Saturday, October 29, 2005

Animal Collective, "Feels"

The Warlocks did it, and now it's Animal Collective's turn to make the Great Album That I Didn't Think They Had In Them. In this case, I thought AC were too obsessed with being weird, too enamoured with starting at the crawling walls they saw in their acid flashbacks to keep their focus over the course of an entire album. I wanted them to make an album of two-minute psych-pop songs, with ten minute drone pieces interspersed around them. The mesmerizing "Banshee Beat" comes close to the latter. It's eight minutes long but could easily stretch on for twice that length.

They haven't gotten less weird on "Feels", but it's a mellower, more restrained album and perhaps that's why I like it so much more than "Sung Tongs": I'll take a good chillout album any day over an album of yelping and screaming.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Warlocks, Gris Gris @ Lee's Palace

This scarily underattended show brought back memories of a Bardo Pond show at the same venue three years ago. The gig was scary good and the crowd was shy, but game, although most people didn't dare to descend upon the largely empty floor until the second half of the headliner's set. The aftermath of this is that Bardo Pond haven't come back since.

Last night, Gris Gris impressed me greatly with their metronomic Spacemen 3 act. Setting up on the floor, presumably because there was no room on the stage to set up around the Warlocks multi-guitar, multi-drum arrangement, brought an intimacy to their set that you wouldn't expect from pounding drone-rock (which always seems like such a standoffish type of music to me).

When the Warlocks took to the darkened stage, the energy level in the crowd was approaching zero, and the band launched into their set with calculated efficiency. As the crowd loosened up, they seemed to do the same (chicken? egg? chicken? egg?), relying mainly on the concise songs from their new album "Surgery". Their last Toronto gig was frighteningly loud, with a couple hundred souls packed into a sweaty Horseshoe to listen to one two-chord jam after another. But just as "Surgery" favours songs over mesmerizing jams, so did this gig, with the bulk of the new album rubbing shoulders with the more "hit-single" qualities of "Phoenix Album" tracks "Shake the Dope Out" and "Hurricane Heart Attack". Although I have to wonder why, if they opted to play a pop set rather than a rock one, why they left out the 60's girl group/"Psychocandy" excesses of "Angels in Heaven, Angels In Hell" or "Evil Eyes Again". Even the critics that dislike the new album (of which there are many, but fuck them) enjoy those two songs. What is holding the Warlocks back? Loyalty to their "jam it out" beginnings? Go whole hog and become a pop band! Verve started out as a jam band and became a pop band. Animal Collective are headed that way too, if their new album is any indication!

Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Depeche Mode -- Playing the Angel

Eight years ago, they delivered a great album when you might have least expected it. It would have been easy to forgive, though. A band is allowed to make a misstep after losing a member (and primary knob-twiddler) to careerism and almost losing another member to the throes of death. Fortunately, this is all a moot point because Tim Simenon stepped in as producer, Dave Gahan sounded fierce and determined on record, and "Ultra" was one of their best albums.

However, "Exciter" didn't live up to the lofty expectations of a DM + Mark Bell collaboration. Beatstompers ("I Feel Loved") and lush, ambient deep sighing tracks ("Freelove", "When the Body Speaks") were the main selling points, whereas their attempts to curl their lips and rock out ("The Sweetest Condition", "The Dead of Night") were not. With half of a brilliant album, plus some of Martin Gore's dullest ballads, I was resigned to an endless future of Depeche Mode albums that repeated "Exciter"'s hit-and-miss rate. After 20 years, I'll take that from just about any band.

But consider my mind blown -- they rendered another point moot. "Playing the Angel" is nothing short of outstanding. It's their best album since "Violator", and might be their best album OTHER THAN "Violator" (pardon the wishy-washiness, but I'll need a few months of perspective with this).

Given the smorgasbord nature of producer Ben Hillier's varied career, I was puzzled as to what the band expected out of him. I wasn't expecting an album packed with such gorgeous industrial noise, quaking bass tones, and electro-sheen. The only fault I can find with it are the ballads, which in contrast to those on "Exciter", are the weaker moments here, despite having a very similar feel to them. That just goes to show how strong the more upbeat tracks are.

"A Pain That I'm Used To" takes the "I Feel Loved" template and adds a smattering of Nine Inch Nails' "Reptile" to it, resulting in an instant industrial pop classic that has future single written all over it. "John the Revelator" is Depeche Mode doing gospel ... ho hum, you say? ... over electro beats straight out of "Computer World". Another corker, and for my money, far less derivative than the very popular "Lose Control".

