Category Archives: music writing

Records from 2013 that are at least worth listening to and probably buying and getting really into because they’re pretty good or maybe even awesome

Posted on May 1, 2013 | 3 Comments

A quick post, because we’re 1/3 of the way through 2013 and I’ve not really written anything about new music yet this year, due to all the noughties stuff I’ve been doing.

My Bloody Valentine – MBV
This is, surprisingly, amazingly good. It sounds absolutely delicious; a warm, enveloping experience, both comforting and exhilarating.

Matthew E White – Big Inner
A soul record, basically. Of the old-fashioned, hot-buttered variety, almost. With a reedy-voiced white guy singing. He’s got a jazz background, and you can tell; it’s subtly sophisticated and the brass is delicious. Amazingly well recorded and mixed.

The Knife – Shaking The Habitual
A big, post-structuralist experiment with cybernetic hooks. Follows Tomorrow, In A Year more than it does Silent Shout, and arguably all the better for it. Again, sonically exquisite. Don’t fear the 19-minute drone.

Brandt Brauer Frick – Miami
Essentially a German jazz trio making electronic / dance music; amazingly proficient and exciting and dynamic and sophisticated, but maybe not in possession of the most obvious tunes (not that it’s difficult). Did I say the other records sounded good? This sounds outstanding.

British Sea Power – Machineries of Joy
I won’t fight BSP’s corner, but I like them well enough, and I enjoy this very much, for what it is; a mature, krauty, relaxed, musical indie rock record. It won’t shake anyone’s world apart, but you don’t always need that.

John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts
Sitting somewhere between Matthew E White and The Knife is this guy, with his pastoral confessional electronic-tinged post-country / blasted folk / whatever. The lyrics, and the melodies therefore too, are complex, rich, idiosyncratic, and affecting. The music is very good too. Sometimes he goes on a little too long, but I forgive him.

Atoms For Peace – Amok
Thom Yorke’s not-a-supergroup, making pretty much a straight post-2003 electronica / laptop / experimental / etcetera record in the vein of Caribou or Four Tet or whoever. Flea’s bass playing is amazing. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Mosquito
I’ve paid them no attention since the debut, when I loved “Maps”. No idea why. This is, sadly, a rock record with mainstream pretensions and therefore sounds pretty rubbish, but it’s not as bad as most, and has a nice, loose, vaguely experimental air of freedom, too.

Phoenix – Bankrupt!
This sounds like shit. I have almost no idea if the songs are any good, because I can’t hear them.

Pantha Du Prince & The Bell Laboratory – Elements of Light
Techno bells. Lightweight (geddit?) possibly, but very, very lovely, if not as compelling as Black Noise to me, yet.

Rokia Traore – Beautiful Africa
I’ll buy anything Seb Roachford drums on, even if it makes me look like a tokenistic colonialist world-music-tourist dickhead. This is really good. I have no idea about the tradition it’s come from. You know when anyone who’s not a British or American pop/rock/blues/roots whatever appears on Jools Holland, and the sound balance always seems much better? Same here; it’s because they’re proper musicians, not indie chancers. It’s notable that a chunk of her backing band on this are jazzers, not rockers.

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Why the vinyl revival can sod off as far as I’m concerned

Posted on February 6, 2013 | 5 Comments

Straight off the bat, for the record, I love Danny Baker as a radio broadcaster; his Saturday morning show on Radio 5 live beautifully demonstrates his story-telling skills, his appreciation of the mythology of the mundanity of everyday life, his understanding of how the format of radio works, and his extensive charm and humanity. It’s funny, and fun, and moving, and I love it.

But last night I watched the first part of his Great Album Showdown on BBC4 and it pretty much infuriated me from start to finish.

I could blame Jeremy Clarkson, one of the anointed foursome discussing what makes a great ‘rock’ LP, but by this point his persona as a caricature of a grumpy old man stuck in the 70s is beyond the worth of criticising. He is who he is, and if you take him seriously, in either direction, you’re an idiot too. I could blame Kate Mossman, for her bizarre assertion that glam and punk were opposites, which is a strange bit of garbled received wisdom that was rightly shot down by the other three (received wisdom being the enemy of criticism and thought in general). I could blame Baker himself, for his unwittingly throwaway sexist remark about not expecting “a woman” to like a particular record (presumably let alone a young, pretty one). Stephen Street, a self-confessed pop fan rather than a rock fan, and the final member of the four, looked uncomfortable, squirmed in his seat when Clarkson anointed Supertramp as the greatest thing ever, and seemed annoyed with the rockism ambushing him from all sides. He was the only one I could really identify with.

So instead, I’ll blame vinyl.

But of course, I’m not really blaming vinyl as a material, or even as an inferior vehicle for the delivery of recorded music (CD has a wider dynamic range when used properly, etcetera); I’m blaming it as a signifier, as a loaded totem of rockist bullshit.

Every time someone eulogies vinyl, they seem to necessarily slag CDs at the same time, and in the process of doing that they’re voiding the cultural experiences and values of a large swathe of music fans.

Because there are lots of people around my age for whom CD was the format through which they experienced music; certainly in our house there are a couple of thousand CDs and barely a hundred pieces of vinyl. Even my brothers, 9 and 11 years older than me, who’ve both been in bands and worked in record shops and so on, have shelves stuffed with CDs rather than crates full of vinyl. We don’t love music any less than the likes of Clarkson and Baker and Mossman, but you wouldn’t think so from last night’s program, or the seemingly endless vinyl-fetishists waxing lyrical about their favoured delivery method online or in print for what seems like the last decade.

Physically, to me, vinyl is an awkward, ungainly thing, difficult to hold in 12” form, easily scratched and made dirty, literally degrading every time you play it (by scraping a needle over a delicate material!), easily warped if not stored with great care. I dislike having to break a mood to change sides, the awkwardness of trying to access a specific song.

In terms of the sound, the warmth that so many people describe vinyl as enjoying just sounds like surface noise to me most of the time, a veil through which detail often has to struggle to emerge. I know a well-maintained vinyl collection and record player can sound superlative, but I prefer the sound of a good CD player; and it’s easier to look after, too. (I use a Rega Apollo for preference; noted for its warmth and detail, if you’re concerned about that type of thing.)

Vinyl’s also expensive and hard to find these days compared to CDs, and in my music-buying history, the last 20 years, has always been thus. Aside from the choice 12” decorations displayed in Urban Outfitters, I literally can’t buy any new vinyl in the city where I live. There is a secondhand shop, catering to old music obsessives and ignoring those after the thrill of the new and the now, but the secondhand market for original pressings and other collectors’ items baffles and disgusts me; scarcity and exclusivity are the two favourite assets of free-market economics and capitalist frenzy. If it’s rare; it’s worth more. Last night Danny Baker mentioned that one LP he had was worth well over £1,000. If you place more onus on the fiscal worth of your music’s format than the emotional and aesthetic worth of your music’s affect, then we’re talking at cross purposes from the very start. I used to deliberately buy debut vinyl singles by indie bands in the 90s and sell them on, circa debut album success and higher profile, for big profits, because it enabled me to buy, and enjoy, more music. The most I’ve ever paid for an album is £36, for the 4CD box set of Zaireeka.

In terms of the wider mythology and affection which surrounds vinyl, the stories people tell about it beyond, y’know, actually listening to it, well; all the things people enthuse about having done with LPs – read the lyrics while listening, studied the artwork, pored over the production credits, even skinned up a joint or chopped out a line on them – people have also done with CDs. These experiences are every bit as valid and meaningful and powerful as their wax analogues, and dismissing them – whether deliberately or as a side-effect of the display of your own preferences – is unpleasant and unnecessary.

