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.
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.
A lot of minimalism and electronic music can sound sterile, utilitarian, and uninviting, as if recorded music was simply the most logical presentation method for the artist’s concepts. This isn’t the case for Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, who manages to invest his compositions with a loose, “live” sound despite the distinctly non-live nature of his craft. “Angel Echoes”, the first track on his latest (and best) album There Is Love In You, doesn’t try to convince you that you’re hearing something entirely organic, but there is a subtle tension in it that implies spontaneity. It could just be the specific sound of the percussion sample, some perceptible trace of humanity that offsets the more mechanical aspects of the piece. Either way, Hebden finds some soulful fragment, and builds up from there, always balancing the physical and the cerebral. It sounds like healthy music, if that makes sense.
I’m very glad that I kept giving Beach House’s Sub Pop debut Teen Dream a shot. I knew that the record was interesting and good from the start, but too many of the songs were blurring together and I just was not connecting with the material on an emotional level. I heard the potential for that, and keeping in mind that a similar thing happened for me with Bat For Lashes’ Two Suns last year, I kept the album in rotation long enough for many of the tracks to sink in.
It’s easy to get lost in Teen Dream, in good and bad senses of that word. The individual songs have dynamics, but the album as a whole does not. It lingers in the same emotional and musical place, and so unless you pick up on the internal shifts in mood, rhythm, melody, and texture, it’s easy to shrug off. It’s the kind of record you have to learn and live with to fully appreciate, but it’s not some hassle. The melodies are low-key but gorgeous, and the arrangements somehow pull off the trick of sounding simultaneous stark and lush. It’s a very seductive set of songs, and once you get pulled in, it’s almost too cozy to get out.
The music has a melancholy tone, but it’s not miserable or dark. There’s an emotional spectrum, but every feeling on it is vague and poorly defined. Complacent is not a word that is generally used with a positive connotation, but in the best possible way, that word suits the vibe of Teen Dream. It’s not apathetic or numb, but it conveys a fragile stability in the face of strong emotion and potentially negative circumstances. Michael Azerrad and Nitsuh Abebe have been throwing around the phrase “smart and serene” to describe a certain strain of indie music that has caught on in recent years, and this record is like the epitome of all that. It’s cool and restrained, and fiery emotions are kept in check, but it’s not dumb or repressed. It’s just the sound of complex feelings mitigated by maturity and responsibility.
“Back of the Card” spends a lot of its time in a zone mined by post-punk fans and Talking Heads disciples, but even after a decade’s worth of that sort of thing, it still comes out sounding fresh and fun. Some of that comes from some clever twists: A vague hint of country twang early on, and a sudden yet somehow kinda gradual meltdown into clattering, droning noise at the end. It hits a comfortable sweet spot, but it doesn’t settle for giving you exactly what you expect. Nicely done.
It’s not a huge surprise that when the Blood Brothers broke up, their two lead singers started new bands in which they never had to scream. After all, one must assume that non-stop hysterical shrieking is a young man’s game. What is kinda surprising is that Johnny Whitney and Jordan Billie have gone in rather similar directions with their respective bands, Jaguar Love and Past Lives. Whereas the former nudged his punk roots in a more glammy direction, Billie and Past Lives’ version of pop owes more to new wave and post-punk. “Don’t Let The Ashes Fill Your Eyes,” a highlight from their full-length debut, comes rather close to the sound of Wire circa Chairs Missing and 154, presenting catchy hooks with a cold tonality and harsh austerity. They really pull it off. It’s all very hummable yet totally severe, with every chord change and word spat out by Billie sleek and sharp enough to draw blood. The real trick, though, is how when they allow a bit of warmth in the form of “sha la la la la” backing vocals, the subtle shift in temperature is just enough to make you realize how frigid the rest of it really is.
I listened to Owen Pallett’s new album Heartland at least five times through before ever coming across the phrase “ultra-violent farmer.” I appreciate Pallett’s sci-fi meta-fiction conceit, but at least early on, I find it difficult to pay much attention to his lyrical games when his arrangements are so dazzling on a purely musical level. “Midnight Directives” is an agile, flamboyant tune that builds from a hum to a symphonic sweep without losing an essential lightness. Pallett is working with a broad palette, but he’s a deliberate, decisive arranger, and he employs sound in a gestural manner that reminds me of the way great cartoonists imply a lot of information in simple, well-placed lines. Even without the high concept, this is incredibly ambitious pop music that deftly avoids the typical traps of symphonic indie music.
