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skykicking
skykicking - february
Wednesday 27
Tweet - Oops Oh My Of course the music
on "Oops Oh My" is amazing - is Timbaland, you dig
- with its heatstroke shuffle, its eerie unidentifiable sounds
and disembodied moans, its general blood-flushed pallor
that has almost disappeared from the guy's oeuvre since Nicole's
similarly awesome "Make It Hot". But there are two
things that hit me faster, harder. For one, there's Tweet, the
most sultry, rich-voiced chart R&B diva in ages. "Oops!
There goes my shirt up over my head! Oh my!", she exclaims
with a generous sense of decorum, affecting a gentle surprise
as she watches her hands explore her body in the mirror (surely
this is the sexiest song and narrative around right now!?).
Tweet's vocals, lazy and delightfully langourous, come on like
a trashy take on Angie Stone, filtering the latter's soulful
"feeling" through a pop-veneer that confers a sort
of cheap and nasty glamour, as if she were a drag queen's take
on the soul-diva's "authenticity".
A tribute to self-pleasure
was perhaps the inevitable result of female-fronted R&B's
look-but-don't-touch policy; once you've bought the house you
live in, the shoes you're wearing and the car you're driving,
the next step in becoming an independent woman is procuring your
own sexual satisfaction. But how do you suggest self-sufficiency
without implying desperation and inadequacy? Can Tweet keep the
two separate? As her dress drops to the floor, does she even
consider the implications of her actions? How do you melt the
ice maiden without leaving just a puddle on the floor? Tweet's
only option is to put off thoughts of the future ("swallow
my pride, let it ride", she says), and even her retelling
of the sequence of events reads like neutral observations - she
hasn't even begun to judge herself. As with most of the best
pop, it's all a bit in the heat of the moment, and its that suspension
of the present, the total inhabitance of here and now, not to
mention the absolute certainty that masturbation-pop is so not
the next big thing, that makes this so damn irresistible.
(the second thing that hits
me is how damn cool it is when Missy murmurs, "I was feeling
so good I had to touch myself!")
eleven-forty-four
pm
Saturday 23
You know a movement's serious
when it gets its own novelty hits, and with Middlerow's "Right
Proper Charlie" it looks like it's the turn of ska-garage
to become a bona fide honest to goodness style of its own. This
is of course quite truthfully the last micro-genre I expected
to take off; I had hitherto assumed it was merely a mad idea
in the head of Mike Skinner aka The Streets (eg. "Let's
Push Things Forward"). Which makes "Right Proper Charlie"
an eerie sort of joke, sounding like a mish-mash of a hundred
cliches that have yet to be invented. It's also not very good,
really, but under the circumstances this minor issue can and
will be glossed over.
"BRUV! Are you SURE, Bruv?"
Someone yells, and then a choir of crooners, um, croon "here
he comes, he's a right proper charlie, flappin' his gums, he's
a right proper charlie, we all know one, he's a right proper
charlie, you'll always have fun with a right proper charlie!"
And then, over an ostentatiously mournful horn arrangement, a
thoroughly silly bassline and brisk-but-understated beats you
get what sounds like a karaoke version of The Streets covering
Blur's "Charmless Man", with all of the dancehall -
the wrong dancehall, mind - references you'd expect. Apparently
this has come from the Ed Case soundsystem, which explains the
presence of Sweetie Irie and the assortment of crazy sounds,
but I can't fathom why they've seen fit to release what looks
set to be the most obvious (but similarly prophetic?) joke-record
the scene's had since "I Don't Smoke The Reefa".
Still, it's fantastic to hear
records like these because you really get a sense of how open-ended
the garage scene (with the emphasis on scene) is. It's
always tempting to locate the genre's innovations within the
hands of a select few auteurs - in my case, Horsepower Productions
and The Streets most often - but as with Bump & Flex, Middlerow
remind me that a seachange is exactly that: a tidal movement
with an enormous group force behind it. "Right Proper Charlie"
isn't lifechanging by any stretch of the imagination (please
listen to The Streets before you pass any judgement on the feasibility
of this genre) but it's funny and fresh-sounding, and its very
anonymity bodes well for the future.
one-fifteen
pm
Tuesday 19
Currently listening to
Jorg Burger's Burger Industries compilation, which
collates his released work from '91 to '93. I'm really enjoying
it, but not quite as much as Burger's recent work as The
Modernist for Kompakt. Unsurprisingly, this stuff is very different.