Because the discourse which so often surrounds vinyl can often and easily be alienating and elitist and gatekeeperish. Vinyl fans will dismiss CDs as soulless, but the 12” LP evolved directly as a capitalist tool of record companies to increase profits by coercing music fans into paying money for songs they may not necessarily want.

Chris Molanphy gave a presentation at the 2011 EMP conference about the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and how it, well, charted the (US) music industry’s tempestuous relationship with the single and the tactics it’s used to make us buy albums (and the way it’s marginalized black and female performers by ghettoizing the genres they often work in as ‘singles’ genres, thus keeping big album profits by and large for white men). I wasn’t at the conference but yesterday Chris kindly sent me a PDF of his slides and notes; it’s fascinating reading. I’ve asked him to put it online permanently for posterity, and if he does, I’ll link it.

My conclusion from Chris’ work is that much of rock mythology is a lie, concocted, like most lies since the industrial revolution (and probably since the dawn of human history), in order to make people part with something in order to benefit the liar. The music industry wants us to worship the LP rather than the single in order to draw more money out of us, and the esteem within which vinyl is held is a part of this mythology. The side effect of this, of course, is a whole heap of wonderful albums that we love, but the application of even the slightest bit of Marxist cultural theory should make us question the ontology of the music that we love; the means of production influences the means of consumption, and vice versa. It’s partly this questioning that makes me favour the CD as my musical carrier of choice. The CD just fits best, for me, right now. And has done for 20 years.

(I got my first CD player 20 years ago this May, for the record; for my 14th birthday.)

The CD has its issues as well, of course – it’s encouraged hideous mastering practices, and made incalculable profits for a greedy industry in the 90s, the fallout of which is being felt now. (Interestingly CD sales, and thus profits, start falling at about the time CD mastering starts going off-the-scale into idiocy, which is also when downloading begins to get a foothold; there’s a PhD’s worth of research and pontification here.)

I asked people on twitter, unrelatedly, just before the program started last night, to tell me one thing that made them love a particular song; I got a dozen and more responses, and none of them mentioned the format it was on. Lyrics, melodies, sounds, specific bits of arrangements, emotions; all mentioned. But no one mentioned vinyl, or CD, or MP3, or Ogg Vorbis or wax cylinder or 8-track or cassingle or anything else. It was the music they were bothered about, not the delivery system.

So I think what irritated me most about last night’s show, and the vinyl revival in general, is the idea and myth of rock music, this hoary, old, patriarchal dog that refuses to die. Vinyl, in its totemic form, is a symbol of that. The people programming the media now – the executives and controllers and senior presenters – are in their 50s and 60s; vinyl is their format, rock is their era, and they wont let us forget about it. But their experiences are not everyone else’s. They’re certainly not mine. If rock was ever about change and energy and youth and the future, it needs to get over its past.

So, essentially, I’m irritated by the vinyl revival, if we’re calling it that, because I often feel like my experience as a music fan is being written off as invalid because it wasn’t mediated with vinyl. I resent being made to feel as if I don’t like music as much as someone else because I was born at a time when the ‘wrong’ format was in vogue. The format itself is fine, and beautiful, and can sound wonderful, and if you prefer it as your carrier for music, all power to your elbow. But don’t diminish my experiences to do so.

Postscript
Purely by chance, Sony have announced that they’ll cease production of their final minidisc player in March, news of which lead me to this old ILM thread from 2003 pitching minidisc against MP3 (minidisc seems to come out best!), wherein Jonesey drops some science about why CDs actually are better than vinyl on a technical level, busting myths about sampling-rates and so on.

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Repetition is a form of change: My Bloody Valentine, Loveless, and what to make of mbv after less than 48 hours

Posted on February 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

Specificity can be a boon to music – the little lyrical details that make a song feel more real; the clarity of something in the mix bursting through the listener’s metaphorical fourth-wall – but a complete lack of it can be even more potent. Such is My Bloody Valentine’s power, perhaps; you can’t tell what the words are, everything is blurred and vague and indistinct, a rush of out-of-focus colour and emotion and sensation, which doesn’t describe so much as it creates or inspires. Even the song titles are so non-specific as to be almost meaningless most of the time.

Because of this elusiveness (Eno described “Soon” as “the vaguest music ever to have been a hit”), and, of course, the peculiar sonic aesthetic the band constructed on Loveless, it’s very easy to project oneself deeply into My Bloody Valentine’s music; whilst their oeuvre is instantly recognizable, it isn’t built on the charisma of the performer the way that much pop is. The thing that’s recognizable is the sound and the feelings it inspires. Which is why My Bloody Valentine’s music is so tied up with sex and dreams and the suggestion of feelings; like Voodoo by D’Angelo, the vocals are measured to completely avoid intrusion on the listener’s experience; the singer’s story is secondary to yours. The sound, in turn, is measured to envelop and control you; its coding is neither masculine nor feminine, neither progressive nor retro. I don’t play Loveless for the rush of singing along with a melody or to appreciate the craft and musicianship; I put it on to take me to the places it’s always taken me to, the places it’s had nearly 22 years to take everyone else who’s listened to and fallen in love with it to.

If Loveless was intended as some kind of ‘grand statement’ by Kevin Shields back in 1991 or not, I simply do not know. Intention is irrelevant; it’s had two thirds of my lifetime to assume the status of a grand statement, to become the totemic, untouchable, revered thing it has most undoubtedly become, to be euologised and mythologised and whispered about and passed on to people (with the caveat that “it’s meant to sound like that”) until the reality is hopelessly eclipsed by the reputation. Yes, Loveless is a wonderful record. No, it’s not the peak of all human endeavour. But mythology is a powerful thing.

And so to mbv, so lacking in specificity that it eschews capital letters, that the title is merely the shorthand acronym for the band’s name, that it took 20 years to make, that it arrived at midnight or thereabouts with no fanfare and no warning, that it is just a record, that it sounds exactly like you might have imagined a My Bloody Valentine record made 18 months after Loveless might have sounded, down to the mastering levels. A warming, beguiling, soothing blanket of sound that will be instantly recognizable and comfortable to a generation of indie people who fell in love with (and to) Loveless on a cocktail of acid and MDMA under the dread auspices of an uncaring Tory government, or however they listened to it, and wherever, and whenever.

I’ve listened to mbv about four times so far. The first listen was whilst I made an omelette, while I ate that omelette, and while I washed-up the omelette pan. I deliberately approached it in as sacrilegious a way as possible, to try and demystify it, to free it from expectation and history. When I first got into My Bloody Valentine, in about 1996, they were already a long-gone proposition, and I never expected or imagined that they’d manage to follow Loveless with another record. I remember playing it at a party once, and being asked to put something else on. I remember convincing someone I met online to buy it, and having to assure them that no, the CD almost certainly wasn’t warped. I remember thinking that the chord changes sounded more like gear changes, that the whole thing seemed to ooze or swoon or stream rather than sound like ‘real’ music. I remember countering people who professed that ‘real’ music was something to aspire to by saying that ‘unreal’ music sounded far more interesting to me, and thinking that this was probably it. Unreal.

So I don’t know what mbv is or what I think of it yet. I’m still not entirely sure what Loveless or Isn’t Anything are. I’ve had half my lifetime to engage critically and emotionally with their previous work, and I just can’t parse mbv yet. I doubt anyone can. For what it’s worth, one song has an almost hip-hop-like drum loop, which invites head-nodding, and which doesn’t seem all that strange or out of place. The second song has that jet-engine-taking-off sound run through it a couple of times. There’s an elongated ambient-ish piece, which surely must use synthesizers. There are beats which sound like the things Kevin Shields described working on in 1996, drum’n’bass progeny layered with sheets of this guitar, so rich in texture and internal harmonics. You can barely hear the voices and you certainly can’t make out the words. It could have been recorded mere days or months after Loveless or it could have been recorded last year. We may never know. It doesn’t feel like what My Bloody Valentine do or are has changed much, if at all. But over 20 years ago they hit on something that a lot of people loved dearly; finding something different that people might love as much would be almost impossible, as would recreating exactly what happened back then too. So we have this, which is almost the same, almost different, and now we have to take the time to get to grips with it.

