david byrne at the tower theater.

hooray. after several weeks of impulsively refreshing http://philadelphia.craigslist.org/search/sss?query=david%20byrne and a handful of fruitless e-mail negotiations, we scored a pair of face-value pit tickets, row CCC (i.e. third row, 4 and 5 seats from the center aisle) from a guy who posted this afternoon, that put us about ten feet from the stage, in (as nava promptly noted) the first row of stadium seating.

david david david. not to recount our long history, as i've done a bunch of times, at least once on this site; though it is striking that it's now been over ten years since i first saw him, with my parents, at a rochester venue (water street r.i.p.?) about 1/20th the size and grandeur of this one. since then i can't remember if it was one or two shows in 2001 at the tla (but i think two), one at the lovely count basie theater in red bank n.j. in 2004, one at carnegie hall last winter. a bunch of great and varied shows, and quite a progression of venues (the tower admittedly a step down from carnegie, but not all that far down.)

was thinking about how much db's stature has changed over those years, as an established musical luminary and general cultural luminary (and also a-list gotham arts-world celeb?) it's not that his (solo) music has gotten all that much more popular since feelings (1997) initiated my interest in (love for) his contemporary career output. (certainly one reason why this tour is so large-scaled is that he's specifically reviving a lot of talking heads material, even though he's also done that every other time i've seen him.) and i doubt anyone expects everything that happens will happen today (2008) to sell especially many more copies than his last bunch of albums, even though it seems, much more than his others, to arrive with a ready-made sense of historicity attached.

yeah, i get that it's about brian eno too, or at least about their collaboration... okay, that's fine. but frankly, if you ask me, this is a david byrne record. eno's a record producer, albeit an extremely big-deal one - to me and many people, he's never been anywhere near as popular or fascinating or exciting as david, but that's another matter - but these are clearly byrne's songs (he wrote the "words and melodies," or something like that), even if eno is responsible for their (less than luminous) compositional underpinnings.

basically, db's cachet seems pretty much unimpeachable in the mid-to-late 2000s, as a combo result of his assorted slate of recent artistic activities and (more significantly) the increasing canonization of talking heads, from various angles, as influential and innovative and otherwise essential. q.v. the whole 1980s new york punk-funk underground hoo-hah, also just the fact that in the '90s the heads had been together less than ten years ago. plus his signing to nonesuch (who reissued the first byrneno alb last year, etc etc.) y'know.

all of which makes this tour (the songs of david byrne and brian eno tour) feel a good bit more of an event than others, or than is usually conducive to transcendent concert-going experiences. which isn't to say it wasn't totally awesome, for sure. also complicating is that i'd heard a fair amount of advance press - this was almost the last date out of two months (though that's just the first leg of a six month world tour), at least the fourth or so in easy driving distance, and the pesky interweb had pre-warned me that this would probably be the closest i'd ever come to experiencing my fabled pop mecca, the whole 1984 stop making sense shebang/panithiopliconica. which of course meant it couldn't possibly live up to it (not that i'd have expected that anyway.)

anyway, it was clearly cut from similar rock-show-as-performance-art/scripted-spectacle cloth, but this ain't no nostalgia trip, at least it's much better not to take it that way (like i said, he's been performing plenty of these songs all along, which makes it kinda cloying that we're seemingly supposed to treasure them so especially dearly this time around.) there's more thn plenty rock show and spectacle on its own here without needing to lean on any reflected glory. the gang on stage (db+11 - among them marc d.g.a. from soul coughing and g+m muldaur's daughter - including 3 dancers and 3 singers, who also occasionally sang and danced) were a relatively young and energetic bunch, with a median age probably at least twenty less than the 56-yo byrne (he's my mom's age), who still has as much youthful energy as any of 'em, and looks like a silver-haired angel-demigod to boot.

so yeah. the new songs are good - mellow, but not overly so (the set-closing "i feel my stuff" got downright fierce); gospelly as promised (via soul and/or country), big simple swoony group-harmony vocal hooks. haven't digested the lyrics all yet, but they nod pleasingly to his younger, angrier, output, and his style hasn't changed all that much (from "world moves on a woman's hips" to the world as "my big nurse" and "the milk of human kindness/from the breast we all partake"; "everything that happens will happen today" vs. "heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.")

similarly, the choreography of the sleek modern dancers (they were on stage about half the time, it seemed, doing everything from contact lifts to twirling on office chairs) occasionally winked at db's heads-era movement vocab - most notably some subtle quotations from the "once in a lifetime" video, and running during the break of "life during wartime." can't speak to whether the "new ography" for the twyla tharp excerpt "big hands" had anything to do with the original, probably not, but it's a good reminder of how fitting it was for there to be modern dancers (db's been working with them for a long time) - a worthy replacement for the string section he had on the last couple tours.

remain in light, never my favorite album, though it may still be growing on me (is that allowed?) got four of its eight songs aired; the obvious ones (since "born under punches" always seems to get short shrift these days) including a totally awesome "great curve" and, my favorite, "houses in motion," which had some of the best choreography (and lighting work) and i wish had come later in the set so i'd have appreciated it more. fear of music actually had four selections too, though i always forget to associate "heaven" and "wartime" with that album (since they're on sms i guess), and the always-punchy i zimbra was slotted second before the new-mellow-one/old-dancy-one rhythm got smoothly established (there was a bit too much up-and-down in our seats over the course of it.) best - and most surprising thing in the show - though was "air," in the second encore. what a crazy, ridiculous, paranoia-perfect song. ("some people say not to worry 'bout the air/some people don't know shit about air!") (and a better representative of what i think of as the utterly weird core of the album.)

would have been cool to hear more more songs songs (i guess eno was less involved? i almost said they're less poppy, but that's...not true.) they did "take me to the river" though, and that is a good good good good-ass song. they backup singers were especially having fun on that one. and he "snuck in" "burning down the house" (as if somebody would complain?) (web tells me they've also done "don't worry about the gvmt" - now that would've gotten me in the gut.) furthermore, there was the catherine wheel bit and, awesomely, "help me somebody" from my life in the bush with db singing/speaking the part of the sampled evangelical preacher.

a fair amount of material, though it was not, as it turned out, a particularly lengthy show. the set proper was over in a bit more than an hour, and there were three encores (five songs? six?) that didn't make it all that much longer, and (from perspective) mostly failed at creating the illusion of an indulgently long show such as the kind that usually has three encores. maybe it's because i sort of knew to expect them, but the encores felt annoyingly obvious/scripted - as is always true with encores these days (you just keep clapping until they one when turn on the lights, and then you leave right away) - but it seemed like with a show as conceptual as this (not heavy-handedly so, but still) they could have come up with a more interesting way to bring it to a satisfying conclusion. it reminded me most of the ritual leavings and enterings and multiple bowings at an orchestra concert.

ah well. i hope it doesn't sound like i'm complaining. some perspective may be in order - suffice to say, of all the various accolades i could lay on him, david byrne remains one of the most soulful, and inspiring performers - or artists, period - that i have ever seen or encountered.

citizen up!

