Arbeit Macht Frei with Fleet Foxes

This new Fleet Foxes track is really very beautiful and it's even getting some mainstream radio play. I think I prefer Local Natives in terms of earnest, flannel-shirted, West Coast adult-pop, but I'll give props to FF for sheer skill, musicianship and whatnot. Sometimes there are bands who you can't love, but you can easily admire. On this side of the pond I might place Elbow in that niche.

But hear this: I have some serious grievances with those lyrics, poetic as they are. The sentiment of 'Helplessness Blues' - unless I have massively misconstrued this - comes from the mind of a person so blindly privileged, so steeped in lazy, developed world luxuries and Oxfam-donating platitudes that it would be offensive even to a working class American, let alone one of the world's billion people living on less than a dollar a day.

The idea that anyone would want to escape a life of writing smart arse love songs and touring the world in order to spend their days doing manual fucking labour in an apple orchard while their girlfriend waits tables is so embarrassingly facetious, so idiotically sexist, so creepily Soviet, in fact so positively fucking Stalinist that I can barely believe they recorded it.

No matter how insignificant and meaningless you feel your life is, as you wander round downtown Seattle/Montreal/Brooklyn/Hackney drinking Americanos and sighing as you open your MacBook Pro for yet another grinding 5-hour day of checking Twitter and pissing around on Final Cut, let's GET A GRIP HERE PEOPLE. You are not picking rubbish off a poisonous dump. You are not mining koltan in the Congo. You are not pulling turnips out of a frozen field in East Anglia, you are not even working in a bloody supermarket or driving a bus or anything that might be considered a PROPER NORMAL JOB with sick pay and benefits - and if you really, really want to work on an orchard you can fly off to have a HOLIDAY on a FARM!

Life isn't always easy, but let's not glamorise fruit-picking, waitressing or arthritis in old age as though it's somehow the more noble and honest choice. That way lies the labour camp, my friend. Wow, I sound like a fucking neocon technocrat here. Ah well, I'll risk it.

Please, have I missed the point? Is there a whole level of irony that has passed me by? I'm more than willing to step off my soapbox if presented with the evidence. Take a listen.

"If I had an orchard
I'd work til I'm raw
If I had an orchard
I'd work til I'm sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store"

OMG! with S.C.U.M., live at The Garage

S.C.U.M.
Upstairs at the Garage
11 February 2011

First published in Loud And Quiet. FYI, I didn't want to bring up the girlfriend thing, but it just couldn't be ignored. And then I saw our humble frontman's bashful guest appearance on OMG and wished I'd actually got my claws out.

With high-waisted wide trousers and spivvish greasy locks, Tom from S.C.U.M. is like Christmas-come-early for uninspired Topman designers. No wonder he's attracted a certain 'celeb' girlfriend, whose 100,000 Twitter followers must be delighted to receive daily photo updates of their budding love story.

Is that unfair? I wish I could say so, but tonight S.C.U.M. are thoroughly failing to live up to their early potential, when they took their performance cues from the alienation-as-spectacle style of Suicide or ATR, and also failing to sound anywhere near as good as they do on record.

Having been on the scene a couple of years they've now smoothed off the abrasive noisenik prickliness of their early shows, back when they were part of a mini-zeitgeist of London bands associated with Offset festival, like O Children and the late Ipso Facto.

Heck, this gig is even part of an HMV-sponsored series, Next Big Thing (oh, the irony). Instead we get a performance that's very nearly commercially viable, but all the more boring for it, with the detail and atmosphere of the recorded material impossible to discern in this sterile mishmash of New Wave synth and industrial rhythms, while Tom's almost vaudeville vocals seem lost in the mix entirely.

\\\ Happy Valentine's ///

OUT NOW >

Downbeats: Visions of Trees live (from Loud And Quiet)

Visions of Trees at XOYO, 6th December 2010

'Tropical pop' is a neat – if kind of crude – tag for those sun-drenched songs built on rippling textures, polyphonic rhythms and 'primitive' percussion (as if played by whooping loin-clothed islanders, maybe – told you it was crude). But over on the shady side of the island, where the vegetation lies in damp tangles rarely brushed by the equatorial sun, a cooler, dreamier kind of 'tropical pop' germinates.

Visions of Trees add a dose of minor-chord industrialism to this darker side of trop-pop, like the twisted steel of a burnt-out propellor plane rusting in the jungle. Without labouring the metaphor any further, the duo carve a downbeat niche from Joni's mournful beats and Sara's R&B-inflected vocals, like the sadface rave of The Knife or Crystal Castles.

