Sigur Rós
Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
[XL; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
My parents went to Iceland a few years ago for their 30th anniversary. I asked them if they could bring back some Icelandic rock. They talked to a waiter and asked what's hip in Iceland these days. Apparently everybody over there is already over Sigur Rós. So my parents got me a Mugison CD. It wasn't good, but it did show me something important: Icelanders are suckers for anything that sounds dramatic, and their music scene is overrated. The end.
Studio
Yearbook 2
[Information; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.8.
I'm thinking the main takeaway from the above-linked review by Tim Finney is that this album failed to help him make any progress with a girl he was interested in. I might be reading a little too much into it, but that sounds about right. He played her a Kylie Minogue remix that's on this, told her it would blow her mind, and then she said "it sounds like the Gypsy Kings," which God Bless, is about the most withering put down of all time. I don't know why you'd lead off your review with such a crash and burn tale, other than to say "I've got blinders on for this stuff; maybe it's a problem to the point where it's ruining my ability to interact with others." In which case, it's kind of a ballsy move to say "this is me, I have no balls." But I still have a feeling I'd rather read her review of both the album and the incident.
I wonder if she'd say what I suspect: girls like boys who like boy music.
The Goslings
Occasion
[Not Not Fun; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.7.
There is an entire rock subculture for masochism. I understand only this about it: if you listen to music that's so loud and harsh and brutal it actually blasts your brain out through the back of your head, then by the time its over you will have a mildly euphoric feeling of having experienced something otherworldly, because human beings until fairly recently had never heard anything louder than thunder. The old voice-of-God trick. There was just nothing in our evolutionary process which prepared us for how loud we can make a guitar these days.
Does that mean we should make guitars as loud as possible as often as possible and never listen to anything else? No. It doesn't mean that. Doing things just because you can is not a lifestyle option unless you're super into masochist rock because you hate your life so much you feel a near-constant urge to be blasted four feet out of the back of it. Or if you're stoned it's good too. Maybe it's ok, like an exploration thing, but then why not go whole hog and get really into mysticism and astral projections and stuff? Oh right, because that stuff is for wusses. Well, carry on then.
Anyway, it's hard to figure out where any of this stuff rates on a quality scale. If The Goslings played a concert and you went to it, it would be a doom point loud on a scale of one to clinically dead.
Grails
Take Refuge in Clean Living
[Important; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.8.
So this is a band from Portland that wants to sound like it's from Morocco/Libya/Turkey/India in 1974. But they're not. It's ok, there's still merit in what they're doing, but when was the last time you heard some obscure thing from Morocco/Libya/Turkey/India in 1974 and thought "yes, this is actually a total classic, and not just kind of a kick I'm getting from knowing about something that's obscure--like oh wow, it's from Morocco/Libya/Turkey/India in 1974?" Those "forgotten gems" are only extremely rarely a "listen to it every day for a month" album. I understand that's a very tall order, but when we're talking about approximating something other than what you are because you enjoy it, I think you've got to be pretty careful about both what that thing is and how specifically you are approximating it, especially if you're white and they're not. I'm for big-picture approximations, like how The Stooges approximated the blues as opposed to, say, how Cream did it. Cop the ideas, leave the sound alone.
In this case, these guys are doing stoner rock ragas. Fine, but their Johnny Whiteguy rock approach makes them come off kind of flat, like either the stoner rock is ruining the raga or the raga is ruining the stoner rock, and it's not some kind of miscegenated blending, it's a conflict. The drums demand only peanut butter, the guitars just want chocolate. The end result is they sound like a lesser mid-90's instrumental post-rock band in the Godspeed You Black Emperor!/Mogwai/Golden/Trans Am continuum, except they're the "Eastern" one. And the jury is still out on whether or not that's a compliment, but it's not looking good.
I don't know why I'm feeling so harsh on this, though. I like the idea. Maybe enough so that I'm allowing the execution to disappoint. It could be that we're dealing with a not very good band which nevertheless is at least clever enough to sound slightly different from other not very good bands, and that's all it is.
Martina Topley-Bird
The Blue God
[Martina Topley Bird; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.6.
Oh, this is the girl from Massive Attack, and she's now in 2008 doing the British "limited-range female vocalist Billie Holiday-inspired soul but with modern lyrical content, about half a million miles less oomph and musicianship than Billie Holiday and always so because all spread over modern studiopop arrangements rather than developing as a three shows a night collaborator of Lester Young and other real-time geniuses of actual unfolding music" thing like what Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse are also doing in 2008. Presumably she is doing this because she has the Brittriphop bona fides to stake a claim to some of those album sales. Sounds like an ok career move to me. I mean, MASSIVE ATTACK, people. She's earned it.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Friday, June 25, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/23/08
Liz Phair
Exile in Guyville (15th Anniversary)
[Liz Phair; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 9.6.
First of all, the above-linked review is one of the best and most heartfelt pieces I've ever read on Pitchfork, and I recommend reading through it.
Now if you'll permit me a little self-indulgent nostalgia of my own: I never got into this record. In fact, I always kind of hated it. More than anything else it seemed like the soundtrack to my near-complete inability to get laid (I could make out with the best of them, but often got picked off trying to stretch a triple) in high school. I was a 13 year-old 9th grader when Exile in Guyville came out, one of the youngest boys in a grade where the girls are light years beyond the boys in the maturity department.
I was full-on ensconced in the stomach-churning self-conscious teen angst (the fitting popular term) of bands like Nirvana, which was perfect for where my hormone-stuffed pipsqueak of a head was at. The girls I thought of as being on my wavelength and hence most wanted to make it with were onto stuff like The Lemonheads and Juliana Hatfield and Liz Phair. Liz Phair especially seemed unfair to me. Here are all these girls who won't give me the time of day because I don't have hair one on my little scrote, and I'm feeling weak and vulnerable but, you know, available, loving even: tender, and they're listening to this incredible over-it grown up tough girl who's singing about being a blow job queen, and in the same breath these 9th grade girls are complaining to ME about how some fucking douchebag junior won't even give THEM the time of day. UNPHAIR.
Of course I was being self-centered and idiotic like all teenagers, but at the time I really thought "What the fuck are these girls complaining about? What do they need to be tough for? They have it made. They could snap their fingers and I'd run through a plate glass window just for a kiss on the cheek, don't they get it? Fuck 'blow job queen,' I'll settle for just holding hands. I mean, what the fuck is going on?"
But being a girl in the 9th grade is no picnic either. I just didn't get it. And I didn't really want to. It took a couple of turns around the fucking girls over carousel when I was the douchebag junior until I started to get hip. That's the high school circle of life. Cruelty begets cruelty.
Listening to this now, it's giving me flashbacks, and it's showing me why I was crushing the hardest on the girls that were into this. It's a pretty amazing record to have float by when you're going through the 9th grade in 1993-94. Nobody was talking about this stuff. The girls I wasn't as into were pumping out Tori Amos and the Indigo Girls, which is totally flaccid compared to Exile in Guyville as far as reality-based female empowerment goes. But why pick nits, in 9th grade you should take all the empowerment you can lest you be separated to the wrong side of the self-esteem tracks. Liz Phair fans at least seemed open to the idea of fooling around, though. And they were sexy. They smoked cigarettes.
Plus Liz Phair was very non-PC at a time when political correctness was actually a social movement that people were embracing as the next way to be. If you wanted to get laid (and I mean anybody, not just high school) in the early 90's, you had to be prepared to spout an awful lot of rhetoric and be willing to listen to plenty of 4 Non Blondes while suffering through some extremely blue balls, or else you had to be a sufficiently bad enough boy to warrant the surrender of caution. There was a lot of caution in those days. Mountains of it. Liz Phair was somebody who had thrown it to the wind a few times and come out wiser in the bargain. God, I hated her for it. I was determined to follow the rhetoric and 4 Non Blondes strategy. I saw it as my only option, shrimp that I was. And here was Liz Phair, blowing that whole trip to smithereens.
I should have just joined. I essentially did, years later, but God do I ever have a heart full of hate for the 4 Non Blondes and the rest of their milquetoast feminism by rote set. I mean it's still hard to even laugh about how bad they are. I'm skipping the laughter and going straight to being upset just thinking about it. Yes really, over 4 Non Blondes. I don't know how else to put this, but they actually seemed REAL at the time, like they were 100% serious and not just a shitty band raking in money for a load of hot garbage. That's how polite everybody was being, like giving a shit about "What's Going On" was supposed to be a way of life. I should have just relaxed about the getting laid stuff and just actually listened to Liz Phair, even if I didn't like it, if only because A. it's not like I actually liked 4 Non Blondes anyway, and B. she was the real one. It would have done me wonders.
The more I think about this the more it's turning into time machine advice, heading into "if I ever have kids, I'm giving them Exile in Guyville on their 14th birthdays and telling them not to tell their mother so they'll think it's actually worth listening to" territory. It's the most honest, grown-up sex talk a kid could get: it's hard and it fucks you up, but of course it can be pretty hot too, and you're gonna have to learn about it sooner or later. No wonder those girls weren't interested in little wimpy me.
Anyway, I get reminded of all this stuff from listening to this album now. I still don't like it enough to actually want to listen to it, but I like it a lot more on a musical level than I did then, and as a statement both historical and timeless I appreciate the fuck out of it. It's just not for me, and probably never was. But it's one hell of a thing to have done anyway. Chris Dahlen is right. I admire it.
Ricardo Villalobos
Vasco EP Part 1
[Perlon; 2008]
Pitchfork gives it a 7.2.
Techno is not a valid form of music.
The Herbaliser
Same As It Never Was
[Studio !K7; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.
This sounds like the cutting edge of hip hop, 1996. Like I should be wearing Jnco Jeans, a fuzzy Kangol, and Gazelles right now.
Mike Patton
A Perfect Place OST
[Ipecac; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.9.
Oh man, they just decided that Exile in Guyville was enough, and then loaded the rest of this 5 pound day with 10 pounds of shit, didn't they?
Mike Patton is doing old timey and/or spooky music for a movie that I guarantee sucks, because the director was like "let's get Mike Patton, I love his work" when they were looking for somebody to do the original soundtrack. It probably has a ton of plot twists but you don't care about the characters, and it's probably loaded to the gills with style and technique without anything resembling substance, and all kinds of unnecessarily complicated edits and whiplash transitions, to the point where you can't follow the plot anymore, except instead of feeling challenged or interested, you're glad to be relieved of the burden of giving a shit, so you turn to whoever you're with and say "you wanna just go" and they're like "yes, THANK YOU" and then you have a lot of fun with the rest of your night making fun of how awful the movie was. Because that's Mike Patton's career if it was a movie. He's basically the Guy Ritchie of music.
Kidz in the Hall
The In Crowd
[Koch / Duck Down; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.5.
Nobody involved in this is Kanye, but they sound like they want to be, down to biting his exact cadence and "experimenting" with the same eurotrash influences in the beats. And I don't even like Kanye.
Exile in Guyville (15th Anniversary)
[Liz Phair; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 9.6.
First of all, the above-linked review is one of the best and most heartfelt pieces I've ever read on Pitchfork, and I recommend reading through it.
Now if you'll permit me a little self-indulgent nostalgia of my own: I never got into this record. In fact, I always kind of hated it. More than anything else it seemed like the soundtrack to my near-complete inability to get laid (I could make out with the best of them, but often got picked off trying to stretch a triple) in high school. I was a 13 year-old 9th grader when Exile in Guyville came out, one of the youngest boys in a grade where the girls are light years beyond the boys in the maturity department.
I was full-on ensconced in the stomach-churning self-conscious teen angst (the fitting popular term) of bands like Nirvana, which was perfect for where my hormone-stuffed pipsqueak of a head was at. The girls I thought of as being on my wavelength and hence most wanted to make it with were onto stuff like The Lemonheads and Juliana Hatfield and Liz Phair. Liz Phair especially seemed unfair to me. Here are all these girls who won't give me the time of day because I don't have hair one on my little scrote, and I'm feeling weak and vulnerable but, you know, available, loving even: tender, and they're listening to this incredible over-it grown up tough girl who's singing about being a blow job queen, and in the same breath these 9th grade girls are complaining to ME about how some fucking douchebag junior won't even give THEM the time of day. UNPHAIR.
Of course I was being self-centered and idiotic like all teenagers, but at the time I really thought "What the fuck are these girls complaining about? What do they need to be tough for? They have it made. They could snap their fingers and I'd run through a plate glass window just for a kiss on the cheek, don't they get it? Fuck 'blow job queen,' I'll settle for just holding hands. I mean, what the fuck is going on?"
But being a girl in the 9th grade is no picnic either. I just didn't get it. And I didn't really want to. It took a couple of turns around the fucking girls over carousel when I was the douchebag junior until I started to get hip. That's the high school circle of life. Cruelty begets cruelty.
Listening to this now, it's giving me flashbacks, and it's showing me why I was crushing the hardest on the girls that were into this. It's a pretty amazing record to have float by when you're going through the 9th grade in 1993-94. Nobody was talking about this stuff. The girls I wasn't as into were pumping out Tori Amos and the Indigo Girls, which is totally flaccid compared to Exile in Guyville as far as reality-based female empowerment goes. But why pick nits, in 9th grade you should take all the empowerment you can lest you be separated to the wrong side of the self-esteem tracks. Liz Phair fans at least seemed open to the idea of fooling around, though. And they were sexy. They smoked cigarettes.
Plus Liz Phair was very non-PC at a time when political correctness was actually a social movement that people were embracing as the next way to be. If you wanted to get laid (and I mean anybody, not just high school) in the early 90's, you had to be prepared to spout an awful lot of rhetoric and be willing to listen to plenty of 4 Non Blondes while suffering through some extremely blue balls, or else you had to be a sufficiently bad enough boy to warrant the surrender of caution. There was a lot of caution in those days. Mountains of it. Liz Phair was somebody who had thrown it to the wind a few times and come out wiser in the bargain. God, I hated her for it. I was determined to follow the rhetoric and 4 Non Blondes strategy. I saw it as my only option, shrimp that I was. And here was Liz Phair, blowing that whole trip to smithereens.
I should have just joined. I essentially did, years later, but God do I ever have a heart full of hate for the 4 Non Blondes and the rest of their milquetoast feminism by rote set. I mean it's still hard to even laugh about how bad they are. I'm skipping the laughter and going straight to being upset just thinking about it. Yes really, over 4 Non Blondes. I don't know how else to put this, but they actually seemed REAL at the time, like they were 100% serious and not just a shitty band raking in money for a load of hot garbage. That's how polite everybody was being, like giving a shit about "What's Going On" was supposed to be a way of life. I should have just relaxed about the getting laid stuff and just actually listened to Liz Phair, even if I didn't like it, if only because A. it's not like I actually liked 4 Non Blondes anyway, and B. she was the real one. It would have done me wonders.
The more I think about this the more it's turning into time machine advice, heading into "if I ever have kids, I'm giving them Exile in Guyville on their 14th birthdays and telling them not to tell their mother so they'll think it's actually worth listening to" territory. It's the most honest, grown-up sex talk a kid could get: it's hard and it fucks you up, but of course it can be pretty hot too, and you're gonna have to learn about it sooner or later. No wonder those girls weren't interested in little wimpy me.
Anyway, I get reminded of all this stuff from listening to this album now. I still don't like it enough to actually want to listen to it, but I like it a lot more on a musical level than I did then, and as a statement both historical and timeless I appreciate the fuck out of it. It's just not for me, and probably never was. But it's one hell of a thing to have done anyway. Chris Dahlen is right. I admire it.
Ricardo Villalobos
Vasco EP Part 1
[Perlon; 2008]
Pitchfork gives it a 7.2.
Techno is not a valid form of music.
The Herbaliser
Same As It Never Was
[Studio !K7; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.
This sounds like the cutting edge of hip hop, 1996. Like I should be wearing Jnco Jeans, a fuzzy Kangol, and Gazelles right now.
Mike Patton
A Perfect Place OST
[Ipecac; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.9.
Oh man, they just decided that Exile in Guyville was enough, and then loaded the rest of this 5 pound day with 10 pounds of shit, didn't they?
Mike Patton is doing old timey and/or spooky music for a movie that I guarantee sucks, because the director was like "let's get Mike Patton, I love his work" when they were looking for somebody to do the original soundtrack. It probably has a ton of plot twists but you don't care about the characters, and it's probably loaded to the gills with style and technique without anything resembling substance, and all kinds of unnecessarily complicated edits and whiplash transitions, to the point where you can't follow the plot anymore, except instead of feeling challenged or interested, you're glad to be relieved of the burden of giving a shit, so you turn to whoever you're with and say "you wanna just go" and they're like "yes, THANK YOU" and then you have a lot of fun with the rest of your night making fun of how awful the movie was. Because that's Mike Patton's career if it was a movie. He's basically the Guy Ritchie of music.
Kidz in the Hall
The In Crowd
[Koch / Duck Down; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.5.
Nobody involved in this is Kanye, but they sound like they want to be, down to biting his exact cadence and "experimenting" with the same eurotrash influences in the beats. And I don't even like Kanye.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/20/08
Religious Knives
Resin
It's After Dark
[No Fun / Troubleman Unlimited; 2008]
Pitchfork gave them a 7.6 and a 6.9.