I realize that there is a lot of dark wit in Los Campesinos!’ music, but I’m not sure if the things I find amusing about them are always the things they intend to be funny. They’re a knowing self-parody, pushing the envelope of overly precious, vainly articulate youthful melodrama in a way similar to emo titans Fall Out Boy and Say Anything, but there’s something about them that seems a lot more…sincere? Is that it? Whatever it is that makes their anger seem more real, that is what makes them kinda unintentionally hilarious but also very relatable. The words spill out, but nothing sounds much like what you’d actually say out loud, and either more like l’esprit de escalier stuff that you think after you’ve had your little confrontation, or the sort of shit you’d spew out on a friends-locked Livejournal entry or a bitter email that you should probably keep saved in the draft folder. “Romance Is Boring,” by far the best Los Campesinos! song I’ve ever heard, is essentially a mid-90s indie rock song in the vein of Archers of Loaf remade with 00s indie aesthetics, i.e. over-stuffed meters and waaaaay too many people playing and singing at once. That’s not a problem, though, because part of what makes this song so appealing is hearing a whole crowd of Welsh kids scream at each other for wanting to fuck each other.
Could this be the greatest tough love song of all time? Even if you’re not exactly the type of smug, lazy person Laetita Sadier is railing against, each lyric stings because on some level you probably feel like maybe you are being implicated, and that you are too bitter, cynical, and apathetic. Part of what makes this work so well is that Sadier is so calm and measured as she sings these stern words, but there’s an obvious tone of disappointment in her voice, like a disapproving parent or authority figure. She makes you feel bad for letting her down, and for not living up to your potential. This is not a dismissive song, it’s not a matter of “Ugh, kids today.” It’s about wanting people to be better, and not giving in to the worst of humanity. She makes it clear that it’s not easy to “apply your leading potential and be useful to this planet,” but it’s worth the effort. After all, as she sings, “the world would give you anything as long as you will want to.”
Dick Valentine has mentioned in a few recent interviews that his method for writing the lyrics for the Kill album was to build a stockpile of lines and then later on work them into songs. This is a fairly standard approach for lyric writing, but the result here is like a musical equivalent of a Dick Valentine Twitter feed. He’s always churning out bitter one-liners and grotesque absurdity, but songs like “One Sick Puppy” feel violent, overloaded and disconnected, a free-associative stream of cynical jokes and pithy disgust set to a slashing rhythm. This could be the band at their darkest, dialing down narrative and empathy, and diving deep into disappointment, aggression, and hopelessness with a maniacal grin.
I knew from the start that this track sampled Klaus Nomi, but it took me a while before I figured out the main vocal sample. As it turns out, it is a section of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s “The Bells,” a song penned by Leonard Cohen and later rewritten and recorded as “Take This Longing” on his album New Skin for an Old Ceremony.
Two interesting things about that:
* When Cohen revised the song, he omitted the sections that are sampled in this piece, i.e., the catchy bits. Fair enough — Cohen is really more of a poet than a pop songwriter, but I prefer the catchy bits, thanks.
* I had assumed that whatever voice I was hearing in “Say Goodbye To What” was in some way processed and altered. Well, no, not really — Sainte-Marie actually sings “The Bells” as if her voice naturally ran through some kind of tremolo effects box.
“Say Goodbye To What” does not transform its component parts, but the shift in context and shape is dramatic enough to completely change the character of the Cohen/Sainte-Marie snippet. There’s still a bit of melancholy to the melody, but the brittle sound is traded for a colorful, bouncy psychedelia that owes something to virtually everyone who has ever tried to make their own Magical Mystery Tour. Sainte-Marie is recast as a groovy cosmic spirit, now totally on the same wavelength of Nomi, the campy space diva. It’s cute, it’s hooky, it’s a counterintuitive connection that makes perfect sense.
