Poni Hoax - Images of Sigrid
2008’s been pretty exciting for new bands… or rather, acts that’ve been around that’ve finally lived up to their promise. We’re talking the large-scale success of Glasvegas alongside the mass-appreciation of acts like Friendly Fires, Metronomy, Cut Copy, et al. … Continue Reading
Mystery Jets - Twenty One
In no particular order: … Continue Reading
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds †Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!
1. Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds †Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!
Revitalised by last year’s Grinderman project, Nick Cave and his crew of now definitely middle-aged musicians returned with an urgency that was hinted at on their Lyre of Orpheus/Abbatoir Blues project and possibly their finest album yet. Contemporary and vital without being obvious, Cave’s lyrics benefit from a more varied and detailed musical backdrop than ever. … Continue Reading
Beck - Modern Guilt
Beck - Modern Guilt. Simply put I couldn’t get it off the player when I got it on. One of only two things I’ve really played to death this year. The other being …
R.E.M. – Accelerate. After two rather crap directly previous efforts I was definitely dubious about this being any good. Happily though I think there are groups half their age who’d kill to bring out something half as good.
Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes. Got me thinking of Pavement.
Bloc Party – Intimacy. Think they’re going from strength to strength.
TV On The Radio – Dear Science, A solid second album, broadening their palette.
A Place To Bury Strangers – A Place To Bury Strangers. Well heavy & sounds so much like The JAMC so what’s not to like?
The Cavalera Conspiracy – Inflikted. Not got a lot of metal this year but always good to see family reunions result in some brutal tunes.
The Faint – Fasciinatiion. Employing more beats than on Wet From Birth this is good dark, sexy & dancey.
Kiko - Slave Of My Mind. More good dancey stuff.
Sparks - Exotic Creatures of The Deep. Still crazy after all these years.
Scrooge
Do they know it’s Christmas? Well, to be honest if they don’t know it’s Christmas by now Bob it’s probably because they don’t care, so if you could kindly just stop. Almost twenty-five years have passed since the original release of the Band Aid track, which is now one of the best-known Christmas songs of the last century. It’s also almost twenty years since the first re-release. Oh and almost five since the most recent re-release – Band Aid 20.
My second example of a ‘favourite’ Christmas track, ‘All I want for Christmas’ was already in the Top 40 before December 1st. I personally, am unsure of what I’ll do if I hear Mariah Carey warble on another night out. In all honesty, it’s a musical meltdown waiting to happen.
And this years festive offerings give me little hope for Christmas classics of the future. The Killers‘ ‘Great Big Sled’ will certainly not be gracing my seasonal play-list. For a band that promised so many great things with their first album, they have certainly slid down the slippery slope into self-indulgence and oddity.
Status Quo are doing nothing for themselves with their latest single ‘It’s Christmas Time’, which literally sounds like every other Status Quo song ever, with bells on. Cheesier than half a pound of gouda (and even more clichéd than that description) it’s most definitely best avoided.
My saving grace could be The Wombats‘ ‘Is This Christmas?’. The song alone isn’t great, but those little marsupials are clearly not taking themselves too seriously. If you watch the accompanying video, you get the impression they’re finding the whole Christmas single experience hilarious, and good on them – I’m glad someone is.
Musically the outlook is bleak. Noddy Holder will be screeching ‘It’s Christmas’ at you via supermarket speakers everywhere. Music television is already lost to songs wishing Christmas upon us everyday and kindly reminding us that ‘it’s the most wonderful time of the year’. And lest we forget that the X Factor single is now looming – it must be that time of the year. I really do enjoy Christmas, but bah humbug, I am the musical scrooge.
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The Brain
The difficulty is that the any conception of Good necessarily contains a subjectiveness – even the open-eared draw the line somewhere. Although by some sort of standards drawn perhaps out of thin air, it must somehow be possible to dismiss some conceptions of Good as having no valid justification.
For me, goodness contains and requires so much (though of course not finitely, for that would be going too far in the way of the objective and crossing the line towards the overly-forumlaic): lyrics, texture, structure, elucidation, instrumentation, melody, harmony, performance, narrative… perhaps even being memorable. But if one or more of these elements is absent, it does not mean to say that the failure to tick a box necessarily leads to failure of the non-test. It is moreover the fact of reference to some justificatory criteria - as opposed to none at all – which I find persuasive in accepting other peoples’ tastes. And this is where the crux lies.