Elx Day Special!

title: Get Out The Fuck!
format: CD
date: October 29th, 2004
packaging: jewel case with canvassing map, masking tape dispenser inserts, and a little propoganda card that makes the spine say THE BUSH-CHENEY RECORD

tracklist (courtesy reminced):
1. the laws have changed • the new pornographers
2. rapture rapes the muses • of montreal
3. lies • the knickerbockers
4. burning with optimism's flames • xtc
5. this will be our year • the zombies
6. rebellion (lies) • the arcade fire
7. this is our emergency • pretty girls make graves
8. 1976 • rjd2
9. simon says • pharoah monche
10. get up • the coup f/ dead prez
11. the end starts today [tommie sunshine mix] • bis
12. making flippy floppy [live] • talking heads
13. nothing can stop us now • st. etienne
14. nothingsevergonnastandinmyway(again) • wilco
15. mr. president • clinton
16. electioneering • radiohead
17. bedlam • elvis costello and the eating pastas
18. i am a tree • guided by voices
19. parade • garbage
20. wake up everybody • harold melvin and the blue notes

wow, four years ago! so long ago! back when i had just moved to philly, back when we wanted john kerry to be president. back when i liked the arcade fire! back when new elvis costello albums were still exciting! back when i was just discovering of montreal, and nobody else had yet! back when i listened to hip-hop (?) back when i was burning with optimism's flames, (unlike now, where optimism just seems realistic and reasonable, and "realism" seems pessimistic.) back when i was a tree for halloween (hence track 18.)

so this was my election day mix, obv. for listening to on election during GET OUT THE VOTE funtimes, titled in reference to our canvassing director's campaign to get us all to hook up (which worked in my case), and also to "simon says" (aka get the fuck up), the semi-title track.

still a very exciting and inspiring listen, even though i was too sick-feeling today to do much more than get out and vote myself... lots of great tunes that i don't think of much anymore. canniest inclusion is probably "making flippy floppy," even though i just put it on for the kerry flip-flop reference and didn't even realize until after the fact how apropos it is:

"the president's crazy - did you hear what he said?"

incidentally, i got an email from david byrne urging me to vote because he (as a green card-holding immigrant) can't.

also, the "laws have changed" brilliance: "all hail what will be revealed today"...

"form a line to the throne!!"

this will be our year!

♥ girls ♥ girls ♥ girls ♥

title: Ladies Love [vols. 1-3]
format: CD-Rs
date: spring 2006; summer 2007; winter 2007
package: various. red and pink (and black) lettering, hearts, flowy letters, etc. folded notebook paper passed-note envelope for delux compendium version.
made for: martha, my sister, the opposite of hallelujah. 3-disc omnibus edition prepared for rebekah 10/08

Ladies Love
1. 4ever ♥ The Veronicas
2. Don't Say You Love Me ♥ M2M
3. Overprotected ♥ Britney Spears
4. L.O.V.E. ♥ Ashlee Simpson
5. I Will Be There ♥ Rachel Stevens
6. Behind These Hazel Eyes ♥ Kelly Clarkson
7. Whatever ♥ Brie Larson
8. First ♥ Lindsay Lohan
9. Round Round ♥ Sugababes
10. What's In It For Me? ♥ Amy Diamond
11. Stars Are Blind ♥ Paris Hilton
12. Like Wow ♥ Leslie Carter
13. Hypocrite ♥ Skye Sweetnam
14. Sweet Temptation ♥ Lillix
15. Graffiti My Soul ♥ Girls Aloud
16. Pull Shapes ♥ The Pipettes
17. LDN ♥ Lily Allen
18. Don't Let Me Get Me ♥ P!nk
19. All About Us ♥ t.A.T.u.
20. Pieces of Me ♥ Ashlee Simpson
21. Rush ♥ Aly & AJ
22. Hand On Your Heart ♥ Kylie Minogue
23. Should Have Known ♥ Robyn

Ladies Love Double Deuce [22nd birthday edition sequel]
1. Lip Gloss ♥ Lil Mama
2. So Do I Say Sorry First ♥ Stephanie McIntosh
3. Lose You ♥ Linda Sundblad
4. Potential Break-Up Song ♥ Aly & AJ
5. Never Again ♥ Kelly Clarkson
6. Everything Back But You ♥ Avril Lavigne
7. Crazy Chick ♥ Charlotte Church
8. Can't Behave ♥ Courtney Jaye
9. Love Story ♥ Katharine McPhee
10. Never Stop ♥ Hilary Duff
11. Me and My Imagination ♥ Sophie Ellis-Bextor
12. Don't Save Me ♥ Marit Larsen
13. Gunpowder and Lead ♥ Miranda Lambert
14. Because I'm Awesome ♥ The Dollyrots
15. I Get Around ♥ Dragonette
16. The Initiator ♥ Fefe Dobson
17. East Northumberland High ♥ Miley Cyrus
18. Headstrong ♥ Ashley Tisdale
19. Shut Up And Drive ♥ Rihanna
20. Will You Remember Me Tomorrow ♥ Margaret Berger
21. That's Life ♥ Amy Diamond
22. Teardrops On My Guitar ♥ Taylor Swift
23. I Want To Have Your Babies ♥ Natasha Bedingfield
24. Girlfriend (Lil Mama Remix) ♥ Avril Lavigne

Ladies Love 3
1. Music Is My Boyfriend ♥ Skye Sweetnam
2. He Said She Said ♥ Ashley Tisdale
3. Ah-Ah ♥ Bertine Zetlitz
4. Nobody's Perfect ♥ Hannah Montana
5. Gotta Work ♥ Amerie
6. Stay My Baby ♥ Amy Diamond
7. About You Now ♥ Sugababes
8. Revenge Is Sweeter (Than You Ever Were) ♥ The Veronicas
9. If I Could Have You Back ♥ Aly & AJ
10. The Math ♥ Hilary Duff
11. Our Song ♥ Taylor Swift
12. One Step At A Time ♥ Jordin Sparks
13. Music Box ♥ Keke Palmer
14. Is It You? ♥ Cassie
15. Pretty Rebels ♥ Linda Sundblad
16. Movie Star ♥ Roisin Murphy
17. Radar ♥ Britney Spears
18. Misery Business ♥ Paramore
19. Getting Ready ♥ Miranda Lambert
20. Blow My Fuses ♥ Lambretta
21. Breakin' Dishes ♥ Rihanna
22. Outta My Head ♥ Ashlee Simpson
23. Get You Off ♥ Fefe Dobson
24. Hot ♥ Avril Lavigne
25. I Like A Boy In Uniform (School Uniform) ♥ The Pipettes [unlisted bonus track]

chronicling, obviously, for anybody who cared to listen (which turned out to include a few people beyond me and my sister, though not many), my discovery and exploration of teenpop, specifically girlpop, which have been almost entirely coterminous for my purposes. (if these comps weren't gender-exclusive, i would have wanted to include the backstreet boys' "just want you to know" and a couple of songs from the jonas bros' debut, but probably not much else.)

these were a good bit influenced (at least the first one) by dave bedbugs' teenpop mixes for stylus: confessional jamz and the five-disc bluffers guide, even though i never had copies of either and i still don't know about half of the songs on there... anyway, that's where i got the m2m>britney opening sequence.

vol. 1 is vaguely historical, covering 2000-06 as viewed from my then-unfolding sense of so-dubbed "confessional" teenpop historiography as filtered through/created by the ilx rolling teenpop crowd and specifically dave, who was my gateway to most of this stuff in the first place. the song that started it all out for me was the veronica's "everything i'm not," which i have very vivid memories of listening to in my carpeted attic bedroom at 6th and fairmount on my grade-school boombox, although the song doesn't stand out to me nearly so much now except as a smashing pumpkins faux-rip ("4ever" is clearly the more distinctive, tho i had forgotten until tonight that "when it all falls apart" was the one that really broke as a hit in the states.)

some of the stuff - the british electropop - comes from a slightly different place for me; i was into it earlier (starting with kylie's fever, though when i made this i had started delving back into her early days, when she was actually a teen herself, hence the inclusion of "hand on your heart," from 1989 though also recently notable famous by josé gonzalez.) i'd have hardly thought to include lily allen, or at least the pipettes, now, since they so clearly have an "indie" rather than "pop" audience, but at the same time they equally clearly fall into the rubric of "girl-pop." (though so do rilo kiley and hello saferide, i guess.) no r&b here, though there's no reason a bit of blu cantrell or nina sky wouldn't have fit right in.

vol. 2 is semi-strictly limited to just the year roughly preceding its creation, and perhaps as a result (though not necessarily) it suffers a bit in quality. actually, the only real issues i have with it (apart from tracks 4-6 turning out to not be very good songs, after all) is that it's somewhat rock-heavy, and the lil mama and rihanna inclusions feel slightly tokenistic. whatever. still great. "east northumberland high," "so do i say sorry first" and especially "can't behave" (though i know nothing at all about courtney jaye) are all great songs that i rarely think about otherwise.

vol. 3 is similarly trying to keep it strictly '07, though there are some obvious exceptions/concessions (scandi-pop retro-grabs bertine zetlitz - even though she's really too old - and lambretta, which is linda sundblad's old band - i'd just written them up - and hilary duff deep cut "the math," i guess because i was saving "dreamer" for new years, and plus it's an awesome track that fits perfectly coming out of the aly & aj.) not sure why i picked all of those and nothing from the new kylie. in any case i think this is a strong mix even though it starts of kind of weird ("music is my boyfriend" is an obvious opener but an uncomfortable one, and the next three tracks don't really find a groove)

"if i could have you back," "our song," "hot," and of course "is it you?" are all utter brilliance. "gotta work" and "misery business" not far behind. girl-pop was alive and well last year.

this year? well... i'll save that rant for a future post, when i will hopefully compile and document two more volumes of ladies love - one current (07-08) and one catching other historical loose ends (00-06-ish) and just good songs that have not made it to the series so far... should be good!