I wonder how often the Pitchfork people cheat. I often dash one of these off in a big hurry without actually listen to whatever it is I'm talking about. Hey, you can't like everything, and I'm pretty sure it's not even worth trying to. Very often I have no particular thoughts on the subject of either the music or Pitchfork's coverage of it. They say "this semi-good rock album gets a 7.2 out of 10" and I say "yes, for me too" and that's all anybody can say about the subject. I at least try to listen. But sometimes I don't. And the stakes are pretty low here anyway. Couldn't get lower, in fact.
Does that mean that the stakes are somehow high over at P-Fork? They aren't actually high, but I'm sure there's a lot of tightly wound people who treat it that way. Throw in the money involved in some of these acts and the fact that P-Fork has legions (?) of devoted, possibly mindless, followers, and I'm sure the contribs over there feel something akin to pressure to get things right. Which is more dayjob than rock, but what are you gonna do? There are several thousand minor music businesspeople whose livelihoods probably hinge on what mood somebody's in when they write a review for Pitchfork. That's probably why the tone of the music writing is usually so somber. They have people's mortgages in their hands. Nice people. Leeches, but still. You can't blame any of 'em. It beats workin'.
So even though their only job is to know things about what's going on in music and have an opinion about what's good that people can agree on or at least hazily see the merit of, I'm sure the job seems a lot more urgent than that. Mostly because there's money to be made in inflating the worth of such an enterprise to the point where it can be toppled and subsumed by savvy insiders with some back-end points hoping to line their pockets by joisting up the next Radiohead. You get the "indie" press in your pocket, you can sell a lot of records to a nation of condo owning end-result-of-urban-gentrification trendjumping wannabes (that I'm WAY cooler than, understand me? I RENT from an OLD LADY: I'm at the most a gentrification middle-man) based solely on "it" factor, even if the band you rep is a fairly straightforward shitty pop enterprise like Franz Ferdinand. So if you're Pitchfork, the odds are stacked sky high against keeping a cool head for too long.
But huge hindsight-is-20/20 whiffs on major acts (it was not entirely unreasonable to make a case for Franz Ferdinand and even Interpol at the time--we thought they might have been stepping stones to some sort of Strokes-based Velvet Underground DNA takeover of all of pop music, rather than just pop music eating all of us alive; it was mildly exciting in the moment and we got carried away) and insider money laundering aside, Pitchfork generally does ok as far as rock crit goes. They just, I think, cheat sometimes.
The boiler-plate template for these Pitchfork reviews is, roughly: share insider-sounding history of the band, gauge expectations for current release based on either previous releases or said history, postulate thesis about the release's ultimate effect in relation to those expectations, prove thesis using concrete examples from the release, hedge bets to show lack of bias, conclude. I don't know if that's cheating, but it sure feels like it sometimes. And I don't blame them, they have to listen to a lot of music. They HAVE to. For proof of urgency, they have about a million A&R reps and PR agents on the phone waiting with baited breath and probably a little implied payola in the form of ad sale bucks. I'd cheat. I'm cheating now, and my phone hasn't rung in hours.
But I wonder if they cheat. I know I do. If I find an angle, I'm off and running, and who cares if it has anything do to with the music (confession time: at this point I have not yet listened to Religious Knives' Resin or It's After Dark). The above-linked review of these two Religious Knives releases seems cheat-y. The cheating is most visible when the formula is at its most transparent, usually when the review is long on history and short on opinion. Or, as in the case of this one, when reviewer Marc Masters drops a little bomb like "Bernstein-- an unabashed fan of Neil Young and the Grateful Dead-- pours his guitar like syrup over pancakes." "Syrup over pancakes": shudder. But also the open sourcing of the Young and the Dead thing indicates that Masters is this guy's friend and knows first-hand how often Bernstein listens to Harvest. Or else Masters read about the Young and the Dead fandom of this obscure noise band's guitarist in some obscure fanzine and passed it off as common knowledge. Either of which indicates either obsessiveness or coolpoint hunting, and both are cheating.
The review is a cheat.
But it's not a swindle.
Now that I'm actually listening to Religious Knives, I'm glad this one got sneaked in there and even received the day's top billing. Even if they cheat (and again: I'm cheating right fucking now) Pitchfork at least slide some of this wonderful, half-assed go-nowhere pretentious druggy noise in with the rest of the up-for-consideration slop as an indication of, "Hey, this is also a part of our collective DNA, you fucking twats, it's not all marketable twee bands and cutesy-wutesy bedroom pop and tongue-in-cheek techno and earnest throaty yelping about loss and regret over indierock jugband accompaniment. Some of this stuff you have to stumble into your local terribleneighborhood artloft for because it's intentionally vague and annoying, and yes, even kind of (totally) sucks. But it's out there too, kids. Go forth and live it if you're curious and bold."
Of course that's quite possibly a part of a larger swindle, the "trust us, we're hip" token review. It's not like these Religious Knives guys are a totally inaccessible wall of ear-destroying noise or anything. They're more in the realm of too loose noodling, searching out the diaphanous border between trance-inducing and just boring, but at least without any overt attention to pop structure. It's not great, sure, and nobody's saying it's great, but it's at least there where it doesn't have to be. If that's who Pitchfork cheats for, even if their reasoning is a part of a larger "hey, we get it" con, then all is not lost.
Good for them. Anyway, this semi-good rock album gets a 7.2 out of 10. Yes, for me too.
My Brightest Diamond
A Thousand Shark's Teeth
[Asthmatic Kitty; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.1.
What is it about musicianship and tastelessness that makes the two of them go hand-in-hand so often? Is it just me? Do I begrudge people for having talent in the first place, or just for wantonly displaying it?
Is it a more objective phenomenon, something more like how incredible technical talent is less rare than a singular vision for how such talent as one possesses should be harnessed? If so, what happened to all those technically gifted musicians (you know the type: Dave Matthews Band members, all of prog rock, Eric Clapton, etc.) to make them end up sounding so awful? Was it money? Lack of motivation? Passionlessness? Abusive parents who listened exclusively to Barry Manilow? Svengali boyfriends who were super into Sevendust? Talent only going so far?
What is it? You know? WHAT IS IT?
Anyway, this is a band fronted by a classically-trained opera singer. Their songs suck.
Dan Friel
Ghost Town
[Important; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
In retrospect, the guitar sound from the first :30 or so of The Strokes' "Last Nite" in 2001 caused all kinds of trouble. The Strokes were a simple rock band (that guitar sound is incredibly simple elemental rock) when we needed simple rock, and they were huge almost immediately. So then people took the simple things they did, including that specific guitar sound and simple rhythm, as being "the way to make it," tightened the vintage jeans on it, and repeated it until it became the pied piper's call to gullible neuternative rock fans.
But almost nobody took the fact of stripped down rock simplicity itself and ran with it. Including the Strokes themselves. They just repeated the guitar sound, processed through 48 track digital ProTools studio techniques. It was a huge disappointment. "Last Nite" was/is a fundamentally good rock song. The verses had a bounce and, dare I say, a swing to them. Julian Casablancas even looked like Richard Hell, for crying out loud. What a waste it is that returns ended up diminishing rather than building into something awesome after those guys came through.
Not that this thought has anything to do with Dan Friel, really, it just popped in there while I was listening to this one song, "Buzzards," and I think it's accurate. "Buzzards" has that exact guitar sound in it, buried under the "harsh" electric drivel that Dan Friel is dishing out. Listen for yourself, you'll know what I'm talking about. The rest of this album is all the "harsh" (read: annoying) electronic drivel without the Strokes-by-numbers this-is-the-sound-of-guitar-excitement® basis.
But it's strange to me that that sound would rear its ugly head even here, in some guy's "look how little I give a fuck, I'm avant-garde" electro-spazz odyssey from 2008. Enough that it'd give me pause and be the most interesting thing about this. And the electro-spazz itself is too complex. Meaning everything I've heard from this is trying at least two things at once ("cute" and "brutal," "loud" and "pretty," "poppy" and "fucked up"), which is a pretty see-thru compositional attention-getter trick. So I've got to run with it if I've got a thought here.
I'm cheating a lot today.
Stars Like Fleas
The Ken Burns Effect
[Hometapes; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
To jump off from what I was saying about The Strokes and Dan Friel, I think just about every creative effort does best when it's simple. Do the one thing that you do. Do only that thing. Learn it, do it well. Find a way to make something that's that. And if you succeed, you will end up making something that only you could possibly have made. Don't shoot for "I want to do something nobody else has done." Shoot for "I want to do something that's so much what I do, that nobody else could do it." And "I do everything" is a copout bet-hedge. It's not going to work. It's not practicable. You're never gonna find a way to do everything. And you don't do everything. Sorry, but there are some things you don't do.
These guys do everything. They do their extreme fucking best at it in a quixotic way that's almost admirable, but it doesn't work.
Twine
Violets
[Ghostly; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
Here's another thing I put on and then forgot was on and now I feel better because it's over. Maybe (probably) this is just a shitty example of it, but I do not understand the point of ambient music. You could save a lot of time and effort by just going someplace that's quiet. That goes for both listeners and musicians.
Resin
It's After Dark
[No Fun / Troubleman Unlimited; 2008]
Pitchfork gave them a 7.6 and a 6.9.
I wonder how often the Pitchfork people cheat. I often dash one of these off in a big hurry without actually listen to whatever it is I'm talking about. Hey, you can't like everything, and I'm pretty sure it's not even worth trying to. Very often I have no particular thoughts on the subject of either the music or Pitchfork's coverage of it. They say "this semi-good rock album gets a 7.2 out of 10" and I say "yes, for me too" and that's all anybody can say about the subject. I at least try to listen. But sometimes I don't. And the stakes are pretty low here anyway. Couldn't get lower, in fact.
Does that mean that the stakes are somehow high over at P-Fork? They aren't actually high, but I'm sure there's a lot of tightly wound people who treat it that way. Throw in the money involved in some of these acts and the fact that P-Fork has legions (?) of devoted, possibly mindless, followers, and I'm sure the contribs over there feel something akin to pressure to get things right. Which is more dayjob than rock, but what are you gonna do? There are several thousand minor music businesspeople whose livelihoods probably hinge on what mood somebody's in when they write a review for Pitchfork. That's probably why the tone of the music writing is usually so somber. They have people's mortgages in their hands. Nice people. Leeches, but still. You can't blame any of 'em. It beats workin'.
So even though their only job is to know things about what's going on in music and have an opinion about what's good that people can agree on or at least hazily see the merit of, I'm sure the job seems a lot more urgent than that. Mostly because there's money to be made in inflating the worth of such an enterprise to the point where it can be toppled and subsumed by savvy insiders with some back-end points hoping to line their pockets by joisting up the next Radiohead. You get the "indie" press in your pocket, you can sell a lot of records to a nation of condo owning end-result-of-urban-gentrification trendjumping wannabes (that I'm WAY cooler than, understand me? I RENT from an OLD LADY: I'm at the most a gentrification middle-man) based solely on "it" factor, even if the band you rep is a fairly straightforward shitty pop enterprise like Franz Ferdinand. So if you're Pitchfork, the odds are stacked sky high against keeping a cool head for too long.
But huge hindsight-is-20/20 whiffs on major acts (it was not entirely unreasonable to make a case for Franz Ferdinand and even Interpol at the time--we thought they might have been stepping stones to some sort of Strokes-based Velvet Underground DNA takeover of all of pop music, rather than just pop music eating all of us alive; it was mildly exciting in the moment and we got carried away) and insider money laundering aside, Pitchfork generally does ok as far as rock crit goes. They just, I think, cheat sometimes.
The boiler-plate template for these Pitchfork reviews is, roughly: share insider-sounding history of the band, gauge expectations for current release based on either previous releases or said history, postulate thesis about the release's ultimate effect in relation to those expectations, prove thesis using concrete examples from the release, hedge bets to show lack of bias, conclude. I don't know if that's cheating, but it sure feels like it sometimes. And I don't blame them, they have to listen to a lot of music. They HAVE to. For proof of urgency, they have about a million A&R reps and PR agents on the phone waiting with baited breath and probably a little implied payola in the form of ad sale bucks. I'd cheat. I'm cheating now, and my phone hasn't rung in hours.
But I wonder if they cheat. I know I do. If I find an angle, I'm off and running, and who cares if it has anything do to with the music (confession time: at this point I have not yet listened to Religious Knives' Resin or It's After Dark). The above-linked review of these two Religious Knives releases seems cheat-y. The cheating is most visible when the formula is at its most transparent, usually when the review is long on history and short on opinion. Or, as in the case of this one, when reviewer Marc Masters drops a little bomb like "Bernstein-- an unabashed fan of Neil Young and the Grateful Dead-- pours his guitar like syrup over pancakes." "Syrup over pancakes": shudder. But also the open sourcing of the Young and the Dead thing indicates that Masters is this guy's friend and knows first-hand how often Bernstein listens to Harvest. Or else Masters read about the Young and the Dead fandom of this obscure noise band's guitarist in some obscure fanzine and passed it off as common knowledge. Either of which indicates either obsessiveness or coolpoint hunting, and both are cheating.
The review is a cheat.
But it's not a swindle.
Now that I'm actually listening to Religious Knives, I'm glad this one got sneaked in there and even received the day's top billing. Even if they cheat (and again: I'm cheating right fucking now) Pitchfork at least slide some of this wonderful, half-assed go-nowhere pretentious druggy noise in with the rest of the up-for-consideration slop as an indication of, "Hey, this is also a part of our collective DNA, you fucking twats, it's not all marketable twee bands and cutesy-wutesy bedroom pop and tongue-in-cheek techno and earnest throaty yelping about loss and regret over indierock jugband accompaniment. Some of this stuff you have to stumble into your local terribleneighborhood artloft for because it's intentionally vague and annoying, and yes, even kind of (totally) sucks. But it's out there too, kids. Go forth and live it if you're curious and bold."
Of course that's quite possibly a part of a larger swindle, the "trust us, we're hip" token review. It's not like these Religious Knives guys are a totally inaccessible wall of ear-destroying noise or anything. They're more in the realm of too loose noodling, searching out the diaphanous border between trance-inducing and just boring, but at least without any overt attention to pop structure. It's not great, sure, and nobody's saying it's great, but it's at least there where it doesn't have to be. If that's who Pitchfork cheats for, even if their reasoning is a part of a larger "hey, we get it" con, then all is not lost.
Good for them. Anyway, this semi-good rock album gets a 7.2 out of 10. Yes, for me too.
My Brightest Diamond
A Thousand Shark's Teeth
[Asthmatic Kitty; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.1.
What is it about musicianship and tastelessness that makes the two of them go hand-in-hand so often? Is it just me? Do I begrudge people for having talent in the first place, or just for wantonly displaying it?
Is it a more objective phenomenon, something more like how incredible technical talent is less rare than a singular vision for how such talent as one possesses should be harnessed? If so, what happened to all those technically gifted musicians (you know the type: Dave Matthews Band members, all of prog rock, Eric Clapton, etc.) to make them end up sounding so awful? Was it money? Lack of motivation? Passionlessness? Abusive parents who listened exclusively to Barry Manilow? Svengali boyfriends who were super into Sevendust? Talent only going so far?
What is it? You know? WHAT IS IT?
Anyway, this is a band fronted by a classically-trained opera singer. Their songs suck.
Dan Friel
Ghost Town
[Important; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
In retrospect, the guitar sound from the first :30 or so of The Strokes' "Last Nite" in 2001 caused all kinds of trouble. The Strokes were a simple rock band (that guitar sound is incredibly simple elemental rock) when we needed simple rock, and they were huge almost immediately. So then people took the simple things they did, including that specific guitar sound and simple rhythm, as being "the way to make it," tightened the vintage jeans on it, and repeated it until it became the pied piper's call to gullible neuternative rock fans.
But almost nobody took the fact of stripped down rock simplicity itself and ran with it. Including the Strokes themselves. They just repeated the guitar sound, processed through 48 track digital ProTools studio techniques. It was a huge disappointment. "Last Nite" was/is a fundamentally good rock song. The verses had a bounce and, dare I say, a swing to them. Julian Casablancas even looked like Richard Hell, for crying out loud. What a waste it is that returns ended up diminishing rather than building into something awesome after those guys came through.
Not that this thought has anything to do with Dan Friel, really, it just popped in there while I was listening to this one song, "Buzzards," and I think it's accurate. "Buzzards" has that exact guitar sound in it, buried under the "harsh" electric drivel that Dan Friel is dishing out. Listen for yourself, you'll know what I'm talking about. The rest of this album is all the "harsh" (read: annoying) electronic drivel without the Strokes-by-numbers this-is-the-sound-of-guitar-excitement® basis.
But it's strange to me that that sound would rear its ugly head even here, in some guy's "look how little I give a fuck, I'm avant-garde" electro-spazz odyssey from 2008. Enough that it'd give me pause and be the most interesting thing about this. And the electro-spazz itself is too complex. Meaning everything I've heard from this is trying at least two things at once ("cute" and "brutal," "loud" and "pretty," "poppy" and "fucked up"), which is a pretty see-thru compositional attention-getter trick. So I've got to run with it if I've got a thought here.
