Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 45

 New era mix #3, 98 minutes

https://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/new-era-mix-3/

Originally this mix had a slightly different tracklist and ordering (and was called "new era mix #2"), but I was unhappy with it.  After mapping out the mix a second time I re-recorded it completely.  The style is very similar to the previous podcast, and uses songs from some of the same older-school compilations.  It's a bit longer and more ambitious, I think. 

David Hurwitz

I have never been into video reviews or reviewers, it's a trend that I never became attached to.  It's the end of 2020, the most impossible and backwards year of our lifetimes, and my favourite music channel of the moment is David Hurwitz's on Youtube, it's an absolute treat.

I'm sure there are plenty of classical music reviewers who can communicate in this style, I am surely decades behind whatever the vanguard of classical criticism is these days.  I just love watching a guy who talks about classical music the way my favourite pop and rock critics always did, with pithy and cynical putdowns of conductors and orchestras, cheeky enthusiasm for his faves, and delightful overuse of the word "cosmic" to describe powerful performances.  He mixes a deep knowledge of the music with charismatic humour throughout, and effortlessly succeeds at the single most important task of a critic in any genre -- he makes me want to drop everything and listen to the music he's talking about.

And again I'm no expert, but I strongly disagree with him on the subject of a particular recording I have thought about quite a bit -- Furtwaengler's singular 1942 recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in Berlin with many top Nazis in attendance.  Nearly everything Hurwitz says is true -- the recording is poor, and the performance has many noticeable flaws.  Despite this, I still love it, as do many of the people who posted in the comments box.  Hurwitz isn't a perfectionist and is happy to judge a piece more by "feel" if appropriate. He believes that if you strip away the context, it's not a recording that you would ever listen to more than once.  But stripping away the context is impossible.  The Nazis were there and nothing could be more important.  I believe, as many do, that Furtwangler decided to make an emphatic point by presenting the blitzkrieg version of Beethoven's 9th, spitting in the face of the Nazis in attendance, and telling them to shove their war in a manner that very few in Germany could have hoped to get away with while living to tell about it.     

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 44

New Controller, New Era Mix #1, 76 minutes 

https://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/new-controller-new-era-mix-1/

It hardly needs to be said that 2020 was not a typical year.  I was so out of touch with contemporary music that I won't be publishing a top ten albums of the year lists for the first time since the early 90's.  I simply couldn't follow along with new releases with any enthusiasm this year.  I was continuously updating a list of new albums that caught my interest, but never got around to listening to most of them.  Having said that, Resident Advisor's best albums list overlaps quite well with many of my tastes (KMRU, DJ Python) and provided me with even more album recommendations that I really must listen to.  

Two themes dominated the year for me.  The first was the rekindling of my love for classical music, thanks to Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise".  The second was buying my first piece of DJ hardware in nearly twenty years, a Roland DJ-505 Serato controller.  Suddenly I feel like I've been transported out of the DJ'ing stone age and placed in front of a modern hardware/software combo that is indescribably better for translating my ideas into results.  After three months, I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what this equipment can do. 

It's taken longer than I expected to start posting mixes made with the controller, in part due to an ear problem that put me out of action so to speak for a few weeks.  But finally I'm thrilled to post the first mix.  It feels a bit like a work in progress where I'm still finding my way around the controller, but the new era has to start somewhere.   

V/A, "In a Field of Their Own - Highlights of Glastonbury 1992"

This past week I noticed that I have never written a thing about my #16 album of the 90's .

It's a two plus hours survey of British indie music in 1992 and as expected, there's a mixed bag of gems, nostalgia, and iffy detritus that hasn't stood the test of time.  But with any festival, the ups and downs are part of the experience.  You can't expect to like everything, and the fun is in soaking up the atmosphere, discovering new bands, and confirming why your favourite artists are in fact your favourites.  That was all true when I first heard this album back in the 90's.  As a snapshot of they way things really were in 1992, this album is a priceless artifact that I never get tired of returning to.  

The running order is completely disconnected from the billing, this democratic presentation is a credit to the bands.  To anyone hearing these bands for the first time, as I was in 1992, there is no bias as to which bands you're "supposed" to like, the 2 PM openers who played to a mostly empty field are presented equal to the bands who appeared at night in front of thousands waving flags. For example, you would have no clue, from looking at the track listing, that Carter USM headlined one night and were the biggest act in British indie music that year.  In a strange coincidence, the final track -- an energized Blur playing "Sunday Sunday" to a nonplussed crowd -- is a window into the future, previewing was to come in the mid 90's.  But listening here gives no indication that Blur would become more famous and successful than any five other bands on the album put together, and within two years would banish nearly all them into irrelevance. 

There are two tiers of bands on the album, and the separation between them has become only more pronounced with time.  One minute you're listening to shouty, ramshackle indie punk-rap (Senser) and the next minute Curve descends from the heavens like a bolt of lightning and you wonder why 85% of these bands even bothered showing up.  Later on, it's guitar pop of the most forgettable kind (The Real People) followed by Spiritualized exploding my expectations with a mind-melting 11-minute performance of "Shine A Light/Electric Mainline" and kickstarting my decades long obsession with them.  And yet, nostalgia for this era runs deeper than I thought.  In writing this piece, I discovered that Senseless Things (arguably the most inoffensively mediocre act on the album) reformed in 2016, and  Thousand Yard Stare somehow released an album this year.  

A few more random thoughts:

James' "Mother Gold" is either an unlikely feminist anthem or one of the most inappropriate songs of all time.  Right now I'm betting on the latter.  This song encapsulates exactly why so many journalists found them embarrassing back in the day.

Kitchens of Distinction -- a terrible name for a great band.  

The Orb -- great band, so-so recording of "A Huge Ever Growing ...".  I guess you had to be there.

Flowered Up, "Weekender" -- the 14-minute epic that nobody remembers, playing this song in its entirely at Glastonbury has to be the most 1992 thing on here, with the possible exception of Ned's Atomic Dustbin still being popular.  

Th' Faith Healers, "Reptile Smile".  This recording was my introduction to the band if I'm not mistaken.  A hugely underrated band.  

Midway Still, "Better Than Before".  A killer tune, but the band was swept away by Britpop along with countless other semi-grunge acts.  The landscape was clear for their return by the end of the decade and they've released five (!) albums over the past ten years.    

Lost in Translation Soundtrack

 I bought this when it came out and it only gets better over time.  I can't remember the last time I watched the movie but can still recall many of the scenes that featured these songs in the movie.  Admittedly I don't watch many movies, but I believe that kind of synergy between (for lack of a better phrase) "pop music" and a major motion picture picture is rare.  Many times I have seen a mega-list of forty songs listed in the movie credits but can't recall hearing most of them.  Songs get played in the background for five seconds during a scene in a club and don't make any impression on me.  "Lost In Translation" rolls out like a dream pop mixtape, perfectly sequenced, capturing a distinct mood and levitating it with perfect stillness for nearly an hour.

But now I'm reading that some people credit the soundtrack for the shoegaze revival.  About five years after its release, MBV got back together and several other first gen shoegaze bands followed.  I would say that shoegaze never really went away.  In fact, 2003-2004 may have been the peak of the "Loveless" cult, where its huge popularity among the new generation of critics finally started to pay off in terms of long overdue recognition in the more mainstream 90's canon.  I wasn't shocked to hear "Sometimes" on a movie soundtrack in 2003, my general reaction was more like "it was only a matter of time".     

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 43

"Munich Mix June 2019" -- 61 minutes 

https://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/munich-mix-june-2019/

I recorded this mix sixteen months ago because I wanted something new to listen to during a trip to Munich.  After returning home, I intended to fix and improve on some parts of the mix, but never did.  I finally revisited the mix after all this time and decided -- after all that waiting -- to simply post it as-is.  

There are a few blips in the middle third and I'm not sure the old school section at the end really fits but this is what we have.

The pandemic has thrown countless people off of their routine.  That is one reason why my podcasts have fallen by the wayside -- a trivial thing of little consequence in the grand scheme of things, but still something I very much enjoy doing.  

I have always said that this blog is about more than writing.  It can cover the full spectrum of whatever I am doing in music.  I recently invested in a new DJ controller, which is my first major music hardware purchase in well over a decade.  I finally decided to step up my game -- and DJing just became a lot more fun.  

This is the most significant (and time consuming) offline music-related activity that I have been doing lately.  I wish I had more time to work on my mixing skills but I do what I can.  It was time to clear out the backlog before I start posting "new era" mixes.  Stay tuned.    

