Still running about two months behind myself with these; not that that's a problem. A large chunk of my AMG output for February was on the artists of Gothenburg, Sweden's excellent, eccentric Sincerely Yours label. Much of the rest of it was on low-key, and even ambient, music of somewhat indeterminate genre, mostly electronic hybrids of some sort or other (jazztronica, folktronica, kindertronica...?) look-see:
"The Tough Alliance's first album is a pure joy; a decidedly summery, nearly perfect pop album. It doesn't sound overly much like anything else of its time, or any other time for that matter, partly thanks to the duo's oddly unrefined, amateurish (but enthusiastic!) singing style, although its day-glo sheen and abundance of synthesizers hearkens knowingly to the 1980s, the first golden age of electronic dance-pop. (In many ways the goofily charismatic duo uncannily resemble a two-decades-younger version of Wham!, with their equatorial overtones and hedonistic irreverence recalling, in particular, the satirical "Club Tropicana.") Theoretically, there's some sort of high-minded aesthetic and political concept behind the Tough Alliance's work - it's gestured at in the dramatically worded pronouncements on their website and sometimes vaguely confrontational interviews, and alluded to here in a spoken word sample of Situationist thinker Guy DeBord - but it's hard to discern, or at least care much about, when they're making music this blissfully melodic and carefree... there's an unambiguous and vital positivity running through its grooves, making The New School a celebration of humanity and life that's about as powerful a political and aesthetic statement as you could hope for."
It's also more than a little reminiscent of those landmark albums in sound and style, grounding its blend of (among other things) dub, sixties pop, reggae, new age and synth-pop in a foundation of early-90s club beats and hip-house. Those dusty grooves, along with the preponderance of '80s-style synthesizers (though by this point they ought to be as strongly associated with the '00s as the '80s) and an outmoded production gloss, give A New Chance a curiously faded, antiquated quality, one that doesn't feel tired so much as refreshingly anachronistic, though it might be more accurate to say it feels removed from time entirely."
"Here Comes the Future is a succinct, engaging effort that establishes the Honeydrips - essentially a one-man project centered around Mikael Carlsson - as proud proponents of the indie pop tradition, in the most classicist sense; inheriting the lineage that originated in 1980s Britain and includes Orange Juice, Felt, The Field Mice, St. Etienne, Belle and Sebastian, and, more recently, many of Carlsson's fellow Swedes and particularly fellow Gothenburgers like Jens Lekman and Sambassadeur. It may not introduce much in the way of innovation to separate him from his fellows and their forebears - if the title is to be credited, the future will mostly consist of more of the same - but that's not necessarily a shortcoming in a genre founded on fidelity to the timeless principles of melody, sweetness and simple, sturdy, songcraft."
"This all-too-brief debut release from the mysterious Swedish electronic duo Air France distills the vaguely Caribbean good-vibes of fellow Gothenburgers (and label heads) the Tough Alliance into a smooth, streamlined confection of impressionistic, almost imaginary pop. Imaginary, particularly considering that although it arrived in the heart of Scandinavian winter, it's an indelible evocation of balmy, equatorial summers. There are words to these songs, most of them appropriated...but they're subtle enough not to distract from the lush whirlpools of sound at the core of the tracks; hazy blends of washed-out synths, reverb-drenched pianos, tropical percussion, and summery sound effects."
"Game stands out as the most musically straightforward act on Sincerely Yours ... hearkening back to both classic British punk -- most notably the Clash -- and big-hearted American roots rockers like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, which makes him something like a Swedish version of Ted Leo."
"ADHD is yet again something entirely new for the label: a good old-fashioned rock album. In many ways Jonas Game represents a marked contrast to the rest of the Sincerely Yours roster: he's unassuming and musically organic where the Tough Alliance are perplexingly conceptual and hyper-syncretist, and his songs and lyrics are as vibrant and life-affirming as the Honeydrips' Mikael Carlsson's are wistful, tentative, and resigned. Still, ADHD is rooted as firmly in the Swedish pop tradition as anything the label releases, which is to say it's infused with that spirit even if its substance may veer elsewhere."
