if FF had of said that the dead on the tower were once little fat babies then maybe

- says:

   hey, listen to this and just tell me it's not heartbreakingly beautiful:

   REALIZE!
- says:
   DO IT
- says:
   you're doing it right? of course, your crippled by musical simplicity and flutter!
+ says:
   yeah i just started it
+ says:
   are you sure you linked me to the right song?
- says:
   The one with little electronic keys, violin and some guy singing through an intercom? Final
   Fantasy?
+ says:
   yeah thats the one
- says:
   FUCKING AMAZING
+ says:
   its ok, a little too detached for me
- says:
   so not detached, LISTEN MAH BOI
- says:
   lol this is gr8
+ says:
   am listening
- says:
   listen to that viola stabs, how that little beat just ons and ons and how DESPITE his
   intercomerising, it's still the most direct emotional shit you've ever copped!
- says:
   it's not about the delivery but how he works around limits of delivery to make it even
   more devastating!
+ says:
   its same ol' sufjan lod-my-ass-with-strings-and-call-me-shirly crap, it would probs be far
   more affective with an aocustic guitar and natural vocal
- says:
   nah it would suck it off all its off-beat power - guy-with-a-guitar is tired and old and
   sapped of its potential
+ says:
   nah you cant ever kill that
   its REAL man
   REAL
- says:
   and its so fucking different to Suffie it's not funny. this is no whiney choir pagent boy
   grandiose bullshit but literally a raging queer singing about how the world's tallest tower is
   meant for the dead
+ says:
    why does he have to be so pessimistic?
- says:
   FF OWEN PALLETT CN TOWER BELONGZ TO DEAD 2 REAL 2 HANDLE!!! OG MUTHA
- says:
   it's not pessimistic but - fucking look through it, you know, beyond the surface - and it's
   really quite sweet and happy.
+ says:
    haha, yeah its quite sweet
- says:
   "from the top of the tower / radio buzz in our ears / we can see you house from here" it's
   like fuck this bullshit tower is killing us all but who cares because the little things (your
   house) still exist
+ says:
   i guess i just don;t like the package this tune is coming in
- says:
   i dunno, don't care really, but i just love it when i get so fucking obsessive over one song.
   doesn't happen but often
- says:
   BIG THINGS COME IN SMALL PAKAGES!
- says:
   lol
+ says:
   you what song i love atm
+ says:
   that 'little fat baby' sparklehorse song
- says:
   how's that one go?
+ says:
   he got dragged by a donkey
   through the dust and the myrtle
   but he was once a little fat baby
+ says:
   it gives me this whole jesus imagery
- says:
   nice call
+ says:
   it's really sad and wistful
- says:
   we wre all just little fat babies once i suppose
+ says:
   I KNOW!
+ says:
   its REAL man
+ says:
   REAL
+ says:
   LISTEN TO IT AGAIN RIGHT NOW
- says:
   AS REAL TRU AS CN TOWER!!!
- says:
   they complement one another
+ says:
   nah if FF had of said that the dead on the tower were once little fat babies then maybe
- says:
   no i just mean because they both so HEART yall
- says:
   but god FF so much more steez; that's one of s-horzes most latent
+ says:
   ?
- says:
   um - CN tower i think is better, because it's got style its got grace and pace, whereas
   little fat baby is good lyrically, but musically/vocally just pedestrian Sparklehorse - he
   could poo that song out in a minute
- says:
   he poos clouds lol!!!!!!
+ says:
   nah, its got WEIGHT
- says:
   nah i think you're mistaking a gradual momentum and some string flecks for weight; it's
   airy as mutha. but then i guess that's where the two songs are similar - they kind of play
   off the juxtapositions between lyric and music? and beyond that, Sparklehorse is always
   really good at singing about fucked up shit like it was a lullaby, nah mean?
+ says:
   haha yeah they do do that
+ says:
   re: the lullaby thing
- says:
   some of his lines are unforgettable - "toothless kiss of skeletons / and summer hail / i'm
   the king of nails"
+ says:
   yeah that song is cool
[sic]


