Mark Richardson is the managing editor of Pitchfork, and in my opinion, one of the site’s best writers. He’s consistently fair and thoughtful, and has a gift for writing about complex, arty works in layman’s terms, both humble and erudite. In other words, he’s the polar opposite of the worst stereotype of a “Pitchfork writer.” Mark’s first book, a volume about the Flaming Lips’ 1997 album Zaireeka for the 33 1/3 series, was just recently released. It’s one of my favorite books in the series, in part because it gets to the heart of what makes the Flaming Lips such a special and inspiring band, but also in that Mark goes on some very thought-provoking tangents about the way we engage with recorded sound as technology advances and how we are conditioned to listen closely to music alone. We get into some of that in this interview, but rest assured that this conversation only scratches the surface of what’s in the book.

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Serena-Maneesh “I Just Want To See Your Face”

“I Just Want To See Your Face” is basically a brief, catchy indie pop song, but its production and arrangement lend the piece an exaggerated depth of field implying that clusters of sound in the recording exist on overlapping physical planes. In some moments, you get the sensation of elements rushing suddenly into the audio equivalent of your field of vision, and in others, a sense of distance from musical elements that relate to and complete each other. The most dramatic overlaps remind me of how when you’d manually record television to VHS tapes, two different recordings would bump into each other, resulting in a fascinating and unique audio/visual glitch. The general effect of the recording makes the sentiment of the lyrics that much sweeter — it’s like trying to recreate a memory of someone, but not quite having your emotional impressions and visual recollection line up exactly.

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Pantha Du Prince “Bohemian Forest”

The brightest notes in this piece all sound like circles to me. Spheres in three dimensions, floating on their own, or in clusters of bubbles through the air. It’s almost impossible for me to hear this any other way, though the title suggests a dark, dense landscape for the circles. Maybe it’s like glowing orbs hovering through the woods at night, like unknown, otherworldly insects. You could see it, and it would seem peaceful and beautiful, but a little uncomfortable and vaguely menacing because you’d have no idea what it is.

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Dum Dum Girls @ Mercury Lounge 2/21/2010
Hey Sis / Catholicked / I Will Be / Don’t Talk To Me / Yours Alone / Brite Futures / Play With Fire / Bhang Bhang, I’m A Burnout / Jail La La / Rest Of Our Lives

Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La”

I didn’t expect to love the Dum Dum Girls’ debut album as much as I do, but quite simply, their songs are very difficult to resist. In aesthetic terms, they are working in well-mined territory, but Dee Dee’s songwriting is a cut above and the production has this ideal balance of lo-fi grit and professional sparkle. They’re going for a classic sound, but unlike many artists who attempt to ape a reverb-heavy style, the material goes beyond recreating a surface. The best of these songs have an evergreen quality, and would be just as good if recorded in a variety of styles.

In concert, the band is sharp and focused, but not overly rehearsed. There is a bit of awkwardness to their set, particularly as Dee Dee pauses to tune her guitar between every song, and her band mates mostly stand around in silence. Near the end, she explained that she thought we’d rather hear the songs in tune than very quickly, and while that is true, they may want to figure out a way to work around this in the future. (Maybe they can get successful enough to have their own guitar tech!) The set was also a bit too brief. I understand the notion of “leave ‘em wanting more,” but the band have at least another five absolutely amazing songs on their album that they did not perform, and they could have easily played another ten minutes or so. While it’s true that I now just want to go see them again in the hopes that those selections will become part of their regular set, I am a bit confused why they’d opt not to play songs as excellent as “It Only Takes One Night” and “Everybody’s Out.” At least they played “Rest of Our Lives”, though — that’s the one that melts my heart, and it was lovely in concert.

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Happy Birthday “Girls FM”

I have not heard any of Happy Birthday’s studio recordings besides “Girls FM”, so I was a bit surprised by their live performance last night opening up for Dum Dum Girls. This recording suggests a cleaner sound owing more to latter day Sub Pop acts, but their show is more early Sub Pop, with obvious roots in early ’90s indie rock and grunge. At their best, they came across like a bubblegum version of Royal Trux, or a K Records take on Dinosaur Jr. I’m curious now to hear how this album came out. Did all the grunge elements get cleaned up? Are they more indie-pop and less rockin’ in the studio? They’ve certainly got some charm and hooks; we’ll see where this goes.