"Needless to say, there's a considerable amount of cuteness and whimsy on display here -- but that's not to suggest that this music is simplistic or overly precious. [...] If the song titles and instrumentation make the childlike qualities of Lullatone's music inescapable, and perhaps suggest a whiff of gimmicky novelty, the music itself reveals that essence to be much more fundamental -- even performed entirely on "adult" synthesizers and classical instruments and given banal, non-descriptive titles (which these pieces are both abstract and accomplished enough to accommodate), the music's simple beauty and sense of wonder would remain undeniable."
"Tiger, My Friend impresses first with its whimsy: it's rife with the sounds of toy instruments (xylophones, pan flutes, accordions, music boxes), toy-like noisemakers (typewriters, door hinges, alarm clocks), and straight-up toys. Actually, who knows where they got all these squeaks and blips and whirrs and burbles and scrapes; the credits list a cat and a beer can, while the album artwork depicts mysterious keyboard-like devices with labels including "strum press wigglers," "surprise noise buttons," and "spectral weasel." For all their imaginatively goofy sound-harvesting though, Psapp's substance lies in their sophisticated and strangely sober songs, which are generally built on fairly traditional foundations -- softly plucked acoustic guitars, parlor-room pianos, stately string arrangements -- with some additional electronic tweaking and trickery, and always buoyed by Durant's honeyed, understated vocals."
"Triosk continue to wander and explore in a hazy territory that's probably best described as post-jazz. At times, they flirt with the semblance of a relatively straight-ahead modern piano jazz outfit -- opener "Visions IV" in particular evokes the muscularity of the Bad Plus, with only a couple of minor electronic flourishes. More often they sacrifice nearly all of the fundamentals of jazz (and, for that matter, most music) -- melody, all but the most basic chordal harmony, in some cases all but the vague suggestion of rhythm -- in the single-minded pursuit of texture. It's this conceptual minimalism, the absence of jazz-like forms and structures, more than the actual sound of the album, that nudges The Headlight Serenade from jazz toward the ambient/electronic category."
"A deliberately plotted and executed project involving a combination of intentionality and improvisation, this solo debut recording by the pianist of avant-garde jazz outfit Triosk is the result of a brief three-week compositional period, a single five-hour recording session (it was all the studio time he could afford) conducted with a single piano and microphone setup, and a few months of post-production processing. Comparable in tone and texture to Adrian Klumpes' work with Triosk, his approach here is even more rarefied, with little if anything connecting it to jazz in any coherent sense, and not much more relating it to the classical tradition (though both musics inform the delicacy and expressiveness of Klumpes' playing). Instead, it's largely indebted to the processes and precepts of minimalism. Each piece tends to linger and explore a small number of sonic effects or a single compositional idea; there's very little sense of progression from one end of a track to another (and certainly never in harmonic or melodic terms), which may explain the stillness of the title."
"Jim White tends to take his time between albums -- Transnormal Skiperoo was only his fourth in over a decade, arriving an ample few years after 2004's Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See. By the time of its release, the Southern-souled transplant and perennial wanderer, who was then fifty, had settled down in a backwoods Georgia farmhouse and was reportedly experiencing "a strange new feeling...after years of feeling lost and alone and cursed." His name for that sensation is the endearingly off-kilter title phrase of the album, but judging from his description it sounds suspiciously similar to contentment. And Skiperoo is certainly his lightest, breeziest record to date, a turnaround from the frequently melancholy Substrate, musically as well as lyrically. That's not meant to imply a dramatic alteration in sound or style: since both sorrow and serenity translate into relatively understated, mellow musical terrain; the shift is a subtle one. Besides, White's always been a philosophical sort, the kind to pick up on the lighter sides of life's tragedies and portray the bitter with the sweet -- there's always a glimmer of redemption in his darkest tales of desperation; skepticism and hope commingled in his homespun gospel mysticism."