Autechre, "SIGN"

Discourse among even the most devoted Autechre fans can be distorted and backwards sometimes.  When Autechre's music turns more experimental, abstract, and unconventional, technology becomes a major motivating factor in shaping the band's outlook.  The technology is there, they are the purported experts, and thus they can't help but follow through with pursuing it.  Stretching the capabilities of their equipment becomes an end unto itself, perhaps even the key purpose of making the music to begin with.  The duo become the conduits for developing a process dictated by the machines, and that's why, save for outliers like "Oversteps", they've not made anything similar to their 90's output.  

"SIGN" strongly suggests that Autechre haven't made another "Tri Repetae" because they simply haven't felt like it.  I really enjoyed the unfiltered jams in their past two albums/filedumps, but this is a refreshing about face, taking me back over twenty years to the days when Autechre albums weren't such a challenge to listen to, in one sitting or not.  They have arguably not come this close to anything on the "Anvil Vapre EP ("au14") or LP5 ("si00") or "Amber" (Metaz form 8") since those times. The Slowdive reunion album was the best of its kind because it pulled off the impossible trick of updating their signature poses to make them contemporary again which simultaneously sounding exactly like they always did.  "SIGN" certainly comes close ... and it's not even a reunion album.        

The Rolling Stone 500

 It's a big improvement on their 2003 list (which was slightly updated in 2012), but won't provoke any fewer arguments.  Lists like these mainly exist as content providers for barroom and chatroom arguments for obsessive music fans.  

The 2003/2012 list was hopelessly stuck in an outdated mindset from two generations previous.  23 out of the top 50 were released between 1965-1971.  Nearly all of them were by white male dominated rock bands.  Such a homogeneous canon isn't defensible in 2020 by any means.  The new list has 15 albums from those years, not all of which were in the previous group of 23, and it's a much more diverse group of artists.  

As for the top ten: 

"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill".  This makes absolutely no sense.  We know that both artists/industry types as well as critics voted in this poll, but the scoring and weighting of votes was not revealed, nor were the individual ballots.  And you can't rule out any "editorial decisions" that would favour the optics of certain albums appearing in certain spots in the list, for example, the optics of having a female POC in the top ten of the poll. Would any serious fan or critic claim this as the greatest hip-hop album of all time?

"Blood on the Tracks".  This has emerged as the definitive Dylan album over the past twenty or so years of polls from any number of outlets.  Albums from the sixties were consistently overrated for decades.  Similarly, the seventies were underrated and the pendulum has now fully swung back the other way.  People prefer the more confessional, softer and personal albums of the seventies to their more bombastic counterparts from the sixties.  

"Purple Rain".  This was probably boosted by Prince's passing a few years ago, but who cares?  He was a genius, and how many eighties albums can claim to be more iconic than this? 

"Rumours".  My favourite album in this top ten.  Definitely deserving of its spot.  It jumped from #26 in the 2003 poll.

"Nevermind".  If any decade is underrated now, it's the nineties.  Hip hop is now well represented, but rock, electronic, and a myriad of other genres have been shunted to the far reaches of the list, if they even appear at all.  Nirvana at #6 is a safe and boring pick to represent this part of the decade, as nonchalant a pick as "Exile on Main Street" used to be on similar lists 25 years ago (or even eight years ago -- it was #7 on the last RS poll).  Of note from the nineties: "Loveless" at #73, "Parklife" and "Screamadelica" going back to back at #438 and #437 has got to be a rib on somebody, and stone cold classics from The Magnetic Fields and Yo La Tengo somehow fail to crack the top 400.   

"Abbey Road".  Everyone knows that "Sgt. Pepper's" isn't the best Beatles album in any conversation taking place after 1973 (although RS somehow still thought so in 2012).  So at least that's been fixed.  But who declared "Abbey Road" the best one?  Its reputation has been on the rise, sure enough.  In 2003/2012, it was at #14 -- behind FOUR other Beatles albums.  For me it's still "Revolver" or the White Album.  

"Songs in the Key of Life".  Incredibly, this wasn't even in top 50 in the previous poll (although "Innervisions" was #24.  I think Stevie's AOR run in the eighties undermined his work and made people forget just how edgy and ahead of the times (while being simultaneously of his time) he was in the seventies. It probably goes without saying that race had something to do with that.  White guitarists had their fine reputations frozen from the sixties onwards.  Notbody ever forgot what Eric Clapton or the Rolling Stones meant regardless of how much crap they released from 1975-1989.  

"Blue".  This pick might have surprised a lot of people, but in the past decade, it was #2 in RS' 50 greatest albums of all time by women, and #1 in a similar top 150 list by NPR.  I have no issues with this pick.  It's one of the most elegant albums ever made and I find new wondrous things to ponder in its lyrics with every listen.  

"Pet Sounds".  Better than the Beatles -- it's official!  Brian Wilson can finally die happy.  It's now "Pet Sounds" turn to be the sixties album that Everybody Can Agree On.  

"What's Going On".  In much the same way that Springsteen drifts in and out of critical consciousness depending on the politics of the time, we need Marvin Gaye's guidance right now. 

Meat Loaf, "Bat Out of Hell II"

The fifth in a series of albums that I haven't heard in over twenty years ... 

The 90's were unique in that their mythology was often well out of step with the reality, more so I think than any other decade.  Everyone "knows" that the 60's were about Motown, soul, the Beatles and Stones.  And indeed, the charts reflected it.  Prevailing rock mythology hands the end of the decade over to the hippies and psychedelic bands, but the Billboard #1 hits of the time show that novelty songs and one hit wonder bands ("Sugar, Sugar", "In the Year 2525"), as well as jazz and easy listening acts (Hugh Masekela, Herb Alpert, Henry Mancini) were the real winners in those years.  But for the most part, the prevailing rock mythology of the 60's is correct.  

What about the early 90's?  It's true that Nirvana and Pearl Jam sold millions, but Whitney Houston's "The Bodyguard" and Garth Brooks sold millions more.  In 1993, Pearl Jam set a record for first week sales with "Vs", but the biggest rock star in the world was arguably a pudgy forty-something whose hadn't had a hit album since the 70's.  This made no sense even while it was happening, but it did happen.  "Vs" moved more units in the US, but "Bat Out of Hell II" made more of an impact worldwide.  Pearl Jam by that time were refusing to release videos, whereas Meat Loaf had the globe conquering smash hit song and video.  Game, set, and match.   

In a down period for Bruce Springsteen, Meatloaf and Jim Steinman strove to out-Boss the Boss and showed there was plenty of life in kitchen sink drama rock even in the cynical, slacker heavy 90's.  "It Just Won't Quit" borrows generously from Bruce's "Atlantic City", a fact that was lost on when this album was released. 

Any discussion of the album's flaws has to start with two things: it's length, and the character of its protagonist.  The original "Bat Out of Hell", released at the peak of the vinyl, FM-rock heavy era, clocks in a standard (for the time) 46 minutes.  "Bat Out of Hell II", released when vinyl was near its lowest ebb and cassettes were rapidly phasing out, took advantage of the added running time of CD and runs for a bloated 76 minutes.  Six of its eleven tracks run for seven minutes or longer.  Listening to it from start to finish is an endurance test, and unlike the original BOOH, these songs aren't multi-part mini-operas like "Paradise By the Dashboard Light" that are constantly shifting and refocusing the listener's attention.  Songs are stretched out via long intros and outros, through multiple repetitions of chantable choruses and inessential fourth and fifth verses.  There are a notable lack of ballads to mix up the tempos, and the rock numbers mostly churn along at the same mid-tempo pace.  It's never boring, it's just overly long and badly in need of a good editor.  

As for the character of Meat Loaf himself, on the first BOOH he was part naive horny teenager, and part motorcycle junkie in a fur lined apartment undergoing sensitivity training.  Who is he supposed to be on BOOH II?  Is "Life Is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back" an attempt to piggyback on 90's slacker culture, or is he an aging rebel revisiting poses from his youth?    Is "Everything Louder Than Everything Else" a rage against the dying embers of rock and roll hedonism, or an anti-war anthem?  Is it trying to be both?  Unfortunately, in trying to modernize the message, many songs come off as cloying and phony.

These are major flaws, and yet in many instances they scarcely matter because of one major ace in the hole:  Meatloaf's impeccable delivery and 100% commitment to his performance.  The full twelve minute version of "I'd Do Anything for Love" might have extraneous bridges and a million forgettable guitar solos, but the intro and outro still give me chills and the quiver in Meatloaf's voice absolutely sells me on the emotion every time.  "Objects in the Rear View Mirror ..." comes closest to the spirit of the original BOOH, a mini-symphony of loss, love, and escape. Next time you're confused about how this stuff managed to co-exist with most of 90's rock, just watch this video back to back with Guns 'N Roses' "November Rain" and you'll understand.    

