Movietone, "The Blossom Filled Streets"

I was surprised to see an album by the fourth best act from the second most famous 90's Bristol scene featured in Pitchfork's Sunday review.  This feature is supposed to highlight notable albums from the past, and this has to be one of the most (if not the most) obscure album of the series.  

Don't get me wrong -- I'm overjoyed to read feature articles about the second most famous (but musically superior) 90's Bristol scene.  And I know why this review exists, that's clear based on the final paragraphs, in which Mark Richardson tells about a chance Movietone live encounter in 2000.  You can't short-change him his memories, similar music-related experiences were probably the best parts of my twenties. But let's not get carried away.  This isn't a "lost classic", it wasn't underappreciated in its time, and there's no narrative that requires uncovering.  

This isn't to say that "The Blossom Filled Streets" shouldn't be heard by more people (surely one of the motivations behind the review), and its rating (8.6) is more than fair.  Richardson isn't grossly exaggerating his case by giving it a retroactive 10 and proclaiming it the best album you've never heard.  But I think this review is symptomatic of an odd trend in modern music criticism, one that I wrote about with a different Sunday Review for Lush.  

Many writers grew up on music criticism from the 80's and 90's.  We regularly read about underappreciated acts from the 60's and 70's.  The Velvet Underground became a myth.  Can became legends outside of their time.  All the proto-punk bands from the late 60's onwards (MC5, Stooges, too many more to name) were anointed as the godfathers of something or other.  Helping to rediscover and promote such bands -- and getting credit as a visionary for doing so -- was the apex of music criticism, just about the loftiest goal one could aspire to.  

Naturally, this generation's writers want to emulate the greats of the past.  But there's a key difference.  When the Velvet Underground were active, the music press was in its infancy.  Criticism was a niche topic, and countless bands came and went virtually unnoticed.  Even the bands that did get noticed tended to flummox the writers of the time, who were still learning how to write about music in an engaging way.  I covered this in a post about then-contemporary criticism of the VU.  But that's not true anymore.  Virtually nothing falls through the cracks, just about every album of note gets pored over in countless reviews and message board posts.  That's certainly true of any band who featured in a celebrated music scene or recorded for a prestige label.  It means that there aren't many underappreciated bands to dig up anymore.  The problem is that some writers insist on trying, searching for a new angle to prop up their pet projects.  I'm sure I have been guilty of it too at times.  

Movietone were properly appreciated in their time.  They were a mid-tier band in a cool microscene that I personally enjoyed very much.  Nobody was under any illusions about Third Eye Foundation or Flying Saucer Attack going mega and supporting U2 on a massive world tour.  But 25-30 years after the fact, "properly rated band that I personally used to like" isn't much of a selling point for a major review.  This brings us to the enhanced prose to describe "The Blossom Filled Streets": "an ethereal and luminescent highlight of the underground Bristol scene" goes the byline.  Not every fine yet enigmatic band from the past needs to be elevated into a folk tale.  I think Richardson appreciates this, based on the final few paragraphs of his review.  However, there are contradictory messages here.  "One of the beautiful things about Movietone is that they're almost always written about as a spoke in their local scene's wheel."  So they're an extraordinary band deserving of this effervescent review ... precisely because they were so ordinary?     

After reading this review, I listened to "The Blossom Filled Streets" for the first time in many years, and it was like effortlessly slipping back into an old, warm jacket.  Each song was immediately familiar, and I was overcome with wistful feelings associated with this music.  The years that had passed simply melted away in an instant.  I did in fact listen to this album quite a lot back in the day -- probably more than I had realized, based on how familiar it all seemed.  It was a nice feeling, but that's about all.  And that's just fine.     

 

IPO dir. Philippe Jordan: Schubert Symphony #8 (Unfinished), Bruckner Symphony #3

Two great works by two symphonic masters -- and also a daring bit of programming.  Schubert's Unfinished is by far the more popular work, but it's not the headliner.  It takes guts to program Schubert's brooding masterpiece and follow it up with arguably the most humourless of the major symphonic composers.  

I wasn't familiar with Jordan before tonight but he impressed me with his flowing, lyrical style and masterful sense of pacing.  I always think of the first movement of the Unfinished as the "fast" movement and the second as the "slow" movement, but Jordan reverses that.  The first movement is meticulous, deliberate and intense, with a surprising emphasis on the brass.  The second movement is shockingly and refreshingly upbeat and full of Viennese charm.  It all sounds effortless, and stands in contrast to the steadiness the first movement.

