Kanye drops some Oedipus-inspired rhymes standing on a table at the offices of Facebook. I don’t know why, but he looks sharp in that suit.
MP3: Kanye West – Power
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Review: Best Coast – Crazy For You
What you take from Crazy For You depends on how much you stomach Bethany Cosentino. Like her boyfriend, Wavves’ Nathan Williams, her songs are inseparably connected to her day to day concerns and personality – as far as can be told through her many interviews and tweets. Coming in at just under half an hour, there’s no time for different characters, voices, perspectives or any kind of crafty artifice in her lyrics. Instead we’re treated to tweet-length streams of angst-ridden thought that typically jump from weed, relationships, other girls, and cats (Snacks, to be specific). Lyrically, Crazy For You is the Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr (delete as applicable) of your typical teenage girl set to fuzzed-out garage pop; if the needy yearning and gentle rebelliousness of teenage girls isn’t your thing then you might want to look elsewhere. Even if it is, the album’s honesty in this regard is one of its most notable problems.
Bethany Cosentino is twenty-two year old college dropout living in the twenty first century and this is where the artifice comes in. Most teenage girls would be more likely to bookend a blog about their guy with the sugary g-pop of California Gurls rather than The Beach Boys or 60s girl groups that the album’s clearly indebted to. That the music on Crazy For You is as borrowed and out of time as the lyrics are goes without saying but it creates an awkward jarring. The dorky, naïve yearning of Spector produced girl groups like The Ronnettes is much travelled territory and Spector’s patented ‘wall of sound’ is an even more familiar aspect in the indie landscape, (shitgaze,C86) but here she’s talking about smoking weed. She’s talking about getting high and displaying affection for a cat in a way that can only be described as post-millennial, post-lolcat. She’s approaching this earnestly. When, say, the Vivian Girls pull off these tricks there’s a separation – ironic and in terms of artifice: they’re not characters in their own stories and they definitely don’t inject their own 21st century behaviors into that archetypal first-love template. In doing it here, it’s hard to say whether Cosentino wants to aggrandise her own experience by placing her struggling relationships and what drugs she takes in that mold – updating, contemporizing The Ronnettes – or if she simply wanted to revel in a more romantic time and aesthetic. Regardless, it never quite sits well and as a 21st century woman in a 1960s landscape, it’s not flattering how needy and dependant she sounds as a result of how earnestly she approaches the project – especially when (if you’re a nerd for these things) the ‘you’ in her songs is unavoidably another artist you listen to.
Lyrical concerns aside, Best Coast know how to write a hook-laden pop song. Their compositions are devilishly simple (four chords and a five note solo simple), to the point and infectiously catchy, communicating the sunny melancholia and yearning for past times lucidly in their retro production and lo-fi gnarl. By grabbing at the right signifiers the band manage to bring to mind sun warped polaroids, first loves, endless summers and the end of adolescence. As the Wavves record perfectly captures a snottier, punkier, more MTV and Technicolor summer spent surfing, skating and avoiding your lame parents, Crazy For You draws to mind more subdued, bittersweet tones and inflection of a summer or relationship past.
If you can stomach a disciple of the unapologetically rough ’n’ ready ‘learning on the job’ school of songwriting, aren’t fed up of the flood of lo-fi crate-diggers already on the scene, and don’t mind adolescent posing in your music (perhaps you are an adolescent!) then Crazy For You might just be for you. Despite the inherent Myspace quality to her lyrics, Cosentino knows how to mine a niche; beyond juxtapositions of tone and (perhaps intentionally) stoner-minded rhymes there are plenty of compelling, bittersweet and sinister turns – see Honey’s minor-key transformation from sweet love-ode to statement of stalkerish intent – that Brian Wilson would (almost) be proud of. And whilst her earnest approach creates as many problems as it solves, it is refreshing and offers a nice dose of emotional sincerity that’s more than appreciated. People will miss the point and fire the same salvos at Best Coast as they did at the Vivian Girls in 2008, but as an album it mostly achieves what it sets out to do. More importantly, it does it more compellingly than most of its peers in an increasingly crowded genre.
