tell 'em

Biggest selling digital single of all time. Re-establishing the mass via interactive media, almost just through sheer numbers.

The film clip actually represents the 'viral' process of the song. Moves through dance crazes, video phones, youtube clips. Entirely inframediate - its audience knows what they are a part of. God, his album is even called SouljaBoyTellEm.com.

The song itself is an exercise in musical economy. Evcavates any discussions of 'meaning' (let alone regression or cultural decline), the issue here is affect and experience (of the dance, of the midi strings, the repeatedly modulated 'X that ho'). 'Ho' loses all designation as a sexist category and comes to mean about just as much as a lolcat.

There is of course the possibility that Soulja Boy has established something like a direct line of communication with his audience. He actually did popularise the track more or less from the back of his computer class, without any major label supervision. And so to an extent the track's content is 'uncensored'. He is the telos of web 2.0 in the category of music performer. And so through comes 'immature', titillating lines like 'supersoak that ho' - and yet this itself should be seen as something of a victory. Away from the incessant gangster gangster violence and mystique to a playground chant immaturity. Which itself is a performance, of course. A performance that energises hip hop's popularity.

Tell 'em.

musical portalopolies

Pitchfork.tv launched today. Is it the seed of a portalopoly mentality in the music press, or the music business at large? It's interesting, because music is often slotted in amongst a variety of other lifestyle garnishings on terrible 'on demand', content-streamining web portals, but to an extend Pitchfork have inverted the framework. Their network seems to say: "music is central to our audience, and therefore will provide across the spectrum of music promotion". With the launch of this narrowcast, they now provide music news, reviews, interviews, op-ed pieces, streaming and downloadable tracks, it's own music festival, advertisement opportunities, and now of course a visual component that will in some way recombine all of the already listed.

It would be fruitful to study how the site disavows its obvious 'big media' structure with standard indie discourses. But one thing is for sure: Pitchfork demonstrates how indie music (press and bands) are now a major organ of the music industry as a whole, in fact they may now be at the forefront of its developments (Radiohead model, anyone?).

It will be interesting to see whether Pitchfork.tv platform will be successful, as it certainly requires a good deal of attention from a web audience habituated to distraction and fragmented reading practices. Having said that, the site of course works on the principals of visual internet media that are sure to dice programming into bite-sized pieces. Nevertheless, the principal of 'less content, more structure' seems to reign here - how will YouTube audiences take to this?

Another interesting aspect is what looks like the fairly high-quality resolution of the videos - will this preclude interest in some way?

And the fact that it offers almost completely original content puts it in good stead too, as so often other portals simply work as just that - portals to other contents - or as pattern repeaters.

I hate to say it, but I'm thinking MTV 2.0 - with all the allusions that term brings up.

Update: Stereogum come late to the party!

crippling/creative industries

Fucking hegemonic bastards. The PPCA (Phonographic Performance Company of Australia) - who you just know are in the pockets of record companies (well actually that's their whole purpose, to represent them and these little plebs called musicians, but the latter are really peripheral) have just had their decision to hike licensing fees for venues to play recorded music upheld in the Federal Court. It's risen from 7c per person up to $1.05 a person, with dance party rates going from 20c to $3.07. Of course this absolutely kills the various pubs and clubs playing Australian music, who are now considering their options:

• Approach the nice record companies individually and ask them to be nice (yeah, right).
• Drop Australian recorded music and go for live music; or
• Drop Australian recorded music and exclusively play US jams, which don't attract the same fees (a far more likely scenario considering it's ease and economy versus the live option)

Of course this presents a situation in which potentially we could see a beautiful explosion in the number of live Australian acts being paid to play music around the country. But then seeing as the majority of venues (and that's anywhere that plays recorded music) aren't indie clubs but rather local pubs, clubs, and hotels that are generally hostile to any live music other than terrible cover bands, the likelihood is that it creates a self-defeating situation in which both: a) no more or less Australian bands get paid for playing live, and b) certainly Australian bands (marginal or otherwise) get paid far less in recorded music royalty fees seeing as venues will drop playing Australian stuff because of the price hike.

Of course, this is just another example of a record industry in the death throes doing the best to milk the fuck out of the one thing the still have left: property. In the face of this whole 'digital music' thing, we're now seeing all these really cynical and desperate attempts to pull money out of the stuff they already have. Another case in point would be these bullshit new '360' degree deals US record companies are trying to push on their artists, which really operate on the reverse principal - "hey, we've got fuck all money coming from selling records, which is our stated purpose, so why not let's try scamming the fuck out of artists on our roster by asking for money from them for touring and merchandising and all that too? Even though we do little to help them in that department!".

I don't think these strategies are viable in the long term, nor are they very productive for (local) music as a whole.

when the glitter has gone

Neither this post or what it discusses could get much more obvious – Goldfrapp’s intention to clearly signpost their musical development via the quasi-visual accompaniment of the cd sleeve and its contents.

A sketch of things:

The cover fonts: the angular scrawl of Black Cherry (this is cookie-cut electro!) or supra futuristic Supernature typeface, versus the embellished seven-ties serifs of Seventh Tree.

The cover portrait of Alison: strange how the very orientation of her figure shifts its axis through her discography, from the deflected mirror of Felt Mountain (inner? At the very least opaque), the blunt come-on of Black Cherry (not to add the pin-up found inside, both wilfully describing the music’s stance), moving back to the side for Supernature (and yet still suggesting a kind of attainable secret, a covering up that is itself an invitation) and then finally to the coy submission of Seventh Tree, with the figure back towards us craning her head, as if the camera had caught her offguard, vulnerable and lost (not the pirate’s hat and cravat – incongruous fantasy or juxtaposed innocent play?). I suppose one could of course suggest Alison’s poses are never more than just that – roles to be taken up and discarded at will, yet it’s still interesting the shift registered here.

The animal meets (wo)man motif: common to Black Cherry, Supernature and Seventh Tree, and yet manifest in different ways. Whereas Black Cherry irreverently cuts up sexualised fragments of Alison with that of wolves heads/bodies (suggesting a feminine animality that more or less theorises (and parodies) itself), Supernature is slightly more sophisticated, drawing a peacock’s tail out of Alison’s bottom-half (still suggesting performance, pose). Seventh Tree taps back into a second-wave feminist ‘union with nature’ type thing that the other two albums’ artwork both suggested and deftly disavowed. The 'pin-up' in this latest release is one of the clown Alison being embraced from behind by a sort of giant flower owl, taught how to fly perhaps, or at least return to the flesh of the world after her gritty, urban flight from it for two previous albums. "Come back to the folky (myth-ridden) pastoral", it beckens with open arms, and the music is only too willing to do so.

Will Gregory’s costume party: Black Cherry had musician/arranger Gregory hilariously donning sharp black shades, black/white striped top and black suit, a kind of electro captain or something. Intentions are again hilariously clear and different on Seventh Tree, with a bust photo of the man, presented in the grain of a slightly over-exposed film print, sporting semi-rimmed eye glasses and the folk rocker requisite moustache and dorky suit.