Faster, harsher and even more relentlessly machinic than "Abi
'81" on Total 3, Burger's early acid techno shares
the same sonic make-up as his subsequent material, but retains
a distinct feel. Perhaps its the Teutonic quotient: all of Burger's
work feels Teutonic (even his gentle ambient pieces) but there's
something much more uncompromising about this early stuff, which
finds a particularly rigid (though thankfully not too grim or
amelodic) midpoint between Hardfloor-style acid trance and Mills-style
minimalist techno... lots of squealing, percolating acid riffs
over brisk rhythms and, um, little else.
What I find interesting I guess
is how much light it sheds on the divide between Europe and America
in terms of what was done with acid house, and how it was interpreted
by either side. When I think of my favourite American post-acid
music - all the second wave Chicago house on Cajual and Radikal
Fear and of course Green Velvet all by himself - it's obvious
that there was a real devotion there to house's pleasure-principle
aesthetic. The pleasure-principle is barely audible in acid house
itself, which always sounded to me like house with all the pleasure
stripped out of it, leaving only that nervous, wired buzz, a
sort of ghostlike memory of the sensation of pleasure
that is no longer present in a tangible form.
The trick of the Chicago second
wave house, then, was to recognise how pleasure ghosted
acid house, and to strengthen its aura until it seemed to rather
illuminate the mindless compulsion. If initially house seemed
to veer sharply from the pleasure-centric nature of the first
wave into acid's dirgelike self-flagellation with barely a pause
for breath, then second wave Chicago house dedicates itself to
constantly teetering on the edge, pinpointing the moment where
the overload of stimulation causes a system malfunction. Even
listen to someone like Green Velvet, whose work is probably the
most rigid and self-flagellating of all second wave house, and
you can hear a real sexiness there. "The Stalker" in
particular has the most lascivious snare/hi-hat pattern ever,
a deleriously drawn-out stop-start shuffle like a deliberately
restrained sexul caress whose constant delay of culmination is
acutely painful. I like too how Curtis reflects that in his stories:
in "The Stalker" his obsession causes him to declare
"I'm losing my mind" with an almost erotic sigh, and
he talks about buying daisies and staining them with his blood
to make them look like roses. You can imagine the object of his
affection being horrified and disgusted, but at the same time
feeling inevitably turned on by it all.
Compare/contrast with the frenzy
of Burger Industries, where any loss of control is through
an asexual, thoroughly German devotion to velocity and sonic
intensity. There's an architectural grace to Burger's work even
at its most full-on, like a perfectly formed and well-oiled machine
manufacturing goods at a breakneck speed (the title's clearly
no coincidence, and nor is the name of the record label, Structure).
As with his later work as The Modernist, Burger loves layering
simple rhythms and Moroder-like grooves to create impossibly
thick sounding tracks beset with internal friction (Andy
Kellman describes The Modernist's sound as "prickly",
which is absolutely spot on) and the effect is that of a hundred
machines labouring in a strange harmony (pumping out weapons
probably).
If second wave Chicago house
highlights the role of pleasure within acid house, Teutonic acid
techno does away with it almost entirely. There's little of the
self-doubt present in acid house (that whole "oh my god
I have become a sex/drugs machine and that is going to far!"
sensation), and the becoming-machine drive is instead actively
pursued. If there's a self-flagellation at work here, it is purely
for self-improvement. The pain is not the focus, but the necessary
by-product of a need to tone oneself, to strip away any excess
or unused flesh and bodyfat. The left over ambiguity is not a
desire to turn around and retreat back into humanity, but more
a profound uncertainty. "If I am now a machine, what feeling
will I (or should I) have? Do I have any at all?" What's
nice though is that this material is early enough that the becoming-machine
aesthetic has yet to become orthodoxy. Occasionally Burger will
throw in a hip hop breakbeat or moments of warm and radiant ambience,
which gives the compulsion surrounding it a pleasingly unconscious
feel, as if its representative of impulses that are yet to be
fully articulated.
