Category Archives: Pop music

Albums from May, part 2; Daft Punk

Posted on May 27, 2013 | Leave a comment

Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
If I’m honest, I don’t think Daft Punk are all that, and I never really did. I’ve liked all their singles enough, and bought all their studio albums pretty much as and when they came out, and can clearly see the influence they’ve wielded over the combined sphere of dance and pop music around the world (do you see what I did there?), and last year I even tracked down the CD single of “Music Sounds Better With You” because I suddenly felt like I needed it, and you can’t download the track individually anywhere.

But they’ve never really grabbed or excited me or shaken my world; Discovery isn’t the totemic monument to electronic dance music in my musical history that it seems to be for so many other web-era music fans, stans, writers, and geeks, it’s just a decent album with a handful of amazing singles on it. I can’t remember the last time I listened to Homework all the way through. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever done it in one sitting. Or standing. Or driving. Or dancing.

Maybe that’s the problem; I’m not, for various reasons, much of an actual dancer and nightclub goer, despite loving a lot of dance music, and I’ve pretty much always found Daft Punk, especially Homework (and perhaps Human After All, too, although who ever actually listened to that enough to tell) to be far too functional and elongated and plain, the hooks sparse, the beats strung out for mixing into what precedes and what follows. “Da Funk” is great, but goes on about twice as long as it needs to. Likewise “Around The World”. They know this; not for no reason is the last track on Discovery called “Too Long”. It lasts precisely 10 minutes.

Daft Punk are also responsible for the phenomenon of side-chaining that’s swept everything up in its wake for a decade, and made stuff like Flying Lotus almost literally unlistenable to me. It was their pumping kick drum, sucking everything else out of its way like a giant, dancing vacuum cleaner, that helped to accelerate the loudness wars in the 00s into unbearable territory. And they’re probably to blame for will.i.am, too.

So I was actually really quite pleased by the idea that they were going to make an organic disco record, with orchestras and session musicians and an old-fashioned mix and ‘quiet’ master, rather than pile up the samples and synths and loops and side-chained compressors again. Those sounded, to me, like the ingredients for a Daft Punk album I might actually want to listen to properly rather than just cull the singles from and ignore the rest.

And that’s pretty much the case, I guess. I wasn’t all that impressed by “Get Lucky” to start with (though I’ve grown to really like it), and I could do without Paul Williams (especially) and Todd Edwards, and the ‘sad robot’ vocoders are maybe done a little too much on the likes of “The Game Of Love”, but the live-drums+synthesizers of the second half of “Giorgio By Moroder” (almost as good as the John Stanier breakdowns from the second Field album), the intricate, pulsing, slippery groove of “Motherboard”, and a whole host of other stuff (the preposterous melodrama of “Contact”; the weird juxtaposition of “Doin’ It Right”) is worth the price of admission and then some.

As for the mastering; it’s not ‘quiet’ per se, it’s just really good, and sophisticated, and dynamic, and open, and lush sounding. It won’t sound weird and out-of-place next to anything else from 2013 on a playlist; it’ll just (probably) sound a lot better. As ever when a ‘big’, beautiful sounding record lands, I hope it will reconfigure the way that other people produce and release their own records; Random Access Memories throws the disgusting sonic mush of the latest Phoenix album into startling, horrific perspective. It sounds almost as good as the House Of Blondes album.

So yeah, cut it down to 45/50 minutes, shearing out some of the overtly cheesy, yacht-rock nonsense, and this is a gorgeous, glorious piece of nu-Balearic liquidity, grooves and licks and sunshine and melancholy and subtlety and some ridiculous solos. Which is pretty much exactly what you’d want from a new Daft Punk album, right? I don’t understand why some people’s knickers are in such a twist.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Pop music

Tagged ,

Albums from May, part 1

Posted on May 26, 2013 | 2 Comments

There seem to have been almost as many albums released in May that are worth giving a damn about as there were in the whole of the previous four months of 2013. They’re probably strategically launched in May so that people will know the words come festival season.

