The Calcination of Scout Niblett is a lonely and anguished sort of album, with most every track sounding like a very introverted woman going through some kind of public catharsis. “Duke of Anxiety” fits into the album nicely, but it’s also something of a reprieve, at least in that it’s more of a “pop” song than anything else on the record, and it seems like it’s coming from a different perspective than the other songs. The skeletal arrangement, bitter wit, and concrete details in the lyrics reminds me of early Liz Phair and her talent for sketching out characters in bleak vignettes that hint at larger narratives and deeper problems than what is being expressed in the song. Niblett’s frail, expressive voice is well-suited to giving voice to a desperate woman sinking into alcoholism, acting out, and considering some kind of escape from her circumstances. Every moment of this is heartbreaking, but there’s a few notes of optimism in here, even if it’s a bit misguided or delusional. That’s part of what makes it all feel so vivid and real.
You can read my review of The Calcination of Scout Niblett on Pitchfork today.
It’s nice to have Martina working with good people again. Her two solo albums weren’t bad, but are bland in a way that strongly suggests that she is the kind of artist who needs a good collaborator to yield interesting results. Her chemistry with Tricky is perhaps one of those once-in-a-lifetime things, but Massive Attack at least get what is so captivating about the sound of her voice, and what kind of rhythms and textures flatter her distinctively slurred purr. In “Babel”, she’s the cool, calm center of a composition largely composed of tense, fidgeting beats and metallic clanging. It mostly sounds like regret and dread, like some bad decisions have been made and we’re just bracing for the aftermath. She sounds like an observer, or someone who has stepped outside of themselves enough to gain perspective on a situation, but at the same time losing perspective on their place in the mess. Ahhh, romantic gloom and cryptic subtext…Martina Topley-Bird’s bread and butter!
Robert is a nervous, uncomfortable guy, and that could translate into seeming a bit creepy. That much is clear in the first few measures of “I Which I, Robert,” before the vocals come in. The song kinda lurches and skulks around with an odd grace. You can picture the guy’s body language as an ugly awkwardness so lived-in that it appears natural, almost beautiful in a way. The lyrics add dimension to the character, and makes him rather sympathetic, but so much of this is in the way they sketch out this person and his interior life with instrumental parts that work much like the gestural lines of a cartoonist.
I’m not sure if there are many pop songs that I would describe as rational, generous, and thrilling in equal measures, but that’s pretty much what is going on in “Thieves In The Night”, on on Hot Chip’s new album in general. They’ve always toyed with presenting warm emotions with a chilly affect, and though that sometimes results in merely lukewarm results, their gems have a wonderful balance and tension to them that is more nuanced and human than flat and robotic. “Thieves In The Night” is one of the band’s finest compositions to date, a steadily building opener that has the bright tonality and calculated precision of Kraftwerk, but the warm soul of a polite gentleman. It’s basically a song about the blurry line separating needs and wants, and the difficulty of going through life without finding satisfaction, or knowing what path may lead to real happiness. There’s nothing smug or condescending about the sentiment. Joe Goddard sings “happiness is what we all want / may it be that we don’t always want” on the chorus, and he couldn’t sound more genuine in wanting the best for us all. Coming back to that chorus after a surprisingly excellent guitar solo, the song seems to glow in pulsing waves, like some kind of beacon of hope and goodwill. It keeps moving forwards, as if to sweep the listener up and carry them along to some better, happier point in the future.
Well, these two sound awfully cheerful for a couple of people singing about abandoning their hopes and dreams! Still, as much as they’re expressing frustration with unrequited love and loneliness, it’s very apparent that they’re having a lot of fun with the drama of it all. Why else would this song sound like such an unironic thrill? On the face of it, Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor are shouting “That does it, I quit!”, but it’s obvious to anyone that they’re actually sweetly proclaiming “I’m ready! Love me! Love me!” The best moment in the song comes when Rebecca sings “I’ve been tired and hopeful for far too long now” on the bridge to the chorus, and despite the negativity in her words, she couldn’t sound more forthright and optimistic. This isn’t really about being sad and desperate, it’s about having a lot of love to give and getting impatient waiting for someone who deserves it all.
