Curve, "Gift"

Curve's fourth album, "Gift", was largely ignored on arrival. You could say that about a lot of albums that were released in the second half of September 2001, but in this case even Curve's own fans passed on this one, partly because few of them knew of its existence thanks to nearly invisible promotion. After starting their career as meteoric indie darlings, they released two albums to lukewarm reviews and "not living up to the hype" derision, split up in 1994, reunited in 1997 and tried to hop on the late 90's electronica bandwagon, and finally ended up back where they started some ten years earlier, toiling away on an indie label and fawned over by a small cabal of post-shoegaze goth misfit fans, but otherwise largely unknown and uncared for by the mainstream music world. Even their sound had returned to its c.1991 roots -- after dabbling in grungy dynamics and near-ambient psychedelia on "Cuckoo", and electronica/DnB on "Come Clean", they returned to the less intricate style on which they formed their reputation, that of hip-hop inflected beats, aggro guitars, and dense shoegaze-y filling stuffed between the two. Swagger over complexity, if you will.

At the time, I had an advance promo EP that contained the songs "Hell Above Water", "Want More Need Less", and "Perish", and was disappointed to eventually discover, upon the release of the proper album, that it didn't come close to delivering on the sensational promise of the EP. Listening to it today, my first impressions (which remained my opinion on the album for years afterward) seem far too harsh. There's a lot of quality in the album's second half, which is a more low-key, less made-for-radio affair that shows that they weren't ready to completely leave their mid-to-late 90's selves behind. "Fly With the High" contains nods to "Come Clean"'s style of dirty electronica, and as such, it's the most skip-able track on the album, something that Republica could have cranked out in their sleep years earlier. Elsewhere, rock songs with tightly coiled moods punctuated by slashing guitars (i.e. "Cuckoo" redux) are precursors to nearly everything that Trent Reznor has recorded in the 00's (after he turned down the noise and turned up the guitars in his music), and Toni Halladay's brand of goth (part sex kitten, part angry young vixen with nails-a-slashing) pretty much invented anything Evanescence had to offer.

But any discussion about "Gift" always comes back to those three standout tracks that were featured on the promo EP. You may already know "Hell Above Water" without realizing it, because it's been featured as background music in a few TV shows and movies, including, most recently "Iron Man". It's easy to see why it's such an ideal piece of film and TV music:

1) fast, galloping beat with aggro guitars = ACTION
2) Toni Halladay's, smooth, sexy, yet caustic voice adds a touch of mystery and exotica (especially useful for opening shot, panorama scenes)
3) touch of electronica adds a hint of futurism, i.e. "this music is the next level shit, which should convince you that the same is true of this TV show/movie"
4) for kids: Curve are not mainstream but their music contains elements of the more mainstream music that they like (i.e.the qualities in points 1,2,3) = cool underground cred
5) for adults: they don't pick up on the specifics of #1-#4, but the music fits their preconception of what kids are listening to nowadays, ergo the song feels suitably appropriate for the movie/show

And finally, there are two songs featuring Kevin Shields, which are either the best songs on "Gift" because he plays on them, or Curve took their best two songs and asked Shields to play on them. There is no easy resolution to this chicken-egg game, but the end results have arguably been the highlight of Shields' non-MBV career, the quality of which were enough to curb any and all thoughts of an MBV reunion for a good year or two. But unlike his other collaborative works, such as Primal Scream's "Accelerator", he is unmistakably the guest artist with Curve, not the svengali whose characteristic style overwhelms the track while the group getting the bulk of the credit get to stand back and watch the magic happen. In simpler terms, "Accelerator", or J. Mascis and the Fog's "More Light" sound like MBV tracks, but "Want More Need Less" and "Perish" are instantly recognizable as Curve tracks.

"Want More Need Less" is one of the fiercest tracks in Curve's catalog -- a guitar-drenched update of their more gothic 90's sound. The nearly manic momentum barely lets up as the song gallops toward the chorus, with the volume growing ever louder thanks to Shields' string-slashing. "Perish" is more subdued but no less intense. Old school Curve were at their best when they added hip-hop-inflected beats into their usual stew (e.g. "Ten Little Girls", "The Coast Is Clear") and it's that sound that is not only resurrected here but is improved thanks to a more finely-tuned hard rock polish and Shields' blistering guitar playing. The heartbreaking lyric finds Toni Halladay expressing fear and anxiety in the face of a relationship that has lasted far longer than it should have -- the core is rotten, both parties are aware of it and yet they continue with the routine merely to put off the tears for yet another day (sounds a lot like "Love Will Tear Us Apart", doesn't it?). It's poignant both at face value but also because, amidst all the turmoil in the Toni/Dean partnership, it's hard to be sure if "Perish" is a just another love song or an encapsulation of Curve's then current state of existence. In fact, the group would release just one more (internet only) album the following year before splitting up one more time, apparently for good. The twisted irony of "Perish" is that they'd apparently exposed their own internal decay in the middle of their best ever song -- lamenting that the tank was empty and that there was nothing left to give, when in fact they had reached the peak of their powers.

