Pitchfork Reviews 4/16/08

Muse
H.A.A.R.P.
[Warner Bros.; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 6.5.

I have a friend who, for some reason, is a big soccer fan. It's really hard to understand, and I can't tell if I like it, tolerate it, or secretly hate it. Sometimes it seems like a big ridiculous Anglophile affectation. Sometimes it seems like just sharing an interest in the world's most passionately followed sport, which IS a big ridiculous Anglophile affectation, but at least it's for sports-and-beers and not something more effete like expensive handmade umbrellas or imported tea biscuits. He's good with cab drivers. For me, soccer is ok to watch if it's high-stakes enough and the players are good. I'd put it somewhere between tennis and hockey on the watchability scale.

Did you know that there's a Rodgers and Hammerstein song, "You'll Never Walk Alone" (as covered by Slade, but still, it's Rodgers and Hammerstein), that's the official song of the Liverpool soccer club? And the fans in the stadium all sing it in unison the way soccer fans do, so it's like 50,000 people singing this kind of corny heartfelt ballad about never being alone because they have the soccer team in their hearts, or something? Isn't that confusing? Like, on one level it's awesome, on another it's completely weird and not awesome at all.

You ever play a soccer video game? I have. At my friend's house. Guess what's the worst part of the game, other than trying to figure out how to play both soccer and video game soccer at the same time. The music. The music is AWFUL in a soccer video game.

You know how in an American video game like Grand Theft Auto they'll sometimes have a track that Snoop shitted out in like 5 seconds, and they'll play it over and over because they paid a bajillion dollars for it, and it's terrible but you understand and you're not mad at Snoop for it because it's just a video game and they gave him free money so they could say "soundtrack featuring Snoop" on the box?

Well, soccer video games are like that but for eurotrash/Britpop. It's the bottom rung of rock before you're doing commercial jingles, a mix of blatant cash grabs by "known" artists, and blatant exposure-grabs by shitty bands that don't know better and who have now reached the peak of their earning potential by selling one track to a video game for a lot less than Snoop got paid.

From what I can piece together out of my very mild curiosity about Muse, the studio stuff sounds like shitty eurotrash Britpop, and the live stuff (did I mention this was a live album? Whatever, if you don't have it, you probably won't ever) sounds like eurotrash Britpop with teasingly encouraging but overly-technical guitar sound in rough approximation of classic hard rock. In short, Muse belongs in a soccer video game. To their "credit," they'd probably be the least annoying song on it, though.


Guillemots
Red
[Polydor; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 5.8.

Ok guys. I get it. It's shitty Britpop day. Good one.

This one is a collection from the "I am running to the options menu as fast as my thumbs will go in order to turn off the music on this soccer video game" Greatest Hits album.


Elbow
The Seldom Seen Kid
[Geffen / Fiction; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 7.8.

This guy sounds exactly like Sting. It's like if Sting impulsively did a "rock" album from now instead of whatever chamber music chanteusing he's doing at the moment. Imagine the production on that Sting "rock" album. Clean as a whistle with, like, barely discernible drum kit wind chimes low in the mix but crisp enough to hear the full range of. Shit like that. Imagine the interactions with the session guys he hired for it, like how early on he yelled at them about how this is a "collaborative process" and that they have to share their opinions with him because "THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE HERE FOR," so now instead of just yes-manning him, they have to put up a token fight first before immediately caving and yes-manning him, because that way he feels true ownership of the resultant guitar effect that kicks in for 4 bars in the bridge of "Goodbye Lenore" before disappearing forever, and that way he'll also have somebody to "tease" in a "funny story" about that guitar effect, which he'll later relay to a reverential "reporter" who is there to film the alternatingly hilarious and infuriating making-of minidoc for VH1. I'm picturing the victim of this teasing to be a six-string bass player with a proclivity for slapping who has long, clean, thin, even salt-and-pepper hair salon dreadlocks: just an affable bass-playing guy who wears slim black t-shirts and chuckles obsequiously for his paycheck like Kevin Eubanks. I'm thinking the resultant album would inexplicably/predictably win 8 Grammys even though it's probably the 113th best recording that year.

But this isn't Sting. I can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing. And I can't even tell if this is good or bad either. It's pretty enough, I guess. All I know is it got me caught up in a Sting reverie, and that sucks.


Colour Revolt
Plunder, Beg, and Curse
[Fat Possum; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it a 5.8.

Straight-ahead rock with shades of Cracker. At least they're not British. Oh wait. Tie-in from this band to the rest of the reviews so far from two years ago today.

This is a bad day. I'm actually enjoying listening to Cracker. Time to move on.


De Novo Dahl
Move Every Muscle, Make Every Sound
[Roadrunner; 2008]

Pitchfork gave it 7.0.

When people write about rock, they use chickenshit shorthand. Often. It's just a way of saying that something is wholly unexceptional, but in a specific archetypal way. And that's fine because we're dealing with rock here, and its basic core has not changed (not even a little bit) since Chuck Berry et al climbed out of the primordial ooze of the jook joints, and there are only so many tricks you can pull until you cross an arbitrary line and become officially something other than rock. So there's a lot of stylistic overlap in the intervening territory, because The U.S. of Rock has a history which spans 65-odd years of (mostly) shitty bands. It seems only fair to catalog those tricks so you know where everybody's from.

So you get useless words like "dynamic" or "jagged" that aren't useless because they're part of a shorthand that means "pretentiously trying to reinvent the wheel of verse-chorus-verse a la Emerson, Lake & Palmer 'composition' goofs" or "trying to approximate the guitar solo from 'I Heard Her Call My Name' for the n-thousandth time." It's only natural. Sometimes a word is worth a thousand bands.

Anyway, this is dehydrated power pop. I can't describe it better than that. Dehydrated power pop in the tradition of forgettable Supergrass album cuts. That's what this is.