Pop Curmudgeon

Gibbs and expectations

2010-09-09T17:57:00.000-05:00

If you know me, you know I'm down with Freddie Gibbs. This past Saturday he put on one of Memorial Union Terrace's most memorable shows, if only because he so defiantly paraded the very things the 5 Elements of Hip Hop diversity festival and MU Terrace were set out to destroy—drugs, sex, "f@#$ the police" chants.

It was kind of liberating in some ways, but one thing at the show that did bother me was his very vocal homophobia. He repeatedly mentioned the strict enforcement on "No gay shit in the Freddie Gibbs show," among other "no homo" taunts.

We've taken to crowning him the next gangster-rap icon, the most likely to write the next "Changes," or whatever 2Pac mantle you want someone to take—and many of Gibbs' insights into the streets makes him seem worthy of this title. He has the chops to attract ears and the wisdom to open eyes. We want people to listen to Gibbs because—when it comes to poverty, gang activity, what have you—he has some genuinely productive things to say. But what happens when we appoint someone as a spokesperson and they don't say what we want them to? You can't hate a tiger for wanting to fight, and I suppose nor can you hate a hood rapper for having some less-than-ideal values.

I suppose it's partially our own fault. We excuse his criminal activity because we can sympathize, and maybe some of us feel semi responsible. He steals money because The System has put him at a greater disadvantage and he needs to get his income some way or another. He smokes weed because it provides him the catharsis from his oppressive lifestyle that we've reinforced in such a closed capitalist system. He fornicates with copious ladies because, well, he's Freddie Gibbs and there's nobody who's going to tell him no. But he doesn't approve of gay people? We had no hand in that.

After writing through that, though, I guess there's still a further paradox that even that thought process yields the hypocrisy of deciding when a subject is black-and-white and when it's got a lot of gray matter. Either way, we're trying to project our own values onto someone who we're asking to shoulder more responsibility than ourselves. Maybe he isn't as enlightened as we set him up to be, and maybe that's enough to turn some people off.

And from where I'm sitting, this is just one of two fronts he's yet to prove himself on—Gibbs lacks a truly signature style other than amorphous. He can spit any flow and fit any beat. He's the five-tool emcee who can do anything and everything, but what happens more often than not is he flexes too much without lifting any weight, if you follow the metaphor. He can change his flow, he can wrap it any which way, but he eludes any identifiable trait other than the trait of elasticity. He doesn't belong to any established geographic field of rap, which makes it even harder. In all likelihood, he needs to recreate midwestern backpack rap (is that even what you call College Dropout?) to fit his modes.

That said, Gibbs' amorphousness has a ways to go before reaching ambiguity, and he still sounds fresh as ever over this new slow, southern joint:

Final verdict: I don't care if he's our spokesperson or not—he just needs to make up his mind and keep rapping.

Camera pop

2010-09-01T11:57:00.000-05:00

Matt & Kim need to coordinate this stuff better. Their previous record, Grand, came out in January; they got naked in the winter; and now they drop this decidedly summer romp just when everyone's gearing up for autumn (link to The Fader's stream). But it's, like, whatever.

The brass-infused hook is pretty hot, and this is easily the most involved Matt & Kim beat we've heard yet. I tend to lose interest in the lazy chorus (since when do Matt & Kim let things swell up like that and abandon so much latent energy?), but I can appreciate the sentiment. Life is short, don't get stuck in the moment so long that it becomes the past—inspirational, right? That's how I know they don't blame me for turning it off in favor of this new No Age leak all the time.

After last year's Losing Feeling EP, we got a sense the two-some might abandon their signature ethereal noise-punk for a more deliberate, pop-minded approach—but this new record is a lot more even-handed than Losing Feeling. They take their hand at capturing the same atmospheric nut-flexing without all the esoteric prodding; and they end up with a whole bunch of sweet pop songs in spite of it all. Of course, sweet pop songs don't always translate too well, and Everything In Between tends to lose traction. At times it almost sounds cute, and it's almost like a regression to '90s pop-punk predecessors. It's got the crunch we need from No Age, but not the stadiums of piercing hooks that Nouns delivered in bushels.

Their dilemma seems contagious, though. Nobunny's new joint, First Blood, is a strong statement and stark transition from the gutter-pop leather on Love Visions. It's more rockabilly, maybe, and invokes more twangy punk a la Spider Bags than the direct Ramones allusions he'd done earlier. It's a more open palette, and in the long run it may be for the best. But right now it just doesn't sound like as much fun—and that's all Nobunny is supposed to be about.

Beach sports

2010-08-24T15:21:00.000-05:00

There's a new Beach House song, but this one sounds, uh, different. "White Moon" is not as lush or as majestic as anything on Teen Dream. It's more of a run-of-the-mill pop song—more practical, even. It sounds like it was recorded on a cheaper keyboard with a cheaper drum machine with a half-asleep vocalist. It's all smaller, more intimate, and yet it doesn't feel as intensely personal as Teen Dream. Whatever, it's still good. (via The Fader or via Pitchfork or via Beach House or via Sub Pop or whatever)
Beach House - White Moon (Itunes Session) by subpop

I guess what strikes me most about it is how out of place it sounds for summer. Teen Dream is an excellent autumn album, but it carries over especially well to the summer. "White Moon," though, doesn't sound at all like anything I would want to play at a cookout.

That's where these guys come in. Husband-wife duo Tennis play the kind of boat music I can get behind. It's gentler and less pretentious than Vampire Weekend, and I joke to myself (every bit as lame as it sounds) that they're the anti-VW. Their name is a reference to the husband's days playing that stuffy sport in college—a self-referential joke.

They've been around for quite a while now, but let's just throw this in the "Kyle's an idiot for ignoring them for so long" pile and pretend like we've been hearing this all summer.

***

And just in case anyone was suspicious about Ted Leo—once the man, always the man.

Chillwave shmillwave

2010-08-17T19:51:00.000-05:00

In all honesty, I'm not sure what we're supposed to be taking from chillwave music. I know I like it because it sounds enchanting in a gloomy way. The chillwave I like most lets me wallow around—not so much in pity or misery, rather in a sense of exploration for the sake of not sitting still all the time. Ironically, I take most chillwave while sitting down.

And in all honesty, I don't know what that means for my consumption of chillwave. Take, for instance, Small Black, who's debut EP I gobble up whole and hard. They're probably not the best chillwave band in the world—hello, Neon Indian—but they seem like the one best suited to my conception of it as an exercise in monotonous relocation.

Their new single, "Photojournalist" from their forthcoming debut LP, sounds like all the other Small Black songs, but the vocals are more reverbed, more slippery. They sound like Washed Out—which is cool, but not as cool as if they'd still just sounded like Small Black. And when he sings "Rise up again / Rise up again like a ghost" it sounds more like a precursor than the chorus they've dressed it up to be. Chillwave is an exercise in monotony, but all too often it's an exercise in frustration as well. The chorus is a launching point, and the only thing that separates those things from cliffs is a strong motor. "Photojournalist" grooves alright, and if New Chain was filled with songs exactly like this I'd probably be just fine with it. But it only bolsters the argument that chillwave is too pretentious for its own survival. Sometimes pretentiousness just means you know more than everyone else—but if that's the case then someone needs to go to the head of the class and prove it.

But we can take solace in bands like P.S. I Love You, who are finally making the dots and lines to chillwave more pronounced. P.S. I Love You is a stupid name for a band, but a good band, you see. Their song from last year's split 7" with Diamond Rings was a seemless re-capturing of what made Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary so comfortably enriching. Matter of fact, I've already blogged about it.

Earlier this month we got two new songs from them, and neither recreate the same immediacy of "Facelove." "2012" starts out appealing enough, with that slick pick-work on the guitar, and it carries it throughout. My one concern about P.S. I Love You (other than the fact that their name sucks so much) is that they don't have enough ideas to sustain the dynamic nature their songs demand. But that's not really a problem here, and it seems "2012" sounds better each new listen.

"Butterflies and Boners" has the opposite deal going on. It starts out slow and lurching—I might even call it fluttering if that guitar wasn't so heavy. It ends up picking up with a pretty rad breakdown, led by that fluttering guitar finally finding a direction and doing what ultimately sounds more like fluttering anyway. Maybe the title has it backwards.

Either way, they're both pretty sweet, and especially interesting because of the lines we can draw between them and chillwave. They're muffled and not particularly thrilled to be getting in our ears, but they show how that can manifest in a more angular sound that accredits Wolf Parade (or, shit, Pixies and Guided by Voices) more than the Beach Boys. It doesn't hide itself behind such dense reverb, and it's not too pretentious for catharsis. If the whole point of chillwave is the unwillingness to get out of bed—and I could be wrong about this; I don't think I do enough drugs to really know—then it's about time someone cook themselves some goddamn breakfast, lest we all starve.

Secret Cities

2010-08-16T16:08:00.000-05:00

I meant to write this up a few weeks ago, but, as is the case with most ideas, I forgot about it. But now I'm here some three weeks later and I'm still listening to Pink Graffiti.

Pink Graffiti is the debut album from Fargo, North Dakota's Secret Cities. It combines orchestral bombast (think Arcade Fire's "Intervention") with soft intimacy that immediately evokes the Microphones (in my mind, at least).

The thing about Pink Graffiti that grabs me most, though, is how much texture and geography they infuse into such soft-spoken medleys. For most people, I assume, Fargo may as well be the entire northern crust of land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains; and Pink Graffiti feels like it covers that same distance. And when it's on, it matches the filthy honesty of such barren land. But when it's off, it tries to shy away in a sonic niche that doesn't lend many roofs to hide under.

Secret Cities are a young group, though, and it shows. The church-choir chorus on "Slacker" sounds too Hallmark-y, like it was ripped straight from the church scene in "Home Alone" (visually, at least—I know they weren't singing this song). I think what bothers me most about it is not the sympathetic predictability of the melody, rather the unsettling dichotomy between the message and the presentation. Pink Graffiti is about a lot of things (remember, sprawling geography), but mostly it covers raw, exposed wounds. It's abandoned and clawing its way out, and the religious imagery they evoke seems like a scapegoat. Confronting problems on our own is what we're here for, and it feels like we're getting rick-rolled when we're deferred to a robed choir.

Yet, there's a point in "Pink Graffiti pt. 2" when the church-choir hums along only to set the stage for the icy, direct chorus. The ascending lead sounds desperate, tarred and remote; and I think that's the whole point of this album. The sprawled arrangements and sloping arcs are all very interesting, but that kind of brutal honesty is what an album like Pink Graffiti thrives on.

Like I said, Pink Graffiti is an awesome debut (it's stuck around for over a month, remember); and those spineless confessionals are few. But they are enough to stall the pace on a record that depends so much on its ability to carry.

Indeed, much of this album sounds like it was strummed out to act as a vehicle for conversation on a late summer night. We're all among friends, and it sounds like they've got some pretty major issues eating at their skin—and in North Dakota, who doesn't? So if we're not talking about baseball, they'd better stop pussy-footing around.

Sing yr strings out

2010-08-15T14:15:00.001-05:00

I generally have a problem with people saying inanimate objects sing. Wrong instrument, you know? And I think that's what makes it so hard for me to really appreciate post-rock. All those major breaks of suspended chorale resonate with me the same way the WNBA does. Know your role.

There's something different about Fang Island, though. Maybe it's that they actually have vocals every once in a while—but most of their songs don't. A big part of it is probably that their songs are not nearly as drawn-out or doggedly ethereal as actual post-rock bands. Fang Island play songs that sound like Andrew W.K. covering Animal Collective—arresting pop with great haste and intensity. It's just, they do most of it with their instruments, and when they do sing, it's usually in the form of group chants that drag along their guitars.

Their record, this year's self-titled debut, can drag on at times, and sometimes it lacks in fruitful ideas. But last night at the Memorial Union Terrace, their set was packed with jams, and stayed fresh—likely due to sheer force of will. They were loud, and they were awesome. For the last song of their set, they covered Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby." Maybe it's because so much of my youth was spent watching music videos on MTV, or maybe because it was such a perfectly executed dichotomy of an impossibly heavy band playing such a soft, breezy song; but one way or another it gave me overwhelming insight into what exactly people mean when they humanize guitars. "Do do doop, dum"—those guitars sang it.

Magic fossils

2010-08-10T20:30:00.000-05:00

One album I've been giving a fair amount of attention over the last month is the Magic Kids debut, Memphis. Magic Kids shared that split 7" with Smith Westerns last year, but the commercial-grade twee that "Superball" did so well hardly captures what matters about Magic Kids: They're twee-ish alright, but there's a glossy shimmer to it that re-captures what I'm about to coin '70s chatterbox pop—it's all centered around an endless dialogue that never actually happens.

Perfect example: "Daydream Believer." It's head-in-the-clouds infatuation brought down to earth only through pop melodies. I like to think of Magic Kids as the Monkees to Smith Westerns' Beatles for basically that reason. On the surface both of their intentions are good; but while Magic Kids dream big and outwardly, Smith Westerns hardly muster the courage to think. Magic Kids buy new wardrobes for the dance; Smith Westerns buy 40s and talk about what girls they would have danced with had they not gotten so loaded. It's probably more rewarding to root for Magic Kids. I can relate better to Smith Westerns. Bingo bango.

You know what else I find myself revisiting just about every week is that self-titled Beach Fossils release. Nothing about it is spectacular—hardly any of it is even noteworthy. But its pop sensibilities are so fundamental and exact that it's usually the most natural choice to hear whenever I have a break.

Pitchfork.tv did a pretty sweet feature on this one time when they let Beach Fossils play their office party, and you can stream that whole thing on the pitchfork.tv site. I've embedded (probably) my favorite below:

They remind me quite a bit of the Drums, only they're not as eccentric (that is, gratingly poppy—more my speed) and their album is better (that is, more consistent). It's a lot more self-deprecating too, which I guess is part of it being more my speed. They get a lot of lushness out of how minimalist their instrumentation is, though, and I'm down with that.

Hello ladies

2010-08-10T15:58:00.000-05:00

I've been down with Puro Instinct since back when they were called Pearl Harbor—how's that for some indie-cred chest-bumpin'. Puro Instinct is a stupid name, and it reminds me of those bi-lingual billboards that're poppin' up in big cities these days. It must be some study in assimilation; if you can't beat 'em, convince 'em to join your corner. And Puro Instinct are the kind of assimilation that'll put chillwave on the CW, or whatever channel "Gilmore Girls" is on these days.

I don't mean to sound too harsh, because I do dig it pretty hard. You can stream their whole EP on their bandcamp page, and it sounds good—sounds like the EP of theirs I downloaded when they had a different name. That guy got a mention on the "Lady Pop" mixtape, so you know it's good.

But we should still acknowledge it for what it is: an overmatched stab at Warpaint (who immediately followed the Peal Harbor track on "Lady Pop"). If Puro Instinct are about to be on "Gilmore Girls," Warpaint are fightin'-fit for... ugh, uh, the type of drama I would watch. I need to watch more TV.

Just learned on their Wiki page that Warpaint were formed on Valentine's Day 2004—which is rad because it's my birthday and also means they embody some sort of date or anti-date ethos. I think it adds something to the slippery anti-tension they create.

I've never watched it, but my guess is "True Blood" would air Warpaint. Not during killing scenes, though.

The Suburbs

2010-08-04T12:40:00.000-05:00

Listen here: If you're going to try to make some grand statement at me, you need to do one of two things: 1. Tell me something I don't know; or 2. Tell me something I already knew, but more eloquently than I've heard it. Just make it the most creative, engrossing story I've heard, that's all.

So The Suburbs, the new album from the Arcade Fire—and which the BBC have claimed might be better than OK Computer—is about aging and modernity. I've read a thing or two about that. I don't think I needed to read The Suburbs.

To be fair: Lead track "The Suburbs" rules—I just didn't need to hear 14 less interesting ways of saying the same thing afterward. The track I left out is "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)," because that song rules, too.

The stuttering guitar line on "Modern Man" and the fist-pumping start-stops on "City With No Children" sound like the most obvious Springsteen allusions in their catalog, and the wasted youth/backs-against-the-wall/no-restraints ethos are all the same. But whenever they show glimpses of a crescendo into the kind of wide-open chorus they threw down on so perfectly on Funeral, they throw up their hands in defeat. Probably wouldn't have sounded as good as "Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out" anyways.

I enjoy the echoing "The Suburbs (continued)," but I can't help but feeling like we've gotten back to the start without actually having gone anywhere. We drove in a big circle and saw a bunch of the same—not unlike a suburb. My biggest problem is that I can't tell how meta-aware they meant it to be.

The Suburbs tries really hard to be black and white. They mention "sides" over and over, as if there's a clear line between corporate and private in gentrification. And maybe that's what bothers me most about The Suburbs: how linear it is. Maybe it's a comment on the linear path to depression suburban life can create, but you're lying to yourself if you think suburbs are the only pure form of evil. Before there was "Bowling Alone" there was "The Jungle"—modernity has been a problem since we acknowledged it as a reference point, and we've been hearing this same story just as long.

So what do I think of The Suburbs? I think it's too long and too obvious. I'd rather read "Revolutionary Road" again instead.

Welcoming friends

2010-07-31T18:29:00.000-05:00

The Internet just got a whole lot bigger. There's been a recurring theme in most of my quasi-insightful long-form posts (i.e. the ones you never read) in that just about all of them originated from some nugget of insightful napalm from my main man Anthony Cefali. Well, now Anthony's got his own blog called Things Mistaken for Dinosaurs, and will assuredly do everything in his power to make my own humble site (even more) obsolete.

Especially refreshing was this take on ephemerality and Titus Andronicus lyrics. Anthony frames it through Interpol, but it may as well have been myself writing about the Strokes, or probably any other one of you and your first favorite band that first let you down (for many I would guess Weezer). At some levels, they're all doomed. No band can grow without ostracizing a number of old followers because we latch onto the early recordings so dearly. The more we invest in a band, the more the band transcends music and becomes an experience, an emotion. By definition, then, the band can become one of two things: abandoned or stuck. If they move on to a new sound and disconnect from the ephemeral emotion in search of another, we lose interest. If they continue to evoke the same emotion, they're not making progress. Think Art Brut.

Maybe it's something about cyclical history—the higher the highs the lower the lows; the more we invest the more we have to lose. But I think there's also a fair amount of personal growth attached. The reason Art Brut's stagnancy doesn't bore us to death is because we're only attached to the point that we attach to our own irony. We connect with a lot of Eddie Argos' ideas, but they rarely teach us anything about ourselves. It's selfish, really: When a band gives us a glimpse into our inner psyches, we have a hard time following them elsewhere.

But then there are times like Titus Andronicus when it just so happens that we're all going to the exact same place at the exact same time.

Jaill

2010-07-29T13:05:00.000-05:00

Jaill get bonus points for being from Milwaukee. I feel obligated to put that in the open because I get that feeling that if you drive in any direction long enough you're bound to run into another band exactly like them. They play up-tempo, feel-good rock 'n' roll and add little-to-no flair to their margarita-brand pop-rock.