Their trip into the fields of the Seventh Tree can easily be seen as a playful retreat, and as such I suppose you’re forewarned against accepting its finality.

2007 my music year

Let's not beat around the bush, there is no such thing as critical distance or objectivity. This list is pure subject - the favourite music that I've listened to this year. We write to no one but ourselves, our ears are always idiosyncratic.

Maybe I listened to more 2007 albums than you (around 70, I think), maybe less - I'm sure my listening history is different to your’s, as is everyone's. Subjectivity doesn't invalidate this, though – well, maybe it does. But then, isn't all music criticism just about finding the right combination of casual, accessible language and technical hook-words and descriptions to convey and simultaneously cover up your fanatic passion (or distaste) for the music you're reviewing? Honestly. But, of course, every journey through music listening gives us a certain perspective on the things we listen to, and with enough effort we can mix this palette together to come up with something insightful, or, hopefully at the very least, something partially expressive of what it is we are hearing, and what those sounds are telling us - about aesthetics, about culture, about music's industry, about music itself.

And so I've mixed myself together this little list, the only reason for its existence being these are the musical events that I've folded towards. For me, the criteria for inclusion is as much about initial impact as it is longevity - why is that? Well, (and here I am about to launch into another terrible tangent) it has to do with how throughout this year I finally found a way of reconciling my relationship towards music listening. I spent much of the first half of the year bemoaning my diminishing affinity with music as I started writing about it for the first time - I felt that special buzz in the gut less when listening to something which I knew anyway was definitly good, I was disengaged from music in many ways, I was even suspecting that writing on music and thinking about it far more substantially (not just in terms of itself but trying to connect it to wider things) had destroyed that ultra special aura that had accompanied its experience throughout my life until now. Although I may have lost this sense of arcane mystique, it is far outweighed by what I’ve gained – which I could sum up as a new form of honesty in my relationship with music. I've eventually found a way, that is, to love music and be critical (musically, culturally) of it at the same time.

And for me, much of negotiating this new relationship comes down to embracing (but never becoming entirely complicit in) the lightning speed of musical connection and consumption - that is, embracing the new, and recognising the value and significance of the initial striking feeling that certain music might give you. To be sure, that doesn't mean I still don't give albums and bands time to grow on me, or that I've stopped listening to music that wasn't made in the past few months (although I've started listening to a lot more of the latter), it just means I've learnt how to harvest the constant turnover of music that the contemporary listener has available to them.

This is not necessarily the same as consumption - consumption is not thinking – although it is a kind of ‘pop’ relationship, not a rock, or indie, one (overrated). Instead, for me, it is about following the cadences of new music, but whilst riding them always considering them for more than just 'does this sound good?' although that question itself is still paramount. In that way, the total sum of more fleeting experiences can potentially be more positive than the occasional gold strike of a classic, and I can also attempt to keep my critical perspective on the zeitgeist always sharp. (So, then, I suppose this list also has a second reason for existence, one just as selfish as the first – it’s to keep me thinking, now more broadly, now less, about the music I have recently experienced.)

This is a manifesto of the new! Fuck that classicist bullshit - in fact, reverence for and wallowing in music's past is the direct cause of much of what is entirely shit about music at the moment. This tired grave robbing of old genres (post-punk, 70s stadium rock (the next big thing, believe me)), old decades (the 80s), old figures (Ian Curtis) and just simply the old is a vitality-sucking force on music. It's when we continually stop relying on, fucking leaning upon, touchstones and start considering that which is happening around us or what possibly could happen that the best of music writing (both musical and critical) occurs. Well, that's my opinion at least. And I'm sticking to it, because I damn well know that it has helped me find a way through the ever-escalating mountain of music. This, before you, is the best path I climbed through 2007.


What happened to (indie) music in 2007?

Not only did pop continue to eat itself (Britney, Kanye, Amy Winehouse, etc.), so too did indie – it is a ravenous genre, just as hungry as pop for any Other sound that it might find to bolster and reenergise its foundations – frankly, I can’t be bothered pointing out all the musical instances of this, but look back over the year and you’ll see them everywhere. And too, I’m not sure at all if this is a trend confined to this year, I think a porous relationship with its so-called opposite is inherent to indie.

But it wasn’t only the music that got pop. Indie as a genre, an industry, a scene, experienced the greatest moments of its popification. Indie now follows the same distribution forms, listening habits, hype structures and obsolescence triggers as its sugary counterpart, pop. Much of this I suppose is due to new media – not only digital music but also what the blogging ‘community’ has wrought – Black Kids being case in point. The speed of consumption of indie – of all music, is so fast now. That sounds quite banal, it is – but it is something profound, and I’m not sure how to describe what it’s doing to us.

And my last bloated summation of music in 2007 – that fucking horrible indie disco (dance punk, new rave, whatever you want to call it) microtrend finally exhausted itself – although some good moments and bands were salvaged from it, in all this sound is now tired (derivative even of itself, which is just piling on the appropriation), so widespread as to be useless (Matchbox 20’s new song rides fast on the hi-hat for goodness sake) and just producing lazy, shitful music (Midnight Juggernauts, New Young Pony Club, Sneaky Sound System, etc.)


Moments - 2007

Before I launch into my favourite albums of this year, I’d like to sporadically pick out a few musical ‘moments’ – be they songs, gigs, events, whatever – that caught me this year.

Battles: Race:(In/Out) – The only tracks that manage to fully articulate the somewhat obvious, if still at times fascinating, formal schematics of Mirrored. A play of ascending/descending symmetry, a frozen yet lightning fast, lithe dynamic. Play In first, play Out first – the duplications and transitions are brilliant – this is a musical moebius strip, a lucid conceptual and musical victory in an album that is altogether too simply complex.

Annuals: Brother – a softly picked guitar and wafting strings emerge languidly from cicada chirps, and you have spring all there in one minute. Then things escalate into swelling, urgent strings, a spaceship powers up and bang! At 1:50min, amazing martial drums and guitar fuzz, lyrics shouted – this is cathartic, anthemic indie at it’s best. What a transition, so emotive – a song that manages to be both soft and touching and so powerfully overwhelming too. The dynamics of this track are astounding, in how it somehow makes three and a half minutes feel as long as a symphony. If only something after this amazing intro came close to matching its power, then Be He Me may have scaled great heights.

Sian Alice Group – I have no idea where they came from or what they’re doing, but this band (multi-instrumentalists Rupert Clervaux, Ben Crook and vocalist Sian Ahern) made some of the most beautiful songs of 2007. Contours especially is an amazing track – its slow, circular ascent which breaks into a luminous middle section of snapping drums and gaping, ethereal vocals, submerging once again into electronic fuzz. Transcendent.