The National – Trouble Will Find Me
In which The National begin their circumnavigation of what one might cynically call ‘MOR’. Which is to say that Matt Berninger is certainly ensconced in his 40s now, and his bandmates can’t be far if at all behind, and parenthood and reasoned perspectives make for a less angry band than they might once have been. Live they may still hurtle through “Mr November”, but I doubt they’d be able to write it anymore.

This isn’t necessarily a problem though, because rather than settle for obvious denominators, easy key changes and platitudinous melodies, The National have evolved in subtle, sophisticated ways. In 2013, their songs shimmer and meander more than they clatter and groan. I can accept this happily; they’ve already clattered and groaned. And with a larger audience now than at any time in their past, it’s a relief to feel that they’re not pandering to expanded (and therefore limited) expectations.

If The National have a problem, and all bands have at least one problem, it’s that they’re too too musical, too clever, that they have too many good ideas. Trouble Will Find Me is a gorgeous record, but it’s so stuffed to the gills with that gorgeousness that it might actually suffer a little from it. They’ve been edging towards over-arranging records for a little while, but here they may just tip the balance. They never single-track a vocal when they can double-track it; never settle for one beatific, anti-gravity guitar line when they can have two, and an organ track, and a piano, and a violin or three, and a whiff of gentle feedback coursing through the song, and a bassline. And that’s not to mention the drums.

All of these elements are sophisticated, beautiful, worth arranging, worth hearing. It would be a crying shame to isolate, eliminate, and waste any one of them. But at the same time, it’s almost a crying shame to use them all; they end up competing for harmonic space and attention, overlapping each other’s frequencies, obscuring themselves. And like a multitude of beautiful colours swirled together on a canvas, there’s a danger that, without absolute, consummate skill, you’ll end up with a dull brown.

Which isn’t to say that The National have made a dull, brown record; but some people, from some angles, will accuse them of having done so. I just wish that The National’s evident sophistication had been applied to what to leave out as much as what to leave in. Perhaps a hand like Jim O’Rourke’s at the tiller during mixing would have steered them into marginally more minimal waters. I’m thinking explicitly of what he did for Wilco with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, allegedly removing a host of subtle, experimental elements from each song with great care and making the entire record feel ten times more subtle and experimental as a result.

All this said, I still like Trouble Will Find Me an awful lot, and, despite my reservations, which still exist, The National have become (largely thanks to my wife) a definite favourite. If there isn’t a tune as direct as “Bloodbuzz Ohio” or “Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks” here, that’s OK, because there are several as indirect as “England”.

Primal Scream – More Light
I have been a fan of Primal Scream for the best part of 20 years. For most of the last ten years of that period, I have had absolutely zero faith in their ability to make a decent record. In their 30-odd-year career (and much of it has been very, very odd indeed) they’ve only actually made three albums that I really like; Screamadelica, Vanishing Point, and XTRMNTR. There are, granted, good songs scattered across their other records, and a couple of those records aren’t absolute disasters (Evil Heat is OK, just about), but those are the only three I’d defend.

So I genuinely thought Bobby Gillespie and co (which now seams to be just him and Andrew Innes, plus whoever wanders through the studio, now that Mani is back in The Stone Roses and Throb is long gone; even Duffy seems to be only an occasional sideman these days) were past the point of ever making another good record again. Really, really far past that point.

Which makes it a surprise that More Light is at all worth a damn, especially when Bobby is opining state-of-the-nation lyrics about teenage rebellion and “favelas up and down the M1”, as he does here from time to time.

The secret seems to be, unsurprisingly, working with a strong producer who has a vision. David Holmes takes the reigns here, having worked on XTRMNTR way back when (Bobby guested on Holmes’ own Bow Down To The Exit Sign a decade and a half ago); the intervening years have seen Holmes establish himself as a film soundtrack man first and foremost, and it seems as if Holmes has guided Primal Scream into doing what they might do best; soundtracking an imaginary film.