Without even an attempt at subjective reasoning, I fail to objectively (subjectively objectively?) see how a person’s taste can withhold even their own psyche. Given, not everything needs a reason, but here I feel that music is something which stands weaker alone than with benefit of being backed up with an interpretation of some sort, something which is linked. Although is ‘linked’ not subjective? There are many hurdles.
One crucial anomaly is as per ’fans’ of music that I deem as having no objective good; I see no possibility for objective good in music performed without feeling. Feeling, accepted, is on my interpretation, but I think it unmistakeable that there is an objective level of feeling forming a dichotomy with automatism (not acquiescence). I suppose I could be seen as a hypocrite for having listened to ‘pop’, performed by artists other than the songwriters, but then again I see no harm in separating my musical experiences into different whys, wheres, whos and hows. And what for a band whose drummer writes the lyrics?
Forget that, let’s go one step further: I can appreciate Girls Aloud on a completely different level to how I appreciate Life Without Buildings. The same applies to any attempted distinction between Cat Power and Madonna. So I’ve ended up switching the focus from my interpretation of music, to my interpretation of the performer, somewhere I didn’t really foresee the argument going. In returning back to the question of whether there is some objective level of musical good, there’s surely another strand that’s been left out – I don’t feel that on a mere couple of listens to a track that music can be fully appreciated.
Is this objective? Well, the casual listener’s argument of subjective good can, in my mind, be superceded by that of the listener who has seen the artist live, listened to the songs repeatedly, built up their back catalogue, listened carefully to the lyrics (these are all just examples of what comes to mind when recalling my connection with my favourite artists) – and referring back to a previous point, a consumer (if that’s the most appropriate moniker) has an objectively better case to argue for an artist whom they’ve partaken in these activities with (albeit the passive ‘with’). But is that fair? Whose fault is it that person x’s favourite band are an Icelandic hip-hop collective they’ve no hope in hell of ever seeing live, let alone listened to interviews with. This is highly contentious as well, but I reckon that y’s appreciation based on the one single they’ve heard on the radio can’t objectively be as convincing a case as z’s, who’s actually bothered to read about the band, listen to more, and generally be more pro-active. There are two further qualifications though:
1. How much can you ever find out about an artist without knowing them personally? Or further, without actually being them?
2. Who’s to say that such self-important attitudes regarding music appreciation and the utilitarian desire to spread the word are the way forward? Well, certainly me but that’s not everything.
Aside from the aside, to say that this is all just opinion would be weak at this point but to an extent I must return to that perspective because with the plethora of ‘good’ music available these days, it is not possible for every ‘valid’ fan to listen to it all. But I still hold that there lies an impermeable membrane between the objectively good and the subjectively good although I’m ever unsure why. How can anyone argue the case for Mika over Kate Bush? Green Day over Funkadelic? Wagner over Debussy? Why do I feel like I’m being more controversial when I bring to mind the last comparison? Is it any less dichotomous to anyone other than myself? Maybe the whole thing’s just a defence mechanism kicking in instead of accepting the reality that humanity is gullible, disappointing and surprising in equal measures.
So it’s not the use of my particular criteria which I feel distinguish the credible from the not-so- (for lack of a better turn of phrase), but instead merely the reference to criteria as opposed to none at all. This is true for any argument – a means of persuasion has greater strength by reference to commonly held principles than one based on mere instinct. I realise I may be contradicting myself in part, but I think that’s because of the amount of time I’ve spent thinking about this – and it’s undoubtedly positive for me to be questioning my own perceptions. I think I think that subjectiveness is always the default, but for me the problem with this is that it deems all music reviews of little worth.
Perhaps this is the case though? Regardless, I tend to return to ‘the criteria’ when listening to music I deem ‘not good’ – I reason in my own mind why it lacks the qualities that my favourite music possesses. And I then return to the theoretical approach, but with a greater focus on looking at similiarites and differences across a repertoire of an artist. This is mainly why I respect The Beatles; I think no other band has or is likely to compose such a hugely innovative and varied back catalogue, yet sound so distinctly idiosyncratic. There’s certainly a massive proviso – history is on The Beatles side, and if they’d never formed (and found George Martin) then some other band may have come along and used the recording techniques they utilised in ’A Day In The Life’, but looking at the music industry now it’s clear to see how that song really did break down boundaries. Of ambition, as well as substance.
