Battles - Gloss Drop

I won't even bother discussing the music. Anyone with passing recognition of the name Battles knows the story: the "super-group" of Tyondai Braxton, Ian Williams, Dave Konopka, and John Stanier arose playing instrumental super-jams bridging the gap between dance and rock, analog chops and digital trompe l'oeil. After 3 EPs of somewhat-interesting high-intensity post-rock, they hunkered down and released the stellar Mirrored in 2007--a breakthrough featuring the band's first vocal forays (courtesy of Tyondai), and songs that pushed musical boundaries while not sacrificing accessibility one iota. Several tours followed, and then they began work on the follow-up, impeded by Tyondai quitting at some point. Much speculation has attended the release of this new album, and how it would be affected by the departure of the band's most readily indentifiable member. Well, the results are no surprise: the EP jams are back, but with obnoxious vocals lacking all the individuality Tyondai had injected. Battles have gone from sounding futuristic and fun with a hint of dangerous edginess to sounding like Ponytail, while behaving like the Disco Biscuits. While their previously workmanlike attitude added to the more-than-the-sum-of-its-crazy-parts feeling, their recent Jimmy Fallon performance revealed three men obviously thinking "we are the shit!" while performing the Gang Gang Dance out-take circa 2005 that is "Futura". Williams mugged for the crowd and ecstatically played two keyboards--without even looking at them! Konopka wiggled his ass and grimaced like he was backing up Edwyn Collins, and John Stanier--long the band's rock-solid eye of the hurricane--bopped his head in time to the absurdly funky beat.

Listening to Gloss Drop at a 2011 Fourth of July party, the mood really suffered. After a while, the conversation drifted to the simpering electro-pop issuing from the speakers, and it wasn't good. "It sounds like a really boring carnival", remarked one. I couldn't agree more, it sounds like people doing what's expected of them in loud technicolor. This is the aural equivalent of a bad round of golf, complete with the ridiculous outfits.

Ok, I said I wasn't gonna talk about the music, and I did, so let's leave it at this: this album is depressing, and for possibly the only reason that these douchebags couldn't assess the problem of a follow-up to Mirrored without going for the obvious cash-in. Why am I surprised? I guess because Braxton really had the least to gain from going solo, but seemed to recognize the impossibility of a sequel. I can't really blame the other three--especially considering that none of them have had their taste of spotlight--but it's tempting to do so, if only for the reason that they seem so eager to take advantage of a chance to dilute their former achievements (plus who can imagine them doing justice to anything off Mirrored now?). For a band that has derived most if it's repuation from strange combinations of man and technology, seeing them on Fallon said it all: the strangest thing at this dance party is probably Ian Williams' windbreaker.

Zombi - Escape Velocity

(Tell You) About Phaedra

Why Sequencers Only Work in Italian Horror
-- OR --
Edgar Froese, Go Home!

Looking back, Tangerine Dream never fulfilled the promise of their first four albums, not that they needed to. From Electronic Meditation on through Atem, TD insinuated more and more shuddering ferocity into their music, while removing anything remotely resembling melody, harmony, and repetition. Then, they blew it all with Phaedra, a sequencer-driven jelly-filled-sock of an album that managed to sound like a total inversion of their most successful formula. In terms of scope, they went from sounds emulating cosmic birth and death to soundtracks for bad underwater chase scenes.

I really enjoyed Zombi's 2005 full-length Surface to Air, though perhaps not as much as Claudio Simonetti's soundtrack work to which the band pays homage. Zombi are yet another band adding little to an already well-defined genre, but doing what they do well, and filling a niche that is seemingly left open for their target audience. They take distinctly 70s-sounding synths (usually a couple of the pad/fake string variety, then a couple bass tones, and lastly some goofy sequencer to reinforce the beat), add some drums, and let things fester for 5-10 minutes. The outcome is a specific type of prog rehash, the kind best accompanied by old movie visuals or underwater documentary footage. To distill their attitude down to a word: menace.

That's why Escape Velocity leaves me completely cold: there's nothing here even VAGUELY menacing. It comes off as more of a poor Phaedra imitation than anything else, attempting to streamline the band's sound, but really just detracting. Instead of leaving behind the necessities, they've scraped the palette clean and removed all of the shadowy territory that made the earlier work more convincing (though that's still not saying much). In doing this, they've managed to create the aural equivalent of a dull grey that believes itself deepest black and cavorts most inappropriately.

