FREAKS -

FREAKS - The Man Who Lived Underground

What a perfectly odd little art-efact: a series of windows opening up to strange goings on, ruttings, gruntings, slices of a party you weren’t invited to and aren’t quite sure if that makes you happy or sad. Like a Kubrick movie, re-shot by Hype Williams. Soundwise it harkens back to the earliest house: the minimal ball-bearing-inna-tin-can jack & acid trax, albeit with 16 years of production finesse and sampler-concrete. Only a few tracks that could really be called “songs”, and even then it’s mostly just because of their lengths: a wonderfully moody descending strut called “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out”, one that explicitly nods backwards in time to Mr. Finger’s “Washing Machine.” The rest are sketches, doodles, harddrive burps, injokes, Cubase scribbles. The male vocals rewrite Prince as a gibbering crackhead. It sounds like the Basement Jaxx of “Yo-Yo” or “Get Me Off” starved on a bread and water diet, and driven a little batty from the hunger.

THE RAPTURE - “I Need Your Love”

Echoes seduces from the outset: the re-recorded “Olio”, the latent Curey tech-mope once wriggling to be free from the shitty post-hardcore recording quality made gloriously explicit. Then “Heaven”, brittle guitar raunch, closer to what you “expect” The Rapture to sound like. “Open Up Your Heart”, unexpected like its title, a wilting piano ballad. And then “I Need Your Love”, rock song of the year if you can even call it that.

“I Need Your Love” is, for all intents and purposes, a disco song. (We call it house music these days, blame the British.) Chattering sequencers, warm lugubrious synths, that metronomic tick-tock boom-tick, & not a guitar in sight. Never has Tom’s “it’s like they found some secret bunker full of stale 1979 air and have been reverently recording in it since” been more and less apt. On the one hand, this is not “house music” in the sense that you could expect to find it on the next Ministry of Sound comp. (Although it’s only one remix and bongo breakdown away from being there.) On the other, it’s not heritage-disco either. (Which is why it’s been appearing on the more outré house comps this year.) Like electroclash, The Rapture has figured out a way to make retro-leaning music which stands apart from whatever the great modernist project of the year is (gutter garage, micro-whatever) and yet could have never been made in any other moment but this one (A Certain Ratio never got on such a good foot as The Rapture does here, just like electroclash’s neuter vocals would have never made it in 1982’s arch-pop landscape.)

(Oh, album of the year so far, btw. In case you hadn’t figured that out.)

In case you somehow missed it,

In case you somehow missed it, Ian Penman now has a blog.

If you don’t know who Ian Penman is or why you should care (whatthehellswrongwithyou?), hie thee hence.

The Heptones - “Make Up Your Mind” b/w “Why Must I?”

The Heptones - “Make Up Your Mind” b/w “Why Must I?”
One of the big problems with fads is that they generally do burn out the general public - even the general hipster public - to a specific sound, which is a shame when the victims are records as beautiful as this one. Will admit to not having listened to it in a while - I’m making CD-Rs of my favorite songs right now…the full list is here on an ILX thread - but hearing it yesterday I’m reminded of why it was the track which really “put me over” when it came to reggae. (The province of stinky hippies with a clutch of Wailers records, at least if you had just recently left American academia.) A fairly unremarkable roots track on the surface, not devotional except in the sense that all roots is devotional. But no cornbread and collie opacity, no shouting down Babylon. It’s a love (lost) song, and as such it’s easy to see why it struck such a chord: throw it up against any moody, mopey indie or pop record you wish and it wouldn’t sound too out of place. In it’s way it reminds me of a Jamaican Smiths or Go-Betweens. Except the Heptones don’t mope. They lope, they glide, they hymn the heavens down with their song, but they do not languish unwashed in their beds wondering Why She Hasn’t Come Back. Towards health and efficiency. The dub (I always forget which is the dub and which is the vocal) is hardly Lee Perry’s most radical production, but that seems slightly beside the point. (At least he doesn’t throw some mooing cows in there for us mere mortals to wonder why.) He abstracts the sound of the original, gutting the vocal and throwing glints of trace memories back at us, in order to make the pain that much more keenly felt. It’s not particularly heavy, or particularly dread. But the “collapsing chambers” here are the hearts. (Easy to find - even in the pre-mp3 sense - on the Perry anthology Arkology, a tricky document which alternates stretches of brilliance and tedium…six versions of “Police & Thieves” in a row.)