It is of course easy to succumb
to these sorts of dualistic divisions between Chicago and Germany,
between sex and the machine. Too easy perhaps, which is why though
I'm really enjoying Burger Industries I find "Abi
'81" more enticing. While its rippling groove and, yes,
prickly synth and percussion arrangement is consistent
with the music on Burger Industries, there's a certain
languidness to it that reinfuses the sexuality orginally purged
from the mix. Subtle, sexy and somehow deeply untrustworthy,
the poise of "Abi '81" reminds me of the female android
in "Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?", existing
in the exact point where robotocism and desire converge, where
the rigid tick of electrical process transforms into the warm
pulse of sensation and desire. Another analogy? If Burger
Industries at times sounds like how scrubbing yourself with
steel wool might feel, "Abi '81" is like having your
erogenous zones stroked with nettles.
And maybe this is part (only
part) of what makes the whole micro-house project so appealing:
if so much great dance music has documented the descent from
erotocism into roboticism, micro-house might be the first music
which chronicles the opposite progression, with obedient labour-droids
waking up one day and suddenly discovering that they have sex
drives. Burger as The Modernist understands the same essential
truth as Green Velvet does: there is a very fine line between
pleasure and pain.
eleven-forty-five
pm
Friday 15
<blatant self-promotion>So,
like, obviously the best thing about the Village Voice
Pazz
& Jop Poll '01 is that a paraphrase from one of my
comments ended up as the title for a commentary
section.</blatant self-promotion>
eleven-oh-four
pm
Saturday 09
Last night on a whim I pulled
out Heather Nova's Glow Stars album from '93, and
thought of the ILM thread What's
so wrong with a girl and her guitar? My answer to that question,
now as then, is that while there's nothing at all wrong with
a girl and her guitar (or her piano, for that matter) it seems
a shame that the Lilith Fair aesthetic - preferencing song over
sound, lyrics over performance, purity of voice over charisma,
live chops over studio manipulation - is so pervasive among female
singer-songwriters, such that "female singer-songwriter"
and "girl and her guitar" are not only largely synonymous,
but mean exactly what they say and no more (no "female singer-songwriter-studio-wizard",
no "girl and her guitar and her samples and her hot rhythm
section").
I've even heard the argument
put forth that women are suited to songwriting where men
are suited to soundsculpting. It's such a nineties argument;
in the eighties - pre the Lilith singer-songwriter explosion
- artists like The Raincoats, Kate Bush, Lydia Lunch and Jane
Siberry were totally up there with the guys as far as sonics
go, and the subsequent reduction of musical horizons for female
artists has a strong revisionist air to it in my opinion. It
depicts an unbroken (and unproblematic) passing of the baton
from Joni Mitchell to Tracy Chapman, and from her to each participant
in the Lilith explosion (excluding, of course, Missy), steadfastly
ignoring anything that might spoil the picture. There are, of
course, females doing amazing things sonically right now. Tellingly
however, very few of them are considered "singer-songwriters".
I've got no problems with the
singer-songwriter style - Joni Mitchell was one of my first musical
loves - but I wonder why it's so rare to find it reunited with
an appreciation of sound, unless in some sort of overly-obvious
tribute to previous female sonic trendsetters. Which is why I've
decided that I really love Glow Stars, an album that seems
to me to perfectly stradle the enforced Platonic divide between
songs and sounds.On the one hand, Heather's penchant
for balladry and personal lyrics, not to mention her impossibly
pure vocals, represents the singer-songwriter tradition distilled.
On the other hand, the album avoids easy categorisation by reaching
out to a sorely neglected but theoretically obvious musical source:
dreampop.
For while Heather's songs are
effortlessly melodic, frequently their arrangements go out of
their way to avoid melody, choosing instead gorgeously unresolved
soundscapes: eerie guitar drones, hushed organs, gentle ambient
percussion and Heather's own soaring harmonies. Listen to the
otherworldly "Frontier", with its descending veils
of A.R.Kane sugardust, or the dazed summerpop of "Second
Skin" (very Cocteau Twins circa Heaven or Las Vegas?),
or the One Dove-like clicking percussion and keening vocals of
"Spirit In You", or the designed-for-David-Lynch-films
blasted guitar noise of "Shell", which could almost
be Labradford gone pop. With its spiderwebs of sound and gentle
plateaus of noise coating "proper" songs, Glow Stars
reminds me of The Kitchens of Distinction or The Verve's first
album, gently negotiating that space between writing songs to
sing and music to float inside.
