Readings & An Open Letter to Kevin Shields

In my recent trolling of the internet I stumbled once again upon critic Simon Reynolds' Blissblog (see: http://www.blissout.blogspot.com/). I enjoy reading the random rants of other music writers almost as much as writing them myself although lately it seems that I am finding less and less to complain about - note the lack of a post here since last year even. More importantly from Reynolds' blog I was able to find links to several other blogs whose writers were engaging in some sort of dare I say "contest" called "I Hate ____" wherein one writer began to rant about hating dubstep musician Burial and continues onward to envelop the entire microcosm of problems in day to day middle class grocery shopping life whilst burying post-Sister Sonic Youth and late era Fall and Nick Cave under a battery of bile along the way. Another blogger continues by ripping into Animal Collective for what he calls Dave Portner's ability to smile similarly to G.W. Bush amongst other things and AC and its fans for their apathetic lack of taking a true political stance on anything while regressing into man-children via the often childlike lyrics of Portner and Noah Lennox.

On a given day I could definitely agree with these guys on a number or nearly all of the points addressed in their blogs. I do enjoy post-Sister Sonic Youth though and I do like The Fall and Nick Cave and Animal Collective quite a lot actually. However, I do have pretty fierce and longstanding leftist political views which I will not go into here as they only marginally relate to the topic at hand. While I am certainly not the type to get all huffy puffy when I see someone hating on music that I like (I know I've viciously hated on things before too), I absolutely enjoyed reading these posts. If you'd like to see them then here are links to the blogs and articles:
http://theimpostume.blogspot.com/2009/05/owen-asked-me-to-enlarge-on-why-i-hate.html
and
http://gaijinseb.blogspot.com/2009/05/my-hate-is-stronger-than-your-love.html

The second of these features the following quote at the bottom of the Animal Collective rant:
"I often think that the best move of Kevin Shields' career has been, despite the incessant pleas from his fanbase, not to release the eternally in-progress follow-up to Loveless."

I cannot agree more with this statement.

Dear Kevin Shields,
Please let me have my Loveless without the tarnishment that will come post-MBV reunion tour should you decide to finally release its follow-up. I am sure that you have been hypercritical of your own work for the last 18 years since the release of my favorite album and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for having the good sense (at least for now) of not making me regret my longstanding love affair with My Bloody Valentine.

Favorite Albums 2008

For a brief moment here at the end of 2008, I give you my favorite albums of the year. Now you can't say I'm a hateful bastard all the time, right? But hey I could still find some shit to talk about even a few things included here. Some of this stuff just barely scraped by while still garnering some bitter resentment among praise. Deerhunter's Microcastle sounds awesome on first listen but after a few spins can seem a little bit too safe, even boring compared with the stuff on its bonus disc Weird Era Cont. or even last year's Cryptograms. Stereolab still sounds like fucking Stereolab so its not like they reinvented the wheel or even seemingly put effort into making something beyond another easily solid album. When will M83's Anthony Gonzalez realize that we don't want to hear this overly dramatic teenage spoken word shit in the middle of an otherwise good song like "Graveyard Girl"? Finally, Shearwater's vocalist Jonathan Meiburg sounds ridiculous for the sake of being ridiculous - bombastic to the point of being laughable at times and crooning in that "great when it's right and cringe-inducing when it's wrong" voice of his, not to mention their unabashed copying of the later Talk Talk albums' sonic blueprint. Congrats are in order to Aufgehoben for being utterly brutal and intelligent at the same time, Khora is sure to be overlooked and given proper credit ten years from now when everyone finally gets around to assessing the band's proper worth long after it's disbanded.

1. Aufgehoben - Khora
2. Portishead - Third
3. Prurient - And Still, Wanting/The Black Post Society
4. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes/Sun Giant EP
5. Hair Police - Certainty of Swarms
6. The Caretaker - Persistent Repetition of Phrases
7. The Sight Below - Glider/No Place For Us EP
8. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie
9. TV On The Radio - Dear Science
10. Fennesz - Black Sea
11. Autechre - Quaristice
12. Cut Copy - In Ghost Colours
13. Nachtmystium - Assassins: Black Meddle, Part 1
14. Deerhunter - Microcastle/Weird Era Cont.
15. Beach House - Devotion
16. Leviathan - Massive Conspiracy Against All Life
17. MoHa! - One Way Ticket to Candyland
18. Tim Hecker & Aidan Baker - Fantasma Parastasie
19. M83 - Saturdays = Youth
20. Daniel Friel - Ghost Town
21. Crystal Antlers - EP
22. Stereolab - Chemical Chords
23. The Raveonettes - Lust Lust Lust
24. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
25. Shearwater - Rook

What's Old is New

Death Cab For Cutie are this generation's Toad the Wet Sprocket. They should both be put in front of a firing squad for making the most tepid music possible. That is all.