Annoyingly, all that ethereal dreaminess falls pancake-flat on stage at XOYO, with the untreated vocals too plain and too high in the mix to chime with the lazy Liz Fraser comparison I'd heard. While the beats are interesting enough, if nowhere near ground-breaking, the show would be more captivating if VoT fucked with the good-girl vocals. There's no denying the potential, but maybe they can't visualise the wood for the – nah, I won't say it...

Charting the Unlistenable, pt. I: Albert Ayler

As someone who writes about music, getting tangled up in genre is an obvious occupational hazard (although tell that to the musicians - for some reason genre is a dirty word even for those who blatantly use it to sell their product).

One common reductive argument when faced with the fragmented multiverses of musical styles, rhythms and subcultures is to say that there are two types of music: good music, and bad music. Those who invoke this argument tend to fall into two camps. First, you have the genuinely disinterested muso who will give anything a listen in the hope that it might stimulate his or her sonic receptacles. Second, you have man-on-street who believes his attitude to be very much like that of the muso, but who actually equates 'good' with a sort of layman's canon of historically approved bands: Beatles, Stones, Clash, Joy Division, Smiths, White Stripes and, oddly enough, Daft Punk.

If we want to make an already reductionist argument even more reductive, we could say that the former is the Wire, and the second is Q (in which case we can add Lily Allen to the approved canon).

So I'd like to propose my own answer to a question that has plagued man from ancient times: WAT MUSIC IS GD???

Under the header 'Charting the Unlistenable', I'm gonna post some tracks old and new that occupy the blurred region that you know your parents would call 'unlistenable rubbish', but that you may well call 'genius', or at least, 'unlistenable genius'. I welcome comments and suggestions on this topic.

My first choice is perhaps an obvious one, but it should get the ball rolling nicely: free jazz pioneer, avant garde psychonaut, cosmic voyager and all-round certifiable nutbar Albert Ayler.



This track is taken from Spiritual Unity, the record which brought Ayler to the attention of the variously horrified, bemused and enchanted jazz world. The 30 minutes of crazed free improvisation, where timbre and texture took centre stage in place of melody, harmony or modality, set a new standard for the free jazz school influenced by Ornette Coleman.

How listenable is it on an everyday basis? I think the ideal setting for Ayler is while doing nothing else, preferably in a darkened room for maximum cosmic vibes. Although I have been known to listen to Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe while walking to work on a Sunday morning...

Ayler's take on free jazz was also a huge influence on one Jim Osterberg of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Stooges of course also took their fair share of criticism for being unlistenable trash: squealing guitars recorded in the red, the bark of a tenor sax and Iggy Pop's double-sided voice, leaping from smooth baritone to primal yelps. All I hear is bonafide genius, naturally...

'Ordinary Things': The mutant garage beast grows and grows

XXXY, a producer from Manchester, makes the kind of warm'n'glitchy future garage that so brazenly appeals to my senses, as if he's hooked me up to some electrode brain scanning contraption that measures the exact pitches, frequencies, chopped beats and head-nod-ability that I'm genetically programmed to vibe off.

'Ordinary Things' is apparently the b-side to his track 'You Always Start It', already sold out on the Ten Thousand Yen label, but I marginally prefer it to the main event - it's not the most original or groundbreaking of tracks, but somehow it ticks all the boxes to become the quintessential sound of this microgenre. Not that it's formulaic by any means - you'd have to be a chronic neophile to believe that this sound has reached such a tipping point - but it goes where you want it to go, propelled on by a gently modulating chord progression and some seriously funky breaks towards the end.

Car-crash pop: Chillwave is serious business (sort of)

In a recent post, I mentioned what I find to be the compulsive-yet-repellent character of the hypnagogic-chill-fi-whatevs-scene, with reference to Hype Williams. Annoyingly, someone from the insanely high-quality Fact mag just wrote a bunch of stuff about HW that congealed many of my thoughts about the band into half a sentence and then went on to say something far more interesting.

Anyway, a couple of other quotes I CTRL-Ced lately have helped me to articulate just what it is about these bands that makes me feel - well, not exactly compelled or repelled, but somehow uneasy.

