Feature
Pitchfork
July 19, 2010
Link
Friday, July 16
Liars [5:30 p.m.; Connector Stage]
Pitchfork: You guys were here four years ago. A lot's changed since-- do you have any fond memories from then?
Julian Gross: I do, I do. I remember Devendra played and had his shirt off.
Angus Andrew: Os Mutantes, that was exciting.
Aaron Hemphill: We were in the same dressing room.
JG: Yep, same dressing room. I remember the heat. It was brutal. I remember the heat on stage and feeling like I wanted to die.
AH: I think we were the only rock band.
Pitchfork: That was my other question. I guess there's Raekwon and Lightning Bolt, but [other] bands here are a summery, good vibes kind of thing. I like to think of the "The Overachievers" as the flip side of "My Girls" by Animal Collective. You're like, "Okay, we got the four walls and there's a darkness to it."
AA: I'm glad you're pointing that out because we feel in a darker corner than a lot of the other stuff that's been coming out. And so it's nice, I think, to be that one token sort of thing as opposed to sort of just being [part of] the flow.
AH: [We're glad] that distinction is communicated through our music. Because if we felt it and created according to it and failed to communicate, then I'd be sort of scared.
Pitchfork: Yeah, why do you think that is-- the good vibes thing? Things suck right now!
JG: That's why. I think it's just this cloud in your face. Like, "Oh what, what are you talking about, man? Everything's awesome. Everything's totally cool and stuff."
AA: We obviously do a lot of press out of the States. When we started making Sisterworld was when Obama got elected. I think [there] was a general euphoria that everyone felt. At the same time Prop 8 was rejected in California so there were protests on the street and I think that was a good marking point for what might be going on. Because people are still caught up in the idea that maybe we're on this higher road now because we elected Obama. But in reality it's still quite the opposite. I think that's what makes it really frustrating to hear celebratory music when on the ground or in the trenches-- as we say-- it's not quite as blimey.
JG: When music is happy and with the idea of everything being so easy to find, maybe happy music is just so popular because it's so easily attainable and if it's not happy, maybe you have to pay more attention and think about it a little bit more and maybe it bums you out a little bit. It seems like everything is geared towards this quickness.
Pitchfork: You guys are associated with so many different locations, be it Williamsburg or Berlin or L.A. Where's your guys' rehearsal space?
AA: In L.A., downtown. So we've been moving around a lot, but these guys are from L.A. so we all live there now and it's really working out quite good. It's a very interesting place.
Pitchfork: Your album, everybody harped on this, but you got the L.A. aspect. Are you guys still really interested in that dark side of L.A.?
AA: In this case what happens is you put out a record and then ideas start coming back to us and so you start to talk about more and it's a way to grow. The great thing about any art work is over time and a little bit of space, you can get another whole thing of the same one thing. It's been interesting trying to deal with this topic that we brought up, but it's good to talk about.
I think one of the things that we like to emphasize, even though we wrote it in L.A. and we were very inspired by what was going on there, I think we feel strongly that it's a universal thing and you could be living somewhere in Illinois and feeling equally isolated or alienated. I like to talk to a lot of people about that-- the connections-- in other places of the world. Because I think L.A., for us, is just this place full of people really shining off some of the things we know.
Pitchfork: You mentioned earlier you have some stuff you guys are working on that you might show off today.
AA: Why don't you talk about the cover we're going to do?
AH: Oh, we might try to do a cover and we're finding how we pull off some of the material and stuff like that. We're really into Bauhaus and stuff like that. Great band.
AA: We've always been talking about them and it's funny for us because right from day one they were a really big influence on us and it's never been talked about.
AH: You listen to their albums and how much territory they've covered and I feel that a certain degree of theatricality has prevented them from getting the sort of craze. They're notorious but I don't think that people should put them below the Cure or Siouxsie and the Banshees. I think that's terrible.
AA: It's really interesting. The Cure and Bauhaus is a good comparison because the goth thing is something that I think is troubling for people to swallow too. They've just made some fucking hit singles, didn't they?
AH: People are just getting more and more afraid of theatrical performance in music. I don't think they like the fact that it's a performance. I feel that "indie rock" prefix even uses this sincerity aspect. And I think people love shows that exclude performance or theatrical elements or ideas. Like in hip-hop, there isn't this tendency to suffocate that element. Or you have much more theatrical elements in hip-hop.
Pitchfork: There are people like Lady Gaga or of Montreal but maybe it's darker theatrics.
JG: Well I feel like there would have to be some sort of mental divide for people to accept certain theater and "indie rock," which is I guess evidence of the limitations of that name.
AH: Pavement pretty much paved the road for this type of thing with their whole stage set. Which, to me is still kind of-- they're like "Oh, we're going to dress normal on stage so it isn't a performance. It's just us being us." But that is still a stage persona. No matter what, you're telling something to these people. Whether you're dressed like of Montreal or Pavement, the idea is sort of still the same as uniform. You're on a stage, that's what that means.
