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The Mary Onettes: Islands
The Mary Onettes
Islands
(Labrador, 2009)
With synth-pop still pulsing in clubs and Jesus and Mary Chain clones continuing to draw, um, buzz to their linty bubblegum, it’s only a matter of time before the ’80s revival has officially gone on longer than the ’80s themselves. Even the Mary Onettes—a Swedish four-piece drawing on radio-ready, mega-produced pop songs—are still relatively early in their life cycle, releasing their sophomore album here in the decade’s dying months. Their self-titled debut album, from 2007, boasted at least one crypto-cover of “I Melt with You” (“Lost”), and like their countrymen in the Shout Out Louds, that kind of head-cold-afflicted Scandinavian English inflection makes the Cure comparisons even more inevitable. (Bonuses: A bit of eyeliner goth, the “Be My Baby” drum intro, and some, god help me but the word does apply, angular New Order keyboard lines. It’s a fun record, and you should totally check it out.)
But unlike the first record, there is a crucial difference between Islands and the awesomely ’80s one-hitters whose moves it bites: The choruses. As far as atmosphere goes, Islands has teen-movie drama to spare—but there are precious few of the kinds of hooks that’ll send you leaping over the driver’s shoulder from the back seat to grab the volume knob (after which the driver will join you in singing along too, momentarily forgetting the fact that you almost sent the car off the road). read more
Art Brut: “Emily Kane” and Adolescent Yearning
A fleshy, floppy-haired, occasionally peach-fuzzed goofball singing about DC Comics and chocolate milkshakes, Art Brut’s Eddie Argos looks like nothing so much as a towel-clad pudgeball lip-synching into a hairbrush while the school bus honks outside. The band’s first single was contagious in its giddy sense of possibility: You can actually become the people you grew up listening to. All you have to do is… form a band. It was a mission statement, and the band made a joyful noise as if to prove their point, but to really understand why being in a band gives Art Brut such a rush, you should listen to “Emily Kane.”
“I was your boyfriend when we were 15 / It’s the happiest that I’ve ever been.” The first words immediately locate the speaker in a position of adulthood, looking back; even more than most pop songs, “Emily Kane”—a serenade to the eponymous long-lost love—is immediately an ode to adolescent yearning.
Argos self-deprecatingly plays up his childishness (“Even though we didn’t understand / How to do much more than just hold hands”) while supporting his account with specific, familiar observational detail (“If memory serves, we’re still on a break”). His longing is plaintive—“I don’t even know where she lives”—and then parodic: “I’ve not seen her in 10 years… nine months… three weeks… four days… six hours… 13 minutes… five seconds.”
All of which reveals Argos, despite his shambling persona and goofy perspective (“There’s a beast in my soul that can’t be tamed / I’m still in love with Emily Kane”), as a master wordsmith. But despite his facility with form, he’s guileless as a teenager when it comes to content. It’s apparently quite autobiographical. Live, Argos used to relate anecdotes about the current status of his relationship with the song’s muse. And the ironic distance seems to stab at him: “I can’t get over my old flame.”
I think this aching nostalgia explains, perhaps paradoxically, quite a bit of Art Brut’s excitement over pop music.
Even three albums into Art Brut’s career, Argos is still writing songs proclaiming “Those… are… the records I like!” (on third album Art Brut vs. Satan’s “Slap Dash for No Cash”) and screaming about his newfound love of the Replacements. To date, Art Brut has recorded songs called “The Passenger” (not an Iggy Pop cover), “Twist and Shout” (not an Isley Brothers cover), “Pump Up the Volume” (not a MARRS cover), “People in Love” (not a 10cc cover), “I Will Survive” (not a Gloria Gaynor cover), “Jealous Guy” (not a John Lennon cover), and “Blame It on the Trains” (not a Milli Vanilli cover).
The guys in Art Brut are fans, is the point. And that’s why the key lyric and most poignant moment in “Emily Kane” sees Argos telling his long-lost teen love: “I hope this song finds you fame / I want school kids on buses singing your name.” Immortality, as he can conceive it, is to become exactly like the subjects of the songs—other people’s songs—he sang along to when they were together. Crossing over from fan to artist is a fan’s idea of immortality; Argos maintains a fan’s perspective on the other side of the divide. As happy as he is to have formed a band, he misses looking up to them too, like he did when he and Emily Kane were a couple of 15-year-olds—and this nostalgia is only appropriate for a guy who, after all, makes songs that we’ll sing along to in our youth, and remember fondly forever after, as perfect three-minute time machines.
Watch: Art Brut, “Emily Kane” [at youtube.com]
The Big Pink
The Big Pink
A Brief History of Love
(4AD, 2009)
This London duo’s debut sounds as large as the band and album names promise it will—even if a better title would have been A Brief History of One-and-Done NME Cover Subjects. The Big Pink has hubris to spare, but a distinctly self-conscious strain of it: Brief History plays like a historically savvy recap of British genres that have recently promised more than they could deliver.