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On the long demise of HMV

Posted on January 15, 2013 | 3 Comments

On Sunday I went in HMV Exeter desperate to spend £20 (that I don’t really have, because it’s January) on season 4 of Breaking Bad on DVD. I vaguely hoped it might be in the fire blue cross sale. It wasn’t, because, they didn’t have any copies of it. I asked at the counter. They didn’t offer to order it in or tell me if they were expecting restock of it. For what are now obvious reasons. (They were pretty obvious then, too.)

I’ve written about my family affection for and recent frustration with HMV before, of course, because this has been a long time coming. If HMV goes, there will literally be nowhere in Exeter to buy a DVD on the high street, apart from Sainsbury’s.

I’m pretty sure I ordered a copy of Ege Bamyasi in my Local HMV, at age 16 or 17, and picked it up from the shop the next week. That’s how things worked then. Not long after that they got a copy of Tago Mago in, possibly inspired by the fact that some enthusiastic kid had ordered in another CAN album, and I bought that, too. I bought the remasters from that bloody rainforest though.

I had a little Twitter spat last September when Grizzly Bear’s album was released and Exeter HMV didn’t have a copy for me to buy until the afternoon, because stock hadn’t come in yet. I’ve been into HMV with a vague wishlist of things I’d like to buy; acclaimed (if sometimes esoteric) new releases, back catalogue stuff. They never had anything. We spend somewhere in the region of £750 a year on new music, on average (at a quick calculation for the last three years or so); my tastes aren’t that weird or leftfield.

I gather HMV moved to central stock ordering sometime in the late 90s, which would have thrown local knowledge and product specialism out of the window as far as staff go, and turn them into little more than cash-register operators and shelf-stackers. Ludicrous. For the last two, three, five years, HMV Exeter piled Kings of Leon albums and Lord of the Rings DVD sets higher than you could reach to pick up the top copy. Doesn’t everyone who could possibly ever want to own Lord of the Rings on DVD already own it? Do people who go into HMV really want JLS badges and One Direction mugs and jelly sweets?

Phil Beeching had HMV’s advertising account for 25 years, and wrote an eye-opening piece last August about how clearly he’d pointed out to them, 11 years ago, what the threats to their business were (online retailers, downloading, and supermarkets, of course), only to be angrily dismissed by the then MD, told that downloading was “a fad”. Three quarters of UK music and movie sales are still physical media, but come on. Consider that HMV decided to try and sell consumer electronics at the same time as the high street retail of consumer electronics collapsed.

We’ve been quietly boycotting Amazon for a few months now, partly because of them remotely deleting customers’ Kindles, partly because of distaste with general e-book DRM and proprietary format issues, partly because their ‘next-day’ service is nothing of the sort, partly because of their massive tax-avoidance, and partly because, these days, they seem like a baddie, and boycotting baddies seems like what responsible people ought to do. I fear that, increasingly, we can justify anything in this country, this culture, by either making or saving money. Tax avoidance? But CDs are a couple of quid cheaper, so who cares. Abusing kids in a hospice? He raises lots of money for us by running marathons, so who cares. Yes, I just compared Amazon to this country’s most evil serial child molester. Like I said, they seem like a baddie.

Before Christmas, on the Monday after ATP weekend, we went to Bristol to see Patrick Wolf, and I nipped into Rise Records and happily, quickly, spent £40 on Fugazi, The National, Liars, and Local Natives records that I’d been vaguely hoping of coming across in our local HMV (or Fopp in Bristol, which I’d checked futilely a few weeks before) for ages, but never seen. The week before Christmas we went to Totnes’ The Drift and spent another £30 on Perfume Genius, Fiona Apple, and Julia Holter albums. HMV Exeter doesn’t have a marker for Fugazi anymore. They didn’t even have the new Fiona Apple album in. Acclaimed, loyal-fanbase, major-label Fiona Apple, appearing high in end-of-year lists all over the shop, and I couldn’t buy her CD in Exeter in December. (To be fair, I could, and did, buy the Deerhoof album.)

We’ve decided that we’re going to make monthly music-buying pilgrimages this year, alternately to Rise in Bristol and The Drift in Totnes; keep a wishlist of what we’re after, and buy a bunch of albums all at once. Chat to the staff. Have a browse. Make an impulse purchase. We might also buy some stuff direct form record label websites, where they’re transactional and I haven’t seen stuff in either Rise or The Drift; we’ll try and support the shops first and foremost. Because they seem like goodies. I’d like to be able to walk into Exeter and buy the records I want, but I can’t.

Because these independent shops have embraced online retailing, have taken to social media, are run by and staffed with people who care about music, who can describe the Perfume Genius album cover to the new girl at the drop of a hat so she can see if she can see if it’s behind the counter because they’ve not put the new stock out yet. They understand that music can (should?) be about community and communication just as much as it can be about anonymous online transactions and listening in commuter silence via headphones. The Drift send a monthly newsletter to email subscribers recommending their favourite records of the past four weeks. Before Christmas they published a list of their favourite 100 records of 2012 online and in printed, fanzine-esque form that you could pick up in the shop. They sell turntables. Their stock is curated like a gallery rather than lumped together like a warehouse or piled high and cheap like a supermarket. They run a listening club (possibly inspired by ours!). They recommend music to you in any number of ways. As NickB asked on ILX, “Can you even listen to sound samples on the HMV website?” No, you can’t. They’d rather sell you some coasters than some records, or so it feels. Has felt for too long.

Michael Hann wrote in The Guardian today about visiting the Oxford Street branch today, and reminisced that he had probably realised the game was up for them a few years ago when Fleetwood Mac were touring and he popped in to pick up Tusk. “The biggest record shop in Britain did not have a copy of a legendary album by one of the world’s biggest bands even as they were on tour in the UK.” I’ve repeated his experience dozens of times in microcosm, the last time being the Fiona Apple failure.

(As an aside, I completely empathise with Michael’s fondness for the big chain in the face of sometimes snooty and elitist indies – it echoes some of my teenage experiences.)

Bob Stanley wrote brilliantly a year ago, and republished today, a piece about the things HMV could have done to stave off what many are talking about as being inevitable. None of these things are outrageous – they’re happening under HMV’s nose, practically next door.

I won’t miss HMV, because I’ve barely bought anything in there for years. But I will miss the act of going in a record shop every Saturday in the hope that something would catch my attention and fire my imagination and make me fall in love. Because that used to happen; didn’t it?

(I know, of course, that the entertainment industry wont let HMV just die, that branches, that the brand, will live on somehow, but allow me this moment of drama and mourning. Even as I write, Canada might be coming to the rescue. Whatever the salvation, though, things will have to change.)

(I ended up buying season 4 of Breaking Bad from eBay. I literally didn’t know where else to get it from.)

(When I say ‘records’, obviously I mean CDs, because they’re just better than vinyl, aren’t they? But there you go. The fact that vinyl sales have been on the up for years, and HMV in Exeter, as well as other branches I gather, failed to stock any vinyl at all, is yet another reason we’re nailing their coffin shut, metaphorically. Let’s hope we bury them with a claw hammer so they can fight their way out.)