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These New Puritans “Three Thousand”

These New Puritans aren’t breaking new ground for apocalyptic grimness in music, but they are quite good at synthesizing very different strains of doom pop into something that sounds rather fresh. “Three Thousand”, for example, is the midpoint between the A Frames’ dead-eyed, deadpan monotone punk and the chilly, broken-machine clunk of Def Jux-style hip hop production. The sound throughout their new album Hidden is consistently shiny and immaculate, which makes its loud martial rhythms sound as though they’ve been freshly minted for destruction. Somehow the rigid order and cleanliness of the music makes it seem much, much more creepy and paranoia-inducing.

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Fight Like Apes @ Mercury Lounge, 2/17/2010
Something Global / Digifucker / Lend Me Your Face / I’m Beginning To Think You Prefer Beverly Hills 90210 To Me / Do You Karate? / Jake Summers / Tie Me Up In Jackets / Knucklehead / Lightsaber Cock Sucking Blues / Battlestations

Fight Like Apes rock out. They’re funny. They chat with the audience, and make sure that everyone in the room participates. They do goofy theatrical stunts in concert. Every song is super catchy. Basically, they are ridiculously entertaining. They should not be playing to small crowds in America. This is a band that should have a rabid cult following. There should be hundreds of teens and college kids totally losing their shit at their shows. Yeah, they play with irony and come out of indie, but they should be playing to emo and mall punk kids. The people who might really appreciate them. Can we get them to tour with Paramore or something? Can I convince anyone in NYC to go see them play Union Hall tonight? Who knows.

Fight Like Apes “Something Global”

So yes, Fight Like Apes are fun and goofy, and they indulge in some ironic humor, but what makes them so appealing is how earnest they can be. May Kay may sing some nonsense, but the emotional content of these songs always rings out loud and clear. “Something Global” is especially straight forward: They feel out of step with music culture, but they love it and hate it and love it and hate it. It’s a statement of intent — they want to get people excited and they’re not afraid to be pop. It’s a bit “take us or leave us,” but it’s mostly “you’d be a fool not to love us.”

Buy it from Amazon. The price for the mp3 download is very low!

The Knife featuring Lærke Winther “The Height of Summer”

The Knife’s Tomorrow, In A Year is a difficult album in several ways. It is an opera about the life and work of Charles Darwin, which would be enough to make it a challenging experience for many listeners, but on top of that, it’s a rather distinct and atypical opera incorporating several abstract sequences and elements of dance music. Its most bizarre moments are often brilliant and evocative, but are not “listenable” in the way most people engage with music, and demand a very high level of attention, investment, and benefit of the doubt. In addition to all that, the advance mp3 for the album, “The Colouring of Pigeons”, was so impossibly brilliant that it was almost inevitable for me to feel let down by the full opera. I had expected an entire record on that wavelength, what I got was a lot more impressionistic and scattered. This isn’t a huge problem, though — I accept and appreciate Tomorrow, In A Year for what it is. It’s a bold, original work that does its own thing, and I have faith that it’s more impressive when actually staged as an opera rather than as a studio recording.

“The Height of Summer” is the final song on Tomorrow, In A Year, and it serves as something of a narrative coda. It is not an opera song or some impressionistic composition, but instead a pop ballad very much along the lines of what is typically expected of the Knife. It’s a strange, beautiful piece of music that has an unlikely yet graceful balance of flutter and bounce. The tone is wistful and nostalgic; it is essentially a piece of correspondence set to song. Lærke Winther’s voice is cool and understated, but she comes across as thoughtful and imaginative, like a person who spends a great deal of time in her head, but is making the effort to check in on the outside world. Darwin the man may be a distant, fond memory for her, but his ideas still resonate for her in the seemingly minor details of life, and in how she imagines a world without her.