White Stripes -

White Stripes - Elephant
“Realness”, in pop, is a deeply silly idea/ideal. Show me a wholly “real” artist and I’ll show you a profoundly boring personality. But you can’t, so there’s no worry. There’s nothing “real” about the White Stripes, or even faux-real, which makes most of the words written about them worthless at best. Jack White (and, no offence to Meg or to women everywhere, but it’s clear that Jack is the musical brains of the operation, y’know?) is as contrived as you or I when he throws himself into the public arena (there’s nothing more embarassing than a writer who claims/feigns “realness” when they are clearly coming at 90% of their subjects through nine layers of distance, not all of them their own.) He is a synthesist, although the materials he synthesizes are rather low on the futurist grocery list: AC/DC, Zeppelin, Queen, The Gories..any jabs at “The Blues” are filtered through suburban sequins, two decades of indie rock, and .75 thrift-store scores. So purposeful obfuscation in the service of one-upping them (3 = 313 = 313PHANT = the Detroit area code, y’see?) just looks silly, like a bunch of prep school kids needling the stoners. But there I go with that realness thing again…

Jack White, like many before him and many after him, is a classical indie songwriter: he is writing songs in his bedroom to be played by other people in their bedrooms. Except instead of Big Star and the third Velvets album, it’s hard rock. But the end result - bedroom music for bedroom people - is still the same. And if you think the world has lost it’s need for such things, then I envy your cosmopolitan lifestyle. Even still, you feel as if there’s something slightly inhibited about it: another collection of demos. Elephant is not a perfect album, although it makes tentative steps towards an “advancement”, such as it is, of the Stripes sound. (Dig the multi-tracking on the harmonies, fer instance.) Jack White is a good - sometimes great - songwriter, but without a shot of ambition and a decent rhythm section he’s never going to escape that bedroom is going to become a tomb. I can’t help think that his heroes - up there in cock rock heavent - are frowning upon his “communal good naturedness” getting in the way of his world-straddling, cod-piece and coke spoon success.

DJ Lance Lockarm - “Lose Yrself Fitter”

DJ Lance Lockarm - “Lose Yrself Fitter”

The notion of The Voice in pop is a long standing Freaky Trigger/NYLPM obsession - just check the archives if you don’t believe me. Little thought seems to be paid to the matching of voice and music once the initial work of forming a band (or grooming an artist) is done. Form follows function, or vice versa. They guys in Creed and Staind sing the way they do because Kurt Cobain or Eddie Vedder (or the guy from Foreigner) did; you wanna play grunge ballads, go with what works. “Expanding” the role of the voice seems then to either be a dog’s dinner or a very, very slow process of refinement.

So at the one extreme you have someone like the Red Krayola, who believe that any vocal (or more accurately any text) can be matched to any music, Ma(y)oist polemic over cod disco-funk or soulful crooning over nasty garage rock or whatever. Occasionally it works, but more often - like a lot of art rock - it’s like a failed lab report, two solutions suspended between each other. At the other, new styles of singing are really points in a continuum: a direct line can be drawn between Otis Redding and K-Ci & Jo-Jo, although you’d be hard pressed to see it in isolation. (Then there’s the outright experiment - Thom Yorke chopping his voice to fuck-all on “Kid A” - and the inspired one-off - Robert Wyatt’s out-of-time bleached mahogany.)

One of the best features about our much-maligned modern Pick’N'Mix culture is that - with the cycles of recycling shrinking every day - the inspired mutations are sticking out and the lame ones receding into the depths of faddish memory even more quickly than usual. So, as Tom pointed out, DFA finally found a working platform for those parched indie yelps, twenty years after the fact. Bootlegs — essentially being the ephemeral crap of bored middle-class computer geeks — shrink those cycles even further, if not obliterate them altogether. Bootlegs do away with the ‘form follows function’ rules at the outset — usually to their detriment — but they also do away with the continuum, so long dead styles — vocal or instrumental — are suddenly reanimated, given new purpose.

‘Lose Yourself’, in it’s original form, blew it when it determined that Eminem’s rabble rousing AOR rap had to be matched with music as turgid as AOR usually was. This boot reanimates the words — which really are invigorating despite overexposure - by linking three alt-rock instrumentals: Smashing Pumpkins ‘Cherub Rock’, The Cure’s ‘Primary’, and Sonic Youth’s ‘Titanium Expose’. (Which, despite seeming incongruous and ‘wacky’, actually form a rather complex new song: grungey opener, punk-funk bridge, careening avalanche rock ending.) Totally ‘tossed off’, despite the obvious work involved, it magically provides a context — one he or his handler’s never would have seen or had the guts to try - for Em’s most ‘rock’ performance yet, while almost making you forget the whiny gurgling, goth poesy, and beatnik affectations of the originals (as good as they can be.)

“Guy With ‘Opinionated Personal Website’ Has Problem With Professional Music Writing”

“Guy With ‘Opinionated Personal Website’ Has Problem With Professional Music Writing”
No one really bothered to talk about the Pazz & Jop poll itself on NYLPM, with good reason, I guess: even Der Dean seems to lament the bleedin’ obviousness of this years winners, the kind of list that one can reply with - no matter where you stand on its contents - a resigned shrug. The ILM debate on the subject has lapsed into a regulars argument which I’m too busy/dense to bothering unpacking (although I can guess it has little to do with P&J at this point.) My problem with the list is that I don’t believe it was such an “obvious” year for music at all; if anything Pazz & Jop’s polled (at least the dissatisfied contingent, yrs truly included) failed to convince their peers (and by extension - obviously - their readers) about the specialness of the lower placing entries.