Britney Spears – it wasn’t only the fascinatingly poor ‘comeback’ performance staged for her at the VMAs (things revealing themselves there if ever), or the again depressingly candid video for Gimme More (in which pre bikey stripper vixen Britney sits at a bar and literally laughs at what she has become up on stage), or the fact that Gimme More registers some of the most unbridled and disturbing neediness for (insatiable) sex and celebrity as one and the same (fucking a microphone?), but that all of this sort of stuff and much, much more was discussed throughout the blogging community with such aplomb. Britney Spears ’07, of course, is one such moment in which the zeitgeist just seems to bare its very constitution to us all, and the reaction to and critique of this moment was brilliant to read.

Against Me!, The Corner, 16 June – the conduit between crowd and performer is an interstice in which new possibilities for musical relations can reveal themselves. If ever a better kind of collaboration ethic between the two groups existed than tonight, I certainly haven’t seen it. After suffering through so many gigs in which the Melbourne crowd were infuriatingly and quintessentially aloof and just ‘not into it’ (the YACHT / Architecture in Helsinki over18’s show at Cloud City being the prime example), it was wonderful to know and experience such honesty and solidarity between crowd and band.

Sodastream splitting up – it took me a long time to actually come up with an answer to the question ‘who is your favourite band?’, and then, almost as soon as I realised that it was indeed Sodastream, they decide to disband. Such is musical life. Never mind, their final show at the East Brunswick Club on March 2 was a sweet farewell, a wave of melancholy and hope carried across a transfixed audience.

‘It’s up to you’ – the distribution model pioneered by Radiohead for the release of their seventh album, In Rainbows, is interesting mostly for what it says about the state of media. This remassification of supposedly individualistic channels is possibly a new hope for a splintered and hostile music community.

Friend’s bands – when I really got depressed about the whole ‘state of music’, so fast-paced and unrewarding at times, I just thought about the music that I love most – my friend’s bands. When I go to some ratty house gig or 2AM slot at a local venue and watch my friends play in their bands, singing to their songs with the rest of my mates and marveling at their undiscovered talent, I re-realise my connection with music.


Honourable Mentions – Great Albums of 2007

Before the top records, a word on the albums that I found truly great this year, but which for whatever reason missed out on making my outright ‘best of 2007’, personal classics list.

Klaxons – Myths Of The Near Future
This album belongs here not only for how it sounds (surprisingly good) but also for what the Klaxons did with it. They are the ultimate pop pranksters, descendants of Malcolm McLaren and the KLF, a band who managed to feed back to the media their own bullshit (creating a near-perfect loop between hype and band), invent their own genre as a joke (new rave), and having everyone expecting them to actually drop a rave record when instead they clearly released a glimmering pop(ular) masterpiece.

Panda Bear – Person Pitch
Golden, coastal echo-pop. Most of it cast in a hazy cloud, like it’s playing from the water of your swimming pool that just went Technicolor. Its nostalgic, domestic feel gives it an irrepressible charm, although the overwhelming critical praise it has garnered is probably a little over the top.

Animal Collective – Strawberry Jam
I know comparing an album to another (even if by the same band) is not really a way of describing properly how the record in consideration is somehow lacking, but for me Strawberry Jam leaves me longing for the ‘feels’ of Feels, the more organic, oakey, communal vibe of their previous release. The sense of glorious ritual and songwriting that met on Feels is only a pale remainder here, instead Animal Collective opt for fullon experimental scribbles so that much of this music really just sounds like a lot of buzzing noises. But, and it’s a big but – this is still great stuff, capable of eliciting powerful, if somewhat jilted, feelings.

Panther – Secret Lawns / Dan Deacon – Spiderman Of The Rings / YACHT – I Believe In You, Your Magic is Real
It’s not that each doesn’t deserve its own heading, but I have grouped these three together because of what the reveal in each other when considered as a trio. All three are one-man ‘lap-pop’, electrified indie groups, they also seem to share a sensibility towards music (that making it, playing it and listening to it should be a fun thing) and a sugary, hungry sound attitude of regurgitated pop tropes and mish-mashed punk and bubblegum. And yet they manifest their talents in different ways – Secret Lawns is a properly brief excursion into shattering pop, all crooning and messed-with synth lines over confused drum patterns, whereas Spiderman performs its deconstructions by stretching things out, twiddling the frequency knob up and down so that noises snake in and out of eachother, adding in laughing bag samples and chipmunk voices (its patronizing, but I really don’t care). YACHT takes a path somewhere down the middle in that his songs usually clock in around 4 or 5 minutes, and musically his vibes are on well-constructed hooks – be they beats, claps or synths – which are then ridden through to their exhaustion within each song. I have no idea what Panther is singing about, I think Dan is singing about being in an indie fairytale, and YACHT is definitly singing about good luck and optimism. All of them are making me dance and smile.

Kings of Leon – Because Of The Times
There is a maturity and pathos to the Kings of Leon’s music that their lyrics are still yet to match. Or is it that this sense of expression in their guitars and drums is actually a form of nostalgia or yearning on the band’s part to return to where they never actually left but really will never be again – youth and young manhood. What are the times exactly? Well for one, they are times in which the countrified steez of their earlier work even further gives out to well-written epicness that doesn’t lose its sense of direction or purpose. Mainly because they seem to have such an intuitive understanding of song dynamics, when to push/pull, fill/suck, draw out/cease and so on, so that listening to them is always satisfying. Listen to how Knocked Up sort of runs out of itself, left only with a kind of desperate ‘woah oh oh’ after each once-victorious line (“people call us renegades”, “we like taking on this town”). Running forwards and backwards into the shadows, Kings of Leon’s (d)evolution is a fascinating thing to hear.

Liars – Liars
Only a band like Liars could actually surprise their listeners on their fourth album by making something that sounds like normal, stomping rock – but then, of course, it’s done by Liars, so in its own secret way it’s also quite fucked up and searing. Plaster Casts of Everything fucking explodes, driven along incessant by drum and guitar, with an amazing coda, it’s a wonder it manages to stop itself. Along with this intro, every other song on here works on a template of holding a certain sound across its entirety, all of them being percussive – but then, what isn’t percussion with Liars? Although it lacks the thematic cohesion and singular aesthetic of Drums Not Dead and it’s probably their first album that is just ‘good’ (not great), that’s still amazing by Liars’ standards.

Six Organs of Admittance – Shelter From The Ash
Floats along like cinders on a dark and stormy wind, moving in and out of the flames across its eight tremulous, guitar-driven tracks. Mining a force elemental, the guitar work on here (in which acoustic and electric don’t so much antagonise as they enmesh) is kept in the fire by a furious yet strangely sublimated energy. Piercing lyrics and craggy atmospherics, leaving one in a somber yet fulfilled mood. This is virtuoso guitar-playing at its most involving and organic.

