Consider two bands, A and B. Both bands release new albums at around the same time (usually this is the case, but not always, sometimes this situation applies to albums released in different years). Band A's album happens to tread on similar ground to whatever Band B is doing, and actually surpasses it -- they have essentially beaten Band B at their own game. The end result is that you end up devaluing, or even dismissing Band B's work because of the music of Band A. There should be a phrase for this.
Sure, it's not really fair -- it's not Band B's fault that Band A put out new music at the same time as them, so why can't both albums be judged separately, on their own merits, without one's perception of the quality of one being correlated to the quality of the other? But our brains don't always work that way, and besides, music listening habits *are* correlated, because listening time is finite, which means that we frequently must choose to prioritize what we want to hear. I could easily find myself thinking "I have Band A now, I don't need Band B so much anymore".
With their most recent albums, Warlocks have been Band A, while the Raveonettes have been playing the part of Band B. It's funny, because Raveonettes played the opposite role last year, acting as Band A and virtually shaming Band B's (Jesus and Mary Chain) debut album. But this year, they've moved past their "Psychocandy" phase and into their "Darklands" phase. They've toned down the cacaphony and the huge choruses, and moved toward something darker and moodier. Enter Warlocks, who have ironed out the jammy tendencies of past albums that usually resulted in a few tracks carrying on for seven or eight minutes as if by force of habit. They've stopped trying to make "Sound of Confusion" (with one exception, "Surgery" where they went girl-group and made their best album by far) and have moved on to making "The Perfect Prescription". The two sides meet at "There is a Formula to Your Despair", where Warlocks manage to outdo the Raveonettes on the latter's turf. Warlocks' previous attempts at girl group pop were highlighted by swagger and arrogance, but they had never convincingly pulled off anything tender or vulnerable.
Here is the albums ballot that I submitted for Pazz and Jop (numbers in brackets are the points awarded):
YYY's (20)
Moderat (19)
Lisa Germano (15)
Ben Klock (10)
Animal Collective (8)
Tim Hecker (7)
Moritz von Oswald Trio (6)
Matthew Robert Cooper (5)
Shackleton (5)
Warlocks, "The Mirror Explodes" (5)
After much thought, I removed Courtney Love's "Nobody's Daughter" from the list because it hasn't been released yet. As a reflection of my own listening habits and my favourite "new" music in 2009, it belonged, but it didn't feel appropriate to include it in a poll (I have thus disqualified myself from picking it for my own top ten of 2010, but reserve the right to vote for it in P&J if I choose ... this seems fair!) The points rankings are top-heavy, as they should be because only the top two albums stand out for me as classics right now, deservedly ranking amongst the decade's best music.
So with Courtney Love out of the picture, I put Warlocks "The Mirror Explodes" in the #10 spot. It's another patchy album in a list full of patchy albums, and it might be more of a "comfortable" listen rather than a work of truly great art, but I kept returning to it throughout the year and that counts for a lot seeing as my attention span has been whittled away to almost nothing thanks to my iPod, using Youtube as my personal jukebox, etc. Warlocks have been getting the shaft from critics for years, which is baffling because they consistently hit on a bunch of crit-love touchpoints (love of druggy 60's pop, girl groups, Spacemen 3/JAMC ) -- all of which can be applied to the criminally underrated Raveonettes as well. How many rock bands this year wrote a song as good as "It's Just Like Surgery"? How strong was 2005? How can a band write a song that good, and only make the 11th best album of the year? I really have no idea why the likes of Pitchfork have turned Warlocks into a punchline, consistently giving their albums grades that are comparable to a C-student's GPA. Do nostalgia trips and California bands who aren't afraid to use the word "psychedelia" add up to some kind of crit-poison?
Little White Earbuds and me: check out the mindmeld. Four albums in common, plus two others (Martyn, Redshape) that IMO didn't live up to the hype but were still pretty good.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
I can't believe it's December 15 18 already
Let's do this ...
TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2009
My excitement level with regard to this list is a bit muted, and compiling felt decidedly dispassionate and undramatic. But it's to be expected -- I blew my listmaking wad amongst all the "end of decade" excitement this year (that list is complete but has yet to be posted). What's unexpected, however, is the fairly uneven quality of these ten records. I'm not sure if there is a slam dunk classic among them, not a single one that I can promise you that I'll go to bat for in five or ten years time. Each of them are great, albeit flawed albums, there's a little bit of Verve in nearly all of them.
I've posted about how in the past couple of years, I've been discovering music more or less at random -- rather than scouring music shops, blogs, and message boards for news about new releases and making sure to check out anything that might interest me, I let the music come to me. Sometimes I tracked down a piece of music right away, and stuff I didn't get around to hearing could be easily forgotten. Sometimes I couldn't wait to hear a podcast by some unknown DJ mixing two hours of c. 1991 Sheffield bleep, and often I didn't have the patience to sit through the entire new Lindstrom and Prins Thomas album because one prog disco epic after another gets to be a bit too much. Compared to past years, this year I spent far less energy tracking down new releases and heard fewer whole albums (listening to entire albums in one sitting has become much more of a rarity for me). But I listened to more mixes and podcasts than ever before -- just another step on the road to hearing music one track at a time, rather than one album at a time.
The decline of the albums as an artistic statement (and more so as a product mover) is nothing new. But this year, I did start to wonder about my long term listening habits, and the consequences of taking the "random" approach to its logical conclusion. Eventually, my listening habits would become completely scattershot. Contextualizing music becomes more difficult if you've cut yourself off from everything going on around you, i.e. the music that's considered to be notable by whatever passes for critical consensus these days. If I can't contextualize what I'm hearing, if I lose the ability to compare my tastes with those of others (and in order to do that, I must hear at least some of the music that "they" are hearing) then my own writing is in danger of becoming irrelevant.
[OK, let's not brag ... it's already fairly irrelevant, but it's in danger of losing whatever small bit of relevance it might have.]
10. Shackleton, "Three EPs"
One person's urban decay might be another person's dreary atmospheric boredom. "Three EPs" might be bleak, but it conjures up images of Indiana Jones-style chase scenes through mossy temples in humid climates. There are no murky city streets here, no ragga croaking, instead, its spidery basslines and eccentric percussion maintain a brisk, energetic pace throughout the album. David Holmes might have made an album like this if he decided to go dub on one of his film soundtracks.
9. Matthew Robert Cooper, "Miniatures"
This was released in September 2008, but I didn't see the album reviewed until this past January. Save for one track, I didn't hear anything from "Miniatures" until 2009 and listened to it regularly throughout the year, so I'm including it here. Compared to the denser atmospheres that are typical of Cooper's work as Eluvium, "Miniatures" feels like a collection of tossed off experiments, or even demos for tracks that could be further fleshed out and recorded for an Eluvium album. If so, even Cooper's leftovers handily slay most other "ambient" composers best work. It's a solid effort until you reach the final track, "Miniature 9", which pushes the album into "must hear" territory. It not only could have appeared on Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works II" but could have been arguably the best track on that album.
8. Moritz von Oswald Trio, "Vertical Ascent"
So you may have noticed that I didn't like this album at a time when most like-minded techno heads were repping it as one of the year's best and most original albums. I've been coming around on it, partly by realizing that it demands patience and concentration, and as you allow it to envelop you, new details and phrases emerge from nearly every listen, jumping out from hidden corners of the record that you hadn't noticed before. From a cursory listen, these four long tracks seem to chase their tails. In fact, there is virtually no repetition here, but rather a stream of complex rhythmic patterns that constantly interlock and play off each other.