The first comes from the esteemed yet divisive Simon Reynolds, who wrote a piece for the Village Voice called 'Leave Chillwave Alone'. The title is misleading 'cos it's essentially Reynolds hatin' hard on chillwave for 500 words. But hey:

In "Hardcore Pops Are Fun," from 2006's House Arrest, Ariel Pink provided a kind of hymn/manifesto for this generation's ahistorical omnivorousness: "Pop music is free/For you and me . . . Pop music is wine/It tastes so divine." But he still had a foot in '90s irony ("Hardcore Pops" was actually recorded in 2001). Archness gets burned off completely in the music of those that came after him, replaced by an earnestness that aspires to spirituality.

Reynolds has picked up on the surprisingly irony-free take on New Age sounds, 80s MOR and AM radio drivel we've been hearing over the past couple of years, largely produced by timewarped dudes in stonewash denim.

Where Ariel Pink's music is ironic and arch (often annoying attributes in themselves), his numerous musical disciples have dropped the humour in favour of a more ambiguous attitude, one that's impossible to read: not joking, yet not serious.

Reynolds goes on:

Earnestness is one of the defining attributes of "digimodernist" culture identified by the theorist Alan Kirby—other hallmarks are "onwardness" and "endlessness." On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there's no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one's name out there.

He points out that where Pitchfork is firmly rooted in a pre-internet conception of music and its industry accoutrements (live shows, albums, reviews and criticism), its sister site Altered Zones is run by a mostly younger generation of bloggers, who tend to see tracks as a steady flow of 3-minute experiences: on and on and on.

Reviews are irrelevant; the critic's job of assessing and archiving is hopelessly out-of-date. Songs are almost impossible to own or play physically (often existing only on cassette or VHS) and disseminated indiscriminately through the infinite reproducers of copy>paste and rightclick>saveas.

Chillwave sounds like the past, but exists only in the present. And when the track ends, it belongs to the past too, making way for the next track from the future. Onward, endless.

Back to that earnestness that aspires to spirituality:

"This reality is twisted, but for me it's really fascinating because seeing past the deranged hypnosis, or merging with it, can also represent our human potential," the experimental musician and hypnagogic hero, James Ferraro, told [David] Keenan [of the Wire magazine] back in 2009. "So it inspires me in that way. KFC, TV et cetera are perfect examples of dark energy temples that alter people's reality in a psychotic way, but it also shows the power of dreams and it is a testament of our ability to plug into our dreams and experience them on Earth."

KFC as a dark energy temple? Personally, feeling lost somewhere in between the P4K and AZ mentalities, my natural assumption is that Ferraro is just dicking around, talking pseudo-spiritual rubbish for the lulz. But I think the truth is he doesn't know - or care - either way. Earnest or ironic, lulz or serious business, the chillwave attitude encompasses everything and nothing.

Tim Burrows from The Quietus goes on:

The attempt to suggest that KFC – an admittedly necessary purchase at various kinds of time-poor/inebriated/frivolous states – has some kind of new age, transformative significance sums up the scene quite well. There is a refusal to look beyond what has been already experienced, a kind of kick back and ignore attitude that, if anything, does not make it unique. It makes it our cultural norm.

I don't have anything against chillwave. I like a lot of it. But as I said, it repels as much it compels me. Car crash pop. Slow motion car-crash pop. Abject slo-mo car-crash pop.

Here's a great video...

Rounding up to move on: James Blake, Hype Williams, Teengirl Fantasy

Once again it has been too long since my last post. I am my own worst enemy.

To ease myself back in, here are a few nuggets of audio joy, all of which I have been rinsing this week through my fucking awesome new soundcard. Even with lame Logitech speakers the following tunes sound heavy like a first day period, as Janet Jackson once said.

#1

James Blake, 'Wilhelm's Scream'


[Had to choose a different video as the Radio 1 version is too wide]

This looped refrain has been pulsing through my brain on and off for the past week now, but the real joy is when I get home and stick it on and am reminded of how damn classy and 'mature' the production is. A lot of people seem a bit surprised/confused at the sound of JB's album, which is so sparse it makes the XX sound like Wild Beasts, but after you get over your initial shock at how many moments of pure silence there are, you start to warm up to all the little production treats scattered throughout. Not to mention his voice - one of my favourite games over the past couple of months has been informing people that 'Limit To Your Love' is not a sampled vocal...

Also I have to briefly boast about seeing James Blake at Plan B last Friday, which @Dummymag pointed out was pretty much a 'We were there' moment. Again, the voice is proper spine-tingly live, plus hearing the bass out of the venue's Funktion One's made 'Limit To Your Love' a quite literally visceral experience. Excited to hear that he's planning a residency in February at a church in King's Cross.

