reading sound

Whilst of course not a simple march of succession, the shift from vinyl to compact disc and now to MP3 represents a kind of arc to an increasing impenetrability of the musical format, as music’s physical form becomes less and less clear through the recording device:

• Whereas vinyl offers the tactile fetish of a needle literally scratching across the grain of the record;

• CD obscures the particularity of the grooves for an unreadable surface sheen, that is nevertheless read by laser in a spiralling movement. We cannot see it but we can still hold it. (with burnt cds you get the unique phenomenon where one can ‘gauge’ the amount of data or length of recording via how much of the original surface has been burnt a slightly darker colour)

• MP3 quite stubbornly hides the process of its encoding/decoding within the player (be it mobile or computer terminal), there is nothing to penetrate or read or look at beyond the file, which of course can be constituted as a sequence of code, but only at great effort and still completely indecipherable.

What does this mean culturally? For music?

What about the sense in which this impetus to obfuscating stands in inverse relation to the quality (conceived of as 'fidelity') of the recording? Is it true, as Adorno argues, that the better a technology gets at reproduction the less 'real' the music sounds? This is attached to notions of authenticity and aura, which themselves are fraught with the danger of privileging the original artifact, something that cannot possibly be done in terms of sound recording (this is a positive thing, in my view).

Just some thoughts...

ii

Why I hate iPods #143

Amongst my biggest problems with these devices, or any other portable digital music players, is they way in which they structure a social tautology - the individual no longer moves to the rhythm of the urban soundscape but to their own daily schedule, continually modulating external events' affective states by bringing them in line with what's inside. Eg. I'm on the train, I don't like the sound of these people talking about whatever, I'll put on my iPod and listen to x because it will put me in the right mood for what I need to do when I get off the train, and then when I'm walking to there I'll put on y because it's good walking music, and so on and so on. Rather than attunement to whatever sonic textures surround one, the digital player allows you to continually collapse bodily and mental movement so that the only thing your listening practices mirror is yourself. Not even does the iPod force you to at least sit with a particular piece of music (say, a cassette or a disc), but at 'touch' you can switch things around endlessly, shuffle them up until all that's left in meaningful, affective, material terms is whatever you want it to be. Sure, this isn't some kind of liberated freedom rather a form of micromanagement of the self, post-Foucauldian control in action. Just what about the music though, at least? Does it even matter anymore? Is a politics of genre (or artist, or period, or any other identity of actual songs) even possible under these conditions?

"Frances Densmore, collector, with Mountain Chief of the Blackfoot tribe, 1906. On behalf of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, Densmore made many field trips using Edison's recently invented wax cylinder recorder, as pictured here. [T]his photo, taken in Washington, D.C., reflects the special aims and conditions not of the "oral poetry act" but rather of what might be called the "photography act." For the benefit of the photographer and posterity, Mountain Chief has donned his ceremonial native dress (his own?). At his side are emblems of the vanishing Native American culture that Densmore was doing her best to document. The collector adopts a non-assuming pose, eyes lowered on the machine. Mountain Chief gestures as if declaiming, although any sound that he is uttering at this moment would not be registered, for he is seated before the listening horn of the machine, not the recording horn."

I can't even begin...

No Age - Nouns

This will hopefully find it's way into Beat but of course you never know ... and reading over the review it struck me that it seemed more at home in the knotty intellectual domain that is (con)temporary, so here you go!

No Age - Nouns
(Sub Pop / Stomp)