Sadly, the coolest thing about this album is the cover, which--while eye-catching--really says it all. Instead of the glacial grandeur of Surface to Air, or the obvious-yet-still-classy cover for 2009's Spirit Animal, which both embodied a similar epic scope musically (and instilled a similar anxiety and awe), we get a picture of a naked woman running off a pier into oblivion with a bat-winged DeLorean in the foreground: this is Chillwave territory. So instead of more haunting traipses through soundtracks for nonexistent horror films, we're given a suburbia with an inappropriate intensity. These guys need to listen to some Rangers, and get their heads straight.

On tracks like "DE3", the techno vibe is definitely present, but more due to the up-tempo pounding bass drum than any change in instrumentation. Inspiration-wise, we're in Demons 2 territory, as opposed to the usual Deep Red territory, or the classic Lucio Fulci film from which the band derive their name.

Honestly, I'm pretty bored by this release, and probably won't play it more than two or three times before forgetting about it. In the past, even when I've found Zombi's work profoundly uninspired, it's at least provided a good soundtrack (usually for "House of the Dead"-style video games). This album, however, only has one track that I can even marginally get into: the closing "Time of Troubles", which sounds like it would not be completely out of place on a Puerto Rico Flowers album. Over a dolorous beat--the slowest on the album--band members A.E. Paterra and Steve Moore layer moody synths that hint more at gothy atmosphere a la Closer than Goblin, although the overall effect is more depressed than doomy, more bored than suspenseful.  Which really says it all: at its most engaging, this album is inoffensive, and at its worst, pointlessly unendurable.  I guess that makes it a pretty successful evocation of their namesake after all, then.

Dope Body - Nupping

In honor of Dope Body's new album Natural History being released tomorrow, I thought I'd re-post this quickie review I wrote last year of their first album, Nupping.

I generally describe Dope Body to my friends as a three-way collision between Rage Against the Machine, Battles, and dub.  That really does this band a disservice, as they sound like much, much more.  Baltimore tends to yield odd genre-combo bands that take a trash compactor to seemingly random modes of expression, then paint the whole thing day-glo.  Dan Deacon, Celebration, and Beach House are the most obvious examples, though Beach House has definitely toned the fluorescence down.  The main point, though, is that Baltimore's exports tend to not RAWK.  Sure, there are plenty of examples that do just that and do it very well (Oxes, Double Dagger, Thank You, Vincent Black Shadow), but they have not managed to light up the blogs in the same way.  Enter Dope Body.

Every song on this album screams "WE WANT TO EAT OTHER BANDS", and for good reason.  Dope Body run through different ideas and styles of music with an enthusiasm and attention-deficit greater than even the most highly-caffeinated twelve-year-old.  There are remnants of prog, metal, rap-rock, grunge, ambience, and even a few shoe-gazes, plus a few things I haven't heard anywhere else.  And it all works.  The video for album-opening single "Enemy Outta Me" was released a full year before the album, and those who saw the video too early slowly drowned in a sea of salivation waiting for its release.  We've been well-rewarded for our wait.  Bands with this much energy and a slash-and-burn aesthetic aren't supposed to write great songs, so why is the jumble of mumbles, hisses, and screeches that makes up most of this album HUMMABLE???  By the time the first track is done (all three minutes of it), we've gone through several distinct sections of fuzzy plug-n-play meandering, blitzkreig stop-start noise-rock, delay pedal looping, stuttering white skank, and post-industrial meltdown.  All done in a highly engaging, visceral manner.  The rest of the songs don't really let up, making for a full-on sprint of an album that really satisfies.

I need a few days to digest the new one, but judging from my initial impressions, I'll be posting about that soon enough--and if that review doesn't seethe and foam as much as this one did, it's only because Nupping is one tough act to follow.

