Yeah, so apparently they make a big deal about the "xx" being lowercase. I'll try not to hold that against them.
This band has been making waves lately; they don't look cool, and not looking cool is an excellent way to be cool, but that's not why people are paying attention to them. What makes the xx unique is their sound, which is incredibly stripped back: as other bloggers have noted, they make four musicians sound like two. That kind of sonic restraint is incredibly rare in modern pop. Even better, they have the skills to use this restraint in service of some really spectacular tension-&-release songwriting. It's quite unlike anything else out there right now, and it's great.
But not great enough for me to spend money on it just yet, apparently.
Their debut album, Replica Replica, should have been a much bigger success – the damn thing was absolutely crammed with excellent, hard-edged guitar pop. But Red Riders don't seem to have the right image for success, or something; they're just too tuneful for the hardcore, too artsy for the popsters, too Sydney for the Melbourne. And apparently one of their (multiple) singer-songwriters has left them since the first album, which is a huge shame; they could have been so much more, if they'd all stuck together . . .
But that's people, I guess. In the meantime: if the second RR album has half as many kickarse songs as the debut, then it will be worth buying. Either way I'll be buying it eventually, I'm sure.
Aw, look – she's just so damn pleasant! I don't know what it is, but there's something about Lily Allen that I just find massively, ineffably appealing. I feel like I probably shouldn't like her music, but I do. It's neat, sweet pop; the lyrics are usually way more clever than they should be; and even when it's bitter and sardonic, which is most of the time, it's also damn nice. At her worst, she's not quite right, but at her best she's excellent.
Florence is epic. I'm not exactly sure how she ended up at #1 on this list, though; her legs may have carried her over the line, I guess. That and her voice, which is astounding. I'm not usually the kind of person to be too impressed by a conventionally tuneful singing voice, but her voice is simply huge; the album title is apt. I've no idea if the rest of her album lives up to the interesting potential of the few singles I've heard so far, but I'm sure it's worth a shot. That, and I worry that she'll beat me up if I don't give her money.
And there you have it – Top 10 #10! And I'll be posting Top 10 #9 will before New Year, turkey permitting.
I am absolutely basking here, up in the glory of the end of local daylight savings time. An extra hour of sleep! I finally got back the hour they took away! About time, about time...
Anyhow. Call me Well-Rested or call me Relieved, I guess. Here are a few of the music videos played on Rage last Friday night. More words to follow.
Man, this is one well-turned-out song. The guitars, the bursts of dissonance, the crisp drums, the balance of the arrangement altogether: the whole thing is so complete, so just so. I don't know how well it'll do as a single, given that the mood is so very 90s to a fault (or i.e. so typically PJ Harvey, I guess), but it's damn fine anyhow. Have we made it to the mid-90s-alternative revival, yet? I guess we still have to work our way out thru New Grunge, first...
I'm curious to figure out the exact influence of this John Parish guy – the song sounds just a lot like late-90s PJ Harvey, to me – but of course that doesn't matter. Whatever Parish is doing, he can keep it up. And I like what they've done with the video here, too: it's very slow and simple, but never not compelling. Good stuff.
You wouldn't guess what the song's really like based on that endless synth intro/outro, would you? Interesting strategy, that... but it's really there as a declaration of punk, I think. And that makes sense: despite the drum machine and synths, the streaming guitars are resolutely, punkishly thick and dominant. And with the emphatic vocals and 1977ish chorus, the whole thing comes on like an alt-universe Iggy Pop (or, even moreso: Suicide). I like it.
The video does a nice job in abject bodyhorror craziness, too (& that's also a bit of a punk move in itself, yeah?). The lamplit foggy darkness is suitably eerie and dreamlike; I thought of Winnipeg. The vomitous black goo motif is taken far enough into grotesquerie that it sidesteps the typical uninspiration of "oh look, vampire zombies or whatev" that you'd otherwise be bored with. If you want to shout "gross!" then it must be doing something right, right? Lovely.
Boy, that's some bad singing right there. I mean, I enjoy wayward antivocals, okay. I love Sonic Youth, Bob Dylan, the Meat Puppets, Tom Waits, etal. But this singing is seriously just bad, I think. Sorry, Nick. (It's that guy, one of the less glamorous Strokes.)
On the other hand: the music here is otherwise really good, I think. So, can you listen to the music and not be distracted by the vocals? (Also, the lyrics aren't good. "Brandy of the damned" –?)