Jaill don't do much to sweep you away. They do away with the bells and whistles of contemporary dance-pop, and clean up the lo-fi aesthetic of garage-rock bouncers like Harlem. Even their 9-to-5 workmanlike diligence distinguishes them from maybe their closest contemporary, the brazenly poppy slackers Let's Wrestle. Jaill are, for lack of a better expression, Milwaukee rock—always overshadowed by its neighbor (Chicago), but not without its own understated attractions. Milwaukee lacks much of the hustle and bustle or any dominant "scene" of bigger cities, but it captures the essence of a metropolis with rural familiarity. Likewise, Jaill capture the essence of danceable pop-rock without any discernible shtick. They don't care about standing out or making a scene, they just want to boogie. And this rad video for their song "The Stroller" proves that, above all else, everyone likes to boogie. I mean everyone.

Jaill - The Stroller from Sub Pop Records on Vimeo.

Menomena - Mines

2010-07-27T22:41:00.000-05:00

If you had asked me in 2007 who I thought the next biggest band in the world was going to be, I invariably would have answered Menomena. I was pretty disappointed by Neon Bible, but Friend and Foe showed glimpses of the same transcendent musical glaciers that made Funeral so mesmerizing. Nothing Menomena did ever seemed all that cutting-edge, it just sounded unique. They had a chemistry on songs like "Wet and Rusting," "Wierd" and "The Pelican" that made them out to be a formidable pop trio, but the profundity of "Evil Bee" made them seem like a jam-band derivative—more organized, more tightly packaged and most of all more exciting. The bari-sax cameo toward the end takes the song's vast landscape and drops an epic mountain directly in the center, as if we needed a more impressive effort to verify its existence.

And here we are three years later, and Menomena still hasn't blown up. Their follow-up to Friend and Foe, Mines, captures a lot of the hefty pop hooks that put my high school mind aflutter; but the closest they come to another chill-enducing euphoria is "Tithe," which sounds less organic and perhaps thrives on context. Each song is almost over-tidy the way they think through each hook and process every melody so as to rid the album of any raw meat.

Mines is good—very good, in fact. It's a pop album with virtually no holes, a plateau of healthy terrain that's safe to eat. But I always listened to Menomena to hear mountains, the loose imperfections that would snag my earbuds on their way by just because they knew they could.

Facelove

2010-07-25T19:50:00.000-05:00

This song came out a while ago (January), but as part of the revisionist listening I've been doing the past few days I was reminded that I should've posted it a while ago.

The song, "Facelove" by PS I Love You, was featured on a split 7" with the pitch-perfect pop jam "All Yr Songs" by Diamond Rings that was sold out long before I ever got around to it. It's not hard to figure out why.

"Facelove" reminds me of everything I wish Handsome Furs had become. It's more dynamic, more tepid and more full. Whereas Handsome Furs lock themselves into dizzying arcs and barrel through solitary lines of dart-like guitarwork, "Facelove" is more cognizant of its surroundings, more accommodating to the song's comforting scenery. Their debut LP comes out October 5 on Paper Bag Records.

Losing ground on Los Campesinos

2010-07-08T14:48:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I wish I would just write about sports. Everything is so orderly and laid-out in front of you. Stats, standings and heroic come-back narratives just waiting to be hyperbolized. We all look at the same game, the same stat sheets, but sports writers get to form the narrative of how—the causal mechanisms of life's sociopolitical phenomena manifest in inter-human contest. Geeze, just writing about writing about sports gets me excited. But those kinds of causal implications are near impossible to discern in music unless we bunker up with the artists in the studio—we don't know what happened, and guessing blindly only gets us in trouble.

Of course, music isn't all bad, and there are surely more songs and albums released in a given week than there are sporting contests I'm interested in. But I can't help but find myself searching for something with a similar bottom line, something objective. If a band does poorly, I want to write about it as if it's a loss. And even so, I want that loss to mean something, like an upset or something that somehow re-aligns social hierarchy and confuses human mores. Most of us get attached to bands much like we do athletes, and that creates the kind of zero-sum outcomes that peddle sports writing. But the problem is, everyone's conception of "zero," in this case, is different. What is a failure to me may be a mid-level exception to someone else. What may be a disappointment to me may be a predictably poor performance to someone else. What's worse—what may be a miserable collapse to me may be a triumphant conquest to someone else. There is no hard evidence for us to build from. And that's inherent in an artform with no established way to discern winners and losers.

But sometimes things happen outside of albums or songs that do lend themselves to a clear feeling of loss. And that's what I'm beginning to feel about Los Campesinos!. We can trace the entire saga back to an exchange of blog posts: the first from Ollie, the second bearing the hashtag of the entirety of LC!.

It all seems amicable enough, each side remorseful of Ollie's departure. But there has to be some moving part we're not getting—some causal mechanism. It's altogether likely that someone has gotten ill and required him to leave, or perhaps Ollie was finally offered a contract with the Food Network. But they haven't stopped touring, and there are two bits of info that might mean more than we're letting on.

The title of Ollie's post, "Dry route to Devon, so great, like heaven, I think that we are losing a way," is, of course, a lyric to the Pavement song "Westie Can Drum," in which the lyrics of Ollie's title conclude with, "Westie, he cannot drum."

LC! have stretched themselves musically with each record, and their latest, this year's Romance is Boring, reached an apex of instrumental flourishes and breaks—a few of which bordered on inane and grating, no doubt. They no longer carried the same kids-running-through-the-fountain abandon, and instead conveyed far more garishness than they'd allowed in the past. It was almost as if, instead of stumbling upon their subtle genius, they were swinging for the fences from the start, less coy than poised. And at some points they did mash some taters, but at others they were their own worst enemies—too serious to be taken seriously. But I gave them credit for stepping up to the plate—writing directly about themselves instead of hiding behind metaphors forever—until they dropped this.

Part of LC!'s biggest appeal was that none of them were qualified for success, and that's why they were all perfect for each other. But the "Princess Version" would be laughably overwrought and trite if my wilting heart didn't stifle my chuckles. And I'm even more afraid that this whole mess is systematic of their shift from tongue-in-cheek affability to teetering grandeur. What I'm saying is, the "Princess Version" might be the kind of thing an unprofessional drummer (read: Ollie) might not have been able to execute—thus the switch in personnel. That said, it's a one-off on the Internet that I'm probably blowing out of proportion (and Ollie's no slouch on drums in his own right). Like I said, there's no causal relationship in music blogging. But while I'm loathe to drag around my once-favorite band like this, empirical evidence is beginning to pile up against them. I feel like I'm beginning to see an objective loss carried out in real time. And it's making me think sports writing wouldn't be all that fun after all.

I want to make a claim about band purity and how "selling out" no longer implies gentrification, but I'm not sure I even know what that means in this case. After all, it was when Gareth stopped cluttering his personal messages with pop culture metaphors that the band would have started to lose sight of themselves—personal clarity yielding mass confusion. Yet, when it's all said and done, there's something very refreshing about this video. Makes me nostalgic for a time when profundity was still in subtleties, and nuances didn't necessarily mean exposing an ugly underbelly; for a time when LC! didn't need to swing for the fences to hit a home run. (That might have been overkill.)

AZ lingers

2010-07-05T15:39:00.000-05:00

I was gone for a while, but now I'm back. That's really all there is to it. I promised myself I'd follow up on Arizona's SB1070, especially concerning the Sound Strike; and things finally seem to have grown to somewhat of a boiling temp. And the results are not far from what I imagined.

First, Charlie Levy, who is apparently a pretty big-time concert promoter in Phoenix, wrote an open letter discussing the real-world consequences of the strike. Go figure—concert promoters, venues, kids are all suffering fromt heir absence; the government—not so much. Although the boycott is aimed to trigger a response from lawmakers, Levy explains that in reality, "Artists are harming the very people and places that foster free speech and the open exchange of ideas that serve to counter the closed-mindedness recently displayed by the new law." I found the following passage particularly poignant to his cause: "The people responsible for SB 1070 don't want you here. They don't want your voices heard."

Of course, that's a tough pill to swallow. Conor Oberst, who's one of the major proponents of the strike, replied with a letter of his own. Unfortunately (predictably), he seems to stumble over himself in a few parts. Most notably, at one time he writes, "Much of the Artist end of the boycott is symbolic, I acknowledge, and no real threat to the economics of the State;" but then later in the same paragraph adds, "It has to hurt them in the only place they feel any pain, their pocketbooks."

Oberst reasons that this strike will ostensibly fuel communication and awareness for their cause, which should then impact the state's economy on a much grander scale; but empirically this seems like incredibly faulty logic.

First of all, the best way to start conversations is to, well, start them. By boycotting the state, they're effectively boycotting the conversation. They're taking an admittedly symbolic stance and leaving all the legwork to those who already feel like they're under a bus. Sound Strike is essentially engaging in a game of Chicken with the Arizona government; only Arizona already affirmed their stance, and the "Artists" are refusing to engage head-on. In other words, they're shying away from the issue.

Second, a common reference point for Sound Strike is the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and Levy's letter turns it upside its head.

What if otherwise outspoken and inspirational activists like Martin Luther King Jr. had turned their backs on the state of Alabama and its citizens because they didn't agree with the discriminatory practices of its government during the critical years of the civil-rights movement? What would have happened if they had chosen to boycott Alabama rather than speak out, organize and effect change?

And that's the big difference: Whereas Montgomery was pointed, organized and compensated, Sound Strike is ambiguous, chaotic and zero-sum. Montgomery's public transportation depended on funding provided by blacks, and so by cutting off that funding MLK & Co. struck a weak spot in the government's economic well-being. Non-discriminatory bus drivers still received their salaries and the leaders were organized enough to offer alternative rides to and from work—it was only the government who ever felt the economic impact. But Sound Strike attacks a state, not a government. As Levy explained, the economic effects are felt at the lowest levels first—and the lowest levels are the ones ostensibly benefitting from this strike.

It's truly perplexing and confounding if you take all Sound Strike's lip service at face value. Compare this "crime against humanity" or "injustice to humans" to other unwarranted acts of aggression. The Haitian earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, Darfur, HIV/AIDS—all of them have galvanized artistic output and support, all targeted at the root of the problem.

How hard would it be to organize a festival with the hundreds of bands already committed to the cause and donate all royalties to an organization to appeal the legislation? Too easy, apparently. But—and now I'm talking to Levy—if there's one thing I learned from watching movies in middle school: If you book them, they will come.

Arizona's mixed messages

2010-06-04T01:14:00.000-05:00

One of the formative scenes in "No Country For Old Men" comes right at the beginning. While walking around with a rifle, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) runs into a drug deal gone amok. Mexican bodies litter the dirt, laid waste after an ostensible skirmish over a truck full of cocaine. While he abandons the truck, the last survivor—"el ultimo hombre," so to speak—asks that he close the door, so as to protect him from "lobos." However, Moss reassures him: "There ain't no lobos."

There still aren't.

The three-time Grammy Award winning Tex Mex outfit from eastern LA, Los Lobos, are cancelling their scheduled Arizona appearance in order to boycott SB 1070.

I already explained my position on this—you're not boycotting the government as much as you are the ones who actually need help—and I'd assumed a group like Los Lobos would be most ready to lift an arm of action on the issue. Everyone in Los Lobos is American, but American in the same way those being discriminated against are American. I thought if anyone would be willing to stand alongside—and not removed from—their Arizona brethren, it would have been a crew like Los Lobos. And maybe, say, Ozomatli will still invade AZ and push for change, but more and more bands are hopping on the bandwagon by banding together—on the outside looking in.

Unlike athletes, musicians generally are paid to share their thoughts. An athletic boycott would theoretically hold weight because a sport's entertainment and economic bump are the only true platforms they have. We take sports at face value. Home runs and slam dunks are bipartisan, strikeouts and three-pointers demand no effect beyond the scoreboard. Some fans are upset when LeBron doesn't speak out against genocide in Darfur, some people chastise MJ for his "Republicans buy shoes too" ethos; but realistically that is what we should expect from them. Whatever political platform they have to speak from is one they have to construct themselves. They don't get drafted or sign endorsements for their political ideals, but they're risking losing it all if they become offensively vocal about any of it. And "offensive" in this case is defined by the corporate heads who sign their checks, not the popular conception of justice we hope they embody.

And that's how musicians are distinct. We give musicians microphones so they can speak. Musicians are a different kind of entertainer because they are capable of speaking partisan messages through notes of neutrality. How many future Republicans bought American Idiot? It was guy-liner pop-punk that made tweens from all corners drop their self respect to join some vague, abstract opponent. And Green Day didn't have to tell the millions of fans who bought the album that "tyranny" meant the Bush Administration, but they all responded anyway.

Because in nature, the door never matters, unless a gang of wolves is going to walk in. And in music, the message never matters, except for when it matters more than anything at all.

This just happened

2010-05-26T21:11:00.000-05:00

I never invested much in the indie vs. mainstream debate because I don't know anything about what anybody in the real world listens to. I know Vampire Weekend sells pretty well, I know people generally get excited about James Mercer stuff, but I have no idea how deep popular opinion digs.

Apparently they dig decently deep. LCD Soundsystem's new album, the spectacular This is Happening, hit #10 on the Billboard Album Chart this week. Cool, huh! Hipster Runoff already asked all the hypotheticals about what this means for LCD Soundsystem as an indie outfit, but my alarm went off at this quote from an MTV news article about the list:

The final debut in the top 10, at #10, is the second effort from indie-dance punks LCD Soundsystem,This Is Happening, which moved 31,000 copies.

(italics added)
This is most definitely not their second effort.

I'm not sure what this says about LCD Soundsystem's acceptance to the mainstream or if it only speaks to MTV's understanding of indie, nor am I really all that interested. I just want to know what it takes to be a copy chief at a joint like that.

AZ boycott, bullet points

2010-05-26T15:26:00.000-05:00

Lots going on today. I'm going to tackle this as lazily as possible.

I've been trying to track some sort of music-based response to this Arizona immigration reform, but it's a whole different world over there. Pitchfork posted a short article today on Rage Against the Machine's Zack De La Rocha's organizing efforts, and he seems convinced that he and others—Kanye West, Sonic Youth, Conor Oberst, etc.—are taking on the role of Rosa Parks. He wants the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but I don't know if I see this going the way he wants. I've already mentioned the discrepancy as represented by two canadian acts, and the more this develops the more I see things the same way as Pink Eyes. Arizona's government gets little-to-no benefit from touring bands, and even De La Rocha seemed to admit that Montgomery-level action will arise only through sufficient levels of public discontent. Bands can boycott, but the relative gains of putting rust on an already bleak economy versus the relative loss of abandoning fans is no contest. Unless a boycott can sufficiently cripple a government, it's plagued by poor aim. Gig promoters and venues will lose their livelihoods long before the government ever feels the effects. By definition, boycott is an inaction, and that's the opposite of what Arizona needs right now. I'll follow this up better once more shit hits the fan, but so long as the movement is confined to petitions I don't see much moving or shaking. Unless they air a telethon. Arizona doesn't care about Mexican people.

One of my favorite jams of the year—and straight-up masher of April's Like a Hole in the Head mixtape— is getting a proper 7" release from gorillavs.bear's exceptional Forest Family records. "I Was Thinking..." adds an abrasive punch to a lot of the shimmering guitars that have been floating around lately. Where most of the blissful summer songs coming out are too waxed-down to gain traction, "I Was Thinking..." rips up the road and drags you as far as it can in its five-minute runtime. The B-Side, "Our Scenery," is a more humbled affair, but engrossing nonetheless. They do a lot to try to cover themselves up, but the result is best received in the wide open, pasted with heat. Thus far, it is exactly what Summer 2010 has sounded like. You can listen to both of the songs here, and you can (should) order the vinyl here.

GAUNTLET HAIR // I was thinking... from caitlin mcnichols on Vimeo.

I try my best not to talk about movies. I like them, I just know nothing about them. But I did write a blurb in anticipation of "The Lottery" at the Wisconsin Film Festival. The documentary was a chilling portrayal of what exactly "less fortunate" can mean, and what kinds of obstacles our institutions face. It's more than just a matter of money, it's an outright paradigmatic failure that cheapens the educations—and thus the futures—of America's less fortunate. But here I go talking about movies. My write-up is (probably) nowhere to be found online, but Pitchfork did just mention it today because the soundtrack was written and performed by TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe and Gerald A. Smith. It's about what you would expect from them—delicate plucks from heart-wrought strings—and it's not exactly timely, but the documentary's website has some interesting asides that you can see here.

Freddie Gibbs has a new song up at The Fader.

Really long/awesome article on M.I.A. in the New York Times. Beauty.

MCC - Teenage Fanclub

2010-05-24T18:53:00.000-05:00

When I was in middle school I listened to a lot of Nirvana. They were so angry and righteous and catchy, and I was pretty sure it was the intensity that drew me in. Kurt Cobain's maniacal lyrics and thrashing howls: That's what I was all about. In-your-face, non-stop aggression and hostility; that was the kind of raw emotive force that drove insightful music. Or at least that's what I thought.

Toward the height of my Nirvana-listening I got a copy of Cobain's collected journal. In it, alongside early lyrics sheets, notes of loathe and drawings of idealized equipment; Cobain would list albums with no real title or explicit purpose. I couldn't tell whether they were wishlists or collections of favorites, but most of them made a lot of sense: the Melvins, Pixies, Vaselines, etc. And then, thrown in as if they were another logical touchstone was the one name I didn't recognize: Teenage Fanclub. Ironically, olde Greggors was real into Teenage Fanclub. I grabbed Bandwagonesque from him and it recontextualized my entire comprehension of music.

"The Concept" tackles the same issues of instability and abandonment that drove Cobain to the edge; but "The Concept" was just so poetic, so self-assured and so calm. I was never an overly aggressive person, but I thought harsh aggressivity was the only direct route to raw, intensive think-songs. But all of a sudden, Teenage Fanclub had made bands like the Eels and Grandaddy make sense in the grander scheme of things. They had created the same connection without the vulgarity or shield of hatred. It was like the Great Awakening in my dome, but I still spent the next two years listening to Rancid anyways.

And this is all still prevalent today, too. The "Less Than Zero" disaffected and unwanted sagas of bands like Girls (my DC review of which has vanished, wtf) have overrun much of indie music's lyrical content. Part of it is the hipster tendency to pay a lot of money to look and feel really miserable, but some of it rouses some interesting socioeconomic/nature-vs.-nurture consequences.

This idea of "legitimate disenchantment" within a relatively pleasant atmosphere is sticky for several reasons, but for whatever reason I keep checking my head against the poem "Nikki-Rosa" by Nikki Giovanni. She mentions how much it would pain her for white people to examine her past because they would "talk about [her] hard childhood / and never understand that / all the while [she] was quite happy." The more we pass judgment the more we're ascribing our own lives on another. So while Christopher Owens (Girls) may live with an extremely wealthy family in San Francisco, his disposition depends less on his socioeconomic status than his internal conflicts spawned by a traumatic childhood. And that currency of comfort is what I think Bandwagonesque is all about. Well, that and the misery and bluntness of fate.