7. Courtney Love, "Nobody's Daughter"
Show of hands, who expected Courtney Love to reinvent herself as an elder stateswoman of rock with an album of grizzled rockers and acoustic balladry? Her nearest contemporary now seems to be Kristin Hersh, but if you compare "Nobody's Daughter" on a song-by-song basis to Kristin's widely praised 2007 album "Learn To Sing Like a Star", Courtney has her soundly beat on nearly every track. And even her voice sounds better preserved than Kristin's. How the heck did all this happen? You certainly wouldn't have believed it based on what you still hear about Love from the tabloids -- losing custody of her daughter is simply the latest disaster in what seems to be an endless sequence of unsightly news, pictures, and public embarrassments -- because on record, she's rarely sounded more determined or more focused.
6. Tim Hecker, "An Imaginary Country"
Tim Hecker's biggest strength has always been his biggest weakness -- he makes more or less the same album over and over again. He's reliable, but not particularly inventive, and his albums have become a bit too predictable. But the same is true of AC/DC! Do you see anybody complaining?
5. Animal Collective, "Merriweather Post Pavilion"
Animal Collective became almost inescapably big this year, and not only within indie music enclaves. Five years ago, who would have thought that a bunch of Brooklyn noisemakers would reach this level of critical mass? It wasn't just that the album was widely praised, lots of albums receive high praise, and in the case of this one it was all either a) deserved, b) patently ridiculous and completely OTT, or c) lamentations for the supposedly halcyon days of "Sung Tongs" (all three cases appeared in nearly equal proportions). The catch was that the album felt canonized from practically from the second it was released, its reputation wrapped up and made final before the end of January. The speed at which all this happens puts "Merriweather Post Pavillion" in a category with albums like "Kid A", or "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot".
I'm not even sure I can properly evaluate this record anymore. I'm not even sure I was able to do it eleven months ago, not after hearing nearly every track countless times on live bootleg after live bootleg over the previous two years. In 2002, I experienced this with GYBE's "Yanqui UXO". By the time the album was released, every note was already a known quantity. Expectations were set in stone and fans delivered their pre-prepared pitch right on cue. Like with "Yanqui UXO", I don't really listen to MPP too much. The studio versions might paint a different sonic palate from the live versions that evolved over the preceding twenty months, but I never felt a pressing need to listen to this album because everything on it seemed so absurdly familiar.
Get back to me in five years with this one.
4. Ben Klock, "One"
Rarely has one techno record managed to collect virtually all the sounds that I want to hear out of clubland in that year. "OK" still feels like the last word in the dubstep/techno crossover, and "Check For Pulse" and "Underneath" hit all the cavernous minimal dub techno sweet spots. But Klock isn't afraid to deviate from his safety zone. "In a While" is a ringer for the material put out by R&S in the mid-90's, and "Cargo" is a reminder of why Richard D. James did his best work under the guise of Polygon Window. In all, "One" is an extremely accomplished debut by an artist who was firing on all cylinders this year.
3. Lisa Germano, "Magic Neighbor"
Hazy piano balladry and the warm feeling of shriveling up into a cocoon never sounded so sultry.
2. Moderat, "Moderat"
With most collaborations, it's enough to expect that the artists will combine their strengths. It's unreasonable to expect that the pairing will also lead to a cancellation of each others' weaknesses. As for Modeselektor, they have a tendency to dabble in goofy ragga and other assorted knob-tweaking silliness in an OTT attempt to be edgy and unpredictable. With Apparat, it's an inability to forge their bleepy melodies into memorable hooks or anything that would stand out in a club. "Moderat" goes from strength to strength, steamrolling over all those potential weaknesses, resulting in an album that's as close to the spirit and genre-bending variety of mid-90's Orbital as anything that's been released this decade.
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "It's Blitz!"
Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always more than just shouty NYC brats, but countless listens to "Maps" didn't really prepare me for the delicate neo-shoegaze balladry of a track like "Little Shadow" (although "Modern Romance", particularly when they played it live, should have prepared me for it but I wasn't paying close enough attention at the time). After hearing the starry-eyed wonderment of tracks like "Little Shadow", "Soft Shock", and "Skeletons", suddenly it made sense to cast Karen O as the token grownup to sing with a bunch of kids on the "Where the Wild Things Are" soundtrack.
Oh yeah, they don't do that thrash-y garage rock stuff anymore, they've tweaked those tracks and they now sound like Blondie-esque disco punk dancefloor fillers. And "Hysteric" is the best ballad they've ever done.
What, you still want more?
TOP TEN ALBUMS OF 2009
My excitement level with regard to this list is a bit muted, and compiling felt decidedly dispassionate and undramatic. But it's to be expected -- I blew my listmaking wad amongst all the "end of decade" excitement this year (that list is complete but has yet to be posted). What's unexpected, however, is the fairly uneven quality of these ten records. I'm not sure if there is a slam dunk classic among them, not a single one that I can promise you that I'll go to bat for in five or ten years time. Each of them are great, albeit flawed albums, there's a little bit of Verve in nearly all of them.
I've posted about how in the past couple of years, I've been discovering music more or less at random -- rather than scouring music shops, blogs, and message boards for news about new releases and making sure to check out anything that might interest me, I let the music come to me. Sometimes I tracked down a piece of music right away, and stuff I didn't get around to hearing could be easily forgotten. Sometimes I couldn't wait to hear a podcast by some unknown DJ mixing two hours of c. 1991 Sheffield bleep, and often I didn't have the patience to sit through the entire new Lindstrom and Prins Thomas album because one prog disco epic after another gets to be a bit too much. Compared to past years, this year I spent far less energy tracking down new releases and heard fewer whole albums (listening to entire albums in one sitting has become much more of a rarity for me). But I listened to more mixes and podcasts than ever before -- just another step on the road to hearing music one track at a time, rather than one album at a time.
The decline of the albums as an artistic statement (and more so as a product mover) is nothing new. But this year, I did start to wonder about my long term listening habits, and the consequences of taking the "random" approach to its logical conclusion. Eventually, my listening habits would become completely scattershot. Contextualizing music becomes more difficult if you've cut yourself off from everything going on around you, i.e. the music that's considered to be notable by whatever passes for critical consensus these days. If I can't contextualize what I'm hearing, if I lose the ability to compare my tastes with those of others (and in order to do that, I must hear at least some of the music that "they" are hearing) then my own writing is in danger of becoming irrelevant.
[OK, let's not brag ... it's already fairly irrelevant, but it's in danger of losing whatever small bit of relevance it might have.]
10. Shackleton, "Three EPs"
One person's urban decay might be another person's dreary atmospheric boredom. "Three EPs" might be bleak, but it conjures up images of Indiana Jones-style chase scenes through mossy temples in humid climates. There are no murky city streets here, no ragga croaking, instead, its spidery basslines and eccentric percussion maintain a brisk, energetic pace throughout the album. David Holmes might have made an album like this if he decided to go dub on one of his film soundtracks.
9. Matthew Robert Cooper, "Miniatures"
This was released in September 2008, but I didn't see the album reviewed until this past January. Save for one track, I didn't hear anything from "Miniatures" until 2009 and listened to it regularly throughout the year, so I'm including it here. Compared to the denser atmospheres that are typical of Cooper's work as Eluvium, "Miniatures" feels like a collection of tossed off experiments, or even demos for tracks that could be further fleshed out and recorded for an Eluvium album. If so, even Cooper's leftovers handily slay most other "ambient" composers best work. It's a solid effort until you reach the final track, "Miniature 9", which pushes the album into "must hear" territory. It not only could have appeared on Aphex Twin's "Selected Ambient Works II" but could have been arguably the best track on that album.
8. Moritz von Oswald Trio, "Vertical Ascent"
So you may have noticed that I didn't like this album at a time when most like-minded techno heads were repping it as one of the year's best and most original albums. I've been coming around on it, partly by realizing that it demands patience and concentration, and as you allow it to envelop you, new details and phrases emerge from nearly every listen, jumping out from hidden corners of the record that you hadn't noticed before. From a cursory listen, these four long tracks seem to chase their tails. In fact, there is virtually no repetition here, but rather a stream of complex rhythmic patterns that constantly interlock and play off each other.