The Brewis brothers of Field Music excel at crafting neat, orderly songs that come across like character studies of mild-mannered, repressed men struggling to deal with stress and anxiety like some kind of mature adult. Some of their compositions deal with faint conflicts rendered in tight yet essentially breezy music, but the most affecting numbers, like “In The Mirror”, foreground nervous tensions without letting them entirely crack through the song’s highly polished surface. In this track, the steady trebly ringing of a piano is contrasted with rock instrumentation so mannered that it plays almost like classical music, like a bit of loose scrawl on a rigid grid. The lyrics are subtly gutting: “I wish I could change and make new rules, and love myself better,” delivered plaintively, but rather matter-of-fact. It’s like a struggle to contain earnest, potent emotion, and to attempt to rationalize every problem. Some music works for us because it allows us to indulge in thoughts and feelings we can’t really allow ourselves to freely express. This has a different function, either giving us insight into someone else, or serving as a mirror for our own repressed anxieties.
I wonder if anyone can listen to this song without the phantom sensation of smelling smoke or imagining men with big bushy mustaches. Malachai’s music is a skewed kind of retro, sounding just enough like lost records from the ’60s and ’70s while allowing for just enough room for modern touches that their aesthetic scare-quotes are apparent to the listener. This could be tedious if the band didn’t have any real songs, but cuts like “Snowflake” have big, burly déjà vu-inducing hooks that grind their way into your skull just as well as the “real” thing. The vocals are notable for their full commitment and slightly odd resonance: This guy sings most of the song with a macho growl that’s more peevish and perturbed than alpha-male commanding.
This remix doesn’t sound a great deal like the original recording by A Sunny Day In Glasgow, but it certainly sounds like A Sunny Day In Glasgow. This version feels more solid and focused than anything on the deliberately hazy and amorphous Ashes Grammar album, but the gently vertiginous swirl of essentially wordless soprano vocals is unmistakable. The arrangement here is lovely, mixing the cool sweetness of the female voices with an assertive forward momentum. It feels like being led along through colorful abstraction, like some kind of obvious sensible path through blissful psychedelic confusion.
A lot of Stephin Merritt’s songs are clever jokes. He owes a lot to musical theater, obviously, but his niche in contemporary culture is often more along the lines of being the audio equivalent of a gag comic in The New Yorker. “We Are Having A Hootenanny” is Merritt as his most absurd, an aggressively cheerful invitation to party where the only barrier to entry is taking a personality quiz. You can pick this apart in a few different ways — maybe this Merritt’s way of making fun of the internet, or it could be a more pointed barb at the way subcultures claim to be “inclusive” as long as everyone matches the same personality profile. It might just be a good excuse for the entire band to comically over-enunciate the letter z at the end of the word “quiz”.
There’s an intimate, conversational quality to this song that makes it seem like the singer is sitting right next to you, babbling on about his friends fucking in the next room and why that’s totally cool with him. You probably don’t know him very well, but he’s kinda oversharing, especially when he mentions that he’s been with that girl too. He’s almost certainly drunk. You don’t know whether you should laugh at his theories about sex, or if you should just humor him and nod meaningfully. It’s also unclear whether he wants to wallow in self-pity, reflect on his friends’ happiness, or if this is his way of trying to bone you. It’s a clever, vivid little moment rendered in song.
Suffer For Fashion / Mingusings / Forecast Fascist Future / Du Og Meg / Lysergic Bliss / Disconnect The Dots / Spike The Senses / And I’ve Seen A Bloody Shadow / Plastis Wafers / St. Exquisite’s Confessions / Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse / Teenage Unicorn Fisting / An Eluardian Instance / Oslo In The Summertime / Every Day Feels Like Sunday / A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger / She’s A Rejecter // For Our Elegant Caste / I Want You Back (with Solange)
First off, this is what you want to see, right?
Moving on.
As you can see in the setlist above, this brief tour is not a try-out period for new material as I had expected. There was one new song in the show, a groovy rock number provisionally titled “Teenage Unicorn Fisting,” but this was pretty much a catalog showcase featuring big hits along with a handful of deep cuts. The presentation was relatively stripped-down, and they cast aside the programmed percussion in favor of live drums for the entire set. In addition to Solange Knowles once again teaming up with the band for a cover song, Susan Sarandon popped up onstage during “St. Exquisite’s Confessions” to spank some pig-men. You know the old show biz saying: “If you can’t get a horse, get Susan Sarandon.”