7/10
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/10-honey.mp3%20MP3: Best Coast – Honey
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/01-boyfriend.mp3%20MP3: Best Coast – Boyfriend
Mountains Beyond Mountains
So The Suburbs leaked on Friday.
MP3: Arcade Fire – Rococo
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/04-rococo.mp3%20 https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/15-sprawl-ii-mountains-beyond-mount.mp3%20 https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/16-the-suburbs-continued.mp3%20Review: M.I.A – /\/\/\Y/\
If there’s one thing to say about M.I.A, it’s that she knows how to push an aesthetic: third-trimester Grammy performances, Twitter hijacks, juvenile scraps with old-media journalists and /\/\/\Y/\’s militantly gauche visual promotion featuring ‘radical’ lenticular images and messy album art depicting her peering out from behind a wave of corrupted video bars. You’d be hard pushed to find a more crudely confrontational statement of intent in pop music. A decent tip for those wanting to challenge that statement would be to scope out her previous two records that took little care in playing with revolutionary politics, symbols of warfare and, most indecently, abundant fractal designs.
She gets away with it because it’s all inseparable from her personality. M.I.A is her message and often her message is M.I.A. The vulgar first-world revolutionary spirit is a consequence of her childhood, the ability to earnestly namedrop Reebok and the P.L.O in the same song a result of an uprooted adolescence and, with /\/\/\Y/\, the confused, provoking nature the product of an artist trying to remain relevant with a millionaire boyfriend, child and Paper Planes around her neck.
Arular and Kala were both confrontational albums, too. They both urged you to hate M.I.A but you ended up falling in love. What makes /\/\/\Y/ \ exceptional is how hard it tries. The fine lines between militant and irritating; polemical and inane; forward-thinking and obscene have rarely been broken as often as they are here. MAYA is the bratty third child who, resigned that it’ll never achieve the critical acclaim of the eldest or best commercial success of the middle, goes rogue, drinks lots of spirits, smokes a lot of weed and takes a transparently dilettante interest in extremist politics to out contentious its elder siblings.
M.I.A has never been the most lucidly minded ideologue, but she stuck to her guns and the productions her slender voice flowed over were kind to her. The shtick worked best when kept brief; illusive rather than illustrative. The production of clattering magazine discharges, ‘oriental’ dialects, chunky tribal beats and baile funk rhythms juxtaposed with a shiny, western pop sensibility was a dazzlingly example of ‘show don’t tell’ with her own first-world revolutionary narrative. The landscapes of her songs said everything about where she was coming from on Arular or Kala before she even arrived in them. Here, she’s left floundering and her meandering voice too repeatedly reaches out to be provocative and current; where the Tamil Tigers and Reebok Classics feel historicized, beyond or past topical, Twitter, iPhones and Obama don’t. She often has something pityingly unhip – almost mum like – about her when she namedrops these late 00s signifiers. Like, yeah, this stuff has happened – where have you been?
In chasing her own half-formed idea of what the zeitgeist is to be shocking with she hits a lot of bum themes lyrically which are exaggerated by the album’s preoccupation with also presenting a musical zeitgeist of sorts, too – most notably represented by the inclusion of Rusko. By chasing hot genres like Dubstep the abrasive and cookie-cutter production is without any lead in hit like Jimmy, Paper Planes or even Sunshowers. It’s not a problem on its own but /\/\/\Y/\’s well of quality songs is pretty shallow so as a listener you’re left wondering what was the point of your investment. There’s a short-lived thrill in the noise of it all, but the most frustrating thing about this search for a sound that matches the militancy of M.I.A’s lyrics is that the brash homespun beats on her earlier works already had this organised chaos down.
