New Pornographers, "Challengers"; Emma Pollack, "Adrenaline" (single)

New Pornographers have been indie rock poster children practically since their conception. With those accolades come responsibilities such as the need to exude geeky cool, spew quirky lyrical imagery. and other indie rock hallmarks. They'd settled on a formula that had produced three nearly indistinguishable albums, a formula that they could have pleasantly ridden with until the end of time or until they got bored with it. Many fans would have been perfectly happy with the first option, but it seems that the second option was the one that actually came to pass. "Challengers" is a pop album with wistful boy/girl vocal interplay and the breeziest, catchiest tunes of their career by far. Their over-reliance on choppy tempos and bouncy guitar hacking has nearly vanished -- in its place, we have the new Delgados. In the meantime, former Delgado Emma Pollack wants to be the new Coldplay. Or maybe she is moonlighting as an uncredited songwriter on the new New Pornographers album?

Seefeel, "Quique" (reissue)

Even when they were around, Seefeel were criminally underrated, and now that they've long since split, they've been sadly forgotten. Their blending of MBV's guitar pyrotechnics, Cocteau Twins' ethereal hymns, and the Orb's free-range flotation was completely out of place with anything going on in rock or techno at the time (there were some exceptions, such as A R Kane, although they had long since jumped the shark by 1993. Nevertheless, their latter-day "dreampop" was a virtual blueprint for what Slowdive would do shortly before they too disintegrated). By not fitting into any then-existing scenes, they never found their fan-base niche, thereby leaving few people behind who were likely to remember them. Then again, they flaunted their outsider status in interviews, so one could say that they were working hard at tarnishing their eventual legacy practically from the moment they first started getting press. And yet again, if you absolutely *had* to shoehorn them somewhere, it would be with the crowd of occasional ravers with a strong curiosity for techno but who, nonetheless, were more comfortable getting stoned in their basements than in going out dancing. In other words, Seefeel's fans were prototype IDM'ers, but unfortunately for the band, that genre and fanbase didn't exist yet as an outlet for this type of music.

Despite being a near-completist, I never owned "Quique" on CD. I still have my old cassette version, which somehow never got re-purchased along with my other 1993 cassette faves (the relative unavailability of "Quique" has something to do with that). Overall, Seefeel dominated my listening habits across multiple formats in 1994. The "Polyfusia" compilation was one of the first five or so CDs that I ever bought. It is a strong encapsulation of early Seefeel before they got all weirded out and ditched the guitars for something far more sinister. Afterward, the band became dominated by the sounds in Mark Clifford's head. Fletcher, Seymour and Peacock later regrouped as Scala, more or less picking up where Seefeel c. 1993 had left off. But once the calendar flipped to 1994, the actual Seefeel started to split from the style they'd become known for, beginning with the "Starethroughs EP". Darker and dubbier than anything they'd released to that point, each successive track is more frightening than the one before it, virtually telegraphing their eventual slide into paranoid isolationism as the EP plays on.

The "Fracture/Tied EP", which was released as a 10" single in the leadup to the release of their second album "Succour", was undoubtedly the point of no return. Even at their most other-worldliness, the Cocteau Twins' music was always grounded in a certain warmth and compassion thanks to Liz Frazer's voice and Robin Guthrie's shimmering layers of guitar. Any remaining stylistic links between the Cocteaus and Seefeel dropped out of sight with this EP. The A-side's crackling rhythms, akin to flailing away on an aluminum pie plate with a wooden spoon, signified the end of their fascinations with guitar and the emergence of a jittery, mechanical form of ambient isolationism. Autechre were one year behind Seefeel at this stage -- with "Amber", they were going through their own "warm" phase, and by the next year, they'd take tracks like "Fracture" to their limits by crafting something even more inhuman, more alien.

But before their music drifted off into those neo-industrial wastelands, there was "Quique". Seefeel at their most accessible, synth-tickling, sunshine-drenched best. The Seefeel that were ten years ahead of their time in anticipating Morr Music and a host of other guitar strumming folktronica bands, which is undoubtedly why most of "Quique" remains remarkably fresh. In the liner notes, Mark Clifford writes how he'd forgotten how little unreleased music was left from that period. That means they were scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel when compiling the second CD, most of which is vastly inferior to the material on the proper album. So credit goes to the band for making wise choices back in 1993 with their track selections on the album. Regardless, fans will certainly enjoy hearing as much as possible from "Quique"-era Seefeel, and curious not-yet fans are in for a treat.

