I remember when it all kind of crested last year, wondering what music would come out of this era. And here we are this season, the wave of the American situation, swelling on the production cycle, comes crashing. Albums by 00's darlings LCD, Arcade Fire, Liars, Thee Oh Sees, and now BSS, all slightly miserable. Onward and aware that this might be music no person not yet already born will ever hear.
And there's this unwillingness to smooth it all over. Here, in the form of this horrid piece of pacing, and endless parade of 4 minute songs, from a band that once let it breathe, this feels like an asthma attack. It feels like a band that thinks each song might be its last, dissonance overflowing every island.
They chug on. Shimmering guitars and this increasingly-fashionable unstoppable approach to post-motorik. There's nothing here that snaps me out, but maybe there's no out-snapping. A dirge even by the standards set before. Golden ages are over. We don't believe in god. We push on, because we must, but fun seems like an unaffordable luxury.
There's flashes of energy, but they feel like the thrashings of a drowning dog. The production itself an act of desperation, dancing in quicksand.
And yet, those horrid horns push us on, more lost than ever, they push us forward. Those chiming voices say "all right all right all right" and repeat what they feel, and crack and crash and hold you close in a sweat-drenched run in slow motion, repeating mantras, trying to convince themselves, too. And in the deep crannies lie wonderful details, little overlaps of vocals, little crackles of production, these cadences of half-smiled survival, small hopes fitting through gaps too small for sweeping gestures.
Yet another footnote for some hopeful future thesis about this era's immolating survival rock 4/5
Sunday, September 3, 2017
Saturday, September 2, 2017
#2600 LCD Soundsystem - American Dream
I've put this on a couple nights now, and it just puts me to sleep. Bear with me.
LCD used to get you ready to fuckinrock, used to reinforce your most romantic notions and buttress your deepest and most petty fears. They used to have you reaching for the stars.
But there's something in this new one that lulls me into the ground. It is the sound of a sympathetic, familiar guide who seems to have given up, and who invites you to give up too, and suddenly, unexpectedly, my worries are eroded, and I might be able to go to sleep tonight without a fight.
How could you make an LCD Soundsystem album in 2017? When the band's come and gone and come back, into a party that's fallen apart in the interim, where everyone is sick, and someone's making increasingly believable threats, and the cops aren't coming, and would it be better or worse if they were.
You do it with an album with song titles in all lowercase. With a title that's half-ironic, half-defeated, half-here, and sentiments that follow suit. It's music to die to, with the thinnest possible layers all piled one on the next. It's music that stretches slowly, just this side of boring, reprogramming your heartbeats, not to dance, but to the rhythm that's needed to make it to tomorrow and the next year and the next term of four, or four terms more, as the situation demands.
Counterpoint: "you should be uncomfortable!" Murphy exclaims. This is a full panic record, one that recognizes that the world is not ok, that maybe the place for wry winks about Losing My Edge aren't going to fly. But man it's exhausting.
More so than any of their previous albums, it feels like the work of a band. And it feels like a rock album, full of weight. And it feels like an experimental album, mostly devoid of hooks, here to melt your space-time, a downtrodden album that feels akin to Everything Now, another miserable, simmering piece of disco-adjacent sludge -- mostly unpleasant, but the medicine we need, maybe.
"I'm still trying...to wake up / I'm still trying...to wake up"
If I've been too subtle lately, let me be clear. The world is in a very bad place and so am I. And so are musicians with any awareness of the world whatsoever. And if we have the luxury of existence in a few decades, and the unlikely luxury of history was we know it by then, then that history will look back on this time with much interest, and all the miserable, peaceful, angry, soporific, desperate albums like this will tell the tale 4/5
LCD used to get you ready to fuckinrock, used to reinforce your most romantic notions and buttress your deepest and most petty fears. They used to have you reaching for the stars.
But there's something in this new one that lulls me into the ground. It is the sound of a sympathetic, familiar guide who seems to have given up, and who invites you to give up too, and suddenly, unexpectedly, my worries are eroded, and I might be able to go to sleep tonight without a fight.
How could you make an LCD Soundsystem album in 2017? When the band's come and gone and come back, into a party that's fallen apart in the interim, where everyone is sick, and someone's making increasingly believable threats, and the cops aren't coming, and would it be better or worse if they were.