AMG review round-up, volume VIII

this time around - covering my review output from september, mostly, along with a few stragglers - we've got a bit from column "A" and a bit from column "B". first up, five assorted and generally quite enjoyable records of electronic dance hoo-hah (from abstractest to poppiest and roughly in order of goodness.) then, an eclectic quartet of singer-songwriter types, only three of them scandinavian. and for dessert, one of the most perplexing albums i've encountered in a while, the self-titled debut of Dominique Leone, which is perhaps somewhere in between the previous categories; perhaps somewhere else entirely. i think i finally figured out what is going on with it, but that took rather a while, making it one of my proudest recent record-reviewing accomplishments. before we get to that, though, another one that, as previously discussed, took me a minute to pin down...

Pink Skull: bio and Zeppelin 3 review

Pink Skull main man Julian Grefe has spoken in interviews about wanting to make a record in the vein of the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, citing its dynamic diversity and cohesive album-length arc as elements lacking in most contemporary dance music. It may not be the first thing that comes to mind when listening to the Philadelphia band/DJ collective's sprawling, perplexing debut album -- for one thing, it's gotten distressingly difficult to think of the Chems as radical and experimental these days -- but that 1997 landmark is an entirely apt reference point. Zeppelin 3 certainly 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. And it doesn't sound anything like Led Zeppelin's III (Grefe's all-time favorite album) either, although like the Chems before them, Pink Skull don't shy away from manifesting their love of rock music and stadium-sized excess -- Grefe's a veteran of several Philly punk bands, and there are plenty of guitars here although they're employed not so much for righteous riffage as for steady, Kraut-like slow burns ("Zing Zong," "El Topo") and ambient smears ("Ssilt.") There's also a bit of deviant hip-hop -- an enjoyable, "Apache"-cribbing remix of Plastic Little's "Crambodia," featuring Amanda Blank, Spank Rock, and, improbably, Ghostface Killah -- and a smidgen of indie folk, in the oddly truncated Mirah guest-spot "Take Me Out Riding," which mostly feels like a missed opportunity (particularly in perhaps unfair comparison with the Chemical Brothers' brilliant work with Beth Orton.) Otherwise, 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, although this album lacks the equivalent of a "Block Rockin' Beats" or a "Setting Sun." There are few apparent bankable hooks, although the abrasive, insistent fuzz bass lick of the break-happy "Gonzo's Cointreau" (the album's most straightforward stab at big beat revivalism -- there's even a siren!), comes close. Partly for that reason, but also because it's not quite as eclectic or as cohesive as Grefe and co. perhaps hoped, Zeppelin 3 can be somewhat daunting and draining to listen through in its entirety. But taken in smaller doses (the ten-minute kitchen-sink workout "Bubblelog Aftermath," for instance), it can be quite effective, and it's definitely a worthwhile and promising step in the ongoing exploration and integration of dance music's interconnected past and future.

Midfield General: General Disarray review

Where has Damian Harris been for the last eight years, you're unlikely to ask? It turns out the Big Beat architect/Norman Cook chum/Skint label boss is alive and well and spent at least a chunk of the time since his late-to-the-party debut LP living in Paris, partying it up with the likes of the Ed Banger and Kitsuné rosters -- labels whose output arguably represents the closest trendy dance music has come to the bombastic, rock/hip-hop/electro-fusing spirit of big beat since the genre fell into disfavor around the turn of the millennium. In fact, to judge by General Disarray's extensive liner thank yous, he's been making friends with virtually everyone who's anyone in the 21st century dance world, but those French connections in particular led to a role executive producing Justice's massive 2007 single "D.A.N.C.E.," and in turn to that group's Xavier de Rosnay's contributions to the Midfield General comeback single, "Disco Sirens." For a song celebrating (and prominently featuring) big beat's most obnoxious secondary trait, it's surprisingly delightful, thanks in part to de Rosnay's funky-struttin' bass work, which nods just slightly to Daft Punk's "Around the World," as well as cheeky rap-styled vocals by Vila of Modular's Bumblebeez 81. That track (it was also mixed by Soulwax, giving it quite an impressive blog-house pedigree) makes an auspicious calling card for this highly unanticipated return, and the guest-heavy General Disarray doesn't disappoint, although it can't help but live up to its title...

diskJokke: Staying In review

Joakim Dyrdhal's fanciful electro-disco productions bear some commonalities with...Hans-Peter Lindstrøm, arguably the Scandinavian electronica scene's de facto figurehead, with whom he shares a label (the increasingly buzzed-about Smalltown Supersound), a strong focus on melody and musicality, and a knack for compositions that feel simultaneously playful and majestic. Though they definitely evince a certain airiness, laced with starry-eyed synths and the occasional woozy swell, his tracks stop short of Lindstrøm's furthest-out, spacy excesses, rarely stretching beyond the six-minute range and maintaining a more or less consistent foundation of sturdy, midtempo disco beats (although he's not afraid to break it down and built it back up mid-song.) Those grooves help ensure a base level of dancefloor functionality without hampering the sense of restless creativity which is perhaps Staying In's most notable quality, though it also turns out to be something of an Achilles' heel. Somewhat paradoxically, the internal variety and subtle complexity of many of these pieces, which seem to unfurl a dizzying array of melodic and textural ideas over their gradually fluctuating beats, can leave them feeling somewhat formless and even faceless.

Nôze: bio, How To Dance and Songs On The Rocks reviews

For all the contributions the French have made to electronic dance music in the past ten years, from Daft Punk's era-defining filter-house to the more recent bangers of Justice et al., it's striking how little of it has been overtly, recognizably French in attitude or musical aesthetic. Parisian duo Nôze go a fair distance toward amending that discrepancy, displaying a (stereo)typically Gallic ability to maintain an air of sophistication and vague superciliousness while indulging an utterly bizarre and often vulgar sense of humor, à la the paradigmatically Frenchy Serge Gainsbourg. Songs on the Rocks, their third full-length and highest-profile release to date, appears on the German imprint Get Physical, which is hardly inappropriate, given a rhythmic drive that's closer to that label's teutonic tech-house than French Touch neu-disco... Nevertheless, it's easily their Frenchiest outing to date, featuring prominent vocals, either in French or heavily-accented English, on every track save one, and making explicit their connection to the long-running chanson tradition, the classic pop likes of Gainsbourg, and more recent inheritors like Arthur H. Essentially, they've made good on the promise of "songs" -- as suggested by the album title and foreshadowed by the popular singles "Kitchen" and "Remember Love" -- while mostly jettisoning the rangier experiments of their earlier releases, thereby making this also their most accessible album yet. It's still a far cry from conventional though, especially when Nicolas Sfintescu unleashes the full power of his distinctively, er, froggy voice, an absurd and sometimes frightening growl that can range from comical to unbearable, depending on your tolerance for unhinged Tom Waits-isms and vichyssoise-thick shtick. On the album's pair of demented quasi-epics -- "Childhood Blues" and the "cinematic" "Slum Girl" -- that voice is just obnoxiously overbearing, dripping with (respectively) caricatured anguish and spy movie sleaze, and likely a deal-breaker for many listeners, but it's a good deal easier to take in clipped, chipper bursts, and in conjunction with other voices, on twitchy, light-on-their-feet groovers like "L'Inconnu du Placard" and the aptly named "You Have to Dance." And then there's "Remember Love," the undeniable standout here, built around a simple but maddeningly effective Chicago house piano figure and an effortlessly funky skip-step groove, with lyrics that touch on barroom infidelity, talking zebras, and the universality of love. That track's simplicity and classicism might have led fans to expect even more of a departure from Nôze on this album, but while it does trend in a more broadly palatable direction, Songs on the Rocks is more of a progression than a wholesale change from their typical oddball antics. Still, listeners drawn in by "Remember Love" (which would be worth the price of admission on its own) may well find the rest of the album nearly as enjoyable, in its own quirky way. Particularly if they have a taste for Époisses de Bourgogne.