Parts & Labor - Mapmaker
Spazmodica, epic noise, artcore, cheesy (post)rock – how the fuck do you classify this? Spectacular. That’s how. It’s cathartic, fluttering – everything aims for the sky and hits it, from the horns on Fractured Skies to the munching guitar-synth that builds up Ghosts Will Burn. This is contagious, ebullient junkyard rock. Hyperactive, kinetic drumming, epic carnie vocals, punk rock keys, melodic guitars, ADD tempos – a sense of victory snatched from the jaws of noise. Gearshifting song dynamics and endearing fuzz; chord progressions to rival even The Boss. The sheer virtuosity of this band: they’re fucking playing these instruments! “We’ve got to take down to build it up again” Dan Friel barks on Vision of Repair, and that’s what Parts & Labor do, throwing fuel on the fire of their industrial sounds until they corrode and rebuild into a glorious, flaming wreck.

Amiina – Kurr
Very delicate and unassuming, and yet somehow deeply affecting – Kurr is a captivating work from the band who once made up Sigur Rós’ string quartet. Put this on in the background and you’ll barely realise what it’s doing, but listen closer and you begin to appreciate the graceful attention to musical tone and expression pervading these compositions. So whilst it may initially sound quite uniform – plinky, glassy instruments played atop soft, hazy tones – the album’s intricacy gradually reveals itself, and you come to realise why the band can be seen knitting out a long garmet on the cover. This is Amiina: subtly weaving tiny layers of texture and instrumentation into a nuanced yet surprisingly warm sound.

Deerhunter – Cryptograms
I spent a lot of time trying to explain to a friend this album’s awesomeness – how, like, it’s like two albums in one or something! Well yeah, in reality, this concept isn’t that amazing, really Deerhunter have just gotten all dichotomous – the first half a deep, long sigh through shoegazing guitar textures and hypnotic drumming, and the second a more ‘structured’ reconciliation of these elements into sparkly, shorter ‘songs’. But then of course the transfer between these two halves is itself interesting, as each informs and dialogues with the other, creating a more unified and whole event of an album that is a joy to play through in its entirety. And that itself is a rare thing in the digital music landscape.

Explosions in the Sky – All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone
Another brilliant record that marries a sense of concept and composition with a spellbinding and triumphant execution, this is a smoldering, smokey album of great prettinesss – “the skyline was beautiful on fire, all twisted metal stretching upwards” – both earthy and ethereal. Explosions in the Sky delight in taking the carefully studied frameworks of their songs and then catapulting them skyward until they explode like dark fireworks. Along with this, the album carries a wonderful sense of narrative, slowly building on a kind of journey that suggestions exodus, loss and then finally acceptance.

Iron & Wine – The Shepherd’s Dog
Slyly uplifting, deceptively upbeat – lush pastures of music hide a dark lyrical soil, but in the end this really doesn’t matter. Music vs. lyrics – it’s a perennial question, but when the sounds are as effusively circuitous and catchy as they are on here, I certainly know which one I’m paying attention to. Nevertheless, The Shepherd’s Dog always threatens to musically articulate its dystopic lyrics, flailing and tripping through moments such as when Sam Beam’s voice is unexpectedly pushed through a grill on Carousel.

Handsome Furs – Plague Park
Music that sounds like bones – gritty songs with the flesh ripped off them. Like a stripped back, programmed Wolf Parade at certain points, but still possessive of its very own aesthetic (and that’s the great thing about the extended Wolf Parade family – Swan Lake, Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, and so on – they share a kind of grammar of songwriting but all are still unique). The lyrical conceit here is brilliantly matched to the music’s texture, terminating synthesisers and sad ‘lalala’s, scrappy drum machines and “hearts of iron”. This is a thematically and consistently brilliant set of songs – one of the year’s underrated best.

Burial – Untrue
Although it has only sat with me briefly (and thus I’m still unsure whether it should go into the below list, maybe) this album pulled me into it quite quickly anyway. I know that it’s the orthodox thing to say about Untrue, but it really is quite haunting, not in a tacky emotive way either, but in the sense of really feeling like a specter passed through your headphones or something. Skittering along, scratched and warped – this music actually bends me. It’s frightening, but I like it.

Radiohead – In Rainbows
What a relief, finally a Radiohead album where pronouncements like “a career-defining classic” or “a revolutionary change” really don’t need to be made. Instead, what a relief it is to pay what you will for what is quite simply just a fucking great album. It’s their first truly open album, and for Radiohead, that is an important move in their music – for all their affect, previous albums were impenetrable, a kind of paradoxical moving and deflection always defined them. In Rainbows, by contrast, is the warmest, most inviting record they’ve ever made – there’s even a sample of children saying ‘yay’ on it! It’s also joyfully schematic, despite the fact they laboured over this for years (some songs having a gestation from around OK Computer, even) – it sounds like they just popped it out, and that’s a good thing.

Tunng – Good Arrows
The thing that intrigues me most about Good Arrows is its ambivalence – it’s a music that takes you to a space inbetween its puzzling yet overwhelmingly logical arrangements, in the middle of its effusive, hyper-inclusive (yet still measured) musical palette and it’s lyrical cosmos of secrets and loss/love. I could go on for paragraphs describing these moments when this thing pops up, and I’d like to quote a lyric or two but I really can’t – it’s all too good. Just listen to it, you’ll find a way into its cryptic, domicile housing.


The Top 4 Albums of 2007 – Personal Classics

I really thought quite hard about this – which albums will I look back on as the true highlights of 2007? That will stay with me (either for the memory of what they gave me when first listening to them, or because I will continue to listen to them) more or less for good? Because, like I said at the beginning of this post, we write only to ourselves – for all the attempts at intellectual distance towards music, at the end of the year all I can think about is the music that has touched me. These are those four albums; my favourite is last.


Yeasayer – All Hour Cymbals








Post-Animal Collective, indie anthropology, the music of the children of Aquarius - call it what you like, Yeasayer's debut album is simply amazing. Mining a deep mystical and ritual sensibility that now seems prevalent in indie, this album trips and bounces through a globe of sounds yet never looses its footing, making it an endearing and amazingly likeable fusion of indie and Other. And it’s not just this eclecticism that makes All Hours Cymbals so inviting, its just this sense of magic – it’s so sweetly made and choral. The early clicky clacky, drum-driven tracks are the most instantly gripping, but the more 60s hippy vibes and classic rock moments that swirl through the later tracks are just as great. No other album has taken me as immediately as this, and yet I’m still finding things in it now. This is music as communication, as ritual – both communal and patterned – listen to the ‘yea yeah’ moment on 2080 and try and not love this. And the final thing? The glorious simplicity that shines through, especially in the percussion – it’s music that I feel I could almost play … or at least clap along to.


Of Montreal – Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?







