Acts To Watch: 2010

OK, so if you follow this blog at all you know I'm not so much about the hype-quest of finding the "next big thing." I prefer a more conservative approach. However, I think it is the responsibility of any music blog to introduce people to new music, and to occasionally make outlandish statements and predictions for no other purpose than making outlandish statements and predictions. I apologize, everyone, for neglecting this duty. Take, for instance, the quote from Mr. Anton Ego, to the right of this page, that I slapped up there as a nice little credo for a nice little blogger. It's an evocative quote, yes, but I'm a nice little blogger in a sea of a million and a half nice little bloggers, and I think it's about time I do my fair share of the "discovery and defense of the new," huh?

So check this, I'm going to push my chips and defend a few newbies, and lay down my official "Acts To Watch for 2010" list. Since this site loosely revolves around the concept of the album as a distinct and concrete form of art, even when I don't really talk about albums, I've picked out a few acts below that have not yet released full-lengths to shine the spotlight on. Sure, they've been buzzed about aplenty; maybe they've dropped an EP here or there, maybe their myspace hit count has broken six digits, maybe they've been in and out of rehab for thirty-odd years -- but none have yet hit us with that full-length knowledge. So grab a stack of Post-It notes real quick and jot down some notes to remind yourself to remember to remind yourself of these names in the upcoming year.

Suckers
These cool cats dropped a self-titled EP this year whose cover featured a dude wearing a gold coat and a masquerade mask. The standout song is "It Gets Your Body Movin'," which is really not like anything you would expect from a song of that title, but is very good nonetheless. Underneath glam-prog and afropop textures there are obvious Talking Heads influences; I don't want to throw them into the Vampire Weekend/TV on the Radio bucket just yet, Suckers have more of a theatrical touch -- but we'll see what happens when they drop an LP.
Suckers myspace

Best Coast
Now here is an artist I find so promising that this isn't even the first time she's been mentioned on this site. Bethany Cosentino, recording under the aforementioned alias, starts with a slate of 60s summertime pop, throws in a few ragged guitars, and tops it all off with a beautifully confident voice that evades the cliches of many female singers. It's a fine line one must walk in order to achieve fauvist legitimacy with lyrics like "Yeah, when I'm with you, I have fun," but she pulls it off, and pulls it off well. I am really looking forward to the full-length album.
Best Coast myspace

Sleigh Bells
OK, if you haven't heard of Sleigh Bells yet -- well then clearly you don't live in Brooklyn. These guys have been blowing up the web with their powerfuck-electrorock dance party jams "Infinity Guitars" and "Crown On The Ground," the latter of which is sure to make you cringe on first listen at its fuzzed-out speaker-blowing overdrive. But once you accept that that's what's hot on the streets these days, you realize that it's actually an amazingly catchy and fun song. They've got a promising groove -- I personally like the Blur-meets-TLC-ish "Ring Ring," which can be found on the group's myspace page. Plus, leadwoman Alexis Krauss ----- total FOX!!
Sleigh Bells myspace


Small Black
These guys dropped a single earlier this year, "Despicable Dogs," that has attracted a lot of attention. You might be able to classify them as some form of Neo-Goth, other sources might throw the "tape loops" memes around -- either way, it's definitely some kind of cool, deconstructed pop; each song is a fuzzy bath of ambiguous waves of sound and delicate, thoughtful vocals and lyrics. Plus, they are selling some cool t-shirts on the myspace page.
Small Black myspace

Steven Tyler
Are the rumors true? Is he done with Aerosmith? Is he back on the drugs? Is Kyra Sedgewick his secret alter persona (the chick from that show "The Closer," look how much alike they look!!)? Who knows, but I think the most believable one at this point is that he is working on a solo album. My man is like sixty years old -- but shoot, if Brett Favre can strap on his pads and go out there and get pummeled each week at forty years of age, I think Steven can pull off a solo shot. In fact, if any of those other rumors are true, I think it's a must.

...And you can quote me on that. Also, with the close of the year, I want to get sentimental for a second and say thanks to everyone who has followed Album of the Week and has supported me thus far. It's been a good run and who knows what 2010 will hold? Happy New Year everyone!