Robyn [6:25 p.m.; Aluminum Stage]
Pitchfork: You're back in the U.S. What are you excited about?
Robyn: I'm excited to tour. I mean serious. I want it to feel real and authentic, even though it's pop music. I think the live thing is important for that because it brings a connection for people that I don't think a lot of times you get with pop music because you get it in big venues. But we're trying to do something more playful.
My audience is kind of the same everywhere. It's this weird mix of people. People that knew me from before, but also mixed with lots of new kinds of people. And it's the same thing here in America, which is so striking to like go to Berlin and then go to London and then go to New York and see the same kind of crowd.
Pitchfork: You were at Roskilde. I saw you there a couple years ago. They are so vocal in Scandanavia too, right?
R: That's the one place where-- actually in Sweden it's like that too. But I think Roskilde is the only place outside of Sweden where I get that kind of response, except for here. The UK, I've sold more records there than anywhere else but it's a different kind of audience. They're a little trickier but here it's just like [makes a noise] you know? Even if it's a small club, people are still into it.
Pitchfork: Recently you covered Alicia Keys. What do you like about her?
R: I like that song. It feels like she listened to Prince. I totally have those songs too where you hear Prince but she did it in this good way that I liked. So I just wanted to pick up on that you know?
Pitchfork: Can you talk at all about what's coming up?
R: I just finished mixing the next album. It's just kind of sent off to the factory. It has more of the traditional pop songs on there, but the productions are still in the same world as the first album [Body Talk, Pt. 1] so it's definitely connected. It's meant to even have a little connection back to like "Show Me Love" and stuff like that. It's not ducking from the pop thing at all. So it's full on, it's like [makes a noise].
Pitchfork: Who do you like in Sweden? Do you listen to anybody else? I mean the Knife you worked with before.
R: I listen to a lot of Swedish music actually. I'm really excited to hear Lykke Li's new album. I don't know what she's up to but I think that's gonna be really fun. There's a Swedish girl, a rapper called Mapei. She's done some stuff with Major Lazer and she's like a new-- it's always bad to compare people-- but she's like a new Neneh Cherry in a way.
There's also this production duo called Savage Skulls that I worked with on the new album. They are also kind of in that Major Lazer world. They really, like, took that into a Swedish kind of context and they're doing that kind of club dance music but it's very, very-- they're not afraid to go Euro or go kind of kitsch but in a really nice way. I really like them.
Pitchfork: What else are you excited about, being back in the U.S.? Is it different in any other way this time?
R: It's nice for me to come back and connect to what I built with the last album and the plan is to come back here and tour with every album so that it's a continuous thing. I hope to just build on what happened here the last time-- all the love I'm getting from this very natural place. It's not filtered through a pop industry that I don't feel connected to. It's really, really nice. I'm just enjoying it really.
Pitchfork: I guess that's what fascinates me, hearing you talk about it. I love, in a connection with Alicia Keys, when it feels really real but it's still accessible to everybody. There's not much music that's like that. What is it about that for you that really draws you to that kind of music?
R: I think that when that happens, when that real thing is there it isn't about the genre anymore. It's more about the sincere pop quality and I think for me that's what I always drove for when I listened to music, whether it's like the things I grew up with like KLF or Technotronic or Neneh Cherry or if it's things that are going on right now. I think that's what it is to me, and it's never about the commercial pop perspective, it's about the place it comes from and the artist that does it.
Saturday, July 20
Panda Bear [7:25 p.m.; Connector Stage]
Pitchfork: Do you feel like you're only in competition with yourself at this point as far as your albums?
Noah Lennox: Always. I mean, even before the past couple years. I think about it a lot like golf. Where you may be playing on different courses, so the terrain is slightly different, but you're always trying to beat yourself. Play better.
Pitchfork: Are you able to talk about this upcoming album, Tomboy, at all? Obviously we've heard your singles, and I guess you've talked about it a little in the past, but how are you feeling this is going to be different from Person Pitch?
NL: As far as like a stylistic shift, I'd say it's less than something like Young Prayer to Person Pitch. But I'm anticipating a lot of people kind of thinking it's crappy, 'cause it's different enough to sort of bum people out who really liked the last one, you know what I mean? I guess I feel like I want to keep the thing moving. If I was like, "I really like the last thing I did, so I kinda just want to slightly expand on that," I feel like that would be kind of like treading water, in a way. Which is fine, but at this point in time it's not really what I'm interested in doing.
Pitchfork: Everybody else is treading that same water right now, it feels like. A guy in his bedroom, using some samples and being kind of nostalgic, and pretty music. Ambient, electronic influence, you know? How do you feel about that stuff?
NL: I think the first thing I would say is that I would guess that for the vast majority of those people, maybe it's not treading water. I'm assuming it's kind of like they're doing something new for them. I feel like that's justified from that perspective. I guess I'm just not the kind of person who likes to hate on anything. I'm surely not gonna look down on something just because I feel like it sounds like somethings else, or fits into a group of things that all kind of sound more or less the same. I may not get as jazzed by it as something that just kind of confuses me. I feel like everything just kind of serves its purpose. Everything has its place, I should say.