Heck, maybe you'll like it after all, okay. Maybe the vocals aren't that bad. Think of it as a challenge.
It's a gutsy move, to style the entire video like a performance on The Porter Wagoner Show, oldstyle visual repetition & familiar slow dissolves & all. But then the music itself keeps to a surprisingly straightfaced country sound the whole way thru, so it makes sense.
Lyrically, it's not as gutsy as Allen's last single; but it's good. She's handling a topic that could easily become tacky, but her touch is too deft to let the mood collapse*. "I think you're really mean" – it's a response that feels honest and realistic, but it's wonderfully unexpected to hear as a lyric.
I know Allen still takes a lot of crap from the tabloids, but she's damn clever and canny, so far as I can tell. (And that's a sight more than she's typically credited for, okay.) I'm really loving her new stuff, actually; I should really go and purchase her entire album, I think. Yes.
Yo, puppets! Nice one. (And the torrents of bloodstring near the end are a lovely evocative visual, too...)
Mighty fine music, here. At first it seems like it'll be a simple funky dance tune, but then the organ starts to riff, and then the horn stabs are jazzier than usual (like, Mingus-like)... and now we're heading somewhere unexpected, somewhere a lot more interesting than "simple funky dance tune". And what's great is that it does all this without ever losing the essential, funky catchiness it started with. It's a really clever balance. Excellent.
Okay, no! Damn it, you know I really want to like these guys, honest I do. I hear the intro and I'm, like: could this be awesome? This could be awesome!
However. NO. The singer sings, the verse verses, the chorus choruses, and after all of this the answer is inescapably NO: yet again, the Galvatrons are NOT GOOD. I can't help feeling this way. I mean, at least The Darkness had some genuine songwriting talent, but this? To me, it's simply the same monotonous bullshit that made 80s hair metal horrible the first time around. There's no twist to it, there's no flair, it's not interesting or smart in any way. "I bought a ticket to your aeroplane" – that should be an awesome lyric, but it's not.
I'm still not sure exactly what I'm irked by, here. Maybe it's the singer's ridiculous fake accent? Or the synthesisers, or the traumatic drums? Maybe it's that the Galvatrons aren't serious enough to be properly ironic. I'm unsure. I guess I'll have to think about it.
And by contrast: here's something that's also completely aping a particular early-80s sound, but instead it's coming up with something actually quite good as a result. Here the oldtime flavour to the sound is just a means to a song, rather than the other way around. (And the musical 80s-isms wouldn't even be that obvious, without the retro visual cues of the video...)
Checking out theirspace, these Golden Silvers folks have definitely got some interesting stuff coming up. The songwriting is in a classically Beatlish mode, but they've got that England-after-post-punk organ & synth flavour to lend the sound an '00s retroism. This single makes me think of !!! doing a tribute to early Elvis Costello, or something, actually. By which I mean: good, interesting stuff. Grease up your stovepipes, for sure.
And on that note, I think it's time for me to leave it alone already.
Back back back to the front, to the top! Lap it all up, folks. It's been a little while since last we sat down to watch some Rage, but that's cool. I'll make this post a little too long, just to compensate. Right now is now right now! And 2009 is rushing in bold and fresh, burning our lips like millionaires' toothpaste.
I'm still not sure if I like the music, but it's a neat video. The whole "suburban shaman" costume design is excellent. It's zeitgeisty too, I think; you could mistake her for a background dancer from an MGMT clip. The more I listen, the closer I am to liking it. Worth paying attention to, for sure...
A slow burner, this one. The quiet vocals (almost whispered, in parts) build excellent tension. The music goes in some interesting directions, too... the synth tones and percussion choices remind me a little of Pivot.
Visuals are neat – it's a clever and amusing idea to do a shoutout to retro vector graphics like this. It's specifically referencing this old game, I think (I was too young for the original, but I distinctly remember playing 90s shareware knockoffs that were near-identical).
Good stuff! Not spectacular, but I think it's on the right side of boring.
Really neat video: deminiaturised stop-motion-animation, 1960s-ish off-brand toys, visuals that remind me of that old Gumby tv show. The video fits & synchs really well with the sound, too. But for some reason, I couldn't find the music as interesting as the images; it's a fizzysour indierock guitarbuzz, fun but nothing special. The melodic hook is catchy enough, and the lead guitar break is pretty nice? That's about it, I guess.