I’ll be honest: I was vaguely dreading this show. I was aware that it was a totally irrational thing, but I’ve actually taken the band’s music out of rotation in recent months to get away from its emotional content, and I’ve had this strange paranoia about the next OM album not being as good as the last few. (This is very unlikely!) I lucked out with this show. Not only did the self-imposed OM hiatus make me even more excited to hear the songs in the moment, but the band were kind enough to not perform the handful of songs bogged down with too much personal baggage for me to handle at the moment. (It’s not as though I asked, but either way: Thanks!)
“Plastis Wafers” was the big revelation of the night. It was leaner, tighter, faster, funkier. This could be a matter of projection for me, but it seemed much sadder than usual. What had once sounded like pure desire now felt more like hopeless desperation. When Kevin sang “You are such a fucking star,” it was like admiration mixing into resentment. The song sounded like an elegy for something that was dead, or dying. “It’s so painful when they amputate the ego.” No kidding, man.
Laura Burhenn is the kind of soul singer who sounds best when she’s not belting it out, but instead keeping the contours of a great melody sleek and smooth. Her tone in “Numbers Don’t Lie” is sweet yet just a bit salty, and forthright enough to make it clear that her deferential attitude on the chorus comes with a lot of eye-rolling. The tune is a minor marvel, and the production by Richard Swift hits his usual balance of retro warmth and modern textures, which keeps the piece from sounding too much like an overly reverential facsimile of Dusty Springfield style blue-eyed soul.
A lot of minimalism and electronic music can sound sterile, utilitarian, and uninviting, as if recorded music was simply the most logical presentation method for the artist’s concepts. This isn’t the case for Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, who manages to invest his compositions with a loose, “live” sound despite the distinctly non-live nature of his craft. “Angel Echoes”, the first track on his latest (and best) album There Is Love In You, doesn’t try to convince you that you’re hearing something entirely organic, but there is a subtle tension in it that implies spontaneity. It could just be the specific sound of the percussion sample, some perceptible trace of humanity that offsets the more mechanical aspects of the piece. Either way, Hebden finds some soulful fragment, and builds up from there, always balancing the physical and the cerebral. It sounds like healthy music, if that makes sense.
I’m very glad that I kept giving Beach House’s Sub Pop debut Teen Dream a shot. I knew that the record was interesting and good from the start, but too many of the songs were blurring together and I just was not connecting with the material on an emotional level. I heard the potential for that, and keeping in mind that a similar thing happened for me with Bat For Lashes’ Two Suns last year, I kept the album in rotation long enough for many of the tracks to sink in.
It’s easy to get lost in Teen Dream, in good and bad senses of that word. The individual songs have dynamics, but the album as a whole does not. It lingers in the same emotional and musical place, and so unless you pick up on the internal shifts in mood, rhythm, melody, and texture, it’s easy to shrug off. It’s the kind of record you have to learn and live with to fully appreciate, but it’s not some hassle. The melodies are low-key but gorgeous, and the arrangements somehow pull off the trick of sounding simultaneous stark and lush. It’s a very seductive set of songs, and once you get pulled in, it’s almost too cozy to get out.
The music has a melancholy tone, but it’s not miserable or dark. There’s an emotional spectrum, but every feeling on it is vague and poorly defined. Complacent is not a word that is generally used with a positive connotation, but in the best possible way, that word suits the vibe of Teen Dream. It’s not apathetic or numb, but it conveys a fragile stability in the face of strong emotion and potentially negative circumstances. Michael Azerrad and Nitsuh Abebe have been throwing around the phrase “smart and serene” to describe a certain strain of indie music that has caught on in recent years, and this record is like the epitome of all that. It’s cool and restrained, and fiery emotions are kept in check, but it’s not dumb or repressed. It’s just the sound of complex feelings mitigated by maturity and responsibility.
“Back of the Card” spends a lot of its time in a zone mined by post-punk fans and Talking Heads disciples, but even after a decade’s worth of that sort of thing, it still comes out sounding fresh and fun. Some of that comes from some clever twists: A vague hint of country twang early on, and a sudden yet somehow kinda gradual meltdown into clattering, droning noise at the end. It hits a comfortable sweet spot, but it doesn’t settle for giving you exactly what you expect. Nicely done.