All told, though, the opaqueness of fate might be the most resonant theme I get out of Bandwagonesque, I just decided not to write about it as much because it's not quite as prevalent today—which is what I'd assumed people cared more about. Rather, Bandwagonesque, "Is This Music?" especially, sounds better tailored for a John Hughes or young John Cusack revelatory sequence than anything in today's cinema. I guess I don't know what that says about its chances in the court of PC readers, but I like it quite a bit so screw off.

Awkward silences

2010-05-21T19:38:00.000-05:00

I don't really know how to say this, but I've got a new gig. For better or worse, I will be working indefinitely as the "Madison Indie Music Examiner" over here.

Of course, that shouldn't supplant anything worthwhile over on this end. If anything, this means I'll spend less time bogging down ye olde Pop Curmudgeon with useless updates on Madison news, and more time talking about stuff that applies outside this college town. Hopefully this is more refreshing than burdensome.

For the most part I'll try to balance between the two and keep this site updated when I think something over there is especially worthwhile, like this post on Voxtrot's farewell tour.

What I'm trying to say is, I hope we can still be friends and that this personal schism does not translate to a friendship divided.

Now go read this interview between Milwaukee's own Kings Go Forth and NBA hoops blog Free Darko. There's something in it for everyone, I promise. The only thing better is this.

May Playlist - Destruction

2010-05-20T13:26:00.000-05:00

We're already a week into summer, and this playlist is long overdue. It's a bit rough around the edges, but that's what happens when you try to cram too many good things into one small box.

This month's playlist is titled Destruction, but that's only sort of accurate. There are themes of chaos and destruction throughout, but at their hearts these are mostly pop songs. And pop songs served well with a hot day and a grill, no less.

I should also take this moment to say that Destruction hosts one of the few pop songs I consider to be perfect. At some point I might compile a list of every song I think of as perfect, but for now just enjoy "He Gets Me So Hard" by Boyracer. There is as much nostalgia wrapped around that statement as anything, so feel free to disagree. On the whole, though, these collective joints should serve well at just about any outdoor summer get-together.

I don't know for sure what Gregg thinks of "He Gets Me So Hard," but I do know he keeps track of so-called perfect songs, and I also know that a lot of music on Destruction came directly from his blog. So hey, thanks Gregg!

Download and tracklisting are after the jump.

Click on Voltron to download Destruction.

Tracklist:

1. The Fake Fictions - "We Could Destroy You"
2. The Maine Coons - "I Am A Motherfucker"
3. Harlem - "Friendly Ghost"
4. Mannequin Men - "Never Lived By Myself"
5. Jaill - "Everyone's Hip"
6. The Soft Pack - "C'mon"
7. Nana Grizol - "Arthur Hall"
8. Sleeping in the Aviary - "Everybody's Different, Everybody"
9. Boyracer - "He Gets Me So Hard"
10. Dum Dum Girls - "Jail La La"
11. Japandroids - "Wet Hair"
12. The Thermals - "No Culture Icons"
13. No Age - "You're a Target"
14. Slow Animal - "Sanity"
15. Best Coast - "When I'm With You"
16. Nobunny - "Church Mouse"
17. Let's Wrestle - "I'm In Love With Destruction"

Bang Pop

2010-05-17T17:25:00.000-05:00

Free Energy's debut is undoubtedly a case of lightning in a bottle. Stuck on Nothing is, in one word, bold, but it somehow gets away with it because of the band's cheeky playfulness. They sound like Rivers Cuomo was in Thin Lizzy, which creates the most perfect blend of defiant high school giddiness I've ever known. The video for their new single, "Bang Pop," hypes that aspect. And while I wish it was a little more "Breakfast Club" dancing and a little less "Porky's" bubblegum, it's close enough to "Detroit Rock City's" stoner escapism for me to deal.

Eh, who am I kidding, this video is perfect.

Bang Pop

FREE ENERGY | MySpace Music Videos

MCC - Lifter Puller

2010-05-17T17:13:00.001-05:00

New No. 2 Todd Stevens and I went head-to-head over the new Hold Steady album, Heaven is Whenever, but you can't see it yet because there's nothing there (Update: link fixed here). But one thing we all can agree on is that this isn't the same crew we met in 2004.

I think a big part of Craig Finn's appeal is his ability to sound so close without sacrificing any of his world-wide perspective. On their first three albums, the Hold Steady were just trying to be each of our favorite bands; they became the biggest band by default. But Lifter Puller don't sound like they're trying to be my favorite band, they sound like they're trying to be their own favorite band. Finn's incisive lyrics are still pointed, but he doesn't dress them up in fables the way Separation Sunday's narrative does.

Finn's lyrics have always been pretty intimate and insightful, but whereas the Hold Steady's usually trying to teach us a lesson, Lifter Puller's just laying their cards on the table. Here, he's just recanting stories; and even moreso than most Hold Steady joints, on Lifter Puller he sounds the most convincingly like a guy who just walked up to you at a bar to talk. He's fighting for an audience and fighting for volume. "Well, ok, I guess I'll just pick it up right after the breakdown."

Lifter Puller sound like a talent-show band, but not necessarily a high school one. They're sloppy and loose like a band assembled and producing music in an abbreviated time, but they carry themselves with a swagger that makes it seem like there's money on the line. They want people to like them, but they can't help but indulge themselves because this is just a one-off joint.

"Nassau Coliseum" sticks out most as a song that tries to reach heights Finn didn't know existed until only recently. But its plain-clothes earnestness seems to say that they don't care how much it resonates with us: To those guys, the ones who know it and play it, that song is huge.

The "Further Listening" sections on the Hold Steady include Guided by Voices, Ted Leo and Spoon, but they may as well start to include Lifter Puller, too. They're still distinguishable in their own right and offer enough of a change of pace to be different. But most of all, we know they'll never lose their perspective.

Level Upped - Julian Lynch

2010-05-13T18:12:00.000-05:00

Fellow Madison resident Julian Lynch popped up on Pitchfork today with a phat old "Best New Music" tag and the kind of track review that generally precedes even bigger things. The song, "Just Enough," reminds me of the drony, distorted elements of early No Age, but all cleaned up and ready for dinner. Also, like they were recorded by an ethnomusicology grad student. Like all of his songs, it imbues the kind of frigid assertiveness that imposes a lot of airy-yet-heavy concepts without stepping on your toes.

The song's album, Mare, comes out later this year, but you can see him perform at Madison's Gates of Heaven (which also has a website here, but talks a lot more about god and a lot less about rock) this Monday, May 17, alongside openers Austin Hays, Yellow Ostrich and Cedarwell.

This is the second Madison-based group to receive high mention from Pitchfork in the last year, and fellow BNM-er Zola Jesus is playing the Project Lodge June 26. Just thought I'd mention.

Sleigh Bells - Treats

2010-05-13T13:52:00.001-05:00

In an interview with ABC News, Derek Miller spoke of Sleigh Bells as just one drawn-out hardcore breakdown, but that's really selling his group short. I've already written about singer Alexis Krauss as a Madonna descendent, and those wiggly pop sensibilities are what make Sleigh Bells the phenomenon they are. The brick-to-the-face songcrafts are the complement, not the focus.

And really that's what's most disappointing about Treats—Sleigh Bells have so much to work with, but they've instilled so little of their own creativity that it's all stiff-in-the-hips head-scratching and very few moments of footloose clarity. I count maybe four (five if you count "Kids" as a song separate from "Crown on the Ground") fully fleshed-out songs here; the rest are linear sprawls that trip all over themselves on their way to the punch bowl.

Their partnership with M.I.A. made a lot of sense amid the hype, and especially with "Rill Rill" floating around the Internet—Sleigh Bells are best when they're force-feeding testicular fortitude to gentle pop. They should be making us care about something we don't, bringing the ugly date to the dance to make us realize how cool she really is. But instead they show up to the Treats formal with two left feet.

The idea I keep coming back to is that Sleigh Bells are grim reapers of indie music. They're transitioning the genre to a state like '90s pop music in that albums don't matter anymore. These songs are built to be put on mixtapes and compilation albums, not their own creative work. Music operates at such a speed nowadays that maybe we can't expect any one band to keep up, and we should be looking for a movement moreso than a single band to lead the pack. I'm not sure how much there is to that idea, though. Hopefully we'll never find out.

But frankly, Sleigh Bells should have a lot more mobility than what's offered on Treats. However rudimentary their drum-and-bass setup is, there's a lot more space to roam than hardcore allows. Dubstep isn't exactly my specialty, but I've spent enough time in an Italian deli to have a decent idea about what kind of flexibility drum and bass can have. Not to mention prog rock or electronic takes on the same concept. It shouldn't be too hard for pop bands to fill in the gap; yet, here we are dubbing this a "riot rhythm."

Sleigh Bells make their money on wholesale destruction. When they're on point, their thunderclap rhythms and skull-crushing riffs create the maniacal intensity that people want when they hear it. But Treats is more catastrophic than cataclysmic, and unfortunately most of its destruction is aimed at itself.

It's Gibbs' ghetto, we're all just living in it

2010-05-11T12:48:00.002-05:00

I can't imagine anyone reading this blog would still be unfamiliar with Freddie Gibbs, and this video for his debut LP's new single, "The Ghetto," has already been floating around the Internet for a while. But I just got e-mailed this high quality, unedited version of it for the express purpose of sharing it. I've got a whole boatload of thoughts about Gibbs, but I'm holding my breath until Str8 Killa No Filla validates or negates them all.

Scope the video below the jump. And correct me if I'm wrong, but there is absolutely no rapper operating at Freddie Gibbs' level right now.

MCC - Clem Snide

2010-05-11T04:03:00.003-05:00

This is a bit later than usual because I had two finals Monday morning and I didn't feel like doing other stuff, but the whole ordeal did get me thinking about what music helps me study. Everyone listens to smooth, atmospheric escapists like Sigur Ros or even Explosions in the Sky (I think?); but for me, studying goes best with the kind of music that'd get caught in your teeth if you didn't carry dental floss.

Your Favorite Music is an awfully presumptuous name for an album, especially one with such limited universal appeal. But I like to think that's the idea. To me, Your Favorite Music is all about autonomy. Each song's unflinching perspective sounds far too secure for the timid narrative it's sharing. Everything is so pointed, directed. And that's why I imagine it to say, "I can't write anything everyone will like, so I may as well write something one person will love." And that's the point of anyone's favorite music, really. "Favorite" does not denote cultural relevance or appeal—that's what "greatest" is for—but instead allows wiggle room for where "great" can become "best." It's all relative, and nobody is really supposed to take it all that seriously. Except for when it applies to him- or herself. And whether it's the cultural ambiguity or suburban monotony, Your Favorite Music, more often than not, applies to me.

On the eponymous track, singer Eef Barzelay shakes out, "Your favorite music / well it just makes you sad," which opens a whole pandora's box. Is your favorite music indicative of your inborn disposition, or is your inborn disposition indicative of your taste in music? If your favorite band is the National, am I allowed to assume that you are a mopey person? If you are often mopey, am I allowed to assume your favorite band is the National? I'm not going to get into this now.

Songs like "I Love the Unknown" and "Loneliness Finds Her Own Way" are the infectious pop numbers that will draw listeners to Your Favorite Music, but in that role they serve only to distract listeners from the body as a whole. Because in entirety, Your Favorite Music is a pretty intimate confessional of suburban irrelevance. Suburban neighborhoods are the result of baby boomers trying to move into a community, and had I been born 30 years earlier I could see myself drawn to the same house. But now that I've grown up in a suburban neighborhood, I feel I'm still looking for the same thing my parents were; and Clem Snide make me think I'm not alone. I'm looking for a more ideological suburbania, one that melds urban appeal and excitement with the comfort of suburban community. But for anyone, that's the same thing as a favorite. Something that entices interest while still remaining relevant to concerns of comfort (that comfort often manifested in nostalgia, at least so far as music is concerned). Something that allows you to be yourself while still pushing that entity to become more. It makes the notion of a comfort zone all the more nebulous so that it follows you toward a new, more difficult arena.

Maybe the most poignant moment on Your Favorite Music is "Messiah Complex Blues." Barzelay lays out the foundation from the start: "I wouldn't die for your sins / 'Cause what if you lose; I win." And it's that very same zero-sum perspective that drives much of my personal political position. The higher you are, the lower you're kicking someone else. And when we create community, that reality often gets muted. Communities restrain our ability to distinguish ourselves for superiority, but they also establish a bystander effect that blocks our ability to rectify inferiority problems. But the way the lyric is posed is a self-deprecating ode to coming out on bottom simply so as not to feel guilty for coming out on top.

To this day, Your Favorite Music is the only Clem Snide album I've ever listened to. I've had Ghost of Fashion on my iPod since high school, but I can never bear to click on it. Your Favorite Music is such a perfect concoction of suburban humility and disenchantment that I couldn't possibly leave it. At its base, "I Love the Unknown" is the perfect theme for suburban abandonment. Your Favorite Music's formulaic predictability and rehearsed routines offer the same securities as a boot camp, and the bus-wandering protagonist of its songs fulfills our desires for abandonment. We want to create something foreign, but with which we still feel at ease. And as much as I've already heard the story before, Clem Snide's droll perspective is the same cautiously eager retreat I leave home with. And when push comes to shove, that's what comprises my own favorite music.

Anti- Progress

2010-05-07T01:04:00.004-05:00

Why doesn't anyone write songs like this anymore?

I'm not talking about the boyish high-school frankness or pounding power chords—those are still pretty commonplace. What I'm talking about is the devolving song structure and song-as-vehicle commitment to thematic constructs. Everyone tinkers with time signatures and keys, but nobody really delves into recreating the parameters.

For some reason I keep going back to a piece Anthony Cefali wrote in the Cardinal's farewell issue this week—and not just because it's brilliant. In it, he explains how our environmental landscape has shifted to where Mother Nature is now entirely under our control—though that's not to say entirely helpless, to which we can attribute the reflexive nature of climate change—and so we're required to draw an entirely new system to view nature and environmentalism. We can't think of nature as naturally occurring, because it only occurs as we allow it. Likewise, music is pretty well under man's thumb by now, so in a way it's time to recreate its wheel, or at least how we roll it.

I know "Popular" isn't incredibly novel, but the way Nada Surf bridge Big Black's speak/yell verses and Weezer's punchy choruses without ever merging the two is still an exciting proposition. Everyone's always trying to find middle ground, but the disorder created by oppositional components forced into the same test tube is often a lot more forgiving, and certainly more refreshing than dischordant feedback. In all reality, "Popular" is likely one of Nada Surf's weaker songs; yet, to this day it's the only one I bother to go back to.

Conceptually, it's pretty close to mash-ups. But whereas mash-up artists spread their limbs across several genres like they're playing Twister on turntables, I'm looking for something more like hop-scotch.

The point is, every time we list influences and chart contemporaries, we're connecting dots; and at this point in history there isn't much area for a new sound to fall that doesn't sit between existing pillars. But I'm interested to see what would happen if bands stopped falling somewhere in between, and started taking and stealing existing tools at face value for their own purpose. Utilitarian garbage pickers. Something that can spread its scope across several touchstones, yet allowing each to exist only insofar as they exist within themselves. The whole point of this is creating a body of dissonance by employing individually clear components. It's the anti-synergy, but in a deliberately ADD kind of way.

Where sports and music collide

2010-05-05T02:47:00.003-05:00

The Cardinal ran the Top 10 television shows of the decade the past two days. I wrote something about the best show of the decade, "The Wire" (which somehow came in at No. 3), and you can read it, along with the rest of the top five, right here.

But anyways, there's been a lot of talk on the Internet about athletes taking an active stance on SB1070. The Suns are finally starting to take shape against it (even going so far as to purposely don the "Los Suns" jerseys in tonight's game), and the Diamondbacks are doing a lot of talking, even if Russell Pearce & Co. will call their bluff.

It's the same kind of issue that came up in the Beijing Games and whether or not athletes should speak out against Darfur. Nobody did, really, and who knows whether it would have made any difference. Regardless, musicians don't run into the same problem of silence.

Most notably, Pink Eyes—you know, the big frontman from Fucked Up—and Stars are calling for action, whatever that may mean.

According to Pink Eyes, the best course of action is to flood Arizona with activism and protest, uniting the youth against the government and the bill. According to Stars, we should let their economy suffer and make the government play with the cards they dealt themselves. Nobody has yet to lobby for stoning town hall, but the point is that musicians are taking up arms, and this time it's not a devastating natural disaster or cut-and-dry human rights issue (well, actually, yes it is; but regardless).

I'm open to excusing athletes on this kind of thing—unlike musicians, they don't live or die with what they have to say, so who am I to force that upon them. But Fucked Up and Stars are pretty meek voices in the grand scheme of things (they're Canadian, after all), and politically minded musicians could easily be tossed aside as "Just Bono being Bono," or whomever it may be. It's not that I think musicians shouldn't speak up, and they can certainly affect a large impact on their own; but rousing a generally uninterested voice to call for change is probably the void-filler we need.

Unless P. Diddy and Jamie Foxx throw something together.

Monday Culture Club - Superchunk

2010-05-03T00:41:00.007-05:00

Superchunk is either the second or the third best band of the '90s, depending on how you feel about Pablo Honey. At one time or another they were a staple in college rock—when that was an actual thing—but nowadays they're relative unknowns. I guess that much could be assumed by the purpose of this Culture Club business. Regardless

Here's to Shutting Up is a gentle rock record, but it's not necessarily a gentle-rock record. More than anything, it captures the quaint, comfortable nicety of '90s college rock. Superchunk is a bonafide rock band, but by 2001 they had already written rock records. On Shutting Up they were ready to pull back on the reigns and expose their underbelly.

It's an eloquent moment in flux, without ever out-and-out declaring itself as such. It's too unassuming to be a dissertation; it's merely a snapshot that lets you draw your own conclusions and apply your own dialogue. And that's what gives it such universal appeal—it is what you make it, and it means exactly what you want it to mean. All the while, they encase it in soothing pop that lets you swallow a rigid, thorny capsule called life with ease. Nothing is ever as static as we think it is; and as many teen-angst records there are that either punch awkward transitions in the balls or mope and cry about them, here's one that just tries to coexist without feeling too emasculated.

Maybe there isn't much of an argument for Superchunk over Radiohead; but I still find myself listening to Here's to Shutting Up far more often than OK Computer. While Radiohead solved the riddle of musical landmarks with mechanical precision, Superchunk imprinted an open forum and left it up to the listener to have his/her say. Maybe that's another way of saying it's bland, unaccomplished, generic or lacking in artistic integrity; but if something so bad can sound this good, it must be doing something right. Or maybe pop music isn't as tough as we thought.