Peterlicker - Nicht

This release is for those (like me) who enjoy their ambience closer to psychedelic-doom-trash than metal-punk-orgasm, if you will: perpetual disintegration. I'm a lazy man: keep the terrain changing so I don't have to change it myself, please. An undifferentiated wall of hiss is just NOT the point, in my opinion. Power Electronics can do that all it likes, there's only so far that the reduction of complexity can take you. Almost everything in this world is more than the sum of its parts, so why say that endless repeats of Second Annual Report done less imaginatively don't provide diminishing returns? Of course, the messenger is always more readily perceived than the message, so in many cases those diminishing returns become necessary. Look at any "major musical event" (whatever THAT might mean) from the last 100 years--someone's still trying to make that revelant, to re-live that importance in the first-person. Whether it's swing, rockabilly, or Nirvana, most creators of music start out believing that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, when it fact it's the laziest. If it isn't completely obvious to everyone already, I'll state my feelings: influence, NOT imitation, is the most polite, inteulligent, and above all interesting way to show kudos. Learning that your favorite band loves the new Hot Chip album usually means that they're going to be skewing their next album towards some vein of lush electro-glitch-core (e.g. David Byrne talking about Jamees Blake in his semi-recent interviews). However, when someone(s) can talk knowledgably about music they love that has had no impact on the music they make, it is usually an indication of egolessness.

I would rather see a million inept attempts to reach something new and wholly original than a dozen well-crafted refinements of existing principles. Even the most experimental genres, labels, composers, etc. have throwbacks--that's not the problem. I suppose what I'm ultimately trying to get at here is the idea that people's needs have changed, so now music must be a throwback in order for most listeners to hear it as more than DATA. This is something we all deal with on a daily level, to the extent that consciousness becomes the dividing factor. What makes our ears stand up has always determined to which ideas we are receptive, which usually keeps our interaction with art to a superficial minimum. "Give me content I'm sure to enjoy, and the form does not matter," is generally what the masses demand--despite the commercial assumption that form dictates content (i.e. radio), which has proven to be correct only to a very limited degree.

I'm no different from these nameless listeners I describe, which is why Nicht really hits the spot. Or a spot, I can't really say I know which one it hits. It comes in the trappings of darkness, more an alliance with industrial noise than ambient drone, but sonically it's really in the middle. The darkness comes mostly from the vocal element, not the instrumentation--although there is an undercurrent of anxiety that would make this hard to term ambient. Calm anxiety? Sort of, more like that feeling when you know something inevitable is forthcoming, but you've accepted your own relation to the event, and the time to bide until it comes. Most of the value inherent in this music (at least to me) is it's ability to depict or reflect conflict without any coloration. I mean, isn't it time for music to make more than just declaritive statements of intent? I don't know about anyone else, but I spend the majority of my time too confused to know exactly WHAT I'm thinking or feeling, I just know that not having a dependable moral or emotional compass is generally upsetting. And since doubt does not exactly inspire ecstacy, it seems that modern life steps further away from that door every day. Ignorance may have used to equal bliss, but these days it just means you're clueless.

The age of the composer, of the singer-songwriter, has not passed, but it is passing.

Movies vs. paintings/photos=current digitization of music past commodity vs. previous humanism. Current music amounts to the closest humans can interact with technology (unless it's busking on street corners, in which case it's generally lame), expectations have risen accordingly. Presently music is more an expression of technical competency in expressing relatable emotion, than any sort of emotional depth in and of itself. Throwing out frames of reference for "sad" or "angry" rather than expressing those feelings in a way that better underlines their complexities. The problem at the heart of the issue is that people are rarely creative out of a pure inner need--that need becomes tainted by ideas of fame or acceptance, and so rather than expressing any true feeling and taking a RISK of being misunderstood, it's far more rewarding to use preexisting modes of communication, even if they are very limited.

I know nothing about Peterlicker, so none of this necessarily applies, I had to get up on my soapbox. Every little bit of info about these guys (and there doesn't seem to be much) puts their aesthetic as some sort of ultimate doom-laden apocalypse refinement. And maybe this says more about my imagination than my musical tastes, but this sounds to me like much more than an apocalypse. It sounds like galactic expansion and contraction. Suns burn out, only to have space evaporate and compact itself. The floor is thirty feet below your dangling legs, then you are swimming in it like molasses, up to your elbows. It's big, but not to the point of insubstantiality, right? Because sometimes something can be so big that it just becomes another microcosm--just so much wasted effort. Compare early Tangerine Dream to 80s movie-soundtrack Tangerine Dream, for example. There's a comfortable size to the five tracks on this album, like being stranded in a station after the last train has left for the night, knowing that you didn't really want to go anywhere anyway. Rather than the typical musical journey, this album provides a large space to explore at the listener's leisure. The dubbed-out mix allows maximum space for sound to play, and meaning isn't imposed.

................Creeping, zittering synths and slurrrrrrred vocals, pitch-shifting, sounds of abrasion. Processing on top of processing. So many shades of grey that it becomes technicolor. No shattering of senses, this melts and melds--not destruction, but creation through deformity..............................