Scarlett Johansson, "Anywhere I Lay My Head"

I had no idea what to expect from this album, and it's safe to say that nobody really did. Hollywood celebs dabbling in music has become fairly commonplace, and some element of predictability comes with that regularity. But ... a Tom Waits cover album? Why Tom Waits? It's simple -- she's a big fan, and wanted to do an album of his songs. Simple as that. But still, why Tom Waits, i.e. a musician with approximately zero hits to his name that were not sung by Rod Stewart? No matter the quality of the resulting music, at least nobody could accuse her of trying to cash in.

So when expectations are completely up in the air, sometimes it takes me a bit longer to convince myself of the quality (or lack thereof) of the music. Actually, this was the easy part. I quickly became convinced that "Anywhere I Lay My Head" was a good album after a couple of weeks of trekking around with it on my iPod. The harder part was convincing myself that in 2008, as impossible as it may seem, Scarlett Johanson is making better Spiritualized albums than Jason Pierce.

The chaotic jazz freak-out of album opener "Fawn" could have been made by the band that recorded "No God Only Religion". The mushy, gated drums (and the way they seem to glide in and out of the mix) recall the dream-rock sound of "Run" and "I Want You". Even if it was produced by Dave Sitek from TV on the Radio, I still need to pinch myself to be reminded that I'm hearing free-jazz freakouts, the semi-conscious neo-gaze of latter-day Slowdive, and David Bowie's background vocals on a Scarlett Johansson album. One can certainly complain about her vocals, which are flat and undynamic in parts, and claim that they don't add anything of substance to the tracks. For the most part, I think she shows just the right amount of restraint and is able to sell the emotion of the song without any attempt to oversing and oversell the tone of her voice -- which is more or less exactly what Tom Waits does on his own albums. Her sighs of disappointment during the chorus of "Fannin Street" turn the backing track from a coulda-been lullaby into a true dirge. It's not simply a sad song sung in a sad way, rather, Johansson brings a deeper level to the song by conveying the inevitabilty behind the lyrics, i.e. you can issue all the warnings you want, but that person's life is headed to the shitter regardless.

"Anywhere I Lay My Head" is what the new Spiritualized album would have been like if Jason Pierce had favoured the kitchen sink drama of "Borrowed Your Gun" instead of the bedroom folk of, well, most of "Songs in A&E". This should be taken as praise for Johansson, not as a backlash against Spiritualized (who are still one of the best bands around). But I can't help it if I miss what SPZ used to sound like.

Dance Music Manifestos

Philip Sherburne recently turned in a sobering edition of "The Month In Techno" that might serve as a major buzzkiller for anyone who truly believed in a "quasi-mystical faith in beats". Fortunately for me, I have been cynical about this sort of thing for as long as I have been even remotely interested in techno. It was axiomatically apparent to me, back in the early 90's, that raves were Just Another Way To Party, no more, no less. A few years later, once preppies in blue jeans started showing up to parties that were "supposed" to be underground events, I became even more convinced that no Fatima-like events of mass enlightenment could ever be possible in settings such as these. I certainly believe that individuals can experience self-conversion at any party on any given night, but this notion of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, where the right scene happening at the right time in the right city can instill a "we are changing the world right now" sense of optimism, enthusiasm, and entitlement among its denizens is something that does not exist now, and probably never has existed in the last twenty years of electronic music history.

I've always felt that these mini (or maxi) conversions are just as likely to happen (at least for me) at home, walking down the street with my iPod, or in a music shop as they are to happen in a club. Music can latch on and couple to virtually any setting, and anyone who needs to be in the coolest club in a happening city in order to absorb their dose or quasi-religious fervour is either taking too many drugs or is trying too hard to convince themselves or something that may not be there. Sherburne writes that "a party culture (and drug culture) predicated upon parties that never end can only result in a music that thumps dully away without surprise or meaningful variation." But this was always the case with minimal, whether he felt it to be true or not. The difference between this column and the ones he wrote a year or two ago (that were drenched with praise for the Berlin minimal scene) is nothing but a shift in the writer's own perception. The music and its context have stayed constant, but people eventually get bored with what they've been listening to for the past couple of years and clamour for something different. It's the natural course of events that unfolds as a scene peters out. Beats have always been just beats, but a red-hot scene in the right city can go a long way toward convincing a lot of people that it all means more than that.