Rex The Dog: bio and The Rex The Dog Show review

The Rex the Dog Show is an unusual combination of debut album and career retrospective, collecting five tracks from Rex the Dog's much-loved 12" releases and two remixes for other artists, along with six new productions. The approach is all killer, no filler -- the 12" sides have been smartly edited down, in some cases to nearly half of their length, to yield a concise, pop-friendly 45 minutes. As for the new tracks, not all that much has changed in Rex's basic production template -- he's still almost monomaniacally fixated on vintage '70s synthesizers and thumping electro-house percussion -- except that all but one of the six feature vocals of some sort (as opposed to only one of the five older tracks), in keeping with the poppier direction signposted by the short track lengths. Actually, as good as the vocals are, they tend to lessen the immediacy of these tracks, deflecting attention away from the rapturous, constantly mutating, elemental synth hooks which are Rex's greatest strength. One could argue that nothing measures up to the delirious heights of the previously released inclusions, but it doesn't really need to: none of the older pieces have lost an ounce of their charm, and the newer material helps to enhance their effectiveness by fleshing out a varied, listenable full-length experience very much in the vein of Mylo's similarly excellent Destroy Rock & Roll. Simply put, it's hard to deny the sheer quantity and quality of visceral enjoyment this album offers -- at his frequent best, which is handily compiled here, Rex the Dog makes (in the words of fellow electro-genius Richard X) "pure 21st century synth-pop": bombastic, euphoric, and beautiful.


Montt Mardié: Clocks/Pretender review

David Pagmar's second album as Montt Mardié is, for all intents and purposes, actually two albums, packaged (quite beautifully) as the two-disc set Clocks/Pretender. Although the 20 songs contained here clock in at just over an hour, and could easily fit onto a single disc, each half has its own distinct character and conceit, and each is entirely satisfying on its own terms. The loosely conceptual Clocks could be considered the "proper" follow-up to Mardié's debut, Drama, although it takes most of its cues from the classic songbook pop of the pre-rock era, rather than the 1980s, and eschews synthesizers in favor of stylish brass and string arrangements, fabulously rendered by a 20-piece big band-cum-orchestra. These musicians provide the buoyant, swinging backup for an authentically brassy rendition of the 1941 Frank Sinatra standard "Let's Get Away from It All," and help make nearly every other (original) song feel just as classic and ageless. Each song deals, in different ways, with the central themes of romance, nostalgia, memory, and world travel, and helps to evoke a vague but potent sense of historical time and place -- the album opens with a thunderclap and a snippet of 1920s bandleader Jean Goldkette, and has an over-arching pre-war vibe, but references to the '60s also abound in the lyrics as well as the music, from the Apollo moon landing and Holly Golightly to the title of the achingly lovely "How I Won the War" and the bouncy pop-soul flavor of "Birthday Boy."

Pretender, meanwhile, feels somewhat scattershot compared to the cohesion of Clocks, but it's nearly as enjoyable on a track for track basis. Each of the ten songs is a duet and a collaboration, all written by Pagmar but roughly tailored to the style of each collaborator and in most cases featuring their instrumental work or production. To some extent this offers a chance for him to demonstrate even greater range, but since his partners are all mostly standard Swedish indie pop types the results can generally be categorized as wistful, acoustic ballads, earnestly melodic synth rock, or effervescent dance-pop. Not that that's anything to complain about. Taken together, [these discs] offer a bounty of tuneful and inventive pop music as rich as any that's emerged from Sweden, or anywhere, in recent memory.

Morten Abel: bio, Here We Go Then, You And I and Being Everything, Knowing Nothing review

Although the core of his fourth solo outing is tasteful, tuneful, upbeat singer/songwriter pop/rock, Morten Abel proves too idiosyncratic to adhere strictly to such a familiar template -- he strays frequently and sometimes quite liberally, to intriguing and generally successful results. Along with plenty of full-bodied guitar work and some particularly lovely female harmony vocals, there are touches of instrumental color that help to liven things up -- banjo; whistling and slide guitar; some horns and subtle synthesizers. There are stylistic flirtations with Primal Scream-esque psychedelia and erratic, reggae-tinged funk-rock. And then there are the real curve-balls, abrupt diversions into hip-hop, a bizarre electro/diva-soul pastiche and, strangest of all, the sing-song story rap of "The Birmingham Ho," a sort of updated "Lola" featuring a saga about a transvestite, some music hall piano on the bridge, and the cryptic refrain "You don't have to be gay to make a friend feel good, OK." For all its playful genre experimentation -- which may explain the "being everything" part of the title -- and general goofiness, however, there's a stronger undercurrent of sentimentality and earnestness that comes through to make the album much more than a novelty; ultimately the introspection and emotional sincerity most evident on the relatively "normal" songs stand out as perhaps album's most essential and appealing qualities.

Britta Persson: Kill Hollywood Me review

Britta Persson may have inherited the Swedish national knack for melodic hooks, but her intimate, decidedly idiosyncratic singer/songwriter approach has little in common with the demure twee and melancholic pop fare most often associated with her native land. Kill Hollywood Me offers a blend of arty pop, indie folk, and smart, gritty rock that recalls the '90s alternative likes of Liz Phair, Tracy Bonham, and Tanya Donelly, with a mix of whimsy and sentiment akin to Regina Spektor and Nellie McKay. Lead track and first single "Cliffhanger" starts things off on a particularly tough, rocky note -- it sounds surprisingly angry for a song about a promising relationship, although that's somewhat tempered by the melodic sweetness of the chorus, which fantasizes about parenthood and domestic bliss, years down the line. Persson has explained the phrase "kill Hollywood me" in reference to her wish to take herself less seriously, to focus on simplicity and happiness instead of a cinematic glamorization of love and relationships -- "memories and fantasies are to be seen as enemies," she sings on the title tune -- and that struggle is evident throughout the album's frequently lovelorn, self-doubting lyrics, which find her alternately renouncing and half-heartedly succumbing to the vicissitudes of modern romance. "If you're scared of goodbyes, don't say hello all the time" she reminds herself in "U-Turns," vowing to stay home at night and pursue "healthy love with healthy people." But "Can I Touch?" finds her out playing the field again, somewhat fatalistically wooing a prospective one-night stand with the come on "Who needs a head when you've got a heart?," which becomes an oddly triumphant group singalong. Ultimately, as much as she may strive not to let her romantic tendencies get the better of her -- "to invest and not get obsessed," as she puts it on the gentle, country-ish "In or Out," which features the unconvincing assertion that "this is about as fun as it gets/between happiness and unhappiness" -- she makes the alternative sound a good deal more gratifying, especially on the upbeat "Happy Hour," whose easygoing folk-pop lope and Sophie B. Hawkins-referencing refrain (or not; after all, there's a certain universality to the phrase "damn I wish I was your lover") make for one of the album's most engaging moments. Admittedly, untangling the album's textual intricacies without a lyric sheet can require some close listening, what with Persson's distinct accent and sometimes bizarre phrasing, but that's hardly a prerequisite for enjoying its richly textured, unconventional arrangements, and it shouldn't stop Kill Hollywood Me from appealing to listeners who don't mind a refreshing dollop of originality in their songwriter pop.