Animal Collective, "Strawberry Jam"

Until quite recently, Animal Collective took a somewhat lackadaisical approach to, well, let's call it "full band participation". Those who wanted to involve themselves with a project under the AC name were welcome, and if they stayed away for whatever reason, then it was no big deal. Before the release of "Strawberry Jam", only "Campfire Songs" and "Feels" were recorded with input from all four band members. Once the band's critical and popular acclaim hit a new peak in 2005 with "Feels", it appears that they hit a turning point. Every subsequent release would have too much riding on it to not require everyone's full attention. Suddenly they had to concern themselves with things like their creative direction and long-term career planning, instead of just mucking around in the studio or at live gigs with whoever happened to be around.

This is a band that loves to experiment with new songs on tour -- most songs on "Feels" had been regularly played live for nearly two years before the album was released, and the same can be said for nearly everything on "Strawberry Jam" (even current live sets feature a spate of even newer songs). Writer's block is apparently a non-issue with these guys. Deciding how the album would eventually sound presented a greater difficulty. But they knew they didn't want it to sound anything like "Feels".

"Feels" was their guitar album. That means their obsession with doing something different -- without guitars -- meant that they had to remove all the best things about "Feels". The gauzy drones that backed so much of the record highlighted nearly every track from a sonic standpoint and provided a counterbalance to the band's zanier impulses. I used to be (and still am) nonplussed by most AC records, and only joined the ranks of the converted with "Feels". With each new release, the superfans emerge to decry the more restrained sound of the album compared with their more freeflowing live shows. And now I've become one of them, because a big complaint I have with "Strawberry Jam". But I also worship at the feet of guitar-drenched albums like "Feels". What else, other than those swarming layers of guitar, could have linked "Flesh Canoe" (which slots itself beautifully next to MBV's "Glider" period) with "The Purple Bottle"'s frantic ode to giddy love?

So "Strawberry Jam" is their electronic album, and it's not that they go too far with the electronics, but that they don't go far enough. Once you subtract the sonic density behind many AC recordings, then the zonked out wackiness starts coming to the forefront, and that's not a good thing. Without enough sound smacking you in the face, parts of "Strawberry Jam" come off like They Might Be Giants with a few electronic bleeps added in. "Reverend Green" ups the sonic mayhem until it reaches a blissful density overload, and along with "Fireworks", these tracks build majestically and jam their way into the kind of semi-epic explorations that the band typically excels at. "Peace Bone" contains the type of pogo-beat and caveman chanting that they use for all their singles, and although the formula is a fun one, it doesn't go far enough over the top. Instead of the wimpy, two dollar electronic backbeat, they could have gone full-mode crazed hardcore techno and blasted the track into overdrive, but even that would have put them in a virtual tie with what Super Furry Animals were doing ten years ago (example: "Mountain People").

Still, the band is on a hot streak where nearly everything they do feels at least a little bit right (although the new tracks they've been playing live aren't exciting me at all just yet). I'm not sure I'd put money on this album not being embarrassingly unlistenable in a few years, though.

Britney Spears, "Gimme More"

This leaked track (leaked by Britney's people to build advance hype, no doubt) has been kicking around the internet for about a week now, and most opinions range between "better than expected" and "fairly impressed". I have no idea where one draws that reaction from a track so horrible. From the opening seconds, straight from the "it's Britney, bitch" opening line (oh, she's sounding it off now, she's so baaad ... don't call it a comeback!) and the muffled, "vocals from a megaphone" whining that kicks off 90% of her repertoire, it's clear that Britney hasn't woken up to the fact that it's 2007 and she might want to try something a bit different. The beat is lifeless and pedestrian, and the croaky two-word chorus is about as catchy and addictive as piss-flavoured cigarettes. One minute and a half into it, the load is blown and the song runs out of anything interesting to say or do, and the rest is little more than endless repetitions on the chorus ("Hey Jude" it isn't), filling time until the allotted four minute time slot runs out.

postscript: I wrote this on the afternoon of (i.e. before!) the MTV Video Awards ... honest!

Newish Albums: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Will Continue

The Ugly: Robbie Williams, "Rudebox".

In late 2003, there were some weird stories swirling around concerning Robbie Williams. I read that he wasn't handling his Knebworth comedown very well. In one interview, he claimed he was retiring. Elsewhere, he began speaking about altering his persona to that of a freakier, more zonked out character named Pure Francis, whose music would dabble in strange forms of electronic squiggliness.

