Pitchfork Reviews 4/10/08

Various Artists
The Sound of Philadelphia: Gamble & Huff's Greatest Hits
Conquer the World: The Lost Soul of Philadelphia International Records
[Philadelphia International / Legacy; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 8.5/7.5.

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that pretty much everything I know about soul music is something that another white person told me? I don't know what to think about that. It might just be that white people have a proclivity to tell you everything they know all the time. Or maybe that's just my specific subset of white people: nerds. I don't know. I don't know, infinity.

I do know that:

1. You should already be familiar with most of the material on these collections.

2. Even if you don't think you are, you probably are. I mean, "Love Train." You've seen a Coors Light commercial. It's great stuff. It's hot, somebody opens a cold-tasting beer, a train comes, it's snowing. You've heard it.

3. You don't really need to know that it's from the Philly sweet soul sound scene or what the story is behind all of it. There is no situation in which knowing those things is necessary other than just saying "hey, I know a thing" in order to not feel too much like the square that you know deep down you are.

4. I can't tell if there's significant enough remastering or whatever for these songs to sound different enough from other versions for these collections to be somehow necessary.

5. I don't care enough to find out, and I'm fine with that. I also can't believe I even typed out item number 4.

6. Soul music was great in the early 70's because the arrangements incorporated psychedelic elements that made the music really great for listening to on drugs, and then later really great for sampling to make hip hop that's really great to listen to on drugs.

7. You can probably get all of this stuff for free off of the internet.

8. I will dance to pretty much any of this stuff if you give me 3 beers and surround me with women.

9. That's about all I feel I need to know about soul music, and I will try not to learn one other thing until I hear it from a brother. Except I probably will by accident because I can't help it and I'm sorry.


Tapes 'n Tapes
Walk It Off
[XL; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 5.9.

Where did all of this shit come from? Arcade Fire and Interpol and Tapes 'n Tapes and Fleet Foxes and Sunset Rubdown and all of this shit? It's like a "Stuff White People Like" blog entry, except it doesn't even have a name. And also the implied message of that blog. Namely: this blog. "White people like this blog. Ah ha ha I got a book deal, you stupid motherfuckers." That's also the implied message of this blog, too, though. Or of just about anything you could possibly put your eyeballs on these days.

"Buy me. Give me money to be what I already am. Please. I don't want to have to work for it. Just let me tell you how great I am. I have to, because if enough people believe me I'll eventually attain the symptoms of greatness, if not the disease. That's gonna be enough for me. Please. Don't let the world make me get a haircut. I'll do anything. I AM PRODUCT."

Anyway, Tapes 'n Tapes makes me think of Alice in Chains for some reason. Maybe it's the completely inessential nature of it, you know, the fact that other people do exactly this but better, and even those people suck.

And I have a theory of where it came from, too. In The Aeroplane Over the Sea. I think it's time to start tearing it a new one, just for damage control purposes. I'll start:

"In The Aeroplane Over the Sea: its staying power is directly related to the fact that it's 1. 'earnest', 2. about Anne Frank, 3. proto-steam-punk (a.k.a. music for those fucking guys who weld their own big bicycles). Otherwise it would just be Toad the Wet Sprocket."

Harsh, sure, but you have to nip these things in the bud.

The alternative is Tapes 'n Tapes.

WAIT. That's the name. That's the connection to Alice in Chains. It's second or third rate neutered alternative music. But from now. It's neuternative music.


Foals
Antidotes
[Sub Pop / Transgressive; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 5.9.

There was a point there in British music in like 1983 where new wave and "new romantics" bands started exploring world music at around the same time when they were going all dance-y/techno-y. The result was stuff like Haircut 100. It was joyful and insincere and pretentious and toothless and dumb, and not altogether in a fun way. Cut to 25 years later. Replace "world music" with "Remain in Light approximations of afropop," "dance-y/techno-y" with "math rock," "Nick Heyward" with "sounds like the guy from Franz Ferdinand," and "Haircut 100" with "Foals."


Strategy
Music for Lamping
[Audio Dregs; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.5.

Remember "IDM?" Intelligent Dance Music. It was music so pretentious that the people categorizing it put "intelligent" in the category so you wouldn't confuse it with that other music that those fucking dimwitted guidos and homos-on-ecstasy idiots dance to. This was INTELLIGENT dance music. And nobody ever danced to it or cracked a smile.

This is basically that, except slowed down to a bunch of slow, boring electric "sonic landscapes" of the sort you'd expect to hear in the background while Carl Sagan is telling you about billions and billions of stars, and maybe for some reason there's a timelapse film of clouds rolling across the sky in Arizona somewhere. And the beat will never ever kick in.

It's headache music.


The Duke Spirit
Neptune
[You Are Here; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.2.

There's an opener called "I Do Believe" that sounds like somebody or somebodies singing shape note harmonies directly into an open-tuned electric guitar with eerily subtle organ accompaniment, and it almost made me pass out from excitement. It's beautiful. And it's over in less than a minute.

And then the rest of this sucks. Think Oasis fronted by a British Edie Brickell. It's the kind of thing you see by accident on one of those "PBS Rocks" shows where somebody is very intently focusing on their tambourine work and affecting a casual smile before launching into verses interspersed between guitar-face solos by a guy with curly gray hair. Everybody in the audience is sitting.

That's exactly what they would be if this album was the MOST they could rock. The real story is probably closer to a female-fronted Walkmen or something like that. But we'll never know the real story now, will we? No we won't.