You do it with an album with song titles in all lowercase. With a title that's half-ironic, half-defeated, half-here, and sentiments that follow suit. It's music to die to, with the thinnest possible layers all piled one on the next. It's music that stretches slowly, just this side of boring, reprogramming your heartbeats, not to dance, but to the rhythm that's needed to make it to tomorrow and the next year and the next term of four, or four terms more, as the situation demands.
Counterpoint: "you should be uncomfortable!" Murphy exclaims. This is a full panic record, one that recognizes that the world is not ok, that maybe the place for wry winks about Losing My Edge aren't going to fly. But man it's exhausting.
More so than any of their previous albums, it feels like the work of a band. And it feels like a rock album, full of weight. And it feels like an experimental album, mostly devoid of hooks, here to melt your space-time, a downtrodden album that feels akin to Everything Now, another miserable, simmering piece of disco-adjacent sludge -- mostly unpleasant, but the medicine we need, maybe.
"I'm still trying...to wake up / I'm still trying...to wake up"
If I've been too subtle lately, let me be clear. The world is in a very bad place and so am I. And so are musicians with any awareness of the world whatsoever. And if we have the luxury of existence in a few decades, and the unlikely luxury of history was we know it by then, then that history will look back on this time with much interest, and all the miserable, peaceful, angry, soporific, desperate albums like this will tell the tale 4/5
Friday, September 1, 2017
#2599 King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard - Sketches of Brunswick East
I just can't get with King/Wizard's slower, softer stuff. Their latest is seasickeningly jazzy, lilting relentlessly on brushy drums and sunny sketches. The vocals are a problem - those wiggly falsettos set me on edge, but the lack of real hooks or focus is the deal-breaker. Too frilly to rock out to, too weird to chill out to - points for uniqueness, another feather in the cap of the most prolific good band going, but it's a useless outing 3/5
#2598 Tera Melos - Trash Generator
Frantic start-stop electronics-drenched art-punk that will hash you to Polysics and Brainiac/Enon.
Half the appeal's in the details of the details of the subject matter, with song titles like System Preferences, Warpless Run, and Men's Shirt, rolling around in the hopeless minutia we're all drowning in. It's catchy, easy/hard stuff that I'll bet's a hoot live, but it could use a pretty island or to to give you respite from that chop 3.5/5
Half the appeal's in the details of the details of the subject matter, with song titles like System Preferences, Warpless Run, and Men's Shirt, rolling around in the hopeless minutia we're all drowning in. It's catchy, easy/hard stuff that I'll bet's a hoot live, but it could use a pretty island or to to give you respite from that chop 3.5/5
#2597 Perturbator - Dangerous Days
I've got this playlist brewing of forward-leaning, nightdriving, electronic music. Nothing too dancy, nothing too overtly 80's revival, nothing too chiptuned, nothing telegraphed, nothing pigeonholed, and definitely nothing slow - just a dozen half-off motorik tracks that pulls you into the next lane left again and again.
This'd fit right in. M83 and Justice in a lightcycle race, those big surging synths, those glacial guitar-impersonators, with clicky beats and plinky arpeggios that pepper the space with anticipation and tension. From the hooky openings to the epic closer - a near-perfect epic rockist beatclipper 4/5
This'd fit right in. M83 and Justice in a lightcycle race, those big surging synths, those glacial guitar-impersonators, with clicky beats and plinky arpeggios that pepper the space with anticipation and tension. From the hooky openings to the epic closer - a near-perfect epic rockist beatclipper 4/5
Thursday, August 31, 2017
#2596 Dan Melchior - Fire Breathing Clones on Cellular Phones
Can always use more Cowgirl in the Sand guitars! Perfectly nice one-man, I-made-an-album album. The songs are a little too repetitive and Melchior's solos occasionally degrade into practice scales, but its charmingly rough around the edges, and the saxes are a nice gravelly flourish 3/5
#2595 Billy Childish and Dan Melchior - Devil in the Flesh
Ragged, rootsy blues, covered in Lomax-level grit - it's a recording made of wood and nails and dust, for better or worse. Catchier than most such basics though 3.5/5
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