A Sunny Day In Glasgow, but it certainly sounds like A Sunny Day In Glasgow. This version feels more solid and focused than anything on the deliberately hazy and amorphous Ashes Grammar album, but the gently vertiginous swirl of essentially wordless soprano vocals is unmistakable. The arrangement here is lovely, mixing the cool sweetness of the female voices with an assertive forward momentum. It feels like being led along through colorful abstraction, like some kind of obvious sensible path through blissful psychedelic confusion.
A lot of Stephin Merritt’s songs are clever jokes. He owes a lot to musical theater, obviously, but his niche in contemporary culture is often more along the lines of being the audio equivalent of a gag comic in The New Yorker. “We Are Having A Hootenanny” is Merritt as his most absurd, an aggressively cheerful invitation to party where the only barrier to entry is taking a personality quiz. You can pick this apart in a few different ways — maybe this Merritt’s way of making fun of the internet, or it could be a more pointed barb at the way subcultures claim to be “inclusive” as long as everyone matches the same personality profile. It might just be a good excuse for the entire band to comically over-enunciate the letter z at the end of the word “quiz”.
There’s an intimate, conversational quality to this song that makes it seem like the singer is sitting right next to you, babbling on about his friends fucking in the next room and why that’s totally cool with him. You probably don’t know him very well, but he’s kinda oversharing, especially when he mentions that he’s been with that girl too. He’s almost certainly drunk. You don’t know whether you should laugh at his theories about sex, or if you should just humor him and nod meaningfully. It’s also unclear whether he wants to wallow in self-pity, reflect on his friends’ happiness, or if this is his way of trying to bone you. It’s a clever, vivid little moment rendered in song.
of Montreal @ Highline Ballroom 1/26/2010
Suffer For Fashion / Mingusings / Forecast Fascist Future / Du Og Meg / Lysergic Bliss / Disconnect The Dots / Spike The Senses / And I’ve Seen A Bloody Shadow / Plastis Wafers / St. Exquisite’s Confessions / Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse / Teenage Unicorn Fisting / An Eluardian Instance / Oslo In The Summertime / Every Day Feels Like Sunday / A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger / She’s A Rejecter // For Our Elegant Caste / I Want You Back (with Solange)
First off, this is what you want to see, right?
Moving on.
As you can see in the setlist above, this brief tour is not a try-out period for new material as I had expected. There was one new song in the show, a groovy rock number provisionally titled “Teenage Unicorn Fisting,” but this was pretty much a catalog showcase featuring big hits along with a handful of deep cuts. The presentation was relatively stripped-down, and they cast aside the programmed percussion in favor of live drums for the entire set. In addition to Solange Knowles once again teaming up with the band for a cover song, Susan Sarandon popped up onstage during “St. Exquisite’s Confessions” to spank some pig-men. You know the old show biz saying: “If you can’t get a horse, get Susan Sarandon.”
I’ll be honest: I was vaguely dreading this show. I was aware that it was a totally irrational thing, but I’ve actually taken the band’s music out of rotation in recent months to get away from its emotional content, and I’ve had this strange paranoia about the next OM album not being as good as the last few. (This is very unlikely!) I lucked out with this show. Not only did the self-imposed OM hiatus make me even more excited to hear the songs in the moment, but the band were kind enough to not perform the handful of songs bogged down with too much personal baggage for me to handle at the moment. (It’s not as though I asked, but either way: Thanks!)
“Plastis Wafers” was the big revelation of the night. It was leaner, tighter, faster, funkier. This could be a matter of projection for me, but it seemed much sadder than usual. What had once sounded like pure desire now felt more like hopeless desperation. When Kevin sang “You are such a fucking star,” it was like admiration mixing into resentment. The song sounded like an elegy for something that was dead, or dying. “It’s so painful when they amputate the ego.” No kidding, man.
Laura Burhenn is the kind of soul singer who sounds best when she’s not belting it out, but instead keeping the contours of a great melody sleek and smooth. Her tone in “Numbers Don’t Lie” is sweet yet just a bit salty, and forthright enough to make it clear that her deferential attitude on the chorus comes with a lot of eye-rolling. The tune is a minor marvel, and the production by Richard Swift hits his usual balance of retro warmth and modern textures, which keeps the piece from sounding too much like an overly reverential facsimile of Dusty Springfield style blue-eyed soul.