Thanks go to the anonymous interlocutor; just getting started. Like mentioned above somewhere, the sweetest thing is just how infatuated I've gotten recently. It's funny, I guess, like how the music you listen to often crystallises around similar things, bands, whatevers. But shit, that's enough. Go listen. And fucking debate yall!

neon bible

Maybe I found a reason for why Neon Bible I just couldn't get with, it was so exhausting, you know, like you needed to lie down after listening to it. So maybe there was something else that Funeral had that this one didn't (funerals?). Oh god, I'm just not sure, and I don't want to throw it all out, but it's hard to disagree:

People who enjoy this album may think I'm cloth-eared and unperceptive, and I accept it's the result of my personal shortcomings, but what I hear in Arcade Fire is an agglomeration of mannerisms, cliches and devices. I find it solidly unattractive, texturally nasty, a bit harmonically and melodically dull, bombastic and melodramatic, and the rhythms are pedestrian. It's monotonous in its textures and in the old-fashioned, nasty, clunky 80s rhythms and eighth-note basslines. It isn't, as people are suggesting, richly rewarding and inventive. The melodies stick too closely to the chord changes. Win Butler's voice uses certain stylistic devices - it goes wobbly and shouty, then whispery - and I guess people like wobbly and shouty going to whispery, they think it signifies real feeling. It's some people's idea of unmediated emotion. I can imagine Jeremy Clarkson liking it; it's for people in cars. It's rather flat and unlovely. The album and the response to it represent a bunch of beliefs about expression and truth that I don't share. The battle against unreconstructed rock music continues.
Green Gartside of Scritti Politti on Neon Bible

Let go of expression and truth? Or reconstruct them?

The Enright House - A Maze and Amazement

This has been out quite some time - well it has in NZ, at least, not yet here - but I was listening to it again recently and I considered that whole 'is post-rock a suitable tag to throw on instrumental, long-form rock music any more?' question that always rears its head. That's not to simply use this album as a prop in a generic debate, because precisely I'd like to argue that it represents a certain trend (and certainly not the only) emerging out of post-rock that is precisely about poetic expression as traditionally thought of. In this sense, I think the first LP by The Enright House, A Maze and Amazement, joins with All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, something corroborated in that 'artistic' way Munaf Rayani spoke about his band's work. I'm assuming here that the prototypical post-rock record is all about decentring and that type of thing, which itself might be misguided. So, anyhow, time for some disparate thoughts.


I think much of post-rock nowadays has shed the initial ambition and weight of the world of the earlier stuff, like it had to tear everything apart and rise only from a broken rubble, and has concentrated on using the same musical elements to make just shamelessly emotive and pretty music. It's like post-post-rock. When rock finds itself back in touch with the tender side of it's history - or maybe borrows from the sweetness of pop, but never with the sour aftertaste - nevertheless underpinned by some dense riffage and beaten, stalling drum-work. To put it another way, it's like post-rock that has shed its ambition to thunderously document the apocalypse and turn inward once again, to explore emotional soundscapes. Still uses textured guitar, beaten, stalling drum-work, stretched out compositions, soft-textural vocals, spectral guitar timbres, etc. but it is to what these stylistic features are put in service of that is distinct, here.

Along these lines, A Maze and Amazement takes the atmospheric lessons learned and reverses the equation - the long tails and heady elements no longer thunderous signals of the social crumbling, but crimson internalisations of the personal, of thought and heart. Because it becomes more obvious from the second track onwards that Mark Roberts is a recalcitrant pop musician. A song-writer going straight for the heart strings, even if he discovers a more interesting path there might be through clouds and classicist arrangements.

So I start to think of him as strongly influenced by the Postal Service when I hear the third track, 'Up'. But there's also something more oblique here that stops that comparison from operating directly and opens up that crucial space between the 'personal expression' of the writer/performer and the 'personal import' such has for the listener, thereby preventing this from taking the 'all eyes on me' traditional singer-God [author-God] framing of rock.