# 2

Hype Williams, 'Rescue Dawn'



Yes, yes, I know hipsters were on this 4real like waaay back in 2010 but I haven't blogged for ages, 'kay? So I've been listening to the elusive duo's album (released on De Stijl) for a while now, having been slipped the promo ages ago and utterly failing to act upon it. It's called Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, And Start Gettin Reel.

Initially the whole concept of Hype Williams made me feel a bit sicky, partly because of the extreme alt.coolness of it all, with its pixellated visuals and anti-aesthetic aesthetic. Strong Dalston vibes emanate throughout, combined with not so much the 3am night bus atmosphere we've had from so many great records of 2008-10, but more a 7am 'oh my God, why am I still awake' feeling, which marries perfectly with the dubious 'hypnagogic pop' label defined by David Keenan of the Wire (hypnagogic meaning the state between awake and asleep). See also, #3 of this post.

Also, something about the warmth of the warped cassette effects, twisted vocals and repetitive infinite loopiness all came together to take me back to being a carsick 7-year-old on the way to Gatwick at sunrise (really). In particular I recall a tape we had in the Renault 21 of Chris Rea's Road to Hell, the cover of which most chillwave bands would kill to have come up with, and which had some sort of profound effect on my developing only-child psyche as it whirred round on its own infinite loop. Listening to the opening track of that album now, I think I get it. It's amazing.

Anyway, Hype Williams' woozy conveyor belt of barely there vocals and distant reverbed drums finally sank in just before Christmas and I learned to accept the fear and love them anyway. I also really enjoy the track names, which sound like placeholder project titles on Logic that they never bothered changing ('Rescue Dawn', 'Rescue Dawn 3', 'Untitled'). It adds to the digital-DIY feel of their of pixellated home videos, which of course works in perfect ironical symmetry with the band name.

#3

Teengirl Fantasy, 'Make The Move'



Yes, I KNOW, I know you've heard them and that 'Cheaters' was Fact mag's top song of 2010, I know all this. But I haven't blogged for a while and I'm seeing them at White Light tomorrow. After being informed that I missed the best show evah at XOYO a few months ago, where they supported Oneohtrix Point Never, I am looking forward to catching up. Sadly Becoming Real has now been demoted to DJ support, when I was expecting a live set of some kind. I dunno, a lot of new artists are having trouble working out how to do show-and-tell with their music now that everyone is a bedroom producer. Do you just bring in loads of musicians and mates to trigger sequencers and hit floor toms? Er, apparently so. But it seems a bit pointless. I applaud James Blake for having found a way round it (i.e. playing piano and singing, with live drums and a bit of looping thrown in).

So Teengirl Fantasy: another 7am 'why am I still awake' album, so much so that it's actually called 7AM. This time I don't feel carsick, just blissed out and over-tired. To me, this kind of beautiful glitchy techy music has a sort of cleansing quality to it, as though all those modulated crackles and stutters are washing out my furred-up insides like ice cubes spiked with bleach, or sugar-free lemonade... am I over-emoting that? Probably. But that's one of the pleasures of dancing about architecture, don't you think?

Enjoy!

What Difference Does It Make?: We can save 6Music, but not our universities

A small warning. Some political comments follow.

In a Guardian blog yesterday, Dan Hancox, a writer who's groped the muddy underbelly of politics before, lambasted Britain's music industry elite for sitting on their hands throughout the student-led campaign against education cuts.

He pointed out that the campaign to save BBC 6Music, the digital radio station threatened with closure last year, was backed by dozens, and then hundreds of well-known figures in the industry - Lauren Laverne, Jarvis Cocker, David Bowie, Emily Eavis and more. A huge internet campaign and reams of column inches eventually gained so much momentum that The Man changed his mind and The People got their music back.

The People, in this case, being exactly the population segment you'd also expect to be miffed about enormous cuts to education and the arts: middle-class, indie-loving, media-savvy 18-40 year olds, in Dan's words. So why aren't they standing up for the big picture stuff, which is just as likely to affect them in the long-term as the closure of a radio station?

My guess is this. They are just about media-savvy and educated enough to know that the British government see its citizens as little more than bots, with two functions. Press up and down to pay tax. Press left and right to vote. Game over.

