Deerhunter - Microcastle (/Weird Era Cont.)

Take out the 'c', replace it with an 'a' and rearrange the letters and you actually get 'mariocastle'. Which is itself quite profound, but what I really just want to get down is this little tidbit:

There's nothing particularly amazing about Microcastle, and yet that is precisely why it is so brilliant.

I can't be bothered explaining that, but Deerhunter have never been particularly inventive, to say the least. Their genius lies elsewhere, and I think on this album they've hit onto it perfect-like.

PSSSSSSSSS : Bradford sez:
"I wanna make songs that, like, a wider, younger audience can get behind. You know? A kid who just now is getting over My Chemical Romance or something. Or like, just now thinking, like, 'I wanna hear something a little more experimental.'"

I HEAR DAT

ribs out

We’re interested in noise as a sonic tool, not as an entity.
- Benjamin John Power, Fuck Buttons

What the fuck does this mean? What is the site of noise?

I guess pretty quickly you'd tell me that it's the body. Duh. But, then the problem is, why is it that so much noise is art-noise, the kind that sits very much in the cognitive, post-/anti-affective dimension? Like a kind of classical for technology? Fuck that.

Because Fuck Buttons make music that is for your bones. But not just to rattle them. Power and Andrew Chung got together initially, so they say, to make pain-inducing noise music. You know the kind, creepy shit that scratches at the back of your neck, repeats on itself in a really violent way. Then they wised up. And they realised that noise and pop/pleasure (well, something like it) were not ≠ - you can bring in structure and process and intention and melody and shit like that, but in a way that fucks with both ends o the spectrum.

Because - we're getting there - the end result is something like a sonic continuum between drone and pop, primal and culture, mind and body. It pleases a deep-seeded animalistic instinct in us (but not in those drums and monkey noises, no no, they're for this next desire) and yet it also appeals to our irreducible socialised sense of 'what music should sound like' - in doing so it deconstructs, no, fuck it, destructs, the barriers between noise and music and opens up once conservative ears to some truly outré shit.

Back to the question, though, what is the site? Mind and body? Well it's kind of actually not either really. Do you know that everything makes noise, that, as our fave John Cage found out, there is no such thing as silence? Well, then, that might give you a clue - FUCK BUTTONS IS EVERYWHERE. It's the horizon. It is the endlessness of sound, alien expanses of beats, drones, pitches, loops, bells.

But it's not all just some slap-dash throw it all together kind of 'world of sounds' bullshit. As if that would ever work. You can never actually include everything on an album, can you? But what you can do is kind of criss-cross bodies with their environments by passing through the ear, so that things kind of stretch in front and behind this music - I'm not really sure if I'm talking time or space, here, maybe both - so its special affect is like before and after you're listening to it.

That's where it is - it is both beating at your chest, and taking those bones well beyond whatever corporeal throne they were meant to stay inside, and it's doing it through your head - because you're processing the modulations, the harsh/nice sounds.

Ribs out.

bros

Apart from some well creepy collages of children, animals and flowers, the inside liner notes to Panda Bear's Person Pitch feature a big, bold, unpunctuated list of musical acts, which I guess are like his favourites or influences. Well, at least that's what everyone on the netz has said about them if they mention this thing, that it's a name-dropping, 'check list' of inspirations for Person Pitch.


But, for me, far from acting like a helpful roadmap into understanding the territory he covers (well, makes, would probably be a better word, Person Pitch certainly beats it own path - even though I still do believe that it's largely the submerged, slightly theistic treatment of the vocal and samples that reviewers have mistaken for some kind of transcendent quality), this list is basically arbitrary and contradictory. For one, trying to join the dots between bands like The Police, Moodyman, Black Dice, King Tubby, Air, Jay-Z, Kylie Minogue, Spaceman 3, Duran Duran, Kraftwerk, The Kinks, Black Sabbath, Theorem, etc. etc. is a completely fucking futile exercise, and the multiplicity of sounds and styles this list references is not so much an indication of Panda Bear's 'eclectic' tastes (fuck I hate that word) but the unnerving, incommensurable, overriding difference that all sound is founded upon. And then as if trying to join everything back to Person Pitch was some way to make the connection - as a certain animated lizard might say, bull shit, no way.