7. Courtney Love, "Nobody's Daughter"
Show of hands, who expected Courtney Love to reinvent herself as an elder stateswoman of rock with an album of grizzled rockers and acoustic balladry? Her nearest contemporary now seems to be Kristin Hersh, but if you compare "Nobody's Daughter" on a song-by-song basis to Kristin's widely praised 2007 album "Learn To Sing Like a Star", Courtney has her soundly beat on nearly every track. And even her voice sounds better preserved than Kristin's. How the heck did all this happen? You certainly wouldn't have believed it based on what you still hear about Love from the tabloids -- losing custody of her daughter is simply the latest disaster in what seems to be an endless sequence of unsightly news, pictures, and public embarrassments -- because on record, she's rarely sounded more determined or more focused.
6. Tim Hecker, "An Imaginary Country"
Tim Hecker's biggest strength has always been his biggest weakness -- he makes more or less the same album over and over again. He's reliable, but not particularly inventive, and his albums have become a bit too predictable. But the same is true of AC/DC! Do you see anybody complaining?
5. Animal Collective, "Merriweather Post Pavilion"
Animal Collective became almost inescapably big this year, and not only within indie music enclaves. Five years ago, who would have thought that a bunch of Brooklyn noisemakers would reach this level of critical mass? It wasn't just that the album was widely praised, lots of albums receive high praise, and in the case of this one it was all either a) deserved, b) patently ridiculous and completely OTT, or c) lamentations for the supposedly halcyon days of "Sung Tongs" (all three cases appeared in nearly equal proportions). The catch was that the album felt canonized from practically from the second it was released, its reputation wrapped up and made final before the end of January. The speed at which all this happens puts "Merriweather Post Pavillion" in a category with albums like "Kid A", or "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot".
I'm not even sure I can properly evaluate this record anymore. I'm not even sure I was able to do it eleven months ago, not after hearing nearly every track countless times on live bootleg after live bootleg over the previous two years. In 2002, I experienced this with GYBE's "Yanqui UXO". By the time the album was released, every note was already a known quantity. Expectations were set in stone and fans delivered their pre-prepared pitch right on cue. Like with "Yanqui UXO", I don't really listen to MPP too much. The studio versions might paint a different sonic palate from the live versions that evolved over the preceding twenty months, but I never felt a pressing need to listen to this album because everything on it seemed so absurdly familiar.
Get back to me in five years with this one.
4. Ben Klock, "One"
Rarely has one techno record managed to collect virtually all the sounds that I want to hear out of clubland in that year. "OK" still feels like the last word in the dubstep/techno crossover, and "Check For Pulse" and "Underneath" hit all the cavernous minimal dub techno sweet spots. But Klock isn't afraid to deviate from his safety zone. "In a While" is a ringer for the material put out by R&S in the mid-90's, and "Cargo" is a reminder of why Richard D. James did his best work under the guise of Polygon Window. In all, "One" is an extremely accomplished debut by an artist who was firing on all cylinders this year.
3. Lisa Germano, "Magic Neighbor"
Hazy piano balladry and the warm feeling of shriveling up into a cocoon never sounded so sultry.
2. Moderat, "Moderat"
With most collaborations, it's enough to expect that the artists will combine their strengths. It's unreasonable to expect that the pairing will also lead to a cancellation of each others' weaknesses. As for Modeselektor, they have a tendency to dabble in goofy ragga and other assorted knob-tweaking silliness in an OTT attempt to be edgy and unpredictable. With Apparat, it's an inability to forge their bleepy melodies into memorable hooks or anything that would stand out in a club. "Moderat" goes from strength to strength, steamrolling over all those potential weaknesses, resulting in an album that's as close to the spirit and genre-bending variety of mid-90's Orbital as anything that's been released this decade.
1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "It's Blitz!"
Yeah Yeah Yeahs were always more than just shouty NYC brats, but countless listens to "Maps" didn't really prepare me for the delicate neo-shoegaze balladry of a track like "Little Shadow" (although "Modern Romance", particularly when they played it live, should have prepared me for it but I wasn't paying close enough attention at the time). After hearing the starry-eyed wonderment of tracks like "Little Shadow", "Soft Shock", and "Skeletons", suddenly it made sense to cast Karen O as the token grownup to sing with a bunch of kids on the "Where the Wild Things Are" soundtrack.
Oh yeah, they don't do that thrash-y garage rock stuff anymore, they've tweaked those tracks and they now sound like Blondie-esque disco punk dancefloor fillers. And "Hysteric" is the best ballad they've ever done.
What, you still want more?
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Minilogue are the marathon men, plus, the new Portishead track, "Chase the Tear", is freaking SICK
It was originally advertised as a six hour live + DJ set, updated announcements during the past week claimed it would be seven hours. I'm in no position to judge, because when I arrived at Barzilay last night, Minilogue's Sebastian Mullaert was at the decks, and when I left five hours later (at 6:30), he was still there. In between, the duo shifted down the table to their live rig for a two hour live performance that relied a bit too heavily on strange effects and tweakery, but was solid nonetheless. Mullaert's two DJ sets, featuring pounding tech house and LONG transitions between tracks, were the highlights. Minilogue are obviously no strangers to this type of performance. They paced the night perfectly, building from 120 BPM to the harder and faster material of their live show, and returning to slower tempos so to not tire out the crowd as dawn approached. It certainly worked -- I can't recall the last time I saw so many people in that club after 6 AM, and many of them were the same people who were on the dancefloor when I arrived five hours earlier!
And now, for your music link of theweekend week YEAR.
My jaw dropped after the first ten seconds. Please, please PLEASE tell me that the next Portishead album will be ten tracks of "The Rip" mashed up with Pete Shelley's "Homosapien".
And now, for your music link of the
My jaw dropped after the first ten seconds. Please, please PLEASE tell me that the next Portishead album will be ten tracks of "The Rip" mashed up with Pete Shelley's "Homosapien".
Friday, December 11, 2009
Could I attempt to rank mixes/podcasts this year?
Answer: ugh. My head hurts just thinking about it.
I probably should do some sort of review, seeing as I tended to be more excited about the appearance of great new mixes or podcasts than for the release of new albums. The announcement of release dates and tracklists for new albums don't seem to match the overall "wow" factor of reading the tracklist for a forthcoming mix.
I should keep updating this space to list more of my favourites, but for now, two stand out in particular.
Ben Klock, "FACT Mix 31". Ben Klock was arguably the year's finest techno artist, his DJ sets helped to further refine the rougher edges of minimalism, and his album "One" was a techno love letter that paid homage to classic Detroit, Polygon Window's "Surfing on Sine Waves", and the banging techno styles of 2009. His FACT 31 was the year's most consistent, effortlessly cresting from peak to peak, and hitting its finest stride around the forty minute mark with his own hypnotic, deathly sparse "Before One".
Surgeon, "Resident Advisor Podcast 144". Typical Surgeon: driving, manic, absolutely relentless. True to his name, he slices up some thirty tracks in little over an hour, skillfully colliding one fierce techno and dubstep track after another. His style hasn't changed much over the past decade plus, I've always been amazed by his stamina (this stuff isn't all a bunch of studio trickery, he maintains this breakneck pace in his live DJ sets too), and how he finds ways to shoehorn non-conventional dancefloor tracks into his sets without ever breaking the mood or the rhythm (track down some sets where he slots in a bunch of mid-90's Autechre tracks, dropping them every fifth track or so).
I probably should do some sort of review, seeing as I tended to be more excited about the appearance of great new mixes or podcasts than for the release of new albums. The announcement of release dates and tracklists for new albums don't seem to match the overall "wow" factor of reading the tracklist for a forthcoming mix.
