the decade dance

i've been thinking more about big beat.

i reviewed the debut album, zeppelin 3 (har har) by philly band/dj project pink skull, using an extended comparison to the chemical brothers' dig your own hole as a central throughline - as inspired and informed by [head skull bro] julian s prcss' reference to it in this article. here are some excerpts [yes! self-quotes!]:

"Zeppelin 3 doesn't sound much like the vast majority of electronic music produced this decade, with a rough-edged, acid-washed sensibility that evinces little of electro-house's garish, '80s-refracting gleam or minimal's streamlined polish. . . . most of the album consists of highly abstract, restively mutating groove-based tracks that land somewhere in between breakbeat and acid house, overlaid with squelching psychedelic synths, percussion breakdowns, snatches of saxophone, and tortured, unrecognizable vocal fragments, and embellished with a dizzying array of effects. In other words, it's not far off from the bulk of Dig Your Own Hole..."

the comparison actually took me by surprise - this album definitely sounds more like classic chembros than anything i've heard in ages (even the chems own recent work), but the connection didn't even occur to me at first, even though i've been semi-actively searching for signs of a big beat resurgence. part of that's because i've been struggling somewhat to really enjoy pink skull - i still like them more in theory than in practice, mostly because although they fare pretty well with chemicalesque eclecticism, psychedelicity, bombast (to some extent), weirdness, and general beat science, they never really nail the pop part of the equation. [it helped somewhat when i realized that "gonzo's cointreau," which you can stream or download here, is this album's "block rockin' beats," if it has one. (it doesn't.)]

which means it doesn't particularly sound like big beat more generally - the chemical brothers, and those first two albums specifically, may have set the template for the style, but a lot of their followers (most notably fatboy slim, the genre's most visible practitioner) took things in a somewhat different direction - more overtly poppy, more streamlined, and, inevitably, more predictable (which isn't necessarily a bad thing - just, more formalized, less experimental.)

i realize that i haven't been very precise about what i mean by big beat - what exactly a resurgence would sound like. the wikipedia description is pretty accurate, i think, and i'd argue that justice, simian mobile disco, and others have been utilizing several of the elements mentioned there, though certainly not all.

this also makes me think about how truly different dance/electronica in the 2000s has been from its most prominent strains in the '90s. m. matos pointed out recently [in his review of the effortlessly enjoyable rex the dog album, which is tremendously bombastic in its fashion, which i'll probably write up tomorrow] how relatively static and unchanging things have been lately:

"Four years would seem like a lot longer ago in dance-music terms than it sounds here. It's been that kind of decade: especially compared to the '90s, the best dance records of 2008 don't sound extremely different than those of 2004, or 2000."

this has meant, somewhat strangely, a paucity of distinct subgenres: as big beat, trip-hop, downtempo, drum'n'bass, and the cut'n'paste/sampling/turntablism based style of dj shadow and the ninja tune stable (um, instrumental hip-hop?) effectively ceased to be significant forces in the broader musical discourse (or, as they lost their luster and we stopped paying much attention to them), we've been left with a far-more-thorny-to-disentangle/subcategorize array of styles (tech-house, digital disco, microhouse, electro-house, the omnipresent, near-meaningless "minimal") that share a pronounced and relatively direct connection to house, electronic disco, and synth-pop. these styles, in turn - effectively direct off-shoots of disco - were prominent in the '80s but were relatively out of favor in the '90s, when they informed merely a portion of the varied electronica spectrum, namely the slick, buffed trance and house music which fueled and dominated the rave scene and mainstream club culture (and are still evidently going strong), and the filter-house of the french touch cohort, which effectively formed the bridge to the new millennium, specifically in the form of daft punk (even as the related but more omnivorous sound of artists like basement jaxx fell somewhat by the wayside.)

of course, all of this decade-based generalizing is to some extent simplified and suspect, but it does seem to work surprisingly well. a lot of things do seem to change around the ends and beginnings of decades: like '77-79 before it, the turn of the '90s was a major turning point for music - specifically '88 (in the UK) and '91 (in the US), for different reasons, but also the early-to-mid '90s more generally - and so was '00-'02, as i'll get into in a minute.