Pitchfork: Is there anything you've been listening to lately that's worth mentioning?
NL: In high school I was really into classic rock radio, maybe just because it was the most readily available thing. That and like the Top 40 of the time, which was the 90s, I guess. In a lot of ways I feel like, in terms of life cycles, if such a thing exists, that's definitely where I am mentally. Sort of like, early high school zone for me, maybe late middle school. A lot of [the new] songs-- I doubt it's very apparent-- I feel that sort of 90s R&B.
There's this certain kind of shaker sample that was used a lot, like C+C Music Factory employed it quite a bit, and I've been really into that. You know that EMF song? With the Dice Clay sample in it? That has the same kind of drum sample I'm talking about out. I've been really into that. I feel like I just ingested that and spit it out in a way that you probably wouldn't be able to know. On "Slow Motion", for example, it's there a little bit. But certainly that zone of music is what's in my head. I said to Danny [Perez, visual artist and collaborator - Ed.], "I feel like I'm into barbecue music these days." Like really slow, mellow... Dâm-Funk is a good kind of example of what I'm talking about. It's just not high-energy music, I'd say. [scrolls through mp3 device] Robert Lester Folsom-- Music and Dreams. That's probably my most listened to record.
Pitchfork: Any plans for your birthday? [Noah's birthday was this weekend -Ed]
NL: Not really. I have to say, I'm sort of dreading what my guys have planned for me. Because I'm pretty sure they're gonna do something, gonna find some way of embarrassing me. I'm kind of bracing for impact at this point. If my wife and my kids were here, I couldn't ask for anything more. But just having a bunch of my bros around is a pretty good start, a pretty good birthday I would say.
Pitchfork: Sweet. So, for the show tonight, what's the set-up going to be? Is it just you up there?
NL: Yeah, it's just me. For better or for worse. Danny will be doing video. That's a big part of the show, as far as I'm concerned. I feel like it's not very interesting to watch, I'm not much of a showman. So having something interesting to look at, and something that works with the music. I feel like it's an integral part to my show.
Pitchfork: Any surprises up your sleeve?
NL: I would guess that the only surprise to people who wouldn't have known about my shows in the past six months or so, or maybe shows with Animal Collective, is that nine-tenths of the show will be all based on unrecorded songs. That's probably the biggest surprise.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Various Artists - Fuck Winter / Regolith Vol. 1 / Patient Sounds Sampler V. 1
Album Review
Pitchfork
July 13, 2010
Link
7.5 / 7.4 / 7.4
Pitchfork
July 13, 2010
Link
7.5 / 7.4 / 7.4
Cassettes are appealing to some listeners in the digital age partly because they're inconvenient. Now that listeners are used to shuffling randomly between hundreds of gigabytes' worth of downloaded audio files, the tape format offers a cohesive, analog listening experience, without the ability to skip around even the way a vinyl record allows. This summer a few of the more interesting, up-and-coming cassette-oriented labels-- Scotch Tapes, Moon Glyph, and Patient Sounds-- are making the search for quality music from the tape world a little easier by releasing compilations. Like Italian Beach Babes/Paradise Vendors label comp PVI006/IBB004 earlier this year, their efforts recall indie comps of decades past, curating a varied and occasionally inspired assortment of ramshackle artists based on a shared camaraderie that runs deeper than superficial styles.
Fuck Winter: A Scotch Summer Mixtape, the first-ever Scotch Tapes comp, is the only one of these three releases available exclusively on cassette. Fittingly, then, it's also the most in tune with the experimental and noise inclinations that kept the format alive in the underground prior to its recent mini-resurgence. Run by Al Bjornaa out of Batchawana Bay, Ontario, Scotch Tapes has put out a tape by Oneida and a 7" by Mike Watt project Al Qaeda, among other releases. Limited to 250 copies, Fuck Winter covers a lot of range in 23 tracks, each so short that if the industrial pummel of Endometrium Cuntplow or vuvuzela-esque James Chance freakouts of Tayside Mental Health aren't for you, just wait for the next track (there's no skipping, remember?). Iowa City-based Wet Hair, whose Shawn Reed runs highly regarded tape-focused label Night People, shimmer through wordlessly hooky highlight "Untitled", which sounds like a half-remembered anthem from a climactic moment in a 1990s slacker movie, while Halifax-based Fuck Montreal come across like a fascinatingly gothy lo-fi girl group on the perversely catchy "Knife Fuck". Different listeners will find different favorites amid the generally fuzzy, scrappy proceedings-- whether the English art-punk of Fever Fever, the Brooklyn post-punk of Talk Normal, or the sludgy riffage of Vancouver-based cassette regulars Shearing Pinx. As Glasgow's Divorce, not to be confused with Seattle's the Divorce, shout: "You can have it all!"
