There's a gas leak in the building. Oh wait, it's Awesome in their stage outfits, with soft glowing white lights where their faces should be, blowing into spooky horns, sampling and looping their voices, and pushing buttons on ancient toy organs. Watching all of this in the darkened room heightens the ghostly elegance of their music, and although the tension slowly builds toward a Black Dice-ian bleep-filled finale, I think their strengths lie in their more anodyne moments. They captured a feeling of pastoral stasis similar to that on Flying Saucer Attack's "Distance", which FSA couldn't or wouldn't recapture after that (typically relying on layer after layer of reverb to make their points both before and after that album).
I know essentially nothing about the state of goth music, or anything related to goth music (except for darkwave, which is still recycling 1995 trance the last I checked) but if more of it sounded like Arcana's "Inner Pale Sun", then I'd listen to a lot more of it. In contrast to highly intimidating labelmates such as Brighter Death Now, this album is lush, inviting, and cinematic, exuding warmth with each blaring note. Goth music always seems to bring thoughts of horror and fright to my mind -- a spider-infested haunted house as opposed to the grand prescence of a true gothic manor with leafy green ivy crawling around its exterior. Why can't more music in this genre sound this grand? Where do I find more of this stuff -- is this as simple as (finally) buying myself some Dead Can Dance CD's? As you can tell, I haven't a clue what I'm talking about when it comes to this stuff, but I know what I like.
I've been meaning to write about that album for a while, but conveniently, it fits into a discussion of Et Sans because they've found another wonderful goth formula that I wish others would use as well. Bouncy synth pop and shimmering keyboards form the basis for improvisational noise and fits of unrestrained screaming. Sure, let's let Fennesz's computer go nuts all over Depeche Mode's "Get the Balance Right", why not? The band are barely able to contain their smiles, which is perhaps a reaction over being not allowed to smile in their 4839 other bands. The sense of fun in their music is mostly absent on their album -- there's obviously something to be said for watching a performers' face and having the option of dancing along with them.
Since I'm writing this a couple of days later, I might as well open up a time loop to the night following the concert in order to talk about one more thing that I know nothing about. I saw five minutes of Canadian Idol last night. These were the only five minutes I've seen all season. What is wrong with my country? The emperor has no clothes and I think I'm the only one who realizes it. The judges certainly don't because they're working overtime to polish turds into gold and if I hadn't seen the two finalists with my own eyes then I might have bought what the judges were selling. Neither Rex or Melissa looks like a star. They look like ordinary kids. Ryan Malcolm looks like a waiter who won a singing contest. He doesn't look like a star and that's why he isn't one. Kalan Porter is a dewy-eyed manchild. He looks like a star and he is one. Rex and Melissa don't look like pop singers. Neither has a future as one.
Rex's version of Five For Fighting's "Superman" was delivered in a brutal monotone that had me aghast at the notion that this was actually the finale and not the round where they eliminate 32 contestants down to 16. Plus, the dude's a midget. Sorry. Melissa has a fine voice and should clearly be the winner, but taking on "Angel of the Morning" was a potentially suicidal move because of the extremely high risk of falling flat on your face with a song that difficult. My perception is that she managed to do enough with it to not change anybody's opinion of her, no more and no less.
Canadian Idol, then: let's have some humility and quit before we make ourselves look any dumber.
Black Dice rocked my socks off. They have got to be in my top five of bands that you absolutely have to see live to appreciate. They're punishing in person, but on record, their electronic squiggling carries maybe 10% of the power (one or two tracks on each album excepted).
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