Jeff Hanson: Madam Owl review

As always -- for better or worse -- the most immediately striking feature of Madam Owl, at least for Hanson newcomers, is his unearthly singing voice: ethereal, gossamer, and yes, undeniably feminine. It's not simply that Hanson's falsetto is high, it's also impossibly delicate; tender but confidently solid; poignant without a hint of strain, with a resigned sweetness that recalls a certain (male) late, great labelmate. Madam Owl does little to discourage the reductive but apt (and inevitable) "female Elliott Smith" tag, although it has as much in common with the ambitious, classicist pop of Figure 8 and XO as the sparse, deft acoustic picking of Smith's earlier work. On the other hand, Hanson's music has always been polite in a way that Smith's is not -- less emotionally urgent, less rough around the edges -- and here it sounds positively urbane, with elegant chamber arrangements that give the album an understated Baroque quality, while still leaving plenty of space for his voice and folky guitar work to take center stage. The orchestration also helps to distinguish his otherwise often faceless songs, whose consistent prettiness and emotive but forgettable lyrics can render them somewhat interchangeable. If "Maryann" happens to echo the phrasing of "No Name #1" from Elliott Smith's debut, while the lyrics of "This Friend of Mine" ("I lost this friend of mine so very young/his wishes we would carry out/but know one seemed to know about them") are nonspecific enough that they could conceivably have been written about Smith, it's nothing worth complaining about -- not when he can make evoking his influences sound this effortless and heavenly.

Dominique Leone: Dominique Leone review

Considering the litany of literate talking-point touchstones that filter their way through the twisted pop phantasmagoria of Dominique Leone's self-titled debut, the inaugural release on Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's Strømland imprint -- for starters, the big-league melodicism (and restlessly conceptual thrust) of Brian Wilson, Todd Rundgren, and XTC; the whimsical arcanity of the Canterbury scene; the brutalist cacophonics of Boredoms; and over a decade's worth of post-IDM exploration and electro-dance rejiggering, from Cornelius to Matmos to Ellen Allien, not to mention the conspicuously cerebral residue of a pedigreed classical background -- it's perhaps a no-brainer that it ends up sounding like very little except for itself. What's more surprising is that it's also remarkably cohesive -- despite a seemingly limitless outpouring of ideas and a penchant for sudden stylistic left turns (including jarring noise barrages) comparable to the convoluted neo-prog of the Fiery Furnaces (and, at times, Of Montreal) and an occasionally manic, giddy energy that recalls the day-glo pastiche work of Dan Deacon and the Go! Team, the album generally avoids merely refracting its cripplingly broad influence roster into a formless, indulgently esoteric hodgepodge. It's held together in part by a consistently dense, garishly glossy sonic aesthetic that layers buzzy, metallic keyboards and guitars around Leone's grittily processed voice, which is often multi-tracked into high, queasy, saccharine harmonies in a malformed take on his beloved Beach Boys, with frequent electronic disruptions of varying obnoxiousness. That may not sound very appealing, and, admittedly, it's not a style that makes for particularly easy listening, but it's an effective, intriguing, and distinctive one nevertheless. By juxtaposing such a willfully "difficult" approach with the surprisingly traditionalist popcraft that lies at the heart of most of these songs (and they are songs, albeit often encumbered as much by bizarre structures and knotty harmonies as they are by textural zaniness), Leone isn't just screwing around with thwarted accessibility for its own perverse, limited ends, but seems rather to be genuinely striving for new ways to integrate pop melodics, unorthodox compositional structure, and avant-garde sonics into a workable whole.

The album presents a range of approaches to this project, with varying degrees of success: "Duyen," the cheerily chugging "Goodbye," and the unexpectedly gorgeous closing piano ballad, "Conversational," are relatively straightforward pop songs, and quite lovely ones too, with little or no structural disruption, though they're in keeping with the rest of the album production-wise. On the other end of the spectrum, "Kaine" and "Claire" are so structurally disjointed as to verge on sonic collage, their through-line melodies all but obscured by shards of noise and shifting rhythms. Epic-length centerpiece "The Return" attempts to bridge these two approaches with only middling success -- it has a decent enough recurrent refrain that passes through untold iterations before descending into an extended miasma of mindless frippery, but as a whole feels plodding and pedantic. Quite the opposite is true, however, of "Nous Tombons Dans Elle," the album's weirdest, poppiest, and by far best track, an utterly baffling, utterly infectious multi-part bundle of boundless cutesy energy that packs in pretty much every sound we've heard along the way, helped along by a couple of killer dance beats. Oh yes, dance beats. Given that electronic dance music is routinely allowed far greater liberty in sound and structure than any comparably popular style -- somehow dance beats seem to make a lot of things more palatable -- this may be the most viable solution to the particular quandary Leone seems to be investigating here. Perhaps he'd consider it a cop-out on the experimentation front, but it would be great to hear him take some cues from his label boss and just do a lot more like this. In any case, this is a striking, accomplished debut that hints at whole new realms of possibility, and an album that should prove absolutely fascinating to anybody able to tolerate it.

is't a prat?

in NYC for a minute, not for CMJ but i did go to this showcase, co-put-on by the fine folks at it's a trap!, featuring three swedish artists i quite fancy and have been bumpin' a lot lately. firefox ak i reviewed two albums by last week (tho the reviews still aren't up, c'mon pokies!); juvelen i've already repped a bunch both here and on amg, and still adore; hello saferide i have warmed up to more recently, after being somewhat indifferent to her/them at first (part of it is the truly awful bandname), but have a new album that i look forward to checkin' out.

ffak was up first; short and sweet (both she and her set.) leaned heavier on the first alb than i might have expected ("habibi" and "love to run"... so actually only two; but out of six...), but then it is by far the guitarier of the two, so those songs gave her more to do on stage (it was just andrea k, without her usual band, but she played a lot of guitar.) she didn't do my faves from the new album either, except for "techno tears" (the others were opener "where are we going," "once i was like you" and "river" with saferider annika on b.vox.) but no matter, it was nice just to hear her, and she's clearly got a wealth of really good songs to choose from.

the crowd was kind of sparse for that set, but it filled in nicely by the time juvelen took the stage, in possibly the same grey tank top and ski cap he wore last time. he played about the same six-song set too (the five bangers from the album, plus opener "a dream" - not my current fave "facts of life.") and i danced, just like that time - the only one at first ("thanks for the dancemoves" he said to me "you win. i mean, it's kind of a ... walk-on victory..[?]..at this point, but still. congrats"), and later on a few others joined in ("rock it like the fellow in the striped sweater.") and we kind of accidentally/spontaneously hugged as he got off stage. he's so cute!

then hello saferide, whose music i knew the least well - the only songs i'd heard before were current single "anna" and her cutesy signature song (ish?) "the quiz." the one she started with was about how people are like songs ("you're the only one i know who's 'god only knows'" - the problem being of course that "god only knows" is too short.) some of the others surprised me with their relative seriousness, and made me almost feel bad for calling her "overly cutesy" in my maia hirasawa review (not that i think that's a bad thing...) - in particular the idea of a song from the point of view of the parents of a neo-nazi (shades of "no thugs in our house"?), although that song turned out to be pretty cutesy anyway (a duet with her pianist/producer andreas mattson.) ditto, duh, the one about wanting to crawl back in her mom's womb. hmm. (she seems to have parenting on the brain.)

annika herself doesn't look especially cutesy - she's taller and tougher and more, i guess, womanly, than i might have imagined from listening to the girly early songs... and i guess she's 'maturing' now, or whatever, in her songwriting as well. anyway her smart-but-rugged flannel-wearing aesthetic fit in well with the enjoyably rootsy-rockin' band (which sometimes made her lyrics - crucial - hard to hear) and the rural overtones of her closer (complete with onomatopoeic noises for winds and trains and snow - cutesy alert!), which she introduced as being about the north of sweden: "i guess a lot of you are from sweden, but i bet nobody here is from arjeplog." "what!?" said lillie. too bad billie and the visions weren't there to sing about her.