Moon Glyph's Regolith Vol. 1 marks the Minneapolis label's first vinyl record, pressed in a 500-LP edition. Accordingly, the psych-heavy, 10-track comp enjoys slightly higher fidelity, meaning slightly less homespun charm but a more headphone-friendly listening experience, emphasizing bands from the imprint's hometown. Many will want to seek this out, digitally if not on vinyl, for "Surfer Girl", a reverb-kissed, disarmingly melodic jangle-pop love song by Minneapolis sextet Velvet Davenport, featuring chillwave-circle mainstays Ariel Pink and Gary War. Still, there are just as many rewards to be found in the oscillating, bass-heavy ambience of Camden (a side project of Cole Weiland, from Minneapolis band Daughters of the Sun, also on this comp-- not the pre-Decibully emo group), the sunny power-pop guitar licks of fellow Mpls.ers Vampire Hands, or the tribal noise-disco of another area band, Skoal Kodiak. The release starts with Leisure Birds' sun-baked, organ-backed whoa-oh-ohing, and ends with the alternating Southern-rock guitar heroics and surreal sermonizing of Moonstone. "This is something you could believe in, if you believed in things," sing Magic Castles. The psych-rock underground in the Twin Cities, it appears, is alive and well.
Patient Sounds, the label run by Matthew Sage of Fort Collins, Colo., psych-rockers M. Pyres, has also issued its first comp, Patient Sounds Sampler V. 1, downloadable free from the label's blog or available for purchase on the band's tour. The release again confirms the wealth of talent making warm, gooey psych just below the average indie listener's radar. A new track from M. Pyres, "Miles & Days Ahead", is a sprawling instrumental, with crystalline guitar figures built for Built to Spill, and a bass line constantly burbling toward a release that never comes. Minneapolis-based Littoral Drift put earthy folk amid outer-space echo, recalling the acoustic work of Kurt Vile, while Greeley, Colo.-based Ambassador Engine stick to wonderfully wobbly underwater séances. Bingo Pajamas, aka Brooklyn-based Niki Smith, has arguably the comp's breakout moment, setting her murmured harmonies over an arrangement equal parts tUnE-yArDs eccentric and Ciara sensual. While the Moon Glyph and Patient Sounds comps veer more toward chillwave than the Scotch Tapes tape, all reflect the unassuming variety of slightly warped sounds currently making their way onto cassette. Most importantly, all transcend the format altogether, even when, as with Fuck Winter, they benefit from its old-fashioned quirks. The medium is the message, sure, but in this case, the songs speak louder.
Fuck Winter: A Scotch Summer Mixtape, the first-ever Scotch Tapes comp, is the only one of these three releases available exclusively on cassette. Fittingly, then, it's also the most in tune with the experimental and noise inclinations that kept the format alive in the underground prior to its recent mini-resurgence. Run by Al Bjornaa out of Batchawana Bay, Ontario, Scotch Tapes has put out a tape by Oneida and a 7" by Mike Watt project Al Qaeda, among other releases. Limited to 250 copies, Fuck Winter covers a lot of range in 23 tracks, each so short that if the industrial pummel of Endometrium Cuntplow or vuvuzela-esque James Chance freakouts of Tayside Mental Health aren't for you, just wait for the next track (there's no skipping, remember?). Iowa City-based Wet Hair, whose Shawn Reed runs highly regarded tape-focused label Night People, shimmer through wordlessly hooky highlight "Untitled", which sounds like a half-remembered anthem from a climactic moment in a 1990s slacker movie, while Halifax-based Fuck Montreal come across like a fascinatingly gothy lo-fi girl group on the perversely catchy "Knife Fuck". Different listeners will find different favorites amid the generally fuzzy, scrappy proceedings-- whether the English art-punk of Fever Fever, the Brooklyn post-punk of Talk Normal, or the sludgy riffage of Vancouver-based cassette regulars Shearing Pinx. As Glasgow's Divorce, not to be confused with Seattle's the Divorce, shout: "You can have it all!"
Moon Glyph's Regolith Vol. 1 marks the Minneapolis label's first vinyl record, pressed in a 500-LP edition. Accordingly, the psych-heavy, 10-track comp enjoys slightly higher fidelity, meaning slightly less homespun charm but a more headphone-friendly listening experience, emphasizing bands from the imprint's hometown. Many will want to seek this out, digitally if not on vinyl, for "Surfer Girl", a reverb-kissed, disarmingly melodic jangle-pop love song by Minneapolis sextet Velvet Davenport, featuring chillwave-circle mainstays Ariel Pink and Gary War. Still, there are just as many rewards to be found in the oscillating, bass-heavy ambience of Camden (a side project of Cole Weiland, from Minneapolis band Daughters of the Sun, also on this comp-- not the pre-Decibully emo group), the sunny power-pop guitar licks of fellow Mpls.ers Vampire Hands, or the tribal noise-disco of another area band, Skoal Kodiak. The release starts with Leisure Birds' sun-baked, organ-backed whoa-oh-ohing, and ends with the alternating Southern-rock guitar heroics and surreal sermonizing of Moonstone. "This is something you could believe in, if you believed in things," sing Magic Castles. The psych-rock underground in the Twin Cities, it appears, is alive and well.