I Bought It Because Of The Album Cover

No, seriously, the only reason I bought King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King was because of the cover. I mean, look at it! Here is the back story: there was this used book store in the town where I grew up on the sidewalk mall downtown, a blatant economically-unsound exercise in favoritism of local business. But I was glad for that. In the basement, they had this ram-shamble, overflowing collection of vinyls. I don't think many people really went down there: the light was usually off as I entered and there was a sign pointing to where the switch was. I loved going down there and flipping through the decaying records, pulling them out and inspecting the back covers, humbled in the atmosphere of half-forgotten history and relics of the not-too-distant-but-forever-gone past. I would usually end up buying some old Genesis album or just plain wandering around for awhile.

On one such occasion of aimless wandering and non-purchasing I was on my way back towards the stairway when something caused me to turn around. There, staring back at me, was the horrid face shown above. There were no words on the cover. The way it filled up the whole cover of the album made the record seem bigger in some way; I could really hear this poor guy crying out from the deepest depths of his hell-tormented soul. "King Crimson" the back said, "In the Court of the Crimson King." I deduced the former to be the group's name. $2.00. Why the hell not? It was in the rock section, so it had to be palatable to a burgeoning 17-year-old, clawing at every played-out method of expressing independence, this time in the form of "being cool because I'm listening to obscure 70s music." Perfect. There was a turntable in the basement, but I had never been able to get it to work, so I truly had to place faith in the instincts that had drawn me to the album's visual appeal that the music itself would be worth listening to. And you know what? That shit turned out to be right up my alley: creepy medieval 70s prog, all drenched in mellotrons and whatnot -- a practical foil for early Genesis. "Confusion will be my epitaph," sang the lyrics of the harrowing closer to Side A, "Epitaph." Fucking PERFECT, I tell you!

The point is, that kind of stuff just doesn't happen anymore. I am all for progress and advances in digital media, etc etc etc, but music is just so damn accessible these days. No chance we drop a dime on an album of which we don't sample thirty seconds of every track on the iTunes music store (unless you're a total Thom Yorkophile and the album in question is In Rainbows); no chance we give an artist a chance without first reading about him, her, or them on our favorite blog (*wink*). I won't get too "back in the good old days" on you, but consider the value of taking a musical risk once in awhile. Who knows, whatever slice of randomness you manage to unearth might be the new cool thing to be listening to tomorrow, and then shoot -- you'll already be one step ahead of the game. I mean, how cool would you be right now if you had already been listening to Biz Markie when those Heineken commercials first dropped? Believe me, this is coming from the guy who brought back Wayfarers.

This song doesn't really have anything to do directly with the topics we've just discussed, but it's so incredibly cheesy that I think you could tack it onto any shard of sentiment and get away with it. Sorry, folks -- must be the Perrier talking!

Thinkin' Bout That High School Dance

The Strokes -- Room on Fire

The summer before my freshman year of college I worked in an administrative department of my soon-to-be university, alongside a guy I had gone to high school with and who was entering his sophomore year at the same school. To get us through the long stretches of producing the university identification cards for the incoming class of freshmen we'd listen to our CDs. I guess at some point I had cycled through all of mine, so my colleague let me peruse his collection for some new material. My selection of The Strokes' debut album Is This It?, which I did not own and had not heard in its entirety, was met with a sneer of disapproval. "The Strokes? Please," he reprimanded, "maybe if you're a screaming sixteen-year-old girl" (apparently he had grown sick of the CD). Of course, by that point, in mid-2004, his criticism did carry legitimacy. The Strokes had long since eclipsed the up-and-coming garage-revivalist coolness that had "saved rock-n-roll," and were now a fixture of mainstream anti-mainstreamism, latched onto by pop culture as an ironic exercise in subculture hipness (think MGMT or any band that's ever been featured in an iPod commercial). But that didn't make them any less good.

By the time the next summer had rolled around and my old coworker had moved on to a different summer activity, I found myself working the same job, and this time The Strokes' follow-up album, Room on Fire, was most often my work-music of choice. The opening "I wanna be forgotten/and I don't wanna be reminded" whisked me away from my desk chair to crowded post-half-past-midnight college bars and hazy fraternity basements; into laughing crowds when you steal a look towards the girl you caught eyes with on the way in -- but then also through the crowded halls of high school and the parking lot after school on a Friday and the bored weekends. The songs struck a chord somewhere amongst the sometimes thick, sometimes acute nostalgia of my then-life's "coming-of-age" moments, however cheesy they seemed: moments that were encompassed by both high school and college timeframes. I was a starry-eyed rising sophomore with high school behind me, but with its taste still in my mouth. And I'd gone through a damn lot of riveting and momentous social situations, you'd better believe it. Julian Casablancas' ineptitude for writing lyrics worth their weight in anything more valuable than empty beer bottles, a perennial favorite target of critics' jeers and sneers, turned out to be The Strokes' most endearing quality.