01 May 2008
AMG review round-up, volume III
18 March 2008
sxsw roundup pt. 1: the cough alliance
(is an anagram of the el guincho canal)
just got back from awesome austin, tx, where i rocked my second annual (so far) south by southwest, this time taking in upwards of forty artists (catching about 36 full or nearly-full sets) over four very full days. most of it spent with three superlative companions: my ever-endearing once-and-future roomie, consummate host and itunes playlist compositor par excellence matthew "dominic" stangoni; my irrepressible, hilary-hatin' cousin bobby "billy bob" gravity, on a long-deserved (and semi-stealthy) furlough after a year of barackin' around the clock; and my tolerant super-trooper of a nap-happy music-appreciation gal navacado rockswild sxswergold. i'd say it was a blur - four days of biking helter-skelter around downtown, eating tacos, imbibing giveaway drinkproduct, spraying on sunscreen, waiting in lines (tho not nearly so much as last year, since thanks to the almighty, er mostly-mighty wristbands), receiving hand-stamps from bouncers, to no evident purpose, coughing up an impressive reserve of phlegm left over from the sickness i'd mercifully all-but-overcome by the start of the festival, and eventually, after many sole-sacrificing hours of standing and dancing and watching and standing and dancing, driving back home, two-to-a-seatbelt, and crashing out on matthew's futon to recuperate from between, roughly, 4am or so until around noon. yeah...it'll be a blur soon enough.
but for the moment it's still plenty vivid; i've still got the logic-puzzle information overload of venue names, cross-streets, set times, rsvp statuses, and reshuffling priorities buzzing around my mental circuitry, i've still got the sense-memory of colors, tastes and sounds, the as-yet-unanecdotified remembrance of recountable occurences, the post-party debrief detail-recall of setlists and banter. so i better jot something down here before it all goes fuzzy. i'll do what i can to mediate between narrative chronicling and merciful brevity:
tuesday
got into town. fine texas welcome in the form of bobby's leftover brisket and ribs from smitty's. wi-fi-netted our lists of show picks at the green muse for as long as my itchy eyes could take, then took semi-respite in the form of a yoga class (led by nicolette of sxsw 07 fame yay!) at their multi-purpose non-church friendlychristian meeting space, mosaic - which was good except i had to give up towards the end. matt and i picked up our wristbands and some goodflow 'n kombucha, but that's about all i was good for that day, so we retreated to his apartment for green chile tamales and an early bedtime. just as oh well since we hadn't been able to secure tix to the free yo la/my morning show that night. (matt did sneak out to see a certain bald four-letter celebrity dj.)
wednesday
actually i almost forgot about them and said it was why? which isn't to say the shi were forgettable - they were fun and young and punky and shambly and had cute stage antics (canvas parachute - no apes and androids tho) and were a decent substitute for not managing to catch no age again later on in the week. but why? were just top-notch. it was great to hear some almost-favorites from elephant eyelash (tracks 1-3, if i'm not mistaken), but maybe even greater getting to take a first-stab at parsing yoni's new beat-leet floetry live, before i get around to grokking their new record i didn't even know existed (which would turn out to be a recurring theme of the week.) vibes as part of the drumset = clutch.
the blow seemed a bit flustered and bewildered; she whined about her short set time and kvetched about the posturing of sxsw attendees in a way that was meant as a performance schtick - complete with play-along "bingo card" - but came off as uncomfortably honest in a not-quite-intentional way. so khaela wasn't quite on top of her game (she dropped quite a few lines too) but she's still plenty charming and too refreshingly down-to-earth to want to acknowledge as 'quirky.' and her songs are great.
we hung around at emo's for the free popsicles (they were out of pistachio and coconut so i settled for watermelon) and caught el guincho, a mildly manic, muppety-looking spaniard who hammered away at a single drum that awesomely matched his bright red pants. (not to mention the scarlet macaw on his album cover.) there were more sounds emanating from the couple of boxes and gadgets on his slapdash table, and he would occasionally sing along with his looped vocal samples, but the combined effect was pretty unidentifiable - discernably spanish with vaguely cha-cha-style grooves and looped flamenco-like exhortations, but far from traditional in any sense, not even as electronic dance music (which, ultimately, is how you'd have to classify it, if you'd have to.) really fun, reminiscent of animal collective in ways that didn't actually annoy me (which is impressive) and basically great semi-abstract background music for a summery technicolor rave.