I'm cheating a lot today.
Stars Like Fleas
The Ken Burns Effect
[Hometapes; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
To jump off from what I was saying about The Strokes and Dan Friel, I think just about every creative effort does best when it's simple. Do the one thing that you do. Do only that thing. Learn it, do it well. Find a way to make something that's that. And if you succeed, you will end up making something that only you could possibly have made. Don't shoot for "I want to do something nobody else has done." Shoot for "I want to do something that's so much what I do, that nobody else could do it." And "I do everything" is a copout bet-hedge. It's not going to work. It's not practicable. You're never gonna find a way to do everything. And you don't do everything. Sorry, but there are some things you don't do.
These guys do everything. They do their extreme fucking best at it in a quixotic way that's almost admirable, but it doesn't work.
Twine
Violets
[Ghostly; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
Here's another thing I put on and then forgot was on and now I feel better because it's over. Maybe (probably) this is just a shitty example of it, but I do not understand the point of ambient music. You could save a lot of time and effort by just going someplace that's quiet. That goes for both listeners and musicians.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/19/08
Scott Kelly
The Wake
Steve Von Till
A Grave Is a Grim Horse
[Neurot; 2008]
Pitchfork gave them a 6.5 and a 7.5.
So these two guys are grouped together because they're both from the metal band Neurosis. This is solo stuff in the late-career I'm an old man now and I'm tired of the world and I sound like Nick Cave vein. It's like this except good. I don't know what to say about it. If you're into medium good lyrics and dark-sounding gravelly voices, and/or you're into metal but you're too old to headbang without fucking up your back for like a week, this stuff is for you.
Tilly and the Wall
O
[Team Love; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
Put it this way: there's a reason why these songs are all available on YouTube, and it's probably not because people love them.
I know it's wrong of me, but I immediately started having very dismissive and sexist thoughts about the three women in this band. They're lookers. They look too good to rock, in fact. They sound like they look too good to rock, too. And they're from Omaha. I have a theory about girls from Omaha. It is not a polite theory, except insofar as it involves a prediction of greatness and also the single nicest thing you can do to a man. I feel gross about the fact that strangers on YouTube in a cutesy indie band are making me think about this theory with sufficient enthusiasm as to experience a heart palpitation upon reading that these people are from Omaha. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking of all manner of horribly pornographic ideas right now.
It sucks because now I have to face the fact that I'm capable of being turned on by a "girl band," and not a particularly great one, either. I hate it. The tapdancing gimmick, too. It's like they're just being so cute and fun and friendly and silly and great, and that's tapping into my inner monster and making me all pervy, like a gross old man who's on the outside rather than on the inside where it's just good fun in the name of fun for young people. It's making me feel like a monster. And worse: old. Out of touch. Like I get that I don't get it. Like if these people were my friends and me was around, I'd feel uncomfortable and hope that me would just go away. God, I have never been more angry at my boner. It's like as much as I'm mad at my boner, I'm equally as mad at these people for causing such an unhealthy "urge to destroy" style boner. This must be what child molesters feel like.
Luckily, my brain is screaming out in agony: "The only female musicians it's ok to have a crush on are really good drummers in bands that actually rock! This is not ok! This is like reading Manga porn! If you feel your boat being floated by this, skip it, go watch some regular porn, calm yourself down if you have to, but don't let your boner tell you about your taste in music! Listen to the song without looking at the video. You don't like this. Remember: you don't like this. Sure it's fun and bouncy and girly, but you don't like that as much as you like oogling these young ladies, you sicko. Get a grip. You're still too young to fall for that whole Suicide Girls thing. Those girls are all crazy and gross. Remember that time you hung out with that waitress who wanted to be a Suicide Girl? She was sad and weird. They're all probably like that, and the reason why is their constant exposure to people who think they look like that on purpose as some kind of a come-on for rapers rather than just being slightly confused but good-looking regular people who just happen to have been born with those cheekbones. Don't be like one of those people who makes these women crazy without them knowing why. Relax! In fact, reminder alert: you have a wonderful, beautiful girlfriend already. Call her."
Ok. Thanks, brain.
Now here's the other thing. Is it ok to assume that a band sucks simply because the people in it are too good looking? Yes, I think so. If it was a bunch of pretty boys, I'd think the same thing. I'm not saying that a bunch of lookers can't possibly rock, but I am saying that true rock is ugly. You have to be willing to make yourself ugly for it, or at least not care how you look. Tilly and the Wall do not appear to be willing to do so.
You know what these people are? They're rockteases. No wonder I was letting myself get all worked up. These people are professionals. Or at least they're trying their damndest to get out of Omaha. Which is part of my theory, actually.
Sorry. I am genuinely ashamed of myself. Thanks a lot, Tilly and the Wall. I hope you guys have to stay in Omaha and be a stalwarts of the Omaha rock scene for the rest of your lives. That would serve them right.
The Notwist
The Devil, You + Me
[Domino; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.7.
I always kind of thought that The Notwist were like an electroclash band. Maybe that's because the only time I ever heard them was in this one girl's car. She wore striped socks on her wrists, that kind of a thing. I just assumed she was super into electroclash. She probably didn't even know what it was, though, and she just saw striped socks on the wrist in a magazine somewhere and decided to go for it. Maybe that's why electroclash never went anywhere. For a while there it was like "Yeah, maybe THIS is what we're doing" and then it just went away. I don't really know why, it was fun at the time. Maybe it was because September 11th happened and we were all sitting around looking like slackjawed idiots with striped socks on our wrists.
Anyway, The Notwist, to their credit, are not an electroclash band. I think I was thinking of Numbers. Less to The Notwist's credit, though, they're actually worse than an electroclash band. They're moody electronic sad bastard music. I'm glad I sorted that out in my brain, and I can just go back to not giving a shit about these guys.
The Ting Tings
We Started Nothing
[Sony; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 3.8.
I have a feeling I'm going to agree with Pitchfork on this one. I hate it when they trash something and I agree with it, and I hate it even more that I'm more likely to disagree with them when they say something is good than I am when they say that something sucks. But maybe that's fine. I do have two years of hindsight working for me, and very few things are as good as they might seem on first listen.
Oh yeah. For sure. I hate it. It took like 3 seconds to know.
What else? Well, I guess I can take some comfort in the fact that I have a total non-boner for this. That's good. If I'm gonna be a perv throughout my 30's, and the jury's still out on that, at least I'm gonna be a perv for more homemade cutesy stuff instead of biting on whatever approximation-of-sexy fishing lure Sony records is throwing at me. I mean I get that that's still a demeaning way of thinking about a person who's just doing a thing, but this time there's no argument that the thing being done is shitty, and also that lady knew what she was getting into when that dress got picked out from the wardrobe department.
It's the difference between amateur porn and professional porn, I guess. As gross and manipulative and still terrible as amateur porn is, at least you're not falling for some completely false faketitted moanmonster. If I can't suppress my prurient interest, at least do me the favor of approximating some kind of intimacy-based authenticity so that my fantasy world does not place me the role of simpering idiot John with money to burn on a hooker. I'm not into that. I like regular-style fun for free. Nice try, Sony.
Auburn Lull
Begin Civil Twilight
[Darla; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.4.
These guys save themselves from instant pretentious ambient music oblivion by bothering to have vocals. I feel like that's a rare enough feat to be mildly impressed by it. I was all set to go "oh no" and just be done with today, and then the vocals kicked in. They're nothing special, they're just there enough to remind you that you're listening to a band and not a museum exhibit. Which in turn is enough to remind you that it's ok to be on drugs, which is pleasant, especially if you're on drugs. Drugs make you paranoid sometimes. And so do museum exhibits.
The Wake
Steve Von Till
A Grave Is a Grim Horse
[Neurot; 2008]
Pitchfork gave them a 6.5 and a 7.5.
So these two guys are grouped together because they're both from the metal band Neurosis. This is solo stuff in the late-career I'm an old man now and I'm tired of the world and I sound like Nick Cave vein. It's like this except good. I don't know what to say about it. If you're into medium good lyrics and dark-sounding gravelly voices, and/or you're into metal but you're too old to headbang without fucking up your back for like a week, this stuff is for you.
Tilly and the Wall
O
[Team Love; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
Put it this way: there's a reason why these songs are all available on YouTube, and it's probably not because people love them.
I know it's wrong of me, but I immediately started having very dismissive and sexist thoughts about the three women in this band. They're lookers. They look too good to rock, in fact. They sound like they look too good to rock, too. And they're from Omaha. I have a theory about girls from Omaha. It is not a polite theory, except insofar as it involves a prediction of greatness and also the single nicest thing you can do to a man. I feel gross about the fact that strangers on YouTube in a cutesy indie band are making me think about this theory with sufficient enthusiasm as to experience a heart palpitation upon reading that these people are from Omaha. As a matter of fact, I'm thinking of all manner of horribly pornographic ideas right now.
It sucks because now I have to face the fact that I'm capable of being turned on by a "girl band," and not a particularly great one, either. I hate it. The tapdancing gimmick, too. It's like they're just being so cute and fun and friendly and silly and great, and that's tapping into my inner monster and making me all pervy, like a gross old man who's on the outside rather than on the inside where it's just good fun in the name of fun for young people. It's making me feel like a monster. And worse: old. Out of touch. Like I get that I don't get it. Like if these people were my friends and me was around, I'd feel uncomfortable and hope that me would just go away. God, I have never been more angry at my boner. It's like as much as I'm mad at my boner, I'm equally as mad at these people for causing such an unhealthy "urge to destroy" style boner. This must be what child molesters feel like.
Luckily, my brain is screaming out in agony: "The only female musicians it's ok to have a crush on are really good drummers in bands that actually rock! This is not ok! This is like reading Manga porn! If you feel your boat being floated by this, skip it, go watch some regular porn, calm yourself down if you have to, but don't let your boner tell you about your taste in music! Listen to the song without looking at the video. You don't like this. Remember: you don't like this. Sure it's fun and bouncy and girly, but you don't like that as much as you like oogling these young ladies, you sicko. Get a grip. You're still too young to fall for that whole Suicide Girls thing. Those girls are all crazy and gross. Remember that time you hung out with that waitress who wanted to be a Suicide Girl? She was sad and weird. They're all probably like that, and the reason why is their constant exposure to people who think they look like that on purpose as some kind of a come-on for rapers rather than just being slightly confused but good-looking regular people who just happen to have been born with those cheekbones. Don't be like one of those people who makes these women crazy without them knowing why. Relax! In fact, reminder alert: you have a wonderful, beautiful girlfriend already. Call her."
Ok. Thanks, brain.
Now here's the other thing. Is it ok to assume that a band sucks simply because the people in it are too good looking? Yes, I think so. If it was a bunch of pretty boys, I'd think the same thing. I'm not saying that a bunch of lookers can't possibly rock, but I am saying that true rock is ugly. You have to be willing to make yourself ugly for it, or at least not care how you look. Tilly and the Wall do not appear to be willing to do so.
You know what these people are? They're rockteases. No wonder I was letting myself get all worked up. These people are professionals. Or at least they're trying their damndest to get out of Omaha. Which is part of my theory, actually.
Sorry. I am genuinely ashamed of myself. Thanks a lot, Tilly and the Wall. I hope you guys have to stay in Omaha and be a stalwarts of the Omaha rock scene for the rest of your lives. That would serve them right.
The Notwist
The Devil, You + Me
[Domino; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.7.
I always kind of thought that The Notwist were like an electroclash band. Maybe that's because the only time I ever heard them was in this one girl's car. She wore striped socks on her wrists, that kind of a thing. I just assumed she was super into electroclash. She probably didn't even know what it was, though, and she just saw striped socks on the wrist in a magazine somewhere and decided to go for it. Maybe that's why electroclash never went anywhere. For a while there it was like "Yeah, maybe THIS is what we're doing" and then it just went away. I don't really know why, it was fun at the time. Maybe it was because September 11th happened and we were all sitting around looking like slackjawed idiots with striped socks on our wrists.
Anyway, The Notwist, to their credit, are not an electroclash band. I think I was thinking of Numbers. Less to The Notwist's credit, though, they're actually worse than an electroclash band. They're moody electronic sad bastard music. I'm glad I sorted that out in my brain, and I can just go back to not giving a shit about these guys.
The Ting Tings
We Started Nothing
[Sony; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 3.8.
I have a feeling I'm going to agree with Pitchfork on this one. I hate it when they trash something and I agree with it, and I hate it even more that I'm more likely to disagree with them when they say something is good than I am when they say that something sucks. But maybe that's fine. I do have two years of hindsight working for me, and very few things are as good as they might seem on first listen.
Oh yeah. For sure. I hate it. It took like 3 seconds to know.
What else? Well, I guess I can take some comfort in the fact that I have a total non-boner for this. That's good. If I'm gonna be a perv throughout my 30's, and the jury's still out on that, at least I'm gonna be a perv for more homemade cutesy stuff instead of biting on whatever approximation-of-sexy fishing lure Sony records is throwing at me. I mean I get that that's still a demeaning way of thinking about a person who's just doing a thing, but this time there's no argument that the thing being done is shitty, and also that lady knew what she was getting into when that dress got picked out from the wardrobe department.
It's the difference between amateur porn and professional porn, I guess. As gross and manipulative and still terrible as amateur porn is, at least you're not falling for some completely false faketitted moanmonster. If I can't suppress my prurient interest, at least do me the favor of approximating some kind of intimacy-based authenticity so that my fantasy world does not place me the role of simpering idiot John with money to burn on a hooker. I'm not into that. I like regular-style fun for free. Nice try, Sony.
Auburn Lull
Begin Civil Twilight
[Darla; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.4.
These guys save themselves from instant pretentious ambient music oblivion by bothering to have vocals. I feel like that's a rare enough feat to be mildly impressed by it. I was all set to go "oh no" and just be done with today, and then the vocals kicked in. They're nothing special, they're just there enough to remind you that you're listening to a band and not a museum exhibit. Which in turn is enough to remind you that it's ok to be on drugs, which is pleasant, especially if you're on drugs. Drugs make you paranoid sometimes. And so do museum exhibits.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/18/08
Silver Jews
Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
[Drag City; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
Sometimes you have to cut somebody off in order to still respect them in the morning. For Dave Berman, that means he didn't do anything but "Punks In The Beerlight" after Bright Flight. Sorry Dave. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here without ruining everything.
James Blackshaw
Litany of Echoes
[Tompkins Square; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.3.
You know that one friend you had who was super into rock music, but all of this cornball hair metal stuff, but that was fine because you thought he was cool and anyway he was kind of a badass because he smoked cigarettes. And then he started dicking around with a used electric guitar, and then all of a sudden instead of just hanging out and being a badass, you'd wind up just sitting there bored out of your mind in his basement while he tried to pick through the riff from "Smoke on the Water," and after you got tired of playing ball in cup and started trying to find something to read through while he did it, he stopped to show you an interview with Jimmy Page that he had in an issue of Guitarist Magazine, and you were like "oh no, I lost him" and you stopped being friends with the kid because he went from semi-badass with kind of trashy taste to being a full on axe-wielding hero-worshipping bummer?
That was a sad day.
Imagine if he wasn't even a badass in the first place, though. Like instead of listening to cheesy hair metal bands, you spent your time listening to classical music, and then when the guitar-centric conversion happened it was to John Fahey and Leo Kottke stuff. I think that's what happened to James Blackshaw, and somewhere there's a kid from his neighborhood who drifted away from him around 6th grade, and that kid, now grown, is reluctantly agreeing to James Blackshaw's Facebook friend request before unfriending him over the constant tour updates.
Orchestra Baobab
Made in Dakar
[Unknown; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
I was raised Unitarian Universalist. It was nice enough. If you're not familiar, it's a church where you don't have to believe any one thing, except you have to respect everybody else's beliefs. It's basically a support group for ex-hippies where mediocrity is rewarded and all points of view are listened to. Oh, and they super love it if you're gay or non-white, which happened occasionally in my congregation, usually whenever some gay people decided they wanted to live in the suburbs instead of the city, and sometimes even some black people got tired of being soulfully yelled at about Jesus by an alcoholic philanderer who called himself a man of God.
Anyway, I can remember one of the exact moments I knew I wasn't going to be a lifelong practitioner of Unitarian Universalism (I guess since there's no real dogma, I still am a practitioner, I just don't go to church). It was when I was 17 and The Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack just came out. My church has a fundraising auction every year. Basically, people host dinners and events, and you auction on the right to go to them, and then the money goes to the church. And in the meantime you have a bunch of theme parties and dinner events attended by a bunch of these doughy middle aged ex-hippies. Anyhow, one of the events was "Salsa Dancing all night long at Tom and Anne's house," and the auction catalog description said something like "if you haven't heard Buena Vista Social Club yet, this is your chance!"