Peter Green's Tel Aviv Christmas, 1980

Writing in the Times of Israel, Amir Ben-David uncovers the mysterious details of Peter Green's visit to Israel in 1980.  If there has been a better English language long form music article published in Israel over the past decade, I have yet to see it.

There are plenty of flaws in the piece.  It characterizes Green's version of FM as "non-commercial" (in comparison to the breezier sounding outfit that made "Rumours" and took over the world) even though Green wrote several hits, including a #1.  It misses basic details of his personal life -- Green divorced shortly before his visit to Israel, not after.  More concerning is that it's rockist to the extreme, mythologizing its subject to absurd, unreachable heights.  By 1980, Peter Green was nearly a decade removed from leading Fleetwood Mac and was clearly spent as a commercial force.  And yet, for him to randomly turn up in Israel at that time bordered on the unthinkable.  Most of the Western world had already forgotten about Green, but Israelis hadn't had their turn yet.  Much in the same way that American blues guitarists were fawned over legends to the Rolling Stones in the early 60's, Green was a deity in the Israeli blues scene to those who hadn't the chance to see him in person.  So the OTT mythologizing in the article has its purpose.  It effectively communicates, with the help of many of the principles involved in the recording session with Green at the time, the breathless excitement surrounding his visit.

The investigative journalism is top notch.  Through a serious of enchanting interviews, Ben-David pieces together the details of a recording session lost to history.  The cast of Israeli characters is nearly as colourful as Green himself.  The fate of the recording is not entirely understood, although some of those who were present attempt to explain it. Only two songs from the session are linked in the article.  Some believe they were the only songs recorded, others believe there were hours more that have since been lost or destroyed.  Like any great mystery, one is left with more questions than answers.  To this day, nobody even knows exactly how or why Green made his way to Israel. 

In general I just love stories about famous musicians who disappear for a while and turn up in an exotic locale with little to no explanation.        

Binging on classical music

In years time, when mountains of books have been written about the COVID-19 pandemic and our grandkids ask about how we handled ourselves when the virus hit, I can talk about how my musical tastes took a sudden and unexpected shift toward classical music.

Black swan events matter -- we saw it in the 2008 crash, and we're seeing it now.  Human reactions to these unlikely but inherently predictable events are themselves unpredictable.  Nobody knows how they will react if and when they occur, because nobody has any past experience to draw upon.  Would I have taken this deeper dive into classical music if I had read Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise" not during the pandemic?  It's hard to say.  If the natural reaction to the pandemic is fear -- fear about one's continued good health, or fear of our everyday way of life being overturned -- then it makes sense to take comfort in music from the more distant past.  We long to turn back the clock to a more comfortable era, to a life with fewer unknowns.  The further back you go, the more you can overcompensate for the uncertainties of today.  Using completely illogical math, transporting back one hundred years produces five times more certainty in understanding the then contemporary world than transporting back only twenty years.  Do I consciously feel any of this?  Of course not, but this is the sort of stuff we all muse about these days ...

I have liked classical music since I was a teenager.  In those days it was a lot of Beethoven and Mozart on cassette, later on it was the odd CD (Stravinsky, Gavin Bryars) and works by some of the key minimalists (Steve Reich, Terry Riley).  Electro-acoustic and other modern experimental works fit into a different category.  Still, as I sit here writing this, I am trying to remember the last time, pre-pandemic, that I bought a true classical CD.  I am quite sure it didn't happen in the 2010's.  My guess would be 2003-4-ish, since those were the last years before filesharing and streaming took over my listening habits, and based on the contents of my music catalogs before and after leaving Canada.  

Then, a few weeks ago, I bought a recording of Sibelius' Second Symphony featuring the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.  It scratched the Sibelius itch I was feeling at the time and was a performance I was familiar with through Youtube.  

Yesterday, I bought another seven classical CD's.  There was no precedent for this type of purchase in my decades as a music buyer.  I have gone CD shopping hundreds or maybe thousands of times, but this was the first time I went specifically to search for classical music. Third Ear and  Black Hole have exemplary classical sections -- the first based around newer recordings, while the strength of the second is their extensive bargain selection.  The damage included works by Sibelius, Bryars, Shoskatovich, Satie, Mahler, and John Adams.  "The Rest Is Noise" introduced me to many contemporary composers, and I took most strongly to Adams.  

Have I mentioned how pleasant music shopping has become?  This is not a pandemic-related thing, it's a situation that has evolved over the past several years in particular thanks to vinyl's huge comeback and music buying (as opposed to streaming) becoming an ever more specialized pursuit by a small number of hardcore fans.  In the supposed golden years of music stores, the clerks were assholes.  That's just a fact, we all remember Jack Black in High Fidelity and know that his character was anything but a parody.  Working in a music store gave you the social cred to claim that your taste in music was better than anyone's other than your fellow clerks, scoffing at the inferior tastes of your customers was part and parcel of achieving the status of music store clerk.  They were conceited and proud of it, and even the most dedicated customers wouldn't have expected anything less.  

These days, there are no more casual music buyers.  Big box stores are gone, and just about all that's left are tiny shops run by exceedingly nice people that cater to exceedingly loyal customers.  The owners offer you water or coffee, everyone is in each other's face because of the cramped surroundings (ratio of music bin space to floor space: typically > 2:1), and the stores are true social spaces more than they ever were in the so-called glorious past.  

Front 242, "Front By Front"

The fourth in a series of albums I haven't heard in over twenty years ...

Very little has been written about industrial music.  Google for "industrial music criticism" or something similar and you'll find multiple links to S. Alexander Reed's "Assimilate: A Critical History of Industrial Music" (which I haven't read) and various odds and sods.  The biographies and oral histories never coalesced.  Good luck even finding a few industrial albums on the plethora of 80's or 90's "best of" lists that have appeared in recent years.

I hate to fall back on cliche's like "style over substance", but I think that many of the key bands were genuinely uninterested in making "classic albums" or achieving similar rock-crit benchmarks.  They were radicals in their politics, performances, and sought to provoke visceral reactions to their music.  Not for nothing that Front 242 popularized the term "electronic body music" to describe themselves.  I always found that term to be deceptively simple and rather underappreciated.  "Body music" doesn't refer to music that gets in your feels and touches your soul -- a description that apply to many other genres.  It's a physical feeling, an abuse of one's body while the crushing beats, clangs, and snarls collectively tear away at your chest cavity when listening or dancing at high volume.  Plenty of bands start out as political agitators and rebels and most eventually refocus themselves towards the task of appealing to a wider audience and making great albums that will stand the test of time (e.g. U2) .  Industrial acts were particularly fixated on radical aesthetics that would challenge contemporary audiences and couldn't care less about showing up on a listicle three decades later.  Nine Inch Nails and Ministry proved there was a path into the mainstream via this music (taking completely different routes -- NIN appealed to teen angst while Ministry courted the metalheads) but so many of the initial late 70's and 80's wave of industrial bands are missing from the commonly accepted musical canon. 

Despite not having heard "Front By Front" in over twenty years, I found myself humming the basic melodies and recalling basic lyrics just from reading the song titles.  I can't say that about the first three albums I revisited in this series.  The first four songs are impeccable. "Until Death (Us Do Part)" is a perfect overture to the album. This is about as pop as Front 242 would get, the synth hooks are Depeche Mode-like in their catchiness.  "Circling Overland" ramps up the brutality with a primitive, bludgeoning backbeat.  The album's darker turn is rounded out by ominous faux-strings and paranoid lyrics about an omnipresent air force surveying all of Western Europe.  "Im Rhythmus Bleiben", as the title suggests, is a series of pulverizing rhythms punctuated by repetitions of the title with increasing urgency.  "Felines" shows a more sensual side to the band, with a slower tempo and a spidery, curdling bassline.  None of this music seems to have aged much, possibly because there haven't been enough copycats mining it for inspiration.  The lack of overexposure has kept this stuff relatively fresh. 

The second half of the album is more mundane and repetitive, but like I said, these bands weren't necessarily about trying to craft classic albums.  The exception, of course, is "Headhunter", arguably the finest single this genre has ever produced.  Much like the title character stalking his prey, stealth rhythms and vocal samples pop up everywhere, whirs, clicks, and muffled shouts are constantly lurking but can do nothing to derail the galloping backbeat.  It's a complex song with a shoutable, club-ready chorus.

My cassette version contained not only "Welcome to Paradise" (a cut and paste club smash in and of itself) and the entire "Never Stop" EP, but seventy consecutive minutes of Front 242 was too exhausting then, and still is now.  You absorb most of their best tricks about about thirty minutes and then it gets repetitive with diminishing returns.  But at its best, "Front By Front" still sounds fresh and confrontational, with lyrical themes that still resonate today.   

Alphaville, "The Singles Collection"

This is the third album in a series of albums that I haven't heard in over twenty years ...