For the Bruckner, Jordan does his best to hold things together while the orchestra struggles through a few sloppy moments in accents and timing.  The director of the Vienna State Opera just has to know his Bruckner, but the IPO comes across as underprepared and uninvested in one of Bruckner's lesser symphonies.  Since it's also one of his shortest, it works as the post-intermission headliner without burning out the audience too much.  Credit goes to Jordan for keeping things moving through the long opening movements, and wringing the energy from the orchestra during the scherzo and the finale, even though the latter is a bit underplayed.  

Schumann*Gardiner, "Complete Symphonies"

John Eliot Gardiner's recordings of Schumann's orchestral works are both celebrated and controversial – it depends on who you ask.  Gardiner wanted to counter the widely held opinion that Schumann was a poor orchestrator.  In the liner notes to this three disc set, he dismisses this notion as a "myth" that can be debunked by re-framing these works in period instrument performance and orchestration.  In this instance, it calls for no more than 50 players, with the violas and violins standing, and fewer instrument groups, all with the intention of reconstructing the orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus of Schumann’s time.  In other words (again, according to Gardiner), this was the orchestra that Schumann was accustomed to and for which he was orchestrating. 

There is something very refreshing about Gardiner's approach.  Sometimes Schumann can come across as colourless, although in the case of the Fourth Symphony, it's crushing bluntness in doubling up many of the instruments is precisely what I love about it.  However, Gardiner's leaner ensemble produces a less adventurous timbre but also a more consolidated one.   The tempos are consistently more brisk than most Schumann sets, the percussion is sharp and bracing, making for an often exhilarating listen.  This is a fascinating and often incendiary take on Schumann.

Having said that, I really couldn't care less about Schumann's "true" intentions, whatever that means.  It's interesting as a historical perspective into the origins of the work.  Since when is art only meant to be enjoyed in a singular manner, representative of an all-seeing eminent truth, frozen for all eternity?  And since when does the creator of said art get exclusive rights to present that truth?  I'm reminded of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", apparently "intended" by Cohen to be a plastic, faux-launge mid-80's soft rock track.   But the song turned into something else thanks to John Cale's cover, and Jeff Buckley's cover of Cale's cover, and then the dozens of versions that followed it.  "Hallelujah" turned it into the "Imagine" of the 00's, and yet I have never heard anyone pontificate on Cohen's "true" intentions for the song, and advocate for a return to the original recording, stylistically speaking.  Over the years the song morphed into something else and affected a lot more people than Cohen's original recording ever did.  That's the story of "Hallelujah", and that's not going to change whether Cohen could foretell it's future of not.  

I would argue the same to be true about the Schumann orchestrations.  Reviews such as these get a bit too hung up on settling aesthetic scores with period instrument practitioners, and the period instrument people are too focused on proving themselves right.  Theirs is a conception of the music, just as valid as any other.   

 

re: Spotify, "The playlist model meant listeners didn't have a relationship with the artists"

The sentence above is the money line from Elizabeth Lopatto's piece about Spotify for The Verge.  She's ostensibly writing a book review about Liz Pelly's "Mood Machine", but she spins it off into her own analysis and some thoughtful criticism on what the book isn't, rather than what it is.  

I like playlists.  Even back in the days of Pandora, I loved the "if you liked that, maybe you'll like this too" approach to sequencing and recommending music.  I have discovered a lot of great new music through playlists.  But it's hard to argue with the notion that many people have outsourced their taste in music to algorithms.  Spotify playlists may be the 21st century muzak -- always in the background, never commanding the listeners' attention.  

Nobody wants to return to the bad old days of $20 CDs and no outlet for buying anything less than the full album when it's only the single that you want.  Having hundreds of thousands of songs available on demand is a minor miracle that was unimaginable to my former teenage self.   But it has created a different problem.  Music is now an accessory, not a commodity.  It's too cheap, and cheap things have little value by definition.  During the peak of file sharing, many noted that music collections had lost their value.  Nobody was going to proudly display and treasure a CD of burned mp3's or an iPod hard drive whose contents were always changing.  And now?  With streaming, most people don't even have a music collection anymore.  The result is that songs drift in and out of our headspaces, and listeners don't connect to the artists who create the music.  Beyond their so very cheap subscriptions to streaming services, listeners feel no loyalty toward artists, and don't spend the money to support them financially.  

Pelly and Lopatto don't have the solution to this problem, and neither do I.  Their central theses appear sound (I haven't read Pelly's book) -- the complex monetization policies of streaming services are a disaster for all but the most successful contemporary and legacy artists.  Lopatto doesn't see why indie labels should matter, but to me it's clear.  The labels are a stamp of quality.  Association with a cool label is just about the best marketing strategy available to an up and coming non-mainstream act.  The labels don't always need to supply the production expertise and studio time, not when many DIY musicians can record at home.  Being with the label means the artist instantly becomes part of a history and a legacy.  That's a powerful marketing tool and a provides a big incentive for listening.  