And my 17 year old brain instantly pictured a culture-theft sexorgy full of pasty white cellulite thumping against itself at Tom and Anne's house, all set to the exotic congo-driven Caribbeat of some Afro-Cuban jazz. You know how American intellectual white women like to think of themselves as being exotic. Put on some Latin-infused thing they can awkwardly bellydance to while wearing some "outrageous" red flowy garment, and it really puts a bean in their canoe. If you can withstand the assualt on your eyeballs and sensibilities, that sweet, sweet post-historectomy 50-something honeypot is all yours. All you have to do is stay nearby and try not to eat too heavily beforehand. Ugh. It was probably the single most non-boner inducing thought I ever had at age 17.
I realize that is not directly the fault of the Buena Vista Social Club. Or maybe it is. Maybe I should be mad at those dudes for being such horny motherfuckers that they can't help but set all of our aging Unitarian Universalist women ablaze as unintended collateral damage of their international war against not getting laid. I guess I can't pin Tom and Anne's complete lack of shame on them, though.
These guys are about the same deal. They're Senegalese Afro-Cuban-Caribbean guys from the 70's who reformed once, I imagine, Europe's horny white women demanded it. I am picturing Dutch women especially for some reason. The kind that are always talking about feeling "shexy" in one of those old fuckyoga seminar episodes of "Real Sex."
Call me an old fashioned hillbilly, but the only horniness-inducing dance I'll be willing to participate in once I go north of age 50 is square dancing. And whoever I've got on my arm better damn well accept it. You want exotic, go fuck around with one of those Cuban guys. Just don't come crying to me when they ditch you for some young senorita, which they will soon's they get the chance, the horny devils. Faithfulness is not exotic, but that's what I have to offer. I'm an old fashioned American white faithful guy, and I think you're a beautiful woman. But I also think you're making a damn fool out of yourself with all this Afro-Cuban stuff. Course that's just my opinion, last I checked it didn't count for a whole hell of a lot around here, least of all when it's of the "I love you" variety. And if you really love me, you won't ask me to change by forcing me to do something that's not me, like salsa dancing all night long at Tom and Anne's house. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm out of PBR and I still got a lot on my mind. Buuuuuuurp.
Maybe that's not as sexy as this stuff, but it'll do in a pinch, ladies. Amiright?
Ladies? Shit. Looks like I'm signing up for salsa classes.
The Presets
Apocalypso
[Modular; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.8.
I can't tell if this is "techno so big it has no choice but to be a joke" or "a joke so big it has no choice but to be techno."
The M's
Real Close Ones
[Polyvinyl; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.
It's weird that I kind of want to rip on these guys. They already broke up. What am I gonna do, discourage them?
Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea
[Drag City; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
Sometimes you have to cut somebody off in order to still respect them in the morning. For Dave Berman, that means he didn't do anything but "Punks In The Beerlight" after Bright Flight. Sorry Dave. You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here without ruining everything.
James Blackshaw
Litany of Echoes
[Tompkins Square; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.3.
You know that one friend you had who was super into rock music, but all of this cornball hair metal stuff, but that was fine because you thought he was cool and anyway he was kind of a badass because he smoked cigarettes. And then he started dicking around with a used electric guitar, and then all of a sudden instead of just hanging out and being a badass, you'd wind up just sitting there bored out of your mind in his basement while he tried to pick through the riff from "Smoke on the Water," and after you got tired of playing ball in cup and started trying to find something to read through while he did it, he stopped to show you an interview with Jimmy Page that he had in an issue of Guitarist Magazine, and you were like "oh no, I lost him" and you stopped being friends with the kid because he went from semi-badass with kind of trashy taste to being a full on axe-wielding hero-worshipping bummer?
That was a sad day.
Imagine if he wasn't even a badass in the first place, though. Like instead of listening to cheesy hair metal bands, you spent your time listening to classical music, and then when the guitar-centric conversion happened it was to John Fahey and Leo Kottke stuff. I think that's what happened to James Blackshaw, and somewhere there's a kid from his neighborhood who drifted away from him around 6th grade, and that kid, now grown, is reluctantly agreeing to James Blackshaw's Facebook friend request before unfriending him over the constant tour updates.
Orchestra Baobab
Made in Dakar
[Unknown; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
I was raised Unitarian Universalist. It was nice enough. If you're not familiar, it's a church where you don't have to believe any one thing, except you have to respect everybody else's beliefs. It's basically a support group for ex-hippies where mediocrity is rewarded and all points of view are listened to. Oh, and they super love it if you're gay or non-white, which happened occasionally in my congregation, usually whenever some gay people decided they wanted to live in the suburbs instead of the city, and sometimes even some black people got tired of being soulfully yelled at about Jesus by an alcoholic philanderer who called himself a man of God.
Anyway, I can remember one of the exact moments I knew I wasn't going to be a lifelong practitioner of Unitarian Universalism (I guess since there's no real dogma, I still am a practitioner, I just don't go to church). It was when I was 17 and The Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack just came out. My church has a fundraising auction every year. Basically, people host dinners and events, and you auction on the right to go to them, and then the money goes to the church. And in the meantime you have a bunch of theme parties and dinner events attended by a bunch of these doughy middle aged ex-hippies. Anyhow, one of the events was "Salsa Dancing all night long at Tom and Anne's house," and the auction catalog description said something like "if you haven't heard Buena Vista Social Club yet, this is your chance!"
And my 17 year old brain instantly pictured a culture-theft sexorgy full of pasty white cellulite thumping against itself at Tom and Anne's house, all set to the exotic congo-driven Caribbeat of some Afro-Cuban jazz. You know how American intellectual white women like to think of themselves as being exotic. Put on some Latin-infused thing they can awkwardly bellydance to while wearing some "outrageous" red flowy garment, and it really puts a bean in their canoe. If you can withstand the assualt on your eyeballs and sensibilities, that sweet, sweet post-historectomy 50-something honeypot is all yours. All you have to do is stay nearby and try not to eat too heavily beforehand. Ugh. It was probably the single most non-boner inducing thought I ever had at age 17.
I realize that is not directly the fault of the Buena Vista Social Club. Or maybe it is. Maybe I should be mad at those dudes for being such horny motherfuckers that they can't help but set all of our aging Unitarian Universalist women ablaze as unintended collateral damage of their international war against not getting laid. I guess I can't pin Tom and Anne's complete lack of shame on them, though.
These guys are about the same deal. They're Senegalese Afro-Cuban-Caribbean guys from the 70's who reformed once, I imagine, Europe's horny white women demanded it. I am picturing Dutch women especially for some reason. The kind that are always talking about feeling "shexy" in one of those old fuckyoga seminar episodes of "Real Sex."
Call me an old fashioned hillbilly, but the only horniness-inducing dance I'll be willing to participate in once I go north of age 50 is square dancing. And whoever I've got on my arm better damn well accept it. You want exotic, go fuck around with one of those Cuban guys. Just don't come crying to me when they ditch you for some young senorita, which they will soon's they get the chance, the horny devils. Faithfulness is not exotic, but that's what I have to offer. I'm an old fashioned American white faithful guy, and I think you're a beautiful woman. But I also think you're making a damn fool out of yourself with all this Afro-Cuban stuff. Course that's just my opinion, last I checked it didn't count for a whole hell of a lot around here, least of all when it's of the "I love you" variety. And if you really love me, you won't ask me to change by forcing me to do something that's not me, like salsa dancing all night long at Tom and Anne's house. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm out of PBR and I still got a lot on my mind. Buuuuuuurp.
Maybe that's not as sexy as this stuff, but it'll do in a pinch, ladies. Amiright?
Ladies? Shit. Looks like I'm signing up for salsa classes.
The Presets
Apocalypso
[Modular; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.8.
I can't tell if this is "techno so big it has no choice but to be a joke" or "a joke so big it has no choice but to be techno."
The M's
Real Close Ones
[Polyvinyl; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.
It's weird that I kind of want to rip on these guys. They already broke up. What am I gonna do, discourage them?
Monday, June 21, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/17/08
Wolf Parade
At Mount Zoomer
[Sub Pop; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.7.
Last night I was walking home from the grocery store, and there was a young woman sitting on the balcony of an apartment building in my neighborhood screamtalking to a friend. I hate screamtalking. It gives me the willies. It's a combination of being embarrassed for the (often) young person who's partaking, and anger at having my ears commandeered by a 20 year old's loud ruminations on the nature of guy and girl relationships, spoken with the urgency and authority of a national address.
But I get it. It's practice. That's how these people think you're supposed to sound when you're saying something important. Of course they're not saying anything important, and any given 20 year old is going to be hard pressed to come up with something to say that will be important to anybody but themselves. But: that doesn't mean they shouldn't try to. They don't know yet that the most important things you will ever say in your life will probably not sound like an English translation of one of Hitler's more obscure 9-hour speeches, one that occurred late in the regime and was for some reason on the subject of the quality of service at Bed, Bath and Beyond.
It's aggravating to hear it, but the subtext comes ringing out: "I am an adult, I have serious opinions, what I say is important, I want to be taken seriously." Let's not get too upset over the conversational equivalent of a teenaged lion's squawky half-roar. We all have to go through this. If I don't like it, clearly I should go make enough money to afford a neighborhood that's not annually overrun by summer-sublet college kids.
Anyhow, I walked past this balcony, thinking to myself "surely this is the worst conversation anybody's ever had. I feel sorry for whoever is not the one talking right now, hopefully they're not just waiting for their turn to scream." And just then the conversation died down enough to where I could hear the music they were also listening to. Maybe that's the reason why the talking was so loud. They were listening to loud music, but they were also talking about their philosophies, and clearly such a conversation should not warrant the turning down of music while you're on the balcony of an apartment building in a working class neighborhood at 10:30pm on a Sunday. Clearly this is something that the whole rest of the world could learn a lot from.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was Wolf Parade.
I think that's fitting. This is the musical equivalent of screamtalking.
King Khan and the Shrines
The Supreme Genius of King Khan and the Shrines
[Vice; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
If you like fun, you should be as excited about King Khan and the Shrines as you are embarrassed about Wolf Parade. This is music for screamscreaming, which I think is a more natural state for kids than screamtalking. Like I'd kind of prefer it if that girl on that balcony had thrown shaving cream balloons at me instead of just talking loudly. Sure it's more messy, but it's also more ridiculous and fun and stupid, and as pissed as I'd be, it wouldn't matter. The joke would be on me. I would only be able to respond with war. And not the kind where you call the cops. The kind where you wait for an egg to rot and then you throw it up there.
Various Artists
African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s
[Analog Africa; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.9.
So it's an Afrobeat compilation. But is it a good one? "Scream contest" sounds promising. And... yes. It's a good one.
Use this to soundtrack "making the potato salad before having a cookout, and FYI I am stoned out of my mind, so I am probably going to spill a shitload of milk into this potato salad, which I won't mind because I'm stoned out of my mind, and neither will all of my young, fashionable stoned of their minds friends, except we of course won't eat the whole amount of the potato salad, and it will sit in the fridge for WAY too long before we eventually throw away the whole thing, container and all, which is a good idea because I definitely don't want to open that because A. it's rotten, and B. I was still stoned out of my mind when it started to rain at the cookout that we had anyway because it was nice when we woke up that day and that's all we had to go on and that should be enough, and I was stoned out of my mind so I wasn't really thinking about proper food storage, so the potato salad also got about as much rain water in it as it does spilled milk." It's the perfect soundtrack for that.
Or if you have a different Afrobeat compilation, you can use that too.
Port O'Brien
All We Could Do Was Sing
[Self-Released; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
Here's what Ian Cohen has to say in the first paragraph:
Thanks for the heads up, dude. I had not read that article. It's great. I won't say I agree with all of it, but I agree enough that rock needs to pull its head out of its ass and try to be fun instead of serious. I wouldn't go so far as to delineate that dichotomy along racial lines, but if that helps somebody else, I'm all for it.
Since Port O'Brien is our jumping off point, here's a different question: when does fun end and annoying begin? And can we, should we delineate THAT along racial lines? If we did, is the general consensus that "annoying" is either too specific to one side or another, and "fun" is great for everybody? Is the hairy-for-liberals difference essentially that if something is "too black" for most white people we think it's cool because we have to otherwise we're being racist, but if something is "too white" for most black people we think it's not cool because that's what defines "cool?" Maybe. I don't know. Sounds like a stretch to me.
Still, I have a hard time believing that a majority of black people would be into this kind of a thing. To be fair a majority of white people are not into it either, just the indie kids who are into it, probably like 50,000 tops. And among those of us who have heard this and want to know about it just in case, I can't be the only white person who thinks this is more annoying that fun. And I also don't think it's reclaiming any kind of "too white" shared white person heritage just because it's totally soul-free. It's soulless, but also cloying and cute. I might not have the best perspective on this, but I don't think "cloying and cute" are overarching qualities attached to the entire cultural tradition of American white people.
"Square" maybe. Maybe you could nail Port O'Brien on its squareness as a vector for being "too white" and hence "more annoying than fun." But then you'd be saying that white people are square, which is maybe truthful, but it stings, guys. Because for all the advancements made by white people over the centuries, including destroying all cultures which ever strove to strike an equilibrium between themselves and the planet they inhabit, that's the one thing we wish we weren't: square. But not all of us are square. Elvis wasn't square. The Fonz wasn't. Chet Baker: not square. Jerry Lee Lewis. Lou Reed. As round as it gets. In fact, the best white person musicians are the few who transcend squaredom. Which means that the stuff that falls short is not good. Which is I think what Sasha Frere-Jones was talking about in so many thousands of words. We're not talking about race here, we're talking about not being a bunch of designer baby stroller-buying SQUARES.
And regardless of what race you are, if you're into Port O'Brien, then you might as well also be into dressing your baby up like a peapod, or buying a little red riding hood cape for your dog, or anything else a person can spend money on for no other reason than because it's cute. Which is as square as it gets. Sorry bro.
Wait a minute. Maybe what we're really dealing with is a gender thing. Yes yes, I can see it now. An inherently sexist ten thousand word essay about the ascendancy of the woman in American culture, with halfassed Gladwellian sourcing on how it's due to the fact that the population has been more female than male for a long while now. Man, that sounds incredibly reductionist and totally wrong, but, possibly if I throw in enough razzle dazzle and critic-proofing "I'm just sayin'" language, it could be considered officially "interesting." I could be a glimmering beacon in the firmament of literary-sounding shittalking. I will file this away in my brain's back pocket in case I get a call up to the major leagues.
Anyhow, yeah, thanks Ian Cohen, for letting me off the hook for your honest analysis of Port O'Brien. This band sucks.
Nalle
The Siren's Wave
[Locust; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.6.
This is Scottish people who are trying to blend Scottish folk nosewarbling with pretentious flatliner Avant Garde drone. Does that sound like something you'd be into? Why not? Is it the complete lack of percussion or the fact that those are two things that tighten your spine? Both? Ok. Me too.
At Mount Zoomer
[Sub Pop; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.7.
Last night I was walking home from the grocery store, and there was a young woman sitting on the balcony of an apartment building in my neighborhood screamtalking to a friend. I hate screamtalking. It gives me the willies. It's a combination of being embarrassed for the (often) young person who's partaking, and anger at having my ears commandeered by a 20 year old's loud ruminations on the nature of guy and girl relationships, spoken with the urgency and authority of a national address.
But I get it. It's practice. That's how these people think you're supposed to sound when you're saying something important. Of course they're not saying anything important, and any given 20 year old is going to be hard pressed to come up with something to say that will be important to anybody but themselves. But: that doesn't mean they shouldn't try to. They don't know yet that the most important things you will ever say in your life will probably not sound like an English translation of one of Hitler's more obscure 9-hour speeches, one that occurred late in the regime and was for some reason on the subject of the quality of service at Bed, Bath and Beyond.
It's aggravating to hear it, but the subtext comes ringing out: "I am an adult, I have serious opinions, what I say is important, I want to be taken seriously." Let's not get too upset over the conversational equivalent of a teenaged lion's squawky half-roar. We all have to go through this. If I don't like it, clearly I should go make enough money to afford a neighborhood that's not annually overrun by summer-sublet college kids.
Anyhow, I walked past this balcony, thinking to myself "surely this is the worst conversation anybody's ever had. I feel sorry for whoever is not the one talking right now, hopefully they're not just waiting for their turn to scream." And just then the conversation died down enough to where I could hear the music they were also listening to. Maybe that's the reason why the talking was so loud. They were listening to loud music, but they were also talking about their philosophies, and clearly such a conversation should not warrant the turning down of music while you're on the balcony of an apartment building in a working class neighborhood at 10:30pm on a Sunday. Clearly this is something that the whole rest of the world could learn a lot from.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was Wolf Parade.
I think that's fitting. This is the musical equivalent of screamtalking.
King Khan and the Shrines
The Supreme Genius of King Khan and the Shrines
[Vice; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
If you like fun, you should be as excited about King Khan and the Shrines as you are embarrassed about Wolf Parade. This is music for screamscreaming, which I think is a more natural state for kids than screamtalking. Like I'd kind of prefer it if that girl on that balcony had thrown shaving cream balloons at me instead of just talking loudly. Sure it's more messy, but it's also more ridiculous and fun and stupid, and as pissed as I'd be, it wouldn't matter. The joke would be on me. I would only be able to respond with war. And not the kind where you call the cops. The kind where you wait for an egg to rot and then you throw it up there.