But let's not forget about the music itself. It is, in fact, nothing short of brilliant. Love them or hate them, The Strokes changed modern rock -- they were the original postpunk revivalists, or at least the ones that brought the movement to national attention. They were good at it, and they knew it. Much like their scrappy, perpetually-recovering-from-the-night-before image, every note of these songs is carefully thought out and placed strategically amongst the others. They are musical whizkids and are probably kind of nerdy about it. They get a lot of comparisons to Television, which I partially agree with. The Strokes are a little less dramatic; they attack and execute the songs all business-like, without the exuberance or drama-queenism of Television. No, they definitely wrote songs that could only have been written by kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties.

It's an interesting contrast -- the obsessive detail of the instrumentation and song construction, and the lazy, half-drunk lyrics. Like I said, it's nothing short of brilliant. Listen to "Automatic Stop," the robot-reggae third track on Room On Fire, and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Get lost in your own memories of those high school dances, those late nights in your favorite dim-lit local establishment, that end of the relationship that was either never a relationship in the first place or isn't really ending (see "The End has no End," track 10). It's a fun, fanciful album, and it remains one of my favorites. Call me a doting sixteen-year-old girl.

You Can't Break Up With Me, I Fucking Love You

Let's face it -- breaking up sucks, no matter how much you despise the person. You just can't shake that "what if" feeling that inevitably creeps up after any major decision; you just can't get the person out of your mind. "What the hell am I doing with my life?" you ask yourself on many a sleepless night. But we should take a queue from breakups. More so than in all of life's other trying situations, during breakups we look towards music to save us. Whilst deep in the throes of one of those self-loathing sessions of sorrow and solidarity, there is nothing like a powerful, uplifting tune to pull our spirits up, to give us hope for the vague and idealistic future. "O, but what is a song?" you might ask. "A three- to six-minute recording of some scattered thoughts, some whimsical product of an artistic fantasy -- how could it possibly help me?" But then you find yourself listening to the damn thing on repeat.

Here is my appeal -- take what you learn from a breakup and use music to help get you through other shitty situations! Below you'll find a few shameless guilty pleasures that are probably breakups songs, but can really be applied with a healthy glob of neosporin to all of life's trials, large and small. Enjoy --







Doesn't sound very happy at first...but it is just listen to it!

Is That That New Androgyny You've Got On?

Girls - Album

I suppose that with a band name like Girls, I really shouldn't have been caught too off guard when a male voice opens the album with the lyric "Oo I wish I had a boyfriend!" And seriously, how P-in-C to be caught off guard, right? It's a moot point anyway, cause check this, he's not talking about a GAY boyfriend, bro, he just means, like, a boy that's a friend. That's not a bad summary of the entire album: leadman Christopher Owens, suppressed as a child growing up in the Children of God cult, is really just looking for somebody -- any gender, race, sexual identity, etc -- to be "friends forever" with.

But before I get ahead of myself. This album was getting some convincing reviews, each and every one harping Owens' endearing personal story, so I decided it would be worth checking out. I found it difficult to classify. It's big these days, since being retro is all the shit, to talk about influences -- but Girls seem to have no influences. Either that, or they're a master collage of the last half-century of music. You'll probably hear the usual Pet Sounds callouts thrown into reviews, but it's kind of a load of crap -- I mean, people have been peddling that comparison since Sgt. Pepper's. Let's see, where to start? The vocals are a goofy combination of Bryan Ferry and pre-White Album George Harrison, the lyrics are loose caricatures of middle-market Morrissey poetics, the music is a song I made up on my guitar last weekend. The latter point should be highlighted -- when you listen to 'em real good, when you really turn them inside-out, these songs are nothing earth-shatteringly innovating. It's kind of one of those things where they are just novel because Girls came up with them first, and everyone else slaps their heads and says, "duh." It seems so obvious when you hear it. But see, Album is all of what I just said in a good way. It's the kind of stuff you listen to and try to declare predictable, until you realize that it was only predictable in hindsight, which makes it not predictable at all.