Please, No More

Sometimes it takes another person to succinctly put into words a seemingly unexplainable feeling that you have. Case in point, behold the following quote from Cokemachineglow's Eric Sams in his review of the Telepathic Butterflies' Breakfast in Suburbia:

"I’m not saying that there’s no good or exciting music left out there. And, yes, I realize that a majority of the good and exciting music ever made was made at the fringes, far away from the vortex of pap that has also always been present since time began. What I’m saying is that big “M” Music—the whole enterprise—never had to deal with the sheer volume of mealy, shiftless pabulum that it is currently charged with the task of encapsulating. Put another way, the good has never been so hopelessly dwarfed in quantity and salience by the bad."

Sams makes this point in the midst of the review although he is applying it to the general state of the music industry and not just the one mediocre/bad album he happens to be reviewing. Maybe it's because I worked at an independent record store for seven years, maybe it's because of the sheer mountain of horrible promos I receive weekly from bands desperate beyond all hope of getting someone to pay attention to them, either way Sams' point really hit home with me. He goes on to also assert the following, with which I also concur:

"Every genre, through the democratization of the medium, has ballooned to bulbous, cartoonish girth"

This was his response to fellow CMG writer Clayton Purdom's statement:

"I cannot stand the amount of singer-songwriters that exist."

Again, a statement that seems pretty on target to me. Allow me to expand on Purdom's and Sams' statements if I may. When the general music fan thinks of singer-songwriters he/she may think of talentless bores like John Mayer, Jack Johnson, Dave Matthews, Jimmy Buffett, etc. Add to that the popularity of pseudo-indie or indie artists like Cat Power, Bright Eyes, Iron & Wine, Will Oldham, Lou Barlow, Elliott Smith, and Patrick Wolf. Now that you've got the big picture allow me to remind you that you forgot Patrick Park, Micah P. Hinson, Donovan Frankenreiter, Jason Mraz, Josh Rouse, Josh Ritter, Jason Falkner, Matthew Sweet, Bryan Adams, Ryan Adams, Tori Amos, Joan Armatrading, Billy Bragg, Tracy Chapman, Bruce Cockburn, Sheryl Crow, etc. etc. etc. and the literally thousands upon thousands of others along with all the unknown artists with Myspace pages cranking out uninspired G-C-D chord based songs with trite lyrics and uninteresting instrumentation. Now apply the same formula to all genres of music across the board and maybe you begin to get the picture of how tiresome the democratization of the music making process has made being a listener or critic, let alone another artist.

Add to all of this the ability of anyone with a computer and basic knowledge of the internet to access any of this music at any time. Bands and labels are shoving crap onto us all the time in an effort to find the one thing that actually sticks. Forget for a second that the attention span of the average music fan in 2008 is barely long enough for a song, let alone an entire album. There's a problem here and I really don't see a solution to it right now. Maybe just because everyone can now make music and get it heard doesn't mean that they should. Not an entirely original statement, but true nonetheless.

Lo-fi...yeah...fuckin'...whatever...

Some have called it "shitgaze." That's probably the most overused and simplified description of bands such as Psychedelic Horseshit, Times New Viking, and The Hospitals among others. Basically these bands share a common theme of revamping the lo-fi aesthetic of 1990's albums by Sebadoh, Guided By Voices, and Pavement without sounding much like them musically. Two major points of contention for me: all of them have vocals that sound like Mac McCaughan from Superchunk and all of them overamp and compress their recordings to make it sound like every single instrument is super-distorted. I thought that awful, mewling, whine was one of the things that was used to constantly deride indie-rock and also emo of the period and if I were to pinpoint a single factor that induces my gag reflex when time-warping back to the 90's this would be it. I can't understand what any sensible person would find endearing about the caterwauling of a man that sounds like he's 12 years old even at 25 or worse 40. I also love distortion, fuzz, and recordings that are pushed into the red and oh yes noise for the sake of noise. The distortion on these records is used to mask the fact that most of these groups actually sound like second rate garage rock for the most part. I could actually hear trace elements of The White Stripes in The Hospitals' Hairdryer Peace album. I swear I wanted so badly to like this stuff but all it does is bring back memories of all the worst aspects of 90's indie rock. And people still think "screamo" is a terrible genre tag....