chemical colors

blog block, where to start. some concerts i've seen lately...

cut copy (& the presets) @ the troc, 25 september
the band who made my ostensibly maybe favorite album of 2008 (?), in ghost colors, (except that i haven't really listened to it all that much), and who i'd previously narrowly missed seeing, more or less, twice so far this year (once at sxsw, once at making time.) was in a kind of a bad mood going in, and by myself. openers/bill-sharers(?) the presets were almost-danceable, but not quite enough for enough of the time, and were just way too dark and intense for me, at least at that moment. they kept reminding me of devo, but not in a good way. some of their songs seemed kind of good. (and they definitely had some serious fans in the audience.)

between sets they played steely dan's "peg," which was much more fun to dance to than the presets. before cut copy i jostled my way forward to get a good spot, but wound up too focused on the crowd manoeuverings to enjoy the music at all, so after several songs (including my fave, "far away," way too early) i drifted to the back of the room and finally started to actually enjoy it a little bit, when they played, i think, "strangers in the wind." the next song, dan (main guy) said something like "ok, here's the part of the show where it gets really good." then towards the end of the song ("saturdays," maybe?) he said "ok, here's the part where everybody goes completely crazy," and he counted off, 1, 2, 1 2 3 4. and it wasn't even necessarily the greatest part, but suddenly the whole room really got lighter and freer, and we were all bouncing and floating as one giant mass, the way it sometimes happens, all smiles, and that was brilliant. then, i think, "feel the love" and "out there on the ice," the brilliant 1-2 that opens the album. and i even hugged the girls i had been bedgrudgingly dancing to the presets with, and we reached out to each other for "hearts on fire." okay, happyfuntimes after all. still, they're sort of just a band, you know. hmmm.

stereolab, back @ the troc, 1 october
at that show i signed up to win tickets to see stereolab the following week, and somehow i kind of knew i would end up winning them, which i did. which is great, because i definitely wouldn't have gone otherwise, even though i've vaguely wanted to see stereolab for a long time now. what a fun show!

totally different vibe from the cut copy/presets gig a week prior - much sparser crowd, and a good deal older and less excitable, which is not a bad thing. not enough of them were dancing, but sara and i and some other folks near us made up for it, gettin silly and rocking out. the band really seemed to be enjoying themselves too - laetitia sadier is about as charming as you might expect, but in a very understated way, and unfortunately i couldn't really hear what she was saying half the time (quiet+accent.) for some reason i never expect them to be a normal rock band, like with a drummer and bassist and everything, but of course they are - they just happen to also have two full-time keyboard players (plus laetitia, sometimes.) some old stuff (opened with "percolator" from emperor tomato ketchup, and also did a handful of others i recognized but couldn't necessarily place - incl. "ping pong") and lots of new stuff, probably mostly from their new chemical chords, which i totally should have gotten there, and need to get sometime. very poppy, very sixties, soul/motown influence. yum.

fleet foxes @ starlight ballroom, 2 october
and the very next night i somehow found myself in another crowd, checking out [the] fleet foxes [as they seem to be called a lot], whom i hadn't really heard thus far. i could definitely understand the appeal... i would probably enjoy it a fair amount myself listening to an lp record... but being exposed to it for the first time in at least that particular live context, i couldn't really get into it as much more than entirely pleasant. pretty harmonies (though they kind of use the same ones a lot, no?) and a couple of melodies that stuck out - also nicely structured songs. but you know, it's just hard to get too excited about that way. clearly, they are related to crosby stillsenash.

i was actually more interested by the opener, frank fairfield, a totally anachronistic old-timey young man, who seems to be very much "for real," whatever that means. does period/style-appropriate dress/hair-styling (marked without being so pronounced as to really fall into novelty/parody schtick) make him more authentic (it seems like it does) or less? would be curious to learn his real story, how he comes to this stuff. of course there's no myspace blog bio. hard one to puzzle out. he walked on stage carrying four stringed instruments (i think?) - fiddle, banjo, and two guitars - and proceeded to play about six songs, and then carefully picked them all up again and carried them off. hum. good stuff.

and then,

jonathan richman @ the sanctuary of the church, 12 october.
eve of my birthday - it felt right. brought some pals. sat on the floor. this was i guess my fourth time seeing jojo - after rochester in high school, san francisco in 2001, the khyber in 2005. i kind of thought i'd seen him at johnny brenda's (and josh marcus opened for him there so i know he's played there) but i don't think i actually did.

he seemed more with it than the last time i saw him and got vaguely depressed by it, though he didn't quite sparkle the way he does in my memory and on the take me to the plaza dvd i'd watched a few nights before and got really excited by. frankly, a lot of it was that i didn't think the new songs were quite up to his best - mostly kind of too-typical takes on his familiar themes ("because her beauty is raw and wild") though he's got an interesting, very strongly-felt humanist/anti-conformist argument going in "when we refuse to suffer" and "our drab ways," which are sort of lifestyle protest music. he did a song about how he doesn't [want to] have a cellphone, which was bratty and snotty in a way that felt like a big throwback to early modern lovers style, pretty funny. and, of course, he did "picasso" and "lesbian bar" (got us all up and dancing, though he only did about a verse and a half.) and closed with "that summer feeling," interspersed with some stories from his earliest childhood, which was truly sweet.

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.

AMG review round-up, volume VII: Labrador Edition

I first heard about Labrador records eighteen months ago, via the P4k review (I think it was) of their 100th-release retrospective box, "A Complete History of Popular Music," which I later picked for cheap-cheap at Academy. Turns out that title's (slightly) less of a gag than you think it is... they really do come off as the premier, "definitive" outlet for excellent [Swedish, indie-]pop(ular) music [1999-2007], and the quality of their output is impressively high, by and large, although that part of that perception is definitely down to some shrewd self-marketing, and there's also something about the neatness of it all - design, organization, numbering. [I think I've recently become a true lover of record labels, as a category unto themselves; Daptone, Numero, Light in the Attic, Lo, Leaf, Sincerely Yours, Hybris, Soul Jazz, and Ghostly Int'l, among others, have all caught my attention in the last couple of years, and I've spent an inordinate amount of time on their websites]

'08 has been a pretty low-key year for the label, with only a handful of releases including the new Pelle Carlberg and Sound of Arrows EP which I'm currently worming my way around, and a short stack of Club 8 re-issues. Meanwhile, I've spent much of the year familiarizing myself with their back-catalog, by way of filling in the gaps in AMG's coverage, of which there were surprisingly many, given the consistent boosterism of Tim Sendra (and now sold-out speed-walker Margaret Reges - remind me never to write an AMG bio of myself.) Anyway, here's what I've found out so far:

Tribeca: bio and Dragon Down review

Dragon Down is uncommonly ruminative for an album of synth-based pop, combining a finely tuned ear for hooks and inventive, often playful synthesizer arrangements with a mature, songwriterly sensibility in lyrical dissections of love and pain that place a definite emphasis on the latter. Right out of the gate, "La, la, la etc." belies its sturdy electro-disco groove and guardedly hopeful lyrics about the prospect of domestic happiness (opening line: "So I love you/I guess that's a good thing") with an air of restraint and weariness that's echoed in the laconic title/chorus. Even the most musically vibrant songs -- the driving "Hide Away," with its deliciously cheesy faux-Chinese riffs, and the massively buoyant dream pop single "Solitude" -- are more than a little tinged with sadness, while the understated, slow-grooving lament "The Big Hurt" slides into hammering hard techno in its final minute, as if to viscerally transfer its anguish onto the listener. The album's second half, in particular, is markedly melancholic and muted, though Lasse Lindh's indelible melodies and sweetly personable vocals, along with the supple programmed beats, help keep it from becoming unbearably bleak. The most striking moment, however, is less tormented than it is disarming, funny, and even a little sexy, albeit uneasily so: "Her Breasts Were Still Small," a strangely somber account of an early sexual experience (apparently the protagonist was 14 at the time of the events in question, which may mitigate some of the creepiness in the song's title) manages to be sweetly nostalgic and disturbing at the same time, with music -- alternately tense and dreamy -- which fits that duality perfectly.