Consequently, the absence of melody draws the attention more focusedly on the lyrics; inbetween the shrieks of a drill you catch the tail ends of political rants even the most outspoken campus politician would cringe at – mostly aimed at ‘the Government’, which never carries the Orwellian tones desired. Tact and nuance were never M.I.A’s strongpoint, but here lyrics are indulged for rhyme rather than reason which delivers lines that force the right images into mind (Like a hand-me-down sucker throwin’ bombs out at Mecca) but mean little when scrutinised.
Appropriately for an artist who invests so much of herself into her music, the best use of her voice has been to employ it as another instrument – whether that be delivering a insistent call to arms or maxim, hollering a wordless hook or captured, sampled and propelled back and forth like those lenticular images. The best M.I.A songs feature little of M.I.A’s voice in a conventional sense. When given the opportunity to over enunciate her politics, she loses all musicality, all sense. /\/\/\Y/\’s attempts to be a zeitgeist-capturing call to arms against the government, The Internet – or both – falls apart most notably when M.I.A adds too much to the conversation.
The album isn’t all failure; there are examples of this tactic being successfully employed on /\/\/\Y/\. Story To Be Told is a mid-album highlight that features an arresting vocal sample that trembles between sub-atomic bass trills; Meds and Feds stomps along on crunching bass hits and slabs of guitar sampled from Sleigh Bells whilst M.I.A keeps her verse vocals short and deliberate before launching into a chorus of processed vocals that eventually overlap and meld into an hypnotic rhythm of syllables which interlock with those uncompromising bass hits and crunchy, sampled handclaps to form an unrelenting, irresistible mess of sound which probably comes closest to achieving /\/\/\Y/\’s mission statement of capturing chaos in music.
A handful of other tracks feature enough promise that an enterprising remixer might salvage something from them – perhaps Diplo might reveal a director’s cut, but as is it stands, /\/\/\Y/ \is a mess of ill-convinced and half-executed ideas and a capitulation to the pressures of her previous successes. Whilst the savage critical mauling she’s received from certain sections has been just as much about M.I.A as an icon than /\/\/\Y/\ as an album, it’s hard to really feel much sympathy in this instance. The album’s a way below-par stumble. She’s done more damage to herself that the truffle fries ever did.
3/10
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/06-story-to-be-told.mp3%20 https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/10-meds-and-feds.mp3%20Zola Jesus – Sea Talk
There’s a select few artists that I will blog about before I’ve even heard the track, some because they’re so big, some because they’re so on form. Zola Jesus is in the latter category.
Sea Talk is a cleaned up version of the track that first appeared on her 2009 EP, Tsar Bomba.
I like Zola Jesus and so should you.
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/zola-jesus-sea-talk.mp3%20Deerhunter – Revival
Strange how the usual two year album cycle can feel so long with some artists but so short with others, as is the case with Deerhunter.
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/01-revival.mp3%20MP3: Deerhunter – Revival
Major Lazer – Jump Up (Thom Yorke Remix)
Famed English miserabilist and creator of skittish, introverted bedroom IDM meets West-Indian zombie slayer and dancehall floor-filler.
Shouldn’t work; almost definitely does.
In other Reggae Radiohead news, this reminds me to recommend Jonny Greenwood Is The Controller the Radiohead guitarist’s excellent Trojan records comp.
From Major Lazer’s new EP, Lazers Never Die, out today.
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/05-jump-up-thom-yorke-remix.mp3%20Post Pitchfork Festival thoughts…
Major Lazer stole the show.
Major Lazer really stole the show.
‘Play Lemonade!’ is the new Freebird.
As good as Sir Lucious is, Big Boi playing Outkast material makes his live show about 400% more vital. Though the copyright wrangles that prevented us webcast viewers from watching his performance was a bit of a downer.
Panda Bear is not a festival act.
Diplo sounds less… nerdy than I expected him to.
I’d never heard Diplo’s voice until yesterday.
Major Lazer really, really stole the show.
LCD Soundsystem keep large swathes of their setlist the same from show to show, but I still want to catch them for a third time this year.
Who is Freddie Gibbs?