Even if you don't agree with the sentiment of the first half of Sherburne's article, the second half contains a bit of something for everyone in the form of content from the personal "manifestos" of various DJ's and producers. Whether conservative or progressive, silly or serious, all the "rules" collated by Sherburne are worth noting and many of them brought a smile or seven to my face (except for Strategy's preachy contributions -- is "Strategy" a pseudonym for DJ Spooky? :0). I want to highlight a couple of my favourites:

Pheek: "Clubbers must make an effort to listen to music on the dancefloor, and if they need to talk, to leave it." Oh yes, yes, A THOUSAND times yes. Most of the time I feel that I'm the only one in the club who understands this seemingly trivial and obvious "rule". Dancefloor behaviour/etiquette is barely spoken about by anyone at any time, but luckily there are people like Pheek, who, like me, believe it's a subject worthy of discussion.

Peter van Hoesen: "Every DJ playing out should dance for at least one hour with the same crowd he/she has been DJing for. We need more dancing DJs." This is the futuristic fantasy utopian world that I want to live in.

Nobody asked me, but I thought I'd thrown in a couple of rules of my own.

1. If you fancy yourself a DJ and can't find a way to include at least two different genres of music into most your sets, then fancy yourself doing something else. I'm not the least bit impressed by, for example, someone who is able to mix nothing but trance or minimal for six hours straight. Most people agree that track selection is the #1 skill that a DJ can possess, and what better way to display that skill than by effortlessly skipping between genres without losing the flow of the set and jolting the crowd.

2. If there are buttons/knobs on your hardware/software that you have never used or even considered using, then you should either a) use them before you buy something else, or b) buy something with fewer buttons/knobs next time. These machines are as much of a musical instrument as a guitar or a violin, and nobody would claim that they know their way around a guitar if they'd never played the E string. Electronic toys (yes, and turntables) are meant to be mastered.

Pitchfork Music Festival

The lineup was hit or miss this year, and although the "hits" did include some of my favourite artists (Jarvis Cocker, Animal Collective, Spiritualized), these bands have been touring almost constantly for the last year, so it's not like one would have to trek to the Pitchfork Festival to have any chance of seeing them. Friday night's lineup was intriguing because the average Pitchfork reader probably hasn't gone out of their way to see, or hasn't had the opportunity to see Mission of Burma or Public Enemy, let alone both of them on the same night. On the other hand, the average reader has probably seen Animal Collective a handful of times already, and can now simply brag to his or her friends that they saw them at the Pitchfork Festival too.

Time zone differences meant that I didn't follow along on the live stream very often. The camera work was OK, the video quality was perfectly fine (I wouldn't expect much more from a video stream), and the sound quality was actually shockingly good, so overall, the live streaming idea was winning one for Pitchfork, even if I was nearly blinded for life by catching a few minutes of Les Savy Fav yesterday. How could anyone glean enjoyment from watching a half naked pudgy guy prance around the stage, backed by the most stultifying hippie hardcore indie rock imaginable? After that, I caught a couple hours of sleep and woke up for Spiritualized, who did their best to wig out (eight songs in one hour) despite the short time allotted for their set. Every time they break into "Shine a Light", I feel like I have no need to hear them play it live ever again, and yet, by the end, the dramatic guitar solos and gospel tinges draw me in. Every time.

Mogwai, "The Sun Smells Too Loud"

My spidey-sense detects a lot of excitement about the new Mogwai album, stemming from the buzz around the new track "The Sun Smells Too Loud", which was posted on the Matador website recently. I guess that the expression about the seven-year statute of limitations for recycling ideas is true, because I can definitely imagine this track having surfaced as a long lost "Rock Action" outtake, as if they were revisiting the second half of "Two Rights One Wrong", with a whiff of M83's recent "dreaming of the 80's" synthfests replacing the mountains of guitar feedback. The point being that "The Sun Smells Too Loud" doesn't really signal a new direction for Mogwai, as yet again the band's (false and incomplete) reputation for little more than soft/loud/Slint dynamics has preceded it and convinced a lot of folks that they're on to something drastically new, when they really aren't. So I'm excited, as I always am with the release of new Mogwai material, but with some reservations.

Besides, when Mogwai "go electronic" or some variation thereof, I have always preferred it when they do it in a simplistic, lo-fi way, i.e. "Superheroes of BMX", rather than with the lush and organic approach they took with "The Sun Smells Too Loud". But mainly I'm wondering why Mogwai are settling into a habit of stealing from themselves (the style of their last album, "Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait", was also lifted faithfully from what they had been doing about seven years previous) instead of letting forward evolution take its course.