Arturo Toscanini, 10 CD box set on Membran

I picked up this 10 CD box several months ago and listened to it in fits and spurts, but in the past week I made a point of listening to the entire thing in a few dedicated sessions.   

One reason for that is the fourth disc in the set -- Wagner.   This was my first time intentionally and knowingly listening to anything by Wagner.  First, I'm not an opera fan.  Second, exactly how does one get in the mood to listen to the music of an unhinged anti-Semite and all-around flake who spent most of his life spewing venom and running away from creditors?  

I'm not a fan of cancel culture.  I came to terms with the moral failings of other classical musicians such as von Karajan.   One simply can't go through life dissecting the character flaws of every artist, I think we'd find most of them highly disagreeable (at best) or flagrantly indefensible (at worst) in some way.  And that's only based on their public personas, through interviews, social media, etc.  I don't need to be pretend friendly with an artist to enjoy and respect their work.  I still listen to the Phil Spector Christmas album each holiday season.  Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas is You" is an obvious Spector tribute, and it's gone to #1 each year for the past several years.  It's a special part of millions of people's lives.  You simply can't cancel some people. 

You can't cancel Wagner, but on the other hand, everyone has a personal choice to make.  I never felt the need to listen to his music, so I didn't.  Until now.  

Unsurprisingly, the quality across these ten discs is consistently great.  Nearly everything is a soundstage mono recording with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, recorded in the 1940's or 1950's.  You know what you're getting with Toscanini -- brisk tempos, highly disciplined yet energetic playing.   I felt that the sound is an impediment to extended listening, not because of the mono recordings -- the quality is for the most part good -- but due to the dry acoustics of the soundstage.  It may be useful for radio broadcasting, but the lack of reverb and depth to the recordings is grating on the ear.  For the most part, the performance sound thin, reedy, and lacking in bass and punch.   

First, the obvious.  The Rossini overtures are a clear highlight -- breathless sprints through the material by an opera master.  Toscanini is also tremendous with Beethoven.  His run through the Eighth Symphony is a delight, capturing all the warmth, drama, and humour that most conductors fail to bring out.  His take on Schubert's Unfinished is a true sprint, running just 21 minutes, but I found myself entranced by the urgency of this interpretation.  His Strauss and Sibelius are also appropriately fiery and intense.

Now, the less obvious.  Disc 8 features a quartet of French composers and is a true gem. I'm not sure I've heard a better Debussy "Images" (unfortunately incomplete here).  Similarly, excerpts from Ravel, Franck, and Roussel respond well to the Toscanini treatment.  Disc 10 features American composers and definitively contradicts the notion that Toscanini didn't connect with American music.  Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue" (featuring Benny Goodman!) and "An American In Paris" are as fine as any on disc, and Grofe's "Grand Canyon Suite" (sometimes derided as trite, populist junk) is a tour de force of symphonic imagery.  Has there been a better recording of "Cloudburst" that captures this force of nature more vividly?  Finally, this recording of Barber's "Adagio For Strings" is outstanding, as you'd expect from the maestro who premiered the work.

And Wagner?  Still not for me, although there are wonderful moments in nearly each piece, particularly the Prelude to Lohengrin.        

Aging out of music fandom

December 15 was traditionally the day that I would roll out that year's Top Ten list(s).  For the fifth consecutive year, that won't be happening.  It's become just another day in the calendar.  But this year, I do want to revisit some of my favourite music of the past thirty years -- with a twist.   

Jim Barber and Rick Beato recently discussed age demographics on the latter's youtube channel.  Their main point is that bands tend to be older than their fans and that this has been a constant throughout most of recorded music history.  The reasons are straightforward.  Music sales were typically marketed toward younger people (e.g. teenagers).  Once they got older and stopped buying music, the next generation of teens would be sold on a new batch of stars.  In this model, both fans and artists had short careers.  People stopped buying music after getting married and finding jobs, and the next generation of young fans weren't interested in what their older brothers and sisters had liked, so the artists were often tossed aside by the industry as a whole.  

This trend of disposability seemed to end with the boomer generation bands.  Barber and Beato don't elaborate on exactly why this happened.  I think that the boomer generation coming of age in the mid-late 60's happened to coincide with rise of the album format.  The album became entrenched as the artistic standard for all serious musical acts, the cultural cache afforded to a great album ensured canonical longevity for the music. Bands could, and still do, coast off the reputations built by great albums for years of even decades.  On the other hand, the singles market was more dominant pre-1960's singles market, and the songs were for and of the moment.  Once those songs completed their chart run and fell off the radio playlists, the music and the artists would fade away too. 