i don't mean to suggest that all of these kinds of music haven't had more continuous trajectories: there were certainly '90s-era forebears of contemporary minimal-style techno (basic channel, for one), just as there are still some practitioners of most of the various '90s styles - fatboy slim and the chemicals still soldier on, as do plenty of others. still, at least from my perspective, as somebody who entered the techno-loving picture c. 1997-98, there have been some dramatic shifts in the relatively prominence of these various strains.

to be specific: the forms that i'm positing as prevalent in the '80s and '00s share a relatively straight-up 4-on-the-floor house/disco rhythm and a sound palette that draws heavily or exclusively on synthesizers. neither of these things is true of the styles i listed as big in the '90s, all of which have much more pronounced influences (something that barely even seemed noteworthy at the time) from hip-hop and/or rock, especially classic and psychedelic rock - in its rhythms (breakbeats, heavy funk, accented backbeats), its sounds (guitars, big boomy drums, eclectic sound effects, and vocals by rappers and rock-styled singers as opposed to soul/disco divas), and also in its song structures and overall presentation.

indeed, the rockiness of '90s electronica (and big beat specifically) seems to have had a lot to do with its success - it's no coincidence that it was the prodigy, a _band_, were the first techno act to really break in the states, and broke bigger than pretty much anyone else to date (oh right, moby.) big beat probably had more bands than any electronic style before or since except for trip-hop - lo fi allstars, lionrock, apollo 440 [and now pink skull] - though the majority of its acts were unquestionably duos (why was that?), most of them pairs of producers who enlisted MCs and vocalists on a per-track basis. (sort of like hip-hop in reverse.) as the decade went on, the lines between rock and electronica (and rap) increasingly blurred, what with high-profile fusionists like nine inch nails and garbage, mainstream (rock) artists like U2, blur, and other assorted britpoppers dabbling in (generally rather big-beaty) electronica, and armies of dabbling experimenters spanning the art-pop spectrum - beck, björk, beastie boys, cornershop, soul coughing, etc. (a sector i've discussed plenty) - all getting their remix on. one could think of all this as electronica bending itself in various ways so as to conform to rockist prerequisites and become thereby more broadly palatable. which is hardly a problem: the results were definitely kaleidascopic and fascinating - like most fusions, it was fertile territory.

perhaps it's a coincidence, but right around or slightly after the turn of the millennium, when big beat was imploding, or seemed to be, due to overexposure (shades of disco '79), staleness, and apparent stagnation, and unadultered, non-electronicafied rock was attempting to reassert itself (mostly unsuccessfully), a rising tide of anti-rockist sentiment was beginning to make the world (or at least the musosphere) safe for the re-emergence of disco, synth-pop, and the like - "pure" (or at least more roots-informed) forms of electronic dance (which, to be sure, also carried their own sort of rockist, unintentionally elitist appeal) - as galvanized by daft punk's widely lauded discovery [2001], which ended up having an unforeseeably wide-ranging influence on the decade. [ironically or not, the chemical brothers had staked out a similar direction on surrender ('99), to middling success, but they were already starting to be seen as has-beens by '02, despite the impressively fresh-sounding come with us.] all of which had the (arguably reactionary) effect of segregating mainstream rock from mainstream dance - reversing the trend of integration that had characterized the late '90s - and killing (at least for the time being, and still) the prospects of electronic music truly gaining mainstream popularity in the states.

now, as i have discussed at length in the process of attempting to genrefy it, there certainly has been plenty of rock/dance fusion this decade, but, as i've argued, it's fundamentally from the way that fusion worked in the '90s. compared to the somewhat overdetermined cut-and-paste genre-blending of the last decade (the "collage" aesthetic central to big beat among various other styles), this stuff feels like a more cohesive and organic combination, which makes sense since it's rooted in the way the genres developed together, "naturally," in the post-disco fallout of the early '80s, often obscured from mainstream scrutiny - some strains of synthpop and new wave became commercially successful, but the original dance-punk, electro-disco, and other sorts of post-disco experimentation were relatively underground until recent years.