While it's technically true that I haven't listened to this exact album in decades (having bought it on cassette for peanuts), I haven heard the singles numerous times over the years, because Alphaville continue to receive steady airplay even today.  Or rather, Alphaville's two best known singles have never really gone away, save for a short time during the 90's.  Like many bands of their era, Alphaville were completely out of place during the early 90's but revived their career once non-ironic 80's nostalgia kicked in.   Jay-Z's sample/cover of "Forever Young" brought them full circle, rescuing them from being an 80's trivia question in the US and introducing them to a completely new generation of fans.  Jay and Mr. Hudson's "Young Forever" was a top ten Billboard hit, far and away bigger than anything they achieved in the 80's.  

"The Singles Collection" was timed around the re-release of the "Forever Young" single, and seemed designed to give them one last crack at breaking through in the US market.  Maybe there was a stigma about European bands looking and sounding too European.  The open vowels and strained pronunciation in "Forever Young" are a clear giveaway as the band's non-British origins. You might say that it didn't seem to hurt a-ha, but "Take On Me" a) had the iconic, way ahead of its time video, and b) was the crazy exception that proved the rule.  Between "Dancing Queen" in 1977 and the rise of Milli Vanilli and Roxette in 1989, a span of twelve years, there were only five number one Billboard hits by continental European acts:

Stars on 45, "Stars on 45 Medley"
Vangelis, "Chariots of Fire"
a-ha, "Take On Me"
Jan Hammer, "Miami Vice Theme"
Falco, "Rock Me Amadeus"

By my count, that's three novelty songs, two movie tie-ins ("Rock Me Amadeus" counts as both), and only one proper, non-gimmicky number one hit -- "Take On Me".  Not to mention that Jan Hammer was living in the US and was a US citizen when he topped the charts -- with the theme song to an American TV show -- and probably shouldn't be on this list.  It was simply not a good time for German bands trying to find success in the US.  It seems they could improve their chances by exploiting their front line Cold War cred and singing about nuclear war paranoia (Nena's smash hit "99 Red Balloons" hit #2).  "Forever Young" pushed all the right buttons (fear of the bomb, teenage melodrama, yanking every heartstring in the chorus) but couldn't even scrape the top fifty.  Alphaville's victory was in the long game, their love song spans five different decades and still matters today.   

It also didn't help that they released a compilation called "The Singles Collection" with only four songs.  It suggested that they were a flash in the pan who didn't even have enough songs to pad out the rest of their supposed greatest hits compilation.  The song selection was unusual, considering that they had four other singles from their first two albums that could have been included, all of which had performed well on European charts  Nevertheless, I loved the format, and still do today.  Think of it as a double EP of remixes, and its a brilliant concept.  You get the single version and a DJ-friendly  extended version of each song, perfect for parties or just for those times when four minutes of a great song isn't long enough. 

"Forever Young". Is there another song whose original version and its radically different remix were almost interchangeably successful?  I can think of R. Kelly's "Ignition (Remix)" and the Todd Terry mix of Everything But the Girl's "Missing", I'm sure there are others.

"Big In Japan".  Still a monster song, and I love how the remix breaks down its rich, spidery, multiple bass lines. 

"Red Rose".  This song is the jewel hiding in plain sight on this collection.  Oddly enough, it wasn't a hit anywhere at the time, but it should have been.  Its driving, vaguely Motown-ish beat suggested a shift away from typical synth pop and toward a groovy, almost Robert Palmer-esque rock and roll vibe.  It was an attempt to appeal to American tastes, but nobody was biting. What a shame ...

"Dance With Me".  The clear #4 on this compilation, with a hokey chorus that I've never been able to enjoy, but still a glorious slice of bouncy roller-rink and 80's teen movie ready synth pop.  Far from their finest moment, but still better than most other bands in the genre were managing at the time.   

The Stone Roses, "Garage Flower"

My second post in an ongoing series where I revisit an album that I haven't heard in over twenty years ...

I first bought this on a bootleg cassette around '93-'94, it was likely a copy of a copy (the level of tape hiss was bordering on unlistenable), was titled "Stone Roses: early demos" or something to that effect, and had a completely different running order than the official release in 1996.  Despite all this, I felt like I'd landed on a gold mine.  At a time when Roses fans were starving for new material during the (at the time) interminable wait for their second album, here were a dozen or so honest to goodness "unheard" Roses tracks, recorded years before they were famous. 

It wasn't a great album, but did it matter?  The seeds of greatness were clearly there.  the swagger, self-confidence, and Reni's fierce drumming all shine through.  It was clearly an important chapter in the Roses' story. 

At the time, I didn't realise that Martin Hannett had produced the album.  That was due to me not being completely attuned to his style -- it's quite obviously him once you know what to listen for.  But these were also the pre-internet days where getting information about something like this was nearly impossible.  I knew nothing about this album other than what was written on the cover of the cassette.  There were no details about the recording (date, studio, personnel ...) and even the song titles were all wrong. 

Hearing "Garage Flower" today, it's clear that Hannett was the wrong person to produce the Stone Roses.  The instruments, and John Squire's guitar in particular, form a muddy, echo-filled blur.  Squire's guitar lines, which were such an essential part of the debut album's bluster, are completely buried under multiple layers of studio trickery.  Ian Brown's nasally voice was always cited as the weak point in the band, but Hannett's solution (drench him in reverb) is far inferior to John Leckie's on the eventual debut (add simple harmonies and have him sing in a more airy tone).  That being said, Hannett wasn't a bad choice for producing *this version* of the Roses, because the songs weren't there yet, and at the time, he probably made them sound better than they actually were.  They certainly sound different than other bands of the time, almost proto-shoegaze and with none of the classic rock and jangly guitar pop elements that they'd later be known for. 

"Garage Flower" was shelved in 1985, but we can still compare it to Happy Mondays' debut album released in the same year (because of course we do ...).  In both cases, once you've heard the first three or four songs, you've heard all of their tricks.  The Mondays had zero tunes to speak of, but could work their way round a simple but infectious groove.  John Cale polished what little talent they had into a hypnotic VU-style drum/guitar loop, and all in all, these days, their debut is more fun to listen to than "Garage Flower".  However, the Roses were far closer to the peak version of themselves than the Mondays were.  "I Wanna Be Adored" and "This Is the One", the two "Garage Flower" songs that eventually appeared on their debut, are far from being the standout tracks.  With slower tempos, more dynamic highs and lows, and guitar playing that can actually be heard, both would sound immeasurably better on the debut four years later.  In general, their formula of shouty intro leading to an aggressive drum fill and caterwauling guitars can't be sustained over an entire album.  It must be said, however, that even at this stage, the Roses had a knack for landing the big chorus.  Again, the elements are there, but they hadn't made the Leap. 

   

Jean Sibelius

I am slowly making my way through Alex Ross' exhausting but fascinating "The Rest Is Noise".  I am in the middle of the chapter that covers Berlin in the 1920's, and the sheer volume of music I need to hear is overwhelming -- the audio clips on the book's website are just the tip of the iceberg.  But the biggest revelation for me by far has been the music and the cultural force that was Jean Sibelius. 

Youtube comment boxes are filled with comparisons between Sibelius' music and the climate and nature in Finland.  The wind, frost, snow, and darkness are frequently referenced, "THIS IS FINLAND!" is a common exclamation that shows, even one hundred years later, that the music speaks to the depth of the Finnish soul in ways that outsiders can't entirely appreciate.  The intricate linkage between the innate character of the musicians' home country and their music reminds me of the writing surrounding Sigur Ros, at least for their earlier albums.  Had Sibelius been born 75 years later, he might have become a Steve Roach-type of composer and produced electronic-based freeform ambient and tribal-ambient works.  The way Sibelius draws out the passages in his symphonies, giving the feeling of time slowing to a crawl, makes him the most "ambient" of orchestral composers that I've heard.  His knack of landing, for lack of a better phrase, the "big notes" is truly wondrous, drawing timbres from the massed orchestra that you just don't hear from most composers.  The overall effect is similar to electronic drone music -- unique tonality + time stretching = motion and form within the notes that can't be heard otherwise. 

Arcade Fire: Miroir Noir (dir. Vincent Morisset), Live at Lollapalooza Chicago 2017

Arcade Fire used to be an incendiary band, a once in a decade instance of a band that arrived perfectly formed upon their debut album, without an obvious predecessor, without even a whiff of corporate guidance or a all-seeing mentor lurking behind the scenes.  Like The Smiths and Suede before them, they knew exactly who they were upon arrival, didn't fit into any existing niche in indie rock, and yet managed to find a huge fanbase waiting for them who didn't even know what they were waiting for until they heard it.