After I listened to their conversation, I realized that the truth had been staring me in the face for years.  Maybe everything in the Barber/Beato video was obvious to many music lifers already.  In those moments, my musical past came flooding back, and the common threads couldn't have been any clearer.   With few exceptions, fans are younger than the acts they follow. It describes my entire fandom.  

I was born in 1974.  Here is a table of all my #1 albums, each year from 1993-2009, along with the birth year of the band's frontman or frontwoman.  For duos, or for acts with multiple dominant creative forces, I listed the birth years of each band member.

Year	Artist, album	Birth year
1993	Orbital, Orbital(Brown Album)	Paul Hartnoll '68, Phil Hartnoll '67
1994	Blur, Parklife,	Albarn '68
1995	Spiritualized, Pure Phase	Pierce '65
1996	Orbital, Insides	Paul Hartnoll '68, Phil Hartnoll '67
1997	Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space	Pierce '65
1998	V/A, Skampler; Mogwai, Kicking A Dead Pig	Braithwaite '76
1999	Super Furry Animals, Guerrilla	Rhys '70
2000	Primal Scream, XTRMNTR	Gillespie '61
2001	Spiritualized, Let It Come Down	Pierce '65
2002	GY!BE, Yanqui UXO	Menuck '70
2003	Plastikman, Closer	Hawtin '70
2004	Xiu Xiu, Fabulous Muscles	Stewart '78
2005	Sigur Ros, Takk	Jonsi '75
2006	Bardo Pond, Ticket Crystals	ages not known, but they started in '91, so late '60's
2007	Eluvium, Copia	Cooper '80
2008	M83, Saturdays=Youth	Gonzalez '80
2009	Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It's Blitz	Karen O '78
2010	Third Eye Foundation, The Dark	Elliott, '71
2011	M83, Hurry Up We're Dreaming	Gonzalez '80
2012	Beach House, Bloom	Legrand '81, Scally '82
2013	Eluvium, Nightmare Ending	Cooper '80
2014	Fennesz, Becs	Fennesz '62
2015	Beach House, Depression Cherry	Legrand '81, Scally '82
2016	Moderat, III	Apparat '78, Modeselektor '75
2017	The Caretaker, Everywhere at the End of Time, Stage II	Kirby '74
2018	Low, Double Negative	Sparhawk '70, Parker '72 Parker
2019	King Midas Sound, Solitude	Martin '73, Robinson late '70's

In 1998 (a strange outlier year in many respects), my #1 album was a compilation so I also listed my #2 album (Mogwai) and the birth year of their lead guitarist.  Discounting 1998, there are 26 albums, and only ten of them were made by "younger" artists.  The youngest of those is Beach House (seven and eight years younger).  But most of the "older" artists are only a few years older as well, born in the late 60's or early 70's.  Looking at all 26 albums using the birth years in the table (and using best estimates for unknown ages), the average age of a #1 album creator is two years older than myself.  

Focusing only on #1's doesn't even take into account many of my very favourite bands over the years, such as Pulp (Jarvis Cocker, born in 1963), Autechre (Booth/Brown both born in 1970), Slowdive (Neil Halstead 1970), PJ Harvey (1969), The National (Matt Berninger born in 1971, the other members are a few years younger). Or look at my final top five from 1999: following King Midas Sound was Nick Cave (1957), Fennesz, William Basinski (1958), and Amp (around since mid 90's, so likely born in the late 60's or early 70's.).  As I got older, I wasn't turning to new generations of artists.  The people making my favourite music were staying the same age.  If anything, they were gradually getting older.  This explains a lot, and in particular, it explains how I gave up almost entirely on listening to new music.  The number of artists around my age still actively working is clearly decreasing -- people retire or leave the industry for whatever reason -- and the ones who are left see their glory years fade further into the past.   Counting on them to continue producing the music I love almost exclusively is unsustainable.  Over time, I was choosing from a rapidly diminishing pool of music artists that I cared out.  It also explains the multiple #1's by certain bands -- great artists to be sure, but also facing decreasing competition.   Eventually the pool of artists became too small, with not nearly enough music arriving to replenish the selection.  Faced with a dearth of music I could truly embrace, I started giving up on new music entirely.  

It makes sense to prefer bands that are older than you. As a teenager you look up to people in their twenties as mature heroes living an exciting, musically fulfilling life. But at any age, one appreciates art from older artists who have experiences and wisdom that predates your own, and who can channel those emotions into their art. As a fan, you seek out those perspectives and ideas.  Younger bands bring new ideas and inspiration, but there's an natural and understandable generation gap that creates emotional distance between them and you.  

I still listen to plenty of music daily.  There are even new releases that I intend to catch up with someday, after being almost entirely uninterested in such things throughout all of 2020 and 2021.  But right now I can't foresee a return to yearly best-of lists.  As the data shows, it's not for me anymore.