Sambassadeur: Sambassadeur review

Sambassadeur's endearingly winsome debut album is textbook indie pop, of the gentle, bookish variety purveyed by the Lucksmiths, the Clientele, the Go-Betweens, and any number of other oft-cited luminaries, not to mention several of their Labrador labelmates including Acid House Kings and Starlet. So what sets this Swedish foursome apart in a sea of softly strummy soundalikes? Nothing much that one can easily point to, although there is something special in their ability to make even perfectly clean and crisp productions sound utterly dreamy and wistful. While the album never strays far from the basic template of soft indie pop (best exemplified by the standout "Between the Lines"), there is plenty of subtle variety here, with synths, beat boxes, and melodica adding instrumental color, and loving stylistic nods to shoegaze, post-punk/new wave and classic French pop (the Serge Gainsbourg cover "Chanson de Prévert" -- the band is named after another Gainsbourg song.) As well executed as all of it is, the record does undeniably trend toward the generic -- but in a sense that just makes Sambassadeur all the more comforting, and a sure bet for fans of the genre.

The Radio Dept: Lesser Matters and Pet Grief reviews

The Radio Dept. are an indie rock band who play fuzzed-out, ramshackle pop songs, and Lesser Matters, their debut full-length, was self-recorded in homes and small studios with unabashedly lo-fi production values, but it somehow manages to project a timeless elegance and aplomb that belie this unassuming provenance. The album crystallizes and perfects a certain strain of understated, sophisticated, genially gritty modern pop/rock, drawing on a host of familiar 1980s post-punk touchstones from shoegaze and noise pop (My Bloody Valentine, Jesus and Mary Chain) to vintage indie pop (Orange Juice, Felt) and major-league rockers like the Cure and New Order (both of whom, not so coincidentally, appeared alongside the Radio Dept. on Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette soundtrack) to create something that doesn't seem like it should be all that extraordinary, but ends up as much more than the sum of its parts.

In the chorus of Pet Grief's lead single and catchiest song, Radio Dept. head Johan Duncanson makes the touching if rather petty confession that the only reason he's able to withstand his jealous despair is the knowledge that his would-be romantic rival has "the worst taste in music." Well, if it makes him feel better, there's certainly no doubting his and his bandmates' taste -- like their buzzy, buzzed-about debut, Pet Grief evinces an impeccably fashionable roll call of influences from British post-punk and shoegaze to more recent electronic indie and dream pop, and if that's not enough, the hook of "What Will Give?" offers the gratuitously hip reference: "I want to hide, like Jandek before playing live." But taste only gets you so far -- if you're going to wear your influences on your sleeve, you'd better have your heart on it too, if not some other tricks up it as well.

The Legends: Public Radio and Facts and Figures reviews

The Legends' sophomore set effectively abandoned the raucously upbeat, '60s-influenced noise-pop of their surprise indie hit debut, proffering instead a tastefully moody if rather antiseptic evocation of 1980s British post-punk. Joy Division, New Order, Felt and The Cure are among the all-too-obvious reference points -- a fashionable list in 2006, certainly, which makes the album feel like an artifact of its time instead of a canny throwback -- but Public Radio pointedly lacks any of spark and personality of those bands. Indeed, it seems as if Johan Angergård was determined to hone in on the fundamental elements common to the sound of those and similar groups, and distill them into a pitch-perfect archetype of their era without any overtly distinguishing characteristics. (Titling one of the songs "I Want To Be Like Everybody Else" is a pretty decent indication, and also suggests he's not doing it without a bit of a smirk.) If that was his goal, he's succeeded admirably here: Public Radio is lavishly laid out, almost wall-to-wall, with atmospheric synth washes, pensive muted guitar leads, and wispy introverted vocals (wanting only for the pained gloominess of a Curtis or Smith), all of it practically buried under layers of reverb.

...More than any of Angergård's other outfits, the Legends make pop music with overt reference to other pop music, and Facts and Figures is no exception. Just for starters, the album shares its opening line with U2's The Joshua Tree, and there's at least one direct Belle & Sebastian quote in the lyrics. In a display of pure music geekery, the liner notes contain a list of recommended records, two for each year from 1974 to 2006, which reads like a road map to the touchstone obsessions evident throughout the Legends' first (Jesus & Mary Chain, Comet Gain, Broder Daniel, presumably others had the list extended earlier) and second albums (New Order, the Cure, Felt, et cetera.) (Those looking for clues to future stylistic shifts might take note that both Barry White and quirky Boston songwriter Don Lennon are featured with three albums apiece.) The inclusions most relevant to Facts and Figures span the entire time range, from Depeche Mode and Kraftwerk (the album design nods to Trans-Europe Express) through Momus and the Russian Futurists and, most pertinently, the Pet Shop Boys. To put it in other words: this is the Legends' synth pop album. Perhaps because synth pop as a style, despite its knee jerk association with the new wave '80s, has remained remarkably relevant, resilient, and versatile, Facts and Figures comes off as the most comfortably modern-sounding and, somewhat expectedly, the most distinctive of the Legends' stylistic forays. Though it flirts with the sort of all-out indie dance-pop one might anticipate, and despite love-struck lyrics like those of the shimmering opener "Heart," this is a curiously conflicted, often emotionally cold album -- palpably the work of an isolated individual rather than a collaborative band. At times the internal disconnect between music and lyrics is downright hypocritical: the insecure downer of a title track laments "I don't like dancing and I don't like to rock," while the self-explanatory "Disco Sucks" (more accurately listed as "Discos Suck" in the lyric sheet) is practically apoplectic -- never mind that these are two of the catchiest and most propulsive tunes on the album. (Dance-hating dance music is, perhaps, a slight modification of the sugar-coated cynicism that has long been an indie pop staple.) Dance phobia or no, Facts and Figures is an impressively solid album of electronic pop that deserves to stand among Angergård's finest work and win fans among discophiles and wallflowers alike.

Wan Light: Let's Wake Up Somewhere Else and Carmaline reviews

Wan Light singer Krister Svensson's voice is nearly a dead ringer for that of Mercury Rev's Jonathan Donahue, which means it's also not unlike Neil Young's -- high, reedy, perhaps a little bit of an acquired taste, but surprisingly affective and resonant. The Swedish duo's music also bears out some broader comparisons to those artists, and to California's like-minded Radar Bros., in its power to evoke an expansive sense of moodiness and melancholy that's comforting and gently hopeful rather than despondent. What sets them apart are the varied and often unexpected ways they go about creating such a mood, which are remarkably eclectic considering the general consistency of affect, and their simple but endearing songwriting, which is unerringly melodic but never feels straightforwardly poppy and upbeat even at its peppiest. Let's Wake Up Somewhere Else encompasses earnest, gently drifting ballads, jangly pop songs built around snappy percussion loops and acoustic guitars, and assorted brief instrumental interludes. Texturally it ranges from the sparse, traditionalist piano accompaniment of "Freedom Fighters" to the skittering electronics of "Soul Sisters" to the lush blend of synths, symphonics, and an oddly poignant computer-voice sample on the gorgeous standout "The Astronauts." It's a lot of territory to cover in 40 minutes, but Let's Wake Up never comes across as rushed or overly ambitious, merely as a relaxed and refreshing glimpse into the hearts and minds of a couple of talented but unpretentious sentimentalists. As inventive as it is listenable, this is exactly the sort of album that habitually inspires laments about inevitable and undeserved obscurity, so spread the word; seek it out, soak it in, and share it with your loved ones.