Even though I spilled a lot of type over trashing K.Barnes a little while ago, I still think this album is definitly one of the best for 2007, for lots of reasons. Its genius is in its blend of giddy, sugary pop tropes (cheesy synths, handclaps, quivering falsetto, absolutely schizophrenic dynamics) and an amazing lyrical document and studied composition. I know that seems weird – an album full of this many seemingly throwaway disco and synth-pop cuts being a truly poetic and worthwhile work? But that’s the thing – underneaths and surfaces here are no longer binaries but one and the same – an epidermal detailing of the fucked up craziness of breaking up. Why write bleedingly ‘authentic’ acoustic guitar numbers when you can create one of the most truly cathartic (for the author as much as the listener) and danceable breakup concept records ever? Singing about heart-tearing experiences with a palpable sense of (wicked) joy – a fey irreverence to the respected conventions of breakup music. And this is a radical desublimation – there is something utterly respectful about being so fucking candid (rather than shading darkness and anger in stifled metaphor and muffled man voices). Just like pop, you know this is wrong (“want to pay some other girl to just walk up to her and hit her”), but for that very fact it is stripped of all ideology.

And this is a record! It might embrace a bubblegum aesthetic but never structure – it is the most cohesive ‘album as artistic statement’ this year. And the fact that it hangs so well together, and that almost every track on here is worthy of single status and yet inseparable from its whole (just hear those fucking amazing transitions (try Gronladic Edit into A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger) that both hold each song completely intact and yet seam them irreducible) is what makes it one of the year’s best.


Sunset Rubdown – Random Spirit Lover







I confess I have quite a lot of trouble really describing, or even understanding, how it is that Sunset Rubdown’s music makes me feel like I do when listening to it. So often I only end up throwing down a few sentences attempting to describe the music and then leave it at that. I’m not sure how far I’ll get here, but I’ll start by saying what it sounds like: it’s altogether more bluster, claustrophobic (every song pushes into the next), urgent, and simply fast-paced than it’s predecessor, Shut Up I Am Dreaming – which was happy to let things sit around in middle-light, syncopating along. Not so with Random Spirit Lover – though it contains the same inventive stitching, unexpected imagery and surrealistic moments that are Krug’s trademarks, its music is a violent and enveloping carnival. And how do I feel? I’m not sure how to say it, but it’s sort of like seeing yourself in a hall of mirrors and somehow all the reflections making one. Things come to light in the strangest of places – sense is made through snakes and ladders.

"Will you live in the physical world?
And though explosions make debris
And catching it kind of suits you
It doesn’t suit me
She said: My sails are flapping in the wind
I said: Can I use that in a song?
She said: I mean, “The end begins”
I said: I know, can I use that too?
Will you live in the physical world?
With the sun setting low and the shadows unfurled
Can you live with the way they make you look unreal?"




Menomena – Friend And Foe










Polyphonic – an explosion of music, bursting with ideas and moments – everything is in here somewhere. Look at this band’s recording technique and you start to understand their modus operandi – they use a specially programmed instrument called the Deeler (or Digital Looping Recorder), which, once a tempo is set, allows the band to sit around and literally take turns in adding as much as they possibly can to one song, piling sound and effect into puzzling and yet somehow machinic unity. As such, each song eats up as many sounds as you care to mention – drum patterns diverting and re-coalescing, horns and pops and keyboards, guitar riffs brought up and then pushed down again, every member’s vocals. And yet I’m guessing that with all this talk of schizophrenic inclusion I’ve made Menomena sound like a hyperactive noise band – here’s the crux, they aren’t. Instead, they completely crash the seemingly opposite poles of experiment and structure – this album is THE deconstruction of balance/imbalance, one/many, individual/group, abstraction/lucidity, friend and foe.

It’s to approach songwriting as an antagonistic process of coming together, and though the songs bear sinewy traces of the three members pushing them in completely different directions, they never once lose a sense of martial cohesion and simple fucking catchiness. Diversity marshaled into an encompassing virtuosity and sense of fun, never distracted or off-kilter at any moment. Because you can turn this on and after one listen instantly enjoy what Friend and Foe offers, and yet you can also continue to find new sounds buried deep in the tracks for months after listening – and it has been months. Friend and Foe was released quite early this year, and it’s easily stood up to the rest of it. And yet still considering the sheer amount of stuff that’s going on in here, nothing ever gets lost or peters out – it all hits with force, Menomena know how to reach for absolutely devastating choruses and refrains.

And yet this joyous experimentalism in sound is itself again opposed in the lyrics – because even though at times Friend and Foe sounds like one great big kaleidoscopic joke, there lies an exacting melancholy underneath these songs – lines like “oh to be a machine, to be wanted, to be useful” or the dichotomous stitching of the phrase/track Airaid (air aid or air raid?) register something a lot deeper than superfluous trickery. How to reconcile these extremes? It can’t be described here, but Friend and Foe itself manages to do just that – “You write ‘Born to Kill’ on your helmet and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?” The lucid and sometimes crushing knowledge of the “duality of man” is all over this album, so that it is always never just your friend, but always too your foe.
To combine the contradictions of craft and substance is probably the ultimate victory of Friend and Foe, but the fact that is does so using its very own aesthetic, even recording technique, is what makes this album simply singular. There might be touchstones lying around to compare this band’s sound to, but in all Friend and Foe has a truly unique mood, timbre and sound, which I could at best sum up as: invigorating.

This is a record I know that I will continue to return years after writing this, always trying to work out just how it was made, just what it might mean – and not even for that sort of vaguely intellectual curiosity, as if it were a puzzle to be solved, because to a degree its contradictions are so proliferate that they may never settle. But mostly I will be here again just to experience these sounds, and the amazing feeling they give me.

Explosions in the Sky - interview

This morning I talked to Munaf Rayani, guitarist with post-rock outfit Explosions in the Sky. The band are touring Australia early next year as part of almost a year and a half of tour's on the back of All Of A Sudden I Miss Everyone, a smouldering, beautiful/terrible composition of songs. Manuf was a great guy to talk to, his answers compelling and insightful. At times he would almost begin to whisper when talking about his relationship with music and the respect he feels for audiences, at other times he would draw out important words with great emphasis. The transcript to this interview is below.

Where are you at the moment?
I just made it back home. A few days ago we played our last show of the year which was in Barcelona, and we came home a few days ago and now we have nothing to do for the rest of the year, and what a feeling! To be home!

It's a change as well, because you've been touring constantly pretty much since the release of All Of A Sudden..., is that right?
Pretty much, there was a little bit of a forced break that came along in the middle of the year in which we had to cancel a good number of events because one of the boys, their mother had gotten quite sick and so he had to go home to tend to her and we had to cancel a few months of tour. But since then, she's feeling much better, and we picked back up around August and were doing something every month until last week!

And what's it been like touring?
Man, it's been pretty great so far, especially with this new album there's been a greater interest in every city that we come too, just because it's the fourth album out and we've been around for a little while now. But it's been rather spectacular, I mean like showing up to rooms and them being full and we are the headliners, there's no other bands after us and so it's kind of nice to see that people would come out and listen. So it's been really great.