New Order, Live at Reading Festival 29/08/1993

I'm still hyped up on New Order since finishing both seasons of the Transmissions podcast, so let's drag out this historic live recording from their headlining set at Reading 1993, the 10th in a series of albums that I haven't heard in well over twenty years, since I started this blog.  I started this series in early 2020 as a 20th anniversary feature and absolutely intend to finish with it before the blog's 30th anniversary.  You can easily find recordings of this show online, here is one of many links.   

When New Order released "Republic" in 1993, Factory had collapsed, the Hacienda was soon to follow, and it was an open secret that the four of them couldn't stand working together anymore.  Yet somehow, "Regret" was one of their best ever singles (on many days, I would argue it's their very best), their videos were all over MTV and MuchMusic, they filmed the priceless "Top of the Pops" segment live from the set of "Baywatch", appeared at the Montreux Jazz festival, and released the excellent "Neworderstory" documentary (ignore all complaints about the shoddy voiceover commentary, those opinions are wrong).  Free of the flaming dumpster fire of financial ruin called Factory Records, and finally making decent coin on a properly run major label (London Records), in many ways it was a triumphant comeback for New Order.  

And yet, they quietly only played fourteen shows in support of "Republic".  This was the early 90's, when a band could pump out singles from a well-regarded album for well over a year, make good money from CD album sales (the single was mostly dead), have their videos in daily rotation and thus appear to be everywhere even though they were sitting at home or doing the occasional press tour.  Hitting the road for long tours was not a necessity once you reached a certain level, and New Order had reached it.  Despite their year-long success, heading into their set at Reading it was widely assumed that the band had reached the end of their rope and even could be breaking up.  This time, the rumours were true.  Following this show, the band fractured and essentially didn't see or speak to each other for years.  

I saw the Toronto show earlier in the year -- the first and still the only time I have seen New Order live -- and it was a wonderful experience even if the show wasn't anything special.  I bought a bootleg cassette of that show and enjoyed reliving the memories, as I tended to do with any recording from a show I had been to.  Later in the year, I bought a cassette recording of the Reading show.  The set list was identical, but the Reading gig was unquestionably different.  

New Order were a famously ramshackle band in the 80's.  They'd show up on stage trashed and write out the set list fifteen minutes before they went out.  They dragged computers, sequencers, synths, and guitars on stage years before anyone knew how to make that setup work reliably day in and day out.  Their concerts tended to be octane-filled dance rock parties or mistake-laden drunken embarrassments, there was mostly no inbetween.  The Toronto show was actually fine, but a bit rote.  By 1993, their concerts were slickly programmed and tough to mess up.  Gone were the days of scribbling down the set list based on their mood in the dressing room.  They were a professional band on a corporate-run label now.  They were real celebrities.  The Toronto show was held in a concert theatre in an amusement park.  They brought the roller coasters to a standstill that day -- the park staff brought them in to skip the lines and have private rides (not a joke, this is true).   They spent the day drinking and touring the park and the gig was fine, even though they didn't seem very invested in it.  

Reading was more energetic, more mechanical (in the best sense -- no blips, losses of concentrations, or obvious mistakes) and more magical.  One can sense that they knew it was their final gig as New Order and that they were determined to make it one of their best ever.  Mostly though, you can sense the lack of tension.  They'd been on the road playing the new songs and had worked out the kinks.  They knew the setlist -- it was the same every night.  They were relieved that the journey was finally over.  Listening to this back in 1993, when I heard the pitch perfect harmonies in "World" I knew that I was hearing something special.  Finally New Order had gotten their shit together, just in time for the end.

Well, not exactly.  Rob Gretton coaxed them back together to play live again in 1998.  The results were better than anyone could have expected.  They still sounded relevant, necessary, and wholly unique.  They started playing Joy Division songs every night, finally embracing that part of their history after publicly distancing themselves from it for the better part of two decades.  Other than a few years of uncertainty following Peter Hook's messy departure in 2006, they've been a functioning band ever since.  The post-1998 reunion period now spans a longer period than their "imperial" phase.  And I don't think it's controversial to say that the post-1998 model, in all its iterations, is a much better live band than any version that came before it.  They have a more maximalist, energetic presence now, the re-worked renditions of "Temptation" and "Bizarre Love Triangle" completely slay, post-reunion material like "Crystal" and "When The Sirens Call" come across like peak New Order, "Age Of Consent" and "Regret" are as vital as ever.  