Odds 'n' Ends

2010-04-27T14:23:00.003-05:00

Hey gang! I've got a preview for the Los Campesinos! show up in the Cardinal today, including an interview with their bassist, Ellen. It's not too, too long, and you can read all of it here.

Believe it or not, there are still tickets available. Which wouldn't be so unbelievable if the show the night before it hadn't sold out. Turns out, I also went to that show, and I wrote about it here. One part of the show that particularly struck me, and one I mention in the post, is that Sleigh Bells frontwoman Alexis Krauss might be a better template for the next Madonna than the commonly held working definition of Lady Gaga. Think about it and get back to me.

But tonight's Los Campesinos! show isn't the only big bill headed through Wisconsin this weekend. Daytrotter's third installment of the Barnstormer Tour hits Lake Geneva and Milwaukee Thursday and Friday, this time towing Ra Ra Riot, Delta Spirit and Free Energy, among others, along for the ride. I'm not stupid enough to question Daytrotter's taste in music, but I am a bit perturbed by their calendar. How can they in good faith call a tour a "Barnstormer" tour if one of its stops is in Milwaukee's Turner Hall. I'm not saying Daytrotter is selling out, I'm just saying. DIY isn't really DIY if the Y has a built-in marketing machine like Turner Hall's. Sure, the trio of Milwaukee venues—Turner, Pabst and Riverside—have really taken to booking big names in indie music; but—and correct me if I'm wrong about this—the point of a so-called Barnstormer Tour is that sometimes a "big" name isn't the same as an important one. Or, if it is, that "big" name can manage without a "big" showcase.

Back in the saddle

2010-04-27T00:15:00.004-05:00

Kevin and I finally have a new podcast up. This time we try to talk about the whole "South Park" debacle, which may or may not have been more than we should have bitten off. Scope it here.

I also wrote a short joint on Small Black's re-released EP over at the Cardinal. Which I guess means I'm back in full effect. I don't think it actually says much of anything (the article, I mean), but the EP sure is good. I mentioned something about it before, but just so this post isn't a total waste of time, watch them perform a track off of it for The Tripwire here:

Monday Culture Club - Built to Spill

2010-04-26T02:25:00.004-05:00

I can never really gauge how much people like Built to Spill. Those who know them seem to assume their relevance, which prevents them from ever really getting the exposure they deserve. But even among Built to Spill-appreciating corners, nobody really seems to talk about There's Nothing Wrong With Love, and I see a big problem with that.

For whatever reason, some bands don't assert their own best or favorite album; rather, it comes down to individual experience. It's often the case with the White Stripes, Radiohead and several others that have recorded several albums of relatively equal caliber. There's Nothing Wrong With Love is the first Built to Spill album I heard, and that's why I like it most.

Sure, Keep It Like a Secret is perfectly formulated from front to back; sure, You in Reverse is irrefutably awesome. But none of those bring me back to my silver stereo and the CD-R on my basement floor on a cold winter day, nor do they make any undeniable argument to rate themself above TNWWL.

Part of what makes TNWWL so much more endearing to me are its flaws. There are only a handful of truly remarkable songs, but the imperfections of songs like "Reasons" and "Distopian Dream Girl" lend them a quality as if they were recorded in a garage somewhere in preparation for a high school showcase. And, coincidentally enough, when I was introduced to TNWWL, I was doing a lot of that very same thing.

But even more than unstoppable jam "Big Dipper," the song that sticks out most for me is "Twin Falls." However riddled with interesting metaphors and substantive anecdotes, most of Doug Martsch's vocals don't mean very much. They connect dots that are way over their or our heads, but "Twin Falls" is the only time we really get a truly vulnerable snapshot. Even on "Car," Martsch is talking about what "comets, stars and moons are all about." He probably describes it best when he says, "I want specifics on the general idea." But on "Twin Falls" we get specifics on the specifics. And when he says "It don't bother me" and when they cut it off short of two minutes and transition into the cascading guitars on "Some," it's almost as if they're hanging their heads in shame. They never meant it to go there, but I'm pretty glad they did.

My brother—olde Gregg, who's still posting can't-miss jams over at skirts—once gave me possibly the most resonant piece of advice I've ever received when he said if a girl liked Modest Mouse but didn't like Built to Spill, I shouldn't be dating her anyway.

It's not really that Built to Spill sounds exactly like Modest Mouse, but it's that Built to Spill is such an unavoidable gateway to so many important strains of music. They're the fulcrum between Modest Mouse and Band of Horses, My Morning Jacket and the Black Keys, and countless others. They sit at the center of indie rock's spokes, I suppose. They're the Dardanelles of indie rock, a touchstone that connects you to where you want to go. And so when someone appreciates Modest Mouse without acknowledging Built to Spill, they're essentially Xerxes. That is, they probably like Modest Mouse because they write pop songs for VH1 or something. At some point shared interests are too ambiguous and you need to establish a shared reason for the interest. My reason for interest is almost always Built to Spill.

Brief aside: The first working title for this blog was "General Specifics," drawn from the aforementioned quote from "Car." ... In case you were wondering.

There's Nothing Wrong With Love was released in 1994.

Building nothing out of nothing

2010-04-19T04:26:00.005-05:00

I'm not going to turn this into another affront to Lady Gaga, but I found this post particularly interesting. Don't ask me how I found it—it's a long story. But the concept itself blew me away: Lady Gaga for hipsters. This video, a strikingly high-quality studio cover of Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" by a band that looks like they paid a lot of money to look like they're really poor.

I did some rudimentary research and learned that the hipster-Gaga is referred to as Lissie and she's blowing up the Internet. She performs a lot of, uh, what do they call them, uh, "intimate" covers of more glammed-up pop songs, it seems. She also has a lot of original compositions that sound like a cross between Neko Case with a sore throat and a bored Elizabeth Powell, which is cool I guess. It's interesting to see a group so bland get so much media attention from MySpace and the like, but I guess that's just capitalism. If Land of Talk (Powell) wanted to get picked up by a major marketing machine like MySpace they should've recorded higher quality promo videos. But that's neither here nor there.

On this "hipster GaGa" joint, Lissie & co. have taken the vocals at face value while stripping the synth hook altogether. They add churning, meandering guitars that wind up exactly where they started—nowhere. From where I'm sitting, the cover is literally void of substance or creativity. But Lissie's wearing plaid and strumming triumphantly so we're supposed to take her as the next Liz Phair. Her band includes guys with beards and she has a quirky way to spell her name, so that makes them "hipster" enough for the "hipsterspinster" and her Internet blog. Life is what you make it, and apparently so is linguistics.

Whether my side should be considered maligning an abuse of semantics or an indictment on society depends on how insulted you are, which probably says a lot about you and your relative hipster-dom. At the WUD "Hipster Culture Panel" last year, there was only one thing that everybody on board could agree on: Nobody knows what "hipster" really means, but the ones who deserve the label never openly admit to being one. And I guess those who do call themselves hipsters listen to stuff like Lissie, stuff with no substance but plenty of style. Just like that Internet web blog. Either the hipsterspinster has no idea what she's talking about or what she's talking about makes no sense at all.

Just for a reference point: Nowadays, THIS is probably the most hipster thing around. Behind the veil of South African street culture, Die Antwoord take and amplify every bit of irony left in us. Song so bad; Zef so fresh.

April Mixtape - Like a Hole in the Head

2010-04-19T03:43:00.016-05:00

I've spent the last week and a half in various states of illness. Each time wellness would peak its head into my periphery and I thought I was scot free, a migraine would pop up and flush relief from the picture. Likewise, it's April. Alongside the rising temperatures come, um, rain showers. Each time the sun sneaks out and warms the lake, a billowing gang of clouds, um, rains on the parade. And so both Mother Nature and my immune system have both independently and informally dubbed April the month of tempered expectations. Accordingly, here's a mixtape of jams tepidly anxious for summer. They hint toward full liberation, but still acknowledge that we've (most of us, anyways) got final exams in a couple of weeks. And, in some cases, more chicken noodle soup than we'd have liked.

Click here to download Like a Hole in the Head.

Tracklist:

The Radio Dept. - "Heaven's On Fire"

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - "Bright Lit Blue Skies"

The Harlem Shakes - "Sickos"

Gauntlet Hair - "I Was Thinking..."

Sunset Rubdown - "Stadiums and Shrines II"

Arms - "Kids Aflame"

The 1900s - "When I Say Go"

Belle & Sebastian - "Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying"

Liam Finn - "Second Chance"

Twin Sister - "All Around and Away We Go"

Whitey - "Cigarette"

Freelance Whales - "Generator ^ Second Floor"

Cults - "Go Outside"

Monday Culture Club - Destroyer

2010-04-18T21:22:00.008-05:00

At the risk of pigeon-holing the Culture Club into any particular niche, this week's focus is another underappreciated gem from another underappreciated songwriter. But while Mark Linkous' Sparklehorse created alt-rock coated in self deprecation, Dan Bejar's Destroyer perfects folk blues thoroughly doused in wine-induced delirium.

"Folk blues" carries more of a ruggish connotation than I intend, and Bejar warrants more of a comparison to David Bowie and Donald Fagen than Dan Auerbach or even Bob Dylan. His sound is smooth and his vocal delivery could buff a blemish out of a glass of Cristal. But his songs are also too reserved, too self-contained to fully warrant a glam-pop moniker. He's a showman in craft, but he's still a lonely drunkard strumming in front of a fireplace at heart.

The Culture Club premise of one album per week paints a pretty trivial border around Destroyer, and because I'm the one who created the rules I'm allowing myself to break them. So while I'll write almost exclusively about Streethawk: A Seduction, keep in mind that not all songs embedded here are Streethawk joints. Case in point:

Among commoners, Bejar is normally recognized as The Aloof Member of The New Pornographers; but in at least one respect he's the only member who remains constantly grounded. While Carl Newman turns more and more into Canada's Ted Leo and Neko Case is happy enough just palling around, Bejar is the only one in the "super group" who maintains his auteur moniker. His pervasiveness is arguably what made their latest, Challengers, so worthwhile. And while I'll argue that his voice is most perfectly encapsulated in 2006's Destroyer's Rubies, Streethawk (2001) is the first point at which he actualizes his potential as a songwriter. He doesn't have the orchestral grandeur to match (that would come on Rubies), but his lyrical acumen, his ear for life-affirming profundities that concoct triumphant misery and his penchant for unhinged storytelling take the relatively sparse instrumentation to a taller plateau.

"Auteur" is a tricky label in music because it can easily be mistaken for anything eccentric. Truth be told, nobody can really say how much of an auteur Spencer Krug is because, through his six-some projects, he's never really been paired with an opposing voice. Distinctiveness doesn't denote a higher influence until it's given a spectrum-crossing counterpoint. You need to beat something before you can ever actually win. For Bejar, that counterpoint manifests itself in Carl Newman's light-headed power pop.

The New Porno's linear pop creates a peculiar vice for Bejar's stumbling delirium, a straight arrow that Bejar tries to coax into a meandering path. But while the forceful commandeering is destined to either break an axel or topple into a ditch, Bejar somehow nudges it into, well, "Myriad Harbour:"

I can't walk to Teddywedgers for breakfast without running into four or five inebriated assholes playing original compositions on the sidewalk. For the most part, pedestrians just pass on by. But when a troubadour dons a shirt to promote literacy and starts singing Neil Young covers, 10-20 middle-aged couples block traffic to soak up the spectacle. That dynamic seems to be more or less what happens to Bejar. Commoners get caught up in the glitz of Newman's joviality while Bejar's the one who actually has something to say. He's drunk, sure, and an asshole, maybe; but whoa nelly can he write a pop song.

So while Challengers was released some seven years after the fact, Streethawk is still an important touchstone in that it shows Bejar's peak as a self-contained oracle of sorts. It's ambitious enough to bombard expectations, yet humble enough to establish intimacy. While it might not be his opus, it is the fertile foundation from which his diverse cornucopia is plucked.

YouTube really hand-cuffed my ability to hit the more distinguished points in Streethawk, and whether it was a result of that or not, the conversation really dissolved into a tribute to Bejar on the whole. So as far as Streethawk is concerned, you'll have to take my word for it. As far as YouTube is concerned, you'll have to trust me when I say I'm working on a replacement.

Monday Culture Club - Sparklehorse

2010-04-11T17:09:00.010-05:00

The Daily Cardinal used to throw around this weekly feature called "Culture Club." It was a collective of music-minded Cardinal writers who would meet each week to discuss and write short blurbs about albums of yore that deserve re-evaluation. We even had an awesome graphic (which I'll try to track down because it was sweet). We covered Paul Simon's Graceland (called it the modern equivalent to Pet Sounds) and Combat Rock (heck, possibly an even more apt equivalent to Pet Sounds), and just when we were about to go into MC5's Kick Out the Jams we pulled the plug. Everybody laughed at us, nobody took us seriously, and they made us feel bad about ourselves so we did what any sensible group would do: We curled up and died. And then I brought it to my desktop and took a defibrillator to it and now we have this.

The inaugural album in these parts is none other than Dreamt For Light Years In The Belly Of A Mountain by the late, great Sparklehorse. The product of multi-instrumentalist Mark Linkous, Sparklehorse borrowed loosely from the guitar arrangements of Big Star, electric buzz of Grandaddy and the pop-minded melodrama of Elliott Smith.

Linkous struggled with depression and drug addiction for the majority of his life, but what set him apart from Smith and any other run-of-the-mill folk instrumentalist was his tongue-in-cheek self-evaluation. The wry perspective in his songs lends a duality to his self-deprecation in that it can just as easily be engulfing than ignored for the grander pop sensibilities.

The second installment of Nitsuh Adebe's "Why We Fight" columns over at Pitchfork (which is more than worth a read and can be located here) discusses a view not entirely dissimilar from one I've expressed in which strains of music can either be novel and outside familiarity (in his case an amphibian outside of the water, in mine simply chaos) while others are familiar, albeit comforting (in his case an underwater uncle, in mine simply perfectly formulated conventions). The crux is that operating within established norms (that is, underwater or in peaceful organization) is considerably more difficult because you're swimming upstream and competing with a plethora of similar-sounding artists. However, on that same token, the more novel or chaotic "amphibians" of bands tend to carry flaws—however negligible—because they could not reasonably have perfected an unconquered sonic territory. And thus it follows that the fish that tend to make it to the front of their pack are generally far more enjoyable because they—by necessity—are much more perfect entities. So while Linkous' commentary is refreshing, what makes this album so important is not what new ground it paved or what new doors it opened for new artists. Rather, it's important because—like most else of Sparklehorse's discography—it is near perfect.

Dreamt For Light Years was released in 2006.

Concurring opinions, added weight

2010-04-07T22:15:00.015-05:00

I caught a lot of flak for that Lady Gaga joint last week, and for good reason. It was hastily written and poorly assembled. But I still stand by my argument, and it seems I'm not alone. Today in Pitchfork (via an interview with MTV), one Miss M.I.A. had a few choice words for Ms. Gaga herself:

"People say we're similar, that we both mix all these things in the pot and spit them out differently, but she spits it out exactly the same. None of her music's reflective of how weird she wants to be or thinks she is. She models herself on Grace Jones and Madonna, but the music sounds like 20-year-old Ibiza disco, you know? She's not progressive, but she's a good mimic. She sounds more like me than I fucking do!"

That sounds more or less like my exact argument. Gaga builds herself up to be some pop behemoth, an idol for all seasons breaking down borders with her charisma and flair. But in fact she's a shell of an artist who makes a spectacle of an honest artform.

The line of argument that normally stems from this is that of super irony. Gaga ironizes the concept of "pop star" itself and turns our own perceptions on their heads. Essentially, she's mocking the very MTV culture she's endorsing. It's the millennial update to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. But if that were to be the case, then shouldn't we expect her to speak out? Doesn't she have to expose the charade at some point to validate any suspicions that she is anything but a product of the very machine she's fueling? If she really is poking fun at her own fans, how far does she go before her effect is counterproductive, dragging more well-intentioned fans into her doldrums before creating an enlightenment?

But there is one side of the argument I've left out thus far, and it's the only side of the argument I can even partially get behind—that of Gaga as a gay rights activist.

The idea is that Harvey Milk couldn't have enacted the paradigm shift necessary for appropriate change—he was too much like us, too normal. We (that is, the royal We, meaning public opinion writ large) could relate to him, and therefore were less willing to forgive his differences. He was so much like us, so why wasn't he like us?

Likewise, Elton John became too much of an accommodationist. He spoke for gay rights, sure, but he still sang songs to/for straight people.

The same thing happened in the Civil Rights movement. W. E. B. DuBois and the NAACP made waves in legislative circles through victories in the courts, but public opinion wasn't as ready to accept a full-on movement because these—the free-born northerners—weren't the African Americans they knew. The full paradigmatic upheaval needed to come from the roots, from the dirtiest, poorest counties of the South. The Civil Rights movement needed a leader who represented not the privileged, free and northern class of African Americans, but one directly from the downtrodden, recently enslaved and so-called "rotten" class.

So in that way Harvey Milk is our Abraham Lincoln (or possibly DuBois), Lady Gaga our MLK.

In that same vein, Elton John is the Booker T. Washington, too much of an accommodationist to actually enact change. He speaks for gay rights, sure, but he still sings songs to/for straight people, just hoping he can appease the rest of the world with his version of Tuskegee University. And that's just how Gaga's isolating garishness can be the ram that bucks public ignorance.

The part of this that still unsettles me is that Gaga makes such a spectacle of what we associate with "queer." When people see her extravagant outfits and outlandish stage antics, they don't remark, "What an awesome display of expression," or, "How creative!" Instead, they say, "Oh Gaga, she so cray cray;" and that's how we (or, rather, they, I suppose) label it. But that might be an unavoidable side effect. MLK didn't need to normalize his status because he was already established as a southern Baptist. Gaga, however, needs to separate herself from just another pop star by making some of the most ostracized expressionists fit into the same mold as the idolized icons (pop stars). In other words, this fruitless "art" is merely her moral re-alignment, affirming that what we are about to hear are not just the words of some pop star, but the words of a gay pop star. And, empirically, that should make a difference. But assuming this is simply an awkward gestation period, at the end of it we should expect Gaga to speak out and actually live up to her MLK billing.

Because otherwise she's back to exactly what M.I.A. and myself have called her: A no-talent hack who thrives on overdeveloped aesthetics and underdeveloped opinions.

Titus Andronicus at the Project Lodge

2010-04-06T23:31:00.009-05:00

I don't know the exact number of people the Project Lodge can comfortably hold, but I know it is about 30 fewer than were crammed in to see Titus Andronicus Tuesday night.

It's a little disconcerting how frequently Titus rifle through lineups. This was the fourth time I've seen them live and featured the fourth different lineup. But I think I understand how it goes: Titus Andronicus is not for the faint of heart... Or people with other interests or obligations. This Madison show was not originally on their tour, but after the dates were released, frontman Patrick Stickles wrote a blog post asking for people to fill in their empty dates. As he said it, "Black Flag never took days off, so why should we?"