After devouring Chris Heath's "Feel" earlier this year, I discovered the real truth. He did retire, but his retirement ended as soon as the interview ended, i.e. he meant it only during the literal moment that he said it. Hey, we all get pissy sometimes. The Pure Francis character wasn't a reaction to the comedown from Knebworth, but rather, a way to avoid the pressures of it. Messing about in Stephen Duffy's cramped studio proved to be a welcome distraction from rehearsal and the general realization that he was about to play the biggest gigs in UK history. It's too bad that Pure Francis never came to be, and the fruits of the Duffy collaborations (the "Intensive Care" album) were fairly indistinguishable from the music Robbie had been making for his entire career up to that point.

Along came 2006, and the re-invention finally came to pass on "Rudebox". Williams shook up his normal work routine and decided to work with a bevy of producers instead of just one. Somewhere along the way, he ditched stadium pop and decided to become a dancefloor diva.

At this point, even if you'd been closely following his career, you'd be forgiven for rolling your eyes at the prospect of Robbie going disco, chasing the electronica boom roughly ten years after Eric Clapton did. And why? For a laugh? Just because he can? Because he no longer gives a fuck? Fortunately, none of those three fears would turn out to be true, but before moving on, let's pause to examine how NOW magazine churned out, as they often do, the worst review in the universe. I hear that 1995 called and it wants its Britpop Review Spreadsheet back, because as you can clearly see from Evan Davies' writing, apparently any and all English artists are cheeky pop pranksters that are in it only for the laughs and for making delightfully naff videos. The notion that anybody might take them seriously as genuine artists who mean something to real music fans is nowhere in the vicinity of the radar.

Is it a great album? Far from it, but it's easily Williams' most inspired album to date, chiefly because he cared enough to try to craft a bonkers epic masterpiece without caring about whether he'd succeed or not. "Rudebox"'s closest recent contemporary is Smashing Pumpkins' "Adore" -- another case where the artists in question sold a zillion albums previously but still chose to release something weird and challenging in lieu of something they were certain would sell, made the album too long by about 25-30 minutes but still forced you to sit through it all because as everyone knows, becoming bored at times is essential for truly "getting" any epic piece of music; "went electronic" and succeeded far beyond expectations in four or five styles that they'd never attempted before but failed miserably with another two or three, and finally: produced some sensational piece of music but dragged down the overall product with the bad songs. Unfortunately, the latter group will likely define the album in the long run in the minds of casual (or is it cynical?) listeners.

Songs like "Dickhead" are fairly inoffensive, in that they were *clearly* done for a dumb laugh and can be easily ignored. But early in the album, the cover versions start piling up and nearly kill the record straight out of the gate. "Bongo Bong and Je Ne T'Aime Plus" is brutal (and a terrible song to boot), "Kiss Me" is fun but is a karaoke experiment that never needed to see the light of day, and "We're the Pet Shop Boys" (featuring the Pet Shop Boys) seems to last forever and is far too concerned with preserving it's own sense of self-irony than in being an entertaining song. It's strange though, that these bad covers rub shoulders with a home run version of Human League's "Louise", coupled with the tender "Burslem Normals" which isn't a Human League cover but could easily pass for one. Adding to the contradictions is the Pet Shop Boys -- after failing miserably with their other aforementioned "Rudebox" production -- who, with their spectacular "She's Madonna", brilliantly mimick the classic funny/sad moments of their peak period singles. "Never Touch That Switch" is a highly addictive piece of warped electro-funk that has to rank #1 on the list of things you never thought could be written about a Robbie Williams song.

Best of all is the pairing of "The 80's" and "The 90's", a couple of autobiographical sketches that are delivered in a passable Mike Skinner-style rap. The lyrics are simple but touching, and the little musical touches on "The 90's" (coming off as a cross between Matchbox 20's jangly guitar pop and "Great Escape"-era Blur complete with trombone solo) are really what make the song so great.

RIP Tony Wilson

Just a few things that made Wilson so great:

1. That batshit moment in neworderstory when he talks about Ian Curtis' death, and he states, completely plainfaced, that Joy Division would have been "as big as Pink Floyd if he'd lived."
2. That other batshit moment in neworderstory when Barney Sumner yells "you ruined my career!" at Wilson in a semi-ironic manner on a mock game-show but you can just tell that he was sort of serious about it and all Wilson can do is look sheepish.
3. Allowing himself to be immortalized by Steve Coogan in "24 Hour Party People" ... the movie is so-so but as a series of snapshots of Wilson's remarkable life, it couldn't be a better tribute.
4. Opening the Hacienda against all good sense and sanity, having it blossom into a cultural touchstone for 80's dance music (albeit never a profitable one), then romanticizing it at every opportunity. See also: Happy Mondays, signing and promoting.