In fact, it's almost like an affront or challenge - just you try and pinpoint the exact moment, sample, structure, whatever, on the record where X influenced me, Panda Bear seems to be saying. Because we're not dealing w/ Night Ripper here. Sure, you might be able to go, "oh his harmonic sunniness is clearly Brian Wilson", or "the repetitive nature of his samples is very 'Insert Hip Hop Act'". But have you actually said anything meaningful whatsoever? Have you even begun to understand how this record works, let alone sounds? Nein!

For me, this endless (ellipses cap it off) list ultimately affirms the uselessness of listing other bands as a critical practice - it's just not a matter of correspondence. Actually, it's only ever a connection made by the listener, wholly biased to their own history and potentially a very real impediment to actually considering the music in question. Sure, everything is a tissue of quotations, blah blah, but every combination is something unique and novel within itself. So deal with that! It just makes me want to try to vow to never listing another band name or genre as reference in a review, even if I can't quite help myself. But, then, at times, this almost tips over into a wish to just stop trying to describe sound at all, as if that were ever possible anyway. It's always connotation, metaphor, tangent - but then, isn't everything?

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

- says:

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

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


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

neon bible

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

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

Let go of expression and truth? Or reconstruct them?

The Enright House - A Maze and Amazement

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

and i may do it again

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

now do you think the second movement has too many violin?

...Such disagreements grew from deeper ones over whether the art [music] was to be valued for its emotional power, its sensuousness, its manipulation of abstract forms, or its enactment of "improving" ethical values. (Harold Love, How Music Created A Public)

Dipping my toes into some pretty heavy stuff at the moment, thinking about the place of music in the space of the public sphere, and further to that the role music criticism might play. Reading Love's historical account of the very emergence of a musical public (ie. a public that exists solely because of their love for music, to play or listen, which has not always existed but is actually a fairly recent phenomenon, roughly overlapping with the eighteenth century development of the literary public sphere) and I came across this quote, in which he is talking about the elements of debate that occurred between the musical public back then, and I come to realise that the mode (for want of a better term) of music is something that has been fretted over long before I came along, in fact ever since it emerged as a relatively autonomous sphere. Because to bring it back to the personal, I've been thinking a lot lately about exactly where music fits in for me, and I find myself moving closer and closer to an aesthetic, emotional connection or conception (that in my view links up with traditionally literary criticism centred on thematic insight), no matter how hard I try to politicise, economise, socialise the whole bloody thing. I'm not sure it's a necessarily bad thing, although I would like to devise a way of rejoining the aesthetic and social that is not through the moral or the personal, if that makes sense. I guess it might come through the affective, or possibly through a renewed 'textual' analysis that posits larger things within the text itself, (to paraphrase Barbara Johnson, herself speaking for Derrida, 'when one hears (or plays), we always hear more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks').

Nevertheless, it's comforting, and also somewhat annoying (in that it hasn't been sorted out) to know that these sorts of problems have been going on since wayyy back. And of course different positions are of course themselves submerged 'ideologies' - matters of taste are always far more than just that. Which one to choose?

emotional power

sensuousness

manipulation of abstract forms

enactment of 'improving' ethical values

But of course - it's not so much a question of style (music outwards) but taste (listener musicwards). And yet is this demarcation itself something worthwhile, or is it itself a kind of ideological (discursive?) operation (see Adorno's typology of listeners...)? Nevertheless, do we still tend to privilege a particular mode of listening in the everyday?

like an animal in your care

I found a bridge. Or built one. I'm not sure. In two ways. The first is pretty restrained, and if I don't put it here the only other place it will languish is stuck between thing newsprint lying in a stack down the beige corridors of a sinking institution:

