Late thoughts on The Suburbs

AF's new Jonathan Franzen Novel

My pal Win Butler.  I’ll hand it to him, he likes to raise the stakes on himself.  He bemoans our fragmented modern condition in big, bold rock-star gestures so convincingly that it almost serves as a perfunctory answer to the perennial boomer question “what happened to music that meant something?”  And he’s mostly successful at it.  Whereas Neon Bible had some cringe worthy over the top pontifications, The Suburbs is just balanced enough not be an embarrassment, and it certainly had every possibility to be.  This is a capital A Album, it is about us, the kids, the suburbs, downtown.  This is about getting old and shedding off the optimism of youth in a terrifying world.  This is an album about punching the clock by one of the few indie bands that doesn’t have to.

The songwriting is much more mature and nuanced, but like on Neon Bible, Win is still always onstage.  Even his more intimate offerings are still backed up by mile long reverb trails and a full string section.  And he’s never really talking to anyone specific, he’s witnessing to the masses, shouting to the mountaintops, standing self aware in a specific moment of history.  I don’t think the Arcade Fire are ever gonna get away from that, that is what they do after all.  It’s just that Funeral sounded like a shout to the sky, The Suburbs sounds like a polemic.

According to their website, “each of the 16 tracks is mastered to a 12 inch lacquer and then transferred back to digital format so that the CD and digital version of the record sound just like the vinyl.”  Like I said, it’s an “Album” motherfuckers, one that has all the hallmarks of an album of the year if not an album for a generation (or at least a sequel to one depending how you feel).  But those hallmarks may be exactly what hinders it from being either.  At 16 tracks, you’re not really left wanting more.  As bleak as Win’s outlook gets, his lack of brevity steals all the punch of his warnings.  What’s put forth as a grand statement ends up being 16 variations on a single theme, sequenced as if they add up to a coherent narrative.  It doesn’t really come together.  The trick would be to cut redundant exercises like “Month of May” or “City With No Children,” because they really just kill time and add heft to what could be a surprisingly elegant and restrained album with a little editing.

Counterpoint- Women- Public Strain

Nigel's totally right about this. Plus, if you don't have the Bonus 7 inch, I will personally bring it over and we'll listen to it. Because it's pretty fun too.

Women: Public Strain

Like they knew this would dominate my winter

Public Strain is brilliant.  Really really brilliant.  Don't believe me?

Buy it.  But a turntable and buy it again.  Tell everyone you know about it.  Send nasty hate mail to Pitchfork for not BNM'ing that shit to 10.

Hot New Trax from Steve Reich

Not too long a ago I got really into Steve Reich.  I listened to all ten discs of the NPU library's copy of Works while working in the basement in the media department.  I have the Deutsche Gramophone 3LP set of Drumming, I briefly had a portrait of the man as my profile pic, etc.  He was, for a short time in my life, the grand master of all things sonic, a position previously held by The Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Brian Eno, and more recently, J Dilla.

Reich's got a new piece out "Double Sextet/2x5" and it's streaming right here.  

Check out the 2x5 tracks, especially the first one.  It's absolutely amazing, which is no particular surprise considering the man is a bona fide genius.  Nor is the "rock instrumentation" surprising, Reich has done this before.  The biggest surprise was the sound of mix, especially the drums.  Those dry, tight drums that cut left and right, the decay of each note seeming to die down unnaturally, almost like they're sampled and triggered.  This doesn't sound like rock instrumentation, it sounds like experimental hip hop.  What's incredible about this is that the Steve Reich is one of the pioneers of sample based music, his innovations are part of the DNA of so much of the music we listen to.  Madlib even gave him a nod.  2x5 sounds like Reich remixed, like Reich chopped and screwed, like a much younger artist.  Good to hear.

Self Truth on the Play Count

Ben's Favorite Beatles Songs Based on iPod Play Count

1. Here Comes the Sun (George)
2. Across the Universe (John)
3. Carry That Weight (Paul)
4. Sun King (John?)
5. Why Don't We Do it in the Road (Paul)

Why: My iPod is full and I was trying to decide what I could live without so I could get this Serge Gainsbourg psychedelic anthology on there. But also, I never know what my favorite anything is. Here's a way of finding my favorites over 3 or 4 years or however long I've had this iPod.
Method: Organizing songs based off play count, and typing in various artists, or just scrolling and seeing which albums are all up in 20s, which artists I don't think of myself as liking that much but go to pretty frequently (I guess I like Simon and Garfunkel), which are only on there for sentimental but not listening reasons (Radiohead, especially Hail to the Thief to the present.), etc.
Critique of Method: Obviously a million different factors play into what songs you play on your iPod (I own the White Album on vinyl, but not Abbey Road or Let it Be, making my affection for Why Don't We.. all the more puzzling and suspicious), but it's an interesting test of which songs you're drawn to, even unconsciously, as you listen to music around town. My affection for Paul, while often difficult to defend, comes through pretty earnestly in a scan of the top 10. The highest Ringo song is "Don't Pass Me By" at 16th most played.