A reactionary evaluation of the debut proper from No Age might go like this: so they're signed to Sub Pop (after releasing a string of totally indie vinyls that were collected into Weirdo Ripper), therefore they had lots of cash to make Nouns, so how come it sounds like shit, like they just chucked the tape recorder in the middle of the room and pressed play? I want to hear the KILLER tracks underneath all this crap! Well sure, No Age do pile things on, it's rough, distorted and their tracks are buried under a certain mulch, but this itself is a subtle reconfiguration of the traditional lo-fi aesthetic that one might initially angrily attribute to Nouns. Because the very thing is, Nouns undoes the ideology of lo-fi the says it can only emerge from tape recorders and the dole, just at the same time as they trash the notion that studio production itself must aim for a kind of perfect sound. It's clear from a little closer listening that No Age truly didn't just set up the mic in the middle of the room and then bash around it, but that its lo-fi grain is actually as much an addition of production - they use overdubbing, looping, resonant atmospherics and so on that take what might actually have been a fairly crisp punk track initially and cast it in some kind of mystical, elemental aura. This itself also delays the orgasmic excess that your traditional punk listener might want from his tracks, as if music were reducible to ejaculatory actions - Nouns says 'fuck that', asserting that we MUST bury things under mulch, make the ears work a little harder and recognise the duality of things - that punk itself can be ambient, and that ambient can be punk. It doesn't let you hear it kicking, even though it clearly is busting out of its seams of that grainy, tactile cloth that lays over it. This sound is punk as an environmental force, not one that works to charge you in force and politics but that works through bodies and envelopes of noise until it reaches something like a scuzzy nirvana. As such, Nouns ceaselessly seems to extend beyond itself, reaching past its initial hearing to emanate beyond and take primal flight - it makes sense that this band have played at the foot of canyons and gorges in their American homeland.

Their mixture of studio production and what you might call field recording (live music or otherwise) also flies in the face of what might be a positive evaluation of lo-fi as some kind of pure sphere of 'press record and play' musical creativity that lends recordings a life-giving and totally authentic force (case in point: Springsteen's Nebraska, “OMG he actually sat at his kitchen table to record this and that’s exactly what we’re hearing!”). No Age more subtly understand lo-fi itself as a form of engineering or trickery, not the beginning and end of production but one means among others to arrive at a particular recorded sound. This particular recording also smashes the two-piece mentality, which amazingly is what No Age are - against that whole ‘what you play live should be what we hear on album’ bullshit, the endless layering and marks of far more than just four hands that pervade this sound force you to hold this album as its own material entity. We're not evaluating what they should sound like here (which the reactionary review might ask for), this isn't sheet music and it isn't a gig. It's Nouns, and it’s the sign of something great happening in music when it can steer a smooth course through knotty, ambient complexity and fuzzy, unbridled fun.

Die! Die! Die! - interview

("everybody move so fast none of this will ever last")

I spoke with Andrew Wilson, front man for NZ trio Die! Die! Die!, for their Australian tour, which is now underway - they hit Revolver on Thursday the 24th, it's well worth checking them out. They are insane live. We chatted about their new album Promises, Promises and what it means for the band. Andrew was warm and really nice to speak to, I'm not sure if that translates into hard text, but he was quite open and grateful to chat. I'm not sure if I interjected far too much, as well, stopping his flow and thoughts. Most of our conversation is below.

The last time you were out here, you played a gig at the Prince of Wales...
I had terrible food poisoning then, I went to hospital after that show. I was really, really, really fucked up – I don't want to go into too many details but I totally thought I was dying. It was probably a really laid back performance.

(Andrew screamed his way through the set, put his head in the hollow drum kit at one point whilst Michael Prain was hammering away at it. Meanwhile Lachlan Anderson, the bassist, is jumping up on the stacks and free falling.)

Well, by that stage, you were playing almost exclusively from Promises, Promises, despite the fact audiences here were yet to hear it.
We've started to play old stuff again now, it's just that we'd only gotten off touring the old stuff overseas and it was just kind of refreshing to play the new music.

It was strange for the crowd, but I thought still quite cool – an entire set list fresh to my ears was a great experience
We actually thought we got a really bad response from Australia, lot's a people were like 'ah you're not playing all the old songs', but see in New Zealand we kind of had the reverse reaction from playing all the new stuff.

(Andrew is at pains to justify playing this new material, but really the crowd should have just necked up.)

So how do you find Australian audiences in general? I find them very standoffish.
Yeah, sometimes, we've had really mixed reactions. They're either really, really, really super enthusiastic or they're super the opposite, and that Prince of Wales gig, well, I wasn't really sure. But I guess in Melbourne it's because you get exposed to so many amazing bands, so a band has to really impress you to get a reaction out of them, and really everyone is way too cool.

