Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Oasis: Time Flies... 1994-2009

Album Review
Pitchfork
June 23, 2010
Link
6.0

Time Flies 











"I need to be myself/ I can't be no one else," sneers Liam Gallagher to start this 2xCD singles anthology. As a one-line encapsulation of Oasis, it still can't beat the refrain from the first song on the band's first album: "Tonight I'm a rock'n'roll star." And yes, there was a time when many indie-minded listeners' first reaction would've been to point out everyone else Liam and brother Noel apparently wanted to be, from the Beatles on down through glam and the Creation back catalog.

In the aftermath of Oasis' 2009 breakup, however, the sentiment (such as it is) behind 1994 debut single "Supersonic" rings startlingly true. The men from Manchester lived out a certain simple, populist idea of rock'n'roll stardom: They drank to excess, did lots of drugs, brawled, waged sibling warfare like the brothers Reid and Davies before them, sold millions of records, and made arrogant statements against anyone who saw the role of a popular musician as anything different. At the same time, as their all-too-human 2000s output proved, they could never be more or less than themselves-- simultaneously swaggering and down-to-earth, and, at their best, indelibly melodic.

This combination of characteristics helped spark an unprecedented 2.6 million applications for tickets to the 1996 English gig that gives Oasis' latest compilation its otherwise anonymous-looking cover image. Where 2006 2xCD best-of Stop the Clocks delved into album cuts as well as some of the band's once-sterling B-sides, Time Flies compiles only the 27 UK A-sides, plus, for the U.S. edition, the full album version of stateside smash "Champagne Supernova". As a product, then, it's equal parts redundant and incomplete, lacking album cuts like "Rock'N'Roll Star" as well as B-sides like "Talk Tonight" while adding three mostly unspectacular singles from 2008's Dig Out Your Soul. As strictly a listening experience, though, it's a decent document of a bunch of relatively unexceptional guys who willed themselves to greatness for a couple of years there but couldn't stop being relatively unexceptional.

Oasis never made a record with Brian Eno. They didn't do dystopian electronic concept albums. So to criticize their singles for being obvious or conservative feels almost as beside the point as dismissing Belle and Sebastian for being fey, Lil Wayne for being foul-mouthed, or Rage Against the Machine for, well, raging-- it's just sort of what they do. And what Oasis did really well was take their favorite musical influences and their favorite lyrical subjects and communicate them to a mass audience in a meaningful way, without ever trying to present themselves as if they were doing something that was over anybody's head. The songs hit you or they didn't. In that way, being unexceptional was the band's secret weapon; the further removed the Gallaghers & co. got from their listeners' reality, the less their music seemed to resonate with many people. They had nothing else up their sleeves.

A big selling point of this compilation is meant to be the inclusion of two non-album singles, 1994's "Whatever" and 2007's "Lord Don't Slow Me Down". Which, whatever. The first is drenched with enough strings to explain why soon-rival Damon Albarn, himself about to release orchestral material such as Blur's gorgeous "The Universal", might introduce the tune on "Top of the Pops". Noel takes the lead vocal on "Lord Don't Slow Me Down", a generically bluesy rocker that understandably earned the group's lowest chart placement in more than a decade; fans obsessive enough to want this already have it on the Dig Out Your Soul bonus CD.

At the very least, these songs exemplify the two basic types of singles Oasis have released over the years. On one hand are the slow, strummy, majestically nonsensical singalongs. Whether acoustic-based like "Wonderwall", piano-backed like "Champagne Supernova", or with a touch of Coldplay-predicting falsetto like "Live Forever", these songs tend to be more yearning and idealistic than is Oasis' general reputation. On the other hand are the cocky, muscular, more uptempo numbers: "Cigarettes & Alcohol", "Roll With It". Either way, the singles from 1994's Definitely Maybe and 1995's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? still sound like the instantly hummable, immaculately recorded work of outsiders who imagined themselves in their idols' shoes and, for a fleeting moment, convinced millions they just might fit. You're still better off buying the albums.