It’s not a huge surprise that when the Blood Brothers broke up, their two lead singers started new bands in which they never had to scream. After all, one must assume that non-stop hysterical shrieking is a young man’s game. What is kinda surprising is that Johnny Whitney and Jordan Billie have gone in rather similar directions with their respective bands, Jaguar Love and Past Lives. Whereas the former nudged his punk roots in a more glammy direction, Billie and Past Lives’ version of pop owes more to new wave and post-punk. “Don’t Let The Ashes Fill Your Eyes,” a highlight from their full-length debut, comes rather close to the sound of Wire circa Chairs Missing and 154, presenting catchy hooks with a cold tonality and harsh austerity. They really pull it off. It’s all very hummable yet totally severe, with every chord change and word spat out by Billie sleek and sharp enough to draw blood. The real trick, though, is how when they allow a bit of warmth in the form of “sha la la la la” backing vocals, the subtle shift in temperature is just enough to make you realize how frigid the rest of it really is.
I listened to Owen Pallett’s new album Heartland at least five times through before ever coming across the phrase “ultra-violent farmer.” I appreciate Pallett’s sci-fi meta-fiction conceit, but at least early on, I find it difficult to pay much attention to his lyrical games when his arrangements are so dazzling on a purely musical level. “Midnight Directives” is an agile, flamboyant tune that builds from a hum to a symphonic sweep without losing an essential lightness. Pallett is working with a broad palette, but he’s a deliberate, decisive arranger, and he employs sound in a gestural manner that reminds me of the way great cartoonists imply a lot of information in simple, well-placed lines. Even without the high concept, this is incredibly ambitious pop music that deftly avoids the typical traps of symphonic indie music.
I realize that there is a lot of dark wit in Los Campesinos!’ music, but I’m not sure if the things I find amusing about them are always the things they intend to be funny. They’re a knowing self-parody, pushing the envelope of overly precious, vainly articulate youthful melodrama in a way similar to emo titans Fall Out Boy and Say Anything, but there’s something about them that seems a lot more…sincere? Is that it? Whatever it is that makes their anger seem more real, that is what makes them kinda unintentionally hilarious but also very relatable. The words spill out, but nothing sounds much like what you’d actually say out loud, and either more like l’esprit de escalier stuff that you think after you’ve had your little confrontation, or the sort of shit you’d spew out on a friends-locked Livejournal entry or a bitter email that you should probably keep saved in the draft folder. “Romance Is Boring,” by far the best Los Campesinos! song I’ve ever heard, is essentially a mid-90s indie rock song in the vein of Archers of Loaf remade with 00s indie aesthetics, i.e. over-stuffed meters and waaaaay too many people playing and singing at once. That’s not a problem, though, because part of what makes this song so appealing is hearing a whole crowd of Welsh kids scream at each other for wanting to fuck each other.
Could this be the greatest tough love song of all time? Even if you’re not exactly the type of smug, lazy person Laetita Sadier is railing against, each lyric stings because on some level you probably feel like maybe you are being implicated, and that you are too bitter, cynical, and apathetic. Part of what makes this work so well is that Sadier is so calm and measured as she sings these stern words, but there’s an obvious tone of disappointment in her voice, like a disapproving parent or authority figure. She makes you feel bad for letting her down, and for not living up to your potential. This is not a dismissive song, it’s not a matter of “Ugh, kids today.” It’s about wanting people to be better, and not giving in to the worst of humanity. She makes it clear that it’s not easy to “apply your leading potential and be useful to this planet,” but it’s worth the effort. After all, as she sings, “the world would give you anything as long as you will want to.”
Dick Valentine has mentioned in a few recent interviews that his method for writing the lyrics for the Kill album was to build a stockpile of lines and then later on work them into songs. This is a fairly standard approach for lyric writing, but the result here is like a musical equivalent of a Dick Valentine Twitter feed. He’s always churning out bitter one-liners and grotesque absurdity, but songs like “One Sick Puppy” feel violent, overloaded and disconnected, a free-associative stream of cynical jokes and pithy disgust set to a slashing rhythm. This could be the band at their darkest, dialing down narrative and empathy, and diving deep into disappointment, aggression, and hopelessness with a maniacal grin.
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