"Republic" was an uneven album with a number of down moments, and the live versions were identical to the recorded ones.  It was the comedown record after the acid house-infused high of "Technique", it was not an album designed to electrify the world over a six month tour.  But for what it is, this set at Reading was the absolute best they could have done it.   It's still a fine recording, but it comes across as a bit lumpy and sterile due to the overly familiar programming and arranging that robs the music of any surprise or spontaneity.  

"Transmissions" Podcast

Having read more than my share of JD/NO books/articles/interviews over the years, including all three of Peter Hook's very candid autobiographies, I was skeptical about this being the "definitive" account that it claims to be.  I can't say it isn't fun to hear these interviews and stories in an easily digestible audio format, but for hardcore fans there weren't many surprises in Season 1, which covers the JD story and the NO story up to and including "Blue Monday".  The lack of new bombshell revelations isn't a negative -- of course most listeners will be casual or lapsed fans who will find plenty to digest, and even longtime devotees of the bands seem to enjoy it based on the responses I've seen.  It features interviews with nearly all the principals plus a healthy number of celeb cameos and commentaries, the episodes are short (30-40 minutes each) and incredibly well paced, and the story arc is wholly unique.  What's not to like?  

Things pick up in Season 2.  The JD story has been told in a myriad of ways and frankly there's not that much to tell, considering how short their career was.  Getting to the bottom of the NO story has always been a more elusive endeavour, considering their aversion to liaising with the press (interviews, photo sessions, videos) throughout most of the 80's.  Hook's biography is still the gold standard, but it's only one side of the story.  "Transmissions" features many other key figures who have never, to the best of my knowledge, talked this openly about the band before.  Chief among them is Tom Attencio, the Qwest label exec who served as their US manager, and Peter Saville, who designed just about everything of note for Factory.  Now that the lawsuits have been definitively settled, with both the Hook-led side and Bernard Sumner-led side enjoying healthy careers, everyone seems to have mellowed out.  Even the tense, bitter moments in New Order's career are recalled with considerable detachment, as if everyone involved has since seen the error of their ways.  Mostly, they are all keen to focus on the good times and the process behind crafting such groundbreaking music.     

Music in "House, M.D."

After about six months (with kids it's difficult to binge watch) I have finally finished watching all eight seasons of "House, M.D." from beginning to end.  For a few years during it's broadcast run, it was my favourite show on television and I wasn't alone -- it was the most watched TV show in the world for a period thanks to international broadcast rights.  At the time, I started watching during Season 2, watched religiously during Seasons 3, 4, and 5, but my interest started waning during Season 6 (spurred by a specific "jump the shark" episode, but we'll get to it).  Frustrated by a frankly ludicrous ending to Season 6, I gave up on the show and never watched any of Seasons 7 and 8 (outside of clips of the finale).  

The show debuted twenty years ago this week, so there have been a number of articles about it on entertainment sites recently.  All of them focus on the influence "House" had on a number of "edgy" shows with flawed, but brilliant anti-hero main characters.  Virtually none of them talk about the music in the show.  And since this is a music blog, I figured I'd pay tribute to my half-year label of love and talk about "House"'s use of music.  This is not a discussion of the soundtrack album released in 2007 as a cash cow tie-in, or an attempt to provide a definitive, comprehensive list of the top ten or twenty musical moments in the show's history.  It's an excuse to write some words about "House" by framing it through a sampling of songs (out of the seven hundred that featured over its eight seasons) that stuck with me for various reasons.

Massive Attack, "Teardrop".   The theme song (but not in most international markets), backed by an intro video with computer generated anatomical diagrams of spidery blood vessels, dissected brains, and x-rayed rib cages all floating through the screen in suspended animation.  The intro is a perfect match for the music and the combination is much beloved by pretty much everyone, but oddly enough it does nothing to prepare you for the style and pacing of the show or the sharp, acerbic personalities of many of the characters.  

Gorillaz, "Feel Good, Inc.", S3E1 ("Meaning").  Season 2 ended on a cliffhanger, with House getting shot and subsequently rushed into the OR for life-saving surgery.  Season 3 begins with a complete turnaround, skipping forward to a few months later with House transformed into a hardcore fitness freak, jogging through parks and up flights of stairs, his life completely rejuvenated by a risky ketamine treatment as a side benefit to his surgery.  

Mazzy Star, "Into Dust", S3E3 ("Informed Consent").   This plaintive, blissful track plays for a full three minutes at the end of the episode, soundtracking the devastating reveal of a fatal diagnosis, a likely euthanasia, and the most genuine and affecting House-Cameron moment of the series.  It's an exquisite pairing of music, scenery and dialogue, seemingly stretching these agonizing few minutes into what feels like an hour.  