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12 albums from 2012

Posted on December 14, 2012 | 6 Comments

People (and by people I mean music writers and geeks and fans of various stripes) often talk about fallow years for music, about an occasional paucity of great albums across a calendar year. I’m not sure how much I subscribe to this theory, although it’s one that I’ve expounded upon at length to my fellow DRC members; I suspect, that if you mine a specific seam deeply enough, you’ll be able to find plenty of wonderful music to fascinate and beguile you. There are innumerable pulses upon which you could have your finger, and there’s always new old music, too.

Why this might be, if you agree with the concept, is a matter open for conjecture – and there is, of course, a huge discussion to be had about how these things get decided (history is not written by the winners, but won by those who could be bothered to document [and perhaps fabricate] it, in the end, in some ways, perhaps) – but it does seem to be an actual thing phenomenologically; look at Pitchfork’s People’s List from earlier this year, and click on the bit where you can see the breakdown of what years albums voted for were from – 2007 and 2010 are big peaks, while 2006 and 2008 are lowly troughs. My own experience bares this out – 2007 felt like amassive, triumphant year for music to me, whilst 2008 seemed dull and empty. Of course, personal circumstances must colour that opinion as much as any empirical assessment of music actually released.

But anyway; this year closing, 2012, seems to be being talked about as being one of those fallow years – the big hitters of acclaimed music that trendy western people talk about on the internet either didn’t release anything (Radiohead) or else released something that everyone seemed to go ‘meh’ at (Animal Collective), and no explosive or unifying new trends or artists emerged to change perspectives and flavour the whole year.

Or did they?

I am just one (lower middle class white English) guy, and I don’t keep up with everything. I’ve not even, at the time of writing, listened to Kendrick Lamar or Frank Ocean’s albums, the two most acclaimed records of 2012 judging by end-of-year lists. The Kendrick I’ve only heard of in the last couple of months, which have been chaotically busy, and the Frank Ocean I’ve had reservations about based on the opinions of people whose opinions I trust. Also, with both, I’m just not that into musical story-telling, which seems to be a big part of the acclaim afforded to both. As I outlined here, I’m not keen on literary-criticism masquerading as music writing, and nothing I’ve read about either record has really given me any idea of what it might sound like. Not being a (semi) “professional” music writer anymore, I feel no need to listen to stuff in order to form an opinion about it, so I’ve not felt compelled to investigate. There’s also a certain bloody-mindedness at play here, if I’m honest. A few years ago I’d have kicked against that bloody-mindedness with equal force from the opposite direction, but today it seems like a waste of energy, when I could just be enjoying the records below again (debate the personal and spiritual growth ramifications or cultural ennui or inherent conservatism or whatever of that as much as you like).

As an aside, because I do love a good aside; I’m always baffled by people, especially people who are just music fans like me rather than industry professionals, who list anymore than about 20 albums at the end of the year. I’ve seen people list 100 or even more records. If you’re Stephen Thomas Erlewine and parse records for your job, I can understand it, but with a full-time job that has nowt to do with music, a home life, and other hobbies to devote time to (football, cycling, films, etcetera, none of which really allow you to listen whilst partaking), I honestly don’t know how I could pay adequate attention to, let alone like enough to list / write about, more than a dozen or so records.

As another aside, I’ve little interest in rap, metal, country, opera, punk, classical, or chart pop, only passing interest in jazz, a dilettante’s knowledge of electronic music… see what I’m getting at? I am not, in any way, authoritative.

What I’m saying is that I don’t know if these albums I’m writing about are the best of this year, because what does that even mean?, but they are my favourites (of the ones I’ve heard, and I’ve [again, just so you don’t moan at me] not heard everything).

So there are 12 records in this list, because this is a year of 12s, and why not? And the only order they’re in is the order they were released, because who ranks art, anyway? The Tate Modern doesn’t put paintings in order of awesomeness. I know; I’ve been there.

So here goes nothing.

Grimes – Visions
I liked this straight off the bat (the bat being a single on 6music) because it reminded me of Cluster and early Orbital, possibly as photocopied by someone with a really old photocopier. It still does. I’ve not played it in full in months, but it soundtracked a big chunk of spring and summer, and Emma liked it a lot too. Grimes’ tunes, and notably her hooks, are insidious but with a short half-life, which made Visions easy to listen to (or, rather, just “put on”) a huge amount without finding it wearying. Yes, she only has one idea; yes, her beats are… prosaic; but, they work. Her DIY ethos and uber-geek aesthetic are appealing too; Grimes seems like she’d be fun to hang with, which is exactly what her music was.

Portico Quartet – Portico Quartet
Like The Necks in most years, Portico Quartet got played a lot whilst doing other things – reading, cooking, packing our lives into boxes. Is it jazz? Yes, but it’s the kind of jazz that any indie rock fan could get behind without suffering cognitive dissonance, all sway and no skronk. I’d been aware of them for years but never delved in; an early-year hunger for some new British jazz propelled me towards it happily.

Field Music – Plumb
I’ve written about Plumb at length, and stand by everything I’ve said all these months later. It’s a delicious, thoughtful, sensitive, creative, righteous (in a good way) record, but more than that it’s packed full of tunes and melodies and musical passages that make you smile to hear them. Lyrically, as a 30-something man with a wife and a mortgage and worries about the state of the nation, it spoke to me. Musically, it sang to me, rocked me, and grooved me beatifically, finding that sweet spot of sadness at joy or joy at sadness.

John Talabot – ƒin
This I struggled with initially – I was expecting something closer to Caribou’s Swim or Orbital from what people were saying, but when I clamped ears on it these seemed like strange, possibly lazy comparisons. I didn’t quite get the Balearic sunset vibe from this either (although I’ve seen Balaeric sunsets for myself I was never dancing). What I did get was something meticulously structured and richly finished, which stayed with me throughout the year, across dozens and dozens of listens, in the car, at home, at work, intensely, distractedly, on headphones. I still have no idea who he is; I doubt his identity would mean much to me. It still feels a little anonymous, but that may be psychological as much as phenomenological, and sometimes anonymity is good.

Liars – WIXIW
Whereas this is almost the polar opposite; rough and amateurish, a hint of sophistication from Daniel Miller but so much rambunctious, experimental enthusiasm and oppression that it could never be tasteful. I fell for Liars heavily with this album, found their immersion in synthesizers and electronic beats beautiful and powerful in equal measure, bought up chunks of their back catalogue, and felt that WIXIW somehow meant something important, though I have no idea why, or what.

Neneh Cherry and The Thing – The Cherry Thing
I’ll be honest – I’ve not listened to this enough to really love it, or even know it that well yet. I’ve not had chance. Em’s not keen on Neneh Cherry’s voice or on free jazz, and I bought this during the midst of our interminable months of living out of boxes. But when I have played The Cherry Thing, it’s been scintillating, outrageous, exciting, and I’ll be getting to know it much better, I know that much.

Four Tet – Pink
Initially I thought this was a strange, hydra-headed beast, created for the dancefloor and not 100% comfortable away from that context. But actually it’s revealed itself over the late summer and autumn as a perfect livingroom record; perhaps not as possessed of the same kind of gestalt as There Is Love In You (which I think is Hebden’s masterpiece now), but thoroughly beautiful and intriguing and enjoyable nonetheless. “Ocoras”, “Peace For Earth” and “Pinnacles” are as wonderful as anything else he’s done. I’m a fanboy; I can’t resist.

Minotaur Shock – Orchard
Speaking of “livingroom records”, this is another fine one. I first heard of Minotaur Shock through his remixes of early Bloc Party singles, and bought Maritime to investigate further. That record never struck me particularly for whatever reason, but somehow, years later, I got talking to David Edwards, who is Minotaur Shock, on Twitter. He sent me a link to download Orchard, so I did, listened to it, liked it well enough, and bought a real copy out of a sense of fairness one day in HMV when I wanted desperately not to walk out empty-handed. Opening Orchard up on proper speakers, letting it fill space, it became a favourite, and much turned to. Deciding not to shy away from the “folktronica” tag he’d found irritating in the past, Edwards has found a beautiful balance of multitudinous elements, from krautrock pulses and folky, English acoustic pastoralism to more exotic textures and rhythms. Orchard covers a lot of ground, and does it all incredibly well and incredibly tunefully.