meanwhile, arguably, jungle/d'n'b didn't so much fade from favor as segue into ukg, grime, and dubstep, effectively strengthening its connection to hip-hop and distancing itself from electronic dance music proper. as for trip-hop and instro-hop, well the avalanches were certainly fresh in '01, but shadow's sophomore alb and rjd2's debut were a good ways from the zeitgest in '02, while diplo's florida ['04] seemed like a total throwback, and this year's return of portishead felt like a completely alien occurence.

so it goes. now another decade is coming to an end, and it's hard to say what might be in store. we may see a continuation of cyclical pattern - it seems likely, though hard to exactly envision right now; things have felt relatively static of late. the only substantial new trend of the last few years that comes to mind, at least in terms of things that have potential widespread impact, is the smallish but still-burbling-along '60s soul revival [which, it just occurred to me, as it's specifically british, perhaps a decades-late upshot of the northern soul phenomenon that kickstarted dj and dance culture as we now know it [q.v. the excellent last night a dj saved my life, which i have just finished reading, and about which i'll have more to say com'n up], could be taken as yet another example, like rock'n'roll and house/techno themselves, of the brits appropriating a black american genre and selling it back to us as white, though the turnaround took especially long this time.]

anyway. the midfield general album drops here in the states next week. i certainly don't expect it to make any major waves.... but you never know. the pink skull album, which doesn't sound all that much like the general's (it's better, i suppose, from an artistic standpoint, but who cares, it's just not as fun) hasn't garnered all that much attention, but some have been hailing it as innovative and forward-looking, and i could certainly envision a similar aesthetic gaining traction in the future. i closed my review by calling it "a worthwhile and promising step in the ongoing exploration and integration of dance music's interconnected past and future." which sounds a bit clunky and vaguely meaningless, even to me, but actually sums it up fairly well, i think. maybe we'll end up looking back on 2008 as the start of another something else. nu rave, indeed. bring on the next, big, thing.

hot like neon fucking neon

there is a certain kind of music - one of the most definitive and popular kinds of the 2000s, and arguably one of the few truly new ones - which does not have a name. (not unlike the decade itself, come to think of it.) i know, it seems veritably impossible for this to be true, but it is.

sure, people have had to try to come up with things to call it, inevitably sweeping trans-genre portmanteaus like "electro house", "dance rock", "disco-punk," "indie/electronic", "electro-pop" and perhaps most promisingly, but ill-fatedly (too belittled, too late), "new rave." but none of these really come that close to hitting the mark. in each case these terms most properly designate something too specific for them to stand in comfortably for what must by now be accepted as a full-fledged, albeit hybrid and certainly multivalent, genre of its own.

the making time folks - who are the kings of this thing here in small-town philadelphia, end up making up their own endless, goofy, hyper-hyphenated (orjustshovedtogether) descriptors for every new party flyer.

when i've had to call this genre anything i've usually resorted to "hipster dance," which at least seems vague enough not to alienate large swaths of what i mean to talk about - and then there's the recently vogueish "blog house," which is somewhat more imprecise than it maybe suggests (is it actually supposed to refer to house music? not as far as i can tell - it seems to be used in pretty wide-ranging and indiscriminate ways.) but there are some serious problems with defining music in terms of its primary/perceived/intended audience - hipsters; bloggers (each of them more or less a stand-in for "music fans," anyway) - notably that they don't tell you much about the music, and they almost inevitably take on a derogatory tone. see: "teen-pop," "mallpunk," "yacht rock," "handbag house," "bubblegum," and "anorak pop" (if that's a term), (possibly: "backpacker hip-hop," "stoner rock" and "beardo disco." "college rock" on the other hand isn't derogatory, just meaningless.)

"blog house" has the additional problem of being sort of self-defeatingly oxymoronic, um, by which i mean that dance music (which, above all, is what this is) is by definition social music, not intended for sitting around the house (yeah, i know) and listening to on the internet. that sucks!! besides, "blog house" doesn't even have a wikipedia entry (shocka!) so it must not really exist. (i've certainly never heard it!)