Douglas Heart: bio and Douglas Heart review

As luscious and lazy as a late summer night, Douglas Heart's debut is perfectly tailored for a spot in the after-hours listening canon somewhere roughly in between the Cowboy Junkies' Trinity Session and Sigur Ròs' Ágaetis Byrjun -- if it's not quite as transcendent or groundbreaking as those sui generis classics, it's notably warmer and more glowing than either. The folk psychedelia of Mazzy Star and Beach House and the hazy space rock of Auburn Lull are perhaps even closer stylistic reference points, but there's a confidence and subtle positivity that sets Douglas Heart apart. Wafting in on a cloud of white noise and backwards guitar and vocal snippets before settling into a mild country-pop lope, opener "Smoke Screen" is actually the album's most kinetic moment, with some especially enjoyable bouncing bass work, but it aptly sets the tone for the album by introducing its two most defining sonic features; Malin Dahlberg's arrestingly pure but strangely twangy voice and the rich, clarion sound of Ramo Spatalovic's Hammond organ.

Laurel Music: bio and This Night and the Next review

Malin Dahlberg's striking singing voice -- clear and sweet, with a curiously accented blend of polish and twang -- worked wonderfully with the hazy dream pop sound of Douglas Heart, but it's an even more satisfying fit for Tobias Isaksson's rootsy, sentimental songwriting. That exquisite combination is the underlying source of Laurel Music's considerable charm, as manifested on the delicate, understated, and all-too-brief This Night and the Next. Split roughly evenly between sparse, tender ballads and more upbeat, shuffling country-pop numbers ("No One Wants Forever" appears once in each style), the whole album radiates warmth and light-hearted intimacy. The band's cited influences skew towards folk and indie pop -- the gentle New York outfit Ida is perhaps the most resonant point of reference -- but there's an obvious country presence here as well, overt but not overstated, what with the Isaksson's rhythmic fingerpicking, judicious use of harmonica and pedal steel, and that elusive twinge in Dahlberg's voice. It's an appealing, instantly familiar sound that has as much to do with 1960s Bakersfield as it does with 2000s Gothenburg, and in Laurel Music's hands it feels quietly, effortlessly timeless.

middling, generally

and speaking of the 9Ts...yember when i was all "big ups Big Beat inna ComeBack style, 2dubble-Oh-7"..? oh what, you nope? well hrm anyway looks like i was pretty much right on the $$$£££, if you consider that the biggest-deal electronica song of '07 (hands down), Justice's "D.A.N.C.E.", was (apparently, we now learn) executive produced (um, whatever that means), by Damien Harris, a.k.a. Midfield General, a.k.a. the head of Skint Records, locus of most Big Beat activity (discounting ChemBros and Prodigy) in the mid-late 9Tz, a.k.a. best mate to mr. Norman Cook... (not to mention the fact that there was a biggest-deal electronica in '07 - when's the last time that happened? i don't know, and it probably wasn't 1998, but i know what song it was that year...)

and now, same year as this sudden Bristol/trip-hop revival, as Thom Jurek pointed out (and he probably wasn't the first, but i no longer read anything except for all music guide) - except that really all it means is the new P-head album, since i guess the Massive won't be out 'til next year, the Big Beat revvvl gets confirmed with some old-true-school legitimacy, via a new album, General Disarray, the first since 2000, by Midfield General himself. [TBH, I never listened to MG before, although I knew the name from some Fatboy Slim mixes and whatnot. the AMG reviews of his 2000 debut and especially of his installment of the on the floor at the boutique mix series - the lo-fi allstars version of which was very formative for me - read like apologia in defense of big beat, whose reputation is still, i think, fairly tarnished:

"one realizes that Midfield's On the Floor... effort is what the big beat scene was truly about in the first place: a belief to stop thinking long enough to scatter usual classifications into the four winds. Well, just as long as it all still makes you dance."

makes me wanna hear 'em too - too bad (and crazy) that generalisation isn't available used cheap...even if it wasn't ever released domestically.]

...and what better confirmation could you ask for than a lead single [video here] explicitly glorifying the genre's most obnoxious (secondary) trait, mixed by soulwax (who aren't actually all that nu-big-beaty, but i got them confused with simian for a second) and with instrumental contributions from xavier d. rosnay (aka 1/2 of justice)?? [...and also vox by the gal from modular's bumblebeez, thereby singlesongedly linking MidGen to three of the major forces in '00s Electro-Blog-House-Tronica...incidentally the epic liner thank yous also include just about everybody else that could be included in that category, especially all those Parisian people that I haven't been too impressed with yet.]

amazingly, "Disco Sirens" isn't actually all that obnoxious, thanks largely to XDR (now there's an alias)'s tasty drum and bass work, which handily happens to blatantly rip off Daft Punk's "Around the World" ripping off (vaguely, not really so much) "Good Times"/"Rapper's Delight." because blatant rip-offing is just a part of what Big Beat is all about. see also the second half of "Bass Mechanic" ripping Nitro Deluxe's "Let's Get Brutal" riff, to excellent fun effect. Otherwise, General Disarray suffers to some extent from a common (latter-day) Big Beat problem, too many guest vocalists that don't contribute anything and end up being distracting and all over the place. especially annoying are the lengthy spoken stories on "Teddy Bear" and "Seed Distribution" - one saccharine and one unintelligible, and both becoming the whole pointless focus of their respective tracks. "On The Road" is with "robots in disguise," who I guess are some kind of disco-punk chicksinger band, at least that's just what this track sounds like, and it's not good.

The ones I like most are the instrumentals or near-instrumentals ("Dennis and My Sister" has some phone messages and Dutch football commentary it, which is just silly), which are the ones that remind me most of Simian Mobile Disco. Especially "137 Piano." "Love Thyself" is really good (and Fatboyish, but not in an obnoxious Beat-y way), and has a sermon over it. Also very nice is "Loving Laughter," which has a languorous female soul sample ("I'd like to get it on with you yeah baby"...sticks in yr head) and a laid-back floaty feel. kind of like Balearic, I guess.

speaking of which, I am finally starting to come around to "Nu-Balearic" music, or whatever it is, as music (not as a genre classification, though i suppose it is useful since it's what we've got) - "cosmic disco" may be better (or at least "cosmic" something), but I'm less interested in thinking about it as disco, per se. I like it qua ambient music, not qua dance music. (and I'm not sure I'm ready for non-danceable disco.) I suppose I've already been writing about it, via my reviews of Air France (though they're possibly too eclectic and idiosyncratic to count, I'd say) and the final third of the Milky Disco comp [i.e. the milky (not disco) part.]

but specifically, I'm really really enjoying this album by Hatchback, Colors of the Sun, which showed up unexpected. they're billing it, I guess, as "Californian Cosmic Krautrock Disco," which is pretty silly but sounds about right - the disco is mitigated by the rest of it. it sounds super Californian. and super simple, but somehow just perfect. apparently the dude is a retro/modernist design freak (just looked at his mice pace, and listen to the songs while your at it), and it kinda shows. i mean, sounds. whatever. I also seem to be enjoying the Quiet Village album. I love ambient music!

meanwhile, Johan Agebjörn (mr. sally shapiro producer guy) has put out an honest-to-good ambient album, on what may or may not be a new age label, which may or may not be an okay thing, which is way more ambient than his milky disco inclusion (not even close) or the lovely "sleep through the storm" instrmntl that closed out disco romance. and my man Lindstrøm, Mr. Cosmic himself, has also been getting toatally epic in a quite enjoyable, but it's not really balearic is it? not sure. to be honest i've been a bit more focused on his labelmates... diskJokke (awesome name, awesome capitalization scheme, awesome piano intro, and the rest is pretty good tooo) and Dom Leone (that's gonna have to wait 'til next time though...)

up next/soon: AMG review round-up of Labrador jawns among others; the frustrated swedemux ("simple syrup"), Step Up 2: The Streets review w/ DVD extras; also, new PB+J? new ex-Hefner dude? new Zoot Woman? and...[[[don't get too excited now[[[NEW MARIT (shhhh) LARSEN ((((!!!!!))))????]]]]]]. and maybe something about the Knife. and hopefully some dj gigs/mixes.

so can i be a music blogger now? is the caps thing bothering you? i can work on that...