The album is lined with strangely narrative-driven lyrics, like they would read as paragraphs in a story if you put them down on paper. Well, actually, tracks five and six feature the poetry of Mary E. Jones.

There is also something very relaxed, or maybe just considered, about this. Structurally and texturally. Lines do not obey their proper direction, electronic peels sweep/stretch across places. Languid, sombre, washed. In that, A Maze and Amazement opens itself up quite gradually, showing deeper complexity than you might first think.

Eventually, this album transcends all its geneses for an intensely idiosyncratic and fragilely beautiful music; an achievement ironically predicated upon its genre.

and i may do it again

Just adding to a chorus, I guess, but it was a thought I had the instant I heard this song, and I just have to get it off my chest.



"Who? Little old me? He he! Oh no, you saw me!"

So this song clearly runs off the back of a cultural trend that may have reached its nadir moment in the Britney-Madonna incident at the MTV VMAs (hot rumour: might Perry and LiLo smooch at this years?! So naughty!), bringing to mind Philip Brophy's comment on The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert:

[T]he gay embrace of Priscilla is a cultural conundrum qualified by how gay iconography has been assimilated into mainstream currents of Australian imagery, and how gay content has strategically lubed broader media channels for PC reconciliation (2008: 54).

Although I'm certainly not sure whether queer culture has exactly 'embraced' Katy Perry, her song certainly furthers this practice of heteronormativity annexing queer identity. Sure, hear it once and you might think, "Wow, pop music certainly is still at the forefront of progressive sexual identities, this is great". You know, "I kissed a girl / and I liked it", all sung with that kind of snarly, sassy conviction. It's all a bit Pink*, heavily-tooled guitar pop that synths and synchs up those countless vocal dubs. Nice, in a way, like a play on surface (ie. as if a girl kissing a girl is just surface).

Wait another line, though, and comes: "I kissed a girl / just to try it / I hope my boyfriend / won't mind it". This is the kind of faux-lesbianism perfected by teenage girls trying to impress their boyfriends, and exactly that - Perry is probably the biggest 'male chauvinist' of the lot. For not only does she insist that queerness is a sort of sexy play, nothing more than a little experiment and certainly ephemeral, thereby evacuating any consideration of bisexuality and/or lesbianism as lived and committed sexual identities (with definite struggles), but that it's all just a bit of fun for the boys! Watch the video clip, and for the most part, the mise-en-scène is splashed with cute girls doing cute things (but, interestingly and pointedly, definitly not kissing) - but then, at the end, we see Perry wake up in bed next her dude, a wry smile across her face as if, thank God [aside: Perry was originally a Christian singer], it was all just some silly dream!

I can see footy jocks unequivocally pumping this out at their next house party, because, you know, chicks are never real lesbians mate, you can always turn 'em, har har! And Perry sings:

No, I don't even know your name
It doesn't matter,
You're my experimental game
...
Doesn't mean I'm in love tonight

How unbelievably offensive to suggest that queer and love are mutual categories. Like I said, though, the worst thing is that heterosexism gets its cake and eats it too. Perry's song effectively does the work of 'heterosexing' alternative sexualities at the same time as it denies the latter any lasting significance. "Ain't no big deal / It's innocent" - bullshit it is.


* I think this comparison is interesting in itself, for Pink is arguably another that appropriates queer signifiers into an undeniably straightforward (but empowered!) heterosexuality. But that's just it - the difference is that Pink plays only with signifiers, therefore effectively interrogating the 'taken for granted' images of queer identity (ie. the assumption that all lesbians are 'butch') which in certain instances are themselves points of discrimination. That Pink pushes these same images across to heterosexuality says that they are not inherently gendered. And, again, it's at the level of signifiers - Perry's song is so much worse because it registers certain attitudes and fucking narratively legitimates them.