that was the end of wednesday: day, and instead of taking the conventional breather before wednesday: night, bobby and i strode across town to try our luck at getting into the van morrison gig. we got in probably two or three songs into the set, though to tell you the truth it was pretty tough to distinguish one song from another. i could only understand at most a quarter of what van was singing, though just about every song seemed to have something to do with trains. anyway, there's no denying it was him - that voice was unmistakable from the moment we walked through the room, even if standing (still) there on the stage he could have passed for any number of the portly be-hatted older denizens of the crowd that were preventing us from really getting a good look at him. eh, it was nice enough to listen to. i've never been a big van fan, but it's still kind of cool to have seen him, even if we did wait in vain for "and it stoned me" or indeed anything recognizable from the three or so albums of his i've ended up with regardless.
seeing freezepop was a bit of a time-filler but i'm glad we did, as they were very enjoyably goofy and amateurish, and there was even a sizable crowd that was fairly amped up about them (and prague is a pretty nice club.) they looked pretty ridiculous/cool, with their two (2) keytars and liz enthusiasm's hot pink dress, but they didn't seem to be especially technically proficient. (one of the guys joked that they couldn't play "less talk more rock" - their guitar hero 'hit' - live because it was too fast, and judging from their performance of it i don't think he was actually joking.) was nice to hear some older stuff too - "boys on film" cover and "stakeout" (from the album of theirs i first heard via a random unlabelled cd-r found somewhere.) oh yeah, they closed with a cover of "the final countdown," which i didn't even know.
just after that set, nava arrived in town, earlier than anticipated, and we bummed around a little in search of the next activity. peeked into the k records showcase, but set times were changed around so mahjonng weren't on then and saturday looks good to me weren't either because i guess they cancelled, so it was this guy city center who said it was his second ever show (the first was at cmj) and it was kind of cool but too noisy for the navi so we walked up the street to see jeffrey lewis instead. and the jitters, as he apparently calls his drummer and bassist and the funny woman who played pennywhistle and a tiny little casio keyboard. happily we caught most of "will oldham williamsburg horror" or whatever that song is called, which was great, and the rest of his set was real fun too (we must have missed the first half of it though), including one of his crass covers and a "film" (with picture book accompaniment) called "creeping brain" that nava said was her favorite part of the festival and was definitely a highlight for me too. gotta remember to see jeff more often - he's definitely awesome live even if his records don't quite do it.
stuck around too for kaki king, whose set veered all over the place from bluesy/folky acoustic picking to straight-up indie rock to mathy/jazzy/proggy muscular post-rock/classical. undeniably impressive musicianship (especially the super sick acoustic guitar v. drums battle in the last song) and often lovely-sounding but a little too willfully eclectic (and the songs not quite interesting enough) to quite gel as a whole.
we were pretty tired by now - it was only day one after all, we hadn't got our stamina up yet - so we only stood for the first fifteen minutes or so of lindstrøm's set at the thirsty nickel (and only danced for a subset of that - hans-peter took his time with transitions, leaving us hanging in space for quite a while between beatdrops), then retreated to sit down in the back of the club, where i somewhat disengagedly watched the beginning of one of the jackass movies, muted, on the bar tv, while lindstrøm's hazy, swirly grooves washed over me - quite a surreal, disconnected experience.