All that nonsense aside, this is a very solid album, and a very palatable artistic effort. In order to be successful, a piece of art must fall somewhere in a specific region on the grand spectrum of substance of content and aesthetic of presentation. Listening to Album has helped me to solidify -- and it thus makes an excellent example of -- my theory of Substance vs. Aesthetic. Turn your attention to the graph at right: you'll notice we've plotted the two-dimensional relationship between the aforementioned qualities. As you can see, there is a critical boundary (blue arc) in the planar relationship past which artists must attain in order for consumers to classify their efforts as "that fresh shit" (or similarly laudatory phrases). Note that the arc-edness of the boundary allows for achievement of fresh shit without much of one of the two qualities -- providing that the other proliferates in the work. But as you sacrifice bits of the proliferous quality, you must compensate with disproportionate additions of the other in order to maintain freshness.

The crux of this model is that when an artist does reach one of those extremes, the excessive quality in fact becomes, in part, the other -- extremely poignant substance of content becomes the aesthetic of presentation; most beauteously crafted presentation aesthetics become the substance. I couldn't figure out the best way to demonstrate that graphically, but you get the idea. What Girls have done is taken such crude, pristine emotion, and thrown it straight at us, without subjecting it to the industrial refinement of said emotion known as, well, artistic expression. Christopher Owens' confused and simplistic complaints, as if coming from a little kid who doesn't understand why none of the other kids want to play with him, move you to simultaneous sympathy and delight. It is pure, unadulterated substance. And in its disregard for the esoterics of subtlety it achieves the aesthetic of presentation required of all art that is captivating and pleasuring.

And it's a veritable exercise in androgyny, which, if you haven't heard, is the new black.

Arcane Delicacy or Blunt Force?

My Bloody Valentine - Sometimes

This song changed my perspective on distortion. I'm sure it was done at least once before Loveless was released in 1991, but for some reason to me the idea of a heavily distorted guitar played without any accompanying drum arrangement to form a song seemed so novel. Who knows what ungodly effects Kevin Shields wound his guitar through to create the sound -- but it comes barreling through with all sorts of raw emotion and angst in tow, channeling a destructive but acquiescent otherwordly space-out kind of vibe (not to mention inspiring at least half of Siamese Dream). Rarely in music do we see such resounding dichotomy between arcane delicacy and blunt force; between individual confidence and gripping self-loathing; between beauty and destruction. But even so, after you listen to it as much as I have you realize there's not really any dichotomy at all, and that all of these sensations are one and the same. It's a delicate and moving force, an inexplicable confidence in one's own self-loathing. And If you can see deep enough into the destruction, you might just see the beauty contained therein.

Recommended listening on high volume or with headphones!

Workin' on a Brand New Stadium

Yo! So I went to the Bruce concert at Giants Stadium last Friday, the LAST CONCERT at Giants Stadium EVER! They are knocking it down to build a bigger and better one right next to it (actually it might be smaller, if the owners are as prudent of businesspersons as the Wilpons and the managers of Yankee Global Enterprises, LLC). Anyway, this concert was toted as the great blow-out to top all great blow-outs, and what better entertainer than The Boss to celebrate the demise of such a grand hallmark of brute New Jersey nationalism? Honestly, it was the first time I had ever been to the Meadowlands, but will hopefully not be my last, now that I know they are constructing a huge indoor ski slope there.

Considering that it was my first time to either the aforementioned venue or a Bruce concert, I felt like a bit of a tourist at first. That is, until the man himself stepped onstage, and instantly warmed over every last frozen fingertip of skepticism in the place with his big, dumb, Garden State charisma. Granted, the only fingertips of skepticism in the place were probably my own -- I mean this crowd was ROARING. And rightfully so -- Bruce is everyman's Everyman, all wrapped in bud-light gold Americana, the voice of every recession-afflicted Joe the Plumber. Within minutes, this avante-art snob was singing right along with those glorious middle-American incantations.