I should keep updating this space to list more of my favourites, but for now, two stand out in particular.
Ben Klock, "FACT Mix 31". Ben Klock was arguably the year's finest techno artist, his DJ sets helped to further refine the rougher edges of minimalism, and his album "One" was a techno love letter that paid homage to classic Detroit, Polygon Window's "Surfing on Sine Waves", and the banging techno styles of 2009. His FACT 31 was the year's most consistent, effortlessly cresting from peak to peak, and hitting its finest stride around the forty minute mark with his own hypnotic, deathly sparse "Before One".
Surgeon, "Resident Advisor Podcast 144". Typical Surgeon: driving, manic, absolutely relentless. True to his name, he slices up some thirty tracks in little over an hour, skillfully colliding one fierce techno and dubstep track after another. His style hasn't changed much over the past decade plus, I've always been amazed by his stamina (this stuff isn't all a bunch of studio trickery, he maintains this breakneck pace in his live DJ sets too), and how he finds ways to shoehorn non-conventional dancefloor tracks into his sets without ever breaking the mood or the rhythm (track down some sets where he slots in a bunch of mid-90's Autechre tracks, dropping them every fifth track or so).
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Top Eleven Remixes of the 00's
I considered making a list of my favourite songs of the 00's, but it was a non-starter. The root of the problem was this: a "best tracks" list that is full of album tracks is boring. It's just a "best albums" list that is bent into a slightly different form. And one's favourite tracks *should* be mostly composed of album tracks, because for the most part, the best albums feature all the best songs. Naturally, there are exceptions such as TATU, who released some of the most brilliant singles of the decade but made extremely patchy albums. But without multiple TATU's and a slate of one hit wonders (which are also rarer these days), the "best tracks" list would be mostly made up of songs from the same bands on the "best albums" list, which is a bit ridiculous because there's certainly no need to essentially compile the same list twice. What could be more boring than reading through a "best tracks" list that consists of someone's favourite album tracks?
Of course, a "best tracks" list should be first and foremost a "best singles" list, thereby clearly differentiating between great albums, great singles, the artists responsible for creating both types of music. I've always tried to approach my "Top X Tracks of the Year" lists in that way, but the distinction is starting to wane I become ever more slowly estranged from the pop charts and find fewer and fewer actual singles to get excited about. I honestly haven't given much thought as to what was the best single of the decade, although if you pointed a gun at me and gave me five seconds to either choose or die, I'm picking "Silver" by Jesu. If we're talking about proper mega-hits, i.e. one inescapably massive chart single to represent the decade, I'd probably choose "Umbrella".
Remixes, on the other hand, are a different breed, a different category of "hits". They can be sort-of singles (in that the originals get played on the radio but the remixes almost always do not), they can be random tracks that were remixed and tossed onto blogs/webpages, they can be tracks that were notable enough to be pressed onto the b-side of a vinyl release. And they are definitely not album tracks. They occupy a niche of musical parameter space that is distinct from that of albums, and largely speaking, distinct from what is happening on the pop charts. (obviously I'm not referring to hip-hop remixes here, or fluke-y exceptions like "Ignition (Remix)")
Unlike ten years ago, remixes now occupy a prominent niche among my favourite songs of the past decade. Chalk it up to a glut of vinyl purchases (mainly in first half of the decade) and an overall increase in dance music listening (thx internet). A "Best Remixes of the 00's" list, even a fairly informal one, felt necessary and appropriate. So, I started listing my clear and obvious favourite remixes from the past ten years, narrowed that small shortlist down to eleven, and assembled a SPECIAL MIX that features all eleven of these amazing tracks. Since this is supposed to be a fairly stress-free exercise, the list is unranked, what follows is the tracklisting on the mix along with comments for each track. Planning the mix itself was quite the challenge though -- I put a lot of thought into the song order since many of these songs would never ordinarily find themselves lumped together in the same DJ set.
What makes for a great remix? For me, the quality of the original track is a non-factor. I'm not looking for a remixer to "save" a track by taking a crap song and converting it to greatness, although with all of these tracks, the originals (at least those that I've heard!) pale in comparison to the remixes. In short, I'm not operating by any kind of convoluted selection process, I'm just compiling a list of my favourite songs of the 00's, except that the pool of choices is narrowed down to remixes only. If, by some vague stretch of the imagination, I was making the effort to compile a top 30 or 50 or 100 "Best Tracks of the 00's" list*, all of these remixes would surely be included (although none of the originals would be)**.
* All would be in the Top 100 for sure. Most would make the Top 50. A few would be in the Top 30
** maybe "Mr Brightside"
Download the mix here!
1. Pyramids, "The Echo of Something Lovely (Jesu Remix)", Hydra Head (2008).
I've said it before, but in latter half of the decade, Jesu became the band that I always wanted Mogwai to be. In the years following "Rock Action", Mogwai deviated from the industrial sludge rock route that they appeared to be treading upon, but Jesu picked up the ball and ran with it, peaking with the massive "Silver" and this remix. Pyramids, who are capable of making astonishing shoegaze/metal hybrids of their own, decided to soften up with this dreampop-like track, as if they were moonlighting as a goth AR Kane. Jesu reshaped the lullabies on the original track and amplified them into psychedelic gothic sludge, proving that Justin Broadrick is only too happy to invent new genres of music that you didn't know you could crave.
2. Ciara, "Goodies (Richard X Remix featuring MIA)", LaFace (2004).
I caned the hell out of this track in '05, and it's still the best thing MIA was or ever will be involved with -- on this remix, she even outshines Ciara. Richard X retained the stripped-down funkiness of the original and turned out an equally sparse remix that still comes off sounding like a club banger.
3. Freiland, "Frei/Hot Love (Justus Köhncke Feat. Meloboy Mix)", Kompakt (2004).
The Kompakt 100 project was rabidly anticipated and with good reason -- two discs of Kompakt artists remixing their label brethren's most well-known tracks, a spectacular array of talent engaging in a cross-pollination exercise to celebrate the mercurial label's one hundredth release. On paper, the concept was mouth-watering, but unfortunately the results were far less than the sum of their parts and arguably signified something of a "jump the shark" moment for the label. Rather than diversifying the styles that Kompakt had become known for, or accelerating the label's creative edge further ahead of the pack, most of the remixers churned out fairly ordinary efforts, with tracks that had seemingly appeared in superior form on many earlier Kompakt releases. Rather than advancing the label forward, Kompakt 100 found them treading water, as if the label's ideas had now been summarized, anthologized, and effectively capped.
There were only two tracks from Kompakt 100 that I would always return to, and Justus Köhncke was featured in both: The Modernist's remix of the deliciously silly "Weiche Zäune", and Köhncke's equally daft and ridiculous remix/cover version of "Frei/Hot Love". It was practically outdated from the moment it was released (schaffel lol), but it's just so damned fun. Somehow, Köhncke took the Profan formula beats, which make you feel as though you're dancing on the deck of a boat that is lurching in the high seas, added a dose of "Hot Love", and ended up with something unashamedly and irresistibly pop.
4. Datach'i, "Memorandum (Mogwai Remix)", Caipirinha (2000).
My opinion of this track hasn't changed from what I wrote on ILMixOR a few years ago, so take a moment to reread that blurb. This remix preceded "Rock Action" and hinted at the inventiveness they'd display on that album. The 2000-1 period stands out as the peak of Mogwai's career, a time when they were so recklessly creative that they could effortlessly make new noise-electronica-rock hybrid genres by night and forget about them before the morning. Although they remained brilliant at times, they unfortunately spent the latter half of the decade trying to be the shoegaze Black Sabbath instead of the shoegaze NIN.