Like the front cover picture
depicting floating jellyfish, Glow Stars largely resembles
a ghostly waterworld of constant ebb and flow. The jellyfish
are Nova's songs: discrete and fully-realised, but somewhat at
the mercy of the aqueous sonics they're immersed in. I can't
help but think of S. Reynolds and Joy Press's discussions in
The Sex Revolts about "flux", there largely
in regards to Mary Margeret O'Hara. But where O'Hara's flux inserts
itself in the performance of the lyrics with her schizophrenic
renditions of otherwise sensible narratives, on Glow Stars
the willfully unresolved element is not the performance of the
lyrics (which is usually straightforward) but the performance
of the music.
Important to note (and this
is what distinguishes Heather from, say, Lush) is that the music
is not built out of flux, but rather destabilised by it. Heather's
vocals are clear, close-up and intimate, dominating the music,
and her tunes are the first thing that hit you. This is in marked
contrast to the washed-out vocals and almost accidental melodies
of most dream-pop, and it confirms that, whatever else it is,
Glow Stars is first and formost a collection of songs.
In the hand of a more mercenary producer they would become ringing,
unblemished guitar-pop; instead they live a precarious, fragile
double-life that is all the more precious for its delicacy. Listening,
I get the feeling that these songs, if pushed either way (be
it towards haze or clarity) would lose their appeal (ironically,
Glowstars is in truth not a proper album but an album-length
collection of demos).
If any further proof is needed,
listen to Heather's subsequent albums. The follow-up Oyster
contained better songs than Glowstars: moments
like "Heal", "Truth & Bone", "Doubled
Up" and "Walking Higher" were sharper, crisper
and more affecting than her previous work. It also contains the
best thing she ever did in "Island", a mini-epic that
seamlessly combined the linear perfection of the ballad with
the crashing, wracked incoherence of Throwing Muses. From its
mournful quiet-dirge beginnings and too-collected deadpan vocal
delivery it spirals into an awesome release, with Heather
sounding caught between Hersh and O'Hara. "You know that
dream where your feet won't mo-move?" she wails, paraphrasing
O'Hara's "Body In Trouble" ("ya wanna c-come but
ya b-body won't let you") and then culminating with a hissed
conflation, "a kiss/a kick/a kiss/a kick/a kiss kiss kick",
that is as perfect an evocation of "flux" as you'll
find.
But Oyster, with its
general swing between a harder rock sound (very timely in '95)
and sparse ballads, had little of Glow Stars' subtle magic
and blurry disorientation. It's a more enjoyable, more friendly
record undoubtedly - in some ways I like it better than its predeccesor
- but it can't help but seem like a regrettable triumph of the
song, and a step away from what initially made Heather
sound so unique. The rot, as such, had clearly set in: Heather's
next album Siren (what an inappropriate title!) was as
straightforward and unproblematic a reproduction of the Lilith
aesthetic as you could hope to find, except that it's, well,
more melodic - the Lilith Belinda Carlisle, perhaps.
It's still a nice record: on
a good day the perfect chime of the guitars and the huge choruses
sound charming; at other times though it just seems too eager
to please, like a dog that just sits there grinning at you and
waiting for you to notice it. The grin's a bit forced too - many
of the tracks sound "jolly" but in a rather typical
way (ie. "up" pop songs), and you'll certainly find
nothing as touchingly whimsical as "Glow Stars", with
its disorienting shifts between slightly silly ukulele strum
and disembodied atmospherics. Only the closing track "Not
Only Human" recalls the fluid sonics of Heather's first
album, and even then only as a dim, passing shadow. I haven't
checked out the new album South yet; I'm not excited by
the fact that the first single was cowritten with Bernard Butler.
Maybe Heather's story reflects
the Lilith story, charting the narrowing of sonic possibilities
throughout the nineties. But narrow doesn't equal shut, and if
more artists started taking their cues from records like Glow
Stars, maybe we could start working out ways to make "girl
and her guitar" a bit less of a dirty word.
eleven-ten-pm
Tuesday 05
So perhaps I posted my
thoughts on The Dismemberment Plan a day or two too soon,
because as much as I really liked Change then, I really
really really like it now - it and Kylie would make a revised
personal top ten for last year, Change in particular is
up there with anything else from 2001. So my "issues"
with the album have faded somewhat - a lot of what I thought
it came close to achieving I now think it does achieve, or comes
so close to achieving that it hardly matters, and all
the other stuff the album does (eg. the rock stuff) is so equally
good that approaching the album with certain demands seems particularly
useless. Still, my ideas from the last post exist independently
of my opinion of the album, and since they only seem about half-explained
(as Josh correctly implies) I may as well expand upon them.