"Can you hear the words that are coming out of my mouth?"

Not only was the fivesome a strain on the venue's capacity, but the PA system had a hard time holding it all in as well. Frontman Patrick Stickles, understandably frustrated with delaying the set, finally just said, "Well fuck it, I'll just yell louder then." Considering responses to similar equipment failures by other indie stalwarts (I'm looking at you, Bradford Cox), this was a pretty monumental (and, of course, rock 'n' roll) moment.

What happened to all those guys in the back? Well fuck them.

At some point, people began trickling out the back and congregating under the awning where they could enjoy fresh air and the full sound. It was not a huge deal, as all of them eventually returned, but it served as a handy microcosm for the band's significance worldwide. On the outside, people stand around and smoke cigarettes. They take in the rain and have conversations. On the inside, strangers take off their shirts and wear as much communal sweat as their own. And all the while, Stickles spurs chants of "It's still us against them."

It's easy for someone to preach rock 'n' roll or a sense of community from center stage at Soldier Field (I'm talking about U2, Bono specifically, here), but it takes another kind of person altogether to be able to bring the altar of rock to a tiny art space in the Midwest.

There aren't many props decorating the stage at ProLo, and Titus aren't ones for gimmickry. But the one thing they do carry is an American flag affixed to the front of their keyboard like a lawn ornament, as if to remind us of one thing: This is Titus Andronicus' world, we're just living in it.

Heat Check - BBU

2010-04-05T00:12:00.005-05:00

Kevin and I are taking spring break a week late at the podcast. But you can still scope the one we did last week right here. The heck if I remember what we talked about, but I remember having a whole lot of fun putting it together.

But I'm out of my shell for another reason now, and that's to talk about BBU. Their newest album/mixtape, Fear of a Clear Channel Planet, features many of the lyrical diatribes you'd expect from a band so clearly trying to replace Dead Prez, but unsurprisingly they're not as swift or intelligent (or as racist). Regardless, they're a welcome respite from the trite, unsubstantiated backpack-rap-gone-swiss-army schtick that seems to have consumed much of the hip hop game nowadays. And make no mistake—BBU aren't the militant Panthers a Dead Prez reference would assume: These guys can bounce, too.

Most notably, scope below for "Chi Don't Dance," the newest submission to 2010's Ultimate Party Mixxx (mix may not actually exist). It's hot, sure; real hot. But it's also got enough substance beneath its hop-scotch creep to sustain considerable strain. All I'm trying to say is, this isn't just another "Stanky Leg."

For further listening, they're giving away Fear of a Clear Channel Planet here.

Nu track - Band of Horses

2010-04-01T14:00:00.006-05:00

Well this is a pleasant surprise. Band of Horses just released their new album's tracklisting and the video for the first single off their forthcoming third LP, Infinite Arms. "Compliments" is busier than older BoH tracks, and it doesn't allow much room for Ben Bridwell to flex those earth-quaking pipes of his, but it doesn't sound overly claustrophobic. It's a lot more Pacific Ocean than Dirty South, but after two full albums of gorgeously wistful summery haze, it's probably an appropriate time for a change.

The video makes Transformers out of landscapes, and you can scope it here:

(Or, if you're having problems, at the band's website here)

Concert Announcement - Let's Wrestle

2010-03-31T21:09:00.003-05:00

I've been looking for an excuse to talk about these guys for a while now, but their album technically came out in Europe last year and I was too late for it to be relevant. Or so I thought. But now we've got confirmation that the rascally group of post-Libertines rawkers Let's Wrestle are coming to our fair city April 16, for to perform at that grimy hole in the wall affectionately referred to as the Annex.

As I just said, Let's Wrestle play some wily post-Libertines punk, which normally I'm not too keen on (It's so played-out and boring!). But their debut, In the Court of Wrestling Let's [sic], hasn't gotten old and it's been about two weeks now.

In his lower register, lead singer Wesley Patrick Gonzalez bounces between Angus Andrew (Liars) and Bob Pollard (Guided by Voices), but his upper register is what ultimately separates Let's Wrestle from other post-Libertines wankers. They carry the kind of swagger that makes their personalized MySpace URL (letsfuckingwrestle) more approachable and endearing than concealing any sort of tongue-in-cheek humor. In that regard, they're what Arctic Monkeys were on their debut, the kind of dudes who would just as soon break a pool cue over your head as buy you a beer.

"We Are the Men You'll Grow to Love Soon" probably isn't their best song, but it is their catchiest, and it's the best song I could find a proper video for. So here it is.

March Mixtape - Rogue

2010-03-28T13:03:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, it's a bit late. I was actually working on this one for a while, trying to find a suitable concoction for a trapeze-artist soundtrack. Instead I came up with this, the Rogue Mixtape. The soundtrack to doing sweet stuff like stealth missions and car explosions and fights with crowbars and pipes.

I had actually abandoned it altogether and even went so far as to get started on a different one for the month, until I saw "The White Ribbon." The unrelenting tension throughout served as my template, but instead of a front-to-back on-edge thriller of a mix, this one eventually takes off. Also, the "Nun's Litany" resolution is sort of a tongue-in-cheek roll-credits moment that probably only makes sense after watching the film, if ever at all.

It has a lot of cinematic qualities for me, and when I listen I subconsciously synthesize a narrative to go along with it. I'm not going to tell you what the narrative is, though, because I'd much rather you tell me the narrative you see/hear. It'll be awesome!

Tracklist:

Liars - "No Barrier Fun"

Caribou - "Odessa"

Yeasayer - "The Children"

HEALTH - "Die Slow"

No Age - "Teen Creeps"

Queens of the Stone Age - "Feel Good Hit of the Summer"

Clinic - "Pet Eunuch"

At the Drive-In - "Metronome Arthritis"

The Walkmen - "Wake Up"

The Mountain Goats - "Lion's Teeth"

The Magnetic Fields - "The Nun's Litany"

Snatch yr copy here.

(Update: Link stolen per the law)

Growing pains and Lady Gaga

2010-03-28T02:21:00.032-05:00

It's kind of embarrassing for me to admit that it took so long for me to get into Joanna Newsom. I'd like to think I'm above being weeded out by such petty nuances as vocals, but when I hear someone belting out lyrics in the key of cat claws-on-chalkboards, I tend to turn the opposite direction. And it's for that reason that I waited so long to grab her latest, the three-disc opus Have One on Me.

But more important than my ability to digest certain vocal chords is the nature behind these growing pains themselves. Newsom struggled to peddle what was ostensibly a less-than-accessible masterpiece in Y's, but Europe's best-selling hooligans Arctic Monkeys showed their awkward maturation phase by recording an underdeveloped LP that still reached a top-5 chart position in eight different countries. There's clearly something that fills some people's puberty with acne, braces and squeaky voices while others suffer through little more than a big nose and wiry frames.

A recent article at Pitchfork (which I briefly touched on here) paired J Newsom with Lady Gaga because of the two's penchants for dividing fans of seemingly similar dispositions. But in reality that's probably a more superficial distinction than it seems. And while I still hold that Parenthetical Girls form a convincing fulcrum between nearly all contradicting norms (modern and classic, pretentious and apprehensive, approachable and shielded, grandiose and subtle, palatable and putrid), making them the midpoint between the two accentuates the misguided attribution. By drawing the line from Newsom to Gaga we're losing sight of the roots behind the style and gestures. Eccentricities are not all born equal.

Newsom's true counterpoint is probably Regina Spektor, who is less divisive than either of the others, but who takes on Newsom's same posture. The difference is that, while Newsom experiences growing pains by stretching the boundaries of soft-spoken Margaret Atwood-centric pop, Spektor parks her piano squat beneath the foliage canopy. So while Spektor fans debate whether she's written songs worth hearing, Newsom demands conversations of whether or not she has yet synthesized pop music, whether she's transcended the boundaries and supplanted the genre to another phase of Being outside folk music's three-ring circus. Of course, that doesn't negate any significance Spektor might have; and actually that's where Arctic Monkeys re-enter the fold. Their first album took off because it was such a complete entity, taking full advantage of all their resources—not least of all being their youthful cunning. But when their third album fell short it didn't demand much conversation. They wrote a new kind of song and it didn't pan out as well. But the point behind that is that they were never fording new waters; they were reducing, reusing and recycling conventions to fit their own aesthetic, and that's why it didn't matter as much. We've seen it all before, just assembled in a different manner. And that's what happens when a genre settles down. There's no such thing as a noble effort because everything is confined inside the same tent. Their new direction was only "new" in a relative sense. And while certain bands who fail to put it together at first still gain acclaim (the most immediate recent examples being We Were Promised Jetpacks, Local Natives and Hockey), it's for their potential to evoke a nostalgic masterpiece, not because we think they'll reinvent the wheel. But those groups demand more skeptical standards placed upon them because, in reality, they're not doing anything new and don't deserve the same credence as an artist knocking down proverbial walls (a la Newsom).

When MGMT are good, it's because they've married David Bowie and nu wave. When they're bad, it's because they've missed Bowie's point. Nothing about it concerns their ability to create anything new or even write a catchy song. You can listen until your ears bleed and argue until you're red in the face, but nothing MGMT has done has broken any boundaries or synthesized anything new. They made pop songs with established pop conventions. If you want to draw a story from their priviledged upbringing, draw it from the ease with which they could obtain Bowie records, not their disenchanted perspectives on life. On the other hand is Diamond Rings. He inhabits the same canopy, but he's in the periphery, lunging through the same walls Bowie stretched, while MGMT take center stage; and that's how we know we can expect more from his debut than anything MGMT will ever do (and that's why a flat Congratulations should be no surprise). Sporting a tattered neckline is better than screwing around in an oversized t-shirt.

But what's especially bothersome is how pompous these people wear these oversized t-shirts—and even moreso, how tight-fitting these same shirts can get. Add Vampire Weekend to MGMT and we get the same phenomenon. These bands are in control of their own craft only as far as they are masters of others' already-established crafts. MGMT's handle on Bowie always seemed suspect, and the relatively flat Congratulations is the proof. Vampire Weekend'sunsubstantiated zeal falls flat for the same reasons. Songs like "Time to Pretend" and "Electric Feel" (and, hell, "I Stand Corrected," even "Walcott" if you twist my arm about it) are a double-edged sword in that they pick and choose so perfectly from their influences that the oversized t-shirt starts to resemble a natural fit, not to mention when bands' egos start to resemble the part. That's when critics crown their asses, only to get burnt when it turns out they're merely hermit crabs inhabiting and reaping the benefits from someone else's shell.

And I guess that's what brings us back to Gaga. At a New Year's Eve party a friend tried to convert me (I should clarify: I disdain Lady Gaga) by explaining Gaga as Andy Warhol 2.0. She allegedly got her Ph.D in modern art, and she's exploiting every facet of it to assume maximum acclaim. And that's a valid point insofar as her fashion sense re-applies many of Warhol's tenets. She wears outlandish pieces that often integrate popular culture into her dress, and where it doesn't we can still call it modern art because we have to assume that she (as a musician and therefore an expressive artist) intends more meaning be derived than Dadaism would necessitate. If she's not stretching our conceptions of product placement she's at least stretching our norms of typical posture and behavior. But the problem is that she's trying to advance a very multilateral persona in a very unilateral way. And that's what makes the delineation between Newsom and Gaga clear: They're both divisive, but for opposite reasons.

We've already seen Bjork wear Gaga-like outfits (or, rather, Gaga wear Bjork-like outfits), but we've also seen Bjork write existential songs that inhabit a realm of thought that matches her realm of dress.

Gaga is eccentric too, but only insofar as her persona allows. And that's the real issue: Her processed beats and heard-it-all-before lyrics don't match her outlandish fashion. Musically speaking, she's little more than an updated Christina Aguilera, fitted especially for some conception of a new age of female. But that new age of female doesn't wear Diet Coke bottles in its hair or attach burning cigarettes to its sunglasses. At its core, each Gaga song still plays on the same old memes—girl power and the escapist freedoms that come with it—which only ostensibly warrant such behavior. Girls have the freedom to do whatever they want and get away with it, sure, I get it; but artists don't have the capacity to do whatever they want and get away with it. What makes an artist an artist is the ability to either instill meaning in objects or to attribute objects to meaning; that is, do whatever they want with meaning. By dressing up teen pop in feathers and boas Gaga's just adding confounding layers to a simplistic notion. She uses a lot of wrapping to cover up a minimal gift. In other words, she's overstating her own significance, which is a mortal sin in artistry as far as I'm concerned.

And really that's my biggest problem with Gaga. Although you'll rarely hear me admit to it, her songs are just fine. They're not exactly my cup of tea, but I understand the appeal. They're club thumpers, booty shakers in their purest sense. But from my standpoint the baggage that comes with them discredits any sonic achievements. She bastardizes modern art and makes a generation of priviledged girls think they understand what is in fact a very esoteric art beneath the surface. And maybe I'm (more than likely) giving Warhol more credit than he deserves, but at least his swagger had a purpose and vision. Modern art isn't Coke bottles and face paint, it's Coke bottles and face paint presented in a fashion to critique some societal thorn. And don't think Gaga is saying something over my head: If she was, her songs wouldn't be such cookie-cutter bubblegum. She takes the aesthetic and divorces it from the meaning behind modern art, which in no way, shape or form makes me want to rock out.

Perhaps a better explanation for Gaga's credibility as an artist was posited at the same NYE party: She's stitched together the Google Ads formula and tailored it to Top 40 music. This much I can follow. She does things that attract attention and she writes club thumpers. Well I don't care much about club thumpers, and an inventive ad campaign still doesn't lend legitimacy to an empty art form. So while I can appreciate an impressive campaign when I see one, from an artist's standpoint (which is all I've bothered to concern myself with), we're back to square one.

So really, then, the best claim to credibility Gaga has is the third and final idea proposed at the NYE party, by a man far less musically inclined than most others in the conversation. He's a politics buff who's worked on campaigns nation-wide, so it makes sense that he'd be the one to crack the code. Because, you see, Gaga's appeal has nothing to do with music at all. I've already admitted she writes club thumpers, but that doesn't explain why she's garnered such a hip underground following. In reality, the reason she's important and the reason us dudes should listen up is simply because, as he so eloquently framed it, "As soon as you put her on the stereo girls get naked." Point taken. I'd like to see Joanna Newsom do that.

Getting personal

2010-03-22T15:21:00.007-05:00

Something unique about indie culture is the way it brought music into our homes. I'm talking about the Internet, but I'm also talking about familiarity of artists. Countless indie bands have embraced the Internet as a format of releasing music, sure, but countless more have embraced the Internet as a forum to meet with and connect with their fans. What's more, these artists seem to be just like us. They don't have heroic rags-to-riches tales about dealing drugs, nor do they brush their teeth with oysters (except maybe Vamp Weekend). But as indie music gets stretched and a personal connection with a band or artist is no longer very novel, and a forum for communication with artists is as oversaturated as the music medium itself, others are going the way of the dodo—novelty through sheer anonymity.

Remember when jj wasn't just some duo with a keyboard and guitar? They were an enigma, a cloaked entity from overseas that produced one of the more expansive of comfort albums in jj n* 2. But what happened between then and now is that they took the cloak off. They performed at SXSW and released a very mediocre follow-up. With or without their mysterious persona, jj n* 2 was an irrefutable success, so we can't necessarily blame their exposure for their lack of a better album. But it was surprising to see them follow up such an exhaustive debut so quickly, and it predictably fell far short of its predecessor.

You can point to a few things for this. It would be implausible to say that since they've unveiled themselves they feel personally responsible and had to abide by our time frame, not theirs, and thus rushed through their second LP. Even less plausible would be to say we fabricated substance where jj lost some in their cloaking, and now that we're more familiar we see there wasn't much in it to begin with. More likely, they just exhausted all their ideas on their first try. But what matters is not that they became better or worse, what matters is that, once the screws came loose and we got to see the inner workings ourselves, we got to see the art for what it was, not just what we expected it to be.

A great lyricist often leaves lines open for interpretation. It's a balance between emoting a message while leaving it open for interpretation on the other end. Just about all art forms act in the same way. Bands like the Knife (and, hell, Hollywood Undead and Slipknot) go so far as to wear masks to de-personalize their art—it's a product of ideas, not a product of a person, and thus the product can be communal so long as the ideas can be shared. But the more and more these anonymous artists pop up, the more we have to take a more analytic lens to them. Maybe it's just the cynic in me, but at some point these cloaked messages are no longer communal thoughts but Xeroxed beats left nameless in the company fridge. We can all stick our fork in them, but they're nothing but cold turkey and mustard.

The Fader dropped this new joint called "Seaww"–which isn't a word—by some group called oOoOO—which also isn't a word. But it's an atmospheric joint that sounds ripped from an extraterrestrial b-movie, which is a good thing. It's the kind of song that would keep me interested in a nameless, faceless group, even if not altogether winning me over yet. Which is the normal trajectory for these groups of anonymity. Case in point: iamamiwhoami.

Some nameless, faceless female figure started popping up on YouTube a couple months ago, and everyone started freaking out over the high-def visual effects and entrancing synth bass. The videos were littered with existential allusions and esoteric clues that promised a moment of musical enlightenment—a music nerd's equivalent to "Lost." The whole world was going to explode with this underground act who was going to redefine musical expression. And then the full-length video came out and it was crap. All the clues led to a quaint cabin, a piano and a really weak song. The imagery of dogs, the screenshots of goats, the strawberries, the numbers, none of them were substantive, and now nobody's listening anymore. There very well may be another video installment left in the plan that will clear up all our foggy ideas, but the point is we've already ridden it out as long as we feel obligated to. We got invested in the marketing scheme, but the song's failure means we won't get invested in the band. She's distanced herself just for the sake of distancing herself, and left us no reason to bridge the gap on our own. We just carry on with the Internet's endless cycle.

And that's really all I'm trying to say. This dada-ist music is a dime a dozen, and any eight-year-old can put it together on a Casio keyboard. It's when dada-ism forges a connection between the art and the person that it creates a lasting impression and gives a band staying power. The nameless, faceless route is a high risk/high reward venture, a zero-sum game in both musical success and artistic legitimacy. The whole conversation reminds me of a quote in Gil Scott-Heron's latest album, I'm New Here, in which he says, "I met a woman in a bar and told her I was hard to get to know, but damn near impossible to forget."

Speaking of songwriters

2010-03-22T12:57:00.004-05:00

I distinctly remember when I downloaded of Montreal's Daytrotter session my freshman year, and now three years later I'm experiencing a bout of deja vu. It's a sparse acoustic joint (is that redundant with Daytrotter?) that lays a few of Kevin Barnes' songs bare. Barnes' voice quivers and breaks at certain points, and the whole performance adds a humanizing element to of Montreal's overgrown, overblown aesthetic. Of Montreal cloak themselves in majesticism and exaggerated materialism; but underneath it all Barnes is a heck of a songwriter, and this session is a good reminder of that. You can get it all for free from Daytrotter's site here.