The album starts off with “Crystal Visions”, which opens with faraway, epic guitars, like a glitchier version of the Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary”, before kicking in with the Spiritualized-style jump rope chant-verse-hook. The fuzz is towering throughout; it’s sort of amusing, maybe even ironic, the way Brief History consistently takes feedback—the most self-effacing of all production tricks, for the way it buries either the musician or the listener, or both—and turns it into an arena-rock trick. Imagine the Boo Radleys on U2’s budget (if you dare).
Vivian Girls
Vivian Girls
Everything Goes Wrong
(In the Red, 2009)
Vivian Girls, like a lint trap, have collected a lot more fuzz since we last checked in. On last year’s self-titled and—need it even be said at this point?—much-buzzed-about self-titled debut full of fashionable lo-fi, distortion, fast, messy playing, and singing got alluringly in the way of girl-group spunk, C86 jangle-hooks, surf guitar solos, and a frontwoman going by the last name of “Ramone.” At 10 songs and 22 minutes, it was, basically, bubblegum sticky with slightly too much fuzz to pick off and put back in your mouth.
There’s more volume to the fuzz on their quickly turned-around sophomore effort, Everything Goes Wrong. Start at the beginning, with the way opener “Walking Alone at Night” goes from zero (that brooding, growling pre-note) to 60 (drumsticks clicking one-two-three-four). It’s a headlong open-road number as sure as any other Vivian Girls song, too fast to jog to like always, but the bass playing of Kickball Katy (yeah, they’re from Brooklyn) is more of an anchor than a rubbery counterpoint; there’s depth to the headlong momentum, less negative space between each instrument.
Michael Jackson: “Billie Jean”
Michael Jackson’s best song—and I can say that it is with certainty, now, in the ecstatic hindsight that his death has brought, following weekends of car speakers and barrooms full of young, dancing Brooklynites and barbecue boom boxes—is also, in hindsight, his most poignant. “Billie Jean”, aside from being his breakthrough hit, and unprecedented floor-filler once again, is almost eerie in the way that its lyrics seem to have predicted the torments that would define the subsequent second half of Jackson’s life. I mean, what is “Billie Jean” if not, first and foremost, a not particularly believable protestation of sexual innocence?
Pop songs, representing, as they do, the art of seduction in 200 seconds or less, are rife with unreliable narrators. Even before his teens, Jackson was compromised and duplicitous (as well as sexualized): The narrator of “I Want You Back” has already betrayed his love (at least) once. Who’s to say he won’t do it again? But Jackson-the-narrator has never been a more unreliable narrator than in this song, based on his and his brothers’ own experience with crazily devoted fans. Surveying the consequences of such an intense engagement with the audience, Jackson came up with a song in which he admitted: Sure, she looked like a beauty queen; sure, she caused a scene; sure, they danced, on the floor, in the round; sure, she came and stood right by him with her sweet perfume; sure, he went to her room; and sure, the baby’s eyes look like his—but, no, Billie Jean is not his lover, and the kid is not his son. Suuure.
A lot of the credit for the ambiguity-at-best should go to the paranoid, slow-building production (probably equal parts Jackson and Quincy Jones), and Jackson’s supremely anguished vocal performance. (Never more so than when “remember to always think twice” is echoed with “don’t think twice,” like the devil on the opposite shoulder of the angel.) But the real punch comes from what we now know are the true implications of the things he says.
Rhett Miller
Rhett Miller
Rhett Miller
(Shout! Factory, 2009)
From 2002’s The Instigator to 2006’s The Believer to this summer’s self-titled offering (why self-titled now?), the covers of Rhett Miller’s solo albums have featured his face—and legendary luxurious locks—less and less, which is nice, for no other reason than that playing up his locker-door (and boyish even through his 30s) looks kind of gives the game away too easy. In his sensitive, romantic, literate singer-songwriter fare, and flipside rakish “serial ladykiller” persona as frontman of the Old 97’s, Stewart Ransom Miller II is already a lot of people’s fantasy boyfriend—why gild the lily?
Miller croons drinkin’ and drivin’ and cryin’ alt-country with the 97’s; a few attempts to invite the guys over to dinner with his special lady—poppy 97’s outings Fight Songs and Satellite Rides—created some lovely fusions and some uncomfortable frisson, so he’s settled on splitting his attentions between going out honky-tonking with the guys and staying home and singing love songs. In truth, the work he’s most likely to be remembered for, work that meshes the two sides of his appeal, predates his solo albums—there was a lot of reckless momentum and transcendent hooks on those first few 97’s albums—and he’s still effortlessly winning when cutting loose and cutting up in front of small crowds. But moments on Rhett Miller capture the full effect of Miller’s charm, equal parts devil-may-care and don’t-you-care, and (despite those album covers) entirely unforced—if you don’t go for him, you probably didn’t go for Mickey Rourke in Diner either, and I pity you for it.
