Rage Roundup – @ 4 July '8

There's been a fair number of nice new clips come out over the past few weeks. Maybe I need to be more regular with my rage posts, in future – there's 16 songs here! This post is huge! But it's all well worth reading, I promise.

Anyhow, here's the jig.

(NB, however: I'm not going to comment on Little Red's new single "Witchdoctor", I think I'm probably kind of  biased when it comes to those guys. But they had a cover story in The Age's EG section the other day, so they don't need anything from me. Suffice it to say that their new album Listen To Little Red is awesome, so go and buy it already. In brief: Little Red are superb. (As are The Hondas, but don't tell anyone about that little side-project – it's almost like a secret, that one...)

Gobbledigook – Sigur Ros

Hey look, naked people. Isn't it interesting that nakedness stops being sexy when it's everywhere? And that complete nudity is less erotic than partial nudity? As for the song itself, it seems to be a bit of a departure for Sigur Ros: a lot brighter & more uptempo than the ethereal glacierscapes they're best known for. It's a good song, with a fun rhythm and some interesting vocal work. The feel of the song is perhaps a little samey overall, but it's only three minutes long, so do we care? (Answer: probably not).

In The Blood – Pivot

I found this really intriguing. It's an instrumental – an interesting mix of unnatural synth sounds and squelchy electric guitar, with aggressive (non-synth) percussion underneath. It's not a sonic blend that you hear a lot of (although it's kind of like Battles, I guess), but it's a great sound. Pivot here have a compelling & original feel that avoids the "feels-like-80s-fusion" pit of doom, unlike so many other instrumental groups. The structure and the dynamics of this song are excellent: it maintains great intensity without ever being monotonous. The clip is a nice & creepy stop-motion animation, too. It's a cheaper video than it deserves, but it's still good. Overall: well worth some attention, I think.

Are You Magnetic? – Faker

From the opening riff, I thought it was going to be yet another plodding 80s retread, but this song surprised me. Although the production is all crappy-80s-power-ballad, Faker prove their chops here by unexpectedly transforming the song into an actually-very-good-80s-power-ballad. There's a genuine grandeur and depth to the whole thing. Somehow, Faker's conviction (and songcraft) overwhelmed my inherent prejudices against faux-80s production, which is no mean feat. They still sound a lot like an indie band angling for commercial radio play, but at least they're doing it well. Good stuff.

Wait For The Summer – Yeasayer

I read somewhere that these guys had been disparaged as "like Animal Collective playing Queen covers", which Yeasayer themselves thought sounded like a compliment. You know what? It does sound like a compliment. It's probably sort of accurate, too. Their sound is dense and eclectic, but never at the expense of clarity or musicality. The tune is catchy; the vocal interplay is interesting & quite neat, too. I don't think the clip is as clever or "meaningful" as it thinks it is, but the music is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Standing Next To Me – The Last Shadow Puppets

Even better than their last (ie, first) single. That's because it's a better song: this time, the arrangement is dynamic enough to keep the music from ever seeming too monotonous or derivative. It is derivative, of course, but it's derivative of a style that's never really been explored in depth (or indeed much at all, since the 60s), so that's cool. Ultimately, it's just a really well-written song. The harmonic progression of the chorus is powerfully melancholic, but the rhythm never drags – the interplay of sadness and triumph is wonderfully ambiguous. It's a great melody, and the music as a whole feels genuinely beautiful. The first single didn't sell me their album, but this song just might.

Social Currency – Children Collide

Another driving, punchy, punkish slice of rock – a real locomotive of a track, and it's great. The only other single of theirs that I've seen around, "We Are Amphibious", played almost like a novelty song; this is definitely something else. More sincere, but also better. There's still a nice line of vicious humour underpinning the lyrics, too. Unfortunately, the clip is pretty uninspired; but it does have an explosion and some stuff being set on fire, so it's not a total loss.

Oxford Comma – Vampire Weekend

Lots of clips have done the "long continuous tracking shot while crazy stuff happens" thing, but this is still an excellent example of the genre. It's a great song, too. The video clip version suffers from "f-ck" censorship of the audio – it's like the song has a stutter – but the damage isn't as bad as it might be. This is probably the song that tipped me over the edge towards actually buying Vampire Weekend's album, and I'm glad I did. It's not a work of genius, but it's very unique, which is almost as good. Catchy songs played well, fun lyrics that aren't what you expect – what more do you want? They may be a bunch of spoilt NY preppies, but so were The Strokes; nobody's perfect.