Bobby’s said that Holmes sequenced the album with this in mind; the propulsive, elongated “2013”, with it’s insistent 70s Bowie saxophone and kraut-ish pulse and Kevin Shields guitar, is a scene-setting title sequence, whilst the “Movin’ On Up” progeny “It’s Alright, It’s OK” is the joyous track over the closing credits. In between we get, to be fair, a handful of semi-turgid future rockers loaded with Bobby’s polemic (to be fairer, at least he cares, when many others don’t seem to), interspersed with awesome, unexpected diversions like “River Of Pain” (check out the orchestral eruption 2/3s through) and “Turn Each Other Inside Out” (those gorgeous twin guitars), and “Relativity”. And even the semi-turgid future rockers are a massive step above the awful modernist-country-blues of Riot City Blues; “Culturecide” (no one but Bobby could neologise such a word) and “Hit Void” are far more memorable and more fun than anything from Beautiful Future.

More Light isn’t an epochal impact like Screamadelica or XTRMNTR; I doubt it will change the way we feel about dance music or usher in waves of discopunk. But it also isn’t an embarrassment. Which, for Primal Scream in 2013, is an achievement.

Words on Daft Punk and Vampire Weekend to follow. And maybe some others.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Pop music

Tagged , , , , , ,

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.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Audiogeekery, music writing, Pop music

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Inside a volcano of sound – My Bloody Valentine live

Posted on March 15, 2013 | 1 Comment

“It makes you wonder, if they’re handing out earplugs to everyone, why they don’t just… y’know, turn it down a bit” commented Paul in the pub before the gig.

“Because sound doesn’t work like that” was the answer from his friend who’d been the previous night, and, like a masochist, was putting himself through it again.

I had a pretty good inkling of what he meant, and the My Bloody Valentine gig experience bore it out. Sound is waves through the air, you don’t just hear it; when it’s loud enough you feel it, physically, in your feet, in your legs, in your chest. Hearing is essentially just feeling sound waves with the sensitive hairs of your inner-ear, your brain interpreting that feeling into auditory signals which can, and usually do, feel like a mental experience rather than a physical one. But that’s a trick of the mind. My Bloody Valentine invert that trick, and make a seemingly mental experience into a physical one.

The gig didn’t start that loud, or didn’t seem to; Em and I both had earplugs in (which I do at most gigs these days, and have for half a decade or more) and whilst the sound seemed clearer and louder than some gigs I’ve seen when I’ve had them in, it didn’t seem… dangerous. But by halfway through the gig, when “Only Shallow” was unveiled, and “Feed Me With Your Kiss”, and something else from Isn’t Anything that was fiercely pummelling and physical, I popped my earplugs out for a second and realised that things had become extraordinarily loud, the volume almost imperceptibly upping from song to song.

I’ve often wondered how Kevin Shields made the sounds he did on record, how the melodic toplines of Loveless, which sound like synthesisers but which we know aren’t, are coaxed from a guitar. I thought seeing them live would enlighten me, but I’m none the wiser; there seems little correlation between what My Bloody Valentine physically do onstage and the sound that erupts from them. Sometimes Debbie Googe plays her bass in a way you’d recognise, for instance, but mostly she seems to strum at it, gently, as if it were an acoustic guitar at a campfire sing-a-long. Her strums come from the shoulder, whilst Bilinda Butcher’s come from the wrist; they’re both static other than that, pretty much, their entire bodies still, Debbie’s arm moving, Bilinda’s wrist pivoting.

Colm is, unsurprisingly if you think about Isn’t Anything, a bizarrely powerful drummer; so much of My Bloody Valentine has seemed so ethereal to me over half my lifetime that the bludgeoning strength of the drums took me by surprise. It shouldn’t have. The songs from Isn’t Anything were the most brutal and physical, searing rock’n’roll destructions; those from Loveless were most beautiful, trippy creations that bend your perceptions; “Soon” was astonishing, psychedelia made real. The new songs, from mbv, were the strangest. The three eras fitted together with far more logic live than I would have expected, about a third of the gig from each.