Watch their performance from Lollapalooza 2017, and see that on any given night (or even most nights considering how good they are on stage), they can still be that incendiary band.  The talent is clearly there, their intensity and boundless energy on stage remains among the best in the world, and based on recent interviews, they still have the drive to succeed.  But perhaps it's never been easier to fool jaded fans like me into thinking they still have it, based on a nostalgia-heavy live show.  The Killers debuted in the same year as Arcade Fire and are the poster children for releasing three great albums and milking them ad infinitum.  They can headline wherever they want, play sets based around those three albums, and be certain of sending fans home happy, anything they've released in the past decade scarcely seems to matter in the big ticket selling picture. 

I hadn't seen "Miroir Noir" until now, and it's been surprisingly under-publicized over the years.  Admittedly, a documentary without a narrator, obvious story arc, and barely any dialogue can be a very tough sell.  It's shot almost entirely in sepia tones or antique-looking colour, and frequently resorts to odd, intrusive camera angles and the camera shakes or jitters with virtually all performance-based shots.  We get a fly on the wall view of the "Neon Bible" recording sessions, and a few representative on stage performances.  That's what passes for a story arc in "Miroir Noir", and the only commentary or sorts comes from the mostly crackpot calls to the 866 number that fans and interested parties could call to hear previews of the album prior to its release.  Despite all this, it's not a densely abstract art film because it's packed with incredible music that produce a string of memorable moments -- "Wake Up" played acoustically amongst fans on the floor of a concert hall, the elevator versions of "Windowsill" and "Neon Bible", the orchestral recording of "Intervention", and countless more.

Where did things start to go wrong? Ten years ago, didn't I review "The Suburbs" and praise them for embracing synths, taking cues from dance music, and hope they'd continue on that road in future albums?  I stand by those comments, while noting that there's a world of difference between a rock band recognizing and absorbing disco into their songs (e.g. Blondie) and concocting a fictional band name (The Reflektors) as part of a tongue in cheek promotional campaign while playing dress up on stage and encouraging audience members to do the same.  When you choose to work with trendy producers because you can, while retaining a pseudo-ironic detachment from the scene you're trying to glean inspiration from, then you're making "Emotional Rescue", not "Atomic".

Through their first three albums, nobody could ever accuse Arcade Fire of not being sincere, it was their most endearing quality.  Even their detractors knew that they *meant it* as much as any proverbial punk band ever had.  U2's "Pop" is now considered a mis-step, and three years later they reset themselves with "All That You Can't Leave Behind", signalling to any lapsed fans that the "real" U2 was back.  However, you can't say that they weren't all-in on that sound at the time -- "Zooropa" in 1993 further attests to this.  Arcade Fire feel like they hedged their bets before this phase even began.  If people liked "Reflektor" and "Everything Now" then great, and if not, they can reset and blame their critics for not understanding the subtext and laughing at the jokes.  Oh wait, they've already started doing this!

Most of all, their last two albums annoy me as a long time dance music fan for the same reasons that I used to rip on Radiohead twenty years ago.  Paranoia over a rapidly changing world, fear and distrust of technology, and criticism of consumer culture were already boring when Radiohead did it, and Arcade Fire have sadly taken many cues from them.  Both bands are also trying to tell us that electronic music is vacuous due to its mostly faceless, wordless nature, and only a rock band can enable such music to reach its true potential by adding conscious lyrics and guitars, thereby providing the music with a social context that was sorely missing until they came along.  Fuck all that.  What emotions do these bands always bring to the music?  Do they try to expand the palate of electronic music, and find new ways to express joy, rage, sadness, love, and all the other common themes in rock music?  No, they always loop back the stereotypes, i.e. they use cold, emotionless electronic music as a conduit to criticize cold, emotionless, uncaring, unsympathetic corporations and misusers of technology.

That said, "Everything Now" is an incredible song, and "Afterlife" shows that if you're going to blatantly copy, you might as well copy from the very best (New Order's "Temptation").  So I still have hope.   

The National - A Series of Exciting Communal Events

During the two months at home it was easy to lose track of what day it was.  However, I always knew which day was Monday because that was the day that the National would stream an Exciting Communal Event.  These concerts, mainly drawing from the band's nearly limitless supply of festival appearances, became a highlight of my week and helped keep me grounded to the idea of a normal life that would one day return.  Obviously plenty of other artists are doing similar things and connecting with their fans via their archive of live recordings or by livestreaming songs from their homes.  But the National's Exciting Communal Events were my favourite vice during the shutdown, and as a way to enjoy great music for two hours and reset one's brain for the coming week, I could find nothing better.  It certainly helped that the streams would go live at midnight my time, when the house was dark and quiet.  It was my secret, private portal into a world where real life can be suspended for happier reasons, and festivals can seem like the most important things happening in the world.  

The Exciting Communal Events will seemingly continue into the foreseeable future.  The National have headlined a couple of dozen festivals each year on their past few tours, so they're not going to run out of content.  Most importantly, the band are using these events to publicize a Gofundme to support their tour crew, and have also set up a separate fund to help their crew using profits from online merch sales.  It might be one or two years before concerts and festivals of this size can take place, so out of the millions of workers currently furloughed, they are among the last people who will get their jobs and normal lives back.  It's a great cause and I would encourage any National fan -- or fans of other bands organizing similar funding drives -- to donate and help out people who work so hard behind the scenes to stage these concerts.

So far there have been eight Exciting Communal Events, all of which are streamed at 5 PM EDT and then archived to the band's Youtube channel here.

High Violet Live from Brooklyn Academy May 15, 2010

This was directed by D.A. Pennebaker (one of his final works) and streamed live back in 2010 on the eve of the release of "High Violet".  At the time it probably blew a few minds and heralded a new era for the band.  Only bands that have "arrived" have their concerts professionally shot by a famous director in a beautiful theatre.  However, as a concert film it's nothing extraordinary, and the backstage stuff isn't particularly revealing, but that's partly because we've been spoiled by the volume of content that came afterward.

Live from Hurricane Festival June 21, 2013

The summer of 2013 was probably the last year you'll find them performing before sunset at a festival.  With only one hour allotted, they aim for highspots only by playing only fast, propulsive songs from their catalogue, with no ballads or slow passages.

  

Live from Primavera Sound, June 1, 2018

Live from Primavera Sound, May 30, 2014

This is clearly one of the band's favourite festivals.  Setlists from the "Sleep Well Beast" tours are always fantastic, and their 2018 appearance is no exception.  However, their 2014 appearance is more unique and fun.  The songs are played at noticeably faster tempos, with an energy and intensity beyond their typical gigs.  Matt Berninger seems tipsier than usual, and a few songs threaten to go careening off the edge into chaos, but the band somehow holds it together.  

Live from Ypsigrock, August 9, 2019

"I Am Easy To Find" drags in parts, weighed down by longer song lengths and experimental passages that don't always slick.  That problem extends to the resultant tour, but fans will still find plenty to like in this 2+ hour show in a beautiful Sicilian square. 

Guilty Party: Basilica Hudson

The band play on a circular stage encircled by a select number of fans.  This was a very special show in an intimate setting, featuring the entire "Sleep Well Beast" album played in order.  They are accompanied by a number of guests (Mouse on Mars, So Percussion, Nadia Sirota, Buke and Gase) who perform on the songs they collaborated on for the album.  There are no video screens or fancy lighting, just simple blue and red lights that dimly illuminate the stage, engulfing the band in an eerie glow as if they're playing under the moonlight.  The camera work is exquisite too, DVD quality work no doubt.  If you only have time to watch one Exciting Communal Event, and it's after midnight where you are, then this is the one to watch.  

Live from Pukkelpop, August 18, 2019

The band grabbed some headlines surrounding this gig by asking fans to choose the setlist.  Natually this meant that the set was skewed toward many older songs.  I wasn't as high on this concert as most people were -- The National don't have an exceptionally deep catalog, and all these older songs make frequent appearances in their sets even today, it's just rare to hear so many of them in the same set in 2019.  

Live from Best Kept Secret, June 9, 2018

The best of the lot in my opinion, and the impetus behind writing this post.  This show was readily available on youtube until about two months ago, leading many fans to speculate that it was intentionally removed so that the band could host it themselves, presumably in perpetuity, on their own channel.  Sure enough, here it is, pretty much the perfect National gig, with exceptional sound, a great crowd, and peak performances of almost every song.  This was my go-to concert for the band, and I know I'm not alone in calling it my favourite.   

