#2547 Sontag Shogun - Patterns for Resonant Space

We can call Tame Impala 60's. We know what kind of guitar sounds we mean when we say "70's rock". Don't get me started on the 80's. And god knows we're having a pretty sweet 90's revival lately: you know what that means, I can see your accidental scowl and grudging toetap from here.

But what's the 00's sound? It was too soon to define it for a while, but that excuse is running thin.

It was an era of "indie", where prettiness and intellect arose, where a less-superficial // still-overpolished version of 80's artifice came along right on schedule.

But -- the early 00's in particular -- were an impossibly generative era in...post rock? It's an overloaded term. Not all that mathy, muso bullshit, but a splintering of indie - a truly generative moment where ideas about how you could bend and break the rock template exploded, a flash, 2002-2004, where that 90's underground thing swung back around, with more production tricks and more ambition. It was the golden age of internet fandom, Pitchfork in particular, which deserves credit (admit it!) for bringing albums like Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone, One Word Extinguisher, Thunder Lightning Strike, Dead Cities Red Seas Lost Ghosts, and Thought for Food to the attention of thousands, inroads//outroads to//from a disintegrating concept of rock music.

--

It's those last two, in particular, that comes to mind here.


There is so much space in these songs.

Emotion hit only indirectly.

Rattle, hiss, incident, accident.

And somehow its a discredit to just call this an electronic album, or an experimental album, because it comes from that rock sense; somewhere down there; of reaching for your heart. Not telling your body to dance, not telling your head to call chin_scratch(), but to really engage you, on pop-parallel vectors.

I've listened to this twice now, and both times I've felt wrung out.

--

Pitchfork, still kicking, did some retroactive reviews of a bunch of Brian Eno albums today. And they praised his genius, his innovation, his embrace of the unpredictable, his outsider stance.

But most of his shit, truth be told, has always left me cold. It seems like an arch exercise, mostly.

--

This record though, does not feel like an exercise.

It is outside, and peering in with interest, and throwing down ropes, and building bridges best it knows how.

Piano notes ring long. Rattle and dust drum up. Space and place are conjured effortlessly, ghosts summoned by ghosts. Even the samples acknowledges that they're samples, a girl muttering "I'm not doing it as well as last time -- did I say other things?" Burning the authenticity of the moment and arriving at a new one in one fell swoop.

My whole prelude is all to say - I've been chasing that era, the early 00's, for a decade plus, now. That feeling of something that's not what I've heard before. And I've found little that didn't feel new for its own sake, that didn't feel detuned just to escape well-trod tunings.

But this excites me. It's new, inventive, evocative, promising -- so refreshingly new and promising.

I'd thought, for a while there, that there was no good sonic space to mine. That we could only drag back the weeds of far lands and chew them in collective consensus on their exotic greatness. But this is a little flash of hope 4.5/5