anyway, it's pretty clear what the genre is: roughly, the point of intersection between pop, rock, dance, and electronic music. those are all nice broad umbrella terms, perfectly useful for what they are. (though "dance" is often vague nearly to the point of uselessness; it being basically, as i've argued before, a doublespeak substitute for "disco") and it's okay to use three or four of them in combination to describe an artist, as i've found myself doing on numerous occasions recently. but given the large and growing set of artists who are setting up shop in the considerable, roomy overlap between these four ultra-expansive genuses, owing allegiance to no one of them in particular, it would really be handy to have shorthand for the region of that intersection, which could at least serve as a starting point for further hyphenated neologisms.

for starters, you could try to identify which are the artists who trend more to one side or the other: the rapture, phoenix, mgmt and !!! on the rock side; junior senior, the go! team, the tough alliance, and maybe datarock slanting pop; simian mobile disco, mylo, justice and soulwax holding it down for electronic dance, while junior boys, royksöpp, goldfrapp, and the knife kick it electronic pop. whew, that was hard to do, and definitely imprecise, even as an example, and some of these are just the fringe cases; artists towards the outer edges of this territory i'm staking out, though definitely significant contributors to its development. you could also throw in folks with more overt hip-hop elements (m.i.a., spank rock, diplo - certainly very much a part of the same cultural milieu) and go further in the dance-pop vein (annie, robyn, erlend øye, lykke li) or the indie-pop vein (architecture in helsinki, of montreal, los campesinos!), and not forget the scene's immediate electro-clash forebears (felix da housecat, tiga, fischerspooner, adult.) there are the djs (optimo, a-trak, girl talk, dave p), producers (playgroup, maurice fulton, calvin harris, joakim), labels (modular, kitsuné, vice) bands (bonde do role, ladytron, scissor sisters, css, out hud), visionary/iconoclast solo acts (peaches, jamie lidell, muscles.)

and, of course, there's the james murphy, aka lcd soundsystem, aka 1/2 of DFA (plus tim goldsworthy) - both the remix/production team and the would-be genre-defining record label - pretty much the godfather/figurehead of all of this activity, who fits into every one of the above categories. and just might be the most important/pivotal/whatever, awesome, musical person of the decade.

and those or just the people i know and like. i haven't listened very actively to chromeo, new young pony club, klaxons, ghostland observatory, or the presets. and i'm just starting to digest the most recent crop: teenagers, crystal castles, does it offend you yeah?, hercules and love affair, neon neon.

blah blag blog. okay, so why am i bringing this up? (well, it is pretty interesting isn't it? i mean, i'm sure that this has been discussed before, given the prevalence of these artists in - it cannot be denied - the blogosphere. but i haven't really read an attempt to taxonomize or analyze in an overarching, big-picture way, what's going on here.)

for a couple years now, i've had this section of my cd shelves (er, back when i had cd shelves), which started as a small hodge-podge (le tigre, dopo yume, some dfa stuff, couple of electroclash things, whatever) wedged in somewhere abutting and imprecisely connecting the sections of mainstream dance-pop and dance-oriented electronica of yesteryear and today. as i found myself repeatedly forced to stick things in there that didn't fit anywhere else, it gradually grew into an extremely colorful (lots of pink spines!) and unruly shelf or two which was nevertheless impossible to deny a certain sense of cohesion. at this point i'm experimenting with 'alternative' methods of music storage, and have accepted a stalemate in the ongoing game of arraying my music collection as a visual/physical representation of my mental musicographical organization scheme. but it's still fun to talk about genre.

without feeling any compulsion to make explicit definitions or draw strict boundaries (you can put them wherever you like, but as usual they won't help too much), i'd reflect for a minute on what the specific qualities this music are, apart from the broad strokes of its adjacent mega-genres. certainly pastiche - an accumulation of multiple and various distinct stylistic sources - in a sense, a specific aesthetic of derivativeness - is a central (not quite defining) feature of many of these artists. yknow, yr basic postmodern schtick.

but there was pastiche-pop in the '90s too, if not, maybe, in quite the same way, too too much before that. cornershop, the beastie boys, st. etienne, pizzicato 5, cibo matto, and maybe most especially beck, among others have plenty in common with all of this stuff - dance-focused (or at least beat-based) artists who incorporated pop, rock, hip-hop, electronica and r&b, generally in a sunny, fun-loving vein. i've talked about this milieu before; no need to rehash much here.