Cool video – constructed from authentic old fairytale animations, maybe? If not, they've totally nailed that old look. The narrative metaphors are a bit obvious & hackneyed (a common Bloc Party tic – they're very earnest musicians, politics-wise), but they're still well done. The songwriting is a little obvious, too... come on guys, a dramatic key change near the end? You can do better than that.
The guitar solo bit is mighty fine, even if it only goes for a few bars. The sound overall is a nice, interesting mix of guitars and dancey stuff – there's nothing else around at the moment that's quite like it. Punchy, energetic sound: I think it's good.
Damn it Pyke, every time now you're doing it to me. Do I have to buy your whole album? Is that what you're trying to make me do? With the subtle production touches, the songwriting that's never as dull or predictable as it should be, the sugarfree nostalgia stabs? Damn you, Pyke! So good, always so good. Always better than it seems. Prick.
Groovy band name, but the song didn't grab me until the chorus energy kicked in. Hnn! A decent bit of vocal kick – that's how you stop an indie song from being another dull sopfest. The video is annoying, but maybe I just don't like clowns & sparkles enough. The singer has a pretty look, tho...
So the zeitgeist is totally all echo-vocals, echo-percussion and 90s synths, now. (Half the songs in this post feature at least two out of three.) New Rave, or not. How did this happen? Who knows?
Synthesizers are drugs. You think you can control them... use them only on special occasions, for specialised effective uses... and when that goes well, you start using them more often. Even when they're not a good idea. And then, before you know it, the synths are everywhere all the time and everybody is doing it, all the time, and now you just can't stop it! Can't stop!
Still, the music grows on me. This is a rave(ish) epic, exceptionally well-constructed: overlapping vocals, overlapping rhythms. Shift your consciousness into some kind of trance state, nod your head repeatedly.
Surprisingly well-played punk-metal; the vocals give it a kind of a late-80s underground proto-grunge feel*. Metal guitar (& even a little percussion & acoustica near the end!), and vocals that are neither deathmetal scream nor emo whine. It's not especially original, but it's got a sweet, honest charm that suits my mood...
When it comes to metal, it's usually the vocals that tip me one way or the other. This here, I think I like it.
*There's an entire subgenre hidden in that description, spiralling around pre-fame Nirvana among others... I only discovered it a few years ago myself, but there's some great stuff in & around that scene.
I think I've figured out what's up with music. See, when I first wrote songs (being in a rock band in high school), there was something amazing about figuring it out, about being able to write a song and play it and Wow! It sounds just like a real song! And I think that's what most music groups and songwriters go through, at least at first. The problem is, I think, they're so excited that what they've written is just like a real song – it's good enough! – that they don't think beyond that. And that's why the vast majority of songs can sound so dull, so predictable. (Or that's how they can sound to someone who's been listening broadly and deeply enough, for a long enough time, I guess...)
The vast majority of songs are just using variations on the same old melodies, the same obvious chord progressions. That's not a bad thing in itself. It's not even that they're entirely unoriginal, because they're not. But if it sounds just like a real song, that's probably because it sounds like something you've heard before. There's a certain obviousness. Expectations are fulfilled.
So, there's nothing bad about it. It's good enough in the context of "hey! it sounds like a real song!"; that's why the musicians did it in the first place. But I think it might be that the musicians aren't thinking themselves beyond "good enough". They're not expecting or believing that they need to be better than adequate, that they need to be brilliant, that they need to be spectacular and genius and new. I think they're thinking: Hey, this sounds as good as something else – that's great!
If music wants to be remembered or to be truly huge, then it needs to be genuinely new & different, and to sound NOT just like any other song. It needs to be exciting. It needs to make you feel something profound. It needs to sound new.
(I know, I know, "new" is not new; 99.99% of everything sounds a bit like something else, of course. And there's nothing wrong with that, that's not the point I'm trying to make. It's not a question of uniqueness, it's a question of obviousness. It's a question of predictability. Good enough isn't good enough.)
So yeah, the Sunpilots have a song called Drones. It sounds like a real song.
(Good band name, though – The Sunpilots! Cool name...)
Anyhow, that's it for this roundup. Bit of a downer to end on, huh? And it's a bit of a clumsy rant there attempting a slightly complicated idea, but I'm tired and I don't feel like cutting it out just now. Let's watch Lily Allen's latest single again, instead. It's still good.
Hey, you want to read something else? That I wrote? Because I wrote a draft of a novel the other day, too. Send me an email & I'll let you read it, I think. It's different. You might not like it. It has jokes, though. Also punctuation. Cheers :)