I’ve been expecting the eruption, the volcano of sound, that comes during that pause in “You Made Me Realise”, since I was about 16 and first heard Loveless, since my elder brother gave me a compilation of Creation Records singles that included “You Made Me Realise”. I’ve read about it levitating people, about it making people feel sick, about it lasting half an hour and venue security guards with air-traffic-control headphones on mouthing to each other “what the fuck is this shit?” as the maelstrom bends time. A guy in front of us started filming it on his phone, and gave up after eleven minutes. It went on, I think, for about half as long again. A steady stream of people shuffled past us and out of the auditorium. Maybe they had tube trains to catch. Maybe it was too much. I laughed my head off at points, turned around to look at faces; some aghast, some ecstatic, some bewildered, as if they didn’t know to expect it.

The volume of this volcanic eruption is phenomenal, alarming. I worried for the fabric of the building we were in. The noise seemed to shift in pitch and tone, slowly increase in volume, vibrating different parts of your body as it changed. I took my earplugs out at one point, for about thirty seconds or so, and the physical crush of sound that was affecting my whole body suddenly consumed the inside of my head too. Not everyone was wearing earplugs. Who knows how those who didn’t managed to get home afterwards; their senses and orientation must have been mashed.

We left the gig giddy and exhilarated, a little baffled and intensely impressed. My Bloody Valentine are a band Em and I both share love for, a band we both brought to the table when we got together many years ago. It’s taken us 12 years, almost, to see them live; I hope we get to see them again some day.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Audiogeekery, Pop music

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in Pop music, Existentialism, Television, Audiogeekery, music writing

Tagged , , , ,

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.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Audiogeekery, music writing, Pop music

Tagged , , , ,

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.)

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Pop music, Current affairs, Audiogeekery, music writing, The internet, social media, Branding, Culture

Tagged , , , ,

12 songs from 12

Posted on December 31, 2012 | Leave a comment

There is, of course, a huge amount of music that I consumed (what an awful word to use when we really mean “appreciated”) through 2012 that came outside of the context of albums. I gather, from The Internet, that many people in 2012 ‘consume’ most of their music this way – individual tracks, singles, remixes, mixtapes (whatever they are), and so on and so forth (I’m, of course, being disingenuously naïve here).

I don’t keep up with bite-sized chunks of music as much as I should or could – I haven’t the time or energy, partly, to keep up with the infinite array of individually great one-off tracks by any old Tom, Dick, or Harry out there – but I do get to hear some stuff, either via 6music or through saturation of opinion and discussion on Twitter or various forums. So I have heard “Gangnam Style” and “Call Me Maybe”, for instance, but I’ve heard bugger-all other big chart pop singles this year. It’d be great to have my finger on the pulse as much as I did in 2002 or 2003, but I was a decade younger then, and had considerably more time, interest, and impetus to do so.

So, once again, this list of individual songs from 2012 is by no means definitive; they’re just the ones I really liked, and feel are worth commenting on. I’ve pointedly left out tunes from the 12 albums I wrote about before Christmas, even though, obviously, some of them are obviously big individual favourites too. Oh, and there’s more than 12. Why not?

NB. And I’ve added some more today (New Year’s Day) down at the bottom, just for good measure.

Emeralds – Does It Look Like I’m Here? (Daphni Mix 2)
Spectacular remix by Dan Snaith of a track by this ambient duo that I’ve not heard – a few years ago we’d have called this “psy-trance”, my colleague Lou (who definitely knows about these things) informed me. Whatever, this is 7-minutes of repetitive, sensual, psychedelic bliss.

Beth Jeans Houghton – Sweet Tooth Bird
Heard this on 6music and bought the album, which this opens – the album’s OK, but nothing matches the blast of trumpets and energy and melodic momentum of this moment of deranged psyche-folk-pop.

Arctic Monkeys – R U Mine?
I’m not, as a rule, a big fan of Arctic Monkeys – we have the debut album (out of curiosity more than anything else) but nothing else since, and I wasn’t really aware of what they’d become since then, if they’d become anything different at all. It turns out that they’ve become a really good studio rock band, a kind of northern-England pop version of Queens Of The Stone Age. The video for this was awesome too – that singer dude air-drumming and lip-syncing to his own tune while driving around a nighttime city in a van.