Mayhap I hath imbibed a generous share of the bitter mead and barley-wine, but I managed to punch some pretty spot-on notes into the Notepad app of my Blackberry (yeah bitches, we have apps too). Thought instead of trying to fumble through the regular gauntlet of self-glorifying prose, I'd simply share the notes with you:

"I'm going down down down" [yup, just typing in lyrics]

"Powerfuck new jersey pride machismoism"

"Every song was the most dramatic thing since the roman senate murdering julius caesar"

"No one wants to be an alcoholic, but glory days just makes it sound so convincing"

"Every song began with 1234, opening the testosterone floodgates and turning the volume up to rock you silly"

"There were no discernable instruments, only an underdriving, mulling sound of powerfuck, with bruce's voice crashing down on your brain with the most driving" [at this point I think I just couldn't think of anything clever to say so gave up]

"To be honest, he might not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he is certainly the fucking boss. No one can deny that."

Amen.

Thrift Store Gems #1

Hum - You'd Prefer an Astronaut

I was digging around a thrift shop and picked up a Hum album called "You'd Prefer an Astronaut" for $1.99. I was only familiar with one song of theirs, a somewhat-typical sounding post-grunge deep-distorted dragging dirge whose main lyric is "she thinks she missed the train to Mars/she's out back counting stars," which I remember being played incessantly on my local modern rock station in the late nineties. The song was also featured in a Cadillac commercial a few years ago, back in the glory days of the clumsy and inefficient American automobile, though I'm not sure any of the song's lyrics were involved. I didn't actually know the name of the song -- but thank the powers that be for Life On Blackberry, for I was able to confirm right there in the store with some quick thumb-punching that it was indeed one of this album's tracks, "Stars." Additionally, the cover of the album was green with a zebra on it, so I was compelled to pull the trigger.

The album opened with a track that was exactly what I was expecting: slow-tempoed heavily-distorted multilayered guitars through which chord changes are hardly distinguishable; a flat, echoless voice that approaches spoken word and boasts mild nasal congestion. Ah, the Nineties. With the resurgence of all these elements of the Seventies and Eighties in popular music, it is refreshing sometimes to hear a good old-fashioned angsty distorted Nineties dirge. I wasn't much a fan of the second track. The third track was "Stars." I realized then what makes this song so great: the intro. A very distortion-less, echo-less, reverb-less, everything-less simple three-chord guitar riff cycles a few times through. The vocalist, Matt Talbott, sings the flagship lyric (above) twice. On the end of the second time through, on the final word "stars," about 45 giant ragged overdubbed guitars come crashing down on a D chord (this song is an unmistakable 'dropped-D' for all of you guitarists out there). Let that note hang as the distortion trails off --- ah yes. That's it. The rest of the song is pretty good too -- at least clearly worthy of extended radioplay and a Cadillac commercial. But it is that forlorn intro that really catches you and gives you that feeling that the song you are about to listen to is about something much more profound than you will ever experience or understand.

That being said, a few tracks later I found Talbott singing lyrics like "it's a waste of a song/you're a waste of my lungs." I realized that the album had a beautiful amateur quality that is harder to come by than it seems like it should be (and not just because the first measure of the fifth track "The Very Old Man" features the Nineties recording trademark of including musician screw-ups in the final cut; see Green Day's "Good Riddance"). Yeah, I know -- there are obviously plenty of bands and songs around that go for that amateur sound. But it almost sounds like Hum are really trying to sound professional, and the amateur sound I'm hearing is by accident. I guess that would be the musical equivalent of just not being good, but it's endearing. You can really hear, see, and feel the instruments being played. You can grasp the songwriting process. You can let yourself get wrapped up in the lunar guitars without losing sight of the humans behind them. While there's nothing truly amazing about this album, and admittedly, the songwriting isn't stellar, I felt instant affection for it. Not bad for a thrift store nab someone probably got bored of in 1999.

FREE MUSIC

SUB POP PRESENTS INSOUND DIGITAL MIXTAPE - SEPTEMBER 2009

Not to let Insound monopolize this site, but they just keep coming up with funky ass shit like every single day. Plus, what I am about to discuss for the remainder of this article is a perfect hybrid between an actual album (as the title of this site would suggest and from which the last two entries have deviated) and the instant gratification of a grab-and-go free mp3 download. So Insound spit out this digital mixtape for the month of September. It's tagged as "Sub Pop Presents:", so take note all you avid record-label followers. Download it HERE.