Divine Fits – A Thing Called Divine Fits
I covered this for The Quietus, and, again, stand by what I said – this is as good a record as any latter day (Gimme Fiction onwards) Spoon album, laden with tight grooves, taut songs, and well-dressed hooks. Yes, it’s just a bunch of guys playing guitars, bass, drums, and synthesizers; no, they’re not breaking any new ground; now, they’re not even writing particularly outstanding songs – but sometimes it’s enough to just be pretty good and very cool and sound like you’re having a lot of fun.

Swans – The Seer
If you were in the wrong mood, The Seer could feel as long as Swans’ remarkable career. I say ‘remarkable’, but I’d never listened to Michael Gira’s outfit before this year, despite having known about them for what seems like forever. This year, though, I found myself lured in by the rabid enthusiasm it was talked about with. The Seer is unremittingly intense, unapologetically serious, unnecessarily long. It feels like desperate music. At times it feels like dangerous music. Like latter day Terence Malick movies it also feels like it could do with a sympathetic but strict editor. But it’s also incredibly rewarding, and – and this isn’t mentioned often enough – remarkably good fun. Like an over the top horror movie, half the pleasure is in the performativity, the fact that you know this isn’t the way that people behave everyday. Or, at least, that’s the case for me. It may be that Michael Gira is like this everyday; if so, I’m glad someone is. When it hits you, when it gets close to pushing for transcendence, The Seer is pretty magnificent.

Grizzly Bear – Shields
It’s about the way “Sleeping Ute” collapses into soporific beauty for the final minute. The way “Speak In Rounds” edges up to you, shuffling and peering around corners, before grasping your hand and galloping for the horizon even as it’s telling you it’s leaving you alone. How “Gun-Shy” pulses, rich in tune, from one place to another. It’s about the brass, the guitars, the drums (the DRUMS!), the voices, the moments of absolute calm and absolute beauty and almost absolute chaos, the way it sounds and feels like a dream much of the time. I’m not picking a favourite album of this year, because who knows how to even do that, but if I did…

Daphni – Jiaolong
Someone much wiser than me described this as “griddy”, in that the structures of the compositions seem to fit perfectly into imaginary grids of how you might draw a topography of a piece of dance music with a pencil and a piece of graph paper. And it is. Of the five “we are going dancing in a club” records I bought this year (Talabot, Four Tet, Blondes, Orbital), Jiaolong is the most fun, the one with the biggest smile on its face, the one enjoying itself the most. It is decidedly functional, and doesn’t beguile or (emotionally) move me in quite the same way as Caribou does, but it’s not trying to do that. It also best captures the “last track feels like going home after a great night out” vibe that I love so much.

Coming at some point soon, 12 songs from 2012, and 12 old records that were new to me in 2012.

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National Motorways

Posted on December 12, 2012 | 4 Comments

All Tomorrow’s Parties, curated by The National

I’ve often wondered whether one day we’ll get to the point where we don’t need roadworks anymore – all the nation’s motorways beautifully surfaced, all the bridges and overpasses structurally sound, every bend and junction and lane everywhere finally finished – and we’ll no longer require maintenance crews, lane closures, flashing orange traffic cones, average speed checks or temporary central reservation barriers.

Of course, this is a crazy pondering: the very act of driving on roads causes them stress and strain and wear and tear – they’ll never be finished. They’re not a thing that can be finished. Few things are; almost everything is a process; moving, changing, not static. That goes for people as much as tarmac.

We went to All Tomorrow’s Parties, curated by The National, over the weekend. I saw (at least some of) 19 different acts perform live over the three days. On Monday we drove back home from Camber Sands in the morning, dozed for an hour, and then drove to Bristol to see Patrick Wolf play the penultimate date of his acoustic tour at St George’s hall. Then last night I had a work Christmas do. I can’t remember the last time I did five nights out on the trot. I feel like I’m coming down with a cold now.

I’m not a massive fan of The National – we bought tickets almost as soon as they were announced primarily because we’d enjoyed last year’s ATP so much, and we love Wild Beasts, Antlers, and Owen Pallett, who were announced early on. Em likes them much more than I do; she’s listened to High Violet a lot and loves it, but I think my ambivalence towards them probably prevented her getting really into them. I feel guilty about this; just because I don’t like something all that much doesn’t mean anybody else shouldn’t, especially my wife. My opinions are loud and not always right.

I bought Alligator when it came out in 2005, and quite liked it. I was sent a promo of Boxer a couple of years later, and thought it was alright too. But they never clicked with me, for whatever reason – in 2007 I was busy with Caribou and Patrick Wolf and Battles and Spoon and so on, and didn’t have room, aesthetically or emotionally, perhaps to invest in someone else. Looking back now, I’m baffled that I didn’t go ga-ga for Fake Empire’s strange build and horns. At the time I wrote something on ILM about how The National were “a no-concept band” with “decent lyrics, decent tunes, decent arrangements”; I think I was struggling to find a USP as a way-in to a straight-up ‘rock’ band. Sometimes I struggle with straight-up ‘rock’ music. I think their occasional fondness for Adam-Clayton-esque basslines probably causes me hesitancy too. I tend not to trust people who use overtly Adam-Clayton-aping basslines. In 2007 I was on my anti-dynamic-range-compression campaign, too, and Boxer could have been more lightly touched, I suppose. I probably dismissed many otherwise perfectly fine records out of principal back then – I probably still do. I had (still have) a point to prove.

But I’ve come away from ATP a massive convert to The National. Partly thanks to their brass section; partly thanks to a beautiful, acoustic sing-along version of “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” as a set-and-festival-closer; partly due to a beautiful, drifting song they played live with Nico Muhly (which may have been brand-new); partly thanks to their evidently massive heart and enthusiasm; but largely due to the nature of the weekend itself.

I’m not talking about the fact that I loved the weekend so now I love the headliners (not quite; though that’s almost certainly part of it): I mean the way the weekend worked, the enthusiasm and care that the band obviously put into curating. The National seemed to have produced or played with almost everyone else on the bill; and those they hadn’t worked with directly were revealed as inspirations. There was a member of The National, usually a Dessner twin, at just about every set by every act.

Seeing these carefully chosen acts, be they influences or musical familial links, exploded the context of The National’s music for me; seeing Michael Rother play the music of Neu! and Harmonia made Bryan Devendorf’s hectic, repetitive drumming make perfect sense; seeing the flamenco guitar and cello of Pedro Soler and Gaspar Claus caused me to hear ripples through Bryce Dessner’s guitar; seeing Hauschka’s minimalist prepared piano (with delirious, highlight-of-the-weekend diversions into full-on jazz-house electronic territory) snapped Mat Berninger’s melodies and song structures into focus. Every act we saw seemed to lead the way towards The National’s climactic, rapturous set, and the band evolved in my mind from an interesting and commendable halfway house between Tindersticks and early Interpol into something incredibly worthwhile and characterful in their own right. That USP that I was looking for five years ago? It’s that they’re really good. Really, really good. That’s enough.

They’re also consummate curators, judging both by this festival and the Dark Was The Night compilation (masterminded by the Dessners) a few years ago. Collaborators, too; as well as the huge list of people they’ve produced records by recently, there’s also a huge swathe of people they’ve worked with – Sufjan Stevens and St. Vincent and Nico Muhly and Richard Reed Parry and Owen Pallett and the Kronos Quartet and David Byrne and Sharon Van Etten and on and on and on.