Since then, Oasis' full-lengths have fallen off sharply, a pattern the singles follow a little imperfectly. For example, while the songs on 1997's Be Here Now are a notch below their predecessors, they're still a cut above most of the tracks that followed; you'll see that here from the deafening helicopter assault of "D'You Know What I Mean?", but not so much from the 10-minute "Hey Jude"/"All You Need Is Love" orgy of "All Around the World". Despite ever-worsening lyrics, the singles from 2000's Standing on the Shoulder of Giants are no longer such disappointments in fuller context. However, the five-- yes, five-- A-sides from 2002's Heathen Chemistry are absolutely as appalling as you remember. 2005's Don't Believe the Truth offers two rollicking, Highway 61 Revisited-style tracks and one drippy piano ballad, all so-so. Dig Out Your Soul comes off best: Noel-sung "Falling Down" fits neither of the two Oasis single categories I've tried to establish here, and it's actually a pretty moving swan song, like "Setting Sun" a decade older and wiser.

In a typically unrestrained interview last year with the Sunday Times, Noel admitted that "I don't fucking know" what "Champagne Supernova" means. "But are you telling me, when you've got 60,000 people singing it, they don't know what it means?" he asked. "It means something different to every one of them." With Liam already prepping his next band-- called, of all things, Beady Eye-- a bit of Oasis nostalgia is probably inevitable. These singles will mean something different to everyone, but the question is whether they will mean anything to a generation that doesn't already remember them fondly. Here's betting a few of them will. Oasis' view of pop stardom was confining, it's true, but their fatal flaw wasn't wanting to communicate with the masses-- it was their eventual failure to communicate. They were only human, after all.

Allo Darlin' - Allo Darlin'

Album Review
Pitchfork
June 23, 2010
Link
7.9

Allo Darlin' 











In April, Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe asked, "Have we reached some point where our knees jerk and we kick away anything any critic can write off as cutesy or 'twee' or associate with the wrong movies?" He had a point, of course. After a short burst of enchanting indie pop albums by Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, the Boy Least Likely To, and many others in the mid-2000s, a cutesy sensibility has gone on to conquer the box office (Michael Cera, Zooey Deschanel) and the Billboard charts (Owl City). Faced with so much mainstream success, an anti-twee backlash was probably inevitable.

Sure enough, the last couple of years have seen the Lucksmiths break up, Los Campesinos! say adios to their glockenspiels, and Jens Lekman fall oh so silent. Younger indie poppers like the Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Vivian Girls ramp up the rickety distortion, while Swedish labels like Labrador, Service, and Sincerely Yours have expanded indie pop's sonic and conceptual palette far beyond C86 and Sarah Records. No-frills twee-pop definitely never went away, but few new bands lately have resonated much beyond the scene.

Say hello to Allo Darlin': a welcome reminder that any aversion to cutesy music in recent years may have been due not to the aesthetic, but the quality. The London-based foursome are firmly in the tradition of classic indie pop: Australian-born, ukulele-strumming singer Elizabeth Morris also plays in Tender Trap, the current band of Amelia Fletcher, an icon since her years in Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, and Marine Research, while bassist Bill Botting has backed former Hefner frontman Darren Hayman. The 10 songs on Allo Darlin's self-titled debut album, out in the UK on Fortuna Pop!, don't rewrite the formula for wistful bedsit charm as much as show that it can still be carried out masterfully.

Rather than the cloying infantilism of some twee bands, Allo Darlin' focuses its tunefulness on the simple pleasures and modest melancholies of young adulthood. With a flute solo and a John Hughes-inspired video, "The Polaroid Song" tackles wistful nostalgia but also sets the album's tone: "Feel like dancing on my own/ To a record that I do not know/ In a place I've never seen before." On "Silver Dollars", with chords strikingly reminiscent of Lekman's "Black Cab", Morris questions her career path and hopes one more gin and tonic will convince her romantic interest to leave with her at the end of the night. "Kiss Your Lips" ba-bas like Grease about salty-sweet kisses and Weezer's "El Scorcho", "Let's Go Swimming" puts Mazzy Star sinuousness behind imagery of a perfect day that "all the hipsters in Shoreditch couldn't style," and "Heartbeat Chili" quotes Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" for a kitchen-sink love story with fewer culinary accidents than Lekman's "Your Arms Around Me", but all of the sweetness.