If I had to put together a wishlist, I'd start with a full recording of the From the Artists Den show at Park Avenue Armory in May 2013.  Filmed right before the release of "Trouble Will Find Me", the fifty minute video currently available on youtube features a mix of live recordings and interviews, but surely a recording of the complete concert exists somewhere.  Playing in such a cavernous building produces an intimidating, dense wall of sound that I've never seen duplicated from any of their other gigs.  Or how about one of the "I Am Easy To Find" warm up gigs, with a parade of guest performers chosen according to the city they appeared in?  And what about some pre-2010 stuff? 

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Updated (May 31, 2020):

Just a few days after I posted this, they streamed the final Exciting Communal Event, and it was indeed quite the event.  They screened the complete "A Lot Of Sorrow", a collaboration between the National and Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, in which the band appeared on a stage at the MoMA in New York and played their song "Sorrow" repeatedly for six hours.  This was an exercise/endurance contest that spoke straight to my heart, making me think fondly of the days when I would occasionally experiment with my own sanity such as the time I listened to Rhythm and Sound's "See Mi Yah" continuously for 24 hours.

Unfortunately, the stream was not archived, likely because it's still an active exhibit in many modern art museums around the world.  But I was entranced by the hour or so that I saw.  Sadly, the band decided to put an end to these weekly events.  The pandemic seems to be far from over but many countries are opening up again whether the situation warrants it or not, and thus, perhaps it's best that the ECE's wrap up here, a shared experience confined to a specific time period in all of our lives.   

Florian Schneider RIP

There were a string of deaths in the music industry in the past month, including Little Richard and Dave Greenfield of the Stranglers.  But the passing of Florian Schneider was the most personally affecting for me.  He died as quietly and as privately as he lived.  We know he had a battle with cancer and little else.  How had he been passing his time since leaving Kraftwerk over a decade ago?  Nobody really knows.  And yet, the list of musicians who truly transformed music in multiple genres is a very short one, and Florian Schneider is on it. 

Is it wrong to be rankled by the obits who make note of the David Bowie song "V2 Schneider", as if he were a footnote in a song title by a more famous musician? 

Florian Schneider has died, but what is there to write about?  Kraftwerk were a monolithic entity, the individual contributions of the group members have been blurred out almost completely.  There are no amusing anecdotes about how Schneider composed a cool keyboard riff, about a song jelling in the studio, about life on the road.  It is assumed that he, along with Ralf Hutter, were the key creative forces in Kraftwerk, and indeed, the band hasn't released any new material since he left.  Kraftwerk and Hutter haven't said anything outside of a brutally dispassionate statement confirming his death, no personal remembrances, nothing.  The statement had all of the emotion of a company-wide email from the CEO's office, informing the masses of an unfortunate death within their ranks.  It was courteous and respectful, but gave no indication that they knew anything about the man other than what appeared in his employee file.

However, there's no indication that Schneider would have wanted it any other way.  He was an intensely private person when he was in Kraftwerk, and had ample time to set the record straight since leaving the band in 2008.  He could have written a book or started new collaborations but he didn't. It's a sad day for music, but music continues on exactly as it did before.   

"Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened", dir. Chris Smith

I finally got around to watching this, and I can safely say that I've never seen a documentary come across more like a horror film.  I can't ever remember covering my eyes at the sight of an *interview*.  Later, I went back and re-read some criticism after the film's release in January last year, and I was a bit surprised to see the horror film comparisons come up again and again. After hearing that they were forty five days out and hadn't found anyone to physically stage the concerts, I could do nothing but bury my head in my hands.  By the time they were a couple of weeks out and were still finalizing the location, I was close to a full-on Colonel Kurtz stunned breakdown.

It was not a "mere" case of gross incompetence, of energetic twenty-somethings that got in over their heads.  They thought it would all come together at the last minute, only to discover that organizing a festival isn't like cramming for a final exam the night before.  But they also had the audacity to think that their customers wouldn't know the the difference between what they'd promised and the haphazard shit show they attempted to present.  The artists hadn't arrived (or been paid), none of the local workers had received a dime, the housing wasn't ready, the food was an atrocity, their guest were effectively stranded, and they somehow, inexplicably allowed the festival to go on.

Somehow, Fyre managed to retain many well-intentioned, hard working people right up until the end.  In the face of all evidence that the festival was careening towards disaster, collective hysteria won out. 

Ja Rule comes off worse than anyone.  Far from the detached celeb who tweeted "IT WASN'T MY FAULT" when his feet were put to the fire (no pun intended), he was an enabler from the beginning and was actively involved in the cover-up/spin doctoring efforts in the aftermath.  His comments during the post-festival conference call ("I wouldn't call it fraud, I would call it ... false advertising") shows that he was as scummy as any of the other principals. 

But at the same time, you can't help but laugh at these entitled assholes getting what they deserved at the end.  Even while watching it all unfold in 2017, I happily took part in the chorus of ridicule just like many other people.

"Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert", dir. Chris Perkel

The release of this Youtube Original documentary coincided with the scheduled start of Coachella's first weekend.  Right now nobody has a clue when even medium sized gatherings will be allowed again, let along multi-day megafestivals.  "20 Years in the Desert" is a fun way to spend two hours while under lockdown, although it already made me feel nostalgic for what already feels like ancient times (i.e. pre-January 2020), when flying in to attend a big festival could be so easy and straightforward.   

The only real historical/critical worth of the documentary happens in the first twenty minutes, which details the festival's origins and features interviews from all the founders and other principal players.  I didn't know that the organizers at Goldenvoice Entertainment came from both the punk and electronic music scenes, providing a synergy between two very distant genres in the 80's.  Their foresight appears prophetic today.  I also had no idea that tickets for the first Coachella went on sale the day after the end of the disastrous Woodstock '99.  Talk about bad timing.

The rest of the documentary is a combination of festival highlights and self-promotion, the latter mostly centred around the festival's cultural cache.  There are a few nods to major European festivals, but nothing in the way of a serious compare and contrast.  What does Coachella offer that other worldwide festivals can't, or won't?  In its admittedly large California-based sphere of influence, Coachella is definitely a trend-setter.  It's a revolutionary festival only if it's the only festival you know or care about.  Just to name one example, Glastonbury put electronic acts in headlining spots more than a decade earlier, and Jay-Z headlined there two years before his supposedly history-making set at Coachella.

In the early years, Coachella was mainly known as the festival of reunions.  Organizing the Jane's Addiction reunion was a coup that made the festival relevant almost overnight.  The Pixies had reunited months before they appeared, but their headlining set was still a huge accomplishment. It arguably launched the wave of cult band reunions and proved that there was huge money to be made from Gen-X nostalgia.  But they risked letting the reunion gimmick define and limit them, because there are only so many truly big reunions you can have. The documentary didn't give them enough credit for ransforming their image from an indie rock festival to a truly eclectic one that hands over headline spots to DJs (Tiesto) or to newer talents without a pre-existing legacy (Travis Scott).  Another understated achievement was the decision to livestream nearly the entire festival starting a few years ago.  This boosted their global presence immensely.

I would have liked to hear more about the logistics of organizing the two weekend festival, starting in 2012.  How did they convince all the bands to go for it?

Moby brought up a point I'd never considered before, that European festivals are mostly enjoyable and have great atmospheres, but they're also cold, rainy, and muddy a lot of the time.  A big part of making the yearly multi-day festival a viable concept in the US was undoubtedly the more favourable California weather. 

Moby, "Then It Fell Apart" (book)

Moby's first autobiography, "Porcelain", was in many ways not even about him.  Big parts of it were about chronicling the early rave scene from an insider's perspective and documenting the smells and sounds of early 90's New York.  In this telling, Moby's career developed organically and almost accidentally out of the chaos of the fledgling American rave scene.  If it were a play, the set design (mainly the recreation of clubs that have long since closed down and entertainment districts that would be unrecognizable today) would be the star, while Moby and his friends would be acting out their personal dramas in the background.

"Then It Fell Apart" is much more of a standard rock star autobiography.  Chapters alternate between his post-1999 rise to A-list stardom, and all the crazed debauchery that went along with it, and his upbringing as a poor, shy, and lonely kid of a single mother in upscale Darien, Connecticut.  Each chapter stands as a self-contained story, usually taking place within a single day.  His earliest memories as a neglected and sometimes horribly mistreated child are heartbreaking and were the most difficult parts of the book to get through.  In this first part of the book, these childhood stories alternate with tales of the astonishing and wholly unexpected success of "Play".

Young Moby never finds comfort or success but he does develop an identity, largely filtered through his love of music -- punk and new wave, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen.  Viewed through this lens, Moby could be me or any of us weirdo alternative music loving kids.  I was born nine years after him, but I was obsessed with Joy Division too, treated the first records I bought like crown jewels, and couldn't come clean to most people in my high school about how much I loved Depeche Mode.  These chapters alternate with portraits of an adult Moby who is completely unrelatable -- globetrotting, filthy rich, and profoundly unhappy.  His excesses go from entertaining to depressingly predictable in a hurry.  Invited to fundraisers and political functions for the NYC elite, he finds himself no closer to happiness and acceptance than he did as a poor boy growing up among rich kids.