This type of constant, flexible collaboration and hunger to make music in many directions at once, with many people, for solo albums and side projects and one-offs, is almost alien to someone who came of musical age during Britpop, when it was a spirit of competition and antagonism that drove success; “Oasis v Blur” not “Oasis with Blur”. There’s definitely, over the last decade or so, something going on with American and Canadian “alternative” music. Em always used to say that she liked hip-hop culture because of the way artists guested on and produced each others’ records, the sense of community that there was (although, obviously, that sense of community has had its problems, and major problems at that, with antagonism); that seems to be very much the case with this school of musicians. Whether it’s in part encouraged, or just documented, by the likes of Pitchfork and other web music communication tools, I don’t know. But it’s certainly fascinating, and rewarding, if a little difficult to keep up with the sprawling, interconnected spider-diagram which links The National to Sufjan Stevens to St. Vincent to Grizzly Bear to Owen Pallett to Caribou to Four Tet to Radiohead (so there is UK representation and participation, although it’s telling that Wild Beasts were the only British act on the bill, as far as I could tell) to whoever and etcetera and so on and so forth.

Anyway, this is everyone I saw over the weekend (Em saw them all too, except Michael Rother and Deerhoof)…

Friday
Hayden
Hauschka
Bear in Heaven
(5 minutes of) Tim Hecker

Saturday
So Percussion
Kronos Quartet
Lower Dens
Michael Rother
Sharon Van Etten
Antlers
Wild Beasts

Sunday
Pedro Soler and Gaspar Claus
My Brightest Diamond
The Philistines Jr
(5 minutes of) Perfume Genius
Owen Pallett
(30 seconds of) Deerhoof
Local Natives
The National

Monday (not at ATP, obviously)
Abi Wade
Patrick Wolf

Other than The National, and the tangible spirit that ran through the whole weekend itself, highlights included Wild Beasts playing all of Smother in order, and then a big chunk of Two Dancers to boot: Owen Pallett charming, beguiling, and mystifying the audience with his generous nature and wonderful, creative music (I’ve seen a lot of ways to play violin and cello lately, many of them baffling): Antlers, threatening to spiral down the Jeff-Buckley-fronts-very-early-Verve rabbit hole of beatific psychedelic meandering despite technical difficulties: Michael Rother bringing to life some of my favourite music ever: Hauschka producing the closest thing to dance music of the weekend (the lack of electronic influence would be about my only complaint: that, and no bowling alley): standing next to a little guy with a moustache at seemingly every set, only for him to appear onstage as the singer of Local Natives (who I knew pretty much nothing about but now own an album by) on Sunday night: the Buddha Bowl van serving delicious vegan “scraps” outside the pub: meeting people I’ve previously only spoken to online and discovering them to be real live human beings, which is always nice: So Percussion’s syncopating finale: Gaspar and Pedro’s genial, gentle introduction to Sunday: Sharon Van Etten being as good as people said. There were others too, but these will be the things I remember.

So what have motorways got to do with all of this? Like wondering if the motorways will ever be finished, I sometimes used to think I was looking for some kind of perfect band who fitted some platonic ideal, who would make a perfect album, and I’d never need to listen to anything else again. This is, of course, a ridiculous idea, like assuming that humankind is evolving and improving towards some end-point nirvana. Seven years ago, when I first encountered them, I think I wanted The National to be that band, realised quickly that they weren’t, and dismissed them. Unfairly. They don’t need to be that band. No one does. It’s a crazy idea.

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On end-of-year lists…

Posted on December 3, 2012 | 4 Comments

End-of-year lists seem to be coming earlier and earlier each year – the last couple seem to have hit even before December has started, presumably in a joint effort to a) attract attention by getting yours published (and ergo talked about) first, and b) inspire increased sales of the year’s anointed releases in the lucrative Christmas period (judging by the state of HMV on Saturday, December is the only month that a lot of people physically go into record shops – it was bedlam).

Having been involved with and run various polls over the years, I know how long it takes to logistically organise one – by my reckoning, contributors are going to have been totting up their individual lists in October, with 8-12 weeks of potential album releases yet to come. If you go through the Metacritic recent releases there are dozens of records getting high scores that would have come out after voting deadline. (The general amount of high scores given out by record reviewers compared to film reviewers is another issue, which I’ve written about before. Apparently it’s worse in games reviews, though.)

After individual lists are done, votes need to be matriculated, final placings argued over (even if the matriculation is taken as law and not gerrymandered to reflect politics and commerce and editorial whim taste, there’ll still be arguments), blurbs commissioned, written, edited, and formatted for publishing, whether that’s online or in print (though obviously the print ones pretty much all get published online before the paper versions hits magazine racks). For lists to be published even before December begins suggests that only three quarters of the year gets considered. But record companies know this. Reviewers know this.

Hell, every music fan on the internet knows this: I was moaning about people talking about records as being “potential albums of the year” back in March, if not before. Amongst a certain subset of music fans it seems as though the narrative of what gets in your personal end-of-year-list, and the minute politics of the ordering thereof, is the most important part of being a music fan. I doubt anyone actually feels this way, but the urgency and importance and eagerness with which phrases like “my album of the year” and “it’ll definitely be in my end-of-year-list” get bandied about feels that way. Listen to it once. Assess its import. Allocate it a space in your list. Never ponder it or listen to it again.

Again, I doubt people actually consume music quite like that. But I’ve done the whole “my album of the year!” thing myself, and I don’t think it’s a good way of thinking about or categorising music. It feels too much like listening in order to form an opinion rather than listening for pleasure. One of the reasons I’ve pretty much stopped writing record reviews is that this kind of listening – which is not necessarily critical (and critical listening is not necessarily a bad thing, either) – doesn’t seem to lend itself to enjoying music; it seems like listening to have listened.

I worked in a library for a few years, and catalogued films: I felt like I knew an awful lot about a huge amount of films – who directed them, who was in them, their historical significance, even an idea of their aesthetic from cover design and stills on the reverse – but I barely watched any of the films I knew about. I barely appreciated any of them. And I certainly didn’t love any of these films that I catalogued but did not watch. It can take so long, so many listens, to unravel a record, that forming an opinion after one or two exposures seems like great folly.

(Side note: if, as a reviewer, you strongly suspect that you’ll never listen to a record again after you’ve sent off your 150 or 400 or 1,000 words about it, if you think you will have no use or love for it after you’ve slotted it into a critical taxonomy, then say so. Don’t let the instinct towards authority or objectivity make you hedge bets. Don’t give 3/5 for something you’ll never play again. I’ve bought too many records over the years just in case they were really good, when in fact they were inconsequential simulacra. I mean you, Maccabees, Django Django and Alt-J, just this year. But this is a whole other post, let alone a side note.)

(Second side note: another reason why I prefer CDs to digital files is the effort that it seems to take to “maintain a digital music collection” – I’ve seen so many people moan about iTunes 11 over the last few days, conversations about listening to music turning into conversations about data-entry and file-management and folder structures and back-up archives and so on and so forth. This type of conversation bores me to tears at work; I’m not taking it home, too. “Opinion-listening” feels like another symptom of the same disease.)

(Third side note: imagine a long paragraph linking all of this to The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord here.)

(Fourth side note: imagine a paragraph about decimal point scores in record reviews here. Or grading records like sixth form essays. Oh god.)

This post was originally going to be called 12 from 12, and be a list (!) of my favourite dozen records of this year, with a little blurb about each, in the chronological order that they were released rather than any order of preference (because how the hell do you even come up with an order; it’s utterly arbitrary), and this “rant” was going to be 100 words at the start about end-of-year lists getting earlier and earlier and how stupid that is. Obviously it’s not gone to plan. I’ll save that list (!) for later, if I do it at all. Swans would feature.