Pit er Pat roughly approximate the sound of Missy and Timbaland circa the late 90s/early 00s in this track, but it’s not a straight rip. Their own style of melody and rhythm is intact, but filtered through modern R&B sensibilities, resulting in a weird mirage of a song in which the various rhythmic and textural elements seem to blink in and out of mix, implying a shape and structure without ever feeling particularly solid. True to its title, “Water” is a rather fluid piece of music, and the atmosphere it creates is rather humid. Whereas this general aesthetic is typically employed to convey sexuality and anticipation, Pit er Pat come across vaguely asexual and totally impatient. It’s a strange effect, really: Uncomfortably groovy, but still pleasure-oriented.
There’s some interesting movement in this piece — circular motions, lateral progressions, synthesizer washes that seem to rise up like mist — but the thing that stands out is how bits of sound seem to get knocked from their course, as if the lines run into a force field and either bounce off or immediately disappear into the ether. The ending is a surprising digression, far more tactile and anxious after the mellow mood blinks out entirely, and all that’s left is an emotional void.
This is aesthetically closer to a whale song than an R&B tune, but I hear some swing and groove in this, lost somewhere in the waves of sound. It could be the echo of something I’m half-remembering, some phrasing or texture that’s mutated as memory fades. This would seem to be the goal of a lot of atmosphere-oriented music these days — reconstructing memory from fragments of feelings. I’m not sure if that’s where Barwick is coming from, but it’s certainly how this works for me.
To think of this music in terms of visual representation: The piano is the tumbleweed, the rest is either the breeze blowing it along, or the empty, wide-open scenery. Lachica’s voice is mannered but highly expressive, fluttering and contracting as the melody swirls around the contours of the chord structure. As much as this song has that quality of direct representation, it’s also an odd, abstracted thing. Listening, I feel like trying to trace its lines, follow them around to find the beginning and the end, but I get lost somewhere, or my attention shifts to some small detail that has me chasing that to its logical conclusion. The song is all a tangle, but it moves so gracefully.
I don’t know much about Merrill Garbus’ life, but I feel like I know a lot about her voice, which might be a separate thing. Garbus sings like a person who, at some point in the not-too-distant past, stopped caring about holding herself back. “Powa” starts off sorta gentle and demure, but as it progresses, there’s a clear physicality to her vocals — a startling, defiant swagger. Unlike a lot of “swagger” you hear in modern pop music, it’s not a put-on or thinly veiled insecurity. It doesn’t sound like control or a desire to be controlling either. It’s more about self-possession, and making a clear decision to be exactly who you are and go for what you want, and take what you deserve after years of feeling unworthy. “Powa” is a song about sex, and it feels triumphant and glorious, like a long-earned reward. There’s still conflict and angst, but it all disappears in moments of pure pleasure, as when Garbus’ voice shoots up into into high notes, yanking us up with her into her giddy stratosphere. You feel her pleasure along with her, but you know that it’s an abstraction. If you really want it, you’ve got to get it for yourself. You’ve got to be more like Merrill.
I wrote a story for The Awl’s End of the ’00s series, and you can read it here. I’m very proud of it, but I don’t want to tell you too much before you read it. Let’s just say that you’re in for some serious carnage at the end.
Also, while I’m writing about what I wrote elsewhere: In case you only read this site via RSS, you might want to check out the Fluxblog best videos of 2009 tag on tumblr.
I feel so dumb for having missed this until just recently, but it seems like the DJ Quik & Kurupt album took just about everyone who has heard it by surprise. BlaQKout is an absurdly pleasurable hip hop record; a tight set of songs that hover in a lovely middle ground between “Wow, they don’t make ’em like this anymore!” late ’90s/early ’00s nostalgia and “What the fuck are they doing?” ingenuity. “Hey Playa! (Moroccan Blues)”, the album’s dizzying centerpiece, drifts between solemn devotional chants and carefree summer jam bounciness, with the emcees deftly negotiating the chasm separating thoughtful intensity and glib hedonism in their verses. The track is a seamless blend of darkness and light, but the result is anything but gray — if anything, the things comes out sounding more like fluorescent day-glo without losing any sense of gravity. This is the work of men who have been working hard at their craft for years, and have reached the point where they can make this elegant music seem totally relaxed and easy. If you need a parallel to another album from 2009, you can think of this as hip hop’s answer to Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix.