So do you think this album is where you've reached critical mass, where you sort of 'broke' as it were?
Sure. I think that possibly, we made a really loud bang with the previous album The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, which came out you know, four years ago almost, and I think we did right by that album. I feel, in my heart of hearts, that it kind of placed us on the map, properly, in which you could see this little iddy biddy dot, "that's Explosions in the Sky" when prior to that I don't even think we showed up on the map. And then, still, with this new album, in my opinion and it's only one man's opinion, I think the songs are very good and very strong that it only made that dot a little bit bigger. So I feel like it really started the previous album, but it's definitly become more solidified with this latest record, which you couldn't hope for anything better - you know, I think that the goal or the daydream for any musician or artist is to do better with every outing.

Certainly. You guys also played with the Smashing Pumpkins on their Zeitgeist tour recently. How was that?
We didn't know what to expect going into a massive tour like that, because, you know, some of the stories that we've heard along the way with a band opening up for a major act like that - usually the crew doesn't give a fuck about you, the crowd isn't interested - it has the great potential of just being a shite state of affairs, but very luckily for us it went amazingly. The crew treated us with the utmost amount of respect, and the crowd every night - who pretty much 90, 95 percent of them hadn't heard of us - were responding in a ridiculous manner to where we were like "oh my goodness, this really worked". So the tour really did right by us, and met Billy a couple of times along the way and he had some nice things to say, but especially like Jimmy Chamberlain. Jimmy Chamberlain was watching the show pretty much every night from sidestage and then would have something to say to us, like "god boys, you really did good", and that was kind of strange, like, "thank you, Jimmy Chamberlain!"

Coz All Of A Sudden... has been out for almost a year now, do you still play most of it at shows?
Definitly, well we mainly play two tracks for sure which is Welcome, Ghosts and Catastrophe and the Cure, show up pretty much every night. But with all these new touring plans for this next year, for the next six months, we intend on bringing at least, all of them, so the five - how many songs on that album?

Six.
Right, so we're going to try and get them all playable at a live show. Because a couple of them involve piano and we're always a little bit strange about bringing a little, it's like a nice piano keyboard that we have, so incorporating that into the show as another piece of equipment onstage and regardless, we intend on trying to play most of that, entire album on this next tour with a couple of other things we're going to bring out of the past just to make the show a little bit more diverse, we do our best to change up the set every night.

I was sort of wondering when you're composing albums, if you sort of arrange it 'at once', as it were - All Of A Sudden... doesn't so much seem like individual songs as it does one really strong composition. So I was wondering how that translates into live, like do you ever play an album from first song to last?
No we don't, but we tend not to break our set - so each song will transition into the next, which makes it a little bit exciting for us on tour - if the set is changing up every night, you've gotta figure out how song A connnects to song B, which connects to song C, you know what I mean? So we've figured out some transitions between songs - "okay, this one's going to go well to this one" - but that's where it gets kind of exciting for us to kind of find out that transition on a nightly basis. So an album that sits by itself from song one to song six, and it's blending all together, which sometimes happens out of just pure luck - like we don't sit down and write track one, and then two and then three - we've written this batch of songs and then placed them in an order in which the connect nicely. So the same kind of idea applies when comprising a set.

So that means each night has it's own little bit of improvisation?
Yeah definitly. Improvisation is not something we're very good at, but it makes us at least try, you know. And some nights it's just really terrible - like that song does not connect to that song - but other nights notes will just hit together and it will be like, "wow, that worked", and then all of a sudden we've transitioned into the next track and it's properly started. So it definitly offers a room for improvisation but it's not something that we seek out actively.

I was wondering as well, now you've been playing these songs for a long time as well, has your relationship with them changed?
Definitly, you know this new batch of songs were cause for a little bit of nervousness because them being fresh songs, playing them live as to all the other songs we've been playing for a number of years to where we've become so comfortable with them that we can all pretty much play them eyes closed, and not even have to really think on it. But with these new tracks, okay, you have to refocus, you have to almost reprogram like, "okay, my fingers have to move this way" or "the beat is changing now, the melody's changing now", but since we've been playing them since February in proper live settings, I've noticed at least, in my playing, it's become more comfortable, more natural. Like I can move easier with the songs, I don't feel as rigid as I once was, but I think that comes with anything that you do repeatedly, that if it's not getting stronger then something's wrong with you. So, I think that the opportunity of playing them repeatedly has offered them to become more comfortable and thus more enjoyable.

What inspires your band to write music? Is it an attempt to express something emotional, is it more sort of, studied? Or is it more of a narrative?
I think that it might have a piece of all those things. But you know, we're inspired by all things - I mean the actions of people, the state of the world, a book that we may have read, a film that we may have seen, other bands that we have met or heard - all these things play as an inspiration as I would imagine they do for anybody, whether you play music or not, you know? If you worked in an office, and this music - whatever the band was that you were listening to - offered a feeling to you, okay, there's an inspiration in whatever it is that you're doing in your life. So with us, the same thing applies. We're taken by all things. Some in a good way - most in a good way, some in a bad way - but they all have their place in our songwriting. Because I believe that we try to give a proper representation of the world through our eyes through these notes.

That makes sense, because a lot of people have said, well you get that whole 'cinematic' tag, that every band does that tends towards post-rock, but for me, I find the album works best when I'm sort of travelling somewhere, or thinking about things, and that more fits with what you're saying.
Oh yeah, I think so, exactly. I mean, we've gotten a number of people who've said, "you know, I was just on a long trip and I was just listening to the album and staring out of a window" - well that's great because we stare out of a lot of windows, and this is what we see. And so even if a little bit matches up for whoever is listening, then we're definitly winning right?

For sure, well for me - two of my best friends just left for America for a few months, and I'm moving out of my old home and I'm not sort of sure where I'm at, and I've been listening to All Of A Sudden constantly, and it's kind of helped me out in a strange way. Can you tell me why?
I don't know - I'm glad to hear that it is helping you out, because it helps me out - already something you and I have in common. But I don't know, that would be a question of 'what is it that art does for one?' and that goes far beyond music as well.

I love, too, with your music there's something open about it, so you can sort write your own meanings into it, if you know what I mean?
Yeah exactly, and that's something else we're very conscious about, while we have our stories, we have our scenes in our head with each of these songs, by no means are they the story, and I would hope that anybody that listens to it - this music is your's to have, here, it's your's. Okay, we wrote and it our name is on it, but it's far from ours. You follow?

Definitly. And does that come through at shows, do you think?
I hope so. Another thing that we try when we get ready to play a show, or when we're talking about shows with whoever - the goal is to have, for that hour, the four of us are doing our best to get lost, to forget about what is happening outside of that room, so I hope that anybody that is in that room with us is also getting lost. Because, here, there is no right and there is no wrong and there is no trouble and worry, there's just us, and there's this sound, and I hope that it's doing something for you. Because when we're playing on stage, you know we're doing our best to get into it I think we tend to, I don't know, we go into - and this kind of an extreme thing to say because it's not as far as that - but a trance-like state where we're all truly lost in the melody and the movement of the song, and when we play I hope that that one feels these notes, listening as much as I'm offering and playing them. I guess it's hard to describe but I often say it's a battle with the spirits. There's all these spirits in the room and their trying to sweep away my feet and get in my way so I have to duck and I have to dodge, I have to play these notes to try and cut through and get to the ears of that person in the front row, that person in the last row, up at the balcony or by the bar. So I hope that when they're in the room watching this show, that they're taking much more from it, than just the melody.

