Cults: Daydream pop with a heart of darkness

Cuter than you.

First published in Loud And Quiet

Jim Jones had a band named after him and so did Charles Manson. The exploits of Anton Newcombe and Brian Warner respectively have tended towards the eccentric aesthetic of both those terrifying cult leaders, if not to the same grisly extent. So you'd expect Cults, the Californian two-piece of Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin, to be ploughing a similarly deranged furrow of dark music for dark people.

Erm, wrong. One listen to 'Go Outside', the song that brought Cults to the attention of Gorilla vs Bear and Pitchfork this time last year, and you'll know that West Coast sunshine is embedded in the bones of this couple, who met while studying film in New York. Xylophones sparkle, a girlish voice cries out for you to get up and live your life. Except – just who is that grainy voice in the background, warning you that living is treacherous? Oh yeah, it's Jim Jones.

“We just casually chucked it on the front of 'Go Outside' one day, and then we ended up writing the lyrics. He says death is not a fearful thing, it's living that's treacherous, and sometimes everyone feels that way,” they explain.

Cults are in London playing one of their first UK shows. In the back room at The Lexington, Madeline and Brian (real name Ryan) are brimming over with the eloquence of young Californians who know their Antonioni from their elbow. Though Cults got together little more than a year ago, they're preparing for a big U.S. tour before the debut album comes out on In The Name Of in May. Has their rapid ascent been damaging to the band's evolution?

“It's hard adjusting to,” says Madeline. “For a year of playing shows we're confident enough,” adds Brian. “It's just better stepping up, better to take risks.”

For a while they tried to avoid the internet hype-mill with a hard-to-Google name and no MySpace page, but their reticence only fed the insatiable hunger of the indie blogosphere, perversely creating even more buzz around a band who have released just three songs. “When all that happened we had a bunch of songs we could have put out,” explains Brian. “But we realised instead of letting it eat itself alive, we should just take a break, become a band, play shows and focus on touring.”

Unsure of what Cults was even going to be, they ignored the press and focused on putting a band together, which now includes Madeline's brother (lying on the sofa next to us, trying to get some shut-eye) as well as old friends and even Madeline's mum as manager. “We were film school students, not musicians, so we think about our band as more of an art project. When we write songs we're thinking more cinematically about them than like, y'know, jamming them out,” says Brian. “And we try to translate that visually too rather than just being the dudes in the band that show up in the flannels and rock out,” he laughs, saying that they are so steeped in film they're too afraid to make a video.

Last year a glossy promo for 'Go Outside', featuring James Franco's brother and Julia Roberts' niece, popped up on MTV as part of a creative project run by the music channel. Verdict? “Off the record?” asks Brian. “It's exactly what we expected it would be,” Madeline says. For an MTV production with celebrities in it, you mean? “Exactly!”

But treating Cults as a simple artistic outlet gives the songs a breezy, vivacious quality that more single-minded musicians might struggle to create. Light and dark elements freely interweave as Madeline sings about wanting to live life, not “stay inside and sleep the light away.” 'Go Outside' is about “battling against yourself, being lazy, being a procrastinator, and the fear of growing up,” says Brian. “Madeline and I would be graduating from college now – that's the mindset we were in while making the record, like, if this doesn't work out we're going back to school!”

You could always join a cult, of course. What'll it be? “I guess I'd be a Scientologist, 'cos that'd mean I had a lot of money,” laughs Madeline. Brian opts for Heaven's Gate, “just 'cos it's a San Diego cult. My friend was neighbours with them.”

“And they ate all the food that was my favourite,” Madeline offers. “They had like, vanilla pudding, Doritos...” So you'd join on the basis of the menu? “Yeah!”

“I wouldn't wanna be in any cult that actually murdered someone,” Brian adds. “They were just kinda peaceful freaks that went over the edge.” They both laugh, long black hair falling into their eyes.

Peanut butter pop: Nodzzz live in Dalston

Nodzzz at The Victoria, Dalston

12th March

First published in Loud and Quiet

“I don't wanna! Smoke marijuana! I just wanna get high....on another drug!” American twee may be louder than British twee, it may have retro guitars in Formica colours and crashy, clashy, garage stylings, but as Forrest Gump might've said, twee is as twee does.
And talking of Gump, Nodzzz singer and guitarist Anthony Atlas has really committed to those high-waisted trousers, paired splendidly with check shirt and dorky specs. They say he was voted 'Most Likely to Succeed' in his 1968 high school yearbook. Hot!

More to the point, Nodzzz have also committed to that niche brand of sub-two-minute lo-fi-pop-ism plied by bands like Grass Widow and tour buddies The Mantles (who are “delirious” with jet lag but excellent tonight), with a handful of songs about girls, smoking, karaoke and their hometown San Francisco.

Other discernible influences come from the early years of punk rather than '60s garage rock – the squareness of Jonathan Richman meets the playing-dumb of Ramones, Buzzcocks or Television Personalities – with lightweight, off-key solos and melodies as weak as diluted orange squash. How much of this punk-pop finger food you can stomach will depend on your taste for bite-size treats and quirky flavours. See also: Reese's Pieces.

The return of PJ Harvey: Angel of Death

PJ Harvey at the Troxy
27 February 2011

First published in Loud and Quiet

An Edwardian angel of death glides onto the Troxy stage, feather headdress bobbing, widow’s weeds swishing, leather tightly binding a bird-like chest. PJ Harvey's captive audience whips itself into a frenzy of earnest fandom at odds with the singer's sombre exterior. “Polly, you look wonderful!” they burst out, ejaculations met with disapproving shushes from embarrassed grown-ups.

And grown-up is the tone of the evening. Harvey tackles the none-more-serious topics of war and nationhood on her acclaimed new record, Let England Shake, which makes up the bulk of tonight's set. Her new higher register marries well with the thorny subject matter as she wavers between control and hysteria like a rock & roll Hecuba, twisted and vulnerable.

But you'd think wearing half a bird of prey as a hat while strumming an autoharp in an East End bingo hall would suggest a playful sense of theatricality, perhaps? Nope, we get barely a word. Harvey's static, almost functional performance and the makeshift atmosphere of the Troxy (Sunday afternoon's roast dinner is wafting round) weaken the emotional punch, with the exception of 'England', a haunting hymn to a nation that never really existed.

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...