The references continue-- a neurotic lover is no "Woody Allen"; a sensitive outcast in "If Loneliness Was Art" necessitates a mention of UK peers the Just Joans-- but as with the best pop, the overall effect more than justifies any clever borrowing. "My Heart Is a Drummer" rejects the notion of guilty pleasures over a chorus to which you can sing "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". Opener "Dreaming", featuring a baritone vocal from Pipettes founder Monster Bobby, plays like an urbane update of Heavenly boy-girl duet "C Is the Heavenly Option". Which reminds me: In a year when the Hold Steady released a song about a seminal indie pop band, the twee sensibility doesn't really appear to be on the decline-- no matter how many how many jerks have twitchy knees. More likely, it's just getting started.

Meet ceo: Inside the Mind of Eric Berglund of the Tough Alliance

Feature
Pitchfork
June 18, 2010
Link

"damn it, i'm not even an artist... i'm a whore and the holy ghost."

Meet ceo: Inside the Mind of Eric Berglund of the Tough Alliance












Eric Berglund is ceo. "I am ceo on so many levels," he says, "it almost makes me blush." With partner in "Silly Crimes" Henning Fürst, Berglund is also one half of Gothenburg, Sweden-based pop duo the Tough Alliance and co-founder of label Sincerely Yours (jj, Air France, the Honeydrips). Nothing to be bashful about there. After two great albums, a vinyl-only instrumental LP, and a handful of superb EPs and singles with TTA, Berglund steps out under the ceo name on his upcoming album White Magic, due June 28 in Europe, June 29 in the U.S., and July 2 in Australia and New Zealand on Modular. (Watch ceo's debut video, for "Come With Me", here.)

Berglund spoke to us over e-mail about his new album, the meaning of life, losing touch with nature, wanting to marry Lady Gaga, and, well, a whole range of topics, from the cosmic to the mundane. The very lengthy interview below appears exactly as he sent it back, with only a few small edits for typos and readability.

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Friday, June 4, 2010

Saint Etienne - Tiger Bay / Finisterre

Album Review
Pitchfork
June 4, 2010
Link
8.7/7.7

Tiger Bay / Finisterre


Many great pop songs can be said to have their own personality. Saint Etienne's have their own sense of place. Last June, Swedish dance-pop duo Air France released "GBG Belongs to Us", a three-part multimedia tribute to their hometown of Gothenburg. The Swedes explained their intentions in words lovingly similar to the ones they'd used to describe Saint Etienne in a Pitchfork interview a few months earlier: "For us, geography and architecture are essential elements of pop."

That goes for Pete Wiggs, Bob Stanley, and Sarah Cracknell, too. As anybody who recognized the above reference to early Saint Etienne album cut "London Belongs to Me" already knows-- and many more people are just in time to discover. The UK trio's first two albums, 1991's Foxbase Alpha and 1993's So Tough, were metropolitan through and through, building 1990s ambient-house modernism onto a foundation of 1960s Swinging London mod. Add the slightly twee romanticism of record-collecting indie kids, and the results transported listeners someplace new and fantastical. (Full disclosure: Stanley, a music journalist, has contributed to Pitchfork.)

Faster than you could say "Live Forever", though, there went the neighborhood. As if those first two albums weren't far enough out of step with the prevailing trend toward grunge, then along came Britpop, which picked up Saint Etienne's Anglophilia only to mire it, with a few happy exceptions, in retro guitars and lad culture. The group kept on moving-- and just as well, too. Tiger Bay was where they successfully confronted that Difficult Third Album by taking the M4 through the British countryside. Finisterre was where, after a record or two in the (relative) wilderness, they revisited their old London and once again made it new. Both, as the latest in an ongoing series of 2xCD reissues from this influential but still underappreciated band, have plenty to offer, to longtime followers and curious newcomers alike.