Paris Is Burning – Ladyhawke

I've talked about Ladyhawke in the past, but on the other hand practically no-one knows that this blog exists. No harm in a little repetition, then. I don't think this particular track is quite as good as a couple of her others floating around, but it's still very good. If she can produce an album to match her best work, I'll tell you now: it will be awesome. 

I Said I'm Sorry – British India

Look, "British India" is a great band name and all, but I just don't see where these guys are getting all their local success from. To me, it just sounds like the same old pseudo-emo-rock crap; the singer's voice is gratingly monotonous, the songs are uninspired, their haircuts & outfits are only average. What's up, fellows? I just don't get it.

On the other hand, I guess they're not really all that successful, yet... so prove me wrong, guys.

I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You – Black Kids

So the record company let them keep "Black Kids" as their name? Seriously? Like, maybe they thought it would give them an "edge", or something? If they're trying to distract me from their music, it isn't working as well as I'd like it to. It's a nice enough indiepop tune, but it just feels too much like a crappy ripoff of Operator Please, and OP aren't exactly perfect to begin with. Black Kids' myspace claims that they're from Florida, but that might be a lie – here they sound as English as a damp crumpet. A crumpet that gets the kids dancing with abandon on Top Of The Pops, mind you. The band all seem to be extremely young, too; so they're probably bound to do well for a little while, before a) evolving into something less twee and not so embarrassingly earnest, or b) breaking up and going off to university.

Yes (I'm Coming Out) – The Horror The Horror

That's The Horror The Horror, not to be confused with The Horrors. This is a great video – extremely no-budget, and the image-and-sound editing isn't flawless, but it's full of great ideas.

The robot dance! Handclaps! Bright colours! Seriously, it's well done. Good music, too; an interesting sonic mash, almost Britpop but more contemporary, yet with a feel that's a bit 70s punk-lite – almost like The Knack, maybe? There's no immediately obvious influence to reduce it to, which is a worthy quality in itself. It's a good song; I thought the bass riffs and the insistent guitars were irresistible. The breakdown at the end is especially fun – there's even something of a guitar solo! Very neat.

DVNO – Justice

Fantastic clip concept – a continuous pastiche of all those 1980s animated production company promos that played at the beginning of a film or at the end of a tv show. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch the clip for a minute). It's a classic & underused style of animation – great fun to watch, and a clever visual hook for nostalgic 80s kids. It also distracts from the fact that while the music is a pretty decent piece of electrish dance, there's not that much to it as a pop song. But it's fun, well-produced and better than most slices of the genre, so thumbs up.

To Be Loved – Joan As Policewoman

This took a while to grow on me – it's so damn mellow – but gosh, she has a lovely voice. I've grown to think that the song is ultimately a real nice one, too. It's cleverly arranged, and it progresses in unexpected directions despite the classic feel of the changes. It feels like lounge indie, or something; it's in an unusual place, somewhere between Feist, Cat Power and Antony. She's wearing a silly helmet in the video, but who wouldn't?

Sneakernight – Vanessa Hudgens

This is a pretty decent pop tune, but the up-&-down chromatic verse riff sure sounds like a total ripoff of "Like A Feather", that Nikka Costa single (you know, from... holy cow... from way back in 2001, actually; Vanessa Hudgens was only 12 years old at the time). It's a pretty basic riff, so it's not a huge creative deal, but... ah, who cares, this song is distinct enough aside from that. I also like the fact that the repetitive singalong line of the chorus here is "basically what we're gonna do is dance". In a pop song, that's a pretty funny line. And the lyrics promote responsible footwear, which is nice. And the singer apparently has the moxie to attempt a pop career without losing a surname as clunky as "Hudgens", so good on her. Oh wait, she's from that High School Musical thing, so she's already famous. Youth of today, what's up with yr pop? etc.

Summertime – New Kids On The Block
Just in case you wanted to see a boy band made up of guys in their 30s. It would be easy to be instantly judgmental – "oh ha ha this is so shit", without even listening to it – but that doesn't matter. Because the truth is, this IS pretty terrible. Or, in other words: this is TERRIBLE. And you should feel comfortable taking my word for that.

That's a bit of a downer to end on. Let's cheer ourselves back up with some Little Red, okay?