Meanwhile, the Hold Steady have released the first track from their forthcoming Heaven is Whenever, entitled "Hurricane J." At first blush it's the same Hold Steady—romping guitars carrying anthemic shouts—but it seems more distant than older Craig Finn lyrics. Finn acts as a mentor to this character, Jessie. And even though he's ultimately trying to date her (for half the song, at least), he's judgmental of her decisions and takes on a more preacher-like role. Honestly though, it doesn't really matter. Finn's always been an enlightened observer of a lyricist, and if there's one person around today who can pull off a preacher role it's him. What's more troublesome is how much the song sounds like something off of Boys and Girls in America. Finn claimed this album would sound different than the last two, and especially now that mustachioed Franz Nicolay is off the team we were right to assume a noticeable left-turn would be in order. Boys and Girls was one of their best, don't get me wrong. But if there's one thing Stay Positive taught us it's that they can't do it again. You can scope the track over at P4K here.

We are the champions

2010-03-22T01:57:00.004-05:00

Get a load of this: Kevin and my podcasts are now award winning! Which is saying something considering how often we abandon it to do other stuff like watch sports and sit around and get drunk. Off the top of my head, I can't actually remember what award it was that we got, but it was probably the most awesome one. It had something to do with media in the state, I think. Regardless, the new one's up; and while it hasn't won any awards yet, there's no telling what sorts of accolades are on the way for another half hour of senseless ramblings about month-old movies and poop jokes.

And in the spirit of talking about movies that hardly matter, get a load of this: It looks like that Hollywood meathead "Avatar" is coming back for seconds. Turns out, I guess they just left all the plot on the production floor. *Ba-dum chk*

And Michael Jackson's estate sold some exclusive goods. I'm linking to it because it's relevant and they're about to drop some fresh MJ stuff, but also because the AV Club cursed in it.

I have every intention of writing a follow-up to a recent "Slate" article about the twilight of indie and how it relates to the twilight of the baby boomers, but I'ma save that for tomorrow.

Chirpin' in yr lobes - 3.16.10

2010-03-16T00:42:00.006-05:00

This morning's issue of The Daily Cardinal features two music pieces definitely worth checking out. First off, Anthony Cefali's exhaustive review of Liars' new joint, Sisterworld, succinctly outlines what makes it one of the year's most surprising outings. As he says, "There is a hurt sexuality to the album, twisted around the arbitrary nature of human interactions and given voice by Sisterworld's morose sing-a-long choruses and guitars that float like a body down a stream." It's amazing how tense the album is, how on-edge they are from start to finish. It's the closest so-called "punk rock" has ever been to cinematic, if only because their foreboding sense of horror is so pervasive. It's less visual than visceral, though, and I guess that's the point. The most impactful horror films keep us on the edge of our seats in inquisitive fear, and this is the first album I can think of that elicits the same reaction.

On another note altogether, Justin Stephani's column this week focuses on the state of the singer-songwriter. I'd like to think I had a bit of a hand in some of this (the entire premise revolves around The Tallest Man on Earth, who you may remember as one of my favorite acts around), but regardless he gets to the root of some of the same issues brought up in Nitsuh Adebe's column I linked to yesterday. That is, what does "pop star" mean anymore anyways? It's a common quandry in the veins of ye olde Pop Curmudgeon's dome, and I'll probably try my own crack at it at some other juncture.

Love gone lost

2010-03-15T14:19:00.002-05:00

I've been putting off this post for a few days now. But, alas, I cannot put it off any longer. I'm breaking things off.

I've never really been able to distinguish the actress from the person all too well because it seemed like there was so much that bled through between the two. Her wry, cynical wit seemed so organic; to borrow from Paul Rudd in "Role Models," it seemed like she was someone who hated all the same things I hated. But now it's pretty apparent that she can't distinguish between the two anymore either. To figure out what I'm talking about, scope this new video from her music joint with a very dapper, Robert Downey Jr.-looking M. Ward:

What bothers me is how campy it is. Believe me, I can enjoy campy, but it makes her usual persona seem forced, even trite. The updated, innocent Britney Spears allusion aligns itself pretty clearly with what we've come to appreciate her as, but her dance routines come off as overly contrived. For the first time, she's removed herself from her role by making it a blatant performance. Things aren't natural, they're scripted. Her personality is divorced from her persona, at least insofar as her acting is purposive, deliberate. And so when she meanders around a bit as if her mind is all aflutter while walking away from the camera at the end, she's doing so consciously. Each hop and skip is meticulously scripted to reinforce an image that thrived on its unscripted appearance. Her natural allure of innocent, even unintentional irreverence is no longer innocent nor unintentional. I don't know, maybe she's being a little too expressive, and maybe that's where I'm having a problem. But it's not as if she's merely overacting. She's abusing her role to manipulate her reception.

Musically speaking, this track is about what we should expect from She & Him. It doesn't sound as much like she recorded her vocals in a kitchen, but Ward's composition is sharp as always and they don't lose much by amping up the production. But that's mostly a testament to Ward's music. However bright a well-produced She & Him track may be, the fact that she sounds removed from the kitchen does take away some of the familiarity. It's the same problem she has with her acting in the video. She blurs the line between the actress and the person to the point where here—in a musical outing that should include exclusively the person—she's implanted seeds of the actress. Put simply, it's a song (and a person) we can appreciate, but probably not one we can fall in love with.

And yes, I did just write an entire break-up post about Zooey Deschanel without using her name once. That's what heartbroken means.

Extended vacation, again

2010-03-15T02:48:00.005-05:00

Kevin and I might get fired from this podcast joint if we miss another week. And hell, with the NCAA tournament coming up this weekend, there's no telling when we'll find time to do the next one. But the three of you out there who actually follow that can thank us later for not wasting your time I guess.

But I thought I'd share something here from Pitchfork, because it's not like anyone actually reads that website without being pointed there anyways. But there's a new column/weekly feature by Nitsuh Abebe in which he looks to analyze our music conversations. Adebe's one of the better writers over there, and it seems like a good idea to have some sort of meta-analysis for those of us who care about this sort of thing—it looks to be a pretty similar idea to this here Pop Curmudgeon; and who knows, maybe this pseudo-competition will prompt me to write more frequently and more insightfully. This time around he takes a look at two of pop music's more divisive females: Joanna Newsom and Lady Gaga. Turns out, I'm not crazy about either. But he does raise a few interesting points about what we expect from our indie acts, and pop music writ large. We label any sort of attempt at cross-over appeal as selling out, and anytime a big-time pop act tries to do something at a more intimate level we cast them off as misdirected posers trying to infiltrate a niche that, honestly, is no longer all that organic. But I was especially excited about his Parenthetical Girls shoutout, and I think they can serve as a useful fulcrum for the indie/mainstream right angle. They carry a mainstream-level bravado and grandeur with an indie candidness and self-deprecative jauntiness.

He makes the point that we expect some sort of humility from indie acts, and when they try to do something they get really excited about we just sort of kick them back down to street level. I'm probably pretty guilty of this myself, but I think there's still a standard that needs to be enforced in order to distinguish the gravy from the mud. The argument screams Vampire Weekend, and I'll argue that VW's pompousness is only part of their problem. Compare them to Colin Meloy: When the Decemberists were putting out joints like Picaresque and Castaways and Cutouts, not all that many people cared whether or not Meloy was a prick; but now that their songs are drawn-out and boring it's an issue. And I guess it's somewhat confounded in that both of these groups' pretense is grounded in thinking they're more innovative than they actually are, but that's probably symptomatic of what's really going on. The fact that they act so ignorant to their source material indicates some sort of rift between us and them: We're smarter than they are, so why do they act like they're smarter than us? I don't want to say bands owe us something for us having listened, but I think we do have to expect some sort of reciprocity. If they can't give us innovation or ingenuity, at least give us something to like.

majer failer

2010-03-12T17:15:00.005-06:00

It's never an excuse to simply call it a "long week," but that's what I'm going to try to pass off. But things are looking up. I have no midterms next week, which means I can make more promises of plentiful posts only to apologize for coming short later on.

There's not a whole lot going on around town this weekend. Well, there is, but if you're someone who would be interested (and also reading this blog), you've probably heard of them already. And, frankly, I'm late for Will Rante's surprise birthday party.

But I did write a review of Titus Andronicus' laughably awesome new album for the Cardinal this week, but I can't in good faith link you to it. To make a long story short, there are some parts of it I don't entirely agree with; and I wrote it. But I will take a moment to reflect on Jacqueline O'Reilly's work on the headline. At first I couldn't put the pieces together: "Remember the Titus (Andronicus)" is too matter-of-fact not to have a pop culture reference behind it, but I didn't immediately catch the "Remember the Titans" allusion. Of course, "Remember the Titans" is the thrilling saga of a high school football team thrust into a position of segregation on the field (and also Disney's best movie, srsly), which is an incredibly apt example of Civil War-related issues impacting modernity ("modernity" of course being relative in this instance), as we see how the lines on the field get blurred to become metonymic of the lines in society. In fact, "Remember the Titans" might be The Monitor's closest contemporary in that regard. And I have no reason not to assume Jacqueline put exactly this much thought into the process as well.

But anyways, off I go.

Appreciating Pavement

2010-03-09T22:28:00.005-06:00

This will be quick and unorganized because I'm in the middle of a whole lot of studying.

I'm trying not to get into the habit of being that prick who's always complaining about other people's articles, but you have to expect something like this when you try to pay homage to a band like Pavement without having much of a clue what you're talking about. Here's the piece, and here's my response:

"Paper Radio," as it's called, is the weekly playlist compiled by some guy I've never met before over at the Herald. It's a stupid concept alright, but there's no question this guy's better at it than the last one. The latest installment is a Pavement-based script trying "to see where Pavement came from, what they've been up to and who they've inspired." Right on.

I'll forgive the mention of Pavement's reunion running alongside a modern lo-fi revival (were they really the source of that? unlikely) and their end to animosity (they never actually broke up, they just went on hiatus; it's pretty well documented that Malkmus was the only one ever opposed to a reunion, and it was mostly just so he could feel out his solo jaunt a little longer).

Lou Reed as an influence is pretty straightforward (even if a bit of a scapegoat, but whatever), but I'm not sure I'm on board with his assertion that Malkmus is a poor singer (for proof see "Jenny and the Ess Dog" off Malkmus' self-titled joint). The point of Malkmus isn't that he's a poor singer (again, I disagree with that anyways, but for what it's worth there are probably just as many songs you could point to where he comes off sharp or flat), but that he never cared much for singing (or trying not to sound sharp or flat). It seemed like a hassle. He was too cool to be singing. That's where Reed really comes in: They were both too cool. That also sounds amateurish. Whatever, next song.

I'm not sure how often Pavement gets called "the most British American band," nor am I sure how often Echo & the Bunnymen get called E & the Bs. I understand the idea, though, and it's true. And even though it is pretty lazy saying Pavement sounds like a band they've covered on record, it's still an apt comparison. The only part that doesn't make sense is the bit about the Cure and Interpol. Fact is, Interpol would not need a time machine to collaborate with a band that has released two albums since Interpol's first. But even if the point of it was that Interpol would be collaborating with an in-their-prime Cure, why wouldn't they just collaborate with Joy Division, who were still releasing albums when the Cure recorded "Boys Don't Cry"? Joy Division's a better touchstone anyways (they actually were an influence, not just some band that kinda/sorta sounded like Pavement and followed five years afterward).

I won't get too into the Spiral Stairs and SM & the Jicks appearances on this list. Go figure, two principal songwriters in Pavement went on to write songs that sounded like Pavement after the group split. For a band that more or less spearheaded indie music and had their hands in 80-90% of all indie music over the last decade-plus, this list of Pavement followers is pretty sad.

The Spoon bit, though the only follower mentioned worth mentioning, is the one that really bolls me over. Spoon is a direct descendant of Pavement, sure, but I don't buy all this minimalism garbage. Pavement wasn't all that minimalist, and while they flexed a bit of the studio-sounds-on-wax schtick Spoon has since mastered, it was nothing Pixies hadn't done before. Instrumentally, Spoon is a stripped-down Pavement, but there are other things at play. What makes Pavement so paramount to Spoon is in the vocals. Britt Daniel draws the same loose portraits in the same off-handed breeziness with the same deftness that Malkmus perfected.

Arguably Pavement's biggest influence on rock is an aesthetic and paradigmatic one. Pavement showed that punk rock didn't need to be aggressive or drug-induced. There's a semi-famous dialogue in which, during one of Pavement's first shows opening for some punk group (I want to say Black Flag, but don't quote me on that), Malkmus was literally shaken after seeing a band member mix some substance into his drink. The dialogue goes on to where Malkmus admits it was probably just some sort of cough medicine or pain killer, but the point is that he was writing Slanted & Enchanted while still incredibly naive of punk culture. And the naivety is what allowed pioneers like Belle and Sebastian to wear sweaters and still be accepted so universally. Pavement was beloved by even the most thuggish bikers, but they'd show up to shows wearing NBA fleeces. The yardstick wasn't based on some metric of roguishness applied to pins on a jacket or studs on a shoulder anymore, but on the head that's atop those shoulders. Pavement drew the line between pop and punk without ostracizing either because they didn't sacrifice either, and that opened the door between the two. I could go on another tangent about the role of post-punk in this whole dynamic, but frankly I don't have the time right now. The point is, that gateway is littered with a lot of highs and lows in pop music, but the glue that cements it in place is Pavement.

And please don't ever refer to them as "the Pavers."

Sad news and semi-constructive discourse

2010-03-07T22:30:00.010-06:00

I'm afraid I return bearing bad news. Mark Linkous, better known to most as Sparklehorse, killed himself yesterday. His music has always been pretty brooding and he's been reportedly in and out of severe depression and drug addiction for years, but that doesn't make this any less unfortunate. You can get a tailor-made mixtape of some of his highlights courtesy bolachas.org here, and you can find a few of his other albums courtesy olde Greggers here.

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But I can't bring myself to brood all day, especially when there's legitimately constructive music talk to be had. My former boss, esteemed coworker and Daily Cardinal world-beater Justin Stephani wrote a pretty interesting review of the new Frightened Rabbit album, The Winter of Mixed Drinks over here, but he presents a few ideas I'm not sure I'm on board with.

For starters, in the first paragraph he posits that, "Gone are the days of the Scottish group sitting in a bar drinking bourbon too expensive for their own good... They are now drowning themselves in a bottle of cheap whiskey," but that seems semi-counterintuitive. The type of alcohol should be swapped, at least to adhere to their discography's trajectory.

Mixed Drinks is Frightened Rabbit all dressed up. It's no coincidence they're not cursing as much as they used to, because their act is becoming over-rehearsed and it's confounding their schtick. Part of the reason Frightened Rabbit was so endearing on their earlier material was because it was so off-the-cuff and messy. Lead singer Scott Hutchison was too fervent with his confessionals to articulate them without a bunch of F-bombs littered about. We could relate to Hutchison's anguish because it was so familiar; the imagery of a man pouring his entrails into a pint glass was too real not to be affecting. But Mixed Drinks loses that element at the cleaners.

It's rare to criticize a band for trying too hard, and I could be misguided. Sure, maybe these songs are more economical, maybe they are better-structured crafts; but the bottom line is, why should I listen to them? If I want structured, composed rock 'n' roll I can listen to British Sea Power or Tokyo Police Club. But if I want the pent-up disgust of a surly Scot, I'll listen to "Head Rolls Off" or "Modern Leper." If I want the kind of vulnerability a drunken Scot only shows through the dregs of his whiskey, I'll listen to "Poke" or "Who'd You Kill Now?". And Mixed Drinks fails to contribute to this area. Rarely if ever will I opt to hear sober, rehearsed, distilled drama strained through soap-opera guitarwork.

As Justin points out, there are a lot more allusions to and imagery of escape, usually fleeing for the sea. But Organ Fight was so powerful for the opposite reason. There was no running involved. It was just a bunch of dudes huddled around a bar complaining about stuff. Mixed Drinks is a solitary effort, vocalist Scott Hutchison running away from his problems. And forgive me for stereotyping, but it negates the Scottish model of confrontational drunkards, counter to the raw display of personality that pervaded Organ Fight and made Frightened Rabbit worth fussing about in the first place.

So I suppose I agree with Justin that Frightened Rabbit are on their way up, making craters with their anthemic triumphs; but for the time being I'm just fine sitting down.

On my way out, in bullet-point format

2010-03-05T13:10:00.013-06:00

I promised myself I'd never turn this into a link dump, but I've got a lot to say and none of it original to me. I'll be out of town all weekend partaking in the legendary Chiditarod. For bookkeeping purposes, olde Gregg—responsible for that sweet skirts blog I mentioned—was a key cog in the perpetual winning machine, Corporate Dalliances, and the riveting story of their takeover is here. But when I come back expect to hear my thoughts on why Conor Oberst became such a chump and why his saga more or less ruined modern folk for a minute or three.

But anyway. First and foremost, be sure to check out Andrew Dambeck's new soul mixtape. Maybe not his most immediately accessible, but the readers of this blog should be far past that type of thing by now.

Secondly, least I forget the major goings-on in Madison while I'm away this weekend. Zola Jesus has been getting some major back-scratching from the folks at Pitchfork lately, not to mention the inclusion of her last LP on Gareth Campesinos!' own best-of-year list, in which he says, "I don't even know what to say about this. Nika Roza is an incredible talent. I'm dying to see what she comes up with next." Well, she's also from Madison and younger than myself, and the goth singer is hosting the release party for her Stridulent EP at the Project Lodge at 7:30 p.m. this Saturday. I don't much get into goth pop all that much, but I'm still terribly jealous of everyone who gets to go to this.

Also, I have e-mail confirmation that the support for Los Campesinos! at the Majestic is none other than the group responsible for The Daily Cardinal's #1 album of 2009, Cymbals Eat Guitars. And while I can't necessarily defend its placement as the best album of the year, I can certainly attest that it was my favorite, and it legitimately did garner the votes to vault it over Dirty Projectors without any hint of foul play. I saw CEG with the Depreciation Guild and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart at the Stage Door last Summer and, among other things, their singer is real, real sweaty. Also, they were real, real good. Oh, and I've got an interview with Ellen Campesinos! on Monday, in case you were wondering. I was hoping they'd give me Harriet, but whatever.

The Hold Steady is announced for Summerfest, which is cool.

And last but most certainly not least, the latest wave of bands performing at the Pitchfork Music Festival was announced today and it damn near killed me. In no particular order, Broken Social Scene, Titus Andronicus, Freddie Gibbs, the Smith Westerns and Girls were all added to the Pavement-loaded bill, among several others. Three-day passes are long gone, but you can still pick up single-day passes here. But I have a feeling if it took you this long to get tickets to see Pavement we won't be hanging out much anyways.