I don't think there is an intended order to the tracks, but here are some of the highlights:

Iron & Wine -- Belated Promise Ring. I haven't heard too many songs from these guys, but from what I can gather it is almost purely folk music. This one is particularly gorgeous. It is a typical ode to the quirky girl that's been around since childhood, with whom the protagonist has always been confusedly in love in spite of the admonishments of others around him, brimming with fondness, nostalgia, and the bittersweet realization that it will never work.

No Age -- You're A Target. No Age, doing what they do best. Rockabilly tunes and rhythms strangled and obfuscated through nightmarish distortion; slightly off-tune demonic sounds -- the exact instrument responsible uncertain -- welling up through the brackish noise. I think the vocals are what make this band great -- they draw the sound away from the My Bloody Valentine comparisons it might otherwise herald and cement the band's status as one of the more biologically sophisticated evolutions of punk.

Sunny Day Real Estate -- Seven. This track is off of the digitally-remastered version of Diary that was released recently. It sounds amazing. I have the original version of the album, but this track alone has been enough for me to seriously consider picking up the upgrade -- and it's in fact one of my least favorite from the album (in spite of its being the most popular). For as long as I've owned the album I've said that a major part of what makes it so great is the drumwork. Plenty of rock music has outstanding percussion, but you usually have to consciously listen to it to appreciate it. On this track, and on the rest of Diary, the drums stand out as magnificent and energetic whether the listener likes it or not.

The Vaselines -- Son of a Gun. The Vaselines are perhaps most famous for being audibly called out on Nirvana's timeless "Unplugged" album. This track here sounds like it was recorded by holding a microphone to a 200-ft metal pipe pointed towards the band -- with the wind blowing. I almost want to say it has a Clash kind of feel to it.

Fleet Foxes -- Mykonos. This song has been kicking around the internet for awhile. It was released as part of their Sun Giant EP, which preceded their critically-infallible self-titled debut LP by a few months back in 2008. The song sounds a lot like the song "Your Protector" from the debut -- until you reach the middle and it launches into a thundering, voluminous refrain, the harmonized vocals soaring above it all in true Foxes fashion -- complete with plenty of references to the narrator's brother.

Red Red Meat -- Gauze. The song opens with a progression of slow chord strums sporting a cadence we might expect from Radiohead -- you know, where you aren't quite sure at first how a consistent percussive beat is going to fit in exactly. The vocals have more of a Collective Soul thing going on. I am quite fascinated with the sort of lazy, inexact guitar, occasionally half-strumming or half-plucking whenever it feels like it. The effect is actually quite soothing, and I imagine this is the kind of song that would precipitate a gradual lull in conversation amongst a small group of people as each inadvertently finds his or herself drawn into listening.

Flight of the Conchords -- Hurt Feelings. These guys never fail to make me LOL.

....And there's plenty more good stuff on this mix to choose from and form your own conclusions about. Take advantage while the gettin's good: Sub Pop Presents Insound Digital Mixtape - September 2009

Straight West Coastin'

Best Coast

I discovered a new artist through Insound's weekly "free mp3" promotional gag. Looking back at that sentence, I realize how incredibly un-noteworthy such a statement is, considering I rarely have heard of the artist featured in the free song of the week. What I should have said was that I discovered a new artist worth listening to: Best Coast. You're probably thinking that such a name could only be the alias of some fuckoff So-Cal punkster -- true from what I can gather, but in this case it sounds like the brains behind the one-woman operation, Bethany Cosentino, at least spent some time across the prairie in NYC before making such an ultimately superlative declaration (and using it as the title of her musical act no less). So, Respeck.

At any rate, I would describe the music as a combination of the song "Strange" by Built to Spill, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and early-60s feel-good rock 'n' roll. I know that can't be too far off base, since under the "Sounds Like" section of her myspace page youtube videos of The Everly Brothers and The Beach Boys are embedded, but there's definitely a multi-generational feel to this stuff. It's as if the music of those bygone days is being channeled through the jadedness of nineties music and spit out through the contemporary acceptance -- nay, reverence -- of lo-fi noise-pop. Like, the song "Make You Mine," for instance, wouldn't sound too out of place on the soundtrack of American Graffiti. There is a beauty in the repetition of these songs (each contains no more than about six distinct lines of lyrics); in spite of the couldn't-care-less vocal delivery, the lyrics themselves seem heartfelt and paint very accessible impressions of emotional places we've all been. Besides, behind all of that static fuzz and not giving a shit, Bethany actually has a pretty solid voice. I keep hearing sort of a Nancy Sinatra sneer to it. It might not be good in the academic sense, but it is good in any and every other sense because I want to keep hearing it.