:D

-the Musical Thoapsl

Rage Roundup, 21 March '8

Holy cow it's been a while. What can I say? Lately, my job sucks. And it sucks TIME. It may not suck the will to live, but it does tend to suck the will to do anything other than lie around and watch The Wire (which I only discovered about a month ago, btw, and which I'm now working my way through like a hungry mouse at a full round of cheddar... & still twenty episodes of delicious brilliance to go, I hope).

Nevertheless: I do have a couple of weeks' worth of Rage to work through here, of the televisually musical variety. Swell.

The Age Of The Understatement – The Last Shadow Puppets

So, that guy from the Arctic Monkeys has a side project already. (As does some other guy* from another band, a fact which enables The Last Shadow Puppets to be marketed as a "side" rather than as a "solo" project & thereby forestalls nasty gossip.) Creative energies to spare, these young folk.

It's a decent song; as with a lot of side projects, it sounds kind of like the non-side project but with strings. Though to be honest that's a bit unfair; the arrangement has a nice Morricone Fistful-of-Dollars vibe (relentless horse-gallop drums, reverb you can feel everywhere) and it's a more than decent song. But it seems a little flat for a lead single, to me... the melody is a bit weak and the arrangement a bit too predictable. It doesn't have the rawness or the dynamism of the Arctic Monkeys. On the other hand, maybe that's the point...

One thing that did annoy me, though. In the chorus, the title refrain ("the age of the understatement") unphrases the words to fit the melody, rather than the other way around. Instead of pronouncing the word with stress on the syllables UNderSTATEment (the way the word is spoken), all the syllables of "understatement" are stressed equally. This means that the "MENT" syllable carries too much relative emphasis, which throws off the entire phrase. It ends up sounding unnatural, I think. Now there are many, many songs which do this, including a lot of very good and very popular songs; so does it really matter? To most people, apparently not. But it always feels off, to me. I like it when a song takes the opposite route: to momentarily dislodges the rhythm of the melody in order to fit the phrasing of the word, rather than the other way around. Shifting the melodic rhythm forces you to engage with the word itself. It dunks you back down into the lyrical-meaningful level of the music instead of just maintaining you at the tune level. It's a bad move if the lyrics are no good, of course... but in the right place, in the right song, it's sublime.

*known as "Miles Kane", but a name like that is far too impressive to not be a pseudonym, right?

Little Girl Lost – The Silents

Nothing to do with the David Axelrod tune, then? Perhaps the Silents haven't even experienced it**.

"The Silents" is a neat name for a rock band (it's almost too obvious – why hasn't it been used before?) and I think it suits their off-kilter punkiness. It feels like a 60s garage thing from its rhythm and vocal sneer, but there's an unexpectedly psychedelic edge to the whole thing; the entire last minute of the (only) 2:45 is a guitar solo! You can't say a song is taking itself too seriously when it's willing to structure itself like that, surely. At least not in 2008.

The more I listen to the song as a whole, the better it seems, although it's difficult to say precisely why. A whole album that sounded like this would probably grate, if the singer was as monotonal on every single song (imagine, say, a really terrible Vines album?) – but as a lone single I'm willing to substitute "grating" with "mean punk attitude, or the closest reasonable approximation". The video is also a fine example of how to make a compelling & rhythmic sequence of images without spending much money, but also without the cheapness being too obvious.

So... it's a hard song to like from thinking about, but my ears enjoyed it okay before my mind got in the way. A win, I reckon.

**my willingness to pun obscurely (& weakly) knows few bounds, motherfuckers.

Thanks For Your Time – Gotye

The most immediately clever and engaging track from Gotye's last album finally gets a video clip. The song remains as excellent as ever, but the video doesn't quite do it for me... the imagery is fun if a little predictable (and, uh, two-dimensional...), but the real problems are with the rhythm. There's a great driving rhythm to the sound (of course there is, it's Gotye), but I think the images just don't match up as well as they should. Transitions lack punch – too often images change in the middle of a phrase, or they move just after the beat instead of just before it. I'm nitpicking like hell, I know... isn't that what blogs are for?

Maybe I'm being a little daft here. It is beautifully animated. Aw, make up your own opinion already.

Coming Back – Gotye

On the other hand, look! More Gotye! That makes two new Gotye clips in only two weeks! The previous one (actually on Rage a week earlier – my blog sneers in the face of strictly chronological discussions) may have been a fan project rather than something official, I gather. This new single is clearly more expensive. It's a real nice video – the storyline matches the song without being overly literal, which is a tricky line to walk. And although it's vaguely kind of amusing throughout, the conclusion turns genuinely creepy.