Pavement - Things Get Old

  I love Pavement, I grew up with their records, I idolized them. My friend once said it best, “What I like about Pavement is that they seem to know me better than I know myself.” As silly as that seems given SM’s obtuse lyrics, that ambiguous Pavement energy, a mixture of cocksmanship, pranksterism, nostalgia, and even a bit of darkness, seemed to resonate with my youth more than most of the bands out at the time. Whereas the Strokes and the White Stripes served straight up retro revival for us too young to remember their forebearers, Pavement was smarter, more nuanced. I felt like they were actually like us, full of anarchic energy as well as a smart-ass knowing. They were too cool to be cool, too smart to be hip, but in the margins they could be incredibly affecting.
  I first heard heard Slanted and Enchanted around 2001, only months after they’d broken up. They were my first introduction to the concept of indie rock and remain my ideal of the form, so much so that I internalized their failures as successes. I even had the notion that me and my smart-ass rock friends could make it just by being our smart ass selves, even while living in the middle of nowhere Indiana, hanging on the idea that someone out there (possibly Thurston Moore) would inexplicably find us and launch us into semi-stardom. A decade of fandom later I’ve become older and wiser. I’ve read Perfect Sound forever, watched the Slow Century, watched my contemporaries rise and fall, played in bands of my own and been thoroughly demystified of the glamour of independent music, or hell, the glamour of music in general. No love lost really, in fact in the place of my youthful idealism is a real love (I hope) for the music that sountracked my maturation and a more nuanced perspective on how bands and the music industry in general work. And after all these year, I still love SM, Spiral Stairs, Nast, Ibold, Westy and Young. But at the ripe old age of 24, and even though I never saw them the first time around, I am getting my first dose of reunion tour blues.
  Malkmus has been openly ambivalent about this reunion. First there was the GQ piece with Chuck Klosterman who, like Malkmus, cares more about sports than music these days and is about just as uninterested in Pavement. Then there was a more exploitative piece in Mojo featuring the whole band, another non plussed SM, and some sad moments when Kannenberg lets on how much more the band means to him than Malkmus. Put together with Perfect Sound Foerever and you can pretty much get the picture: Malkmus is kinda a dick and kinda aware of that, the rest of the band are kinda not dicks but maybe kinda not as talented and no one in the band really wants to talk about it. So my expectations for this Pitchfork performance were kinda secretly not so high, despite my really wanting them to be.
  I only went to one day of the festival this year, for money reasons and due to my work schedule. So many of my old pitchfork pals didn’t go at all, having either moved away, moved on, or completely lost interest. Whereas in the past the fest had always seemed like a sort of like a homecoming or gathering of a disparate community, this year everyone looked unfamiliar. I tried to summon the spirit, but it was hot, the sound was often shitty, there was no 312, and everyone looked if not young than childish, as if some shift into real adulthood had occurred unnoticed in my life this past year and I was just now realizing it. I wasn’t hating on anyone, my worst criticism of the day was launched Washed Out, saying they were a little boring. Beach House put on a great set, Major Lazer made me dance, Big Boi sounded good while I waited for Pavement in the setting sun. I was having a reasonably good time. And then the sun went down and Pavement sauntered on.
  And the set was, well actually quite good. The sound was awful for half the songs (the lighter half), the guys were so completely unenthused to be there it hurt, there were about 5 false starts, and the crowd was exhausted as fuck and pretty sick of standing face to armpit in the hot sun waiting for them to play. And yet, somehow, it was worth it. When the band was on, they delivered. There were several moments were I thought they’d fall apart but they’d swing back into cohesion, making the high points matter so much more. They played the songs faithfully but changed them up enough to make them sound if not new, then at least like living songs. It wasn’t slike the Slint show, where they played note for note but with no energy or spontaneity. It was by all metrics a real Pavement show. Compared to the footage from their last show before their breakup, maybe even a really good Pavement show. And since this will probably be the only Pavement show I ever see, I’m glad for that much.
  Perhaps it was disappointing for some. To be honest, I didn’t walk away in a blissful haze, and I don’t think Pitchfork fest has ever had such an anticlimactic end: no encore, no announcement, everyone just slowly walked out a little puzzled. And maybe I am so prematurely old, so jaded, expectations so low and so willing to forgive that I couldn't actually be disappointed. But Silence Kit killed, and it killed in that sad longing way it did when I first heard it. And when Malkmus replaced “shitty-life” for city-life the second time, instead of feeling sapped or slighted I kinda felt on the same page with him. It was unexpected and cathartic, and it revealed something I love about Pavement that no one talks about that much, that they’re a kinda dark, depressing little act when you get down to it. So many of their best songs are colored with loneliness, misanthropy, loss, anger, bitterness. It’s by far not what this band is about, but it’s all there. There were definitely more uplifting highlights of the show: Conduit for Sale, Trigger Cut, Frontwards, Spiral Stairs’ songs actually sounding really good to me for the first time maybe ever. But for all their attempts and all their thank-yous and all their practice (really, they sounded pretty tight), they couldn’t put on a convincing face of gratitude, they couldn't fool any of us into thinking that they were at all as excited to be there as we were to see them. Whatever wasn’t working for them before is still not working. But they were themselves, they played well together, and there were enough moments where they looked like they might actually be really enjoying the music they were playing, if not the people they were playing it with.
  And I think it was all very fitting. The era that birthed Pavement is clearly over, Pavement as a living entity is clearly over. They sounded out of context, out of place, and out of style at the fest. They aren’t some returning heroes getting their long lost due from a generation that finally “get’s them.” Although, I would have loved for them to say “hey kids, you Pavement fans are alright, I’m glad you still exist” But they did their job and they tried hard for us, for the kids who weren’t there the first time around, or maybe it was for our money. Who cares? I got to see Pavement, the real deal, in all their hapless glory. They gave me an unrepeatable performance, they surprised me, and I still feel like those songs I’d heard a million times meant as much to me now as they did ten years ago.