Now that I've talked up Best Coast enough for you to run out and pick up the album, I have to tell you that there is no album to pick up -- yet -- unless, that is, you're more authentic than I and own a device capable of playing 7" vinyls (aka 45s). I found this youtube video featuring one of her songs, Sun Was High (So Was I) laid over a portion of some weird French movie. Though it's a song title you might expect from a bunch of high-school juniors who smoked weed for the third time yesterday, it seems to be Bethany's most popular song at this point, judging by the playcount statistics on myspace. It has an attractively warm and dreamy feel to it, and yes, does convey all that which its title suggests. Hope ya can dig on this stuff as much as I am, and definitely check out the myspace page.

A New Zoo

Come one, come all: the Electric Zoo music festival, a celebration of the genre formerly known as "techno," Electronica. The former was probably always an overgeneralized, blase term anyway, but I think it would be safe to say at this point that "techno" has been reduced to an uneducated and possibly condescending appellation for a style that has truly become more than a mere hypersexed niche of fist-pumping guidoism. That's not to say that the crowd assembled at this effective tri-stage outdoor rave on Randall's Island seemed interested in any consideration of the music beyond that which is required for the most primitive of dancelike bodily movements. Circa 6 PM on Saturday afternoon, amidst the muddy cocktail of pulsating bass that hung in the air, one look around the place revealed a raw and ragged picture of guiltless hedonism. Cigarettes hung from the mouths of sweaty, emaciated faces, which adorned every color and style of sunglasses to be popular within the last 25 years, and whoops and hollers and other nonsensical ululations rang out as the music would reach one of the climactic buildups that are so characteristic of electronic music.




It was an experience to say the least. I didn't really know what to expect, going into it, and that's probably why I decided to go. After the perfunctory milling about inside the entrance, our group made its way over towards the second-largest of stages. It was hot and messy and everyone inside was pretty spaced out but enjoying the music. We made our way to the heart of the thing and began bouncing and grooving with the music. The performer was up on the stage amongst a stack of equipment and a tangle of wires, furiously intent on manipulating whatever buttons and switches were splayed out in front of him to exact the most body-pumping sonic sensations on the engrossed crowd. After a series of electronic whirrs and crunches, the sounds quickly evolved into a new rhythm. Some sort of continuous synth-bass infiltrated every nook and cranny of my sensory awareness and I was helpless but to bob my frame up and down in sync with the fascinating noise. Looking around, most of the other concertgoers appeared to be similarly affected -- and of course others were still just sort of spaced out and hanging around -- but either way, it was pretty effing cool stuff.

After a bit of the standard festival lollygagging and much-needed hydration (the water/gatorade lines were longer than the beer lines by about sixfold), we found ourselves at the main stage. This marvel of modern visual sensationalism was equipped with all sorts of nifty lights and LCD screens blasting the illest of abstract lines and shapes, and occasionally, when the situation warranted, the nodding likeness of a grinning dead rodent. I'm serious -- for those of you who are down with this electronic music shiz, you probably know this to be none other than the calling card of Deadmau5 (pronounced "ded mouse"). To uproarious cheers, what I could only assume to be a twenty-something man wearing an opaque, spherical, red mouse-helmet with enormous ears emerged onto the stage. With a few fluid hand motions across the equipment in front of him a cycle of pacman-era tones began. The man-mouse deftly whisked more and more sounds into the cycle, until the whole thing could no longer contain itself, and erupted into a glorious beat with those backwards-sucking kick drums and that electronic venom for which the wild-eyed crowd hungered so.



"This is pure hedonism, and I love it!" exclaimed one of our group members at one point. We were dancing around a pole supporting the tent above the smallest of the three stages in a murky half-light of greenish blue. After having experienced this stuff for upwards of 7 hours, I still couldn't tell any difference between one song and the next, but I realized that wasn't the point. It was complete hedonism, a reckless orgy of youthful disregard, and promised nothing else. Was that anything new? As we walked back into Manhattan across the Triborough Bridge I caught a great view of the shimmering skyline reflecting in the East River. The reflection of the headlights of cars flying up the FDR Drive reminded me that the rest of New York City was going about its business as usual.