in contrast to more recent stuff though: those '90s artists are more cutesy, even "jokey" in a fairly self-aware way. even the campiness of junior senior or the go! team feels unabashed in a way that can't be said for the arty stereolab or dimitri from paris or even shibuya kei (deee-lite is another matter, but they're of a slightly earlier epoch.) which doesn't necessarily mean that one era's music is more authentically fun than another, but there is a straightforwardness to the current stuff, especially in terms of its relationship to danceability (significantly, the culture surrounding this stuff in '90s was not really dance culture - which was more focused instead on somewhat segregated strains of electronica; raves, etc. - but rather alt/rock culture - britpop; the college rock c. the indie revolution; new york "downtown" art music scenes, among other things.)

another distinction of the '00s corpus i'm discussing is that a lot of it rocks, hard, with big stupid guitars. with the exception of garbage (pioneers, as i always maintain), it's hard to think of any '90s groups that fused pop and dance music with real rawk guitars, despite their popularity as sample fodder for big beat artists like fatboy slim and apollo 440. this could certainly be related to my point about straightforwardness, as rock often entails an earnestness and assuredness that doesn't really work aside winking cuteness. (unless it's a wink that specifically references rock, a la electric six or the darkness, who may or may not be that winky anyway.) (something could also be said about 90s and 00s eclecticist dance music in relation to the electronica of its era - trip-hop, IDM and big beat vs. the more unilaterally house-inspired 'minimal,' micro-house, techpop, neodisco and what have you.)

also, the reference points for '90s artists tended to be the 1960s, and especially what i like to talk about as an 'internationalist lounge aesthetic,' if you glean my meaning. (though straight-up '60s pop/rock too, though girl-group and motown would have to wait a bit longer for true resuscitation.) these days, on the other hand, it's all about the '80s - mostly, as mr. murphy said and i love to quote, "borrowed nostalgia for [an] unremembered" probably reductionist version of that decade - post-punk, new wave, synthpop, fringy/mannerist disco excess, etc. in the '90s, apart from obviously being too recenet to revive, one might argue that some of it was still feeling the brunt of disco backlash, a couple decades on. the 60s>90s/80s>00s dichotomy is evident all over the place, in pop culture, politics, american society in general, and this isn't the place to get into that (it's been discussed before too, for sure.) (what happened to the '70s? well, lots of things. mostly that people get that confused with the '60s a lot. also punk.)

to be honest, "pastiche" isn't all that good a word for talking about '00s hipster dance music and culture. it skews appropriationist, to be sure, but the synthesis is smoother than that (the collage aesthetic of mashups and quick cuts and endless remixes notwithstanding), and plenty of groups stick within one relatively defined style or sound (even if its a hybrid one), rather than flaunting their eclecticism. in fact, the primacy of sound and style, over compositional/lyrical content - beats, grooves, riffs, and hooks (easily snatched and recontextualized for a bit o' the ol' thrill of recognition) over memorable songs or even melody per se - is a rather curiously defining feature of 00s dance music. consider the canon: "house of jealous lovers," "losing my edge," "galang," "let's make love..." "d.a.n.c.e," "hustler," even "move your feet" and "over and over." who are the songwriters in this scene? you might point to james murphy, again, but we can't really expect the man to do everything for us, now can we?)

finally, there is truly a recognizable "scene" surrounding all of this, which i'm not sure (i guess i wouldn't know?) can really be said about that '90s stuff. there was a lot of bellyaching in the late 90s and early 00s about kids not dancing - something that has surely changed (tho, i dunno, the rapture were still whining about it two years ago in "wayuh," but who cares about the rapture anyway.) there's just critical mass. these artists are constantly remixing one another, touring together, putting each other on their curated mix compilations, etc. etc. in philly, anyway, most of them play dance parties rather than proper concerts - new rave, indeed! and sure, there's plenty to dismiss and dislike about the spazzy/dayglo myspace aesthetic, the rampant disposability of plenty of this output (many of those aforementioned remixes, to be sure), the hyperactive, compulsive download/messageboard culture, and the weirdly unconvincing brand of hedonism that accompanies a lot of it. also, who asked for an '80s revival in the first place?