Titus Andronicus are a festival band.
St Vincent burns easily.
If you’re not following pitchforkreviewsreviews, you should.
HRO and altreport put in good post-festival performances.
This is the first festival I’ve blogged about without actually being there.
Major Lazer really nailed it.
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/01-hold-the-line-feat-mr-lexx-santigold.mp3%20MP3: Major Lazer – Hold The Line feat. Mr. Lexx & Santigold
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/15-back-up-plan.mp3%20 https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/02-slow-motion.mp3%20Posted in Music
Tagged Beach House, Chicago, Lemonade, Major Lazer, Panda Bear, Pitchfork Festival, St Vincent
Good Vibrations
You know what else grinds my gears? Fuzzy, lo-fi surf rock.
And as a sort of validation of my meanderings on yesterday, there’s this piece I stumbled upon on whilst searching Best Coast on Pitchfork. Though it’s focused on surf rock, and the Brian Wilson legacy; music that creates a yearning for Summer – perhaps at that same previously drizzly, windswept beach – it keeps the same sense when applied to Chillwave’s attempts to call to mind rainy landscapes as depicted in ‘blurry jpegs with faded colours’. Both genre’s are similiar in that sense and I reserve a similar dislike for what artists like Best Coast are doing with their ‘aesthetic’. It also touches on Neon Indian quite a bit through its druggy, melancholic style, so the link’s not as tenuous as you might think.
This passage seemed quite related to what I was saying yesterday, the bits I think are most relevant are in bold:
Looming large over all of this music this year is the specter of Brian Wilson. Which is not to say that any of this music sounds like the Beach Boys, or even tries to. When it does go in that direction, bad things start to happen, like this painful cover of “Girl Don’t Tell Me” by Vivian Girls. The Beach Boys exist in this music in an abstracted form– an idea, rather than a sound, as it’s often been. This is partly up to the fact that sounding like the Beach Boys is actually very difficult. You have to be able to sing on key, understand how harmonies work, and have the songwriting skill to get creative with structure and the arranging chops to take the music somewhere unexpected.
There just aren’t any short cuts to “I Get Around”. And if you only get part way there, you wind up as Explorer’s Club, a band that probably wouldn’t have made an impact this year even if they’d put out a record. Their version of the Beach Boys is too literal to catch on in this climate, as well as being too sober. The Brian Wilson that permeates indie today is the emotionally fragile dude with mental health problems who coped by taking drugs. Summertime now is about disorientation: “Should Have Taken Acid With You”; “The Sun Was High (And So Am I)”; You take the fantasy of his music– the cars, the sand, the surf– add a dollop of melancholy and a smudge of druggy haze, and you have some good music for being alone in a room with only a computer to keep you company.
* * *
When it came time this year to think of the albums of the decade I kept flashing back to the original cover of Fennesz’ Endless Summer: two images sit next to each other at an odd angle. One of them has bathers on the beach in silhouette standing in front of the sea, the other shows a distant sailboat heading toward the horizon. The horizontal lines on the shot with people are suggestive of a video monitor, even though the images have holes on their edges, which points toward film. So it’s like a video of a film of a memory that may or may not be based on any real experience. It’s not mean to evoke the physical sensation of standing on the beach, but the feeling that comes from experiencing media depicting the beach and wondering what it might be like to be there. And the music extends this essential idea in a hugely successful way. You listen to the Sandals’ “Theme From Endless Summer” (a wonderful tune that sounds uncannily like the also wonderful new band Real Estate) and then play Fennesz’ “Endless Summer” and you see what sort of beauty can be generated by the fuzz of memories and media being folded together, duplicated, sectioned off, blown up, and amplified. Copies of copies of copies start to turn into something original.
I’m not as optimistic as Richardson, I don’t think. It undoubtedly creates something original; something that’s often quite good – as with Washed Out and Chillwave I quite like Best Coast and fuzzy Surf Rock – but there’s still something about that insincere, mediated, second-hand experience that troubles me.