"Suffer Well" gives a stiff shake to "A Question of Time" and amps it way, way up inbetween the ethereal backgrounds that cloak the verses. Elsewhere, "Black Celebration" is given another stern talking-to, as "Nothing's Impossible" one-ups "Fly on the Windscreen" and brings the dense, near-industrial gloom while Dave Gahan intones "how did we get this far apart?" in blank disbelief. There's a lot of Projekt Records' cinematic gothic intensity in this album -- and if the idea of Depeche Mode making that type of album appeals to you in the least, then you need to run, not walk, when this album is released next week.

"Precious" is one of the most understated Depeche Mode singles ever, as Gahan shows the sort of vocal restraint that is usually reserved for the Martin Gore-sung tracks. The lack of a gigantoid chorus doesn't hurt this song a bit, making it the stark opposite of a single like "I Feel You", which is ALL chorus. I make that comparison here because "Precious" is easily their best single since "I Feel You". Elsewhere, "Damaged People" people adds extra layers to DM's "Construction Time Again"-era minimalism, and looks back to how ballads might have sounded on that record if they had let up on the metallic wasteland concept just a bit.

A one-line soundbyte for this album might be "Black Celebration done better". Incredibly, we still seem to be living in Depeche Mode's peak years.

Sunday, October 02, 2005

MIA and Dylan

The mini-controversy over the Honda ad featuring MIA's "Galang" is a a great example of what I called a "trivial" issue in my last post. The two sides of the argument are as follows:

Side A. MIA has sold out to a big corporation. She makes anti-capitalism/anti-imperialism overtures in her interviews and therefore she is a hypocrite for allowing her song to be used in this commercial.

Side B. A girl's gotta pay the rent.

Preamble A. People still care about "authenticity"? Is it 1977? Liscensing songs for use in ads -- is this uncommon?

Preamble B. MIA is already a total hypocrite in regard to her so-called "values", because in interviews she talks about being anti-war and how violence solves nothing, but her album cover is adorned with pictures of bombs, machine guns, and tanks -- imagery which effortlessly slots in next to her fascination/hero-worship toward her PLO-trained father.

Now then, she let Honda use her song, a move which appears to be in conflict with her personal politics/values. And you know what -- it is! However, she can carry on pushing the same issues she's always pushed and I don't have the slightest problem with it. Similarly, I have absolutely no problem reconciling my feelings about unionism with my habit of shopping at Wal-Mart. There's a Wal-Mart three minutes from my house, they sell things I want and need, it's fucking cheap, and I'm not exactly rich. I sleep just fine at night after shopping there, knowing that I'm going to work at my unionized teaching job the very next day.

I'd much rather talk about "No Direction Home", the strongly-hyped four-hour Bob Dylan documentary that aired this past week. The attitudes I just discussed were also raised in this excellent doc, which needless to say, is required viewing for even casual Dylan fans. A couple of quick thoughts:

-- Joan Baez does a great Bob Dylan impression
-- Dylan was remarkably lucid (for Dylan), although he did seem noncommittal at times in that he dodged potentially revealing questions ("my songs weren't about anything", "I was always an outsider" = "I will only comment on the things I personally did and can't (or won't) provide my present-day perspectives on the folk/political scene as a whole")
-- Part I is a remarkably detailed historical document (old pictures, recordings). Part II's power is slightly curtailed if you've already heard the 1966 concerts and seen "Don't Look Back".

Dylan famously (supposedly) sold out by going electric, but even before that, some people within the folk scene weren't happy that he signed to Columbia and started cutting records, leading to (naturally) a spike in his public profile. Ires were raised because his behaviour ran contrary to the intimacy/politics/monetary goals of the NYC folk scene. On the other hand, it was noted in the doc that some of this animosity was because Dylan's success forced some folkies to look in the mirror and notice that they were hungrier than they cared to admit. They needn't have bothered tearing themselves apart over this -- you can sell a few records and not worry about how you're going to eat without feeling that you've betrayed your personal politics. In the mid-60's, maybe this presented more of a dilemna ... Joan Baez talked about how everything was so polarized -- you were either for or against the war in Vietnam, for or against segregation, etc. -- to the extent that you had to decidedly pick sides, leaving no room for any "shades of grey" fence-straddling attitudes. But in 2005, mobilizing around the big issues is more of a slog, and such polarizing rhetoric is more easily marginalized. In 2005, you can have your cake (speak your mind) and eat it too (sell your song to a car advert).