One of the “odd” side effects of this years list I’ve noticed is the amount of ire it seems to be drawing from the non-respondent contingent, esp those with blogs. Frankly, I agree - more or less - with Simon Reynolds: I don’t know why anyone who isn’t involved in the “industry” to one degree or another would give a flying fuck about what basically equals a meeting of the Royal Water Buffalos Lodge with a Dean Martin roast for those “in the know.” I care, of course, because I am involved, and I have loved the components of the list since I was in high school (geeky listmaking, the clash between the personalities of the individuals with the Master List, the unexpected upsets…basically a ghetto-ized version of the Oscars for those of us who still hold delusions about the glamour of criticism.) (Oh Pauline, whither next?)

The Blog Xplosion, however, means that their are more Music Writers than ever before (there were 1300 people polled in P&J this year…I have no idea what 2001’s stats were but I’d imagine it was markedly less. And 1300 is still a far cry from early early days of, like, 24 people.) Many of these writers enjoy the freedom of expression and low bar of entry blogging and webzines enjoy, while harboring a resentment towards the idea of Music Writing itself (exclusionary, pretentious, whatevah.) So naturally the idea of P&J - a big, semi-prestigious, semi-pretentious list-poll summarizing the entire year, an idea originally born out of gentle mocking humor or the same type of mainstream subversion which powers the bloggers or even sincerity (imagine that) that got out of the hands of its creators until it grew and grew to become something else entirely - feeds right into that resentment. And yet, and yet. Again, I’d have no idea why they’d care. Except that more and more people who have made their names in blogging or on music related webboards or the like are ending up in P&J (cough, cough), which confuses the sense of self-righteousness: this is beneath (above?) contempt but why am I/this blogger/guy who writes fro webzine A not included?? (It’s not quite sour grapes, but its certainly a cake and eating it too thing.)

The problem is that, as always with anything that matters, the mountain ain’t comin to Mohammed. Those included in the poll from the “blog community”?; I have some harsh news for you all: they asked to be included, in some cases fought for it. They are the Greatest Heroes of All, because their arguing for the value of blogging and internet-based criticism against some spurious standard of “professional” music writing has allowed - perhaps for the first time - all the internet writers you Want to See In Print (your results may vary) to actually get in there. But you still have to try. Not to come over all dad (but the weblog community seems to need a swift kick in the solipsism every now and again): get off your asses and do something about your complaints. Or quit fucking whining.

Wolf Eyes - “Dead Hills Pt. 2″

Apparently a whole generation of latch-keyers reared on the NES, skateboard vids, and 7 Seconds albums are discovering the joys of rudimentary, home-cobbled electronics, raining cold gray slush - Residents chirrups, Whitehouse grind, Masonna shrieks, Neubauten bongo oil cans - on an unsuspecting hardcore underground. It’s a measure of hardcore’s insularity as a genre that “noise” is the New! Now! Over To You! order of the day because “noise” as a genre doesn’t change much: because it can encompass Everything it usually ends up encompassing nothing but its own cannibalized guts. So the same repeat motifs — vid games in meltdown, metal on metal scrape, feedback blare, strangulated vocalese, abused FX pedals — wash alleviatory and unchecked over the unwashed. (The last 30 years of ‘avant’ anything have traded on the rather hackneyed notion that experimental = drifty, and Noise does nothing disruptive here, reinforcing its own widdle womb. An ocean made of razor wire or brillo pads is still an ocean.) As always, the best noise acts attack their material with a bloodyminded humor; Wolf Eyes (the lastest cause celeb in a milieu where 500 cassettes sold makes you a star) render early Swans in negative, flipping and reversing their plod so that the heft of the guitar chunk-a-chunk becomes a swarm of addled texture blips, leaving only the agonizing pace and groaning humanoid yelps. It’s hilarious (if tiring), and says only one thing about (my/your/their) life: steaming rectal intubation with intolerable hot enema now.

Tee hee.

Tee hee.

(Thanks to M. Matos for the link.)

And not to preempt my own press, but…:

And not to preempt my own press, but…: great Voice all around this week, with ILX’s Sean Carruthers giving Tom Petty a nice noogie of logic, Elena Oumano on Sean Paul, Shaggy, & “American” dancehall, and a Michael Freedberg piece on darkwave (paging DJ Martian), which made Nancy happy with the line “Me, I’m not only far too mainstream, I’m skinny — a size 12, dammit.”