soon enough it was time for a final slog across town and up a little hill to karma, the off-the-beaten-path venue for the first sxsw appearance about which i was truly excited: the tough alliance. they fulfilled expectations perhaps too fully, and turned out to be just as obstreperous, impertinent, and iconoclastic as you could anticipate, deliberately subverting concert conventions by showing up late (maybe not deliberate, but unconventional by sxsw standards) and "playing" a six-songs-short set that pretty much consisted of them mugging, 'dancing,' and generally goofing around on stage, only occasionally even bothering to lip-sync, in front of projected videos of dolphins, waves and carnival dancers, while their records played. it was actually pretty intense. the one dude mostly just kind of stands there with his mouth open and his arms in the air, shaking spasmodically. one of them took apart a mic stand and started banging the pieces together. at one point (when there were strings in the music) one of them mimed playing a violin with a mic stand and microphone as a bow. they didn't talk at all, though they did acknowledge the small but enthusiastic audience in their dancing, coming down into the crowd and pulling somebody on stage at one point. actually, one of the nicest things about it was the (pre-recorded) transitions between the songs, which flowed very smoothly. the whole set was taken from the new school, in album order (songs 1-4 plus "neo-violence") except for "silly crimes" added in the number three slot. was it a disappointment? perhaps, frankly, but only in the ways that i more or less expected. if it was another group, i wouldn't mind so much that they're more interested in inscrutable performance art that deconstructs the very underlying concepts of "performance" than they are in just putting on a good show, but their music is just so damn good that it kind of hurts to see it, in a sense, mocked and dismissed by its very creators. at least it was great to dance to... (and yeah, i'd go to another tta show in a second, just to hear the music.)
31 January 2008
in january it's so nice
mostly it's a month for playing catchup, or in whatever sense to deal with old music. because in januarys there is more or less no new music. few if any big deal new releases to speak of
[this year no bright-eyes, no strokes, no shins and of montreal; i guess the big stories were the magnetic fields' predictably accurately-titled non-return-to-form distortion - not too impressed yet, though (i hate) "california girls" is nice enough, but maybe i need to go listen to some jamc and come back to it - and vampire weekend, who seem very nice, but also seem to have enough people liking them for the time being; i'll be glad come back and like them some more in a little while. of course the biggest album released in january 2008 was radiohead's in rainbows, which i recently purchased for $9.99 - it's very nice, with cool and pretty if confusing packaging - but as we all know it's very much old news]
and even anything released in december is officially old because it's just gotten finished being endlessly included on year-end lists and recaps, or more likely not included on those things because people didn't have a chance to process it yet. so basically january is a chance to discover the music that other people were excited about the previous year, even though your enjoyment of it will inevitably carry a sort of tarnished feeling, since it will be decidedly, emphatically so last year.
in my case (and for more than a few, i'll reckon), i took a gander at that there pitchfork best of 2007 list and gaggled, huh-what is this "swedish" "pop" musics of which you speak? am i aware of these "fellow swedes" who were busy "concocting anthems for sunshine-soaked shorelines this year"? and wait whaddayamean "it was a balearic year"? uh-oh, was i listening to the wrong 2007? no, i just wasn't paying attention to p4k, rlly, what with stylus ceasing to publish and all.
anyway, so i just found out about this band the tough alliance. they took me a number of listens to "get" - and it's still sort of hard to describe their music (i said it's the intersection of swedish indie-pop, swedish synth/dancepop, and swedish spacey electronica - except they sound like they're pretending to be caribbean, or they're in the caribbean) - but they really are something pretty great and unique. i immediately wrote the official definitive biography about them, as per my job as authoritative expert on scandinavian pop music, which i mostly researched by looking at everything on the amazing sincerely yours website (that's the label they're on and run), where they assign a catalog number to everything, including mp3s, music videos, weird one-off merchandise items, and oh yeah records too. i kontakted the label and told them i liked their website, and they sent me a lovely gorgeous package with a sticker claiming it had been lost and/or damaged in the mails, but in fact that was not true, it just had copies of the tough alliance's a new chance, the honeydrips' here comes the future, air france's beach party, and jonas game's adhd. all of which are great, and which i will review soon. see, i'm as cool as pitchfork!
there's also this group studio, whom i had already heard of, and whom i haven't been listening to - in fact i passed up a copy to buy their album used (which i now regret), having heard them a bit and decided they were nothing special; fine but dispensable, atmospheric and jazzy and organic and groovy in a kind of jam band way that i have not much use for. honestly i think this is my problem with appreciating jazz; it's not that it's indulgent, i just feel like there's so much of it around that i don't need to worry about it - it's easy to come by, more of it can be easily generated, without the kind of investment and craft that goes into, for instance, pop songwriting (not that jazz doesn't involve craft, it's just a sort of craft that involves endlessly renewable well-springs), so that its value becomes hopelessly watered down. that said "life's a beach" is actually pretty sweet. (and by the way it's not jazz at all.)