5. Rhythm and Sound with Willi Williams, "See Mi Yah (Hallucinator Remix)", Burial Mix (2006).
This remix seemed to come out of nowhere -- Hallucinator hadn't been heard from in ages but returned to remix "See Mi Yah" into a monstrous palate of echo and bass. This is what I always hoped that the long awaited/rumoured Scion and Tikiman album would sound like.
6. Shackleton, "Blood On My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos Apocolypso Now Mix)", Skull Disco (2007).
I often have pangs of doubt about the quality of this remix, which is related to the notion that Villalobos was completely half-assing here. The beat is so simple, it might as well be a Minimal Preset on a groovebox. I can picture him stapling that beat to the spooky vocal lines from the original track and proceeding to tweak filters for twenty minutes while sipping his coffee. On the other hand, the track is relentless, hypnotic, and scary as fuck. The line "when I see the towers fall ... fall ... fall", with its zombie-like delivery and spooked-out menace laid over zonked-out acid squelches, adds up to possibly the most unexpectedly great refrain of the decade (in any genre). On both sides of the coin, a collection of simple tricks done well can certainly result in something greater than the sum of their parts, which is basically minimal techno in a nutshell.
7. Ellen Allien, "Go (Marcel Dettman Remix)", BPitch Control (2007).
By mid-decade, a lot of minimal had fallen into a comfortable rut, but tracks like these symbolized a shift away from all that, as the genre stopped being all plink plonk and started to quake again. This might be the definitive Berghain track too, a record that sounds like the environment it was meant to be played in, eight minutes of horror dub, bleeding the reverberations of cold, monolithic stone slabs.
8. Pantytec, "Elastobabe (Soul Capsule's Cosmic Warrior Mix)", Perlon (2002).
On a personal level, this record was one of the most significant vinyl purchases I ever made. It completely exploded all of my preconceptions about what styles of techno I could conceivably like and profoundly influenced my future listening habits. My preferred styles were nicely pigeonholed, on one hand you had the Mills/Lekebusch-type bangers when you wanted the hard stuff, ultra-stripped down minimal or atmospheric dub techno when you wanted the softer stuff, and in between there was virtually nothing except for the odd Thomas Brinkmann record. Anything with vocals was dismissed without a second listen, nearly without exception.
On the surface, "Elastobabe" fit into that hazily defined "in between" area but there was a lot more to it than that. "Elastobabe" was ... strange. The vocals seemed to be swirling into a hidden vortex, garbling the lyrics and rendering them incomprehensible. The pulsing rhythms were infectiously danceable, but the record still had an alien, otherworldly feel to it. I had no idea what to make of the record, but knew I had to own it because it felt like one of the hardest techno tracks I'd ever heard, with enough bass to kill a small animal. In a way, I never forgave minimal techno for quieting down so much after this.
9. Motor, "Sweatbox (Chris Liebing Remix)", Novamute (2005).
Liebing stayed fiercely loyal to hard, banging techno (occasionally getting carried away into pop trance territory) even when those styles had seemingly lost their cred among all but a few music critics and fans living in Berlin. This is the one of the ultimate "more is more" tracks, with one of the most audaciously huge breakdowns ever committed to vinyl in the name of techno.
10. The Killers, "Mr Brightside (Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke Dub)", Island (2005).
Jacques Lu Cont/Thin White Duke remixes will turn up in plenty of "best remixes of the decade" discussions, which is a testament to Stuart Price's remarkable ability to transcend genre boundaries over the past several years. Like Ric Flair in the 80's, Price has a formula (loop secondary melody line during intro, stomping chorus, bridge, stomping chorus, stir for approx. eight minutes and serve) and could plug virtually any artist (Colplay? yes, even Coldplay) into that formula and turn out a great remix. At the time, this searing tune from the Killers seemed like an unlikely candidate for a club banger, but fast forward a few years and you have Price producing the band's third album and hardly anybody blinks, so what did I know? I specifically chose the TWD Dub Mix, which to me is head and shoulders above the more commonly praised TWD ("Club Vocal") Mix thanks to stronger, beefier beats and more selective use of the vocals. When Brandon Flowers' voice crops up to sing the anthemic chorus after about five minutes of buildup, the effect is uncannily similar (at least for me) to Dave Gahan's voice hovering over the triumphant finish of the legendary Split Mix of Depeche Mode's "Never Let Me Down Again".
11. The MFA, "The Difference It Makes (Superpitcher Remix)", Kompakt Pop (2004).
If you ignore the fact that the Beloved's "The Sun Rising" (whose legend was grown thanks to a million drug-fueled dancing-til-dawn parties) was not one of their better singles, you could say that this remix was "The Sun Rising" for the 00's without insulting Superpitcher's finest achievement. Its hazy, ambient synth washes (which are what MAKE the record, hands down) and slick, propulsive beats are as positive and uplifting as any balearic anthem ever conceived. Sometimes, it almost feels like it's a shame to dance to this song and not to simply bask in it, gazing at it as if it were a painting.
Of course, a "best tracks" list should be first and foremost a "best singles" list, thereby clearly differentiating between great albums, great singles, the artists responsible for creating both types of music. I've always tried to approach my "Top X Tracks of the Year" lists in that way, but the distinction is starting to wane I become ever more slowly estranged from the pop charts and find fewer and fewer actual singles to get excited about. I honestly haven't given much thought as to what was the best single of the decade, although if you pointed a gun at me and gave me five seconds to either choose or die, I'm picking "Silver" by Jesu. If we're talking about proper mega-hits, i.e. one inescapably massive chart single to represent the decade, I'd probably choose "Umbrella".
Remixes, on the other hand, are a different breed, a different category of "hits". They can be sort-of singles (in that the originals get played on the radio but the remixes almost always do not), they can be random tracks that were remixed and tossed onto blogs/webpages, they can be tracks that were notable enough to be pressed onto the b-side of a vinyl release. And they are definitely not album tracks. They occupy a niche of musical parameter space that is distinct from that of albums, and largely speaking, distinct from what is happening on the pop charts. (obviously I'm not referring to hip-hop remixes here, or fluke-y exceptions like "Ignition (Remix)")
Unlike ten years ago, remixes now occupy a prominent niche among my favourite songs of the past decade. Chalk it up to a glut of vinyl purchases (mainly in first half of the decade) and an overall increase in dance music listening (thx internet). A "Best Remixes of the 00's" list, even a fairly informal one, felt necessary and appropriate. So, I started listing my clear and obvious favourite remixes from the past ten years, narrowed that small shortlist down to eleven, and assembled a SPECIAL MIX that features all eleven of these amazing tracks. Since this is supposed to be a fairly stress-free exercise, the list is unranked, what follows is the tracklisting on the mix along with comments for each track. Planning the mix itself was quite the challenge though -- I put a lot of thought into the song order since many of these songs would never ordinarily find themselves lumped together in the same DJ set.
What makes for a great remix? For me, the quality of the original track is a non-factor. I'm not looking for a remixer to "save" a track by taking a crap song and converting it to greatness, although with all of these tracks, the originals (at least those that I've heard!) pale in comparison to the remixes. In short, I'm not operating by any kind of convoluted selection process, I'm just compiling a list of my favourite songs of the 00's, except that the pool of choices is narrowed down to remixes only. If, by some vague stretch of the imagination, I was making the effort to compile a top 30 or 50 or 100 "Best Tracks of the 00's" list*, all of these remixes would surely be included (although none of the originals would be)**.
* All would be in the Top 100 for sure. Most would make the Top 50. A few would be in the Top 30
** maybe "Mr Brightside"
Download the mix here!