Promiscuous Anglerfish: David Bowie vs. Kanye West
There are several ways we might go about demonstrating that hip-hop, not rock (or country, or old-time folk, or jazz, or blues, or chamber, or orchestral classical music, or opera, or musical theater, or mainstream radio pop, or whatever else you might name as a world unto itself), is the dominant form of today’s American popular music. We might demonstrate it via an example as significant as hip-hop’s lyrics, which speak for the nation the way rock used to. (There is a straight line leading from Buddy Holly’s “My love bigger than a Cadillac” to Biggie’s “Birthdays was the worst days, now we sip champagne when we thirst-ay”—the desire for size, appreciation, and material goods, belted out in primal grammar. Revivalists like the Hold Steady approach arena legacy, but their songs are about that tradition, not part of it.) Or we might demonstrate it via an example as mundane as the fact that a twentysomething douchebag like Asher Roth feels most comfortable using rap, not backwards-baseball-cap-party-band music, as the vehicle for his frat-tastic boasts. But the way we will go about demonstrating this premise here is by noting how hip-hop now does what rock used to do: Namely, absorb all the lesser genres it comes in contact with, in much the same way a male anglerfish is absorbed into the bloodstream of the larger female with which it copulates.
There used to be rappers invited to drop by and lend some novelty to rock songs (KRS-One on “Radio Song”, remember?); now rappers have little guitarist catamites that they carry around like itsy bitsy dogs in sweaters (Lil Wayne with Kevin Rudolf, for instance). But I’m talking less about head-to-head dominance than relative gravitational force. In its origins as a collage of samples, hip-hop has an undeniable advantage here; still, note how we’ve gone from horn loops to undisguised lifts, like in Flo Rida’s frankensteined ’80s one-hit-wonder “Right Round.” But the clearest way to make this point is with an SAT-style analogy:
Rock : Hip-hop :: David Bowie : Kanye West.
Peaches
Peaches
I Feel Cream
(XL, 2009)
Since The Teaches of Peaches, Peaches hasn’t really released a set of songs to match her shtick—that mix of abrasive minimal drum-and-synth techno, crass sexuality, and performative, almost parodically forward gender-bending antics that’s earned the admiration of club kids and gender studies majors. This, arguably, doesn’t matter—live, she still plays “Fuck the Pain Away” (and “Lovertits”, and “Hot Rod”, and “AA XXX”, and…), and, like we learned in academia, just because the music’s kind of meh, that doesn’t make it any less fun to parse. (Even the Dean got into it: “Pro-sex post-feminism for the age of internet porn, in which thousands of women a day prove how cool they are by smiling through their semen facials.” Oh, Christgau, that’s not necessarily semen.)
Though I Feel Cream boasts the least amusing sexually-tinged album title in the Peaches catalog, it does feature several of Merrill Beth Nisker’s best tunes in nearly a decade, along with the usual heapings of empowering dom-sub role-playing.
Camera Obscura
Camera Obscura
My Maudlin Career
(4AD, 2009)
I don’t like this as much as Let’s Get Out of This Country, but I don’t know why. Is it not as good, or have I just listened to Let’s Get Out of This Country too many times, in too many private moments, for it to be displaced in my affections by a new toy?
I talk about affection, and I indulge in the first-person, because there’s something very personal about Camera Obscura. Tracyanne Campbell’s heart-on-sleeve lyrics and breakable vocals; the cozy arrangements and production betraying a deep fondness for earnest ’60s pop—no accident that their best song references an old English popster and admits, “I’m ready to be heartbroken.” They’re the kind of band you feel protective of, and that type of intimacy and need leads to a very close sense of emotional communion.
Album Review: Free Energy, Stuck on Nothing
by: Mark Asch
Stuck on Nothing
(DFA, 2010)
Everybody likes T-Rex, of course, but it’s hard to credibly claim them as an influence: Marc Bolan’s dickswinging power-chord swagger and earnest hippie-dippie fairy mysticism are two elements not usually found in solution these days. Hell, they were barely found in solution then, even at a time when punk bands played in lipstick and platforms. Think about the churning music and saccharine lyrics of “Children of the Universe”, say, or “20th Century Boy.” “I wanna be your toy,” Bolan sang, boldly objectifying himself, like Mick Jagger pouting and flirting with his audience before he lost his looks, or lost interest, or fashion changed.
The Philly five-piece Free Energy’s debut record Stuck on Nothing is just out from DFA records and producer James Murphy—having done what they set out to do with disco, I guess, he’s moved on to reviving another somewhat disreputable ‘70s genre. There’s not really an album’s worth of good material here, but it hardly matters: Glammy, skuzzy, preening, boozy, Free Energy at its best puts the crotch bulge back in skinny jeans.
The album peaks early, with the band’s first two singles and (by far) best songs to date, “Free Energy” and “Dream City.” The titles alone should prove my point—or else the first five seconds of the band’s self-titled lead-off track, which begins with a spat-out guitar lick from cofounder Scott Wells, and frontman Paul Sprangers proclaiming, “We’re breaking out this time / We’re making out with the wind.” Yes. Making out with the wind. In the opening seconds of his band’s lead single. An ode to being “young and still alive,” in which everything is happening “tonight” and “right now, when every thought is electrical,” the song is an ode to golden youth, people fair with sky in their hair, declaimed over stroke-off squiggly fretwork and a shit-ton of handclaps.
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by: Mark Asch
published: March 16, 2010
in column: Reviews, What Goes On
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