mgmt, who i first encountered opening for of montreal lo these many years ago (august of 2005!), have finally grown up and released their debut album (on columbia records no less, and the first of a reported four-album deal - that's crazytalk!) i'm not sure what i think of it yet, but it does at least reprise two highlights from their EP that i bought way back then: everyone's favorite hit "kids" (made famous on my october is eternal mix) and p4k best-of-'07 inclusion "time for pretend," which has an unbelievably awesome video (seriously, one of the greatest music videos i've seen, which may not be saying too much) made by a friend of somebody who lives with my friends, that i was lucky enough to see at a weekly variety revue at their house two weeks ago. apparently, amazingly, that video is not available on the internets yet, but i will let you know when here it is (embedding disabled by request, don't wanna figure out how yr supposed to get around that.)
ingrid michaelson, whose album was wxpn's cd of the month this month, and whom i saw perform at "free at noon" a few months back, and who gets photographed eating food creepily often (each with literally hundreds of comments about how beautiful she is - u have to be signed into myspace to see though), and who supposedly is emblematic of a new model of indie music success (i.e. song placements in tv shows and commercials), has this song, her "big hit", "the way i am," which is so minimal and slight that it's barely even there, with short simple verses (with lyrics that are banal, and worse, embarrassing - liz always talks about how it mentions rogaine) and even shorter, simpler choruses - the whole song is basically this tiny nugget of melody, 1-2-3-2, which is fit into a single syllable in its first three iterations ("i" "love" "you") and then stretched out to four words ("take me the way.") it's kind of brilliantly economical, and annoyingly catchy in a really obvious but understandable way. by the way, we don't think we like ingrid michaelson.
i heard the song on the radio and it made me get, in succession, regina spektor ("better"), natalie imbruglia ("torn"), and the cranberries ("zombie") in my head. not sure what to say about that.
meanwhile, i've been thinking about kylie and madonna. i was out somewhere recently and heard a song that i vaguely recognized, then realized was from madge's maligned 2003 album american life (i think it was "nobody knows me") - it sounded pretty good and it reminded me very much of blackout and the corresponding recent glut of vocal-twerking electro-pop productions (most of them by bloodshy/avant), and i wondered whether american life might have been ahead of its time, prefiguring that recent wave of innovation (if that's what it is) and unjustly dismissed as uninventive. relistening to it a little bit... well it's not a great album, mostly because the songwriting is somewhat wooden and of course the rapping is just embarrassing, and as appealing as the acoustic guitar + electronics formula is, it mostly sounds like it's attempting to recapture the glory of "don't tell me" and never quite hitting it. still, it's probably better than it's remembered as. "nobody knows me" is probably the best song.
this is totally weird: it is the only album in history to provide seven top-ten hits on the hot dance music/club play chart. (from wikipedia.) (even though it only included one #8 single on the hot 100, the bond theme "die another day," which barely counts - though it does also feature some of that bloodshy/avant steez.
you know what album's even worse though? kylie's body language, which is also from 2003. i remember being tremendously excited for both albums when they came out - i bought a bootleg copy of the madonna in the ny subway for $5 (only time i've ever done that), and waited and waited to order the kylie online at a halfway-reasonable import price - having totally swooned over their respective predecessors (i actually loved music when it came out in 2000, but fever was still a belated revelation for me when i first heard in '03 - it was the turning point for me in terms of embracing mainstream pop.)
but i never warmed to body language, as much as i was determined to, and it's obvious why - it's just not that interesting. apart from "slow," which is pretty nifty and unusual, but never got me that excited, i don't understand the singles choices at all. to me the obvious standout would be the rather blunt but funky (at least) "sweet music" or perhaps "obsession." otherwise i can't even remember how any of the songs go, looking at the track list, although upon listening i remember that "still standing" is pretty cool and catchy (though i would never have remembered that it's called that.)