You tour shitloads, do you find you pick up many influences along the way?
Yeah, not really by choice we've spent a long time in America, which, um, I mean it was quite inspiring ... I haven't really seen that many bands which inspired me but just the hectic lifestyle and everything has just definitely inspired us, and we're really into dancehall and reggae this year because we ended up hanging out with all these, Rastafarian dudes who decided to really like our band and come on tour with us. So we've had some interesting stories, we're really influenced by the places we're at. When we were in LA we were hanging out with all these people really into Morrissey and the Smiths and stuff, and they're all like Mexican ... I wouldn't say gang types, but tough types. Everywhere has kinda got its own individual flavour and we definitely get influenced by where we're at.

The Locust Weeks EP looks like it has a photo taken in the US, on the front?
Yeah that was the street which we lived on in New York.

And was Locust Weeks the title any reference to your time there?
Nah: we practised on a street called Locust St, and then we recorded it there. I don't know about that recording - we did it in three hours.

Strange, I love that record, especially the last track - it feels like it's been made in three hours, but that lent it something.
Yeah, I mean, it was really - that song 155 has been around for a while. The other three we kind of wrote in NY, but 155 we wrote in Auckland before we moved.

Locust Weeks sort of seems like a bit of a continuation of the debut album, and it almost seems like it was kind of like it was the last chance you got to really kick out a lot of, not anger - but really expel something. And Promises, Promises seems a bit more calculated, do you agree?
Um, oh, I think a lot of that was that the first EP was done in a day, the Steve Albini LP was done in three days, Locust Weeks was done in three hours, and then Promises, Promises was done in 12 days. If you think about it, 12 days mixing and mastering in there too, is actually pretty insane. 12 days is not really that long. Although, I know what you mean calculated, but also the fact that we're working with the producer on Promises, Promises really affected, you know - working with Shayne [Carter, renowed NZ producer] really influenced Promises, Promises.

How?
Kind of arrangements and moods.

Because it definitely has a different recording grain/texture than say the Albini one which seems a bit more polished, whereas this one seems rougher around the edges but the songs themselves seem a little bit more hemmed in.
Well, that's kind of it actually. The sound is actually a lot more budget because we didn't have as much money as the other three recordings but the songs are a lot better, I reckon.

They seem like they have a longer gestation.
Well, actually, probably the opposite - we wrote most of Promises, Promises a week before we recorded it. Sideways Here We Come was actually a day before. Yeah, it was the last song we wrote on the album. What I found really funny was that was the song that was gonna be left off the album because we weren't gonna finish it, and that one - the structure’s actually not kinda finished.

It’s my fave track on there, especially the ‘ooo’ [makes terrible imitation of modulating, wordless falsetto refrain] in the background.
That was the most unfinished song definitely on the record.

So how do you explain that then, so you're saying it’s a bit rougher in the sound and then the songs sound more measured/focused, even though you still only wrote them a week before? Is it the song writing process?
I think that we really did make it an idea not to write stuff we'd already done, make sure that it was kinda fresh. I dunno we've just kind of got in a real pattern of song writing with the other records and we really wanted to mix that up, definitely.

From the self-titled EP to the self-titled album, it did almost seem like a loop.
Yeah, exactly.

This one it seems like you guys have entered into a new phase, this is a maturing of the band.
I definitely reckon. I mean like when we did that first EP we were 19, you know what I mean. And now we're 23, well Lachlan is 21. And there's a new bass player as well. Well I mean we've definitely grown up a lot, and a lot of the shit which used to impress doesn't impress me at all and a lot of the shit which used to make my skin crawl like now I really love, you know what I mean. And I think that's natural to anyone who is involved in music, your tastes kind of change.

Well what are some examples of shit you used to hate and you’re now into?
I dunno, like Led Zeppelin, I used to despise them. When I was really young and you know, punk music - I was like fuck that dinosaur rock shit and now I love Led Zeppelin. Not saying that Zeppelin has got an effect on our band, but. And even like T Rex, that classic rock. And we've got quite a good scene of friends and music in NZ and they've all changed what they're into as well, and I dunno we're all kind of just creatures of the environment.

This is a difficult question to ask, maybe even retarded.
I love difficult questions.