Patient Sounds, the label run by Matthew Sage of Fort Collins, Colo., psych-rockers M. Pyres, has also issued its first comp, Patient Sounds Sampler V. 1, downloadable free from the label's blog or available for purchase on the band's tour. The release again confirms the wealth of talent making warm, gooey psych just below the average indie listener's radar. A new track from M. Pyres, "Miles & Days Ahead", is a sprawling instrumental, with crystalline guitar figures built for Built to Spill, and a bass line constantly burbling toward a release that never comes. Minneapolis-based Littoral Drift put earthy folk amid outer-space echo, recalling the acoustic work of Kurt Vile, while Greeley, Colo.-based Ambassador Engine stick to wonderfully wobbly underwater séances. Bingo Pajamas, aka Brooklyn-based Niki Smith, has arguably the comp's breakout moment, setting her murmured harmonies over an arrangement equal parts tUnE-yArDs eccentric and Ciara sensual. While the Moon Glyph and Patient Sounds comps veer more toward chillwave than the Scotch Tapes tape, all reflect the unassuming variety of slightly warped sounds currently making their way onto cassette. Most importantly, all transcend the format altogether, even when, as with Fuck Winter, they benefit from its old-fashioned quirks. The medium is the message, sure, but in this case, the songs speak louder.
Kevin Dunn - No Great Lost: Songs, 1979-1985
Album Review
Pitchfork
July 12, 2010
Link
7.5
Pitchfork
July 12, 2010
Link
7.5
Kevin Dunn is the latest unjustly overlooked figure to reemerge from the 1980s Southern new wave scene. A songwriter, producer, and electronically adventurous guitarist in the Robert Fripp school, Dunn co-founded pioneering Atlanta band the Fans, whose music R.E.M.'s Peter Buck later tried to release, without success. Dunn also co-produced two seminal Georgia singles, the B-52's' "Rock Lobster" and Pylon's "Cool"/"Dub", along with the latter's debut album, Gyrate. His solo work, however, has been out of print for more than 20 years.
Watertown, Mass.-based Casa Nueva Industries sets that right with No Great Lost: Songs, 1979-1985. Coming after last year's DFA release of Pylon's Chomp More and the recent Acute reissue by fellow Athens, Ga., band the Method Actors, this anthology shows Dunn made some strikingly contemporary-sounding records in his own right. Bridging effete 1970s UK art-rock and the jagged, jerky American new wave he'd helped shepherd, with clever deconstructions of rock'n'roll classics for good measure, Dunn would fit right in with the more recent Atlanta scene of brainy, bratty bands like Deerhunter, the Coathangers, and Black Lips.
In a recent interview with Atlanta's Creative Loafing, Dunn recalls making "Star Trek" jokes while a student at Cal Arts during the early 1970s, and indeed there's an endearing nerdiness throughout No Great Lost. On 1981 solo debut The Judgement of Paris, presented here in its entirety, Dunn applies his autodidactism to oblique hooks, analog synths, drum machine beats, and inventive guitar freakouts; he can sneer, "Mommy, I don't wanna be a fascist," mock a "prolix prole," and warn of "rising vampires and falling empires," right before offering a resplendently textured "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" instrumental. For all Dunn's intellect, though, he also shows balls. Surfy opener "911" doesn't get much less incendiary once you remember he's hiccuping "nine-eleven" about not the World Trade Center attack, but the Jonestown mass suicide (bands: cover this). Nearly as impressive as the music is the album's remixing by engineer Pete Weiss, who tried to recreate the sound of the vinyl from the master tapes following the destruction of Bruce Baxter's original mixes in an apartment fire-- "Bother," Dunn dryly notes in his hyper-intelligent accompanying essay.
No Great Lost can be a lot to take in one sitting, but it's worth setting aside some time as well for its inclusions from Dunn's 1984 C'est toujours la même guitare EP, 1985 sophomore LP Tanzfeld, and 1979 single "Nadine" (featuring synth by the Brains' Tom Gray-- hey, when is somebody going to reissue the band that gave Cyndi Lauper "Money Changes Everything"?). There's even one Fans song, the aptly titled "Cars and Explosions". Arriving with testimonials from Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider and the late critic Robert Palmer, this release is a singularly warped artifact from a post-punk intellectual off in his own world. It's a world not so different from the one many bands inhabit today, and it has its own strange rewards.
Watertown, Mass.-based Casa Nueva Industries sets that right with No Great Lost: Songs, 1979-1985. Coming after last year's DFA release of Pylon's Chomp More and the recent Acute reissue by fellow Athens, Ga., band the Method Actors, this anthology shows Dunn made some strikingly contemporary-sounding records in his own right. Bridging effete 1970s UK art-rock and the jagged, jerky American new wave he'd helped shepherd, with clever deconstructions of rock'n'roll classics for good measure, Dunn would fit right in with the more recent Atlanta scene of brainy, bratty bands like Deerhunter, the Coathangers, and Black Lips.