{...}

It would do to try build a bridge, then, lest the gap widen to the point where Wolf Parade becomes two bands with the same name. You might find it in musical cohesion – unlike the more ragged and disjointed debut, At Mount Zoomer gathers itself into a colourful tapestry of what might be called indie-prog, ornate arrangements, barbed and ringing, but all more lush and defined. Or maybe you pick up the lyric-sheet, noticing that, they’re both tired, preoccupied with radio wires and looking at the same sea. They might have gotten there from different places – Boeckner from within the decaying spires of the modern urban core, Krug, who long since gave up the city, riding horseback from a fantastic forest where he tried searching for some ritual, fantastic place to return to. They reach the edge of the cliff and pick up their tools (the rest of the band pitches in), building a giant, teetering helter skelter on the edge of the waves. It might topple, but we’re on it, and we gotta stay on it. It’s the modern world, baby, and whichever place you might sing and search from, don’t you know that you’re trapped in here. Or maybe not, maybe we can yell “fire in the hole” against this fucked up structure and jump as we sing with Wolf Parade: “Oh follow me / Allow me to play the voyager / Oh take a dive / Take a dive”.

That's pretty restrained I guess. It's not too held in, like it's probably not suitable for the channel it's going to, but whatever. So that's all good, then, but I'd much rather, much rather, build the bridge another way. Oh no, actually, this bridge I found, I didn't have to do anything here, make tenuous connections and mythologise rings around it all.

That bridge is Animal In Your Care. Penultimate track. I love how it's actually lyrically written backwards. It's just the sweetest kind of melancholy, because you never really know whether this will actually happen as he sings at the start:

Time after time
You will forgive me
Like an animal in your care
But give it time
You will outlive me
And take the bow back you put in my hair

Because he sings the end, oh the end, well the whole song sings the end it is like its own undeniable chorus the most amazing first-to-second half song transition I've probably ever experienced (I though My Latest Novel had the monopoly on that, but no) and it's all built around that ivory, no more meandering it all just comes out like glass punches and then he sings:

You let me hang, hang, hang around
You put your ribbons in my hair
It's in this language that I found
I am an animal in your care

An animal in your care
An animal in your care
An animal in your care


So fuck it, Wolf Parade or Spencer Krug or whoever they're all just tags for the music, this is not about the modern world and all that, well maybe it is if 'you' were some kind of structure, but god that's just sad. So I take back my review and I put this song in it's place. This love song. Twisted one, that's for sure.

It's not like this is all mine. Like I'm hoarding Wolf Parade's magic. (I was on their Myspace and I saw someone had just left a comment with a few lines from I'll Believe in Anything - why not say something, I might of thought. But I knew why, it's like those times you just can't say anything - 'hey guys, I love your music' just doesn't cut it. You've just gotta try and reflect that feeling you get from it. And you can't, but the closest you can try is just stamping those lines there like they speak for themselves.) Though I do get that solipsistic feeling sometimes that I'm the only one that knows them - or maybe it's that feeling like me and the music are the only things left in the world. For this song at least. But someone else must be introduced. Another Beast.

made me bolt like a horse

Just to continue the obsession, I stumbled on a cover of Peach, Plum, Pear by Final Fantasy a little while ago, and I've been listening to it pretty regularly. Trying to work out what it's doing, yer, where it's going. Of course, it's all string-filled whimsy and plucking as is his steez, but there's something about the 'levels', umm no, the emphasis he places on the various parts of this song that just brings out a whole other side to it. For one, his vocals never get beyond this sort of mildly disinterested kind of talk-sing from the middle of the room into a tape recorder like it's all just something to be calmly and uniformally recounted, which in turn paradoxically gives the lyric even further desperation. And then like the whole plucking - it's a lot sharper, umm no, cleaner than Newsom's - less urgent, but still quick. Like is this a Disney film or something? Hahaha of course not, it's fruity indie chamber music, complete with strings that come in just where they should but of course are very surprising because you didn't expect them with the almost languid feeling of the song up until now. And that cobbling hooves sound? A tad obvious, but brilliant - just the right kind of discordance this whole thing needs to throw it all off the track it never really walked along anyway. Things stay vocally quiet all through the end, and why not. So what does it all mean Basil? Well, that's just it, it only can ever mean for me something secondary, and I'm not even sure what that is. It's like recently I'm losing some kind of analytic and thematic grip on music and to be really honest I love this. And this.

Final Fantasy - Peach, Plum, Pear