As I write this, Major Lazer has just come on stage at the Pitchfork Music Festival…
http://pitchfork.com/features/resonant-frequency/7732-resonant-frequency-65/
Edit: 20/07
Not going to do a third post on this subject, but I just remembered this video of ABC’s Amplifed feature, fronted by the heartbreakingly unassuming, and quite flirtatious newsreporter, Dan Harris.
Don’t want to try and deduce too much from it, but I found the bit about listening to Beach Boys, New York not being California as her muse and the outakes at the end where she admits she’s not that ‘into the ocean’ quite illuminating. Perhaps the copies of copies that I’m so awkward about are just a natural consequence of an age of cheap travel, the proliferation of recorded music and how easily accessible that music is.
MP3: Major Lazer – Pon De Floor
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/01-something-in-the-way.mp3%20Posted in Music
Tagged Best Coast, Detachment, Irony, Major Laxer, Pitchfork, Surf Rock
In search of sincerity
Obviously I’ve got a lot of time on my hands to over listen to certain music, it being Summer and all, but I can’t think of a genre of music I appreciate less than Chillwave at the moment.
It’s not so much an objection to ‘chill’ synths, disembodied vocals or the consciously aged, retro production. It’s not even the over-proliferation of the stuff on every other blog. I just find the script that it seems to be reading from limiting and insincere at best, ironic at worst.
More than any genre I can immediately (like, just now as I’m writing this) think of, Chillwave tries to capture a place and time; namely, a drizzly, windswept beach in the 80s/early 90s and beyond recycling musical cues – which it does with its bedroom production – it swallows signifiers to add to how ‘authentic’ its sound is, as Carles would put it. The problem with it being that it does this through media already made about the time. The description on last.fm of Chillwave intending to evoke feelings that you would get from playing GTA Vice City seems dead on. It’s a second-hand emotion, it exaggerates the mood of the late 80s/early 90s into a neatly digested piece of kitsch. An entire decade and a half distorted through the lens of some artist who was a kid for most of it for kids whose first conscious memories involve Pokemon rather than Transformers. Hey kids! This was the 80s! There’s something disingenuous, slighting unsettling about it. Don’t get me wrong, I like the music, but still…
Take the drizzly, windswept beach example. It seems to me that Chillwave isn’t trying to capture that beach, it’s trying to capture a movie – definitely a fuzzy VHS tape – of someone walking along that beach, presumably during a soul-searching montage in some sub-Miami Vice TV series to which the song made would also be the soundtrack to the scene it’s trying to evoke. Endless layers of meta-irony and referentiality.
Imagine Titus Andronicus, in trying to capture the grandeur of their sweeping American Civil War metaphor, using period music as interpreted through Cold Mountain or some other mediated, condensed 90-minute interpretation of a four year event and a musical period that could have lasted decades. You’d think them taking the piss. That’s not to say that The Monitor isn’t without its knowingness or referentiality, the ‘Ken Burns’ type recordings of Lincoln speeches have a playful quality to them where they could easily indulge in Shakespearian solemnity and the Springsteen influences and lyrics are abundant, but this isn’t 1864 in 2010 via a 2003 interpretation. They’re playing rock music. The sweaty springsteenian element screams America and is suited to the content, but it’s not trying to be America 1864 in anything beyond its occasional lyrical references and musical flourishes.
As it is, The Monitor is a remarkable album not only because of its quality but because it’s swimming against the tide. I mean, they just closed their Pitchfork festival set with a suggestion to check out your local public library if you’ve any interest in American history. Whilst at the other end of the scale, the explosion of Chillwave on blogs like gorillavsbear and their imitators just feels like the ironic detachment of hipsterdom going up its own ass and saying nothing. [via. 1989]
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/titus-andronicus-the-monitor-01-a-more-perfect-union.mp3%20MP3: A More Perfect Union – Titus Andronicus
https://misspeakmusic.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/washed-out-01-get-up.mp3%20MP3: Get Up – Washed Out
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