So it's almost a gift then?
Ah, well, sure. But it's as much of a gift to me that someone is sitting there offering their attention, and that's one of the greatest things that anyone can offer in this life, is their attention, their time. Because more than anything else in this life, those things are priceless, those things you cannot buy. So I would think, anyone who is listening to the album or coming to the shows is because you're offering your offering your time to us, and that's, shit, that's expensive.

Speaking of time, it's been like a really long time that you guys have been together now, and I was going to ask how does it feel - is it comforting, or just normal? Is it still awesome to play as Explosions in the Sky?
Yeah, when we sit down and really think on it. I mean, it's easy to get lost in it's routine, that we have been doing this for a number of years now - we're but a step a way from ten years of Explosions, we're coming up on our ninth year. So when doing anything that long, it can become routine. But when we stop, and really talk with each other, or take a look at where we are, goddam man, I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, and it is pretty spectacular that we are still getting to do this, at this level, and it only seems to be getting better with every day. It just seems to be clicking on all the right levels, the sequence of notes is working, and so I hope that we can keep coming up with those, because we truly enjoy it, because this is our life. And while we've had a number of troubles individually, you know as anybody does, those troubles have been eclipsed by the beauty that music has offered us, not only listening but now playing, you know?

It's awesome really. Finally, I was going to ask, what's up next for you guys? I know you've got shitloads more touring, it extends into March as far as I can see, but apart from that are you going to get a chance to sit down and write?
Yeah, we won't catch the right time to write until, well touring will go all the way through June, I believe mid-June will be the last show of the whole run, and it's going to be in Russia, which is incredible, we're going to Moscow for the first time in our lives. And that'll be the last show of this whole rollercoaster ride that begins in January. But after that, after June, we're going to take a decent amount of time, upwards to a year, if not more, and not tour. Sure we'll do a one-off here and there but we will not have any proper big tours planned, so that we can offer the appropriate amount of focus and time to writing music, do it justice. We don't want to just sit down and write a song, write an album, in a few weeks or in a month - because one, we can't even do that, but two, we don't want to do that. But it's after that point that we will really, really put our heads down and start writing new music, and I'm just as curious as the next man of what that's going to sound like.

How's that though, it will have been almost a year and a half that you've been touring off of this album, that's just amazing isn't it?
Yeah, definitly. But that's the process, or a process, in achieving whatever it is that one wants to achieve. So you know when we write an album, we could usually just sit at home and let it cook on it's own, but it may not bloom as quickly as say touring, if you go tour on it. Then it offers people to see it live and hear it in different settings, and push it further. So I think that going to do these tours is going to be only a good thing for the long term. So while we've been on this ride for a little under a year now, okay, we offer six more months to it and we've really given this album it's fair shake in us promoting it. So after that, hopefully we've made a good enough mark that will sustain for a year or two years until we come back around, you know.

i will give up this house also, and his shape

geographical imaginations

Music produces space. Statement of the obvious, I know, but music plays a unique, often hidden, and sensuous role in place making, both physical and thematic. Get Lonely, of course, is about getting lost, and the very meaning of loneliness is spatial. As such, above all it is a music of place, of empty, lonely places. On this album space is a much a metaphor as a an actual lived landscape - spatialised, physical motifs and allusions abound throughout the album, so that John Darnielle might build up walls in which to lose himself, or trace a dreamlike (un)making of places that sound experienced and yet not quite there anymore.

Because space is as much about time as it is about place, and most of the scenes here seem like those from the past, always just behind us - that's slightly depressing, if somewhat relieving too. They are oddly detached tableaux, like we were looking at poorly projected super 8 stills scratched and dark. Yet still meticulously detailed. Building the most affective of occupied moments from the smallest suggestions, metonyms of a distinct geography of alienation, erasure and darkness. Dark highways "where unlucky stray dogs bleed"; hidden flowers on hillsides no one ever sees; half-light, empty streets; empty houses, morning chilled. So many empty houses, often in early morning, all closed in, looking out at winter weather.

Musically, the album eschews Darnielle's trademark frantic strumming that whacked around on The Sunset Tree, in favour of quieter band arrangements and even quieter string sections, at moments approaching the sepia-tones of Sodastream's softer work. The music is at times languid, lethargic even. The aural sense of a dark, stunted loss at the centre of the record.

The beginning drum pattern and steel shakes of New Monster Avenue remind me hugely of Grand Salvo, an artist who with the same sort of instrumentation seems to evoke a dusty, Australian desert. Here, however, these steely frames seem to produce nothing but an empty house: "shadows on the broad, canopy of trees / sometime after midnight, the ground is gonna freeze". Starkly insulated, there is no one here, even when people are there - the title track:

"I will rise up early and dress myself up nice
and I will leave the house and check the deadlock twice.
and I will find a crowd and blend in for a minute
and I will try to find a little comfort in it.
and I will get lonely and gasp for air.
and send your name up from my lips like a signal flare.
and I will go downtown, stand in the shadows of the buildings
and button up my coat, trying to stay strong, spirit willing.
and I will come back home, maybe call some friends,
maybe paint some pictures,
it all depends.
and I will get lonely and gasp for air.
and look up at the high windows, and see your face up there."

The sense of territory here is constantly uplifted, as Darnielle takes sad, slow migratory movements across and within each track, drifting through settings that never seem to settle (him). Not that it's so much a journey - one of the most affecting realisations of Get Lonely is that there is truly no narrative here, only incremental stumbles into different places, none more resolved than the last. A wandering, vagrant suspension in somewhere (nowhere?), lost and cold, frozen emotions.

Moon Over Goldsboro: "I lay down in the weeds, it was a real cold night / I was happy until the overnight attendant switched on the floodlight" - light as pain - all shades and shadows hurt here. "Frost on the sidewalk, white as a bone / Tried to get close to you again, always wake up alone". Ghosts.

"I turned my face away and I shut my eyes tight
and dreamed about the flowers that hide from the light on dark hillsides
in the hidden places."

From In the Hidden Places, an image that almost captures (and capture is the right word here) the kind of place Get Lonely takes you to, a harsh and hard place to be, one you only escape when the cd clicks off twelves songs later after In Corolla, where Darnielle and we finally disappear into the water's vertical horizon.


The Mountain Goats - Get Lonely

suffer for fashion

Of Montreal and Commercial Culture
a speculative analysis of Kevin Barnes' penis, Outback Steakhouse, Selling Out and the feminine consumptive sphere

Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes registers a strange form of aggressive glam, a kind of masculinist femininity. Quite happy to dress up glitzy at shows (or not dress in much at all), sings high-voiced in vaudevillian disco tracks and takes Jean Genet as his idol (who was also one of Bowie's, in turn another of Barnes'). Yet underneath all this Patrick Wolf-esque sheen (segue - are we seeing a reemergence of a much-needed camp aesthetic in the dullness of indie?), lies a strangely pathological kind of masculinity - it's certainly not your run of the mill jock type, but it's still there - most of the songs on Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? spend their time blaming his wife for their (now-resolved) breakup and his subsequent breakdown, crafting the female as romantic succubus.