Sigur Ros, "Med Sud i Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust"

It makes perfect sense that they'd release a stunningly lush DVD that serves as their love letter to their home country of Iceland, and then realize that they'd pushed their fairytale shoegaze sound as far as it could go. There is no use trying to sound like the swirling mist rising off a glacier once you've been there, done that, and produced the career retrospective DVD as a visual aid. As career decisions go, the shift they've undergone on new album "Med Sud i Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust" might be the smartest one they've ever made -- even though, between this album and the "Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do" EP from a few years back, Sigur Ros have taken more surprising turns with their music than virtually any other band that is often accused of being a one-trick pony.

The days of the bowed guitar or anything else resembling shoegaze are gone, at least for now. Sigur Ros have crept closer in style to indie rock then I would have ever believed possible -- 2nd track "Inní Mér Syngur Vitleysingur" could nearly pass for Spoon, at least before the strings kick in. Toward the end, the song starts to sound like a more scaled back version of "Hollipolla" from "Takk...", but make no mistake about it, they're bringing their usual magic but are thinking big without having to sound big. On "Med Sud ...", less is more, and folk balladeering and warm-blooded tenderness has replaced standoffish epic maximalism and ten minute crying sessions.

Jay-Z at Glastonbury

So the Jay-Z vs Noel Gallagher feud (it feels silly just typing that) came to an appropriate conclusion with Jay-Z's ironic cover (or was it a big "FU Noel", sung far and wide so that all of Britain would hear? Does it even matter?) of "Wonderwall". Lost in the controversy was Noel Gallagher's long since annoying push-button tactic of drumming up publicity of himself by slagging other musical artists -- he's been doing it since 1994 and I'm shocked (well, not really, given the British music press' all-consuming love of THE QUOTE from artists with quotable reputations) that people are dumb enough to always fall for it and continue to give him the time of day. Between Jay-Z's live band and the whomp-ass AC/DC sample in that clip of "99 Problems", he's more rock and roll than Oasis have been in years, further rendering Noel Gallagher's point moot. On the other hand, I think I'm going to be humming "Wonderwall" for the rest of the day ...

My Bloody Valentine, London ICA, June 13, 2008 (mp3 recording)

I have recurring dreams/nightmares, but not the typical ones where you find yourself naked in public or back in school and writing a test that you haven't studied for. My dreams involve buying or receiving a wonderful gift -- usually CDs or something otherwise music-related -- and waking up to discover that it was all a dream and I don't own that piece of desired merchandise. Morning ruined: population Me. The fact that these dreams are strongly divorced from reality in that those CDs usually don't exist in real life is besides the point.

After MBV announces their return to gigging a few months back, many people's reaction was a breathless, sustained hope that this wasn't one of those types of dreams. I think a lot of these feelings lingered even as the tour dates lined up and anticipation began in earnest. The next step in the recovery process was fear. In a small sense, it was the fear that the live shows would be shambolic, reminiscent of Sex Pistols-reunion-style OTTness and poseurism that would only serve as a reminder of how cool a band they *used* to be. In a much larger sense, the real fear wasn't that they'd be bad, but that they'd develop into Just Another Touring Band that draws decent-sized crowds who flock to hear the hits from a generation ago. A lot of music fans prefer memories and romanticism to something tangible and in-the-present, and long-held romanticism dies hard when you have to stop peddling barely-whispered campfire stories to a generation of folks who'd give their right arms to have been there back in the day because all of them can now start blogging about gig experience that had been the exclusive domain of history for so long. The transition for Legendary Recluses to Just Another Touring Band has probably hurt the reputation of a band like Kraftwerk over the past ten years, to name but one notable example.

Maybe we'll reach that point with MBV someday. But for now, we have this comeback gig, which is astoundingly, crushingly good. There are a number of blips and mistakes scattered throughout, but this scarcely matters considering how fantastic the overall show turned out to be. Even more to the point, it's just the first gig of their return, and they'll obviously improve and continue to re-gel on stage and blast brains even more thoroughly. They play frighteningly loud, obviously, but with the guitars set less to "FX-drenched stun" than in the 1991-2 gigs, and more to "primal howl". In other words, more like the MBV of the 1988-9 era that the more frequently bootlegged "Loveless" period.