In a recent interview with Atlanta's Creative Loafing, Dunn recalls making "Star Trek" jokes while a student at Cal Arts during the early 1970s, and indeed there's an endearing nerdiness throughout No Great Lost. On 1981 solo debut The Judgement of Paris, presented here in its entirety, Dunn applies his autodidactism to oblique hooks, analog synths, drum machine beats, and inventive guitar freakouts; he can sneer, "Mommy, I don't wanna be a fascist," mock a "prolix prole," and warn of "rising vampires and falling empires," right before offering a resplendently textured "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" instrumental. For all Dunn's intellect, though, he also shows balls. Surfy opener "911" doesn't get much less incendiary once you remember he's hiccuping "nine-eleven" about not the World Trade Center attack, but the Jonestown mass suicide (bands: cover this). Nearly as impressive as the music is the album's remixing by engineer Pete Weiss, who tried to recreate the sound of the vinyl from the master tapes following the destruction of Bruce Baxter's original mixes in an apartment fire-- "Bother," Dunn dryly notes in his hyper-intelligent accompanying essay.
No Great Lost can be a lot to take in one sitting, but it's worth setting aside some time as well for its inclusions from Dunn's 1984 C'est toujours la même guitare EP, 1985 sophomore LP Tanzfeld, and 1979 single "Nadine" (featuring synth by the Brains' Tom Gray-- hey, when is somebody going to reissue the band that gave Cyndi Lauper "Money Changes Everything"?). There's even one Fans song, the aptly titled "Cars and Explosions". Arriving with testimonials from Apples in Stereo's Robert Schneider and the late critic Robert Palmer, this release is a singularly warped artifact from a post-punk intellectual off in his own world. It's a world not so different from the one many bands inhabit today, and it has its own strange rewards.
The Pipettes - Earth vs. the Pipettes
Album Review
Pitchfork
June 30, 2010
Link
3.2
Pitchfork
June 30, 2010
Link
3.2
The 1960s girl groups went overlooked for so long in part because of their failure, often through no fault of their own, to establish successful long-term careers as album artists. We remember the young women featured on essential box sets like Phil Spector compilation Back to Mono or Rhino's more recent One Kiss Can Lead to Another not for their full-lengths or their larger-than-life exploits, but for their singles. In some cases, as with the Crystals, the artists you heard singing over your car's AM radio weren't even the same ones who came to town to perform.
Initially dreamed up as a modern girl group, the Pipettes have defied this grim logic once before. On 2006 debut We Are the Pipettes, the Brighton, England-based indie-poppers improbably managed a full-length's worth of cheeky, refreshingly contemporary, and wholeheartedly catchy songs to match their polka-dot dresses and choreographed moves. They were "the prettiest girls you've ever met." Your kisses were wasted on them. They were playful, they were divisive, but they were memorable and, to many, instantly appealing.
Four years later, the Pipettes are an almost entirely different group. Unfortunately, at least on Earth vs. the Pipettes, they're also a much, much worse one. It doesn't help that the rotating lineup of vocalists, now down to the sister act of Gwenno and Ani Saunders, trades the breezy, conversational singing style of the debut for a brassy, over-emotive approach that probably wouldn't make it far on a TV talent contest. It doesn't help, either, that what Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal called the "DIY-Spector flourishes" of We Are the Pipettes now give way to synths, disco-funk guitars, clattering bongos, and Miami Sound Machine horns, with plenty of strings and 60s sha-la-la backing vocals still there to clutter the over-crowded mix. It definitely doesn't help that the last few tracks tack on a vague interplanetary conceit, complete with robot vocals proving once and for all that T-Pain has a harder job than you might've thought.
What makes Earth vs. the Pipettes irredeemable, however, is an utter lack of what the Pipettes and their girl-group predecessors once understood so well: distinctive, emotionally affecting pop songs. Self-destructive crushes are nothing new to the girl-group genre, of course, and can be at least as artistically compelling as healthier romances, but tracks like the U2-echoing "Thank You" or redundant soft-rocker "I Always Planned to Stay" ("It's nothing less than what was expected") are full of generic, boring girls pining blandly for generic, boring boys. The rhymes, melodies, and brutally obvious key changes used to stretch weak ideas to an acceptable length-- you've heard them all before. Hell, the outer-space conceit might be fitting, after all, because there's nothing like an actual human being anywhere in these songs; it seems important that the only character with a name is the eponymous officer of the T. Rex-shuffling "Captain Rhythm".
Worst of all, Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group. "I don't want to hold your hand," sang the 2006 Pipettes, but on this album they ask us to give it to them on at least two separate songs (please "understand"). Where "Pull Shapes" insisted, "Just don't let the music stop," the new single begs for somebody to "Stop the Music". Speaking of "Pull Shapes", for fun slang this time we get "I Vibe You"-- about which the less said the better.