thing is, stuff gets tagged eighties-throwback so often these days that it's become all-but-meaningless, if not inaccurate. i don't pretend to really remember the eighties very well (much less do i feign nostalgia), or even the earliest nineties (though i probably should.) but if it sounds like it's from the eighties, it's probably going to sound like the 2000s. and, somehow or other, that's still managing to sound pretty good. more on this to come...

stop-gap song-gab

just taking a little break from writing about music for that other place (most recently a bio and two reviews on sway - not yet pubbed but watch that link) to write about music here for a change. sidebar updated to include links to the old podcast posts. (i'd almost forgotten i'd started to do that. never fear, i've already got an idea for a new one: expect it later this week! ha, i mean decade!) also, some new links that i won't have time to fully follow, and a ish-ton of new titles in the acquisitions dept. flick, did i really buy/earn/acquire forty-seven new records in october? what the christ?! no wonder it's eternal! so you can see why i haven't been able to think of anything to write about here lately.

and that's not counting my prodigal/prodigious itunes/download influx lately - i'm still in the midst of processing new/ish albums by [in stupid lacitebahpla order] tunng, tmbg [bonus disc], the veronicas, the mitchell brothers, the clientele, the avett brothers, susumu yokota, sugababes, studio, sloan, skye sweetnam, royksopp, roisin murphy, radiohead, pole, paramore, pantha du prince, panda bear, minor majority, lucky soul, lil wayne, lethal bizzle, les savy fav, kompakt, kathy diamond, jens lekman, jay-z, iron + wine, helios, colleen, cassius, britney spears, black milk, beirut, amerie, aly & aj, aesop rock, and 65daysofstatic. er, among others. (and that's just the '07 stuff: new years' coming soon y'all - have you got your listing brain in gear?) (and a couple of those emboldments are based on a single serious listen, or even less - many of the others i've barely begun to graze.) back to the racket, basically. but it's been good to me, thistime, thusfar. guess i'll be reporting back on these... all in due time.

i have in fact managed to process more of that october overload than you might be imagining, though there's certainly a ways to go - i thought i could point to a few recordings that have stood out in recent weeks enough to achieve some prominence in my headspace - many of them, as it happens, on the older side of things. i'd post mp3s but i've been at a total loss for a decent server lately (free or otherwise, just so long as it works - let me know if you have suggestions.) couple youtube links tho:

"been it" - the cardigans
i know, it's pretty ridiculous that i didn't own first band on the moon until now (after all, it's officially a 1st-tier album by a 1st-tier band within the swedish pop/rock category - shhh i don't own any ace of base either, but that's also nothing a 99¢ bin somewhere isn't just waiting to fix.) guess everybody else had their fill of it about a decade ago (!), whereas i, c. 1996, was about a month late in jumping on the odelay bandwagon, which meant i lost out on the chance to catch the cards' opening slot on that beck tour which easily makes my missed-concert-regrets top 5. (this is in 8th grade mind you.) had things been different, my swede-tooth phase might have arrived significantly earlier - or not. actually, i was hepped to life a few years later, via "carnival" and "gordon's gardenparty" on my first girlfriend's first mixtape (aw), but never fully completely embraced it past a few songs.

so anyway, i had a pretty good idea of what i was in for when i finally snagged fbotm (for only 50¢!) at circle thrift the other week, but i don't think i fully anticipated just how much unmitigated poptastic brilliance it contains. of course i knew and loved "lovefool" for the perfecto-popslice it is (covered it in a college band, even, and no-way ironically), but it's almost diminished in its album context: among its less polished peers, it's so seamlessly shiny that it sounds sarcastic, revealed to be the snide euro-pop caricature it obviously always was - albeit note-perfect enough to outclass the genuine article even as it mocks it. but it's the weird, complicated, elegant, almost grotesque, blissfully jaded constructions - "losers," the "iron man" reinvention, "your new cuckoo" - that elevate this disc to the height of pop/rock in the most literal sense of that usually glossed-over term - or, better - art-pop, wherein not one iota of the pop is sacrificed, and yet it just bleeds archly artless artifice.