Orbital – New France
I initially liked, and still do quite like (just not massively) Orbital’s new album, though it felt a little too functional at times (and that feeling of functionality probably caused my esteem for the album to wane a little over the year). This obvious radio-friendly-unit-shifter, though, despite being the most functional of functional tracks on Wonky, still stands out in my mind as a great moment of the year, though. Maybe, once again, it’s just 6music airplay over-familiarity

Chromatics – Kill For Love
An awful lot of hype for Chromatics’, admittedly very stylish and on-trend, Nicolas-Winding-Refyn-film-soundtracking, album, but the entire thing didn’t completely translate for me – cool, but vatic. As a highlight that nails the aesthetic and ties it to a song that adds a smidgeon of substance, the title track will do as a stand-alone representation of these immaculate, crepuscular, synthetic, neon soundtracks.

The Antlers – Drift Drive
In which the tiny, beautiful, Jeff-Buckley-alike Pete Silberman sees the rabbit hole and decides to take a look; The Antlers could very easily lose their songwriting foundation and give it all up for drifting, psychedelic lullaby-grooves like this. I wouldn’t mind.

David Byrne & St. Vincent – Optimist
The whole album by this unexpected-but-obvious musical partnership is very good, and I enjoy it, and I love the way it uses brass as a main instrument, and the way his voice combines with her guitars from time to time, and so on and so forth, but it’s a thing I admire and appreciate more than adore. Except for this, which Annie sings, and which finds that sweet spot of emotion which might be joy-at-sadness or might be sadness-at-joy. The melody; her delivery; the subtle, quietly burgeoning arrangement: it makes me swoon.

BEAK> – Wolfstan II
Plenty of krauty goodness (Lower Dens) and also badness (Toy) this year; but Geoff Barrow’s BEAK did it best; rather than sounding like kids playing at bolting a krauty drumbeat onto a crappy indie song, they just outright played kraut. This track is monstrous and instantaneous and irresistible.

Cat Power – Manhattan
Oh Chan Marshall. Sun has some decent songs, but it’s a mess, a hodge-podge of sounds, a textural toybox opened and splashed over everything, obscuring the good stuff that lies beneath. It seems fine on first contact but it fades, fast. Apart from this, mimimal, motorik, piano-and-drum-machine-and-voice-and-emotion. By far the standout song of the record.

Richard Hawley – She Brings The Sunlight
In which Hawley moves from 50s crooner to late 60s groover. Some might compare it to early Verve, but really he’s gone back to source. The album’s immaculately recorded and observed, an obvious lovesong to psyche, swooshing airplane guitar tones and feedback and beautifully-rendered hi-hats and buried vocals, but the whole thing is perhaps a little much.

Japandroids – Younger Us
Emma loves Japandroids, and I don’t mind; they capture that listless energy of youth brilliantly, even while singing about trying and failing to capture it. Just two guys, drums and guitars and shouting. We saw them live and it was noisy and sweaty and primal, hooks and riffs and wordless choruses ripped through and repeated with complete, whooping abandon. Hüsker Dü for kids?

Fiona Apple – Hot Knife
Julia Holter – Marianbad
Let’s deal with these two together: Tom played them both at us at Devon Record Club the other week at out end-of-2012 meeting, after me being intrigued to hear both of them for months and months. Apple got the full album playback, but Holter only got the opening track relayed to us, and both blew me away. So I bought both albums. The former song is a majestic, euphoric, looping jazz chant, whilst the latter is a modernistic, layered exploration of the human voice. Had I got hold of the albums earlier, they’d probably have been in that list. But I didn’t, so the songs are in this list instead.

Mary Epworth – Black Doe
Banjo-and-drone post-folk with sudden bursts of cacophonous organs, synth-brass, and guitars over a moaningly powerful chorus. I have no idea what it means, but I like it a lot.