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“A song doesn’t have to mean something: it is something.”

Posted on November 28, 2012 | 1 Comment

I’ve been saying the above phrase as often as possible for the last few years: it’s my own personal counterpoint to the oft-expressed adage that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. My bugbear is that most music writing isn’t writing about music; it’s largely literary criticism applied to music (and, thus, mostly lyrics) plus some historical / cultural context (“X is in a lineage from Y” rather than “X sounds like ∉ because they did ♣ with Ψ”). The stuff that steps beyond this, that deals with sound, with texture, with consumption (with technology, or musicology itself, which is beyond my expertise), is the stuff that fascinates me.

The other month I had the pleasure of interviewing a prominent art historian about his research. The next 300 words or so are taken straight from that interview, after the conversation turned to areas where, as a music writer or some semblance thereof, I felt very strongly that the experiences and bugbears I describe above became violently analogous to what the professor was saying. It’s pretty much verbatim from the tape, minus one short interjection by me where I explain how much I identify with what’s being said.

“The other thing which gets me out of bed is wrestling with the solution to a problem common to all art historians, which I’ll express in a banal way: if pictures, or sculpture, could be represented in words there’d be no need to make them as pictures and sculptures. They’re self-sufficient, they’re very rich, they work in a form of cognition which I think you can only call sensuous – they appeal to eye and hand. And we’re left, as art historians, in the odd position of trying to use words to capture something that quite properly lies beyond words. It doesn’t mean that painting and sculpture are not intellectual; they’re incredibly intellectual, it’s just that the form in which the expression is couched is not verbal. So we’re in a ‘silly’ profession if you like. It’s very difficult to overcome. Students in schools are not trained in ‘visuality’, so if you give people a picture to write about, everybody tries to go through the picture to talk about what lies beyond, as though the picture reflects ideology X or reality Y, and it’s an obvious and easy temptation. It’s not just students who do this, its art historians as well – a great deal of the writing on Victorian art will simply assume that they can talk about the social world of Victorian life of which the picture is a product. But I think ‘no’, the word is mediation, and that means we’ve got to pay attention to texture, to brushstroke, to colour, to composition, to what the artist is working with, the expectations of the audiences (which is plural, because there are many audiences). The whole thing is incredibly difficult to unpick and we’ve got to find a way of using words that keeps the work of art and the experience of works of art central to the discourse.”

You could very easily switch the words ‘art’ etcetera to ‘music’ and so on, and it would make perfect sense. To me, it means exactly the same as “a song doesn’t have to mean something: it is something,” but it elucidates and expresses itself better, couches the argument fully. So there it is.

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Four Tet, and some thoughts on music as content

Posted on August 27, 2012 | Leave a comment

I feel like my musical life divides semi-neatly (but almost completely arbitrarily) into three chunks thus far: pre-university (adolescence, I guess); university; and post-university. The post-university phase starts in summer 2001 (when I finished university, oddly enough), and is the longest, richest phase so far, maybe. It’s also the phase I think of as belonging to the internet, when online resources completely eclipsed print media as a means of finding and investigating new music, gorging on ILM discourse, writing for Stylus, scouring the archives of AllMusic, discovering music by the likes of Talk Talk and LCD Soundsystem that would become some of my absolute favourite music ever.

If there’s one artist that encapsulates… no, not encapsulates… if there’s a single artist who’s soundtracked this third phase more than any other, it’s probably Four Tet. Everything Is Alright was one of the first songs I downloaded using Audiogalaxy at my parents’ house back in 2001 (when it took ten minutes to download a two and a half minute song), and Pause was one of the first albums I bought after graduating, as well as being one of the first albums I bought after meeting Emma – in fact I think she sold it to me whilst she worked in Virgin Megastore. Since then I’ve bought each album as it’s come out, seen him live a couple of times, and investigated a load of other music that he’s been associated with, including Caribou, whose debut album as Manitoba I bought on Amazon’s recommendation after telling them I owned and loved Pause.

So I’m currently enthusiastically devouring Pink, Four Tet’s latest offering; not an album so much as a compendium of DJing-derived singles from the last couple of years, completing his move towards the dancefloor since 2008’s Ringer EP nicely. It perhaps doesn’t have the gestalt of There Is Love In You, although my perception of this may be compromised by knowing the music’s origins, but it’s pretty wonderful nonetheless, his music still looping and spiraling and layering in on itself like it always has done, but now more controlled, more purposeful, less given to happy accidents and tangential detours. Some other artists move from one location to another with their music, but he almost seems to spin in place, whilst maintaining a sense of momentum, of travelling. I like to listen to him whilst on trains, or cycling (only on cyclepaths, kids; no headphones on the roads).

Three of my most-listened records from this year (which feels pretty fallow to me thus far compared to the last three) are very utility-driven in their construction. Which is to say that the three in question – Pink, Wonky by Orbital, and ƒin by John Talabot – were all very definitely conceived for the dancefloor, or feel that way. Not that this should be at all surprising; all three are by dance artists who regularly DJ / have vast experience of getting fields of ravers going. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this as a motivation for music making – we’ve been doing it since the dawn of humankind, and it’s resulted in oodles of stuff that I absolutely adore and hold very dear to me.

But I’m just not quite feeling the love here with these three, even though I’m enjoying them all a lot. With the Four Tet this may just be a matter of time and familiarity; I heard several of the tracks live last December and loved them all, and Pinnacles was a favourite of last year too. The Talabot feels slightly lacking in personality and texture to me; it feels (and this is purely gut feeling, not any technical knowledge) as if every sound used on ƒin came straight out of Ableton or whatever software it was recorded on. There’s little in the way of grit or dust or blood in there, which leaves me feeling at a slight remove from it. This may be different had I ever danced on a Balearic beach, and compositionally its tight as hell in the build and release, but it just feels too focused on dancing to me to really make me love it as a listening experience.

I described Wonky the other day as feeling “like content rather than music”, which, understandably, prompted someone to say it was a meaningless comment. Ironically, the person who said it was a meaningless comment also said, a few months earlier, that New France was “so obviously there for the radio”, which may not have been meant pejoratively, but which I took as being such, from the context of the discussion

Back in April I reviewed Wonky for The Quietus, and included this comment: “Opener ‘One Big Moment’ starts with layers of quiet, sampled voices, a little like ‘Forever’ from Snivilisation, before dropping a beat and a reverberating synth riff and a slowly developing melodic topline that will have a Pavlovian effect on tens of thousands of people of a certain age. You could interpret that cynically, or you could put your hands in the air.” It’s that feeling, coupled with the idea that Wonky exists more as a way of providing new material to play live than as a record in its own right, that makes me think of it as a content rather than music.

I feel like I recognise content because I “produce content” for a day job; I’m a copywriter, a communications officer, and I know that, whilst what I write might be good, and fulfill its purpose, and have a desired effect, it’s done for a reason outside of itself. A brochure or website exists not because I was desperate to produce a brochure or website, but because we wanted it for a reason, and even if I had great fun interviewing researchers or taking photographs and feel proud of said brochure or website, it’s status is forever tied into its purpose. And I think great art, which is what pop music can be, transcends its purpose (and its status as a commodity, too).

Wonky, ƒin, and Pink (at the moment) all feel just a little too closely tied in to their purposes, which is a barrier to me, as listener, from falling hopelessly, desperately in love with them, and thinking of them as a great. What strange characteristic they’d need to possess in order to transcend their purpose, I don’t know – that’s part of the magic of art, of music, arguably – and there are, of course, huge and unanswerable questions about why we do things, about purpose and intention and the death of the author and the birth of the listener / reader / viewer / audience (once I buy a record the artist has no right to tell me how to use it; but how much should I respect their intentions?), about what music is for, both for the listener and the music maker.