This is not to say that musical goodness is synonymous with the quantification of how many current artists were influenced by the original artist – in fact, far from it. Again this returns to the point I made earlier, that it is not certain criteria which comprise ‘goodness’, it is instead merely the reference to some criteria. It’s ok to like whatever you want to like, provided you actually like it. But there’s yet another proviso – why does ‘like’ necessarily go hand-in-hand with ‘think’? For me, that’s because it does. But for others? That can’t be objective. As a sidenote, I think that ‘good’ is a weak description but instinctively, we use it merely to separate the music (or anything else) we like from the music we don’t. It’s an easy operator, and moreover, a convenient comparator.
The intentions of the music have to be important too, regardless of whether I’ve convinced myself out of the case for the objective good – and I think with great pop (what even IS pop?), there’s nothing wrong with listening to it. I’ve said it once with Girls Aloud, but some of the latest album is pretty challenging structurally and in its harmonies. Not so with the Spice Girls, but is nostalgia objective? This is brain-frying, ultimately.
On a very basic level, something which I have only touched on so far is the importance of whether the performer is also the songwriter – and it is clear to see that this is the main reason why ‘pop’ (i.e. commericial music making the top 10 and appreciated mainly by tweenies) is so easily and often dismissed, and I’ve been thinking about the concept of lyrics ‘intentionally made simple’. Whilst I think that it detracts from the possibility of the song being deemed ‘good’, I also wonder whether by default (or necessary antithesis), musicians who calculate every minute detail of their material could also be guilty of the same thing.
Take Field Music: one of my favourite bands, whose second album Tones Of Town is one of my favourite and most defining albums of the century thus far. It is immediately obvious to notice that every note, every chord, every change in time signature, has been done for a reason. I suppose this is different in that the reason it has been done is for exactly the opposite reason as that of the ‘over-simplified lyrics’ example, but playing devil’s advocate, who is to say that the manipulation is of any greater worth? Both are acts involving the demarcation of an ideal listenership. Thus I think it does come back to the same thing – whether the performers have had anything to do with the writing process. And my manipulation point links back once again, as if the listener/consumer/audience can see that the performer has been manipulated (again though I question whether there is a degree of this everywhere in the self-manipulation of performance), then that would provide some instinctive basis against a high ‘goodness’ score.
I think this comes down to something very similar to ‘the social function’ of the artist, creating something fairly akin to a presumption that ‘pop’ has to ‘do’ a lot more in order to gain respect, whereas music consciously and intricately written almost sets out on the other foot, creating expectations of high ‘goodness’, but perhaps facing harder critique because of this.
My motive for this thought process isn’t purely one of self-entertainment, but instead, I am thinking out loud to try and effect a change in those I consider ill-educated, or brain-starved. So this goes back to the self-obsession point. And again, the more I think, the more I seem to theorise – the concept of a ‘goodness’ score also is something that I have trouble with, but this has made me think a bit deeper still, as who is to ever say that anything can ever be marked by anything other than subjective criteria? This is because I have just thought about music which technically possesses all of the criteria I deem as facilitating/constituting ‘goodness’, yet for some unattributable reason, I do not deem accessible or enjoyable.
Equally, fitting new music into existing definitions of what one likes can potentially keep a person from hearing extremely difficult, yet wonderful, music, or can keep one from enjoying a simple, stupid, (yet fantastic) pop song. That’s the necessary antithesis of the whole criteria thing too though. It’s one hugely vicious circle, and I love it so.
The Week That Was - The Week That Was
In no particular order, these albums were my personal highlights of the fantastic musical year that’s now drawing to a close. … Continue Reading
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Here’s another timely selection of highlights from the clever people at Muso’s Towers, some in a particular order and others, well, not.