Initially dreamed up as a modern girl group, the Pipettes have defied this grim logic once before. On 2006 debut We Are the Pipettes, the Brighton, England-based indie-poppers improbably managed a full-length's worth of cheeky, refreshingly contemporary, and wholeheartedly catchy songs to match their polka-dot dresses and choreographed moves. They were "the prettiest girls you've ever met." Your kisses were wasted on them. They were playful, they were divisive, but they were memorable and, to many, instantly appealing.
Four years later, the Pipettes are an almost entirely different group. Unfortunately, at least on Earth vs. the Pipettes, they're also a much, much worse one. It doesn't help that the rotating lineup of vocalists, now down to the sister act of Gwenno and Ani Saunders, trades the breezy, conversational singing style of the debut for a brassy, over-emotive approach that probably wouldn't make it far on a TV talent contest. It doesn't help, either, that what Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal called the "DIY-Spector flourishes" of We Are the Pipettes now give way to synths, disco-funk guitars, clattering bongos, and Miami Sound Machine horns, with plenty of strings and 60s sha-la-la backing vocals still there to clutter the over-crowded mix. It definitely doesn't help that the last few tracks tack on a vague interplanetary conceit, complete with robot vocals proving once and for all that T-Pain has a harder job than you might've thought.
What makes Earth vs. the Pipettes irredeemable, however, is an utter lack of what the Pipettes and their girl-group predecessors once understood so well: distinctive, emotionally affecting pop songs. Self-destructive crushes are nothing new to the girl-group genre, of course, and can be at least as artistically compelling as healthier romances, but tracks like the U2-echoing "Thank You" or redundant soft-rocker "I Always Planned to Stay" ("It's nothing less than what was expected") are full of generic, boring girls pining blandly for generic, boring boys. The rhymes, melodies, and brutally obvious key changes used to stretch weak ideas to an acceptable length-- you've heard them all before. Hell, the outer-space conceit might be fitting, after all, because there's nothing like an actual human being anywhere in these songs; it seems important that the only character with a name is the eponymous officer of the T. Rex-shuffling "Captain Rhythm".
Worst of all, Earth vs. the Pipettes sounds like not just a different group, not just a lesser group but, in sadly off-putting ways, almost an opposite group. "I don't want to hold your hand," sang the 2006 Pipettes, but on this album they ask us to give it to them on at least two separate songs (please "understand"). Where "Pull Shapes" insisted, "Just don't let the music stop," the new single begs for somebody to "Stop the Music". Speaking of "Pull Shapes", for fun slang this time we get "I Vibe You"-- about which the less said the better.
The-Dream - Love King
Album Review
SPIN
August 2010
Link
8/10
R&B hit man romances everything within reach.
“Radio killa”? Sure, but the R&B ATLien behind “Umbrella” and “Single Ladies” is also an auteur of weirdly personal, brilliantly lowbrow, and dazzlingly state-of-the-art pop albums. As bawdy, referential, and effortless-sounding as ever, Terius “The-Dream” Nash takes his long-playing love affair to the next level on this third solo effort, fading snappy summer-jam contenders into seething urban-rock suites. Mostly, though, The-Dream loves to love, so much so that you can hear it through the fourth wall: “Know this song is over / But I can’t get up off ya.”
SPIN
August 2010
Link
8/10
R&B hit man romances everything within reach.
“Radio killa”? Sure, but the R&B ATLien behind “Umbrella” and “Single Ladies” is also an auteur of weirdly personal, brilliantly lowbrow, and dazzlingly state-of-the-art pop albums. As bawdy, referential, and effortless-sounding as ever, Terius “The-Dream” Nash takes his long-playing love affair to the next level on this third solo effort, fading snappy summer-jam contenders into seething urban-rock suites. Mostly, though, The-Dream loves to love, so much so that you can hear it through the fourth wall: “Know this song is over / But I can’t get up off ya.”
Fidelity, Federated Jump on iPhone Release With New Offerings
News Article
Ignites
June 28, 2010
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Ignites
June 28, 2010
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Fewer Companies Granting Employee Stock Options
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July 12, 2010
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July 12, 2010
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CEOs Overhauling Risk Practices Amid Shareholder Concerns
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July 12, 2010
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July 12, 2010
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Climate Proxy Proposals Gain More Shareholder Support
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July 12, 2010
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July 12, 2010
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S&P Finds ERM Lacking at Most Non-Financial Companies
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July 12, 2010
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July 12, 2010
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Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Requests Additional Funds
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July 12, 2010
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July 12, 2010
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Ex-Bristol-Myers CFO Wins Deferred Prosecution Deal
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July 12, 2010
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July 12, 2010
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Leash Tightened on White-Collar Prosecutions
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July 6, 2010
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Bank Regulators Rap ‘Deficient’ Pay Practices
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June 28, 2010
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Lehman Case Shows What Not to Say in E-Mail
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Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Oasis: Time Flies... 1994-2009
Album Review
Pitchfork
June 23, 2010
Link
6.0
Pitchfork
June 23, 2010
Link
6.0
"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.
