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.