So, some additional thoughts:
Josh
says he doesn't think Remain in Light grooves as much
as I suggest it does. At first I was going to e-mail him and
tell him he was a mentalist, but then I listened to the album
again and... well, no, Josh is still a mentalist as the
whole thing grooves like a mofo, but the misunderstanding almost
certainly arises from the fact that when I talk about groove
my meaning is a bit ambiguous. I tend to use the word in two
ways: in the ordinary sense, as the rhythmic pull/swing of a
record ie. the groove in a house track; and, in some more vague
sense, as an approach to making music that may not necessarily
express itself in the overriding presence of grooves in the first
sense.
With this second, more expansive
use of the term I guess I'm referring to anything that seems
to disrupt the songfulness of a song in a physically felt and
cyclical manner. "Groove" as the third choice between
narrative and noise, connoting neither stately progression nor
absolute freefall, but rather a sort of restless directionless.
In dance music the absence of focus on the song makes grooves
unproblematic, which is why the word can be so used so easily,
so neutrally (House in particular refines this restless directionless
down to a simple suspended moment; it could be the embodiment
or the apotheosis of groove, I guess). In rock however there
is usually a tension between groove and rock's tendency towards
progression (with their sudden linear switches in time signatures
and rhythms, prog rock and emo are fairly extreme exampes of
this "progressive" urge).
And here is where I have to
be careful, because obviously some sortsof grooves actually
tend to be accomodating towards rock as an idea. The Stooges,
for example, whose grooves are focused in the overpowering riffs.
But riffs, no matter how brutal, always suggest some sort of
forward motion to me, of being slammed forward in bursts, fits
and gasps. The groove I'm talking about avoids this sort of motion,
and perhaps that's often why rock music in which this sort of
groove appears sounds like it's had its middle punched out of
it (even literally, in terms of a relative lack of mid-frequency
sounds). As such it always strikes me as being oxymoron-rock,
rock that is in and of itself a critique of rock. Rock that debilitates
its own original function just as Remain In Light and
Change do for punk and post-hardcore specifically.
And maybe this is why the grooves
I'm talking about almost necessitate the decentering of
the guitar, because the guitar as a focal point always seems
to suggest travel, even of the "spacing out" kind.
Groove on the other hand is like jumping between stills
of the same image, arriving at the same place despite movement
from then to now. It's about each element of the music seeking
to constantly recreate itself so as to frustrate the search for
a narrative. Being anti-narrative, "groove" also democratises,
resisting the urge to give one instrument an organising role:
on Remain In Light, and on parts of Change, the
rhythms, the bass, the guitar, the keyboards, the vocals (urgent
and key: both David and Travis have a tendency to slip into falsetto,
or something near it, their high, "weak" vocals the
opposite of "commanding") etc. all seem to work together
in a loosely interdependent manner, with no single aspect more
important than the other. Josh is correct in suggesting that
it's all about song structure, or to be specific, about how the
song attempts to achieve unity.
Rock, with its emphasis on
unified mid-frequency noise, envisions a surge; Groove-based
music, with its wildly divergent interdependent parts, is more
of a structure, a house you can step inside and wander about
in. The drumming on Remain In Light and on Change (particularly
The Face Of The Earth and Ellen & Ben) emphasises
this: the way the drum hits fall all around your ears, dazzling
them with a strange sharpness arising from the lack of filled-in
spaces around them, where the guitar noise should be. (It was
the drumming here that originally inspired me to run with the
whole The Dismemberment Plan/Talking Heads comparison after initially
dismissing it as groundless)
And so with Remain in Light
when I talk about "groove" I'm as much referring
to the foregrounding of the repetitive bass and rhythm sections
(even when they're "monogroove"; perhaps especially
when they're monogroove), the sudden snatches of shrieking guitar
in Seen And Not Seen, the hypnotic interweaving vocals
on The Great Curve, the graceful shimmer of the keyboards
on Once In A Lifetime, the gorgeously fragile percussion
of Listening Wind as I am to its "grooves" in
the ordinary sense of the word. Crucially though, the guitar,
the rock elements, are decentered but not banished, which
allows this music to still be rock, albeit rock that is constantly
eating itself (hence the idea of rock that is consumed
by grooves). It creates a tension that might be lost if the rock
was totally excised. I tend to enjoy Remain in Light more
than My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, perhaps for this reason.
... Does this explain the idea
better? Or am I doomed to incomprehensibility?
eleven-thirty-eight
pm
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