most of all, it's "been it" - perfectly perfect pop, with about four times its share of hooks, but more than that, so inventive in every direction - i could dissect practically every second and come out gleaming and beaming - it's like the breeders "cannonball" like that - but, i hazard, better? just a couple - that indelible opening, synch'd bass and bass-drum pick-up fill before it bursts into full-on cooing pop. the varied hesitations in the deceptively arhythmic verse riff [0:35]. fake-out slope-rhyme of "sister" with "mistre-ess." the alarm clock at [2:13]. the seemingly antithetical verse (crunchy rock sparseness) and chorus (fleshy pop swoon) unexpectedly merging [3:20] for a tantalizing moment (rok gtr + pop vox) before the entropic, unspiralling breakdown. whew. and all of it, of course, lofted heavenward by nina persson's gossamer croon, the band's truly unshakable asset, in finest feather here.

this has been my dishwashing album of choice lately (along with in rainbows), and that's the one that keeps sending me back for the replay button. the feel-good dishwashing hit of the fall! yeah i know it's old news - shut up. at this rate i'm going to have to actually investigate those later-day cardigans records that i'd always passed over dubiously...until then, though.

"one sound" - knife in the water
awright. already wrote about this one. maybe you didn't notice though, plus i thought it belonged in this round-up. could've come up with another of their tunes to write about - the album keeps going and growing on me; "seat of pity" has been in my head plenty, and i went and got earned myself their later cut the cord album too, which promises to be just as enthralling. but this'll save me some work. here's what i wrote:

"dusty semi-country minimalism. nine minutes plus. same progression just repeated and repeated, sometimes with verses. organ harmonizations just so-slightly off, never quite resolving they way they should, but growing familiar enough that you almost don't notice - the unsettling rendered inconspicuous through desensitization. 'i want to fall right back to sleep/to dive back in the sheets.' hypnotic."

and it's still just as powerfully intense. between these guys, okkervil (new album very nice), and spoon (obv.), i'm cultivating some major affection for austinites lately, and looking to expand - def. intrigued by what i hear about future clouds and radar (and cotton mather, of which that's an offshoot.) go tx!

"can i change my mind" - tyrone davis
got this a few months back but it just keeps getting better. totally my serendipitous soul find of the year - and not from one of those collector-cheatin' rare-groove compilations i'm so ardently ambivalent about neither - just a budget-quality reissue i stumbled across in a random $2.99 bin in boulder. the whole album's sweet - "knock on wood" gets reinvented as a ballad, the arrangements throughout are consistently stellar, even when the songs sometimes dip below that mark - but it's plain to see why the title cut was the single, and apparently a respectable hit, though mostly lost to history, at least for folks like me.

it locks right off into a loping, almost mellow funk groove, with a nimble, rubbery bassline and chunks of guitar hittin' on the 2 so fat you could slice 'em - plus another guitar licking out effortlessly spidery spangles. and the horns - a single unison swell, repeated once up an octave, and then retreat, to make room for mr. davis' achingly langorous entrance on the vocal. the way he yawnily slides into that opening line - "...aaw, she didn't bat an eye" - is just priceless. ditto his smooth semi-crack on the word "time" at [1:14]. aw shucks. so gooey.

an intriguing premise too - it's nothing new under the soul sun for him to be lamenting his lapses that lost him his love, realizing it only too late - but the way he asks the title question, so innocently, as though he'd be doing her the favor, when clearly it's her mind that would need the changing. sly, kinda, but seductive. ooh, and check the reggae version by mr. mittoo, too.

marshall crenshaw - marshall crenshaw
part of my ongoing campaign to get more comfortable or at least better acquainted with the [non-synthpop, non-talking heads] 1980s, partially sparked by my reading of this fascinating, smartly-written book, whose most substantial contribution to my understanding of the t-heads was a historical contextualization by means of occasionally interjected news-headline highlight reels, pop'n'politics anecdotage, and downtown-scene local color. also part of my ongoing campaign to get more familiar with more singer-songwriter types, if nothing else so that i can have more coherent things to say (and examples to give) in situations like that knotty wrangling with folk songwriting i was doing a few posts ago.