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
Pitchfork
June 23, 2010
Link
7.9
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.
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."
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.
Pitchfork
June 18, 2010
Link
"damn it, i'm not even an artist... i'm a whore and the holy ghost."
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.
Build America Bonds Uncertainty Hasn’t Deterred Fund Launches
News Article
Ignites
June 21, 2010
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Ignites
June 21, 2010
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Lehman, Goldman Boards Not Structurally Different: Study
News Analysis
Agenda
June 21, 2010
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SEC Clawback Suit to Proceed Against Innocent CEO
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June 21, 2010
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Whistle-Blower Bounty the ‘Sleeper’ Provision in Finance Bill: Lawyer
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June 21, 2010
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SEC Mulls Revisiting Pay, Risk Disclosures
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June 21, 2010
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Genzyme Proxy Fight Ends as Icahn Gets Two Board Seats
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June 14, 2010
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Will PCAOB Rule Overload Audit Committees?
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June 14, 2010
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Bernanke to Banks: Tie Poor Performance to Lower Pay
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June 14, 2010
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SEC Upping Focus on Offshore Accounting, SF Chief Says
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June 7, 2010
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Finance Bill Rewrites Rules of Clawbacks
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June 7, 2010
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COSO Study Finds No Link Between Fraud, Board Policies
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June 7, 2010
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Bailout Company Shareholders Lose Nearly Everything
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June 7, 2010
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Allete’s Nom-Gov Chair on Director Recruitment
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June 1, 2010
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Finra Proposal Seen Having Limited Industry Fallout
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Ignites
June 7, 2010
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June 7, 2010
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Friday, June 4, 2010
Saint Etienne - Tiger Bay / Finisterre
Album Review
Pitchfork
June 4, 2010
Link
8.7/7.7
Pitchfork
June 4, 2010
Link
8.7/7.7
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.
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
Pitchfork
June 1, 2010
Link
8.5
"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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Jeremy Jay - Splash
Album Review
Pitchfork
May 24, 2010
Link
6.3
The son of a composer father and a French-speaking Swiss mother, Jeremy Jay recently relocated from Los Angeles to London. On third K album Splash, though, the real move is from Jay's usual Land of Nod to somewhere near what used to be called Alternative Nation. This is an elegant place, as Jay envisions it, full of yearning and wonder, but at times it can also come to resemble an empty stage set.
Pitchfork
May 24, 2010
Link
6.3
The son of a composer father and a French-speaking Swiss mother, Jeremy Jay recently relocated from Los Angeles to London. On third K album Splash, though, the real move is from Jay's usual Land of Nod to somewhere near what used to be called Alternative Nation. This is an elegant place, as Jay envisions it, full of yearning and wonder, but at times it can also come to resemble an empty stage set.
Splash represents only the latest sonic evolution from one of the recent pop underground's more intriguing stylists. After sleepwalking through a cinematic cityscape soundtracked by buoyant 50s doowop and brittle 80s indie on 2008's A Place Where We Could Go, Jay added John Hughes synth romance and swaying winter-formal rhythms on last year's Slow Dance. With Splash, Jay's shift toward the sloppy guitars and meaty chord progressions from MTV's "120 Minutes" heyday is, at least on its surface, no less masterful. His voice remains adrift between the airiness of former tourmates Deerhunter's Bradford Cox and the hiccupy dramatics of Morrissey, while jangling or distorted guitar melodies bound forward with a new sense of purpose, occasionally replaced by piano or streaked with feedback. The drums gallop now, rather than canter; the rollicking title track is perhaps the most urgent song in Jay's small, confident catalog. "Walking down the street at night with your headphones," he whispers at the end of tantalizingly brief "Someday Somewhere", seeming to describe the ideal listening conditions.
However, the increased directness of Jay's latest approach also exposes how thin some of his songwriting ideas can be, resulting-- at a scant 27 minutes-- in what is paradoxically this often-ethereal artist's least substantial album. Although billed as less aloof than previous releases, Splash doesn't really offer any easier way in than its predecessors. Jay still cuts quickly between his typical vivid images, here of street-lit cities, evening BMX rides, and pouncing jaguars, but this time he's no longer in a world all his own, and the artists who've been here before left more memorable impressions. "I was there wishing on a star/ Knowing it probably won't go very far," Jay sings on the draggy "A Sliver of a Chance", for example. With a repetitive, note-bending guitar line that distinctly recalls Modest Mouse, finale "Why Is This Feeling So Strong?" opens up the most-- "It can't ever happen, can it?"-- but it's still basically more of the same, unlikely to win over many new converts. Jay sings at one point of an "elusive angel," and one hopes his next plunge is toward something just as angelic, only less elusive. With Splash, the water's fine; it's merely the flesh that's weak.
Monday, May 17, 2010
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