.................Moments of shimmering ambience, creaking, yattering, rumbling, crashing, background detritus so overwhelmed by sound that its origin becomes unimportant, just another set of elements within the scintillating psychedelic wash......................

Notes shouldn't be clean, like the rest of music. Mixed Fidelity infects everything we now listen to, from the dirty/sparkly accessible pop on the radio to the most experimental. Why would a note start or end the same way each time? Why does a riff bear repeating? These are not questions anyone should be interested in answering definitively, they continue to inform every piece of music. Notes should slide, collide, become dissonant and assonant, yet for some reason cleanliness is prized. Thankfully not here. The listener is thrown down a dark tunnel, with few textural reference points, only a sense of gravity. The gravity provides the grace. It may seem directionless, but only when atomized. If taken as a whole, there is more than enough differentiation to allow for gleanings beyond the initial. They removed the repetition so you could replace it, through repeated listens during which you don't need to pay attention anyway. If you already know what's there, then why confirm it through acknowledgment? The only end result that matters is gained understanding, revelatory or otherwise. Art that hits the pleasure center without informing is the worst sort of friend, and this cautions like little else. It is a WARNING, here to keep you away from anything of less value.

Sleepers - The Less an Object

"Whatcha gonna do with a girl like that? Not much."

Sleepers were a band that perhaps most perfectly reflected the migration from pop sensibilities to punk, beyond, and then back. Formed in Palo Alto, CA in 76 or 77, the Sleepers were one of the Bay Area's first punk bands, and then almost immediately, one of the first post-punk bands. The band's only two constants from start to finish were singer Ricky Williams and guitarist Michael Belfer, which accounts for a little of the sonic variety, but not much.

In Simon Reynolds' post-punk pantheon "Rip It Up and Start Again", the Sleepers garner a brief mention, wherein they are described as an American Joy Division. SST's Joe Carducci described the band as possessing "spectral, jaw-dropping beauty". Spectral is really the key word. There's a certain quality about the band--Ricky Williams in particular--that's very difficult to pin down. So much of this collection should be cringe-worthy, as Williams screams his heart out, in ways that would embarrass lesser singers: "I've got these guns and knives and ropes in my room, they are effective--I want to get rid of you" goes one line from the somewhat-deplorable ramalamafest "The Mind". However, Williams has the grace to pull things off in the most near-disastrous fashion, constantly turning belly flops into swan dives. While Joy Division is notable for being one of the few bands to accurately capture the feeling of claustrophobia and despair that flow through depression, the Sleepers' praises should be just as well-sung: while they don't exactly inspire hope, there is a transitory sense given by this body of work (and Williams' other work, notably on the Toiling Midgets' Sea of Unrest), that one is witnessing a beautiful metamorphosis.

The music on this disc falls into three distinct phases of the band's career: the first five tracks are from the initial lineup's Seventh World EP, the next two from the Mirror/Theory 7", and the remainder from the Painless Nights LP (with a few out-takes thrown in for good measure).

It seems like Tuxedomoon was somewhat crucial to this group's development, though it could be the other way around. Michael Belfer joined as their guitarist for a few years, playing on the definitive "No Tears" and "What Use?" singles. Apparently Williams was also a brief member (supposedly only joining for one rehearsal), as evidenced by his presence on the track "Straight Line Forward" on the Pinheads on the Move retrospective. Whatever the case, the crossover went both ways, as saxophone/synth player Steven Brown joined for the Mirror/Theory sessions. It is on these two tracks that the heavy technology enters the picture. Most fundamentally, both tracks feature primitive drum machine rhythms (the beat on "Mirror" sounds like "59 To 1", while "Theory" has the exact same beat as "What Use?"), but there are other similarities: Brown's saxophone is processed beyond the point of recognition, and Belfer's guitar undulates in much the same way as the Tuxedomoon tracks on which he also played (the chorus to "Theory" again uses a similar sound to his techno-shredding on "What Use?"). The leap forward there makes perfect sense: after playing with Tuxedomoon, their resident tech guru Tommy Tadlock built him a treatment kit which it seems Belfer never stopped using (and thank God for that). Even Williams' vocals remind of Tuxedomoon, as on "Mirror", when he moans "what about the other side, always stay the same, the same to meeee!", it sounds a lot like the "grandma don't bite me!" voice at the end of "Pinheads on the Move".