An Album Like This:

    I was initially confused and borderline disappointed with Cosmogramma when I first put it on.  After pouring into his back catalog and remixes I came to expect a certain feeling from Flylo tracks, something dark and simmering with a sinister sense of humor, music made by the dude grinning ear to ear in his promo shots ala Richard D James or the Joker.  His earlier more hip hop inflected work lumbered along in a narco haze, an already textured and gritty sound that would end up going into hyperspeed and endless grooves on Los Angeles.  With Los Angeles, there are beats on top of beats fighting other beats through thick smoky static, like so many bass bombed cadillacs passing each other on L.A.'s smoggy highway night.
   On Cosmogramma, Flying Lotus is equally comfortable delivering what listeners have come to expect from him (sick beats, tactile textures, an ADD predilection for 8 bit blips and beeps) and blowing those expectations wide open.  You hear it right away on Clockcatcher, first unleashing an unholy manic onslaught of space invaders artillery that has you thinking "too much too soon" right before it spins out in all directions leaving behind a field of sonic debris.  Much of the album's first half has an equally disorienting soundscape.  Sounds and melodies collide and fracture only to coalesce moments later into a cohesive groove.  It's disorienting but more than worth it.  This is how you know an album is going to be a grower, when you get halfway in and you already want to back track to get a closer listen.  It delivers the goods, but in such idiosyncratic and surprising ways that you're not sure how to take it at first.  You let in unravel and open up and discover a new way of listening until your more or less hooked.  Like, I really wasn't down with all the bit crunched bass solos at first, now I can't imagine the songs with out them.

    Although this wasn't the album I was expecting, it's actually the kind of album I've been waiting for all year.  Don't get me wrong, Teen Dream still makes my heart do swan dives into a sea of dark blue melancholy, but there's only so much of that I can take in my life.  Teen Dream is something to be careful with, to dole out with care or save for a rainy day.  Cosmogramma is an album to get lost in, to dwell upon and discover as well as (at times) something to play at a BBQ or a midsummer's dance party.  It's daring and inventive as well as warm and inviting, much like the man himself was when I saw him rocking a packed Double Door crowd, the wizard himself tearing it apart and grinning for days in sheer enthusiasm.