"Georgia on My Mind" (Hugh Laurie on Piano), S5E22 ("Saviors").  Anything with Hugh Laurie on piano (or guitar) was gold.  The last minutes of the episode are a montage of different characters finding joy and happiness, which cuts to House at the piano in his apartment, jamming alone in his without a care in the world, celebrating his apparent emancipation from drug-induced psychosis.  But the mood turns on a dime with a slow exhale into a harmonica and a surprise hallucinations.  Jubilant, and then chilling, all within a few seconds.

Norman Greenbaum, "Spirit In the Sky", S4E9 ("Games").  This song bubbles up after House's new team members are revealed.  "House" featured a lot of classic rock, but was always framed as a "let the good times roll" moment or used for comic effect.  This is a rare poignant moment set to fuzzy guitar.  There's little doubt that whoever chose the song went for the full ironic effect due to its equally famous 80's cover by Dr. and the Medics (get it ...)

Bon Iver, "Stacks", S416 ("Wilson's Heart").  The song works as the farewell to Amber, and especially at the very end when Wilson returns home to read her heartbreaking note.  This really makes the list because the "House's Head"/"Wilson's Heart" finale were likely the two best episodes of the entire series, and this was the song that capped it.  

Hugh Laurie, "Cuddy's Serenade", S5E15 ("Unfaithful").  Composed and played by Laurie during the final minutes of the episode, this touching little piece was the peak of the Cuddy/House storyline, in which House deals with his inability to reveal his feelings to Cuddy by retreating to the safety of his home and expressing his emotions at the piano.  

Rolling Stones, "As Tears Go By", S5E24 ("Both Sides Now").  "You Can't Always Get What You Want" appeared in about three episodes, but "House"'s best use of a Rolling Stones song was in the Season 5 finale.  The elation of Chase and Cameron's wedding is blended with the devastating uncertainty of House's trip to a psychiatric unit, having pushed his drug addictions over the edge into full blown psychosis.  This was the logical end point of House's addiction, which had been tolerated and enabled for years by his colleagues and even turned into something of a running joke.  There was no way to get more extreme than this, and as a result House's behaviour was far more subdued in the next season.  But the showrunners tried to top it at the end of Season 7, trying for shock and awe to recover the show's edge (I guess), and failing.    

Radiohead, "No Surprises", S6E1 ("Broken").   The only episode that didn't use "Teardrop" as a theme song (outside of a handful that featured a cold open without any music), this coupled House's brutal detox from vicodin addiction with Radiohead's claustrophobic masterpiece.  Arguably the best minute of television the series ever produced.  

Prince, "God", S6E4 ("The Tyrant").   I would never have guessed that this snippet of stirring, neo-classical ambience was a "Purple Rain"-era b-side.  Taken at face value (Foreman burns the log with proof of Chase's guilt), the music works.  The episode is the jump the shark moment of the show that irrevocably destroyed my devoted fandom at the time.  As I watched the entire series, compressed into a shorter time span, it became clear that this was easily the worst episode of "House" to that point, and likely the worst of the series.  A fiercely apolitical show suddenly developed a moral conscience with each character inexplicably virtue signaling, and breaking with their established character arcs.  In the narrative presented on the show, this should have touched off a major international incident.  Instead it led to weeks of crybaby Chase, the laughably dumb break-up of his marriage to Cameron, and then the whole thing was mostly forgotten about.  As an eerie coincidence, James Earl Jones (who played the dictator) died in real life the day after I watched this episode.  I don't have the space or the gumption to provide a detailed overview of the preposterous premise behind this whole storyline, it was an experiment in political posturing that never should have been attempted.   

Funkadelic, "Maggot Brain", S6E11 ("The Down Low").  There is hardly a context in life or in art that isn't suited to hearing "Maggot Brain".  Here, an undercover cop dies in horrifying agony in the hospital while the criminals he spent months pursuing meet their own ignominious ends at the hands of law enforcement.   

LCD Soundsystem, "No Love Lost", S7E10 ("Carrot or Stick").  This serves as the motivational music during a boot camp scene.  But it really makes the list because I had no idea this Joy Division cover existed, and was startled to hear it pop up during a random Season 7 opening scene.

House and Cuddy sing "Get Happy", S7E15 ("Bombshells").  Now here's an experiment that passed with flying colours.  I never wanted to see House and Cuddy get together and there were many, many cringe-worthy moments in Season 7 as I watched them try to conduct a semblance of a serious relationship.  You know what "Huddy" needed more of?  More FUN, more outlandishness, more camp!  This "Material Girl" meets "Rocky Horror" take on a Judy Garland number was a home run, a dream sequence to remember in an episode based upon increasingly bizarre dream sequences.  

Warren Zevon, "Keep Me In Your Heart", S8E22 ("Everybody Dies").  Chosen by Hugh Laurie himself as the penultimate song of the series, providing a glimpse into all the principal characters' lives post-House.  I'm not a Zevon fan, but the music fits and the final scenes of the series are nothing if not memorable.  