Various Artists
African Scream Contest: Raw & Psychedelic Sounds From Benin & Togo 70s
[Analog Africa; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.9.
So it's an Afrobeat compilation. But is it a good one? "Scream contest" sounds promising. And... yes. It's a good one.
Use this to soundtrack "making the potato salad before having a cookout, and FYI I am stoned out of my mind, so I am probably going to spill a shitload of milk into this potato salad, which I won't mind because I'm stoned out of my mind, and neither will all of my young, fashionable stoned of their minds friends, except we of course won't eat the whole amount of the potato salad, and it will sit in the fridge for WAY too long before we eventually throw away the whole thing, container and all, which is a good idea because I definitely don't want to open that because A. it's rotten, and B. I was still stoned out of my mind when it started to rain at the cookout that we had anyway because it was nice when we woke up that day and that's all we had to go on and that should be enough, and I was stoned out of my mind so I wasn't really thinking about proper food storage, so the potato salad also got about as much rain water in it as it does spilled milk." It's the perfect soundtrack for that.
Or if you have a different Afrobeat compilation, you can use that too.
Port O'Brien
All We Could Do Was Sing
[Self-Released; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
Here's what Ian Cohen has to say in the first paragraph:
Are the manifold manifestations of twee the most fearsome boogieman facing rock music? Did you frame that Sasha Frere-Jones article where he complained about indie not being black enough? Ever consider buying a Decemberists concert ticket just for chance to get a clean shot at Colin Meloy? You should probably just stop reading right now. Odds are, this very site is reviewing four other records that you'll almost certainly like more than this one.
Thanks for the heads up, dude. I had not read that article. It's great. I won't say I agree with all of it, but I agree enough that rock needs to pull its head out of its ass and try to be fun instead of serious. I wouldn't go so far as to delineate that dichotomy along racial lines, but if that helps somebody else, I'm all for it.
Since Port O'Brien is our jumping off point, here's a different question: when does fun end and annoying begin? And can we, should we delineate THAT along racial lines? If we did, is the general consensus that "annoying" is either too specific to one side or another, and "fun" is great for everybody? Is the hairy-for-liberals difference essentially that if something is "too black" for most white people we think it's cool because we have to otherwise we're being racist, but if something is "too white" for most black people we think it's not cool because that's what defines "cool?" Maybe. I don't know. Sounds like a stretch to me.
Still, I have a hard time believing that a majority of black people would be into this kind of a thing. To be fair a majority of white people are not into it either, just the indie kids who are into it, probably like 50,000 tops. And among those of us who have heard this and want to know about it just in case, I can't be the only white person who thinks this is more annoying that fun. And I also don't think it's reclaiming any kind of "too white" shared white person heritage just because it's totally soul-free. It's soulless, but also cloying and cute. I might not have the best perspective on this, but I don't think "cloying and cute" are overarching qualities attached to the entire cultural tradition of American white people.
"Square" maybe. Maybe you could nail Port O'Brien on its squareness as a vector for being "too white" and hence "more annoying than fun." But then you'd be saying that white people are square, which is maybe truthful, but it stings, guys. Because for all the advancements made by white people over the centuries, including destroying all cultures which ever strove to strike an equilibrium between themselves and the planet they inhabit, that's the one thing we wish we weren't: square. But not all of us are square. Elvis wasn't square. The Fonz wasn't. Chet Baker: not square. Jerry Lee Lewis. Lou Reed. As round as it gets. In fact, the best white person musicians are the few who transcend squaredom. Which means that the stuff that falls short is not good. Which is I think what Sasha Frere-Jones was talking about in so many thousands of words. We're not talking about race here, we're talking about not being a bunch of designer baby stroller-buying SQUARES.
And regardless of what race you are, if you're into Port O'Brien, then you might as well also be into dressing your baby up like a peapod, or buying a little red riding hood cape for your dog, or anything else a person can spend money on for no other reason than because it's cute. Which is as square as it gets. Sorry bro.
Wait a minute. Maybe what we're really dealing with is a gender thing. Yes yes, I can see it now. An inherently sexist ten thousand word essay about the ascendancy of the woman in American culture, with halfassed Gladwellian sourcing on how it's due to the fact that the population has been more female than male for a long while now. Man, that sounds incredibly reductionist and totally wrong, but, possibly if I throw in enough razzle dazzle and critic-proofing "I'm just sayin'" language, it could be considered officially "interesting." I could be a glimmering beacon in the firmament of literary-sounding shittalking. I will file this away in my brain's back pocket in case I get a call up to the major leagues.
Anyhow, yeah, thanks Ian Cohen, for letting me off the hook for your honest analysis of Port O'Brien. This band sucks.
Nalle
The Siren's Wave
[Locust; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.6.
This is Scottish people who are trying to blend Scottish folk nosewarbling with pretentious flatliner Avant Garde drone. Does that sound like something you'd be into? Why not? Is it the complete lack of percussion or the fact that those are two things that tighten your spine? Both? Ok. Me too.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/16/08
Jeremy Jay
A Place Where We Could Go
Airwalker EP
[K; 2008 / K; 2007]
Pitchfork gave them a 7.6 and a 7.5.
This is terrible, and exactly the kind of thing I always don't like. But I might actually love it. Jeremy Jay has a hairbreadth chance to one day uproot the Violent Femmes for the title of "most 8th grade album of all time," at least among the nascent gay kids sect. He appears by all accounts to be serious about somebody being both "beautiful" and a "rebel." Which is a huge bonus for the nascent gay kids sect of 8th graders, because they always think everything is the end of the world, and somebody being both beautiful and a rebel would be a real mindblower. Nobody is beautiful at that age, and junior high kid society mores are as intolerant of rebellion as mores will ever get.
God, this is the most overwrought thing in the world. It's so dramatic and over the top. I do not understand why I love it so much. But I do. It's great. I feel like I'm gonna put this on a mix tape for Nadia Levinson even though I shouldn't waste my time because everybody knows she's in love with Mark Bradley, the asshole who put a tack on my chair. He just thinks he's awesome because he's already 5 foot 9, he's not a good person like I am. Why can't Nadia see it? Oh boo hoo hoo.
Coldplay
Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
[Capitol; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.9.
Sure, I'm going to listen to Coldplay and then write down my thoughts.
Nice try, glittertits.
Mogwai
Young Team (2008 edition)
[Chemikal Underground; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 9.2.
I never understood why people got into Mogwai, and I was one of the people who got into Mogwai. It's basically grunge-prog. Looking back, I was into a lot of post-rock instrumental music back then, I think because my drug of choice was sleeping. But the Mogwai quiet-LOUD thing would always fuck up my sleep buzz, so I never really liked them. But I had all their albums anyway. I don't know why. I was just an idiot, I guess.
Windsor for the Derby
How We Lost
[Secretly Canadian; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
What is this, Adopt A Late-90's Instrumental Post-Rock Band With Vague Unrealized Metal Leanings Day?
Monotonix
Body Language
[Drag City; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
There's a lot to be said for the live-only band. As much as I don't like to leave the house, this is probably like 1,100 times more fun than this. Neither is exactly groundbreaking, but with a live show like this it's like "who cares?" A Monotonix record is like "who cares?" too, but in a bad way.
But so what? These guys at least are doing their best to rock. And they're funny as hell too, if their pube-centric album art is any indication. That puts them ahead of what, 90% of all other bands? God bless these guys, and here's hoping they don't die of inner ear necrosis or whatever.
A Place Where We Could Go
Airwalker EP
[K; 2008 / K; 2007]
Pitchfork gave them a 7.6 and a 7.5.
This is terrible, and exactly the kind of thing I always don't like. But I might actually love it. Jeremy Jay has a hairbreadth chance to one day uproot the Violent Femmes for the title of "most 8th grade album of all time," at least among the nascent gay kids sect. He appears by all accounts to be serious about somebody being both "beautiful" and a "rebel." Which is a huge bonus for the nascent gay kids sect of 8th graders, because they always think everything is the end of the world, and somebody being both beautiful and a rebel would be a real mindblower. Nobody is beautiful at that age, and junior high kid society mores are as intolerant of rebellion as mores will ever get.
God, this is the most overwrought thing in the world. It's so dramatic and over the top. I do not understand why I love it so much. But I do. It's great. I feel like I'm gonna put this on a mix tape for Nadia Levinson even though I shouldn't waste my time because everybody knows she's in love with Mark Bradley, the asshole who put a tack on my chair. He just thinks he's awesome because he's already 5 foot 9, he's not a good person like I am. Why can't Nadia see it? Oh boo hoo hoo.
Coldplay
Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends
[Capitol; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.9.
Sure, I'm going to listen to Coldplay and then write down my thoughts.
Nice try, glittertits.
Mogwai
Young Team (2008 edition)
[Chemikal Underground; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 9.2.
I never understood why people got into Mogwai, and I was one of the people who got into Mogwai. It's basically grunge-prog. Looking back, I was into a lot of post-rock instrumental music back then, I think because my drug of choice was sleeping. But the Mogwai quiet-LOUD thing would always fuck up my sleep buzz, so I never really liked them. But I had all their albums anyway. I don't know why. I was just an idiot, I guess.
Windsor for the Derby
How We Lost
[Secretly Canadian; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
What is this, Adopt A Late-90's Instrumental Post-Rock Band With Vague Unrealized Metal Leanings Day?
Monotonix
Body Language
[Drag City; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
There's a lot to be said for the live-only band. As much as I don't like to leave the house, this is probably like 1,100 times more fun than this. Neither is exactly groundbreaking, but with a live show like this it's like "who cares?" A Monotonix record is like "who cares?" too, but in a bad way.
But so what? These guys at least are doing their best to rock. And they're funny as hell too, if their pube-centric album art is any indication. That puts them ahead of what, 90% of all other bands? God bless these guys, and here's hoping they don't die of inner ear necrosis or whatever.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/13/08
The Beach Boys
U.S. Singles Collection: The Capitol Years (1962-1965)
[Capitol; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.3.
So this is a limited edition CD box set of the Beach Boys' 45rpm singles from 1962-1965, released 2 years ago. If you want to buy it, it'll cost you like $200. For a CD box set. Or you could get all the songs you like the most on it from downloads. Or else you can just turn on oldies radio for half an hour. Other than that, I'm basically here to talk about the merits of "Surfin' Safari" and "Little Deuce Coupe" and "I Get Around." They have merits. The end.
Oh, and is there a more natural fit for a product advertisement than "409?" I think about it every time I clean my kitchen, even if I'm using Fantastik.
N.E.R.D.
Seeing Sounds
[Interscope; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.6.
I was thinking recently about the Beastie Boys, and it kind of blew my mind. Not that the music is mindblowing or anything, I mean it's fun and it has its moments. I was thinking about their career trajectory. It's astonishing. Basically all they've ever done for a living is had fun fucking around, and for some reason everybody respects them for it. They're not at the top of the cred ladder or anything, but if Ad-Rock showed up at some obscuro-noise loft party, it would not feel especially calculated. You'd just be like "oh, that's cool, I guess" and go about your business. If anything it'd make you like him more. In other words, almost nobody on Earth hates the Beastie Boys. Why bother? That would be like hating fun.
The Neptune guys are a different matter, though. I feel like they're aiming for the rarefied Beastie Boys trajectory, but got too hung up on looks and sex and fashion and the math of sparse beats with snapping and syths in them, and in the process lost their ability to find or express joy. They have to leave that to the people who collaborate with them. They're never gonna be the Beasties, though they will try and try.
And the reason why, theory alert, is the Beasties had that early indoctrination into punk rock and hardcore. It's the most vital set of aesthetic values in the history of American Music.
I don't mean to imply that the punks invented it or anything. Maybe the colonized it and codified it and made it into a manifesto that could then be followed to the letter by endless waves of quickbuck artists, and so in that way they overdid it. It might have been better as a secret. The good news is it doesn't really work unless you live it. You can't do punk from the penthouse. You have to say "fuck it" and forget about yourself and the world and everything in it and just do this thing all the way with everything and not care especially about anything else, or at least you have to have a sense of humor about how ridiculous everything is. It can even be a grim sense of gallows humor if you want. And that guiding punk principle of "fuck it" is both too big and too specific to go away forever, and I believe it's the common string of anything that's good, and has been since Louis Armstrong and Robert Johnson came walking out of the primordial ooze of the early recording industry and first said so with their respective "fuck it" statements of this is how good I am.
The Neptunes don't have "fuck it." They have "eclectic" and "hey, I'm into 'punk rock,' let's do a collaboration with Good Charlotte." They have "I'm telling you--fuck it," and they have "I'm gonna do a track with Snoop, whose delivery is so lazy-sounding it could qualify as hip hop's most singularly 'fuck it' voice, and in the process I might get a little 'fuck it' spillover onto me," but they don't have "fuck it." And if they ever do, it'll be because they're reading it off the instruction manual. They don't really need "fuck it," though. They're rich. "It" has been good to them. And they can fuck pretty much anything they want.
Richard Pinhas
Single Collection 1972-1980
[Captain Trip; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.
I don't read Pitchfork every day. I mean, I read two-years-old Pitchfork every day, but as far as keeping current and on top of everything they do, I haven't done that in years and years. I'd feel maybe a little guilty about this if it weren't so trivial, based on the fact that I trash them fairly often here, and do so mostly out of laziness and/or ignorance. The fact is: I do not envy their task, and also I don't begrudge the fact that their task is not making sure I always love what they're doing. Making fun of Pitchfork is easy. It's like a bottom-rung comedian saying "I don't even watch Saturday Night Live anymore, it hasn't been good in years." Oh really? You mean to say you're not 13 years old anymore? Who cares, it's just a TV show. They're just people doing a thing for money. If it's not your thing, great, do your thing.
Well here I am, doing my thing. Which is, loosely, making fun of their thing. Whatever. I'm not particularly creative, and I'm lazy as shit. I like music. Those are my qualifications.
I did not know about this Japanese-only CD compilation of Richard Pinhas's early 70's output. I also did not know who Richard Pinhas is. Pitchfork told me. I am grateful to Pitchfork for exposing me to his work, especially this very early stuff. Not that it's the best thing I've ever heard or anything. In fact, from what I've heard it's out-of-the-lineup psyche/prog/Enoworship whose main draw among those capable of passing a field sobriety test lies in its obscurity. But I admit it's built from some of the same materials as went into the construction of my wheelhouse, and it's not like I'd necessarily always pass a field sobriety test with flying colors.
Regardless of whatever potentially false musical merit might come from simple obscurity, this is the kind of stuff that you'd expect to find out about every once in a while from a site that seems like a repository for knowing and caring about all music. Removed from the question of musical merit (a difficult surgery, but one often enough managed by Pitchfork for analysis of dozens of musical artists who defiantly refuse to be interesting on anything but nonmusical grounds) this release is in fact fairly obscure. It's at least difficult to find, to the point of being a Japanese import CD that some bozo is selling for $52 bucks on Amazon and some Dutch guy is selling for 15 Euros on Discogs, and that's just about it. That's a rare occurrence indeed these days, when something is only available on the CD format. I won't lie, I kind of like it. Or at least I like that I know about it now. Learning is FUNdamental.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is the Pitchfork equivalent of one of those "we're out of ideas this week" oddball sketches on SNL that happens at 12:50 and is somehow actually very strange and funny in a way that shows how capable these writers and performers are of running rings around your average bottom-rung comedian.
Bryan Scary
Flight of the Knife
[Black and Greene; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.6.
Stuart Berman posits, based on this album that "prog-rock is really just psychedelic pop with the between-song gaps removed." I disagree with it.
I think as far as this goes, "prog-rock is really just pop with too many ideas and showoffy musicianship crammed into it."
In fact, that's a fitting enough epitaph for the entire genre. I've always thought that the only drug it accurately replicates is Ritalin. And in the case of this specifically, it's rocketing between otherwise very palatable straightforward pop precepts. Maybe even too palatable. It's like being tossed around by a kids coaster after too much cotton candy. No thanks.
Paul Haig
Go Out Tonight
[Rhythm of Life; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.2.
So this guy was the front man for an obscure Scottish new wave band. Joshua Klein uses this solo album's existence as an excuse to talk about the obscure Scottish new wave band, which is actually pretty decent in a direct-predecessor-of-the-Strokes way.
It's good move, because there's no point in focusing on this new stuff, unless you want to set the mood to be creepily leered at by a lecherous old homosexual.
U.S. Singles Collection: The Capitol Years (1962-1965)
[Capitol; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.3.
So this is a limited edition CD box set of the Beach Boys' 45rpm singles from 1962-1965, released 2 years ago. If you want to buy it, it'll cost you like $200. For a CD box set. Or you could get all the songs you like the most on it from downloads. Or else you can just turn on oldies radio for half an hour. Other than that, I'm basically here to talk about the merits of "Surfin' Safari" and "Little Deuce Coupe" and "I Get Around." They have merits. The end.
Oh, and is there a more natural fit for a product advertisement than "409?" I think about it every time I clean my kitchen, even if I'm using Fantastik.
N.E.R.D.
Seeing Sounds
[Interscope; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.6.