In the final part of the book, mid-80's Moby has a glimmer of a future and a measure of self-confidence.  Against the odds, it looks like he'll escape Darien and end up OK.  Adult Moby has also come full circle.  He starts the book as a megastar in waiting, but he ends it as a mid-40's has been and professional alcoholic.  Just when you can't bear to read another mind-numbing tale of his slow self destruction, he chooses to get help, and the book ends.  He leaves the door open for a third book detailing his recovery, prolific post-sobriety music career, and activism.

While not the home run that "Porcelain" was, "Then It Fell Apart" is still a powerful continuation of the Moby story.

Amorphous Androgynous, "Tales of Ephidrina"

This blog celebrated twenty years (!) this past January.  Even though I've been really terrible when it comes to introducing and completing a new series of posts (reviewing every Eurovision winner TBC, I promise), I'm going to be optimistic about this newest idea.  To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the blog, I'm going to write a series of reviews/thoughts of albums that I haven't heard in over twenty years.  These are not first time listens, but rather, albums that I already know (or knew) quite well but as far as I can recall have not heard since the year 2000.

I have the first three albums lined up and they are not albums that I heard once or twice, never really understood or appreciated, and am coming back to revisit over twenty years later.  I listened to them quite often during the 90's, but somehow they fell through the cracks and then somehow you blink and it's twenty years later.  I may have heard some of the songs here and there, but have not listened to the complete album during the life of the blog.

"Tales of Ephidrina", released under the Amorphous Androgynous moniker, was a not so secret side project of techno pioneers Future Sound of London.  There was a time, before I truly accepted CD's, that I bought techno mostly on vinyl but also, on rare occasions, on cassette.   Seefeel's "Quique" and Autechre's "Incunabula" were two of the other techno-esque albums that owned on cassette and listened to regularly at the time.  On principle, because I felt silly paying for the same thing twice, I didn't repurchase hardly any of my old cassettes on CD.  I finally caved and bought the 2CD "Quique" reissue several years ago (so technically not a repurchase), and found "Tales of Ephidrina" for cheap (five Euros) on my recent trip to Hamburg (I still don't have "Incunabula" on CD). 

In those days, the opening track "Liquid Insects" was one of the most progressive pieces of club music I'd ever heard.  At a time when IDM was still an original concept, this kind of track was the album's drawing card for me -- a long, drawn out intro, intricately layered samples and field recordings, Detroit-ish eye on an a glistening technological future, but still rooted in early 90's rave.  As the cliche went, it was the type of then-emerging style of techno that worked equally well at home as in the club (although I never heard it in a club and have no clue if it ever got much play in clubs).  Twenty seven years later, I hear this track a lot differently.   Now it sounds as though FSOL simply recycled the template for their earlier classic "Papua New Guinea", by slightly altering the delicate breakbeats and rumbling bass, and replacing the chanting with birdcalls. It's still very good, but not the world-changer that I once thought it was. 

"Tales of Ephidrina" was recorded at the same time as their later classic "Lifeforms", which departed completely from a club-oriented vision and birthed the idea of the two-hour bedroom-listening modern electronic opus.  In hindsight, with both albums well in the rear view mirror, the similarities couldn't be more obvious.  The broken beats of "Swab" are an interlude that serve to ease the listener into the idea that the dancefloor is about to be left far behind.  "Mountain Goat" brings the album to a very different headspace.  There's a dichotomy between the whirring electronic blips that rush by and between the speakers, and the gentle strums of acoustic guitar that slow everything down to a lazy afternoon's snail's pace.  It takes its cues from the KLF's "Chill Out" for sure, but also anticipates the fusion of abstract electronics and the wistful dreamlike melodies that Fennesz would master on "Endless Summer".  There would be more of this to come on "Lifeforms" and today it's the style that connects with me more than anything else on the album.

Elsewhere, fifth track "Ephidrina" seeks out a vague space between the chill out room and the 6AM post-rave vibe, and "Auto Pimp" tried to out-quoth "Quoth" (i.e. Polygon Window") with its clanging, propulsive beats and ultra-repetitive hooks.  "Pod Room" ends the album on a wonderfully down note, slowing acid house down to a squelchy 110 BPM crawl before giving way to a dense flurry of weird alien noises.

At a time when the idea of a long form techno album was still a work in progress, and many techno acts struggled to escape whatever niche they'd been pigeonholed into, "Tales of Ephidrina" presented something very different to the norm. Most of its tracks can't be called techno at all, which was entirely the point.  By the time "Lifeforms" was released a couple of years later, the term "modern classical" was being thrown around in all seriousness to describe it, at least for the beatless experimental parts.   "Tales of Ephidrina" isn't a great album, but certainly did its part in helping to expand the boundaries of 90's electronic music.

RIP Andrew Weatherall

I know this is late, but I couldn't let this one pass ... Celebrity producers have been around for decades, often upstaging the acts they produce.  Andrew Weatherall was the first such producer that I was aware of and admired.  His groundbreaking work with Primal Scream in the early 90's shifted the goalposts of two genres.  Indie rock bands, with the exception of several bands on Factory, weren't looking to dance music for inspiration.  Weatherall dragged them there.  Notably, he also had a hand in Factory's late 80's success with his remix of Happy Mondays.  With Primal Scream laid down a blueprint for the fusion of rock and dance that cast a long shadow over the whole of the 1990's and beyond.

After years of wearing out "Screamadelica" and hearing its greatest moments in heavy rotation on radio and in clubs, I was sick of hearing "Loaded".  Great art, no matter how original, loses its luster after overexposure.  Fortunately, an extended hiatus is often all that's needed to restore its power to be great art again.  A little while ago I heard Outkast's "Hey Ya" on the radio for the first time in years and was blown away all over again.  Fifteen years had passed and nobody had caught up to them -- if "Hey Ya" hadn't existed and suddenly appeared on the radio today, it would be every bit as arresting.  I had the same reaction when "Loaded" was played on the radio as a tribute to Weatherall after his death.  Take the best bits from a mediocre rock track, loop it to infinity, craft a boombastic groove, and ride it to club domination -- such an absurdly simple idea, yet so difficult to pull off.

If classic albums are your barometer of greatness, then his contributions to "Screamadelica" are undoubtedly his most timeless achievements.   His Sabres of Paradise and Two Lone Swordsmen projects are well worth checking out as well, and in recent years I've come to consider One Dove's "Morning Dove White" (produced by Weatherall) as a downtempo indie-dance masterpiece nearly equal to "Screamadelica".

Weyes Blood, "Titanic Rising"

I get it, I really do.  It's rare to hear an album that sets out such a lush, gorgeous mood and can sustain it song after song.  The music billows and floats with a relaxed ambience that's found in peak Kate Bush and very little else.  Natalie Mering's vocals are a cross between Karen Carpenter and Joan Baez, soothing to the extreme, gentle above all else.  She has a voice you can listen to for hours, she can sing to an audience of thousands yet make person feel as though she is singing to them and them alone.   The album is usually classified as "baroque pop", which is the usual catchphrase for chanteuse-based music with string arrangements in a somewhat unconventional pop structure (i.e. beautiful, sweeping melodies but without obvious hooks and big choruses).  It definitely checks off all those boxes, but avoids the studio excesses that can alienate some listeners who prefer music that could have been conceivably been recorded in a studio apartment, rather than a big budget studio.

I think that Weyes Blood's music stirs the same emotions for her fans as Beach House's music does for me.  And this is where I get confused.  I don't hear what definitively separates "Titanic Rising" from many other vaguely lo-fi, ambitious-sounding indie pop records past and present.  Seeing how Lana Del Rey's album also finished near the top of many critics' lists, I sense a trend.  Both look for inspiration from classic song styles of yesteryear (when life was supposedly simpler) and project a contrarian mixture of optimism and cynicism. If they sing about love, are they being sincere or is all love simply doomed? It's a sign of the times, where life is fairly good overall but many people are convinced that we are on the inevitable downslope toward something immeasurably worse.  It's a good attitude to have for an artist in many genres.  But is the music really anything special? 

Peter Hook, "The Hacienda -- How Not to Run a Club"

This is the first book written by Peter Hook in his three part autobiographical series, albeit read by me in reverse order. 

The Joy Division book didn't add much to the mountain of literature already written about JD, but as a series of picture postcard memories of his time in the band, it was fine.