Tiger Bay is sort of Saint Etienne's best album. I say "sort of," because it depends who you ask, but also because it depends which version you ask them about. There are different track listings and different covers and everything. This deluxe edition stays truest to the original UK release, which is a bit odd, seeing as in the liner notes Stanley is quoted as saying that Tiger Bay "needed a couple more punchy pop songs." The 1996 German reissue, an editorial favorite around here, includes probably the group's punchiest pop song: Eurodance smash "He's on the Phone", which isn't on either disc of this volume.

No matter. Originally released in 1994, Tiger Bay still makes for the subtlest, most cinematic, and pretty much indisputably last of Saint Etienne's astounding initial burst of albums. The record's blend of pastoral folk and silvery electronics was worlds apart from Union Jack-waving contemporaries' phony Beatlemania. More recent atmospheric-folk records like Goldfrapp's Seventh Tree haven't quite been able to get there, either.

The geographical Tiger Bay bustled as a 19th-century Welsh port, gave its name to a 1950s Hayley Mills slice-of-life film, and has since been rebranded as Cardiff Bay, a contemporary leisure and entertainment district. Saint Etienne's Tiger Bay can evoke all three locations at once. Just see "Like a Motorway": It borrows the melody of traditional song "Silver Dagger", coolly recounts a suburban melodrama, and runs on pulsating synths befitting Giorgio Moroder. It never breaks for a chorus.

The rest of the album brilliantly explores this crossroads between pre-modern, modern, and ultramodern. Underworld's Rick Smith, who mixed and engineered "Like a Motorway", also lends a futuristic sheen to instrumental opener "Urban Clearway" and wordlessly urgent harmonica trip "Cool Kids of Death". For orchestral folk, there's acoustic ballad "Former Lover". Sometimes Tiger Bay wants too much, like dub meeting traditional song on "Western Wind / Tankerville", or Massive Attack's Shara Nelson howling into a gale on the downtempo "On the Shore". The poppier moments hold up best: the flamenco-Eurodance weirdness of "Pale Movie", the Bacharach-house swoon of "Hug My Soul", the unadorned yearning of "Marble Lions".

Eight years later, Finisterre was a return to urbane form for Saint Etienne. After a pair of albums that were, by their standards, underwhelming-- comparatively old-fashioned 1998 Sub Pop debut Good Humor (no "u"), recorded in Sweden, and sprawling 2000 Sean O'Hagan/To Rococo Rot collaboration Sound of Water, recorded in Berlin-- the group jetted back to London. The city was in transition, and so were they. The clever spoken-word samples they'd used until Tiger Bay were here again, and the stylish dance-pop was, too, only with a crucial difference.

No longer the café-hopping naïfs of the early years, these were suburban adults reclaiming the city nightlife. That's more or less the subject of surging acoustic-house opener "Action". Sometimes they mature gracefully, as on the easy-listening "Stop and Think It Over", but not always: Would you check out the electro muscle on critic-baiting "Amateur"? Other times they remember not to grow up at all, whether with galloping vocoder flirtation "New Thing" or the gorgeously textured stomp of "Shower Scene". Slinky, self-referential "B92" continues to impress even after Annie's "Heartbeat" and Little Boots' "Stuck on Repeat" have helped take this idea to fluxpop extremes. Wildflower's cutesy rap on "Soft Like Me" still isn't fashionable, but the song's title is an invitation; those who accept it won't mind.

Elsewhere, the bonus tracks are the expected hodgepodge. On Tiger Bay's second disc, German-edition tracks "Hate Your Drug" and "I Buy American Records" are welcome, as are the Christmas songs-- add them to your holiday playlists now, before you forget-- while the previously unreleased demos, though historically interesting, are no match for the album versions. Finisterre has its hidden gems, too, such as "Soft Like Me"-like instrumental "Primrose Hill" or the laidback pop of "Anderson Unbound". But it's mostly curios: an electro banger for a canceled "Dr. Who" compilation, a Serge Gainsbourg genre exercise, and pretty decent Lee Hazlewood and Beach Boys covers. The low point comes on Tiger Bay extra "Black Horse Latitude", when Cracknell wonders, "Is Michael Jackson's Dangerous as 'bad' as people say?"