Alt-J – Mathilda
The Maccabees – Pelican
Let’s deal with these two together, too. The Maccabees’ tune was all over 6music early in the year and I grew to like it, I suspect through familiarity more than anything else. The album was hyped in certain circles when it arrived, and wanting an early-year hit, I bought it. I regretted it almost straight away – shrill, substance-less, indie “maturity” signified by borrowed tropes from U2 – slow intros that fade from ambience, reverb, those plodding basslines – no oomph, no character, no originality, barely any tunes. I still like “Pelican” fine, but it sounds like a child’s toy version of a real thing. The Alt-J album I bought blind on the basis of the growing word-of-mouth hype, assuming it must be a grower, have staying power, have substance. But it has no more than The Maccabees album. Indie stuff that interpolates tropes and signifiers from other things, adding nothing new other than the pop equivalent of white gallery space to hang a collection of paintings in, and in seemingly random order; why have this strange facsimile when you could have something real? I’m not talking about ‘authenticity’, for what it’s worth – the BEAK record isn’t authentic, but it succeeds where these fail by not being an ugly, try-hard hybrid, by having some integrity (whatever that is) and purity of vision, even if it lacks originality or invention. Plus the Alt-J guy sings like a farmer. “Mathilda” is the only tune I took away from it, an unexpected ambush of sweetness and melody that escaped the clever-clever framework of the rest of the album.

Willy Moon – Yeah Yeah
I’ve seen almost literally nothing written about Willy Moon, and only heard his music on TV – first on Jools Holland, where he whirled and twirled like a fucked-up shopkeeper’s dummy on a fairground ride, and then on the latest iPod adverts – and I have no idea if he has any kind of credibility or cache or even any kind of audience. But I do know that, in a year of wall-to-wall eurohouse-derived bullshit misogyny pop stuffing our charts, this (and maybe, at a push, that Rizzle Kicks tune) were about the only ‘pop’ I heard and didn’t think was insulting. This sounds like it samples Wu Tang Clan at one point, is insanely catchy and danceable, and notably didn’t feature in the New Year’s Eve Top of the Pops, which was wall-to-wall eurohouse-derived bullshit, pretty much.

The Invisible – Generational
The Invisible’s debut album about three years ago was produced by Matthew Herbert, had links to London’s F-ire Collective (which begat Polar Bear and Acoustic Ladyland, amongst many others), and inhabited that post-Radiohead territory between rock and electronic music (with a tiny pinch of jazz). I liked it well enough, but something about it felt a little sickly – a lot of post-Radiohead territory stuff does; you have to be really good to pull it off, and not many are. So I wasn’t compelled to investigate their new album this year, but somewhere along the way I heard and liked and picked-up “Generational”, which grooves and pulses and repeats and is sinewy and makes me wish I could justify buying the album so I could soak the rest of it in.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Pop music

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

12 albums not from 2012

Posted on December 15, 2012 | 1 Comment

Sometimes, in fact often, the most important records for me in any given year aren’t the salivated-over new releases, but the “why didn’t I hear this before?” discoveries, the things you’d ignored or dismissed or not got round to or simply not heard of previously. The back catalogue albums.

These might be re-releases or remasterings (although I’m pointedly not including My Bloody Valentine’s remasters here, as I knew all the music very well beforehand, and this list is about stuff I discovered for the first time), or explorations of the oeuvre of an artist whose brand new album you’ve fallen for, or they might be inspirations referenced in interviews by current beau musicians. Often, over the last couple of years, they’ve been records introduced to me by my fellow Devon Record Club members at our fortnightly meetings.

Every year I feel like I promise myself (and my wife) that I’ll buy less back catalogue albums over the coming 52 weeks. This year I promised I’d only buy one a month at the absolute most; with a fortnight and more of the year to go, I’ve bought 36. I don’t know how. I still fancy a trip to Rise Records in Bristol or The Drift in Totness before the month is out. Currently, these are my favourites.

Dungen – Ta Det Lungt
Various algorithms have been recommending Ta Det Lungt to me for years, but for some reason this year my desire to listen to it finally reached critical mass – I’m not sure why. Finally buying and enjoying this unashamedly retro psyche rock / jazz cornucopia is probably what’s stopped me from investigating Goat – I feel like I’ve got my fill of northern European psychedelia for the year.