Okay, the video is fine. The music is what makes it all work. Gotye melds a genuine old-school pop songwriting technique (like, 1960s svengali producer hornrims & a tie, old-school – his songs are natural hooks without cliche, and he wears a necklace of hen's teeth) with a set of samples that should probably come out sounding as hackneyed as heck (like the Avalanches without any density, or sped-up trip-hop with flowers in its hair, or something even more crass and pathetic – try hearing the samples in Thanks For Your Time out of context & maybe you'll see what I mean). But it's not. Instead, there's an original brilliance which makes you forget all about the components and see only the whole.

What's his alchemy? I think it's the words, and the voice. You can tell that his lyrics have been written with effort; they're trying to be good rather than trying to be good enough. That would be enough to distinguish them from most pop lyrics... (I think it's incredibly difficult, even in indie/alt circles, to find lyrics that aren't basically just the writer's idea of what they think song lyrics are supposed to be – why else is the word 'baby' sung by so many people who would never, ever use it as a term of endearment in real life?)

And Wally's voice – that's the keystone. Listen to the way it's on the verge of cracking, all the way through the bridge: with every word he sings, the tone of his voice carries weight. There's a delicious hint of bitterness and anger that's very rare in mainstream music, but I think it's exactly that which gives Gotye the emotional edge which secures his success. Not many people can come out of nowhere like he has, to make it with commercial radio & indie hipsters alike. (Although nowadays, admittedly, he's a little too popular for hipsters to admit to liking without a little self-deprecation).

So yeah I liked the song, it was okay I guess.

It's A War – Dukes Of Windsor

Okay, so they owe their present visibility to somebody else's remix of a song which was otherwise going nowhere. That's not an auspicious beginning. But this new song is a hell of a lot better than I was expecting after that. It's treading through indie-rock/electro-dance waters which have been mined to death over the past several years*** but it manages to find a new middle-point in the feel which (somehow) doesn't sound like you've already heard it before. The chorus is catchy, the arrangement is sharp, the bridge is clever; unlike The Others, it's not an easy tune to dislike. The lyrics aren't brilliant, but they could have been a hell of a lot worse. (That sounds like faint praise, but now I think about it, it probably is.)

Even so: as a move forward from their last hit, it's a bloody promising one.

***so hey guys, why do mixed metaphors get such a bad rap, anyway? Do they honestly deserve it? Isn't it all part of the wondrous tapestry of language, or something? Ah, whatever

Grounds For Divorce – Elbow

This didn't really do much for me the first time I heard it, but it might be growing on me. It feels like a pretty straightforward middle-of-the-alt 00s rock song; nicely done, if not outstanding in any particular way. But hey, look: he's smashing a pint glass down on the table, as a percussion instrument!

Seriously, you have to admire that. It's damn punchy, if nothing else.

Polka – Yves Klein Blue

Genuinely different, this one. For one thing, they sport a look so unfashionable that they may or may not come out the other side as "ironically fashionable" again: the frontman is a fey pre-punk teddy boy, and the rest of the group look like 80s stoners who wish they were hippies. The music itself is even less tied to any obvious contemporary trends. It gently transitions out of a traditional pattern (kind of a polka-like feel, actually) into fuzzed-out punklike extremity, and then later moves into a guitar solo which is (to begin with, at least) almost clean trad-jazz! What are they up to? If they're willing to make music this idiosyncratic, they're worth listening to. Definitely worth investigating, I think.

Move Along – Casual Projects

This is what I like about Aussie hiphop – sometimes, it's made by acoustic jazz groups who secretly wish they were 60s Motown. Okay, so occasionally that means you end up with the Cat Empire. But then there's also stuff like this, a song which absolutely deserves to be some kind of crossover pop hit. Come on, the piano work is awesome – that opening riff is killer – and the instrumental sounds are sweet throughout. The rapping and the singing are both really solid; the song itself is a beautiful slice of propulsive toetappery. The video clip is a pleasantly daft little storyline, with some neat & original visuals. What's not to like?

Okay, I've got quite a few more to do, but this is already one or two weeks late – let's leave it here and continue later. I'll catch up to the present eventually, I promise.

-the Musical Thoapsl