The New Order book is probably the only essential one of the series, not least because the band rarely gave interviews and hid behind their music for most of the 80's.  The book confirmed that all the rumours were true (nobody at Factory had a clue what they were doing, the members of New Order generally despised each other), but it was still surprising -- and engrossing -- to read about it in such detail. 

The first part of this book is true to the subtitle -- "how not to run a club".  Opening the Hacienda was a visionary act by a bunch of inspired, supremely talented people.  It was also an act of horrible mismanagement and astoundingly bad financial decisions.  Both sides of the coin are outlined by Hook, and I was under the impression that I was in for a downer of a read, full of spite and bitterness.
But once the club reaches the peak of its popularity, the tone of the book changes to one of pride.  It becomes a love letter to the club that Hook clearly still misses very much -- so much so that he opened a new club in 2010 after vowing never to get involved in one again.  Hook gets to brag about what the club meant to people, and how they helped reshape dance culture.  The Hacienda's final years were plagued by violence, shady dealings and dwindling attendance.  I never realized there wasn't a big closing party like the one depicted in "24 Hour Party People".  The club closed down pending a renewal of their licence that never came.  Nobody knew it would be their final night at the time it happened. 

In the end, the book's message is one of positivity -- the experience of running the club and being at the epicentre of an entire culture was worth it for him in the end.  Right before the club closed, Hook recalls a meeting with his accountant where he was asked if he was doing it for his ego or for his wallet.  Of course, it was for the ego -- being a club owner and having a place to go was meaningful for him.  He'd long since known that it was a titanic waste of money and any pretense of the Hacienda as an investment was long since gone.   

Music in Hamburg

All the best stores in Hamburg seem to be in or around the neighbourhood of Sternschanze, northwest of the city's downtown.  This helps explain why I'd never been to any of them until now.

Slam Records has an impressive selection of rock and jazz vinyl, which is clearly the store's calling card.  In the CD section there are plenty of second hand bargains to be found for surprisingly cheap.  Google's description calls it "unassuming", which is accurate based on the graffiti that adorns its outside walls and the colourful yet scruffy display of records in the window.  Zardoz Records is closer to a boutique shop, featuring more contemporary electronic music and a strong indie selection.  It's easy to see why it's considered a "one stop" type of store according to its reviews online.  But the best hidden gem in Hamburg may well be Rekord Musik.  Ignore the blinding whiff of cigarette smoke by the entrance and the oddball, wizardly-looking staff/clientele.  This store has one of the best selections of second hand electronic music I've ever seen.  The quantity isn't huge, but almost everything in stock is a minor classic.  In this genre, albums and compilations from the 90's and 00's are their specialty.  The back room had an eye-opening rack of 90's dance records as well. 

The musical epicentre of Hamburg these days has to be the Elbphilharmonie.  It's exorbitant cost -- over 800 Million Euros -- is something of a running joke among Hamburg residents based on my last two visits to the city.  Its unconventional look -- shimmering waves of glass plopped on top of a red brick warehouse -- also takes some getting used to.  Entrance to the plaza level (~ 35 m) is free, and gives you a taste of what the building has to offer.  Once I saw the building from close up, walked around inside, read more about the architectural concepts behind the building, it all seemed a lot more impressive then it did on my first glance two years ago from the port. 

B-factor revisited

Eight years ago, I looked for a common thread that connected critically acclaimed albums.  I felt there was were two "sweet spots" in an act's career, a window where they were most likely to hit their critical peak (unrelated, perhaps, to their creative peak).  The result was the "b-factor" (admittedly a horrible name), equal to (# of years since the debut album + 1) x (# of albums).

The conclusion?  Critical accolades are most likely for a debut album (b-factor=1, always) or for b-factors in the 15-35 range.

And now, eight years later?  Let's extend the chart from the post eight years ago, using the #1 albums on Pitchfork's year-end critics polls as an example:

Year	Artist	Album	"Years"	"Albums"	b-factor
2019	Lana Del Rey	"Norman Fucking Rockwell"	9	6	60
2018	Mitski	"Be the Cowboy"	6	5	35
2017	Kendrick Lamar	"DAMN"	6	4	28
2016	Solange	"A Seat at the Table"	14	3	45
2015	Kendrick Lamar	"To Pimp a Butterfly"	4	3	15
2014	Run The Jewels	"Run the Jewels 2"	1	2	4
2013	Vampire Weekend	"Modern Vampires of the City"	5	3	18
2012	Kendrick Lamar	"Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City"	1	2	4
2011	Bon Iver	"Bon Iver"	3	2	8
2010	Kanye West	"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"	6	5	35
2009	Animal Collective	"Merriweather Post Pavilion"	9	9	90
2008	Fleet Foxes	"Fleet Foxes"	0	1	1
2007	Panda Bear	"Person Pitch"	8	3	27
2006	The Knife	"Silent Shout"	5	4	24
2005	Sufjan Stevens	"Illinois"	5	5	30
2004	Arcade Fire	"Funeral"	0	1	1
2003	The Rapture	"Echoes"	0	1	1
2002	Interpol	Turn on the Bright Lights"	0	1	1
2001	Microphones	"The Glow Pt. 2"	3	5	20
2000	Radiohead	"Kid A"	7	4	32
1999	The Dismemberment Plan	"Emergency and I"	4	3	15

Four out of the eight albums fall squarely in the 15-35 range.  Solange's situation is clearly unique, but this is the kind of scenario I was referring to when I wrote about the number of albums likely needing a higher weight that the number of years since a debut.  Critical fatigue sets in after a certain number of albums, more so than the number of years that an artist has been around.  The same would apply to "Black Messiah" by D'Angelo (and the Vanguard), with a (19+1) x 3 = 60 b-factor.

I wrote that megastars can skew the statistics.  Take Kendrick Lamar, with three #1 albums.  Which is most representative of the kind of critical peak we're trying to identify?  The first one?  Just the ones in the 15-35 range?  All of them taken together?  I'm still not sure.

So the original b-factor reasoning is holding up fairly well ... or is it?  There are competing trends as well.  Let's look at the Pazz and Jop #1 albums over the same twenty year period:

Year	Artist	Album	"Years"	"Albums"	b-factor
2018	Kacey Musgraves	"Golden Hour"	5	4	24
2017	Kendrick Lamar	"DAMN"	6	4	28
2016	David Bowie	"Blackstar"	39	25	1000
2015	Kendrick Lamar	"To Pimp a Butterfly"	4	3	15
2014	D'Angelo and the Vanguard	"Black Messiah"	19	3	60
2013	Kanye West	"Yeezus"	8	6	54
2012	Frank Ocean	"Channel Orange"	0	1	1
2011	Tune-Yards	"Whokill"	2	2	6
2010	Kanye West	"My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy"	6	5	35
2009	Animal Collective	"Merriweather Post Pavilion"	9	9	90
2008	TV on the Radio	"Dear Science"	4	3	15
2007	LCD Soundsystem	"Sound of Silver"	2	2	6
2006	Bob Dylan	"Modern Times"	44	32	1440
2005	Kanye West	"Late Registration"	1	2	4
2004	Kanye West	"The College Dropout"	0	1	1
2003	Outkast	"Speakerboxxx/The Love Below"	9	5	50
2002	Wilco	"Yankee Hotel Foxtrot"	7	4	32
2001	Bob Dylan	"Love and Theft"	39	31	1240
2000	Outkast	"Stankonia"	6	4	28
1999	Moby	"Play"	7	5	40

Dylan broke the scale with his late career resurgence, and David Bowie releasing "Blackstar" and dying in the same week is a confluence of events that might never be repeated. Megastar Kanye West had four #1 albums, thereby explaining the relatively high b-factor for "Yeezus". 

I see two possible changing trends.  First, between the two lists, there hasn't been a debut album at #1 since 2012. However, Pitchfork's list has three sophomore albums in the '10's, and one could argue for lumping together the debut and sophomore releases as the works of new, emerging artists.  In that case, they are faring as well as ever, it seems, albeit less so over the past few years.

Second, between Mitski, Lana Del Rey, the critical acclaim for albums such as Low's "Double Negative" (b-factor=300) and Robyn's "Honey" (b-factor = 192), b-factors seem to be slowly rising because "established" artists seem to have a lengthier peak than in the past.  A veteran act with more than ten years and several albums in their catalogue would become a "for fans only" enterprise, or at least that's what you'd be led to believe (as a non-fan) based on the perfunctory 6.5/10 or 7/10 reviews for their albums.  Familiarity breeds contempt.  But now, a true creative spike can generate more critical excitement than in the recent path, presumably because critics see more worth in reliable, consistent acts?   On the other hand, more than half the #1 albums from the combined two lists were the third, fourth, or fifth albums from those artists.  Right in the 15-35 wheelhouse for b-factor, in other words.  It will be interesting to see if any of these are real trends in the coming years.