1. Pyramids, "The Echo of Something Lovely (Jesu Remix)", Hydra Head (2008).
I've said it before, but in latter half of the decade, Jesu became the band that I always wanted Mogwai to be. In the years following "Rock Action", Mogwai deviated from the industrial sludge rock route that they appeared to be treading upon, but Jesu picked up the ball and ran with it, peaking with the massive "Silver" and this remix. Pyramids, who are capable of making astonishing shoegaze/metal hybrids of their own, decided to soften up with this dreampop-like track, as if they were moonlighting as a goth AR Kane. Jesu reshaped the lullabies on the original track and amplified them into psychedelic gothic sludge, proving that Justin Broadrick is only too happy to invent new genres of music that you didn't know you could crave.
2. Ciara, "Goodies (Richard X Remix featuring MIA)", LaFace (2004).
I caned the hell out of this track in '05, and it's still the best thing MIA was or ever will be involved with -- on this remix, she even outshines Ciara. Richard X retained the stripped-down funkiness of the original and turned out an equally sparse remix that still comes off sounding like a club banger.
3. Freiland, "Frei/Hot Love (Justus Köhncke Feat. Meloboy Mix)", Kompakt (2004).
The Kompakt 100 project was rabidly anticipated and with good reason -- two discs of Kompakt artists remixing their label brethren's most well-known tracks, a spectacular array of talent engaging in a cross-pollination exercise to celebrate the mercurial label's one hundredth release. On paper, the concept was mouth-watering, but unfortunately the results were far less than the sum of their parts and arguably signified something of a "jump the shark" moment for the label. Rather than diversifying the styles that Kompakt had become known for, or accelerating the label's creative edge further ahead of the pack, most of the remixers churned out fairly ordinary efforts, with tracks that had seemingly appeared in superior form on many earlier Kompakt releases. Rather than advancing the label forward, Kompakt 100 found them treading water, as if the label's ideas had now been summarized, anthologized, and effectively capped.
There were only two tracks from Kompakt 100 that I would always return to, and Justus Köhncke was featured in both: The Modernist's remix of the deliciously silly "Weiche Zäune", and Köhncke's equally daft and ridiculous remix/cover version of "Frei/Hot Love". It was practically outdated from the moment it was released (schaffel lol), but it's just so damned fun. Somehow, Köhncke took the Profan formula beats, which make you feel as though you're dancing on the deck of a boat that is lurching in the high seas, added a dose of "Hot Love", and ended up with something unashamedly and irresistibly pop.
4. Datach'i, "Memorandum (Mogwai Remix)", Caipirinha (2000).
My opinion of this track hasn't changed from what I wrote on ILMixOR a few years ago, so take a moment to reread that blurb. This remix preceded "Rock Action" and hinted at the inventiveness they'd display on that album. The 2000-1 period stands out as the peak of Mogwai's career, a time when they were so recklessly creative that they could effortlessly make new noise-electronica-rock hybrid genres by night and forget about them before the morning. Although they remained brilliant at times, they unfortunately spent the latter half of the decade trying to be the shoegaze Black Sabbath instead of the shoegaze NIN.
5. Rhythm and Sound with Willi Williams, "See Mi Yah (Hallucinator Remix)", Burial Mix (2006).
This remix seemed to come out of nowhere -- Hallucinator hadn't been heard from in ages but returned to remix "See Mi Yah" into a monstrous palate of echo and bass. This is what I always hoped that the long awaited/rumoured Scion and Tikiman album would sound like.
6. Shackleton, "Blood On My Hands (Ricardo Villalobos Apocolypso Now Mix)", Skull Disco (2007).
I often have pangs of doubt about the quality of this remix, which is related to the notion that Villalobos was completely half-assing here. The beat is so simple, it might as well be a Minimal Preset on a groovebox. I can picture him stapling that beat to the spooky vocal lines from the original track and proceeding to tweak filters for twenty minutes while sipping his coffee. On the other hand, the track is relentless, hypnotic, and scary as fuck. The line "when I see the towers fall ... fall ... fall", with its zombie-like delivery and spooked-out menace laid over zonked-out acid squelches, adds up to possibly the most unexpectedly great refrain of the decade (in any genre). On both sides of the coin, a collection of simple tricks done well can certainly result in something greater than the sum of their parts, which is basically minimal techno in a nutshell.
7. Ellen Allien, "Go (Marcel Dettman Remix)", BPitch Control (2007).
By mid-decade, a lot of minimal had fallen into a comfortable rut, but tracks like these symbolized a shift away from all that, as the genre stopped being all plink plonk and started to quake again. This might be the definitive Berghain track too, a record that sounds like the environment it was meant to be played in, eight minutes of horror dub, bleeding the reverberations of cold, monolithic stone slabs.
8. Pantytec, "Elastobabe (Soul Capsule's Cosmic Warrior Mix)", Perlon (2002).
On a personal level, this record was one of the most significant vinyl purchases I ever made. It completely exploded all of my preconceptions about what styles of techno I could conceivably like and profoundly influenced my future listening habits. My preferred styles were nicely pigeonholed, on one hand you had the Mills/Lekebusch-type bangers when you wanted the hard stuff, ultra-stripped down minimal or atmospheric dub techno when you wanted the softer stuff, and in between there was virtually nothing except for the odd Thomas Brinkmann record. Anything with vocals was dismissed without a second listen, nearly without exception.
On the surface, "Elastobabe" fit into that hazily defined "in between" area but there was a lot more to it than that. "Elastobabe" was ... strange. The vocals seemed to be swirling into a hidden vortex, garbling the lyrics and rendering them incomprehensible. The pulsing rhythms were infectiously danceable, but the record still had an alien, otherworldly feel to it. I had no idea what to make of the record, but knew I had to own it because it felt like one of the hardest techno tracks I'd ever heard, with enough bass to kill a small animal. In a way, I never forgave minimal techno for quieting down so much after this.
9. Motor, "Sweatbox (Chris Liebing Remix)", Novamute (2005).
Liebing stayed fiercely loyal to hard, banging techno (occasionally getting carried away into pop trance territory) even when those styles had seemingly lost their cred among all but a few music critics and fans living in Berlin. This is the one of the ultimate "more is more" tracks, with one of the most audaciously huge breakdowns ever committed to vinyl in the name of techno.
10. The Killers, "Mr Brightside (Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke Dub)", Island (2005).
Jacques Lu Cont/Thin White Duke remixes will turn up in plenty of "best remixes of the decade" discussions, which is a testament to Stuart Price's remarkable ability to transcend genre boundaries over the past several years. Like Ric Flair in the 80's, Price has a formula (loop secondary melody line during intro, stomping chorus, bridge, stomping chorus, stir for approx. eight minutes and serve) and could plug virtually any artist (Colplay? yes, even Coldplay) into that formula and turn out a great remix. At the time, this searing tune from the Killers seemed like an unlikely candidate for a club banger, but fast forward a few years and you have Price producing the band's third album and hardly anybody blinks, so what did I know? I specifically chose the TWD Dub Mix, which to me is head and shoulders above the more commonly praised TWD ("Club Vocal") Mix thanks to stronger, beefier beats and more selective use of the vocals. When Brandon Flowers' voice crops up to sing the anthemic chorus after about five minutes of buildup, the effect is uncannily similar (at least for me) to Dave Gahan's voice hovering over the triumphant finish of the legendary Split Mix of Depeche Mode's "Never Let Me Down Again".
11. The MFA, "The Difference It Makes (Superpitcher Remix)", Kompakt Pop (2004).
If you ignore the fact that the Beloved's "The Sun Rising" (whose legend was grown thanks to a million drug-fueled dancing-til-dawn parties) was not one of their better singles, you could say that this remix was "The Sun Rising" for the 00's without insulting Superpitcher's finest achievement. Its hazy, ambient synth washes (which are what MAKE the record, hands down) and slick, propulsive beats are as positive and uplifting as any balearic anthem ever conceived. Sometimes, it almost feels like it's a shame to dance to this song and not to simply bask in it, gazing at it as if it were a painting.