For people who own the original records, the best reason to shell out some cash this time around is probably the film counterpart to Finisterre, which comes on a DVD with limited-edition versions of its namesake album. The arty cinematography can make for slow viewing, but the movie provides an enjoyable glimpse of a wonderfully intimate London, including music from the two discs and interviews with the likes of Vashti Bunyan. Also worth owning are the informative Q&As in the liner notes, although it's a shame that Cracknell and Wiggs' comments couldn't be included for Tiger Bay-- victims of a hard drive crash, apparently. Harrumph.

Where were we? Oh yeah. So Tiger Bay became Cardiff Bay, and Finisterre is now Fitzroy. "Tear it down and start again," Cracknell sings on Finisterre's title track. On the same song, Cosmetique's Sarah Churchill declares, "I believe in Donovan over Dylan, love over cynicism." These two albums are landmarks in the career of a band who turned that belief into great pop; in 2010, they sound less like museum pieces than a living, breathing part of the musical environment. This place belongs to us.

Robyn - Body Talk Pt. 1

Album Review
Pitchfork
June 1, 2010
Link
8.5


Body Talk Pt. 1












"I'm always going to feel like this person on the outside looking in," Robyn recently told Popjustice. The Swedish singer and songwriter has no fear of pop: A platinum seller in her own country, Robyn cracked the Billboard top 10 in the late 1990s working with famed teen-pop producer Max Martin. As the daughter of a couple who ran an independent theater company, however, Robin Miriam Carlsson is also a woman who enjoys doing things her own way.

Robyn, first released in Scandinavia five years ago on the newly liberated singer's own Konichiwa label, ultimately led to a UK #1 hit, a tour with Madonna, and Snoop Dogg remix spots. Major labels turned out to be a necessary evil, but the deal's on Robyn's terms now. "It's pop music, you know?" she told us earlier this year. "It's entertainment and at the same time it has to mean something to me. I like dealing with that balance."

With Body Talk Pt. 1, the first of a potential three new albums tentatively scheduled for 2010, Robyn doesn't just walk the line between what she has called the "commercial" and "tastemaker" realms. She obliterates it. Immaculately produced, fantastically sung, and loaded with memorable choruses, this eight-song effort has plenty to please everyone from post-dubstep crate diggers to teen tweeters-- often at the same time. Like most of Robyn's best tracks, though, from mid-90s teen-pop hit "Show Me Love" to "With Every Heartbeat" a decade later, Body Talk Pt. 1 is capable of not only appealing to many different people, but also touching them emotionally.

"Play me some kind of new sound/ Something true and sincere," Robyn begs on "None of Dem", a dark, tense, early-morning type of dance track featuring Norwegian electropop duo Röyksopp. She's not being hypocritical. Opener "Don't Fucking Tell Me What to Do", a talky electro-house tirade against electro-age anxieties, really isn't like anything else in the singer's discography. "Dancehall Queen", her so-wrong-it's-right collaboration with tastemaking Philadelphia DJ/producer Diplo, may have purists grumbling at its 1980s dancehall synths, subwoofer wobble, and "Sleng Teng" shoutout-- the title's sideways allusion to ABBA appears to have gone generally overlooked-- but "I came to dance, not to socialize." It's here, dancing, with a chorus that Santigold and Gwen Stefani might kill for, that Robyn is free from all the worries that are "killing" her at the album's start.

Robyn reintroduced Robyn as a Missy Elliott-loving badass. Body Talk Pt. 1 texts that persona into the 2010s. Most of a piece with songs like "Konichiwa Bitches", "Cobrastyle", and "Curriculum Vitae" is first preview "Fembot", a Klas Åhlund co-write that flips the script on Robyn's track for Röyksopp's 2009 Junior. On "The Girl and the Robot", Robyn was the neglected lover "asleep again in front of MTV." Here, to wonderful effect, she's a "scientifically advanced hot mama."