That 16th Note High Hat = Crack

Discovery - LP

My street cred came into question at a party recently when I had to admit I hadn't heard of Discovery. Granted, I don't normally fucks with electronica-dance-type stuff, and I really don't know much about the genre, the major players, benchmarks, etc, but I figured there was no time like the present to tackle something new, unfamiliar, and endorsed by designer-drug enthusiasts around the globe. On their myspace page, the duo (composed half-and-half of Vampire Weekend and Ra Ra Riot members) describe themselves as "experimental neo-soul," which I think is exactly accurate. Not that I could ever really disagree with the description a band assigns to itself (hell, Liam Gallagher had me convinced that Oasis really were the "best band in the world"). I was happy as well to see that they listed "that sixteenth-note high hat that you're hearing in da night" as one of their major influences, finally some credit where credit is due. And plus -- Dipset, anyone? Hot damn! So I clicked "play."

The sounds are a lovely pastiche of both all that is cool and all that is good about contemporary dance party music. Those who create, broadcast, and listen to party music walk a precarious line: you need something that is new, fresh, and, in the case of hosting the party, ideally that only about a fifth to a quarter of the partygoers have heard before -- but you need something that still has that feel-good groove and those pleasure-pushing tricks. Discovery seems to fit the bill. Most people have heard of Vampire Weekend, some people have heard of Ra Ra Riot -- I'm willing to bet that a smaller fraction of the intersection of those two populations has heard of these guys. And it's certainly got that synth-pump crack that you hate to crave. Soft, honest vocals take us on a tour of the youths' modern dance-floor world, backed by reprocessed snippets of popular culture (i.e., those beats that are hot on the street) arranged into synchronous, soul-pleasing rhythms. "My bed's too big for just me" plead the multitracked vocals, reminding us how tough it is to be young, single, and hip as hell. I'm lead to believe this is all a satirical experiment, an embellished joke on all the hot shit the kids are listening to these days, exaggerated to the point of being entertaining and satisfying.

By the end of the album, it's clear they seem to have run out of sounds, but the songs still have that fruity lusciousness to them. It's good in the David Bowie sense -- kind of like a fun-house mirror, it's an interpretive and exaggerated expression of what's around it. It's a creative summary of the industry-leading trends. I don't think it will last, but it will be fun while it does. It'll be bumping at my next party. Consider yourself in the knowing fifth.

"A Maze" of Sound

Amazing Baby - Rewild

I was listening to Amazing Baby's album, Rewild, while riding a bus through a torrential thunderstorm in the Catskills. It had been mostly sunny for the beginning of the journey, but at some point I looked out the window and there was this enormous ugly writhing mass of black clouds ahead of us. The rain hit hard and lightning flashed from every direction, though the thunder was nearly drowned out by the roaring of the rain, the bus, and the road. All this while I had been listening to Rewild. I had recently bought it from iTunes and hadn't really listened to all of the songs yet. In the most basic sense, I would describe the band as a more guitar-based fractal of MGMT that has been increased by a few dimensions -- with equal likelihood of spinning off into a beautiful, organic design, or crudely overlapping itself into an unattractive mess (which, not coincidentally, does also describe MGMT's lower-dimensional sound).

Technicalities aside, Amazing Baby's flavor of the fashionable clusterfuck hipster dance party psychedelia does seem to jab at an elusive organ of human nature. The songs are crisp and powerful, and there is enough echo on the vocals to distract you from paying too much attention to the actual words being sung. The lyrics, mind you, were also the last thing I would have been paying attention to, as our driver fearlessly bucked and wrenched the bus through a blinding downpour and what I was convinced was a flash flood. Though undeniably pretentious, Rewild on some levels manages to capture the magnitude of the human experience, in spite of song titles like "The Narwhal," which I am pretty sure features a choir of eunuchs rehearsing Eastern scales. There is some kind of honesty to the songs -- though many of them are a bit too coarse and awkward to try to swallow whole, they certainly don't pretend not to be. There's quite a bit of heart to 'em. Progressive could be the sympathetic way to describe it.

Not long afterwards, I had the chance to catch this band live at the Pier 54 summer concert series. Though I have to say the performance was mediocre, the band certainly gave it 120%, and they were by no means modest about voicing their respects to the main act, Yeasayer. Maybe they are trying to be a little more than just cool.