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Party weekend
Most of the happenings during the Tabac Weekender were not really my style, but seeing Rhythm and Sound ft. Tikiman was a must. I still have strong memories of the Scion ft. Tikiman show that I saw in 2002 (which was one of the very best shows I have ever seen) and I couldn't miss the opportunity to see (some of) these guys again, to hope that they can reproduce the magic of their recordings together.
Warming up the crowd beforehand is "A1 - Live Dub PA", and from the title I was expecting a guy playing records while his friends joined in with percussion. In fact they were a full-fledged drums/bass/keys/brass live band, making this the most live "Live PA" I've ever seen. The guy working the mixing desk was punching buttons like an ADD-riddled child on a sugar rush, but otherwise, this was a strong, tight performance.
A few years ago, I saw Rhythm and Sound perform a DJ set in Toronto, IIRC, Tikiman was supposed to join them but had to cancel at the last minute. This performance was more or less what that one was slated to be -- Ernestus plays the records and works the FX, while Tikiman sings on top. He's such a great vocalist that it's great to watch him work no matter the material, but needless to say I miss the techno elements of this collaboration. They've sounded great together when they've stuck to more traditional dub reggae (on "See Mi Yah", for example), but I start losing interest when they venture into dancehall.
For their 6th Anniversary party, Pacotek went the extra mile and booked a fantastic double bill. Falco Brocksieper, performing live, worked an energetic set of streamlined, Detroit-ish techno that was fairly reminiscent of Dave Angel's mid-90's work. I was a bit surprised to discover that Mike Huckaby is a bit of a sloppy mixer behind the decks, but what he might have lacked in precision was more than compensated by his ability to keep the set flowing with one massive techno soul anthem after another.
Warming up the crowd beforehand is "A1 - Live Dub PA", and from the title I was expecting a guy playing records while his friends joined in with percussion. In fact they were a full-fledged drums/bass/keys/brass live band, making this the most live "Live PA" I've ever seen. The guy working the mixing desk was punching buttons like an ADD-riddled child on a sugar rush, but otherwise, this was a strong, tight performance.
A few years ago, I saw Rhythm and Sound perform a DJ set in Toronto, IIRC, Tikiman was supposed to join them but had to cancel at the last minute. This performance was more or less what that one was slated to be -- Ernestus plays the records and works the FX, while Tikiman sings on top. He's such a great vocalist that it's great to watch him work no matter the material, but needless to say I miss the techno elements of this collaboration. They've sounded great together when they've stuck to more traditional dub reggae (on "See Mi Yah", for example), but I start losing interest when they venture into dancehall.
For their 6th Anniversary party, Pacotek went the extra mile and booked a fantastic double bill. Falco Brocksieper, performing live, worked an energetic set of streamlined, Detroit-ish techno that was fairly reminiscent of Dave Angel's mid-90's work. I was a bit surprised to discover that Mike Huckaby is a bit of a sloppy mixer behind the decks, but what he might have lacked in precision was more than compensated by his ability to keep the set flowing with one massive techno soul anthem after another.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Lisa Germano, "Magic Neighbor"
It's shame that casual listeners and reviewers will hear this album and wave it away as just another Lisa Germano album. Every review will feature at least one Michael Gira reference and take note at Germano's signature talent for being simultaneously twee and glum. They'll tell you that it's a nice listen, and present a 7/10 rating to ensure that nobody other than her fans will get too excited about it. It's really a shame, because "Magic Neighbor" might be her best album.
Sure, it's partly Germano's fault. She's long since settled into a comfort zone where she's comfortable playing for her small and devoted fan base and has no interest in taking new risks to get noticed, which is why you don't see her trying to expand into piano-led dubstep or anything.
During the album's perfectly brief 34-minute run time, she repeatedly hits upon the magic formula that made "The Darkest Night of All" one of her very best tracks -- the combination of angst and heart-swelling delicacy, where the whole track floats gently by and you find yourself asking whether you dreamed the whole thing once it's over. It's her most "4AD" album, even more so than the albums she made for 4AD. It feels like dreampop even though it doesn't resort to a lot of studio trickery, which is a tribute to the strength of the songwriting, Germano's use of her voice as a simple yet powerful lead instrument, and light embellishments (echo or double-tracking on the vocals, using the piano pedals as subtle percussion as in "Snow") that give the album its other-worldly qualities. In fact, it's her simplest album in terms of instrumentation. With little more than piano or guitar carrying nearly every track, these are almost fully formed stage-ready arrangements for Germano's solo gigs.
The few mis-steps happen when Germano tries to be too lighthearted and cute, but it's a pill you have to swallow when you listen to her albums. On the title track we get the obligatory cat reference, "he must be G-d, he can turn cats into pieces of furniture, or a couple pieces of furniture" ... OK, she loves cats, we get it, but oh wow is that a horrible line. Even so, she buries this song midway through the album, so it's hardly a focal point on the record. Yeah, the sequencing here is also great, starting with the pretty instrumental piece "Marypan" (which acts like a mini-overture), bouncing between sombre tunes and lighter interludes like "Kitty Train", and finally dropping the hammer with the closing triumvirate of "Snow", "Painting the Doors" and "Cocoon". "Snow" is the album's standout piece, with its sparse opening swelling into almost unbearable tension by the end, reminiscent of (and comparable to) Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" (oh yes, I just went there, believe it, and if you play the songs back-to-back you'll notice the similarities too). After a two minute, piano-only intro, "Cocoon"'s refrain of "make the butterflies go away" feels devastating, regardless of whether you take the line literally or as a plea for the banishment of nervous feelings in the pit of one's stomach.
Sure, it's partly Germano's fault. She's long since settled into a comfort zone where she's comfortable playing for her small and devoted fan base and has no interest in taking new risks to get noticed, which is why you don't see her trying to expand into piano-led dubstep or anything.
During the album's perfectly brief 34-minute run time, she repeatedly hits upon the magic formula that made "The Darkest Night of All" one of her very best tracks -- the combination of angst and heart-swelling delicacy, where the whole track floats gently by and you find yourself asking whether you dreamed the whole thing once it's over. It's her most "4AD" album, even more so than the albums she made for 4AD. It feels like dreampop even though it doesn't resort to a lot of studio trickery, which is a tribute to the strength of the songwriting, Germano's use of her voice as a simple yet powerful lead instrument, and light embellishments (echo or double-tracking on the vocals, using the piano pedals as subtle percussion as in "Snow") that give the album its other-worldly qualities. In fact, it's her simplest album in terms of instrumentation. With little more than piano or guitar carrying nearly every track, these are almost fully formed stage-ready arrangements for Germano's solo gigs.
The few mis-steps happen when Germano tries to be too lighthearted and cute, but it's a pill you have to swallow when you listen to her albums. On the title track we get the obligatory cat reference, "he must be G-d, he can turn cats into pieces of furniture, or a couple pieces of furniture" ... OK, she loves cats, we get it, but oh wow is that a horrible line. Even so, she buries this song midway through the album, so it's hardly a focal point on the record. Yeah, the sequencing here is also great, starting with the pretty instrumental piece "Marypan" (which acts like a mini-overture), bouncing between sombre tunes and lighter interludes like "Kitty Train", and finally dropping the hammer with the closing triumvirate of "Snow", "Painting the Doors" and "Cocoon". "Snow" is the album's standout piece, with its sparse opening swelling into almost unbearable tension by the end, reminiscent of (and comparable to) Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" (oh yes, I just went there, believe it, and if you play the songs back-to-back you'll notice the similarities too). After a two minute, piano-only intro, "Cocoon"'s refrain of "make the butterflies go away" feels devastating, regardless of whether you take the line literally or as a plea for the banishment of nervous feelings in the pit of one's stomach.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Priceless bit from Ralf Hutter interview
Pitchfork: What about the place of humor in Kraftwerk's music?
