You Have A New Name

Junior Boys “Bellona” – My favorite thing about the new Junior Boys album Last Exit is how incredibly cool it sounds. Not cool as in hip, but coolness as it relates to temperature – I feel a slight chill whenever I listen to the record, as though it were the audio equivalent of air conditioning.

Last Exit is a peculiar kind of pop album. Its rhythms and textures are familiar from over a decade of electronic music, modern hip hop and r&b; but they still feel vaguely alien in this context, particularly when paired with vocals which sound simultaneously aloof and soulful. It is not a cheerful record, but it isn’t quite melancholy either. Last Exit is the sound of complicated in-between feelings, the kind of emotions which we are often ill-equiped to articulate, but sound sublime when expressed in music. (Click here to pre-order it from Warp.)

Pet “No Yes No” – This cheery, sunny bit of electro-glam is the first single from Berlin’s Pet. I don’t know very much about Pet, and I don’t have anything particularly clever to say about this song (other than maybe “wow, it’s really great and catchy, I like to bop around to it”), so I’m going to fill up some space by quoting some of the more cringe-inducing sentences from the press release on his label’s website:

“It’s all about the tunes and there’s not a sample in sight!”

“Classic influences aside though, you’ll hear catchy, infectious proper pop music by a serious producer; one whose musical vision is as accessible as it’s amenable to repeat listening, delivering slamming energy-packed electronic music that rocks as much as it rolls.”

(Click here to buy it from Amazon UK.)

Elsewhere: You should head on over to Tyrone Shoelaces’ blog (which you really ought to be checking every day) and get the excellent new Kiki/Silversurfer/Captain Comatose single, which I was planning on posting later this week. Laces beat me to it, because he is cooler than I am.

And: I was just checking the official Phoenix website to see if they were coming to New York City any time soon (they aren’t), and noticed a mystifying quote from a magazine review of their new album which was being used in this animated gif: “Outkast Meets The Strokes: Awesome!” I’m not sure how anyone could listen to Alphabetical and hear much of either act in Phoenix’s music, unless for some reason Outkast and The Strokes were among the only artists in contemporary pop of which the reviewer were aware. (Highly doubtful!) There is plenty of music out there which Phoenix does in fact sound like; it’s not as though they are particularly difficult to define. This sums up the album rather well, for example: “Justin Timberlake Meets Steely Dan: Awesome!”

In all likelihood, Outkast and The Strokes were invoked primarily because they exist as a sort of shorthand for “critically approved mainstream pop” and “young neo-classic rock band” in the parlance of mainstream music publications. So in these terms, we arrive at Phoenix’s sound by adding clean, modern, keyboard-heavy production (Outkast) to young white men who seem to prefer rock music made prior to 1980 (The Strokes). I’m all for writing music reviews so that they are accessable to casual listeners, but this is dumbed down to a ridiculous extreme! The reference points are so arbitrary (and relatively inaccurate) as to give the reader a totally warped idea about what the music is like that it practically sets them up to be disappointed by the actual recording.

It would certainly make me feel better if I knew that this was a result of critical laziness rather than editorial cynicism – it depresses me to think that someone would ask a writer to sound so dim because they have a low estimation of their readers.