Pitchfork Reviews 6/24/08

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.