It's yoooooooo!!! Yeah!

After reading multiple reviews of the new Sigur Rós album, Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust, I was suprised to find that not a single one of them mentioned the lack of electric guitar. So many of these reviews (Cokemachineglow, Pitchforkmedia, Delusions of Adequacy, and Tiny Mix Tapes just to name a few of my favorites) neglect to mention that simple fact, a major turning point for the band on this album (regardless of my opinion that the album itself is somewhat mediocre). I thought it bizarre that so many of the reviewers focus on the fact that parts of the album return to the band's "formula" of crescendo after crescendo without bothering to mention that those crescendos were heretofore fundamentally built on the band's use of bowed guitar, an element that is non-existant on the album. Instead we get a band that needs some element of "loud" to remain interesting. I'm not suggesting that Sigur Rós didn't desperately need something to change things up, that should be apparent to any discriminating ear that found a new love in Ágætis byrjun only to watch the band repeat its tactics ad nauseum until the law of diminishing returns took effect. Most incredulous is that Pitchforkmedia went so far as to call them the musical equivalent of Michael Bay, a comparison made numerous times recently on Cokemachineglow in reference to many other artists. Okay we get it, the band trades in epics that (depending on your take) may be a distraction for a lack of substance. But come on, Michael Bay? He has yet to produce a single movie worthy of the distinction of making indie kids cry en masse during viewing. Maybe he should make a sequel to Lars Von Trier's Dancer in the Dark where all of Sigur Rós get hung in front of their children while "Starálfur" plays in the background. That should make everyone happy.

Girl Talk = A Failure Pile in a Sadness Bowl

The comedian Patton Oswalt has an album on Sub Pop that was released last year called Werewolves and Lollipops. I mention this because there is a bit on it where he launches into a tirade against KFC's Famous Bowls (see picture below)


Patton refers to these as "a failure pile in a sadness bowl," and I couldn't agree more. The bit basically utilizes the KFC Bowl as the measuring stick for the typical American asshole's indiscriminant taste when it comes to food. In other words things have gotten so bad that people actually desire a meal where a bunch of seemingly random foods (mashed potatoes, cheese, corn, chicken nuggets, gravy) are stacked on top of one another for easy consumption. The point I'm getting to here is that "it boy" Greg Gillis' Girl Talk project is the musical equivalent of a "failure pile in a sadness bowl."

For the uninitiated, Gillis takes popular music of every imaginable stripe and piles little pieces of it on top of each other to make a supposedly original work. It's not a new concept, it's called a "mash-up" and was first popularized in the 1980's when sampling technology become readily available to a larger number of people. The simple formula goes that you take an acapella vocal track from song A and put it on top of song B. The mash-up itself isn't what I personally have a problem with. It's the Attention Deficit Disordered tendency of listeners that says more about their indiscriminant tastes in music that they can no longer make it though a simple three minute pop song. Instead, they demand 40 fucking song parts crammed into the same three minutes. I must admit that the first time I heard a Girl Talk song I had the same knee-jerk "this is pretty interesting/entertaining" reaction that his fans do. After an entire album of it, it just becomes obnoxious. My wife has asked me to point out that she was not even amused and saw right through this bulllshit on the very first listen. Then consider this quote from Gillis himself, contained in the Pitchforkmedia review of Girl Talk's latest album, Feed the Animals: "The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs. Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people." In other words, Gillis know you're listening and he's playing you for the indiscriminatory fool that you are simply because its easy and he can. I believe I even said something very close to this in an extremely negative review of his last album, Night Ripper, for DOA a few years back. You can check that out here:
http://www.adequacy.net/review.php?reviewID=7129
So in other words it isn't necessarily Gillis' fault that he likes making music this way. And I'm all for people doing what they want, for the most part, regardless of how stupid it seems to me. Hey if you want to keep eating Gillis' failure bowls he's gonna keep cranking them out! Just don't expect me to pat you on the back for eating garbage when there's an entire world of other cuisine out there.