Field Music – Tones of Town / Measure
Cheating, I know to put two records, but so it goes. Inspired by falling for Plumb so hard, I quickly went back and picked up the Field Music records I’d missed first time around, and found them both beautifully agreeable. A very special band.

The Modern Lovers – The Modern Lovers
Tom played this at Devon Record Club, and I fell for the Velvet-Underground-with-a-smile aesthetic straight away. A name and reputation I’d known for years, but never pursued.

Simon and Garfunkel – Bookends
I bought the latest remaster of Bridge Over Troubled Water to play at DRC myself, and, falling in love with it all over again, I also picked up Bookends for a pittance. As well as the fact that it has songs like “America” and “Mrs Robinson” on it, it also has the astonishingly modernistic and confusing “Save The Life Of My Child”. A very different record to Bridge…, but still awesome.

Roxy Music – Avalon
An obvious pick-up (for about £3) given my Kaputt love from last year.

Destroyer – Streethawk: A Seduction
As was this; Em spent a fortnight in America for work in February this year, and I asked if, while she was in NYC, she’d see if she could pick up this early acclaimed peak of Bejar’s from Bleeker Street records; she duly obliged (it’s seemingly impossible to find over here). Far more rewarding than a squashed dime.

Beastie Boys – The Mix-Up
A sentimental purchase in the days after Adam Yauch’s untimely, sad death. I’ve always enjoyed Beastie instrumentals, and this recent-ish collection shows off just how integral his musicianship was to the band; every piece here lives by its bassline, pretty much. We lost one of the best this year.

The Antlers – Hospice
Another DRC-inspired purchase, after Rob played Burst Apart at our ‘albums of 2011’ session. Falling heavily for their latest, I ordered this highly-acclaimed concept album too. It’s a very different record to Burst Apart, and I think I prefer where the band are going now, but this is a heck of a piece of work nonetheless, deeply emotional and affecting.

Hauschka – Salon Des Amateurs
A little cheeky, as a CD of Salon Des Amateurs literally arrived only this morning. We saw Hauschka last weekend at ATP and his set of prepared piano and drums was one of the most beautiful, intriguing, and enjoyable of the whole festival, especially when he went full-on jazz-house for the penultimate number. I ordered this from our chalet the next day, direct from the record label’s website. The album itself sees Hauschka layer his prepared piano (via computer-based recordings) (and with occasional touches of drums, brass, strings, harmonica and mandolin) into house/techno-ish arrangements. The prepared piano (preparing it by tying wire and laying other objects on the strings and hammers inside it) allows him access to a huge array of textures and sounds, man of which you’d assume were digital in origin. There’s a complexity and sophistication and organicness which marks out what Hauschka’s creating here from ‘real’ (as it were) dance music, but nevertheless it’s definitely of a kin. It’s also an absolute joy and pleasure to listen to – tuneful, fascinating, rhythmically addictive and compelling. Off one listen, I know I’ll be turning to this record for years to come.

CAN – Anthology
Although I’ve had various copies of the first five or so CAN albums since I was a teenager, I’ve never picked-up the legendary Anthology until now, meaning I’ve missed whole swathes of fascinating stuff post-Damo Suzuki, and that I’ve never heard the (arguably superior) edits of mammoth tracks like “Mother Sky” and “Halleluwah”. I was probably put off by the fact that they look like aging college professors still desperate to be cool on the cover. With CDs packed into boxes at the end of July, I picked this up recklessly in HMV in August when I had a desperate urge to listen to CAN and this was all that was available. Although I’m gutted it misses crazy b-side “Turtles Have Short Lets” (seemingly unavailable on CD), I’m still very glad I finally succumbed.

Lindstrom & Prins Tomas – II
This was like a cosmic-disco sticking plaster for the weird semi-aberration that was Six Cups of Rebel. It more than made up for that misstep.

The National – Boxer
Like I wrote the other day on returning from ATP, I simply don’t understand how I didn’t fall for this five years ago, except to say that bloody-mindedness has its uses and its failings, too.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Existentialism, Pop music

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.

→ 6 Comments

Posted in music writing, Pop music, The internet

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,