Only during the fourth song, "I Only Said", did it finally sink in that the whole thing was real and that this gig was actually happening. I'd seen a few grainy Youtube clips of this show that were taken with cell phones whose microphones were frazzled immediately upon sound impact. Their dismal quality had the effect of planting an irrational doubt in my mind, as if I wasn't seeing and hearing what the clip was purported to be, like the sound and vision equivalent of identifying a burn victim. But once "I Only Said" appeared in all its power and magnificence, the emotion of the occasion finally hit me. This recording is the best piece of music I've heard all year -- not the most original or most relevant, but certainly the most rewarding.

A World Without Bo Diddley

I was more or less in awe of Bo Diddley -- his music, his guitar playing, his unconventional and un-rock star look (thick glasses, the "who me?" dumbfounded looks he'd give before starting to shred on the guitar), his bad-ass lyrics, the hot chicks in his bands. He stayed relevant well into his old age, not only thanks to a series of fondly remembered Nike ads, but because his groundbreaking music (which includes his distinctive playing and macho posturing style) has proved to be virtually timeless. Bo Diddley was a gunslinger, Jesus, and about two dozen other things. Everything he said about himself or was said about him -- it was all true. He was a bad motherfucker, the baddest. As far as musician deaths go, this is about as sad as it gets.

I think I took to Bo Diddley more so than other first generation rock and roll legends because I hear the roots of 90's rock in so much of his music. His use of the guitar as a rhythm instrument not only far predated James Brown's more celebrated style, but also anticipated the rise of scores of white experimental guitar bands. Listen to the intro of, say, "Roadrunner" and then slap on Sonic Youth's "Bull In the Heather" as a good point of comparison. Check out "The Story of Bo Diddley" and it's driving, repetitive chops and think about the debt that Stereolab owe to Bo Diddley. His obsession with effects (particularly delay) made him one of the first shoegazers, a true "smother the song with guitar" original.

Don't misinterpret this as my appreciation for Bo because he sounded "white". I could also write about my love for Bo Diddley the funk star and blues poet. But principally, it's silly to apply labels like "white" or "black" to music made by Bo Diddley in the 1950's that would only acquire race-related labels decades later. When Bo made his version of motorik rock, he was the trailblazer, making music that nobody else was making and as such, could not possibly be contextualized until a bunch of other bands (who happened to be white) picked up the mantle where Bo had left it. Bo Diddley's music was his own and nobody else's, and once elements of his style became some of the standard tools of white rock, the evolution of the music was well out of his hands. With the best artists, their legacy and influence is always this extensive, spanning multiple genres and scenes over multiple generations, such that disentangling is a confusing task at best, and futile at worst.

Now get thee to youtube if you haven't been doing so already for the past two days.

Junk notes

Just to check whether k.d. lang's version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is as good as I thought it was, I played it back to back with John Cale's version from "Fragments of a Rainy Season" (pretty much my favourite Cale album). I'll be damned if Cale's version didn't sound cocktail lounge-y next to lang's majestic performance. The girl has pipes, but you didn't need me to tell you that. With most singers, the song is just a pretty piece of poetry that makes you take notice of that person's enunciation more than you normally would. In k.d. lang's capable hands, "Hallelujah" sounds like the first and last word on all things related to love (with the exception of, naturally, "If You Could Read My Mind", and you can bet your left arm that I'd love to hear her cover *that* some day).

Thanks to Idolator for the link to the WOXY Modern Rock 500 List. I don't outright hate any of their top ten songs, but I count only one song in my personal pantheon ("Love Will Tear Us Apart", duh), three that I burned out on more than fifteen years ago and don't feel the need to hear ever again ("Sunday Bloody Sunday", "London Calling", "Blister In The Sun"), and five that I like but with reservations, as in "me likee but am glad that I don't listen to the radio anymore or else I'd surely be as burned out on them am I was for the previous three ("Creep", "Paranoid Android", "How Soon Is Now", Radio Free Europe", "Smells Like Teen Spirit"). The odd man out is the Pixies, a band that I never really got into, and therefore I never got around to liking them or getting burned out on them. The Pixies have become fixtures on Top ___ Lists over the past few years, much in the same way that the Ramones suddenly appeared on the same lists around ten years ago. The pop-punk Green Day disciples used to be everywhere, not indie rock is back in a big way, so the Pixies have stolen the slot that's seemingly reserved for all non-Smiths/REM/Clash 70's and 80's modern rock. In a few more years, the Pixies will be out in favour of a pioneer band in whatever will be big in modern rock circles in a few years time. I vote for either MBV (something called emogaze might take off) or Chemical Brothers (if big beat electronic music comes back via the likes of LCD Soundsystem-ish rock/electronic hybrids).

Matthew Sweet, "Sick of Myself" at #489 = a crime.

After several weeks with No Age's "Nouns", it's grown on me to the point that I'm convinced it's a masterpiece.