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Peter Gabriel “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”

I’ve been getting sent a steady stream of terrible, mediocre, or forgettable records for many years now, and I think it has given me a pretty decent frame of reference for how bad and boring music can get. In most cases, instinct kicks in and I immediately get a feeling of “Yeah, this is not for me” or “I need to turn this off right away.” Sometimes something will be bad in a way that is amusing, and I’ll share it with a friend for a quick laugh before moving on and forgetting all about it. I tend not to dwell on the bad music.

Peter Gabriel’s new album of covers, Scratch My Back, is one of the most mesmerizingly awful records I have ever encountered. It is terrible in a way that seems unique and special; hideous in a way that is possibly quite profound. His selection of material is fine, but his execution is horrendous, to the point of obliterating the appeal of every song.

Gabriel is a man who has written and recorded many good songs with thoughtful arrangements in his life, but his approach to this material is that of a pompous buffoon who has no understanding of why any of these songs worked in the first place. His bombast is flat, his phrasing is awful, his instincts are poor. He eliminates rhythm and melody from his Talking Heads cover, strips the wit from the Magnetic Fields and the levity from Paul Simon, and performs David Bowie’s “Heroes” in a way that ignores its essential dramatic restraint. There are two modes on this album, and sometimes they intersect: Bloated melodrama and/or clinical depression.

Gabriel’s version of Radiohead’s “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” is a great example of just how much he doesn’t get it. The reason why the original is so moving has to do with the way the guitar parts fall together into gorgeous harmony with Thom Yorke’s lead vocal. It sounds like clockwork, specifically like a Doomsday Clock ticking away. It’s a very delicate piece of music. Gabriel’s version is a morose tuneless mess, with every bit of subtlety, melody, and beauty wiped out completely. It seems as though he thinks these songs are just lyrics arbitrarily paired with music, and that if you just recite the words with any old thing, it’s still the song. NO, PETER! THAT’S NOT WHAT MUSIC IS!!!! You don’t need to be totally slavish in replicating a song to produce a good cover version, but you have to on some level recognize the basic elements of what the song is, and carry that over to your interpretation.

The abysmal arrangement would be bad enough, but his vocal performance is truly appalling, especially for such an accomplished vocalist. Did he take a gun shot to a lung while recording this? Was he bleeding out as it recorded? Is this his death rattle? Is this a posthumous release?

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Thrushes “Crystals”

There are a lot of songs about being rejected by someone that you adore who would rather be with some other person, and to some extent, Thrushes nod in the general direction of a bunch of them, keenly aware that they are treading on familiar territory. “Crystals” is a real gut puncher. It’s sweetly romantic and eager to please; it’s like a sad puppy face getting stared down by indifferent eyes. Anna Conner sounds wounded but not quite defeated, there’s still a lot of hope in her voice. The thing that really breaks my heart, though, is how she keeps singing “Who will I find to talk to? … I wish it was you.” It doesn’t sound like she’s asking for a lot, but she’s still being denied. So much loneliness, so much frustration, so much love to give. Happy Valentine’s Day, everybody.

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Scout Niblett “Duke Of Anxiety”

The Calcination of Scout Niblett is a lonely and anguished sort of album, with most every track sounding like a very introverted woman going through some kind of public catharsis. “Duke of Anxiety” fits into the album nicely, but it’s also something of a reprieve, at least in that it’s more of a “pop” song than anything else on the record, and it seems like it’s coming from a different perspective than the other songs. The skeletal arrangement, bitter wit, and concrete details in the lyrics reminds me of early Liz Phair and her talent for sketching out characters in bleak vignettes that hint at larger narratives and deeper problems than what is being expressed in the song. Niblett’s frail, expressive voice is well-suited to giving voice to a desperate woman sinking into alcoholism, acting out, and considering some kind of escape from her circumstances. Every moment of this is heartbreaking, but there’s a few notes of optimism in here, even if it’s a bit misguided or delusional. That’s part of what makes it all feel so vivid and real.

You can read my review of The Calcination of Scout Niblett on Pitchfork today.

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