I was thinking recently about the Beastie Boys, and it kind of blew my mind. Not that the music is mindblowing or anything, I mean it's fun and it has its moments. I was thinking about their career trajectory. It's astonishing. Basically all they've ever done for a living is had fun fucking around, and for some reason everybody respects them for it. They're not at the top of the cred ladder or anything, but if Ad-Rock showed up at some obscuro-noise loft party, it would not feel especially calculated. You'd just be like "oh, that's cool, I guess" and go about your business. If anything it'd make you like him more. In other words, almost nobody on Earth hates the Beastie Boys. Why bother? That would be like hating fun.
The Neptune guys are a different matter, though. I feel like they're aiming for the rarefied Beastie Boys trajectory, but got too hung up on looks and sex and fashion and the math of sparse beats with snapping and syths in them, and in the process lost their ability to find or express joy. They have to leave that to the people who collaborate with them. They're never gonna be the Beasties, though they will try and try.
And the reason why, theory alert, is the Beasties had that early indoctrination into punk rock and hardcore. It's the most vital set of aesthetic values in the history of American Music.
I don't mean to imply that the punks invented it or anything. Maybe the colonized it and codified it and made it into a manifesto that could then be followed to the letter by endless waves of quickbuck artists, and so in that way they overdid it. It might have been better as a secret. The good news is it doesn't really work unless you live it. You can't do punk from the penthouse. You have to say "fuck it" and forget about yourself and the world and everything in it and just do this thing all the way with everything and not care especially about anything else, or at least you have to have a sense of humor about how ridiculous everything is. It can even be a grim sense of gallows humor if you want. And that guiding punk principle of "fuck it" is both too big and too specific to go away forever, and I believe it's the common string of anything that's good, and has been since Louis Armstrong and Robert Johnson came walking out of the primordial ooze of the early recording industry and first said so with their respective "fuck it" statements of this is how good I am.
The Neptunes don't have "fuck it." They have "eclectic" and "hey, I'm into 'punk rock,' let's do a collaboration with Good Charlotte." They have "I'm telling you--fuck it," and they have "I'm gonna do a track with Snoop, whose delivery is so lazy-sounding it could qualify as hip hop's most singularly 'fuck it' voice, and in the process I might get a little 'fuck it' spillover onto me," but they don't have "fuck it." And if they ever do, it'll be because they're reading it off the instruction manual. They don't really need "fuck it," though. They're rich. "It" has been good to them. And they can fuck pretty much anything they want.
Richard Pinhas
Single Collection 1972-1980
[Captain Trip; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.
I don't read Pitchfork every day. I mean, I read two-years-old Pitchfork every day, but as far as keeping current and on top of everything they do, I haven't done that in years and years. I'd feel maybe a little guilty about this if it weren't so trivial, based on the fact that I trash them fairly often here, and do so mostly out of laziness and/or ignorance. The fact is: I do not envy their task, and also I don't begrudge the fact that their task is not making sure I always love what they're doing. Making fun of Pitchfork is easy. It's like a bottom-rung comedian saying "I don't even watch Saturday Night Live anymore, it hasn't been good in years." Oh really? You mean to say you're not 13 years old anymore? Who cares, it's just a TV show. They're just people doing a thing for money. If it's not your thing, great, do your thing.
Well here I am, doing my thing. Which is, loosely, making fun of their thing. Whatever. I'm not particularly creative, and I'm lazy as shit. I like music. Those are my qualifications.
I did not know about this Japanese-only CD compilation of Richard Pinhas's early 70's output. I also did not know who Richard Pinhas is. Pitchfork told me. I am grateful to Pitchfork for exposing me to his work, especially this very early stuff. Not that it's the best thing I've ever heard or anything. In fact, from what I've heard it's out-of-the-lineup psyche/prog/Enoworship whose main draw among those capable of passing a field sobriety test lies in its obscurity. But I admit it's built from some of the same materials as went into the construction of my wheelhouse, and it's not like I'd necessarily always pass a field sobriety test with flying colors.
Regardless of whatever potentially false musical merit might come from simple obscurity, this is the kind of stuff that you'd expect to find out about every once in a while from a site that seems like a repository for knowing and caring about all music. Removed from the question of musical merit (a difficult surgery, but one often enough managed by Pitchfork for analysis of dozens of musical artists who defiantly refuse to be interesting on anything but nonmusical grounds) this release is in fact fairly obscure. It's at least difficult to find, to the point of being a Japanese import CD that some bozo is selling for $52 bucks on Amazon and some Dutch guy is selling for 15 Euros on Discogs, and that's just about it. That's a rare occurrence indeed these days, when something is only available on the CD format. I won't lie, I kind of like it. Or at least I like that I know about it now. Learning is FUNdamental.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that this is the Pitchfork equivalent of one of those "we're out of ideas this week" oddball sketches on SNL that happens at 12:50 and is somehow actually very strange and funny in a way that shows how capable these writers and performers are of running rings around your average bottom-rung comedian.
Bryan Scary
Flight of the Knife
[Black and Greene; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.6.
Stuart Berman posits, based on this album that "prog-rock is really just psychedelic pop with the between-song gaps removed." I disagree with it.
I think as far as this goes, "prog-rock is really just pop with too many ideas and showoffy musicianship crammed into it."
In fact, that's a fitting enough epitaph for the entire genre. I've always thought that the only drug it accurately replicates is Ritalin. And in the case of this specifically, it's rocketing between otherwise very palatable straightforward pop precepts. Maybe even too palatable. It's like being tossed around by a kids coaster after too much cotton candy. No thanks.
Paul Haig
Go Out Tonight
[Rhythm of Life; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.2.
So this guy was the front man for an obscure Scottish new wave band. Joshua Klein uses this solo album's existence as an excuse to talk about the obscure Scottish new wave band, which is actually pretty decent in a direct-predecessor-of-the-Strokes way.
It's good move, because there's no point in focusing on this new stuff, unless you want to set the mood to be creepily leered at by a lecherous old homosexual.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/12/08
Lukestar
Lake Toba
Ailanthus
[Phone Me / Metronomicon Audio; 2008]
Pitchfork gave them a 7.0 and 7.4.
How is this any different from this? I get that one has keyboards and is cutefromnow and one is more guitar-y and emofromthen, but the emotional content is the same: zero. It's hooks for hits.
Lil Wayne
Tha Carter III
[Cash Money; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.7 and named it the 11th best album of 2008.
Lil Wayne is the Brett Favre of hip hop. He's great, probably not the greatest despite what the press constantly says, although there is an undeniable joy in his playing that justifiably gets "he's just having fun out there" accolades, but on the downside he's probably not winning any more championships, and either way you're tired of hearing about him. Also: huge pill popper.
Sloan
Parallel Play
[Yep Roc; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
Sloan are like Canadian Weezer without as good of a sense of humor. Seeing as how Weezer is basically a joke band right now, that's not so good for Sloan. They're basically ONLY Canadian. I've met people from Canada. They honestly like Sloan. Like a new Sloan album will come out, and these people I know from Canada will get all excited about it, like "have you heard the new Sloan album yet?" It's crazy.
Sloan should be nationalized and become the official rock band of the whole country. They can play at state dinners and stuff. They should have played at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony. I don't want to ruffle any feathers, but K.D. Lang in high definition television was not a good idea. I understand that's beside the point, and that Canadian production values should by all rights be charmingly amateurish, and that she has a beautiful voice and etc. But: come on. Shoulda been Sloan. They're the national rock band. Like they should required to play the halftime show every year at the Canadian Super Bowl or whatever thing there is that they have up there that is kind of like that.
D. Charles Speer and the Helix
After Hours
[Black Dirt; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
Alt-country is what happens when somebody who's not particularly great decides, "you know what, I love Willie Nelson." I love Willie Nelson too. What the fuck do I need you for?
Mixel Pixel
Let's Be Friends
[Mental Monkey; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.9.
I was just in Columbus, Ohio last weekend. Every time I go there, I like it more. People there are so friendly, they'll talk your ear off if you make eye contact. I seriously had a ten minute conversation with the guy who sweeps the floor at Wendy's. I know this is not unusual or anything, and it's maybe even kind of sad that I count this behavior as being notable, but there you go. The guy who sweeps the floor at the Wendy's on High Street is about as friendly as it gets without exchanging bodily fluids or personal information, and he's by no means remarkably friendly for Columbus. People were talking my ear off all weekend. About weird stuff, too. I don't know why, either.
And everybody there is doing something, and they're doing it just to do it because they're bored. Nobody was like "I'm gonna move to Columbus and put out a zine about boogers." They just do it. And then if you hang out alone in a place for longer than 20 seconds, they tell you about it. And you tell them about the stuff that you know about, and they're like "right on, sounds fun." This was my experience of Columbus, at least. It was my fifth time being there.
Mixel Pixel seem like they should be from Columbus instead of Brooklyn. Moving to Brooklyn was a bad move. I mean, it was probably good career-wise, but who out there really gives a shit about Mixel Pixel's career anyway? Might as well live in a fun, friendly city that smells like hot garbage in the summer time and looks run down but is full of friendly people who make zines about boogers. (Nobody actually did that, by the way, it's just a guess.)
And then instead of being some Brooklyn band that makes goofy little songs on a casio and presents them as some kind of anti-art anti-rock artrock, they'd just be friendly people who are doing this thing for fun, and they wouldn't each have to find a way to afford $800 a month (bare minimum) in rent. Come on, guys. You can rent a house for less than that in Columbus. Think about it. I am.
Lake Toba
Ailanthus
[Phone Me / Metronomicon Audio; 2008]
Pitchfork gave them a 7.0 and 7.4.
How is this any different from this? I get that one has keyboards and is cutefromnow and one is more guitar-y and emofromthen, but the emotional content is the same: zero. It's hooks for hits.
Lil Wayne
Tha Carter III
[Cash Money; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.7 and named it the 11th best album of 2008.
Lil Wayne is the Brett Favre of hip hop. He's great, probably not the greatest despite what the press constantly says, although there is an undeniable joy in his playing that justifiably gets "he's just having fun out there" accolades, but on the downside he's probably not winning any more championships, and either way you're tired of hearing about him. Also: huge pill popper.
Sloan
Parallel Play
[Yep Roc; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
Sloan are like Canadian Weezer without as good of a sense of humor. Seeing as how Weezer is basically a joke band right now, that's not so good for Sloan. They're basically ONLY Canadian. I've met people from Canada. They honestly like Sloan. Like a new Sloan album will come out, and these people I know from Canada will get all excited about it, like "have you heard the new Sloan album yet?" It's crazy.
Sloan should be nationalized and become the official rock band of the whole country. They can play at state dinners and stuff. They should have played at the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony. I don't want to ruffle any feathers, but K.D. Lang in high definition television was not a good idea. I understand that's beside the point, and that Canadian production values should by all rights be charmingly amateurish, and that she has a beautiful voice and etc. But: come on. Shoulda been Sloan. They're the national rock band. Like they should required to play the halftime show every year at the Canadian Super Bowl or whatever thing there is that they have up there that is kind of like that.
D. Charles Speer and the Helix
After Hours
[Black Dirt; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.6.
Alt-country is what happens when somebody who's not particularly great decides, "you know what, I love Willie Nelson." I love Willie Nelson too. What the fuck do I need you for?
Mixel Pixel
Let's Be Friends
[Mental Monkey; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.9.
I was just in Columbus, Ohio last weekend. Every time I go there, I like it more. People there are so friendly, they'll talk your ear off if you make eye contact. I seriously had a ten minute conversation with the guy who sweeps the floor at Wendy's. I know this is not unusual or anything, and it's maybe even kind of sad that I count this behavior as being notable, but there you go. The guy who sweeps the floor at the Wendy's on High Street is about as friendly as it gets without exchanging bodily fluids or personal information, and he's by no means remarkably friendly for Columbus. People were talking my ear off all weekend. About weird stuff, too. I don't know why, either.
And everybody there is doing something, and they're doing it just to do it because they're bored. Nobody was like "I'm gonna move to Columbus and put out a zine about boogers." They just do it. And then if you hang out alone in a place for longer than 20 seconds, they tell you about it. And you tell them about the stuff that you know about, and they're like "right on, sounds fun." This was my experience of Columbus, at least. It was my fifth time being there.
Mixel Pixel seem like they should be from Columbus instead of Brooklyn. Moving to Brooklyn was a bad move. I mean, it was probably good career-wise, but who out there really gives a shit about Mixel Pixel's career anyway? Might as well live in a fun, friendly city that smells like hot garbage in the summer time and looks run down but is full of friendly people who make zines about boogers. (Nobody actually did that, by the way, it's just a guess.)
And then instead of being some Brooklyn band that makes goofy little songs on a casio and presents them as some kind of anti-art anti-rock artrock, they'd just be friendly people who are doing this thing for fun, and they wouldn't each have to find a way to afford $800 a month (bare minimum) in rent. Come on, guys. You can rent a house for less than that in Columbus. Think about it. I am.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/11/10
Crystal Antlers
EP
[Self-Released; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.5.
There is no way to touch this without getting cliché all over myself.
It's like cliché glitter.
Seriously, I dare you to have an interesting opinion about this. The music itself is fine, if a little try-too-hardy from a medium good band. But then they go and call themselves Crystal Antlers and the music has no particular angle. It's just "General Rock." Go ahead. Listen to some Crystal Antlers and then tell me what you think. Just try it.
Adem
Takes
[Domino; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
You know what's just about as bad as "quirky?"
"Charming."
Don't charm me, I'm not some teenaged babysitter who will totally fall for the old smirk-for-a-cookie razzle dazzle precocious child routine. These are MY cookies. You need to go cookieless, kid. It'll be good for you. Oh, and by the way these cookies are emeffing DELICIOUS. Ha ha, fuck you. Your mom bought you that shirt from Threadless kids because she feels guilty that she doesn't love you.
Maybe now you can write a charming little song about loss and pain, and you can drum it out on your little Fisher Price tambourine or whatever little goofy thing you're working on. Aaaats a good little boy.
Paavoharju
Laulu Laakson Kukista
[Fonal; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.3.
I was all set to be excited that music from a developing country could get this pretentious, but then it turns out these people are from Finland. These fuckers aren't risking anything. They're on the dole. They're "experimenting" with "genre jumping" just in case one of the things they do hits, including "experimenting" and "genre jumping," because that way they can go back to heroin instead of slumming it with government methadone.
Cassettes Won't Listen
Small-Time Machine
[Self-Released; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.0.
Even if I am in an itchy mood, it's a bad sign when I'm listening to a 30-second clip and can't make it all the way through. These guys are like... yeah, no thanks.
Yoav
Charmed & Strange
[Verve Forecast; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 2.0.
This guy makes delay-pedal dance music using only an accoustic guitar. Once people fail to be impressed by it, you'll eventually be able to check this dude out in the kidz entertainment tent at some local street fest.
Dammit. I knew this was going to happen sooner or later. I listened to everything P-Fork looked at 2 years ago, and it made me think of nothing. The Ghostbusters should have listened to Crystal Antlers, Adem, Paavoharju, Cassettes Won't Listen, and Yoav when they were on top of that building. New York would have been killed by an maybe-I-can-make-fun-of-the-band's-name storm.
EP
[Self-Released; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.5.
There is no way to touch this without getting cliché all over myself.
It's like cliché glitter.
Seriously, I dare you to have an interesting opinion about this. The music itself is fine, if a little try-too-hardy from a medium good band. But then they go and call themselves Crystal Antlers and the music has no particular angle. It's just "General Rock." Go ahead. Listen to some Crystal Antlers and then tell me what you think. Just try it.
Adem
Takes
[Domino; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.
You know what's just about as bad as "quirky?"
"Charming."
Don't charm me, I'm not some teenaged babysitter who will totally fall for the old smirk-for-a-cookie razzle dazzle precocious child routine. These are MY cookies. You need to go cookieless, kid. It'll be good for you. Oh, and by the way these cookies are emeffing DELICIOUS. Ha ha, fuck you. Your mom bought you that shirt from Threadless kids because she feels guilty that she doesn't love you.
Maybe now you can write a charming little song about loss and pain, and you can drum it out on your little Fisher Price tambourine or whatever little goofy thing you're working on. Aaaats a good little boy.
Paavoharju
Laulu Laakson Kukista
[Fonal; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.3.
I was all set to be excited that music from a developing country could get this pretentious, but then it turns out these people are from Finland. These fuckers aren't risking anything. They're on the dole. They're "experimenting" with "genre jumping" just in case one of the things they do hits, including "experimenting" and "genre jumping," because that way they can go back to heroin instead of slumming it with government methadone.
Cassettes Won't Listen
Small-Time Machine
[Self-Released; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.0.
Even if I am in an itchy mood, it's a bad sign when I'm listening to a 30-second clip and can't make it all the way through. These guys are like... yeah, no thanks.
Yoav
Charmed & Strange
[Verve Forecast; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 2.0.
This guy makes delay-pedal dance music using only an accoustic guitar. Once people fail to be impressed by it, you'll eventually be able to check this dude out in the kidz entertainment tent at some local street fest.