It’s wrong to dismiss the idea of making music to make money, for instance, because the notion of the “sell-out” is a dangerous, disempowering one for many people, I suspect, but it’s also wrong to go too far the other way, into utility, and to dismiss the idea of art for art’s sake, music for music’s sake, the ancient human instinct to create beautiful things simply because they are beautiful. The former philosophy makes you a crippled idealist; the latter makes you David Cameron.

So Wonky feels to me like content for a setlist rather than, necessarily, as an album in its own right; likewise Pink, especially when thrown into relief against There Is Love In You, feels like content for a DJ set. But does that mean that This Unfolds, from Four Tet’s last album, is just content for an album? Maybe it is. Does this mean I don’t like Wonky, or Pink? Not at all; I just don’t find myself overcome by them the way I do by In Sides or There Is Love In You. Which could just mean that they’re not as good; or it could mean that they’re for different purposes, as much as any music is for any purpose.

But now I’m going in circles. Fin.

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Am I a racist sexist scumbag (when it comes to being a music fan)?

Posted on August 19, 2012 | 3 Comments

Following debate on the ILM thread, I’ve been thinking about the gender and race make-up of my Pitchfork People’s List.

I’ve been conscious that I don’t listen to much music ‘involving women’ (for want of a better phrase) since I was about 15, and it’s something which bugs me. When I was 15 there were literally no female vocalists in my collection at all. There’s probably only 10% now, and that’s even after Emma and I amalgamated our record collections. Emma didn’t like music with female vocals until her late teens / early twenties either, which is something we’ve talked about many times.

Depending how you count, there are between 12 and 20ish albums with female musicians / voices (ranging from Electrelane at one end of the scale to Massive Attack / Patrick Wolf with guest female vocalists at the other, and possibly including things like Four Tet which have samples of female vocalists somewhere on the continuum) on my ballot.

There are also somewhere between 12 and 20ish albums that are either completely instrumental or which feature barely any vocals at all (which includes the last Four Tet album, which, obviously, could also be counted as having female vocals as described above, and also includes things like Venice by Fennesz, which has one song with vocals and none anywhere else).

There are probably only six albums which could really be described as being hip hop / rap / r’n'b, and perhaps only a dozen which feature black musicians.

Without checking sleeve credits, I think there’s only one record produced by a female producer – Kate Bush.

So it’d be pretty easy to read my list as being racist and sexist (which I hope it isn’t, on any conscious level), as being the product of straight white male privilege (which it undoubtedly is, because I’m a straight white male).

There are some 25+ albums which I’d count as ‘duplicates’, i.e. which are by artists who have multiple albums selected: so 3 Caribou records, 4 Four Tet, 4 SFA, 2 PJ Harvey, 2 Electrelane, 2 St Vincent, 3 Spoon. This skews ratios slightly – just those artists skew from 4:3 to 7:3 from multiples. Not that, if I’d gone for one-per-artist, that the rest of my choices would all have been female-counting records, but it definitely changes the ratio from male-artist:female-artist to male-album:female-album.

Had I had more time, and been able to consult my actual record collection (currently in boxes waiting for us to move house next week) and check dates and so on, then I’d almost certainly have included Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch, Is This Desire by PJ Harvey, Begin to Hope by Regina Spektor, but probably also a load of other albums by men, too. So who knows what more time would have done.

This huge gender / racial / genre bias/weighting does concern me to some extent and if I think about it and ask ‘why’ on an ontological, socio-cultural level, I don’t really know the answer, beyond “I’m a white male 30-something and I mostly listen to music made by people like me”; when couched in that terminology, it doesn’t seem outrageous at all. But if I were to say “I only think one album by a black women is worth including in the top 100 of the last 16 years”, however, it sounds pretty awful. In my ‘defence’, my list isn’t about ‘best’ or objectivity in any way; it’s about the stuff I like the most, and I had to be honest about that.

This is something we’ve discussed at Devon Record Club, too, where choices are massively, massively weighted in favour of white male musicians, to the extent that we’ve had themed evenings where one had to bring a record by a woman (again, there’s the problematic issue of defining ‘by a woman’) and where we’ve asked our wives to choose the records instead of us (which resulted in a 3:1 ratio of women-to-men choices that evening) in a pathetic attempt to try and redress this imbalance, if only for one or two evenings. I asked Emma to replace Tom at our last meeting because he was on holiday, and she politely declined, despite the fact that she knows as much about music, and loves music, at least as much as any of us, and I can’t help but think that the boys-club atmosphere (and fear of being judged upon your choice) probably made her say no. We are boys, and we do compete, even when we’re not competing.

I don’t know how one can ‘solve’ this, or if it’s solvable at all, or even if it needs solving. ‘Solution’ is probably the wrong word. Does it need addressing? Do our music tastes reflect who we are and the attitudes we hold (consciously or subconsciously), or do they just reflect what we like? Does what we like reflect who we are and the attitudes we hold (consciously or subconsciously)? I recall a philosophy seminar from a dozen or more years ago, where we were asked to consider how one ties one’s shoelaces, and if tying shoelaces was a form of self-expression; I was the only person to say ‘yes’ (using Run DMC as an example, if I recall), and from there to conclude that everything you do is an act of self-expression, because it is you doing it. So yeah, I probably am a racist, sexist scumbag. I’m trying not to be. Are you?

Postscript
Saying “So yeah, I probably am a racist, sexist scumbag” at the end wasn’t really helpful to this discourse. Not liking “enough” music by female or black musicians doesn’t make you sexist or racist. But it does raise interesting questions about subconscious taste biases and social privileges, which point towards all sorts of contributory factors, which we might not fully understand the interactions and origins of. Only a crazy person would say that someone’s music taste indicated they were racist (unless they liked Skrewdriver etc). Refusing to listen to or engage with Chris Brown’s music because he hit Rihanna, whilst happily listening to John Lennon (or any of a number of other women-hitting white rock stars through time) might suggest conflicting and hypocritical attitudes, though, and the question of where they come from seems to have some of the same underlying biases as answers.

I caught an interesting moment on BBC 5live this morning where Nick Hancock was talking with guests about the different perceptions of Olympic athletes and professional football players, and who you’d rather have over for dinner, or something (I only caught some of it), and the subject of class bias was raised as a motivator for how people responded (the insinuation being that you’d rather have an Olympian over, presumably because they’d be more polite, better company, more engaging conversationalists, whereas a professional football player would be a classless, self-centred, drunken idiot). This got me thinking about whether the make-up of my Pitchfork People’s List is subconsciously influenced by class issues as much as race / gender ones, and even whether this broad sphere we call ‘pop music’ can be coded on a class basis at all – it’s harder to determine if someone’s music is “middle class” or “upper class” or “working class” than it is to determine if a musician is white or male. Which is to say that it’s complicated, and incredibly difficult to unravel, and, possibly, not all that important.

When I put this list together, like any list, I picked first-to-mind favourites initially, and then perused old lists to jog my memory of other things that may not have been at the front of my mind (and to remind myself of what fell within the chronological barriers); there was no conscious rule to not pick music by any given demographic, or to privilege any other demographic. My motivation was “these are records that I like”. The nuance comes in wondering why most of the music I like seems be the product of similar demographics, even if it’s superficially aesthetically quite different. Of course there’s also the idea that if we like one thing, we may well like other, similar things, and that these other, similar things will quite possibly be the product of similar types of people. It wasn’t until after I’d finished the list and seen other people talking about the gender composition of some lists that I thought to look at how mine counted out.

Of course there’s the genre music which is most explicitly the product of white male privilege of them all, and which I have almost absolutely no time for: metal.

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Posted in Existentialism, music writing, Pop music

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