RH: It's really good humor, I think it's also very serious. It's simultaneous. So I don't know; I can't express in words, but it's in the music, and it's in the words, and I think people understand. It's also what I call "black humor", because we wear black shoes.
He blindsides you with that line and plays it completely straight, but that just *has* to be a joke, it just has to be. He might be a bit of an eccentric, but this is proof that Ralf Hutter is funnier than you. Read the whole interview here.
And this wasn't even the most awesomely bizarre music-relating thing I read today ... that honour goes to the news about Ladytron working with Christina Aguilera on her next album. She's done poppy, skanky, jazzy, and now ... goth-y? I'm there.
RH: It's really good humor, I think it's also very serious. It's simultaneous. So I don't know; I can't express in words, but it's in the music, and it's in the words, and I think people understand. It's also what I call "black humor", because we wear black shoes.
He blindsides you with that line and plays it completely straight, but that just *has* to be a joke, it just has to be. He might be a bit of an eccentric, but this is proof that Ralf Hutter is funnier than you. Read the whole interview here.
And this wasn't even the most awesomely bizarre music-relating thing I read today ... that honour goes to the news about Ladytron working with Christina Aguilera on her next album. She's done poppy, skanky, jazzy, and now ... goth-y? I'm there.
Orbital, Live at Manchester Academy, 18/09/2009
Orbital returned to gigging this year and amidst all of the bug-eyed excitement over the setlist, I quietly noted that it wasn't all that different than what they were playing over the last few years of their career (including the often wretched "Doctor" as an encore), plus, no tracks from "Snivilisation" and the worst track from "Middle of Nowhere" does not add up to my dream anything.
And of course, then I heard a live recording.
Reading the track list doesn't do the gig justice ... it doesn't capture the four minutes of "The Mobius" that gets dropped into the middle of "Out There Somewhere", or how "Lush" is repeatedly peppered with snippets from the still-arresting "Lush (Euro-Tunnel Disaster '94), or the way "Chime" also cycles through a bunch of different versions, or how "The Box" gets yanked out of mothballs and segues its way into "Doctor", which sounds like a disastrous transition on paper but works brilliantly because of how they tame most of the latter track's innate silliness. Orbital are BACK, and they've tweaked the old formulas just enough so that it actually feels like a near-complete reinvention ...
What's more, the timing of their comeback is fitting -- now that the minimal fad has receded and big, melodic anthems have picked up in popularity, Orbital's music feels more contemporary and relevant than at any time in the past ten years. After their "Orbital II"/"Snivilisation"/"In Sides" run, almost any follow-up album would have to be viewed as a disappointment, but ten years removed from that context, it's a lot easier to hear "Middle of Nowhere" as a stand-alone work and to recognize how brilliant and forward-thinking it is. At the time, I felt that the album peaked during the first minute of "Way Out", from that moment on, they said goodbye to the sweeping cinematic scenery that made "In Sides" so magical, and settled into being just another techno act. Well, I was wrong -- "Middle Of Nowhere" is a complex work, packed with more bleepy hooks than should be legally allowed, and "Nothing Left" is by far their most underrated single.
And of course, then I heard a live recording.
Reading the track list doesn't do the gig justice ... it doesn't capture the four minutes of "The Mobius" that gets dropped into the middle of "Out There Somewhere", or how "Lush" is repeatedly peppered with snippets from the still-arresting "Lush (Euro-Tunnel Disaster '94), or the way "Chime" also cycles through a bunch of different versions, or how "The Box" gets yanked out of mothballs and segues its way into "Doctor", which sounds like a disastrous transition on paper but works brilliantly because of how they tame most of the latter track's innate silliness. Orbital are BACK, and they've tweaked the old formulas just enough so that it actually feels like a near-complete reinvention ...
What's more, the timing of their comeback is fitting -- now that the minimal fad has receded and big, melodic anthems have picked up in popularity, Orbital's music feels more contemporary and relevant than at any time in the past ten years. After their "Orbital II"/"Snivilisation"/"In Sides" run, almost any follow-up album would have to be viewed as a disappointment, but ten years removed from that context, it's a lot easier to hear "Middle of Nowhere" as a stand-alone work and to recognize how brilliant and forward-thinking it is. At the time, I felt that the album peaked during the first minute of "Way Out", from that moment on, they said goodbye to the sweeping cinematic scenery that made "In Sides" so magical, and settled into being just another techno act. Well, I was wrong -- "Middle Of Nowhere" is a complex work, packed with more bleepy hooks than should be legally allowed, and "Nothing Left" is by far their most underrated single.
Monday, November 09, 2009
Old Fart Musician complains that things aren't what they used to be, film at 11
The musician in question is John Taylor of Duran Duran, and he actually makes a good (albeit not particularly original) point.
The internet has not stunted our collective musical growth, so ignore that slightly batshit comment for the moment.
However, there is unquestionably "immense power in restriction and holding back". Celebrities are celebrities because we, who are not famous, revel in watching people do things that we cannot do. You, me, and Kanye West can all post updates on Twitter. However, me and you will not appear on MTV.
Duran Duran became megacelebs because there is nothing cooler and sexier than being on TV and having your music played over video montages of the band lounging speeding yachts, throwing champagne parties, and frolicking with girls in skimpy bikinis. Of course, it was all possible because a few major labels controlled all the music, and one channel (MTV) controlled which videos were played -- when your video was in heavy rotation on MTV in 1983, EVERYONE saw it. Those times are long since gone, the industry is too fractured now. This fact seems to be lost on John Taylor.
But the question remains: given that attention spans are shrinking all the time, partly thanks to our gazes being averted to a zillion nodes in a multimedia sea, how can a musical artist seek the kind of "magnetic attraction" over that can only come with being *less* interactive with their audience? The formula has worked in dance music circles for decades (Burial, "who is Rex the Dog?", the list goes on and on). REM became exponentially more famous when they stopped touring in the early 90's and captivated music fans with two somber, emotionally draining albums accompanied by a series of unforgettable videos (this model for success is of course dead in the water now, I am simply pointing out what they did). Could the next wave of pop stars find their breakthrough by following Taylor's advice -- by finding a way to become more famous by receding from the spotlight? It would be a refreshing change ...
The internet has not stunted our collective musical growth, so ignore that slightly batshit comment for the moment.
However, there is unquestionably "immense power in restriction and holding back". Celebrities are celebrities because we, who are not famous, revel in watching people do things that we cannot do. You, me, and Kanye West can all post updates on Twitter. However, me and you will not appear on MTV.
Duran Duran became megacelebs because there is nothing cooler and sexier than being on TV and having your music played over video montages of the band lounging speeding yachts, throwing champagne parties, and frolicking with girls in skimpy bikinis. Of course, it was all possible because a few major labels controlled all the music, and one channel (MTV) controlled which videos were played -- when your video was in heavy rotation on MTV in 1983, EVERYONE saw it. Those times are long since gone, the industry is too fractured now. This fact seems to be lost on John Taylor.
But the question remains: given that attention spans are shrinking all the time, partly thanks to our gazes being averted to a zillion nodes in a multimedia sea, how can a musical artist seek the kind of "magnetic attraction" over that can only come with being *less* interactive with their audience? The formula has worked in dance music circles for decades (Burial, "who is Rex the Dog?", the list goes on and on). REM became exponentially more famous when they stopped touring in the early 90's and captivated music fans with two somber, emotionally draining albums accompanied by a series of unforgettable videos (this model for success is of course dead in the water now, I am simply pointing out what they did). Could the next wave of pop stars find their breakthrough by following Taylor's advice -- by finding a way to become more famous by receding from the spotlight? It would be a refreshing change ...
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