Dammit. I knew this was going to happen sooner or later. I listened to everything P-Fork looked at 2 years ago, and it made me think of nothing. The Ghostbusters should have listened to Crystal Antlers, Adem, Paavoharju, Cassettes Won't Listen, and Yoav when they were on top of that building. New York would have been killed by an maybe-I-can-make-fun-of-the-band's-name storm.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/10/08
Robert Pollard
Robert Pollard Is Off to Business
[Guided By Voices, Inc.; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.9.
I was never a huge huge megafan like a lot of people, so I might be wrong about this, but wasn't the deal with Guided By Voices that they were pop songcrafters par excellence who nonetheless buried their songs in lo-fi noise, goofed off with insane meaningless Captain Beefheart lyrics ("Kicker of Elves"?), and truncated their songs so short that none of the potential hooks actually got repeated? And the effect was of gleeful subversion, like "we're so good we don't actually have to be good to be great"? Is that accurate criticspeak for what we're dealing with here? Oh, and also isn't Robert Pollard the drinkinest son of a bitch on the face of the planet even though he's in like his 50's by now?
Well, I've heard some bad things about his post-Guided By Voices solo stuff so I was reluctant to check any of it out. Well, ok. It turns out he's following the basic same artistic trajectory as Paul Westerberg. Casual unserious genius followed by a gradual "take me seriously now" jettisoning of the old shitfaced and snotty ironic distancing techniques (or maybe, rather, augmenting/hardening them into serious pre-conceived "this is my art" techniques). The process threatens to plunge the whole enterprise into a blissful adult contemporary mediocrity, but what is he supposed to do, not age? At least he's got enough cred in the bank for it, and Bob Pollard's version of mediocrity is still better than most to the tune of this being a pretty great record, and anyway mediocre doesn't mean bad. It means better than bad.
Also, if the tales of his alcohol intake are anywhere near accurate on a habitual basis, we should all hope this serious songwriter direction at least gets him enough cash to buy a new liver. Organ failure is no way to die. He deserves more comfort than that. Maybe that's what he's shooting for, I mean there's a man-sized clue right there in the title. So ok, he had a long, productive noise rock career and now in his emeritus years he gets to settle into more plush venues, maybe weeklong solo acoustic engagements at the Knitting Factory Los Angeles for beaucoup dollars, that kind of thing. I can think of plenty of people on that road who deserve it less.
Supergrass
Diamond Hoo Ha
[Astralwerks; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.2.
Remember that one minute like six months ago when Jennifer Love Hewitt said something about "vagazzling?" Total publicity stunt to get the entire internet talking about her cooch: it worked and then it didn't of course, because how long are we supposed to be captivated by Hewitt's cooch, anyway? It's just a cooch. You've seen one, you get the basic idea. Plus: it was a pretty transparent stab at viral me-marketing cooked up by some publicist somewhere.
I remember at the time I looked up vagazzling, safesearch: off, and could not find one internet picture of a vagazzled cooch. And I have a rule about viral publicity campaigns that says if there's some supposed phenomenon that involves cooches, and you can't even find an internet picture of a cooch that's participated in this phenomenon, that means that the cooch phenomenon under discussion is bullshit.
But it's mildly real now, the pictures are up, though nothing as salacious as I had hoped. It's basically rhinestones where your bush should be, for people who's hip-huggers, thong, and tramp stamp-based aesthetic reasoning permits them to think that such a thing is "cute" instead of "a fingerpoke in the eye of God." I hesitate to use the word "slut" here, because I think of these women as being sexually empowered but just dumb and tasteless. "Trashy" works best.
This album reminded me to re-look at the vagazzling phenomenon. I couldn't wrap my brain around it before seeing the pictures. For some reason I was imagining jewel-like decorations adorning the outermost labia, framing the vulva, so that if your were to penetrate a vagazzled cooch it would be visually similar to fucking a disco ball. The possible appeal of which didn't make any sense to me. But I understand now. It was the name that threw me. It's really pubazzling. And it's just as dumb but more inane than what I was previously thinking about. I'm kind of disappointed.
Also: is there a sadder human being than Kathy Whatsherfaceunfunnyredhead?
Supergrass are enjoyable as a one or two singles per album mainstream rock band, and the rest sounds like vaguely European rock for a soccer video game. That is my opinion about Supergrass.
Shy Child
Noise Won't Stop
[Kill Rock Stars / Wall of Sound; 2007/2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.0.
Watch/listen to this and then look me in the eye and tell me you find it anything but annoying. If you don't have the energy or time to click and investigate, I'll summarize: this is the keytar and drums duo dancepunk band, and no, they're not "ha ha ha awesome lol."
Thomas Brinkmann
When Horses Die
[Max Ernst; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.
There are very few ways to get me to enjoy techno. One of them is "be so pretentious and intense and German that I can't help but laugh, and then I'll be willing to listen to what you have to say for a little while before I get bored and stop." Other ways include: I am 14 and I think I might see a boob while I'm here so I'm in it to win it; giving me free drugs plus sounding dubby as fuck and not expecting me to dance; and being a fake-tanned guido blasting horrible disco diva techno out of your customized-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life Mitsubishi and making a tough guy face like you're the awesomest dude on the planet.
None of these methods actually work for longer than a minute, although both the free drugs method and the being 14 method will generally make me sedentary, so I'll at least have to sit through whatever it is you're doing. This guy is using the German method. I sat through a whole song, even.
Ex Reverie
The Door Into Summer
[Language of Stone; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.6.
Pitchfork basically calls this constipated nerd music, and I agree.
Pitchfork didn't say that exactly, but I did.
Robert Pollard Is Off to Business
[Guided By Voices, Inc.; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.9.
I was never a huge huge megafan like a lot of people, so I might be wrong about this, but wasn't the deal with Guided By Voices that they were pop songcrafters par excellence who nonetheless buried their songs in lo-fi noise, goofed off with insane meaningless Captain Beefheart lyrics ("Kicker of Elves"?), and truncated their songs so short that none of the potential hooks actually got repeated? And the effect was of gleeful subversion, like "we're so good we don't actually have to be good to be great"? Is that accurate criticspeak for what we're dealing with here? Oh, and also isn't Robert Pollard the drinkinest son of a bitch on the face of the planet even though he's in like his 50's by now?
Well, I've heard some bad things about his post-Guided By Voices solo stuff so I was reluctant to check any of it out. Well, ok. It turns out he's following the basic same artistic trajectory as Paul Westerberg. Casual unserious genius followed by a gradual "take me seriously now" jettisoning of the old shitfaced and snotty ironic distancing techniques (or maybe, rather, augmenting/hardening them into serious pre-conceived "this is my art" techniques). The process threatens to plunge the whole enterprise into a blissful adult contemporary mediocrity, but what is he supposed to do, not age? At least he's got enough cred in the bank for it, and Bob Pollard's version of mediocrity is still better than most to the tune of this being a pretty great record, and anyway mediocre doesn't mean bad. It means better than bad.
Also, if the tales of his alcohol intake are anywhere near accurate on a habitual basis, we should all hope this serious songwriter direction at least gets him enough cash to buy a new liver. Organ failure is no way to die. He deserves more comfort than that. Maybe that's what he's shooting for, I mean there's a man-sized clue right there in the title. So ok, he had a long, productive noise rock career and now in his emeritus years he gets to settle into more plush venues, maybe weeklong solo acoustic engagements at the Knitting Factory Los Angeles for beaucoup dollars, that kind of thing. I can think of plenty of people on that road who deserve it less.
Supergrass
Diamond Hoo Ha
[Astralwerks; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.2.
Remember that one minute like six months ago when Jennifer Love Hewitt said something about "vagazzling?" Total publicity stunt to get the entire internet talking about her cooch: it worked and then it didn't of course, because how long are we supposed to be captivated by Hewitt's cooch, anyway? It's just a cooch. You've seen one, you get the basic idea. Plus: it was a pretty transparent stab at viral me-marketing cooked up by some publicist somewhere.
I remember at the time I looked up vagazzling, safesearch: off, and could not find one internet picture of a vagazzled cooch. And I have a rule about viral publicity campaigns that says if there's some supposed phenomenon that involves cooches, and you can't even find an internet picture of a cooch that's participated in this phenomenon, that means that the cooch phenomenon under discussion is bullshit.
But it's mildly real now, the pictures are up, though nothing as salacious as I had hoped. It's basically rhinestones where your bush should be, for people who's hip-huggers, thong, and tramp stamp-based aesthetic reasoning permits them to think that such a thing is "cute" instead of "a fingerpoke in the eye of God." I hesitate to use the word "slut" here, because I think of these women as being sexually empowered but just dumb and tasteless. "Trashy" works best.
This album reminded me to re-look at the vagazzling phenomenon. I couldn't wrap my brain around it before seeing the pictures. For some reason I was imagining jewel-like decorations adorning the outermost labia, framing the vulva, so that if your were to penetrate a vagazzled cooch it would be visually similar to fucking a disco ball. The possible appeal of which didn't make any sense to me. But I understand now. It was the name that threw me. It's really pubazzling. And it's just as dumb but more inane than what I was previously thinking about. I'm kind of disappointed.
Also: is there a sadder human being than Kathy Whatsherfaceunfunnyredhead?
Supergrass are enjoyable as a one or two singles per album mainstream rock band, and the rest sounds like vaguely European rock for a soccer video game. That is my opinion about Supergrass.
Shy Child
Noise Won't Stop
[Kill Rock Stars / Wall of Sound; 2007/2008]
Pitchfork gave it an 8.0.
Watch/listen to this and then look me in the eye and tell me you find it anything but annoying. If you don't have the energy or time to click and investigate, I'll summarize: this is the keytar and drums duo dancepunk band, and no, they're not "ha ha ha awesome lol."
Thomas Brinkmann
When Horses Die
[Max Ernst; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.4.
There are very few ways to get me to enjoy techno. One of them is "be so pretentious and intense and German that I can't help but laugh, and then I'll be willing to listen to what you have to say for a little while before I get bored and stop." Other ways include: I am 14 and I think I might see a boob while I'm here so I'm in it to win it; giving me free drugs plus sounding dubby as fuck and not expecting me to dance; and being a fake-tanned guido blasting horrible disco diva techno out of your customized-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life Mitsubishi and making a tough guy face like you're the awesomest dude on the planet.
None of these methods actually work for longer than a minute, although both the free drugs method and the being 14 method will generally make me sedentary, so I'll at least have to sit through whatever it is you're doing. This guy is using the German method. I sat through a whole song, even.
Ex Reverie
The Door Into Summer
[Language of Stone; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.6.
Pitchfork basically calls this constipated nerd music, and I agree.
Pitchfork didn't say that exactly, but I did.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/9/08
My Morning Jacket
Evil Urges
[ATO; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.7.
I don't know, I think this is a pretty bold move. It's like they stood up for themselves and said, "Hey, wait a minute, guys. You're getting carried away calling us an 'important band.' We're not an 'important band.' In fact, we suck." In a way, it's the best song they've ever done. Because they're right. They do suck. They always sucked. We just didn't know because everything else also sucked.
The Orb
The Dream
[Six Degrees / Traffic Inc.; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 3.6.
I stared at this review for a while with an uneasy feeling that I should know what this is. I didn't read it. It was more of a "transfixed by the cover art and artist name" thing. I had the feeling that it recognized me and I was supposed to return the favor. The sensation was probably a bit like what having Alzheimer's is like. I didn't enjoy it.
So I found some snippets online and listened, and it came rushing back: this is one of those shitty interchangeable 90's UK techno supergroups, like The Crystal Method or U.N.K.L.E. or The Chemical Brothers or Fatboy Slim or Prodigy or etc. etc. The Orb. The Orb. Which one were they? Was that the "shamma dah dow boy, kneecaps boy" song from the Trainspotting Soundtrack? Nope. That's "Born Slippy" by Underworld. Well then. The Orb is just one of the other ones, then. They probably had a hit beat that I would recognize. If I heard it, I would probably describe it as something like "the one that goes bowbow bow bow BOOOOM tikkatik tik tikka tik." But I'm not gonna waste my time tracking down the big Orb hit from 1996.
I looked them up on Wikipedia. They are old now. It must be sad to be an old man in 2008 with all of your worldly possessions hitched up to the "big techno" wagon. Hopefully they're drug addled enough not to know what year it is. There are certain situations under which memory loss can be a blessing.
Christopher Bissonnette
In Between Words
[Kranky; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
This is a total snoozefest. As in it's the vanguard of the ambient electro-composition scene, and this guy is going to headline Snoozefest this year, with support from other notable acts such as "a vacuum cleaner in the next room" and "hissing baby monitor." Get your tickets now.
Walter Meego
Voyager
[Sony / Almost Gold; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.
Sometimes I wonder if I hate fun. That would depend on whether or not fun is this. If it is, I hate it. If fun is subjective, then I love fun but hate this.
(FYI it's American Apparel music for ironic fucking.)
James Pants
Welcome
[Stones Throw; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.0.
Oh man. This is strange. I feel like I'm being busted right now, because from a musical standpoint this is exactly like Walter Meego, but for some reason I like it and I think it's great and I want to be friends with James Pants and have fun dancing at a house party while he's playing. For some reason I feel like delineating the subtle differences so as to not come off as a hypocrite.
There's two kinds of kidding: real kidding and fake kidding. Walter Meego are either really really amazingly great like next level shit at kidding, or else, more likely, they're fake kidding. I don't know how else you'd explain something like this. It's ineffective kidding in bad taste. Or else, basically the same thing, it's wishful thinking fake kidding in bad taste by some dudes on a major label. The bad taste I can live with. The bad at kidding I can't. If it's a joke, I should be laughing. There are only like two actual jokes that happen in that video, and they're not good or funny. You get the feeling that the Walter Meego guys themselves are not actually funny. They seem like the kind of guys who'll call your sister fat and then say "just kidding" as if that saves it.
James Pants on the other hand, is really kidding. Which I appreciate. If you're going to be a joke, I figure, be serious about it. Joke all the way. Don't make a synth-overload song called "Girls" and then accompany it with an expensive-looking video about how you've got the power to airblast any female just by walking by them and then in the course of its narrative never smirk even once or have a punchline. It's confusing. I think you're probably a joke, but if the joke you're trying to make (and either you're playing your cards too close to your chest or else you're a shitty joker) is that you're not a joke, then either I'm not in on that joke, or else you're actually a total fucking JOKE. And regardless of what's happening, I'm too busy trying to figure this out to be able to enjoy myself, so it's not fun or funny. So if you don't mind, I'm going to go hang out with my buddy James Pants, who would never call my sister fat but would, and often does, gleefully fuck a fat chick.
But of course the distinction is all hypothetical. I'm not gonna go out and buy or routinely listen to either of these albums. I just would be psyched to be at a James Pants party, and if I was at a Walter Meego party, I'd feel a "this sucks" compulsion to get drunk on the official vodka sponsor, pull the plug on the band, get kicked out by the black suit black t-shirt bouncer with the secret service ear thingie, and then piss on the banana tree in the lobby of The W on my way out. That would be the only way I could enjoy myself. In other words, it's asshole music, where James Pants is buddyfun music.
Evil Urges
[ATO; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 4.7.
I don't know, I think this is a pretty bold move. It's like they stood up for themselves and said, "Hey, wait a minute, guys. You're getting carried away calling us an 'important band.' We're not an 'important band.' In fact, we suck." In a way, it's the best song they've ever done. Because they're right. They do suck. They always sucked. We just didn't know because everything else also sucked.
The Orb
The Dream
[Six Degrees / Traffic Inc.; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 3.6.
I stared at this review for a while with an uneasy feeling that I should know what this is. I didn't read it. It was more of a "transfixed by the cover art and artist name" thing. I had the feeling that it recognized me and I was supposed to return the favor. The sensation was probably a bit like what having Alzheimer's is like. I didn't enjoy it.
So I found some snippets online and listened, and it came rushing back: this is one of those shitty interchangeable 90's UK techno supergroups, like The Crystal Method or U.N.K.L.E. or The Chemical Brothers or Fatboy Slim or Prodigy or etc. etc. The Orb. The Orb. Which one were they? Was that the "shamma dah dow boy, kneecaps boy" song from the Trainspotting Soundtrack? Nope. That's "Born Slippy" by Underworld. Well then. The Orb is just one of the other ones, then. They probably had a hit beat that I would recognize. If I heard it, I would probably describe it as something like "the one that goes bowbow bow bow BOOOOM tikkatik tik tikka tik." But I'm not gonna waste my time tracking down the big Orb hit from 1996.
I looked them up on Wikipedia. They are old now. It must be sad to be an old man in 2008 with all of your worldly possessions hitched up to the "big techno" wagon. Hopefully they're drug addled enough not to know what year it is. There are certain situations under which memory loss can be a blessing.
Christopher Bissonnette
In Between Words
[Kranky; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.7.
This is a total snoozefest. As in it's the vanguard of the ambient electro-composition scene, and this guy is going to headline Snoozefest this year, with support from other notable acts such as "a vacuum cleaner in the next room" and "hissing baby monitor." Get your tickets now.
Walter Meego
Voyager
[Sony / Almost Gold; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.
Sometimes I wonder if I hate fun. That would depend on whether or not fun is this. If it is, I hate it. If fun is subjective, then I love fun but hate this.