Friendly Fires – Friendly Fires (live review here)
Ladyhawke - Ladyhawke
Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
TV On The Radio – Dear Science
Foals – Antidotes
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
Mystery Jets – Twenty One
Laura Marling – Alas, I Cannot Swim
Santogold - Santogold
Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
Crystal Castles – Crystal Castles
1. We Are Scientists -Â Brain Thrust Mastery
2. Dan Le Sac Vs Scroobius Pip -Â Angles
3. Vampire Weekend -Â Vampire Weekend
4. TV On The Radio – Dear Science
5. Frank Turner -Â Love, Ire and Song
6. British Sea Power -Â Do You Like Rock Music
7. Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now, Youngster
8. Laura Marling -Â Alas I Cannot Swim (Mercury Music Prize review here)
9. Frightened Rabbit -Â The Midnight Organ Fight
10. Glasvegas -Â Glasvegas (see: ponderings, live review, Christmas album review)
British Sea Power – Do You like Rock Music? (mini-interview here)
Frightened Rabbit – Midnight Organ Fight
Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks – Real Emotional Trash
Of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping
Shearwater - Rook
Vampire Weekend – Vampire Weekend
Okkervil River – The Stand Ins
REM – Accelerate
Beck – Modern Guilt
Bowerbirds – Hymns For a Dark Horse
Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight (a selection of gushings aqui)
Los Campesinos! – Hold On Now Youngster… (live review here)
Frank Turner – Love, Ire and Song
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip – Angles
Los Campesinos! – We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
Neon Neon – Stainless Style
Glasvegas – Glasvegas
Black Kids – Partie Traumatic
The Cool Kids - The Bake Sale
Styrofoam – A Thousand Words
Johnny Foreigner - Waited Up 'til It Was Light
My personal top 10 albums of the year – this list does leave out a number of great albums that I did listen to, and many more that I didn’t get round to checking out. Nevertheless, in reverse order:Â … Continue Reading
Caz:
Illegal downloading, then. Never has a music-related topic split fans down the middle so much as this little issue, not even the great Blur/Oasis divide. The main bugbear for artists, record companies and the authorities is that the few rules that do exist are so blurred, and who really knows what they are anyway? I know I don’t. I know that downloading tunes from P2P is illegal, and that I should be buying them from an official store such as iTunes, but how much is too much? If I download a rare David Bowie b-side, is that just as bad as someone who sticks the entire Beatles back catalogue on Limewire?
Also, many artists have applauded the exposure that giving away their music can bring them. Case in fact, Arctic Monkeys, and we all know that story. MySpace might be overloaded with crappy bands these days, but five years ago when those Monkeys demos made the rounds via email and IM, it was something exciting. YouTube also gives free access to music via video – double the fun.
If I stumble across a new artist, I might want to check out a couple of their tracks before taking the plunge and shelling out for the album (especially in these days of crunching credit). I suppose this is the crucial moment – if I love the tunes, I might trot straight over to HMV and buy the record. If I’m feeling skint, I might just download the rest of the tracks to make up the full album, ‘cos the record companies sure as hell ain’t going to miss my ten quid, right?
Nat:
Is it really all that different to how it used to be, when you borrowed CDs off a mate? I guess the industry’s problem conceptually is that they can’t trace who you’ve borrowed it from. Is this really any different from buying an antique at a jumble sale? Or buying junk at an antique shop?Â
Aside from the analogies, this 2.0 epoch has certainly opened up a massive arena for discovery, and that’s got to be a positive thing. But that’s just my perception y’know – the perceptions of someone thinking outside of the musical box, wanting to discover new bands (as opposed to downloading the new Akon album).
Sure, the artists have got to make a living, but these times can give them a push in the right direction – even if it comes via the loss of a tenner to the record company.
Caz:
If millions of people are seeing it as “oh well, it’s only a tenner”, then that adds up to tens of millions of quids, right? And when you factor in that the artist only receives a miniature portion of that (even less if there is more than one artist, or if the song was written by someone else). I think the industry knows that it can only survive by going with these trends and not trying to fight them. The advent of iTunes et al is obviously a concession to the new generation of listening.
Thinking back ten years ago, your average album was about £16. Nowadays, thanks to supermarkets and websites getting in on the act, you’re looking at single figures for many LPs. Surely that’s a turn up for the books?
Nat:
But is it a concession, an adjustment or a rethinking? That’s the point in hand. When an artist releases something new, it’s not even a question whether they should:
(a) Go with the whole illegal download thing and openly embrace it; or,
(b) Take a stand
There’s nothing (in certain terms) that can stop it happening, nor looking into the future, that can stop it happening again and again and again.
What came first, the commercial success/money combo or the free 2.0 Version word of mouth phenomenon?
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