The Cure, "Songs of a Lost World"

This will be my first review of a new album release in about four years ... although one could say that it was sixteen years in the making.

The anticipation surrounding this album has drawn in many casual and lapsed fans.  Even without any new music, their profile has arguably never been higher thanks to regular touring, high profile festival appearances, the RnR Hall of Fame induction, and the overall appreciation of a still-functioning band whose enormous influence is still being felt.  For much of the 2010's, I had the sense that The Cure didn't need to record anything else, that they could continue indefinitely as a legacy act.  I'm thinking of the likes of Billy Joel, who hasn't released an album of new music in thirty years (and has no plans to do so) but sold out MSG monthly for years and received the most glowing reviews of his entire career. 

The new album is out and two more are reportedly on the way, so the Cure are very much a fully active band again.  The early reviews for "Songs of a Lost World" have been outstanding.  The new songs were centrepieces of their last world tour, and the lyrics are sobering takes on the incessant reality of death and aging in a broken, uncertain world.  The Cure are back to help us make sense of it all, people are ready and waiting for this album, and hoping for it to be a masterpiece.  

There has been a lot of criticism about the mixing of the album, and on my initial listen I agree with most of it.  It sounds squashed and overly compressed, the drumming is muffled and lacks punch, the synths are too upfront in the mix and have a confusingly preset quality to them, there is little of the high reverb ambience that I want from such an overwhelmingly sobering album.  

Despite those sonic issues, many truly great songs shine through.  Sometimes they imitate the funereal, dirge-like qualities of Joy Division's "Decades" (e.g. "Alone") and sometimes they beef up the doom-laden inevitability not unlike New Order's "In a Lonely Place" (e.g. "Endsong").  The mountains of synths covering "And Nothing Is Forever" produce one of the most lush and purely gorgeous backing tracks in the Cure's 40+ year recorded history. "Drone:Nodrone" distinguishes itself from the somber majority of the album by featuring a more muscular, funk metal sound.  Throughout the album, Robert Smith's voice is in pristine form.  Perhaps nothing is forever, as the album keeps telling us, but his unvarying voice is miraculously the one constant in an ever-evolving band.

Putting aside the production issues for the moment, this is a very good album, although not the classic I was expecting based on the tour recordings and the the pre-release hype.  When the Rolling Stones reformed for "Steel Wheels" and launched a record-breaking tour, everyone remembered that they were a singular band after they had lost their sense of purpose for much of the 1980's.  Starting with that album, and for much of the next fifteen years, critics and fans were on the lookout for the next classic Stones album, the one that would complete their journey from yesterday's legends to contemporary studio giants, irrespective of their remarkable concert tour successes .  Each album was hailed as the best since "Some Girls", or "finally, a Stones album that you don't need to make excuses for".  I think the Cure are firmly entrenched in that phase of their career.  Remarkably, the Stones in the 90's were a much younger band than the Cure is now.  That entire studio run of the Stones didn't add anything to their overall legacy, that vindicating return to form never happened.  Mick et al laughed all the way to the bank (and still are!).  But there was an outsized emphasis relevance through new studio material, and the Stones were judged accordingly.  If that was happening today, with the album in rapid decline as the definitive musical artifact, I think they'd be judged very differently.  

The Cure are one of those few remaining legacy bands who continue to be judged according to the old standards.  I think we've been here before.  "Bloodflowers" was expected to be a classic following the underwhelming "Wild Mood Swings".  It had the hyped up pedigree as the final album in the trilogy that began with "Pornography" and "Disintegration".  It's a good album and the Trilogy DVD is still one of the best projects they ever did, but who reps for "Bloodflowers" these days?  The self-titled album in 2004 was also praised by fans and earned respectable reviews.  It had Ross Robinson producing, adding a nu-metal sheen to the band's sound that at the very least made for an interesting pairing.  They headlined the Curiosa festival with a cadre of bands that owed them a debt creatively, and it all made perfect sense.  Old meets new, the Cure properly launch themselves into a 21st century context!  At the time I listened to the album a lot, but who listens to it today?   During the "Songs of a Lost World" tour, they played 60 different songs across 89 shows, but not a single one of them from "The Cure" (according to setlist.fm).  

"Songs of a Lost World" feels like a big deal now, not least because it's been such a long wait.   But who will be listening to it in ten or twenty years?   As much as there is to like about this album, I can't say that I hear anything "permanent" about it.  That said, much like the Stones beginning with "Steel Wheels", does that even matter?  Focusing too much on the quality of a new Cure album, and evaluating their worth based on that, might mean that we were asking the wrong questions all along.