And that was what made Wilson so entertaining -- he was the eternal optimist that you couldn't bring yourself to hate. He might have been irrelevant to the industry once Factory imploded (and the complete invisibility of the follow-up label, Factory Too, really hammered the nail in deep) but you could always could on Wilson to pop up in the middle of an NME news item, giving his two cents on some new band or controversy. There is a generation of Mancunians -- among them Mark E Smith and Peter Hook -- who were slightly bonkers (at least in quotes) but whose reputations had reached a certain level of immunity. That combination made them a bottomless source for good press, which is a tough combination to pull off consider how easily pop stars can become boring / the public can become bored of them. These guys could always say anything they wanted at any time and people would always tune in, not necessarily out of reverence, but for simple curiosity. I always got a kick out of reading Tony Wilson's two cents on something. And why not? He used to run the coolest music label on the planet.

Newish albums: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly III

The Bad III: Do Make Say Think, "You're a History In Rust". DMST picked a great point in their career to careen into a sideways shift in their sound. Another album like the last two could have sent them down a path of jam band predictability, but "You're A History In Rust" sees them exploring not one, but two new avenues. The far more interesting one is the high-density, speed-fueled barrage featured in "Executioner Blues", and most spectacularly, "The Universe!". With eighty or so musicians, it's about time they cranked the volume a bit higher, and the furious anger of "The Universe" could almost be mistaken for speed metal at times.

The other half is what drags down the album as a whole, namely the folksy parts with vocals. I'm struggling to understand their internal logic when it comes to approaching vocals, and I'm really not getting it. The down-home feel of the title track almost demands vocals but doesn't deliver, whereas "A With Living" (for example) sounds more or less what they usually do on their other albums and yet the vocals simply show up without warning. It's as if they pre-decided that there would be vocals in certain places and were determined to shoehorn them into their songs no matter what.

In addition -- and this isn't the sort of thing that normally gets on my nerves -- the record would benefit tremendously from better sequencing. They missed an opportunity to start slow and mellow and build up to something loud and explosive at the end, but instead all of the sonic palette I discussed here is schizophrenically strewn all over the album.

Kanye West, "Stronger"

It's been a while since I had one of those "awestruck by pop music" moments, but a couple of days ago my jaw dropped open when I saw Kanye West's "Stronger" video for the first time. Goth clubs probably wouldn't have the guts to play this song even though the glistening keyboards and industrial-strength backbeat likely smoke just about anything else they'd normally play. I could claim that Kanye has made good on Derrick May's 20-year old futuristic utopian vision of black music (even though he had to sample Daft Punk in order to do it), but that would be going a little bit overboard (and willfully ignoring a bunch of old Wu Tang videos). Let's simplify things: the electrode-plugging, body-scanning stuff just reeks of stale pre-millenial paranoia, but screw it, Daft Punk are IN THE VIDEO, looking like cool as fuck alien svengalis, and are about to make a billion zillion dollars off this song's can't-miss success.

Big Sellers

Articles like this don't appear nearly often enough. With catalog sales accounting for 40% of all physical music sales and 64% of download sales (according to the article), you'd think that there would be a lot more ink devoted to the hows and whys behind this aspect of the music business.

The sizable, year-in and year-out sales of many twenty and thirty year-old albums lends support to my "discount theory" of music sales, that is, the notion that people will gladly pay money for albums if the price is right (as opposed to downloading them for free from file-sharing networks). Classic albums routinely go on the sale racks at large retailers like HMV as part of a "buy three discs for forty bucks" display or some numbers to that effect. It's easy to be cavalier with one's money when you're buying an twenty-year old album that you know will be great, particularly when it costs far less that a new release that you may or may not like now (or twenty years from now!). We're long past the point of baby boomers re-purchasing their old vinyl collections. People making these catalog purchases are 1) buying music that they know very well but never got around to buying, 2) finally checking out an album that they always heard was great but somehow never heard, 3) younger fans who are starting to build their collections or simply want to check out what all the fuss is about with an album that's older than they are, 4) any of the above groups of people who know that twelve or so bucks isn't a lot of money so what the hell, why not spend a bit of cash on some older music, 5) ...