"there's the girl that left me bitter / want to pay some other girl to just walk up to her and hit her" (She's a Rejector)

"Eva, I'm sorry, but you will never have me / to me, you're just some faggy girl / and I need a lover with soul power" (Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider)

No lyrics better register the congealed and confused sexuality/violence of Barnes persona.

Now, how might all of this fit in with Barnes now avowed happiness to willfully commercialise his music? I say avowed because Barnes penned a 1000+ word diatribe to Stereogum and its readers in anticipatory response to backlash from a new ad featuring not only the band's music - as was done last year when Outback Steakhouse hilariously covered their Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games - but the members themselves discussing their 're-reunion' (LOL!) in relation to some swanky new mobile phone. He entitled the essay, 'Selling Out Isn't Possible', part of which follows:

The pseudo-nihilistic punk rockers of the 70's created an impossible code in which no one can actually live by. It's such garbage. The idea that anyone who attempts to do anything commercial is a sell out is completely out of touch with reality. The punk rock manifesto is one of anarchy and intolerance. The punk rockers polluted our minds. They offered a solution that had no future. Of course, if the world would have ended before Sandinista! was released then everything would have been alright. It didn't. Now we have all of these half-conceived ideas and idiot philosophies floating around to confuse and alienate us. I think it is important to face reality. It is important to decide whether you are going to completely rail against the system or find a way to make it work for you. You cannot do both -- and if you attempt to do both you will only become even more bitter and confused.

He also goes on to describe the machinations of capitalism through a metaphor about sucking cocks and slitting throats (there he goes again, getting all sexually bloody). Nevertheless, the main 'thrust' of his more or less convincing argument is that 'selling out' (licensing your songs/image to other companies) is a good way for struggling indie artists to make a bit on the side and thereby continuing making the albums we love.

Now I'm not going to stray entirely into the perennial anti/capitalist debate over selling out and integrity and all that, but rather enter it from a sort of oblique angle, one that Barnes perceptively discusses himself and one that got me thinking about all this in the first place: the punk ethos. As that chunky quote from his essay above signals, Barnes argues that it is the contribution of punk to the formation of indie that makes the (sub)culture so strongly hostile to any kind of commercialisation. These comments clearly articulate with the longstanding notion of the maintenance of 'authenticity' and purity within musical groups, initiated by punk and certainly inherited by indie. The indie quest for an imagined state of purity is one of a strong antithesis to the always present, in fact, defining mainstream (that being one of the main problems of indie, it's constant need for this monolithic other to conceive itself against, an imagined fulcrum). Part of this quest is the clear repudiation of the 'pollutants' of mainstream corporate culture and the recognition of consumption of its products as a betrayal. Blah blah. This sort of stuff pops up all the time. Barnes takes issue with those music fans for whom apparently a strange form of transvaluation occurs between a music and the activities of its producer that forever strips the pure musical expression of its untainted meaning. This notion of 'tarnished' music pops up remarkably often with indie fans, who regularly comment how a musician 'ruins' 'their' (and here the possessive noun seems to somehow refer to the fan more so than the artist) music - see, for example, the backlash against Bradford Cox. Indie fans somehow manage to abstract this music from what is already an inevitably commercial ('sold out') system of production (or, moreover, consumption) and then lambaste any other form of money-making that doesn't have a clear aesthetic (i.e., purely musical) goal. So I hear you, Kev, when you say stuff like:

People who wanna be artists have the hardest time of it 'cause we are held up to these impossible standards. We're expected to die penniless and insane so that the people we have moved and entertained over the years can keep us to themselves. So that they can feel a personal and untarnished connection with our art. The second we try to earn a living wage or, god forbid, promote our art in the mainstream, we are placed under the knives of the sanctimonious indie fascists.

But I'm not so much arguing one way or the other here, nor am I drawing battle lines between fans and producers as if one holds the moral key. Rather, I'm crapping on about all this to get to a point I do find quite interesting in relation to Of Montreal especially, how this prototypically indie anti-commercial/mainstream ethos registers as a strongly masculinist stance. It is an ideology of exclusion, as Moore notes: "notions of anticommercial authenticity are inseperable from anxieties about mass culture and consumerism which echo Oedipal fears of castration and male uneasiness about stereotypically feminine attributes, such as passivity and vanity" (from 'Postmodernism and Punk Subculture'). In the grammar of indie, independence is 'sterilised' or 'tarnished' by commodification outside pure musical expression and thus within the mainstream, which absorbs and domesticates these acts. This ideological coupling of the feminine with the consumptive still holds strong even in our pervasively consumerist society - witness the conclusion to this year's Superbad, it's telling the space in which the two male protagonists and close friends Evan and Seth are finally torn asunder after their adolescent bonding experience: the mall. And this separation of male comrades is inextricably tied to the young women they pair off with, and thus we have the feminised sphere of consumption.

Now, we begin to tenuously tie these strings together, with an initial recognition that although he may have 'sold out' in the indie/punk sense of the term, Barnes cock is still firmly in place (no "fears of castration"), wilfully paraded around, in fact. Not only, but Barnes is quite happy to Suffer for Fashion ("stereotypically feminine attributes") whilst doing so. We might secondly note that there is a quite definite overlap between the aesthetics of Of Montreal and that of advertising culture - both quite glossy (even though Barnes' version is intentionally shambolic) and stylised - how else would Wraith Pinned to the Mist... translate so easily into an advertising jingle? And it's really no surprise that you'd find the band themselves all dressed up in their trademark wacky attire in this new T-mobile meta-ad.

So, the crux (crutch?) of it: Barnes has successfully found a way to negotiate these sexualised streams, by paradoxically retaining a form of very-visibile masculinity of success and violence underneath the feminine ways of style and consumption, or 'selling out'. "Selling Out Isn't Possible" for Barnes because, consciously or not, he knows that he can capitulate to commercial culture and still walk away with his dick intact, in fact he can use his well-manicured tackle as the prime agent of his successful reconciliation of the feminine and masculine in capitalism.


Of Montreal - Suffer For Fashion

(Stay tuned next post for a literary analysis of the existential vacuum suggested by Outback Steakhouse's re-jingling of Wraith Pinned to the Mist... ("let's go Outback tonight / Life will still be there tomorrow")*

*jk

ignore the last post...

... it's still there, just under more covers.

Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover

It's still a carnival, more cluttered and baroque than ever before, but this time it's as if the magic holding it together, seeping from under the surface (you often smelt it when things went quiet for a while), is no longer there. Profoundly disturbing, and yet somehow still iridescent.