I'm sure a lot more of this would make sense had the participants been better documented--Williams' lyrics in particular--but it's that inscrutability that ultimately aids the overall effect of listening to this. Just like with Joy Division, these can only be taken as terminal statements, primarily because the groups didn't stick around long enough to dilute their catalog. His lyrics contain a lot of recurring themes: misogyny, reputation, rejection, retreat. Comparing the two versions of "Theory" actually helps most in unlocking any sort of meaning in these songs.

Belfer was probably the party most responsible for the intense changes in vision throughout the band's history--although shifting lineups would most likely have a lot to do with that, too. However, it's Belfer's playing that most challenges the accepted roles of his respective instrument. While there may be some similarities to Bernard Sumner's absorption of heavy metal guitar into the punk canon, Belfer manages a panorama of styles--from the overlapping plucked structures of "Zenith", straight-ahead riffing on "The Mind", to creepy atmospherics on "Mirror" and scratchy funk feedback on "Walk Away". While some of it is strikingly processed, there's still a big portion of these tracks that contains artful subtleties not revealed on first listen.

However, what ultimately makes this a fascinating listen is the way that the Sleepers consistently managed to mine the darkness and find things to hope for, confusion begetting transcendence. And again, a lot of that has to do with Williams' way of eliciting meaning from seemingly meaningless nonsequiters, as well as his risk-taking. A song like "She's Fun" (containing the immortal "sometimes it's fun to fuck, that's all she's meant for") manages to make Williams sound like a terrible person, but combined with the rest of these tracks, it just seems to convey one portion of his conflicted worldview. It's this ability to counter blatantly ugly statements (both verbal and musical--not to mention the cover art) with stunning ones that makes this collection truly adventurous.

Sightings - Future Accidents

 

Dredged loops, more tightly wound than usual.  Sightings' releases have a general air of claustrophobia to them, but that's usually from the recorded ambience, not the closed-circuit RAGE overload in the material.  Maybe you'd expect a high level of rage content in most noisy post-music these days, but I've detected a more resigned/becalmed air recently, one that this album certainly has its share of, but tempered with an immediacy born of negation.  Noise as a genre certainly points towards a distrust of machinery, of precision in general.  Sightings do an about-face on that basic principle: theirs is a medium of tight control, leavened only by occasional bursts of raw sound--because tastefulness can only get you so far, right?

While there's plenty of ambient space on here--as well as compositional space, as on the 20-minute album-ending "Public Remains", which spends its first half drifting and slowly building.  By the time the eight-minute mark rolls around, we're in heaving, roiling open water, full-on Svarte Grenier territory, but executed with a sense of rhythm and feeling to rival the brooding atmosphere.  It doesn't just sound like a boat, that would be too easy and too practical.  Sightings turn it into an epic Nantucket sleighride of a piece, fighting, kicking, seething and bubbling before finally sinking beneath its own weight. It's hard to forget that Sightings are astute students of Insect Death and the hard-won visceral punishment of No Wave: there's an intense physicality to this music, almost like Ligeti.  Their music weaves a hallucinogenic spell around broken instruments and hissing amps, so it's totally appropriate that they sit on the furthest fringe of the noise scene, on Mouthus' label Our Mouth.  Mouthus are one of the few other bands that I hear making broken music for healing: sinister ambience that encroaches and recedes without threatening, yet fluctuating enough to draw the listener in.

This is dark music, a thick brine within which to marinate one's own failures.  Probably their most nebulous release yet.  Considering that the material on their last few releases was inching closer and closer to melody, the decision to make this album less structured (at least in the traditional sense) is a surprise.  It shouldn't be, especially when the band is releasing two collaborations with To Live and Shave in L.A.'s Tom Smith--never a sign of compositional focus, but a guarantee of unhinged rawness.  With the exception of "Public Remains"' spacious dignity, the rest of the album contains scores of knotted tension, arrhythmic in the extreme.  "On a Pedestal" is particularly blistering, with out-of-control feedback guitar two rooms over, and a bass running all over the place, you almost miss the drums, which are reduced to sheering electronic pings and bleeps.

All in all, this album might seem a little long-winded to some, but I find it justifies its length through the blending of the meditative and abrasive, which gives it a unique "eye of the hurricane" feel.  Cozy chaos. While most artists who started out in this noisy vein (Black Dice, the Chromatics, etc.) are pursuing more structured sounds and the attendant audience that brings, it's refreshing to see a band like Sightings pursue their muse, even if that pursuit occasionally leads them off the side of a cliff.