Oh, and for those of you who were concerned: I slayed that social movements midterm.

Soul Mixxx 9

2010-03-05T13:00:00.005-06:00

Booty Shaker Deluxe Andrew Dambeck has unveiled the ninth installment of his venerable soul mixtape series, and it's a bruiser. He describes this one as having "everything from latin boogaloo to modern soul boogie," and while I have a feeling those words are made up, they're pretty good descriptors of what you're getting into. Especially the latin aspect, which was somewhat foreign to me in regards to soul music, but it's a refreshing change of pace.

Dambeck puts these out monthly and I'll do my best to post them here in constant rotation with my own monthly mixes. One thing to keep in mind: These are all thrown down onto one track, ripped from vinyl. It can get exhausting, sure, but I wouldn't put it here if it wasn't rewarding as all hell.

Git yr boogie on here and pay yr respects by hiring him for yr next party. This guy doesn't mess around.

Nü Tracks — Crystal Antlers

2010-03-03T14:56:00.010-06:00

"Little Sister" was a song by Queens of the Stone Age on Lullabies to Paralyze, which marked the first point at which you can stop caring about Queens of the Stone Age. "Little Sister" is good and all, but it lost the grit and tenacity that shone through Homme's earlier compositions.

So then I give a big WTF to Crystal Antlers, who just released two new tracks on their website in anticipation of their upcoming album. One of the two is named "Little Sister," and it's a drastic departure from their gritty and tenacious styles of yore ("yore" being, you know, less than three years ago). Crystal Antlers were one of the most violent bands around, and played one of the most frenetic sets I've ever seen anyone play to 25 people at six in the evening on a Tuesday. But I think it was obvious their melodies lost a lot of people in their ferocity (like I said, no more than 25 people for a show that cost $5 and included free pizza), and if this is the kind of shift they have to do every now and then to make a living then I can deal with it. After all, these guys literally funded their music by working as chimney sweeps, and it's nice to see less residual ash caked in their instruments.

The keyboardist from the Mars Volta was a major player on their first album, Tentacles, and it was pretty apparent. They were neighbors in California, I guess, and he produced the album, I think (no time for fact checking). The fluttering keys and aimless guitar sprawls beat you over the head with Mars Volta influence, but the point was that everything beat you over the head.

They still suspend chords in space, but it's less of a forced, quasi-art affair this time, invoking more Band of Horses or Shins than Mars Volta, to their credit. A band so hell-bent on tearing shit up needs to calm down every once in a while so as not to run straight through a record without accomplishing any goals. But they're still too garish to capture Band of Horses' poignancy or fragility, and if their new album is comprised of nothing but songs like this, I'm going to be very, very disappointed.

And just saying: This photo on The Fader shows a picture with a woman not previously in the band. I'm not one to point fingers, but I am noticing a common denominator.

Tallest website on earth

2010-03-03T00:51:00.009-06:00

For a while now I've been meaning to mention something about olde Gregg's new website, but I was waiting for an appropriate time to do so. And what better time than a new Tallest Man on Earth album leak?

TMOE, stage name for Kristian Mattson, is an essential grab for near everyone. He's the closest thing we have these days to an early-years Dylan, but his sharp, hoarse Swedish drawl and hit-the-deck finger-picking set him apart as a troubadour all his own. Lyrically, his profundity is in his subtlety, relying more on imagery and symbolism to weave the narratives Dylan often accomplished through dialogue or more conventional, linear storytelling.

For whatever reason, The Wild Hunt, follow-up to 2008's staggering Shallow Graves, sounds more like Dylan to me, and somehow that's a detraction. But detracting from brilliance still registers remarkableness (what an awful word, I'm sorry), and I've a strong feeling The Wild Hunt is a grower. Mattson's an onion, you see. Looks solid, but many layers underneath.

I should also clarify one thing: I met Mattson last summer and he's remarkably shorter than his name might suggest. If I had to take a gander, I'd guess somewhere near 5'6'' with boots on. Regardless, he was genuinely one of the nicest, most humble people I've met, and he sounds great on vinyl. Not sayin', just sayin'.

Of course, this isn't the only post on Skirts (same link as above), and it's definitely worth keeping up on his daily recommendations. Full disclosure: Gregg is my older brother. But he is also responsible for a large chunk of my musical taste, and to this point he's proven his taste in music to be just as reliable. So add it to your RSS feed before it gets taken down by the law.

And for good measure, here's a video of TMOE on KEXP playing "I Won't Be Found," which gives a decent idea of what his finger-picking's all about.

Video killed the radio star

2010-03-02T15:19:00.004-06:00

I think I might be late on this, but whatever. If a band wants me to be on top of things they'll write good music. Which I suppose is the perpetual quandry related to Ok Go. They're known for sweet videos, and their latest (embedded below) is no different. Of course, I have a problem with the video at roughly 2:40 when the sledgehammer smashes their old (linked to above) video. The treadmill video is the band's only notable accomplishment (yes, I am discarding "Get Over It"), and the imagery involved in the smashing shows a sort of demolition, a re-invention, which of course is the exact opposite thing they're doing here. The song, like "Here it Goes Again," is boring and relies solely on the viral campaign of its visual accompaniment (I actually had to search YouTube for "Ok Go Treadmill Video," just to illustrate the irrelevance of the music itself).

From the start we know the punchline: They're already plastered in dry paint, so we know that at some point they're getting blasted. The story of the video, then, is the means. Ok Go show some humility by including at the end of the video a shot with the group of people who are ostensibly responsible for the elaborate construction, but at the same time the band is discrediting themselves. Or, rather, they're exposing themselves. Like I said, the song isn't the draw here, and by including the video's makers (even if the band lent some insight to design ideas) it's like they're passing the torch to the ones who really matter. They get blasted with paint, but I can't help but think of the paint as egg, and the people who deserve the credit are cheering while the band has to wipe the egg from their faces.

But it also introduces a few thoughts on the relevance of music videos. "Video killed the radio star" is a radically outdated concept, and the medium of videos themselves show little promise beyond ephemeral marketing schemes (Ok Go ostensibly the masters of said campaign). More and more bands are including videos on enhanced versions of their CDs, but those too are becoming outdated. In the end a band's meddle is always proven or disproven relative to musical performance. Perhaps the Buggles' insight should be modernized to "Video saved the radio bust... for a minute or two." The title of the song, "This Too Shall Pass," is eerily self-aware. But I suppose, so long as they know what they're up against...

From underneath a pile of trubble

2010-03-01T21:20:00.006-06:00

I've never actually gotten myself on any sort of regular posting schedule, so I don't feel obligated to apologize for the recent lack of posts. Nor do I feel obligated to post much the rest of the week while I try to dig myself from underneath all this homework I've been putting off for so long. Rest assured it's not that I've nothing to say, it just so happens I have a lot more to say about the Baton Rouge Bus Boycott, at least until Thursday afternoon.

But, another week another podcast, and—though only loosely related to the contents of this blog—this week Kevin and I tackle the plight of popular films trying to retain perpetual relevance. "Back to the Future," "Boondock Saints," "Office Space," "Fight Club," even "Avatar" (briefly), we cover 'em all.

Being March 1, we're officially past the Record Production Month challenge. I spent the last month watching basketball and celebrating my birthday, but hopefully other people were more productive. I'm going to take some time to digest them, but expect a breakdown of some of the contest's more important contributions next week. Per usual, if you (yup, any of the three of you) happened to participate in the contest, please be sure to forward your product my way. I promise I'll be cordial. We can swap banana bread recipes if you'd like.

And I'd be remiss not to mention Pavement's reunion tour's kickoff yesterday. You can keep up with the band's progress via fan-submitted setlists, audio, video and photos on this exhaustive, meticulously organized fan-site. Those are the kinds of things that re-affirm my geekdom.

Concert Announcement - Los Campesinos!

2010-02-26T07:15:00.002-06:00

You may or may not be able to tell because the exclamation point was built into the headline, but boy oh boy am I glad I woke up to this. Los Campesinos!, whose new album is a titan of a grower, whose other albums need far less time warming up to, whose live show is paralleled by few, whose female members are as attractive as they come, are coming to Madison's Majestic Theatre April 29.

This is, of course, very conflicting news for me, a staunch opponent to the Majestic's shoddy service, crappy sound and innate ability to draw nothing but dickheads to their shows, but this isn't the kind of show to pick and choose venues for. I'll post more when my ride to work isn't parked outside, but for now mark yr calendars. What a time to be alive!

Lazy weekend

2010-02-26T00:56:00.003-06:00

Not much in the way of live music this weekend thanks to Cold Cave canceling their show. Still, Justin Townes Earle and Joe Pug are playing High Noon Friday, and Saturday you could see the Minnesota-native all-girl pop-punk band Sick of Sarah (who claim their "influences range from Joan Jett to Vanessa Carlton") at der Rathskeller... Or you could go see "Police, Adjective" at the Play Circle, if you wanted. Or, if you're looking for something especially fun, check out the "Apple Pie" exhibit at the modern art museum, about which Anthony Cefali and Dan Sullivan wrote very highly. Beauty.

Something to look forward to, though, is the Sandwitches at ProLo Monday. I'm not going, but I'm sure some other people are. Should be good.

I've got a lot of homework to do this weekend, so don't be surprised to see something up here about Beck and his new Record Club outing—among other things—soon. Ish. But until then, get yr hands on the newly leaked Javelin album, No Mas. So hot so hot.

City hall's new bffs

2010-02-24T13:51:00.008-06:00

I don't have the energy nor the interest to get too worked up over this, but it doesn't seem to make much sense: Madison politicians are lobbying to adopt Wilco as honorary citizens.

Maybe it's like they say, and Madison's just trying not to be out-cooled by Duluth. Maybe they're attempting to become more hip, trying to align themselves with Portland or Austin to lure in more progressive students; but once hip-ness enters government it ceases to be all that hip (I'll tackle gentrification soon enough). And Wilco's an interesting choice. Part of their appeal is their Chicago roots. Sure, their latest cover art was shot in Milwaukee and Jeff Tweedy's thrown out the first pitch in Miller Park, but he's also sung the National Anthem at Wrigley Field and played more benefits and regular shows in Chicago than any other city nationwide. When Conan O'Brien filmed a week of shows in Chicago, he picked Wilco to headline it. Nearly all geographic reference points in their songs are Chicago. Detaching them from Chicago detaches their base; and maybe Wilco's stretched broad enough to encompass America writ large, but that would make them even less qualified for the distinction.

If they'd been looking to establish hip-ness, they could have welcomed Okkervil River, who at least mention Crystal Corner Bar in "Girl in Port," but no dice (maybe they were as underwhelmed by their latest as I was). Or maybe Scott Van Pelt, who repeatedly refers to Madison as the best college town, mentions Wando's bacon night in Badger highlights, spoke at a graduation, but is still no resident to the town. It doesn't matter how important Madison is to you, it matters how important you are to Madison. Or something.

But even so, Wilco seems to be losing their favor with the younger demographic; and while it may be indicative of a hip-er adult presence, it speaks little to the hip-ness of a student body that would embrace a past-their-prime alt-country-gone-adult contempo group. City hall would be much better off fostering the existent-yet-undercover local scene (I'll get to that later, too) instead of importing one it can't support (Wilco would sell out James Madison Park, almost guaranteed). It's city hall trying too hard to fit in. Or maybe, like Pitchfork alluded, it's city hall flexing their muscles to get a personalized autograph from their favorite band (and getting mentioned on Pitchfork—how hip). Or, maybe it's city hall flexing their muscles to increase revenue (what other band exclusively plays the Overture Center?). But unless that's true and there's an actual political agenda at play, there isn't much news to this. Or at least none that interests me.

Heat Check — Caribou

2010-02-23T02:19:00.004-06:00

I know I'm late on this, and sure, it's pretty redundant pointing people toward a band everyone's been fully aware of since at least 2007, but this—the first single from their forthcoming follow-up, Swim—is worth taking special note of.

Before Woods, Real Estate and the like were blurring the lines between psychedelia and sloppy folk, Caribou's Andorra set the gold standard for rough (albeit summery, clean and new) folk music framed in psychedelic terms. But while their genre seems to be reaching a prominence with the glutton of lo-fi folksters out there nowadays, Caribou seem headed in another direction. On "Odessa," they bring the bass to the front and gloss over their folksy production, creating a subtle romp that shows no signs of wearing down. Swim drops April 19, and you can download an mp3 of "Odessa" from the band for the small price of an e-mail address here.

[I'm not entirely convinced (it could just be a little girl in a hood, idk), but chances are this video is NSFW]

Caribou – Odessa - Watch more Music Videos at Vodpod.

Old men and young rock

2010-02-22T00:33:00.005-06:00

The podcast is taking a sick day this week, so all of you can have that half hour for stuff that matters, I guess. Despite Cold Cave's last-minute cancellation, the week ahead still holds a few gems, including a pretty compelling situation Wednesday night when Alec Ounsworth at High Noon, the Post-Racial Comedy Tour and preparing for a poli sci presentation all vie for my attention.

But I'm actually here to talk about something else—Ted Leo. After Living With the Living came out in 2007 and in anticipation of his latest, the newly leaked The Brutalist Bricks, it's time to revisit the old man and figure out why his last two records (I give Shake the Sheets the benefit of the doubt) have been so awful.

Olde Jake Victor made the interesting point that Leo had, what, 31 years to write Tyranny of Distance. Jonathan Richman had some 26 years to write Modern Lovers, and his career trajectory is flatter yet. Same story, different player. And while Hearts of Oak is arguably better than his debut, Leo hasn't written anything on par with either of those since. He might have just run out of ideas, and it'll take him another 30 years to come up with more.

But another idea that I'm mostly hung up on is that Ted Leo was never actually a punk rocker. His former band, Chisel, played pretty deliberate punk rock, but it had about the same success as his new stuff. Tyranny of Distance and Hearts of Oak weren't punk masterpieces, but they came from similar roots (routes?). Leo covered Stiff Little Fingers, sure, but he wrote about rude boys. He played ska songs cloaked in his Irish heritage; which is to say, loud, fast and soaked in beer. But his songs aren't as angular anymore, and the linear riff structures lack the mobility of his songs of yore. He doesn't sound like the youthful voice he was, but the strained, old man he is. Where his songs used to have legs, they now have wheels. It's as if he no longer writes with the same joy and enthusiasm, dragging himself through the legwork instead of plunging into his passions.

His career should be compared to Robert Pollard or Elvis Costello, not Jonathan Richman. But Leo's not nearly as prolific as either of those two, and that's where we return to the 30-year gestation period.

I'm willing to live with political lyrics, but when his messages are as straightforward and played-out as his riffs it's unnerving, and confounds his problems. I don't mind be bludgeoned over the head by music, but it needs to come from an innovative or at least fresh perspective for me to care about it. No work of art is void of value, but a lot of art fails to progress or assert anything. And when it comes to rock 'n' roll, standing still is one of the most vexing things you can do.

Over the forest and into the weekend

2010-02-19T06:39:00.004-06:00

This weekend crept up on me. First, you can check out my new article at the Cardinal. It is, in a word, weak. But it's about Art Brut's frontman, and the headline is a pretty subtle quip. There's nothing I love if not subtlety.

The main show around town this weekend is Title Tracks at der Rathskeller tonight. Title Tracks is the new(ish) group by Q and Not U's drummer. I haven't heard them, but supposedly they play pop music. The only time I saw Q and Not U, they opened for Interpol, ended their set with looped distortion and got booed off the stage. Needless to say, I'll be there tonight.

I'm also making sure to check out the "Automata: Contemporary Mechanical Sculpture" gallery this afternoon. The Cardinal's review didn't tell me much, so now I'm left to see it myself. *Shrug*

And lastly, the new Frightened Rabbit, The Winter of Mixed Drinks, leaked. You couldn't do much better than to grab it for yourself.

Normalizing chaos, saving the world

2010-02-18T02:58:00.007-06:00

Sorry I've been gone so long. It's been a busy, busy week, and it's still getting busier. Expect a long-ish piece on Ted Leo soon, but for now just chew on this.

A good friend of mine recently posited a thermodynamic theory to me (the second law? I don't know). For anyone who knows anything about science it's probably rather basic, but for a liberal arts man like myself it was pretty groundbreaking. The theory, as I remember it, suggests that the universe is in a natural flight toward chaos. The example given to me is to think of a piece of wood. We burn it for heat, and the wood is gone. Of course, the Law of Conservation rules that the wood is not gone, rather transferred to heat. For our purposes, though, the wood is useless. We'll never get that back.

But the kicker is that it is man's inclination to try to organize this chaos. At his onset, man relied on nothing but solar energy. But as technology progressed we allowed ourselves to transcend its supply, and now we have such luxuries as nuclear energy to provide for us. Of course, technology allowed us to surpass solar energy's affordance, and now we deal with overpopulation. With nuclear energy came easy, affordable living, but also came nuclear bombs, nuclear wars, and the current crises we refer to as our politics. We keep supplanting our problems with bigger ones, and eventually we're going to run out of solutions. Cool, right?

So naturally I broke this down into how it translates to music.

I've written before (and undoubtedly will again) about a developing divergence in the scope of music history: The pattern either regresses back to a re-imagined beginning (think TV on the Radio, Yeasayer's latest), or launches itself into digital expansion (namely Animal Collective).

But for these purposes it's better to view the two as either a post-modern regression to democracy (TVOTR) or a more natural embodiment of anarchy (note: I'm differentiating here between the organic features of a re-created tribalism and the natural features of a sonic expansion a la Animal Collective. That is, the course of events that have happened organically and those that would naturally follow in linear history).

In the beginning, Animal Collective did embody chaos. Their early material (which I suppose means anything pre-Merriweather) sounded painful, like Avey Tare was ripping the lyrics from his throat and their PA system broke before the recording but decided to leave the grating distortion and feedback in for kicks. That was chaos, that was the burning wood. That stuff, those noises, they were unusable goods. And that's what makes Animal Collective's early material so mesmerizing: the fact that out of all that hellish noise and distortion they were able to locate and synthesize parts of pop music. They found a way to organize the un-organizable, displacing our chaos to another level.

And don't be mistaken: It all comes back to pop music. No Age (who admittedly are much less a 'noise' band than they were several years ago) have no qualms admitting their affinity for pop music. What saves noise is its ability to create melody, or even purpose, from destruction. That's what differentiates a noise band from plain white noise.

But the problem we run into now is that bands lose sight of the end-game. They hear Strawberry Jam as the gestation of something new, not the apocalypse it truly is. The xx are the immediate example, and partially the reason for this post. No, I won't make the claim they sound anything like Animal Collective (though I suppose I could. I mean, who doesn't these days?), but they use the same spacey sounds and minimalist drub without the earthly disorder to lead it anywhere. There is nowhere to go from here because the sound is detached from its roots. Animal Collective was the apocalypse, but the xx is the end (same effect, but there's no brilliant explosion from which to draw something new).