It's a bit bizarre that normally bankable artists like REM and Mariah Carey don't sell many copies of their debut albums. I chalk this up to turnover of their style and fanbases. Most of REM's catalogue sounds a lot different than the music they were making in 1982. The new fans they picked up over the next ten years stuck with their newer sound, and many never looked back to investigate the older one. "Everybody Hurts" and "Losing My Religion" probably get 100 times more plays that "Radio Free Europe" on radio and VH1, so it's not too shocking that the albums containing those songs are the ones that still sell.

Mariah's career pulled an about-face when she split from Tommy Mottola and began making music for kids instead of music for adults. It's little wonder that not many of her fans care to return to the outdated style of her shlocky debut, even if it was a huge seller at the time. This notion is enforced by Mariah's bumpy career path: becoming the biggest-selling female artist ever, followed by the Glitter/psych ward/label-dropping debacle, only to stage a remarkable comeback and become bigger than ever thanks to the top-selling album of 2005. Fans seem eager to forget her past in favour of whatever she's doing at the moment, and in doing so they further distance themselves from the music she made at the beginning of her career.

Although it's worthwhile to wonder why some recent classics sell ("OK Computer", "The Soft Bulletin", Pavement re-releases) while others don't ("Loveless"), there's a much larger elephant in the room: why are AC/DC still shifting so many units? "Back In Black" might be widely known, but it's not the type of album that fans and critics (even those who are strong devotees of classic rock) would regularly rank high on "best ever" lists. And yet somehow, "Back In Black" now finds itself among the top ten best selling albums ever, and much like the similarly eye-popping sales figures for "Eagles Greatest Hits", these numbers really sneaked up on people.

Neither band ever had the Beatles/Stones/Zeppelin honour/stigma of being the "anointed band", and therefore never reached a level of overexposure and oversaturation that those bands did. When I was in high school, those were three bands that were passed down to us from our parents and were anecdotally acknowledged to be part of the musical canon that you simply had to be familiar with. AC/DC didn't have to be the greatest ever, they were simply a very good band that played balls-out rock and roll, which for 99% of the populace is far more important than who was the most influential or most innovative.

Newish albums: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly II

The Bad II: Apparat, "Walls". I don't understand why more producers these days seem to be influenced by Orbital's poppier, later phase (in particular "The Altogether", but perhaps to a greater extent the bright, optimistic bleepiness of "Middle of Nowhere") instead of their mellower, brooding, prog house peak phase ("In Sides", "Snivilisation"'s epic, paranoid world view ... even the Brown Album, although it was banging dancefloor stuff, is half euphoric, half something of a darker mood entirely). Apparat's "Walls" has followed me around for weeks -- on my iPod, various times of the day, as background music for a dinner party -- but for the most part it has failed to make a lasting impression. Its best function was the last of these -- it's a bridesmaid album, always in the background but rarely stands out in the foreground. Once in a while I was caught humming a tune or two, but it was always the grimier, Death In Vegas-y stuff like "Hailin From the Edge" or "Hold On". The more abstract tracks like "Fractales" are engaging and offer new twists with every listen, but for the most part I'm simply not amused by the album's relentless bouncy cheer. Ellen Allien brought some thump to this kind of material on last year's terrific "Orchestra of Bubbles" collab, but once most of the dancefloor elements are removed, my attention span vanishes along with them.

The (very, very) Good: Matthew Dear, "Asa Breed". His earlier vocal effort, "Leave Luck To Heaven", was a great idea in theory but not so much in execution. Vocals meandered on top of a Montreal minimal blueprint, and although the combination seemed fresh at the time, there wasn't any need for these two components to be stapled together. These songs didn't need vocals, they were simply there for the sake of being there, and on virtually every track the beat was the star and would have been improved had the singer simply stepped aside.

"Asa Breed", however, might be the first true minimal pop record. Artists like Luomo have received a lot of credit for bringing pop and soul into a largely stoic, mechanical genre (minimal techno) but Dear actually went out and made what is first and foremost a pop record. It so happens to be chock full of weird, warped, minimal elements. With an uncanny resemblance to late-70's Bowie, Dear's voice intones strange, twisted tales over funky minimal numbers like "Don and Sherri" and "Pom Pom" -- both of them being abrupt, three-minute pop gems. Darker corners and bizarre sounds abound in the album's freer, more experimental tracks ("Midnight Lovers", "Give Me More"), and the druggy blues of "Vine To Vine" finely accentuates the record's dark, cagey perspective.