As one of the commenters pointed out, the situation is different in some regards. The 6Music campaign was small, manageable, essentially apolitical. Nearly everyone agreed that the Beeb needed to cut executive and celebrity pay cheques, potentially saving millions, and then nearly everyone was baffled when the corporation choose to bring the axe down on a low-cost, niche radio station that provides a unique service to a small but loyal group of listeners (one that could never be matched by the commercial sector).

So The People made their voice heard, backed by celebs and media-savvy types, and the BBC decided to listen to the licence fee-payers and retain 6Music.

Success! Power to the people! Or is it?

The BBC is essentially publicly funded, as very few people do not have a television. If you have a telly, you have to pay the licence fee. But it is a choice, a service. We are essentially consumers in this transaction (as a horrified Reith turns in his grave). In fact, you don't even have to pay the licence fee to listen to 6Music - you just have to live in the UK.

Education is also publicly funded, largely - a proportion of our tax goes towards it. That proportion may change, but the principle remains the same. But you are not a consumer of government; taxes are mandatory and the way they are spent is chosen on behalf of you as a citizen. You can't cherry pick your service; there is no free market of competing governments from which you select your favourite, red or blue. Democracy involves compromise, essentially. Your vote is counted (press left, press right) and then you can like or lump the results.

Christ. Does that sound right to you? Is that what democracy is all about, in the end? The sacred D-word that took us to Iraq, Afghanistan and back?

Look at the BBC. I know the Beeb is unique because of the way it is funded, I remember the old idents, but come on - it isn't a principality. The licence fee is not a tax, because it's bloody optional. Throw away your TV if you don't like it (I'm simplifying here, but bear with me). And yet, even as consumers, we were able to shout loudly and get things done the way we wanted them done - and save 6Music. We would have paid the licence fee anyway, most of us, yet the BBC listened.

Now compare that with the way the government operates. This government in particular is all about 'choice', it seems. But no one can choose not to pay their taxes. (Well, except Vodafone. And Topshop. And Barclays. And...)

So we're not buying a service here. We are deeply involved in the running of this service as citizens, not consumers. We shouldn't be fobbed off with a sneer or teased with promises, broken promises and backtracking. 'You pays your money, you takes your choice', they shrug. But that is exactly what true democracy should not be.

What happens when a few hundred media bods and a few thousand music fans run an online campaign to save a radio station, mostly via a petition and some celebs mouthing off?

And what happens when hundreds, then thousands of students, school pupils, teachers, parents and ordinary citizens march through the streets, occupy their classrooms, make banners, wave flags, stage flash mobs in high street stores and invade a political party's headquarters?

The BBC ends up looking a hundred times more democratic, open and progressive than the Liberal Democrats, or contemporary British politics, could ever hope to be.

Apparently Jarvis Cocker will be speaking at the demonstration in central London tomorrow, but somehow I don't think David Cameron will be paying much attention. If only someone could persuade Morrissey to lead the troops down Whitehall...

Coming live from a distant subwoofer: Local Natives at the Forum, 23rd Nov 2010

From London Student, December 2010

Even avoiding my usual two-for-one cocktail deal up the road, there is just no getting past the fact that the sound quality at one of London's few remaining mid-sized venues is utterly, unforgivably woeful. Think of the bands who have played here this year – Jόnsi, Wolf Parade, Liquid Liquid, Einstürzende Neubauten – and it seems bonkers that the Forum can get away with this half-arsed set-up; a feeble rig aimed straight into the ears of the front row and no further.

Local Natives' particular brand of finely balanced and tightly harmonised indie, like a cheerier Grizzly Bear or Fleet Foxes, is treated with asbestos mittens by the muddifying speakers. Standing in what should be a prime spot, 10 rows back and smack in the middle, the L.A. band's set comes off like listening to their precocious debut, Gorilla Manor, through a single subwoofer.

But! Local Natives are bigger than this sonic set-back. Their amazing too-tidy harmonies and fractured afro-popisms almost crave the shitty sound to make the thing sound like a live performance at all, so tight and polished is their set – but whereas a Grizzly Bear show leaves you open-mouthed at the fidelity to the record, Local Natives reanimate their songs with a welcome dash of vim and vigour.

The band seem genuinely chuffed to be playing their final show of 2010 here in London, where their following has grown exponentially since a tiny gig at Hoxton Bar & Kitchen in January. The unexpected disco dénouement of closer 'Sun Hands' ties up Local Natives' year just so, before they bow out gratefully to a satiated crowd.