And so it goes all over the place. There are countless Crystal Castles and xx off-shoots that write distortion-heavy pop, but are ultimately limited by their means. They use the tools (again, I mean the distortion, sound effects, etc.), but don't start from the same state of chaos that gives Animal Collective its solid ground. It sounds oxymoronic, but without the chaos there is no order. When we lose sight of the disorder and tumult that drove our predecessors to this point, we lose sight of how to rectify our plight (Think of the mid-'90s pop-punk scene. Worthwhile efforts by a young Green Day, NOFX, Rancid, what have you, were ruined by pansies—I'm looking at you, Good Charlotte and Simple Plan—who wore the same clothes, used the same guitars, but wrote sappy emo songs that lacked the ruffian chaos that drove them there). We run out of wood so we burn plastic for heat. And without getting overly dramatic, that plastic (the disingenuous novelty of misled bands) poisons us. And that does not bode well for indie music. Whatever that means, anyways.

Of course, it's never as cataclysmic as it sounds. Rock 'n' Roll and hip hop have been in this state for years, and they still stumble across worthwhile acts. But the success rate is much lower and they don't undergo the same kinds of paradigmatic shifts they used to. Everything starts to sound the same, and before you know it we'll be looking for something new to solve our problems. They're a lot bigger now than they once were.

Lady Pop

2010-02-15T02:14:00.004-06:00

Rent's due, and that can only mean one thing: February mixtape.

This month I present Lady Pop, a mixtape made by ladies for ladies (featuring very special guests Beck, Conor Oberst and that guy from First Rate People).

Tracklist:
Cat Power - "Love and Communication"
Land of Talk - "Some Are Lakes"
Tune-Yards - "Sunlight"
Micachu & the Shapes - "Worst Bastard"
Charlotte Gainsbourg - "Heaven Can Wait" (feat. Beck)
Gillian Welch - "Lua" (feat. Conor Oberst)
Camera Obscura - "Forests and Sands"
Beach House - "Heart of Chambers"
jj - "Things Will Never Be the Same Again"
Best Coast - "Sun Was High (So Was I)"
Cold Cave - "Life Magazine"
Pearl Harbor - "Sunburn"
Warpaint - "Billie Holiday"
First Rate People - "Girls' Night"

Snatch yr copy here.

Paying interest

2010-02-15T02:10:00.002-06:00

At one point in this video by the upstart pop outfit Diamond Rings (the same one responsible for that quaint pop masterpiece "All Yr Songs"), singer/songwriter John O takes a bat to a baseball-shaped pinata, only to discover that it's empty on the inside. It's a deflating nothingness that exposes a metaphor for materialized gimmickry. Later in the same segment he tosses a Michael Jordan cardboard cut-out into a crowd surf.

It's an interesting case of post-modern influencing (which I suppose is just called pop art), championing iconic aesthetics for the ideas they purvey, not the stars they represent. We (intentionally or not) place a lot of hidden meaning behind recurring images, and when we remove the background relevance we're left to ponder how resonant our cultural memes can be. If an alien were dropped in the middle of Times Square, what impression would he (it?) relay to the tribe (colony?)? Or, hundreds of years from now which social studies texts will reference which television ads?

Jordan is already often referred to in degrees of past tense, and however celebrated he is as an athlete, his impact writ large is as a promoter, the charismatic role model we idealized him to be. But his Hall of Fame induction speech exposed a more bitter core, his repeated ill-conceived comeback attempts an insufferable ego. In the Internet age, not even Jordan is granted a facade. Kobe Bryant had marriage issues, Seth Rogen was caught being rude to fans, Britney Spears walked into a gas station restroom barefoot; but however much we rob superstars of their right to personal lives, the tragedy is that we rob ourselves of the right to heroes. John O doesn't hoist a living person, one with insecurities and flaws, but an image, a label, and most of all an idea, a perfectly-formulated aesthetic that can remove us from the insufficiencies of real-life characters. It's something we don't see anymore, unfortunately linked with other archaic mediums like the cassette tape that induces the video's dance-party send-off.

But from an artistic standpoint it's also a tedious balance to strike. It's hard to reference something with built-in significance because your use is relatively pre-determined, limited to the scope of influence of the items you employ. The more resonant the images you use, the more resonant the message you give; but the most resonant images are often not malleable enough to craft something new. The bottom line is about the same place as Jet, those Australian kooks who couldn't seem to write an original song without plagiarizing four or five others. It's one thing to wear your influence on your sleeve (Cymbals Eat Guitars and Surfer Blood the most prominent, recent examples), but it's a whole other to let someone else's art stream through your mouth.

At another sequence in the video, John O takes off with a basketball toward the hoop, immediately evoking a similar montage in which Jordan dunks in "Space Jam." But when he gets to the rim, O doesn't dunk, he tosses up a left-handed reverse lay-up. And that seems to be the key to this whole charade. Recycled fragments from pop culture are only one step removed from the trash heap, and unless the stylistic mash-up instills a unique message or narrative into the piece there's nothing to justify its resurrection. Diamond Rings takes liberally from the pop dumpster, but so long as he sticks to lay-ups he seems unlikely to become the empty pinata on the ground.

Trees falling on deaf ears

2010-02-15T01:52:00.007-06:00

Sorry I missed out on this weekend, but it was my birthday and I didn't think too much was going on (though apparently I was wrong: word on the street is I missed quite a show by Dawes at der Rathskeller Saturday night).

Without sounding too self-righteous or self-promotive, my old co-editor at the Cardinal, Kevin Slane, and I have a new podcast up. We refer to it as a "popcast," though I'm suspicious we might be breaching some sort of copyright in doing so. At the risk of drawing ire from our esteemed colleague Dan Sullivan, we spoke at length about 3D films (which Anthony Cefali will have you know is actually 4D; tune in to find out why), as well as the state of Pixar and visually enhanced cinema in general. We also decide which Disney princess we'd most like to take on a date, though Valentine's Day is old news by now. And as much as I'd like to cast all the blame for the Disney soundtrack on Kevin, I can't. We win as a team and we lose as a team.

And the best news of the entire week:
Somebody answered the call: Titus Andronicus at the Project Lodge Apr. 6. Here's to hoping it stays there, too.

Mic Check — Parenthetical Girls

2010-02-12T18:26:00.002-06:00

The first time I heard Parenthetical Girls, I immediately e-mailed their MySpace page to a lady friend of mine, adding, "You'll love this. They sound just like 'Aladdin.'" I guess I stand by that. Androgynous frontman Zac Pennington belts his vocals as wide-grinned as Princess Jasmine, but the backing instruments expose the bleak pragmatism that coats his olde tyme wit.

The first chords of "Evelyn Mchale" evoke Okkervil River's "Lost Coastlines," and I suppose Will Sheff isn't a bad reference point for Pennington. Pennington's less bookish and less idealistic, but he boasts his hyper literacy with the same off-handed, breezy nature as Sheff. Overall, though, Pennington's melodrama adds a theatricality that Sheff whiffed at on The Stand Ins.

Parenthetical Girls' latest venture is an real doozy. They're recording five different EPs, releasing each as it's completed. Each EP will focus the lens of one of the five band members, and the fifth will include a commemorative box with space to hold the preceding four. And what's more—Each EP will see a limited release of 500 mail-order only 12" vinyls, individually numbered with the blood of the corresponding member. Assumedly it will have dried by the time it gets to your door.

The first EP (chapter?), Privilege, suggests this bloodshed is as apparent metaphorically as it is physically (poor writer cop-out alert, sorry). Pennington regresses chatter-pop to antiquity, synthesizing the kinds of minimalist orchestral grandeur that makes the Decemberists look like little more than overzealous slaves to pop glory.

Parenthetical Girls "Evelyn McHale" from judesays on Vimeo.

There's no future

2010-02-11T17:32:00.007-06:00

I just did a whle lot of dishes.

To revisit some of the past few posts:

Small Black's EP came out less than a year ago, so waiting until later this year to release the follow-up LP makes perfect sense. But the only thing more striking than that the LP was already completed was that my immediate response was to wonder why they would wait so long to release it. Technology has had such an impact on the immediacy of music that sitting on a completed album seems foolish (though it probably happens all the time without our knowing). Bands get shuffled through like cards, and the longer one stays out of the blogosphere the less willing most of us are to remember they exist.

Japandroids have a different story, though. Months before Post-Nothing hit the shelves, it hit their Facebook page for free. It was hard to find a leak of the album because it was so easy to make one for yourself, and with the band's permission no less. And now, less than 13 months after Post-Nothing was actually released, they're sending out a series of b-sides while they tour, as if they owe us more constant output. The press release was almost apologetic that they weren't going to be able to record another album until they were done touring.

But it's near impossible for a band (especially one so young and without a built-in audience) to make a living in the recording studio anymore, and nobody (to my knowledge) has embraced that fact more openly. The pay-what-you-want scheme made waves in that it erased the middle man and offered an alternative to listeners unwilling to pay inflated CD prices but were still supportive of the music. But pay-what-you-want quickly becomes pay-nothing when you stockpile albums the way most of us do, and here JPNDRDS seem to have hit upon a business model that would not only promote band profit, but perpetuate that profit by staying relevant. Additionally this model could, ironically, save the album as an artform.

Instead of waiting for a 10-year-anniversary deluxe reissue series, release the non-album tracks now. More often than not, songs miss the cut because they don't fit in the album's flow, not because they're any less accomplished or noteworthy (as seems to be the case with "Art Czars"). And where the Internet and MTV have tag-teamed music to a world dominated by videos and singles, these non-album tracks fit right in.

Not everyone will pay for the 7" (I did, at least this time), but just about everyone will listen. So while bands are making money on the road, they stay fresh and relevant in our ears until they're ready to sit down and record a proper full-length. Girls have done a lot of this since their Album dropped last summer, and people are still talking about them. Each new quality track keeps the album from going stale while they bide their time for another release, oftentimes making the money to make said release possible.

Very few bands are willing to "settle for our utter disdain," and likewise very few are willing to record the kind of monstrous wonder Titus Andronicus did on The Monitor. But if bands consistently release a bunch of miscellaneous songs while on the road, they'll naturally attempt to set their full-length apart, by making it an album, even if not a 2xLP concept album about the Civil War.

But this still requires bands to make their money on the road, and in this way it separates the chuck from the steak. The common denominator is performance, and bands will have to be both consistent and talented for this model to work. But in an ideal world, that's how it's always been. And for what it's worth, I wouldn't be writing about JPNDRDS or Small Black if I didn't think they qualified.

JPNDRDS single

2010-02-11T12:20:00.007-06:00

Garage-rock superheroes Japandroids announced a series of five singles to be released this year, each 7" vinyl pairing a non-album track from their Post-Nothing sessions with a cover. The first, to be released in early April, pairs a cover of Big Black's "Racer X" with another anthemic ode to punk rock and, like, girls, "Art Czars." Early standout quote: "I'm really sorry if you're still believing / They suck in angels but they spit out demons."

You can stream it courtesy Pitchfork here, and you can pre-order the 7" via Polyvinyl here. And, in the spirit of ruining surprises, you can hear a live cut of their "Racer X" cover (as well as "Rockers East Vancouver," beauty) on Daytrotter.

Update: Just remembered JPNDRDS covered McClusky's "To Hell With Good Intentions" at their show at the High Noon. That was on their All Lies EP, though, and I kind of doubt they would just re-release that. What other covers could there be? Hüsker Dü and the Minutemen are my immediate thoughts.

Small Black on Jagjaguwar

2010-02-10T16:25:00.007-06:00

Jagjaguwar just announced that they've signed Small Black. The label will release a "remixed, remastered and expanded version of theSmall Black EP" April 27, and tentatively have the band's already-completed follow-up LP ready by the end of the year. Which is awesome news because Small Black rules.

They're going on tour in March and will stop by Chicago, but miss Madison by a few hundred miles.

Small Black: Despicable Dogs from Yoonha Park on Vimeo.

In somewhat related news, Titus Andronicus will also be skipping out on Madison on their upcoming tour, though they have an open date in April on which they'll be driving from Minneapolis to Chicago. Someone holler at WUD Music.

Heat Check — Local Natives

2010-02-10T00:33:00.010-06:00

I first saw Local Natives in a stuffy attic this past summer as part of Daytrotter's Barnstormer Tour. I spent a good amount of time after the set talking to the singer/keyboardist, and it felt almost redundant meeting him. Hailing from the home of the most dominant forms of distorted haze, noise and chill-wave, the band's sound is both clean and nice. They're Belle & Sebastian revivalists for the post-Vampire Weekend era. Or, they're a band you can take home to your grandma but still be entertained by later in the week. I mean, if you were dating.

They complicate Band of Horses' breezy country and make Grizzly Bear pedestrian. In other words, they're like a Grand Archives we can get excited about. Their debut LP, Gorilla Manor, drops next week, and I figure someone at The Daily Cardinal will probably handle writing about it.

(I don't understand why they're booing at the beginning of this song. I know it's a slow piano part, but geeze. From what I can tell it's about a dead grandparent. Give him a break.)

Juiceboxxx mixxxtape

2010-02-09T15:11:00.006-06:00

Jake Victor has three albums on his iPod, Tyranny of Distance the only one not recorded in the seventies. He and Emma Roller are the two whitest people I know, so when those two get giddy enough to tweet about a rap album, I've learned to pay attention.

Juiceboxxx raps over some ambitious beats (DMX, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne all included on his production hit-list), but what makes them work is that he makes no attempt to be their successor. He raps honestly, addressing the problems he knows—suburban stagnancy, getting ill and just how low lower middle-class can go—without any distorted misperception of his own position. He doesn't want to inherit any title or throne, he just wants to go to "Discotheques that serve me wine." And that's what prevents him from falling on his face. He doesn't rap better than anyone else, he just raps harder (that is, the kind of 'hard' that's amplified by air horns, not street cred). He's the Andrew W.K. for a different kind of party, even if that party's best received through headphones.

Any Steev Mike can rap hard over some beats though, and what sets Thunder Zone Volume I apart from any number of high schoolers on YouTube is the original beats he got for the tape. Thunder Zone features appearances from both Spank Rock and Ninjasonik, Javelin and Teengirl Fantasy each produce a track and even Carrot Top and Diplo holler at him. This guy's not going to interfere with Freddie Gibbs' takeover, but he should immediately supplant LMFAO and save us all the headache.

You can grab Thunder Zone Volume I for free on his website.

XLIV

2010-02-07T22:25:00.001-06:00

Despite the high scoring, Super Bowl XLIV was pretty quiet. And as much as I'd like to waste your time talking about the value of an offensive coordinator on the Colts or how Sean Payton's supposedly "ballsy" play calling is actually incredibly fruitful (backed up by some of the finest statisticians in the blogosphere), it's worth dwelling on (and more relevant to the purpose of this blog) the halftime entertainment, the Who.

The last time the Super Bowl hired modern acts to perform at halftime, they put a boob on the screen. So from a PR standpoint it makes a lot of sense to keep the training wheels on pop music for a while. And to be fair, it's not like many modern acts could have one-upped the performances of Prince, Springsteen or even Tom Petty, but at some point there has to be a transition. Eventually, the "oldies" will be the "really oldies," and the NFL will be left looking for performers who aren't also health liabilities.

A main factor is agreeability of the acts—the most niche-oriented band to perform at a halftime is probably either No Doubt or ZZ Top. So as great as it would be to see the Hold Steady or Modest Mouse on top of a flourescent island, we're probably stuck with a more VH1-friendly group. But there's no reason to think a band like Wilco or Radiohead couldn't make it. Neither have the universal sing-along choruses or seminal nostalgia attachments, but they seem to have broad enough appeal to keep people tuned in during the downtime. On the other hand, the Flaming Lips seem like a band built for the sole purpose of playing the Super Bowl halftime (if they could ever clean up the mess before the second half, or if Wayne Coyne could ever shut up long enough to actually play some songs).

Of course, the true descendents of halftime glory are likely artists like Alicia Keys and Jay-Z—the future is a place of Disney-produced urban strife, and what better encapsulation than a Rhianna/Chris Brown kiss and make-up performance? Mariah Carey even sounds reasonable.

But this vision is a troubling one in the way it ascribes a culture to the NFL. The NBA re-gained relevance by embracing the culture of its players. In a period of hopeful yet aimless canonizing, Allen Iverson was once heralded the next MJ, and in a big way he was. MJ had transcendental value because he was the greatest to play the game, but his tangible (and reasonably repeatable) relevance was that he made people care about the league. By bringing his tattoos and dreadlocks, Allen Iverson did the same. But the NFL isn't in as bleak of a dark age as the NBA was, and there's no point to exclude fans that are already there.

But after booking bands like the Who and the Rolling Stones, bands almost entirely washed out by gentrification and old age, the NFL has refused to let itself embrace a similar potential. The NFL is the most successful professional league in America right now (if only because they allow playoff games to be held without Joe Buck), and for the time being they don't need to rely on an image to put fans in the seats. But if the talent falls off like the post-MJ NBA experienced, they could be backed into a corner that only Wilco could squeeze them out of. Of course, the Packers are enough proof to suggest that this downward trend is nowhere near us, but it's the kind of thing I think about during the commercial breaks.

Chirpin' in yr lobes

2009-11-11T22:47:00.000-06:00

New article at the Cardinal, now with 100% more zombies!

Back to Nature

2009-11-07T16:36:00.000-06:00

To get an idea of where I’m coming from, check out my review of Phrazes for the Young over at the Cardinal, but in retrospect I really missed the point I meant to get on. The title is an embarrassingly transparent embodiment of what I meant to say but ended up rambling too much to actually get across.

I think of it like a Hobbesian musical State of Nature in which we (or, rather, musicians) are born with certain faculties and their objective is to make concessions until each is reconciled in a coherent body (actually more Kantian than Hobbesian. Whatever). The Leviathan is the perfect marriage of style and substance, sincerity ascribed to whichever is the strength. In other words, Is This It?.

Even if a Strokes reunion is as catchy and buoyant as “11^th Dimension” like I hope for in the article, I can’t help but worry that it’s going to be at the cost of everything that made me care about the Strokes in the first place. His appearance on Conan was such a nervous Tom Jones impersonation that it would’ve looked like Barry Manilow at the Copa if not for the drummer’s egregious hodgepodge of fashion clichés. His LA/NY clothing split is synecdochic of their attempted universal appeal; but style is specific to a niche, and when something gets stretched across too many borders it loses its depth and value (case in point: flannel). The group’s attempt at cross-cultural swag is a contradiction of style in itself.

Julian’s buoying around the same boat, wearing necklaces, a tailored leather coat and streaks in his hair. It’s punk chic and it’s stupid. He lost his hell-bent disregard for emotions, but he also lost his functionality, which makes his style void of a social contract. He’s back in the State of Nature, hanging out with Brandon Flowers, probably.