but on the whole it's an astounding and inexplicable disappointment as the follow-up to fever, which was not just one of the greatest dance-pop albums ever made, but also among the most successful. it's probably relevant to note that almost none of the same songwriters return: cathy dennis and the duo of stannard/gallagher, who each had a hand in three of fever's standouts, get one co-credit apiece, on the two fine but unremarkable closing two tracks; and then there's kylie herself (who has four co-credits here rather than five.) it's certainly stylistically coherent (as fever was), but it's just nowhere near as compelling.
if you ask me, her two stand-alone singles from 2005 - the glistening, scissor sisters-produced futurism of "i believe in you" and the simple but effective pumping disco of "giving you up" (orphaned except for their appearance on the double-disc ultimate kylie) - are far superior to anything from body language.
and then there's x, the actually-not-that-interestingly-titled 2007 album, which is a "return" after kylie's succesful battle with cancer hoo-rah! and also after four years which is actually not that much time in blockbuster pop diva album terms (she's on course with madonna, for instance.) and, from what i can tell, it seems to be getting a sort of middling reception from critics for being stylistically scattered and unfocused and not projecting a clear persona that's recognizably kylie.
i guess if those things are true enough, if they bother you, but to me they overlook the fact that this album is just so much more vital and vibrant and fun than, for instance, (the generally well-received) body language. i mean, fair enough to have your specific preconceptions of what you expect a given popstar to deliver musically, but what with this recent glut of (especially english) diva-pop full-lengths (kylie, sophie, roisin, natasha, mutya, siobhan, sugababes, girls aloud) to work through, i'm just trying to stay focused on who's actually bringing the goods, and to my ear (and maybe my surprise), kylie's got this round covered (roisin maybe a close second, that'll take some more listening.)
i've been listening to x a bunch, and it's just tremendously listenable. that may be because pretty much every track stands out in some way or other, from the obvious highlight of guitar-based glam-schaffel lead single "2 hearts" to the jaunty, serge gainsbourg-sampling "sensitized" to the sparse, boom-bappin' "heart beat rock." sure, much of it is - obviously, gleefully - derivative, including "2 hearts" (shades of goldfrapp, though of course it goes further back than that), "speakerphone" and "nu-di-ty," which are cut from the same whole cloth as blackout (and yeah, recall "technologic" too), and slightly slight but appropriately immediate second single "wow," which is a second-hand "love at first sight." and whatever's not specifically derivative is generically derivative - hey, it's electro/disco/pop.
my current crush/favorite is "all i see," which is just a sweet lil love song written and produced by cutfather and jeberg, who also did "one step at a time" on the jordin sparks album that i blogged about somewhat randomly and intensively and which has exhibited considerable staying power ("no air" has really grown on me too, though i still haven't paid enough attention to determine why/whether the central metaphor makes sense.) and the two songs ("all i see" and "one step") are extremely blatantly similar, with the same step-step groove, very similar harp figures, and almost identical chord progressions. they've been playing off one another in my mind all the time - i never know which one is stuck in my head, since it's pretty much a trick question to begin with.
the thing i can't decide is whether this is a problem. is it okay for writers and producers to recycle their own material? what's the line between "sonic signature" consistency and unethical self-plagiarism? (do ethics even enter into it, or is this purely an aesthetic debate?) obviously if both songs were on the same album it would be pretty obnoxious (kylie is nearly guilty of this herself on fever, with "come into my world" following soundalike "can't get you out of my head" up the charts just a little facilely), but most kylie fans are unlikely to even encounter this random jordin album track, and vice versa. which may make it even more insidious. personally, i'm just interested in hearing more of what jeberg and cutfather have to offer, to find out whether it's more than this one particularly captivating, sentimental pony trick. (even as i consider that the seductive familiarity of "tattoo"'s opening synth-strings probably owes a little too much to the benificent omnipresence of the likewise stargate-produced "irreplaceable.")
hm. is that what i have to say about january? guess so.