(FYI it's American Apparel music for ironic fucking.)
James Pants
Welcome
[Stones Throw; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 5.0.
Oh man. This is strange. I feel like I'm being busted right now, because from a musical standpoint this is exactly like Walter Meego, but for some reason I like it and I think it's great and I want to be friends with James Pants and have fun dancing at a house party while he's playing. For some reason I feel like delineating the subtle differences so as to not come off as a hypocrite.
There's two kinds of kidding: real kidding and fake kidding. Walter Meego are either really really amazingly great like next level shit at kidding, or else, more likely, they're fake kidding. I don't know how else you'd explain something like this. It's ineffective kidding in bad taste. Or else, basically the same thing, it's wishful thinking fake kidding in bad taste by some dudes on a major label. The bad taste I can live with. The bad at kidding I can't. If it's a joke, I should be laughing. There are only like two actual jokes that happen in that video, and they're not good or funny. You get the feeling that the Walter Meego guys themselves are not actually funny. They seem like the kind of guys who'll call your sister fat and then say "just kidding" as if that saves it.
James Pants on the other hand, is really kidding. Which I appreciate. If you're going to be a joke, I figure, be serious about it. Joke all the way. Don't make a synth-overload song called "Girls" and then accompany it with an expensive-looking video about how you've got the power to airblast any female just by walking by them and then in the course of its narrative never smirk even once or have a punchline. It's confusing. I think you're probably a joke, but if the joke you're trying to make (and either you're playing your cards too close to your chest or else you're a shitty joker) is that you're not a joke, then either I'm not in on that joke, or else you're actually a total fucking JOKE. And regardless of what's happening, I'm too busy trying to figure this out to be able to enjoy myself, so it's not fun or funny. So if you don't mind, I'm going to go hang out with my buddy James Pants, who would never call my sister fat but would, and often does, gleefully fuck a fat chick.
But of course the distinction is all hypothetical. I'm not gonna go out and buy or routinely listen to either of these albums. I just would be psyched to be at a James Pants party, and if I was at a Walter Meego party, I'd feel a "this sucks" compulsion to get drunk on the official vodka sponsor, pull the plug on the band, get kicked out by the black suit black t-shirt bouncer with the secret service ear thingie, and then piss on the banana tree in the lobby of The W on my way out. That would be the only way I could enjoy myself. In other words, it's asshole music, where James Pants is buddyfun music.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Pitchfork Reviews 6/6/08
Fleet Foxes
Fleet Foxes
[Sub Pop; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 9.0 and listed it as the best album of 2008.
Hype is funny. It's only natural, really, and it's not even that bad of a thing. It comes from a very understandable human desire to want things to be good. If we like something, we want it to be considered good. Great, even, if we like it a lot. Sometimes we get carried away, but that's ok. It's ok to be wrong sometimes. Or to indulge in a little hyperbole for the sake of feeling good about ourselves. And it keeps us connected to each other, we can say "hey that thing, isn't it great?!" And then respond "yes, it is, I think so too and I'm also excited about it!" And that's a little boost to the days of those two people who agree on something being good.
Of course hype is destructive too. Because people are just trying to do a thing most of the time, and when it's not as good as everybody says it is, there's backlash. And backlash is natural too. "This is the best thing EVER, is it? Well fuck you pal, you're an idiot. This is not the best thing ever. In fact, it sucks. Ha ha." Nobody likes being told what they should and shouldn't like, and it's fun in a mean way to shit on somebody's parade. Makes you feel better about yourself, like you're not a sucker, like you're different than anybody else. Misanthropy is a fairly natural human phenomenon, because after all, we are all alone, stuck inside of our own brains and bodies.
But also: backlash bands misanthropes together through the bond of bad vibes "this sucks, right?" "You got it buddy, you wanna go get a burger?" "Naw man, burgers suck." "Totally." So that's maybe good in a way too, because even if it's through negativity, misanthropes need to bond with other people. Just for practice.
There's also the kind of anti-backlash backlash and anti-hype hype where you're like "calm down, it's not actually important that we figure out how to properly rate Wavves." That's only natural too, because telling other people to calm down convinces you that you're the calm one, when really you're anything but.
All forces combine over time to the point where any given band generally rates out in the world of opinion-havers as pretty much what they are. Some get perennially rated too high because of some ancient historical context based hype carry-over (see: Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds, et al), and some will have weird, ultra-high-rating cult audiences that nobody else can understand for the life of them (Rush, Tool, et al), but in general, graded for whatever community you're loosely a part of as an opinion-haver, everybody over time pretty much gets everything right. Thanks to the competing forces of hype, backlash, and "calm the fuck down."
I'm a bit of a misanthrope/"calm down" guy, and I consider myself to be a part of the "Velvet Underground-based taste in rock" community. So I set the bar pretty low for Fleet Foxes because I figured it'd just be another dispatch from the Bob Dylan/Neil Young community of thinglikers. I tried my damndest to avoid getting carried away or being dismissive, but I figured dismissive would probably be the right call and anyway I didn't feel a lot of urgency to have an opinion on this. So I can honestly say I've never listened to the entire Fleet Foxes album until right now. Well, they scraped their way over my low-set bar of expecting disappointment, like an 8 year old wiener dog who somehow manages to jump onto the couch. Sure, they're only on the couch, but they weren't supposed to be.
What can I say? They're right up there with the other luminaries of 2000's era "indie" soft rock, like The Shins or Arcade Fire or Kingsbury Manx or whoever else. Which sounds dismissive and might be kind of, but how excited do you expect me to get about soft rock? That's what it is. Soft rock. Good times, good tunes. Easy on the ears. Ok, then. I will like this and those other bands only so far as I like their best singles, and the rest is the right now equivalent of Seals & Crofts album cuts. But that doesn't mean that both "White Winter Hymnal" and "Summer Breeze" aren't gold-plated classics of smile-inducement.
I think this is a kingsize compliment for Fleet Foxes, by the way. But that doesn't matter now, because they've had two years of hype to live up to/live down, and they're now spit through the machine onto a different level where their next thing they do will have different expectations than the last thing. Oh well. They're just people doing a thing and hence they don't really deserve to be a battleground for musicnerd opinionfights, but them's the breaks and anyway they're probably making pretty good money per appearance now as compensation for all the "trouble" they've been caused by the hype wars. I guess that's how it goes.
Anyway, Fleet Foxes are now properly rated somewhere between "entrancing, beautifully executed pop/rock vocal arrangements the likes of which we haven't heard since The Mamas and the Papas" and "derivative limpdick hype machine cash grab" to become what they essentially are, a "solid outfit." I've got no real complaints. Wiener dog, on the couch. Well alright. Next.
Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War
[Motown; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.8 and listed it as the 13th best album of 2008.
Erykah Badu has more soul in her pinkie toenail than I'll ever have in my entire lifetime. And to her credit she's pretty much always used this as an excuse to do whatever the fuck she wants musically and say whatever the fuck she feels like saying lyrically without worrying about creating some ghastly overproduced vocal workout knockout album like Whitney Houston.
Maybe that first album was a little too pop-oriented, but I don't know. It's been a long time, and I'm not gonna go back to check. I do know that she came out around the same time as India Arie, because I associate the two mentally. India Arie turned out to be a triviajoke punchline compared to Erykah Badu.
Here she's getting as political and as personal as she feels like, and using her soothing, grounded voice to reign in some genuinely-on-the-weird-end stoner Madlib raggas. The whole thing sound like it was fun to work on, and nobody confused getting it right with getting it perfect. Which is all great.
P-fork rightly made reference to the fact that it might be condescending for people to praise this album with a "thank God for a black person finally making 'message music'" angle. But it really deserves whatever praise it can get for the "thank God for any person, black or not, making music that sounds like they just decided 'fuck it' before doing whatever they felt like, messages or no" angle.
Still, I'm an unfunky white boy, and more of a drunk than a stoner to boot, and this isn't for me. I'm just happy for it, is all. I'm glad that Erykah Badu is out there not giving a flying flock of shitgeese about what I think.
The Death Set
Worldwide
[Ninja Tune / Counter; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.8.
The Death Set has just pulled off the improbable feat of making me think about Atari Teenage Riot. They're just as "confrontational" and annoying and "dance punk"y, but they're from now instead of fifteen years ago and they sound like a mix between Wavves and The Go! Team instead of a mix between a headache and a headache (just kidding, it's the same thing).
Lemuria
Get Better
[Asian Man; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.4.
Ian Cohen is cute in the above-linked review. And he makes me feel old. Basically he's having a hard time understanding that the 90's were ONLY BANDS THAT SOUNDED LIKE THIS. Like for 10 solid years, there were at least 50 bands that sounded just exactly like this. And he wasn't really in the middle of it (neither was I, really, but still), so he hears a mediocre 90's-sounding pop/rock band and doesn't immediately start to have flashbacks of embarrassing overwrought self-righteousness.
This isn't just cutely 90's-sounding. This is the EXACT SOUNDTRACK to the single most can't-get-laidest period of American cultural history. That's why it sounds like a combination of "cutesy girl I wanna hold you hand" lyrics and "I'm so tense and full of jizz I want to smash my head through a wall but I can't because that would be impolite, so instead I guess I'll just learn to talk about my feelings, oh yeah, I love holding hands too, sure" guitar. That whole grunge thing they did to their power chords, I don't know what it is technically, but it sounds awfully frustrated, like a mute on a trumpet. There's a reason why people were moshing to Green Day in 1994, and it sure as shit wasn't because Green Day is a kick ass band.
Anyhow, this is a nightmare. And I don't mean that it's just bad, I mean that it's bad and also it's like the theme music to that nightmare where you're back in high school for some reason even though in real life you're 30.
Okay
Huggable Dust
[Absolutely Kosher; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.
And then of course there's this, which is what people from now who can't get laid sound like.
Fleet Foxes
[Sub Pop; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 9.0 and listed it as the best album of 2008.
Hype is funny. It's only natural, really, and it's not even that bad of a thing. It comes from a very understandable human desire to want things to be good. If we like something, we want it to be considered good. Great, even, if we like it a lot. Sometimes we get carried away, but that's ok. It's ok to be wrong sometimes. Or to indulge in a little hyperbole for the sake of feeling good about ourselves. And it keeps us connected to each other, we can say "hey that thing, isn't it great?!" And then respond "yes, it is, I think so too and I'm also excited about it!" And that's a little boost to the days of those two people who agree on something being good.
Of course hype is destructive too. Because people are just trying to do a thing most of the time, and when it's not as good as everybody says it is, there's backlash. And backlash is natural too. "This is the best thing EVER, is it? Well fuck you pal, you're an idiot. This is not the best thing ever. In fact, it sucks. Ha ha." Nobody likes being told what they should and shouldn't like, and it's fun in a mean way to shit on somebody's parade. Makes you feel better about yourself, like you're not a sucker, like you're different than anybody else. Misanthropy is a fairly natural human phenomenon, because after all, we are all alone, stuck inside of our own brains and bodies.
But also: backlash bands misanthropes together through the bond of bad vibes "this sucks, right?" "You got it buddy, you wanna go get a burger?" "Naw man, burgers suck." "Totally." So that's maybe good in a way too, because even if it's through negativity, misanthropes need to bond with other people. Just for practice.
There's also the kind of anti-backlash backlash and anti-hype hype where you're like "calm down, it's not actually important that we figure out how to properly rate Wavves." That's only natural too, because telling other people to calm down convinces you that you're the calm one, when really you're anything but.
All forces combine over time to the point where any given band generally rates out in the world of opinion-havers as pretty much what they are. Some get perennially rated too high because of some ancient historical context based hype carry-over (see: Sgt. Pepper, Pet Sounds, et al), and some will have weird, ultra-high-rating cult audiences that nobody else can understand for the life of them (Rush, Tool, et al), but in general, graded for whatever community you're loosely a part of as an opinion-haver, everybody over time pretty much gets everything right. Thanks to the competing forces of hype, backlash, and "calm the fuck down."
I'm a bit of a misanthrope/"calm down" guy, and I consider myself to be a part of the "Velvet Underground-based taste in rock" community. So I set the bar pretty low for Fleet Foxes because I figured it'd just be another dispatch from the Bob Dylan/Neil Young community of thinglikers. I tried my damndest to avoid getting carried away or being dismissive, but I figured dismissive would probably be the right call and anyway I didn't feel a lot of urgency to have an opinion on this. So I can honestly say I've never listened to the entire Fleet Foxes album until right now. Well, they scraped their way over my low-set bar of expecting disappointment, like an 8 year old wiener dog who somehow manages to jump onto the couch. Sure, they're only on the couch, but they weren't supposed to be.
What can I say? They're right up there with the other luminaries of 2000's era "indie" soft rock, like The Shins or Arcade Fire or Kingsbury Manx or whoever else. Which sounds dismissive and might be kind of, but how excited do you expect me to get about soft rock? That's what it is. Soft rock. Good times, good tunes. Easy on the ears. Ok, then. I will like this and those other bands only so far as I like their best singles, and the rest is the right now equivalent of Seals & Crofts album cuts. But that doesn't mean that both "White Winter Hymnal" and "Summer Breeze" aren't gold-plated classics of smile-inducement.
I think this is a kingsize compliment for Fleet Foxes, by the way. But that doesn't matter now, because they've had two years of hype to live up to/live down, and they're now spit through the machine onto a different level where their next thing they do will have different expectations than the last thing. Oh well. They're just people doing a thing and hence they don't really deserve to be a battleground for musicnerd opinionfights, but them's the breaks and anyway they're probably making pretty good money per appearance now as compensation for all the "trouble" they've been caused by the hype wars. I guess that's how it goes.
Anyway, Fleet Foxes are now properly rated somewhere between "entrancing, beautifully executed pop/rock vocal arrangements the likes of which we haven't heard since The Mamas and the Papas" and "derivative limpdick hype machine cash grab" to become what they essentially are, a "solid outfit." I've got no real complaints. Wiener dog, on the couch. Well alright. Next.
Erykah Badu
New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War
[Motown; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 7.8 and listed it as the 13th best album of 2008.
Erykah Badu has more soul in her pinkie toenail than I'll ever have in my entire lifetime. And to her credit she's pretty much always used this as an excuse to do whatever the fuck she wants musically and say whatever the fuck she feels like saying lyrically without worrying about creating some ghastly overproduced vocal workout knockout album like Whitney Houston.
Maybe that first album was a little too pop-oriented, but I don't know. It's been a long time, and I'm not gonna go back to check. I do know that she came out around the same time as India Arie, because I associate the two mentally. India Arie turned out to be a triviajoke punchline compared to Erykah Badu.
Here she's getting as political and as personal as she feels like, and using her soothing, grounded voice to reign in some genuinely-on-the-weird-end stoner Madlib raggas. The whole thing sound like it was fun to work on, and nobody confused getting it right with getting it perfect. Which is all great.
P-fork rightly made reference to the fact that it might be condescending for people to praise this album with a "thank God for a black person finally making 'message music'" angle. But it really deserves whatever praise it can get for the "thank God for any person, black or not, making music that sounds like they just decided 'fuck it' before doing whatever they felt like, messages or no" angle.
Still, I'm an unfunky white boy, and more of a drunk than a stoner to boot, and this isn't for me. I'm just happy for it, is all. I'm glad that Erykah Badu is out there not giving a flying flock of shitgeese about what I think.
The Death Set
Worldwide
[Ninja Tune / Counter; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.8.
The Death Set has just pulled off the improbable feat of making me think about Atari Teenage Riot. They're just as "confrontational" and annoying and "dance punk"y, but they're from now instead of fifteen years ago and they sound like a mix between Wavves and The Go! Team instead of a mix between a headache and a headache (just kidding, it's the same thing).
Lemuria
Get Better
[Asian Man; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.4.
Ian Cohen is cute in the above-linked review. And he makes me feel old. Basically he's having a hard time understanding that the 90's were ONLY BANDS THAT SOUNDED LIKE THIS. Like for 10 solid years, there were at least 50 bands that sounded just exactly like this. And he wasn't really in the middle of it (neither was I, really, but still), so he hears a mediocre 90's-sounding pop/rock band and doesn't immediately start to have flashbacks of embarrassing overwrought self-righteousness.
This isn't just cutely 90's-sounding. This is the EXACT SOUNDTRACK to the single most can't-get-laidest period of American cultural history. That's why it sounds like a combination of "cutesy girl I wanna hold you hand" lyrics and "I'm so tense and full of jizz I want to smash my head through a wall but I can't because that would be impolite, so instead I guess I'll just learn to talk about my feelings, oh yeah, I love holding hands too, sure" guitar. That whole grunge thing they did to their power chords, I don't know what it is technically, but it sounds awfully frustrated, like a mute on a trumpet. There's a reason why people were moshing to Green Day in 1994, and it sure as shit wasn't because Green Day is a kick ass band.
Anyhow, this is a nightmare. And I don't mean that it's just bad, I mean that it's bad and also it's like the theme music to that nightmare where you're back in high school for some reason even though in real life you're 30.
Okay
Huggable Dust
[Absolutely Kosher; 2008]
Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.
And then of course there's this, which is what people from now who can't get laid sound like.
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