I'll ask you first from your point of view - do you write the songs/lyrics mostly?
Yeah I wrote the lyrics but the songs we all kind of write.

Well, what is it that sort of – if you say that you’re not as angry as much that you used to be – well, what is it that is still driving you, because there's still a sense of pissed-offed-ness that comes through.
Well I'm definitely still kinda pissed off. I dunno, just life and love and stuff. It's just kind of, well I've noticed Promises, Promises is more direct in the lyrics, and you know, on the first record I dunno I kinda wrote about the stuff I didn't really put my head around. Just kind of let me put my head inside it. I dunno, it's really hard to talk about.

Yeah, your other records seem a bit more obtuse, you kind of put what you were talking about to the side, whereas this one it's just kind of head on.
Well that's pretty much exactly it. Before it was like ‘Oh shit, do I actually wanna sing about that, oh maybe I’ll add something else funny into it so I'm not actually directly talking about it,’ whereas on this record, I just went like ‘Fuck it, I’ll just be as honest as possible for the whole record.’ It's quite a hard record for me to listen to, but in hindsight I feel a lot better about it than the other record, where I was not really trying as much.

So have you found it hard to go back, to play it?
Oh yeah, it's been out in the New Zealand since October so we've been playing it a lot, it is quite a ... it does take a lot to play it. Yeah. But you know, we're all so involved in it now that it’s all pretty good.

Is it almost that it's beyond yourself now?
That’s what I've noticed about it, it's definitely its own beast.

Whether or not it’s hard for you personally, too bad you've just gotta keep going on the juggernaut?
Yeah exactly. And now we've kind of, yeah. I mean it's kind of like, in New Zealand when the first record came out, it was really hated on - actually all our recordings before Promises, Promises. And when this one’s come out it’s actually be quite well received in New Zealand for the first time ever. And the first other recordings did really well overseas but not in New Zealand, and then this record has done quite well in New Zealand, and it's been out in America for three weeks, and its already outsold the first record which we thought did really well. So it's just become its own beast, we've really get into the mindset of it, and we've written a lot more new music recently, in New Zealand, but then we can't really do Promises, Promises justice unless we just kind of go overseas and just play it over there.

That's a good background actually - because I read some overseas reviews on you guys and you're stuff was coming up on quite a few US sites and the reaction was good.
It's doing really well in America, I think we're playing on one of those American talk shows. They've chosen one of our more abrasive tracks off Promises, Promises as well - ATTITUD. It's pretty funny actually.

What a gauge of how big you've gotten over there.
Yeah it's doing surprisingly well. and when it came out in New Zealand and we found that people were starting to like it in our home country which was a really big step, and everyone in Australia hated it. But now people in Australia have started to hear it they're catching on to it, and people in America are really starting to catch on to it. Hopefully it will be good - it could just flop, and we could be back in Dunedin on the dole, writing more songs.

So where to for you guys now?
Yeah we're recording a new EP probably in the next month actually. But um, it's for this American label - I dunno if it's gonna come out in New Zealand or Australia yet. and then I think we're touring in America in their winter. And then at the end of the year we wanna, we just wanna settle down in Dunedin and probably write our next record.

You're pretty quick really.
Yeah, we are actually. I mean there's a hell of a lot more prolific bands, but you know - it's just because we were kind of stuck in a rut touring that first album so much, for so long. With that first record, we kinda got trapped just playing that first album for so long.

And you know, so many of those songs on the album are on the EP as well.
We really weren't very prolific for a really long time, which was probably the time we should have been most prolific. Oh well, I reckon it's good, because we're not going to be like ‘first album fucking yeah’ and then, you know - we're quite glad we're not that band. And if we kind of reached our peak on our first record that would have just been a total disaster.

That wasn't quite the height you wanted to hit.
Totally not, just because we weren't prepared you know - we kind of wanted to get out of NZ so quickly and we didn't actually think about the music as much as we should have.

And so now do you feel like, not like you have more time because you're still on a strict schedule, but do you feel like you have a bit more space?
It's not really like we've got time, because we're playing more than we ever have, but I definitely feel like we've got a lot more space from it all actually.

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.