the same (the former, esp.) is true of the feelies [crazy rhythms, 1980] and aztec camera [high land, hard rain, 1983] albums i also picked up recently, and scritti politti before that - of that bunch, crenshaw is clearly the least post-punk (ergo least punk) and most songwriterly - not sure if he quite fits into the "new pop" rubric with which i'm haphazardly lumping the others, but whatever. i've known for a long time that i would like this - it's just been a question of whether i'd go with the readily available original release or hold out for the spennier rhino bonus-tracks reissue: i didn't. actually i don't think i really knew who he was until tara mentioned him, with vague disinterest, as somebody her dad liked - even though i feel like my dad might have one of his albums, maybe even this one.

right, so it's very obviously dad-rock - there was probably no disputing that even at the time - but let's not forget that it's still rock (it came out in 1982, the year of my birth - according to amg "a brief, exhilarating moment in between the fall of disco and the rise of MTV, when the eternal verities of real rock & roll broke through once again.") it reminds me, more than anything, of the likes of joe jackson and graham parker (and oh yeah robert gordon duh - elvis c. was never this prosaic), though not as punkily disaffected as either of them ("cynical girl"'s lyrics notwithstanding) - especially the way he talks about 'girls' (might as well spell it 'gurls') girls girls, walkin' down the street [q.v. "pretty girls," "local girls"], feels like a direct lineage from the beach boys and big star. is it just me or do people like this no longer get away with making reference to 'gurls' anymore in such a flip, factual manner?

anyhoo, peep it it pops. (obviously, btw, what this really is is power-pop, 'nuff said.) i couldn't choose a favorite track to single out for this - "rocking around in nyc" has one of the nicer unanticipated harmonic moves (the "...she's facing disaster" bit); the groovy "there she goes again" has been known to course through my head in the mornings, compelling me to put the album back on; "someday, someway" is a perfectly sensible single choice with swell harmonies - though in general i like the rootsy-cutesy rockabilly cuts less than the more straight-forward rockers (although honestly the best thing on here might be the cover of arthur alexander's "soldier of love," because that song is just so awesome and it's a pretty good cover.) which, ultimately, is kind of the problem - marshall crenshaw is a triumph of formalism, and everything on it shines with wholly admirable, consistent craftsmanship, but not with the spark of truly inspired, individuated songs-qua-songs. still craftsmanship is something - you certainly don't get it this good too often. remember, i like formalism.

[eta: if only marshall crenshaw were a brit (bloody sounds like one innit?) he would get some coolness points for being pub-rock, which is clearly what this is, except that it's american. nevermind that pub-rock is like the most dad-rock thing conceivable, it's still cool because it begat brinsley schwarz who nick lowe who begat elvis costello, or something like that. right? i need to investigate it more, but first somebody needs to make the early nick lowe albums available/affordable. obviously it should/would be yep roc, who are his current label and who just reissued robyn hitchcock's catalog and billy bragg's before that. ok?]

transient random-noise bursts with announcements - stereolab
i don't have anything to say about the music on this yet, except that it's slightly underwhelming so far (tim sendra don't fail me now), but now that i've finally got it, which means i've now completed my collection of classic-era (i.e. pre-cobra) 'lab proper full lengths (groop's an ep rite?), which for a long time didn't really seem possible (though as it turns out there are only five)...i thought i'd be justified in asking a question that has always bothered me about this album:

is it "[transient random]-[noise bursts with announcements]"

or is it "transient [random-noise] bursts with announcements"?

i like the latter better, i think, as a theoretical description of music (that there would "random-noise bursts", which happened to be transient, as the primary feature, followed by the announcements.) but the former kind of seems more likely? can't tell.

as far as more current stuff goes, well i will admit that skye sweetnam's "music is my boyfriend" (awesome video too), roisin murphy's "overpowered" (ditto), lethal bizzle's "police on my back," britney spears' "heaven on earth" (yeah, "piece of me" too but that's old hat) and the veronicas' "untouched" all remain pretty righteous. but y'all knew that right?

as rumored, the bonus disc to they might be giants' the else, entitled cast your pod to the wind, is pretty phenomenal ("why did you grow a beard," "brain problem situation," "i'm your boyfriend now," "employee of the month" = future classics), though despite being fluffier and fresher, it'd be hard to say it's actually better than the album proper. which is also quite good by the way.

oh yeah, and did i mention that i rather like this devon sproule character?