But Robyn seems most comfortable watching from afar as somebody else goes home with her prize. Dancing, the narrator's escape on "Dancehall Queen", becomes a prison of her own making on the album's emotional peak, "Dancing on My Own"-- a clear descendant of Robyn's girl-loses-boy, boy-ties-Ms.-Whatshername's-laces classic, "Be Mine!". With unadorned piano and strings, "Hang With Me (Acoustic Version)" is closer to "Be Mine! (Ballad Version)" and hits similar emotional notes: You say you're just friends, well that's OK, but don't you dare "fall recklessly, headlessly in love with" her. If she's sitting on a killer dancefloor version of this one, good luck.

In an album full of songs that manage to be both specific and universal, "Cry When You Get Older" might prove to be the most enduring: a prom song, a graduation song, an end-of-summer-camp-PowerPoint song. Dudes like Max Martin and Peter Bjorn & John meet at parties and brag about what great melodies they've written, Robyn told us a couple of years ago; this is one worth bragging about. The lyrics are conversational, the synths respond, and there's a Prince reference to go with a Smashing Pumpkins' "1979"-like perspective on teenage ennui. Everybody in the back, quote it: "I lost all my faith in science/ So I put my faith in me."

Body Talk Pt. 1 ends painfully soon, but at least it ends with a pair of tracks focusing on Robyn's soulful voice. In addition to "Hang With Me", there's "Jag Vet En Dejilg Rosa", a Swedish traditional song the singer performed over Björn Yttling's piano accompaniment in a 2007 tsunami memorial. Here she's backed by bells, and her touch is lighter. Robyn's vocals aren't only about singing; they're also about untranscribeable details like the little flutter when she sort of smiles at herself on this slow song, or her goofy ad libs between lyrics on faster songs. Above all, Robyn puts herself on the line-- loses her cool for the sake of emotional connection-- like few other contemporary vocalists.

In 2000, a guy I know e-mailed Robyn about singing technique. In her reply, she gave detailed advice about maintaining his jaw muscles, hips, back, tongue, and vocal chords. "But the most important thing," she wrote, "is to be happy, and I don't mean that you always should be in a good mood. Because all the emotional stress that you feel is reflected in your body and can easily affect your voice-- which is a good thing if you take care of it. Because it is a tool that will help you get to know yourself and remind you when it's time for you to look inside for answers." Head and hips are both important, but the heart is still the strongest muscle. Bring it, Body Talk Pt. 2.

Cate Le Bon - Me Oh My

Album Review
Pitchfork
June 1, 2010
Link
7.3















Wales is used to being overlooked. Seven centuries of English occupation will do that. Almost 15 years after Super Furry Animals, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Catatonia, and Manic Street Preachers drew attention to their tiny country's music scene, newer Welsh artists like Race Horses and the Joy Formidable are plugging along amid considerably less media fanfare. Now add Cate Le Bon to that list, with a bullet.

On her debut album, the Cardiff-based singer/songwriter introduces a beguiling, idiosyncratic voice almost designed not to call attention to itself. No relation to Duran Duran star Simon, Le Bon is probably best known for her fembot guest spot on "I Lust U", from Super Furries frontman Gruff Rhys's Neon Neon project a couple of years ago. Yet on Me Oh My-- first released via Rhys's fledgling Irony Bored label last fall, and finally for sale in the U.S. this month-- she buries her pop hooks like the childhood animals that gave the album its working title, Pet Deaths, and lets her freak-folk flag fly half-mast instead.

Me Oh My is an understated work, but by no means an underwhelming one. Le Bon's coolly enunciated vocals, resembling an earthier Nico or an eerier Victoria Bergsman, are the biggest draw. But the "Pale Blue Eyes" twang of "Sad Sad Feet" ("Baby, I'm headed for the black") or recession-era Neil Young of "Shoeing the Bone" ("These are hard times to fall in love") should earn enough repeat listens for the rest of the songs to reveal themselves. Accompanied by members of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Le Bon elsewhere updates the 1970s Welsh psych-folk reveries and fuzztone free-for-alls that Rhys has ably documented on his Welsh Rare Beat compilations. If side two opener "Terror of the Man" is a rare droney snoozer, rough-hewn details such as the retro-futurist synths on the title track help make up the difference. "I fought the night and the night fought me," Le Bon sings. The night wins, of course. But, on a modest scale, so do we.

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