Aural Fixation
You might not know it, but I was diagnosed with something called a protodiastolic gallop last Fall. It is not as sexy as it sounds: it adds up to being a third heart beat that erratically makes my heart bump and whir like a malfunctioning cog and while it’s not dangerous for a young man such as myself, it is certainly aggravating. I haven’t been able to pinpoint what sets it off, since I’m not a caffeine man and stress seems to have no obvious correlation to its occurrences, so I am more or less randomly struck with eye-watering spasms that soil my mood for hours at a time.
Of course, with about 230 Lotus upgrades to go, don’t be surprised if some day soon I’m pushed home in a wheelbarrow after collapsing and clutching at my chest. I’m not saying the process is killing me, just that a history of obtuse heart conditions is a dynamite excuse for getting out of anything one could think of.
I am, in all sincerity, feeling remarkably horrible today, so I’m getting to the music update for this week post haste.
Doseone – Skeleton Repellent
I didn’t give Mr Adam Drucker’s solo album from last summer a single valid listen, in spite of my love for the man who fronts my beloved Subtle. The learning curve for Skeleton Repellent is considerable, even for one well versed in Doseone’s unique mix of bedroom production and utter insanity, but I wasn’t at all cognizant of the reward to be had herein until last week. It took a shift in my approach to finally break into the Salvador Dali-esque landscape that Drucker creates, to realize that this output is a far cry from the post-rap indie rock bombast of Subtle and is, in fact, an intensely personal affair. Dose isn’t rhyming nor hollering about the religious atmosphere of the Middle Class or attempting to weave any superheroic pariahs into life, he’s crooning and often muttering the pains and privations that he and his have suffered for their art. The music is dense and those moments where Dose’s words find purchase on your ears come shrouded in layers of fuzzed out synth lines, muted drum tracks, and the omnipresent miasma of Dose’s own vocals, looped and warped almost constantly throughout the album.
It’s a curious effect, and while the man knows how to hit his audience hard with hook and drum, he gives himself more room than ever before to meander, get lost, and leave us off balance. The artist touches on elements of electronica, lo-fi, astral folksiness, and gothic intricacy, often in rhapsodic fashion all in the same song – Dose seems not only unphased but entirely unaware of his limits. This is a challenge to keep up with, but to sit through the work and let Dose lead you where he may is a phenomenal performance by one of the most underrated artists of the past decade. He’s penned one of the most absurd breakup songs ever to grace my ears, and it is utterly hypnotic. Closing this record of vulnerabilities and pain with the fearless and awkward singing, “I have chosen / to never be tamed by a lack of choice / to be Dax-strong” in reference to Dose’s good friend Dax Pierson, who was paralyzed while on tour with Subtle but whom never gave up on music, is a tearful confession that will mean so much to only some very few. I’m one.
Rag and Bone
Just two for you this week. I’ve more to discuss, but this duo has a nice symmetry to it I wouldn’t dare sacrifice. You’ll see what I mean in a moment.
I never write my opening blurb for Music review days first – it’s not the point of the article, so why dwell on it? It is with some horror, however, that I realize I’ve submitted recommendations for a country act and a hip hop act in the same stroke, two genres that, in their processed top-40 form, represent the most vile atrocities of sound you or I are ever likely to suffer through. You know it, and I know it, and you have my firmest assurances that I’d never inflict anything that bad upon you.
Trust me, just listen.
Invincible is easily the most thuggish hip hop I still genuinely enjoy. I loathe the stereotypical brain-dead drug-dealing misogynistic crap that makes up the most visible slice of the hip hop genre, and tend to shy away from any artist taking up elements even vaguely resembling it. Drawling gangstahs opening up every song with a litany of “uh” is like nails on a chalkboard, it wounds me. Invincible hooked me when I discovered that this artist was a white woman from Detroit – with endorsements from towering icons of orthodox rap like Talib Kweli – who writes about the economic conditions in blue-collar Michigan and her identity as a Palestinian immigrant much more than her desire to waste fools. Ilana Weaver is fierce and eloquent about her own politics, pouring a sharp intelligence through creative feats of rhythm and rhyming to rival any poet I’ve yet encountered. Rhyming “flesh is bio degradable / people equal deflatable” with “I’ll be the gabriel / with a sledgehammer” is incredibly powerful when it strikes you, posing Ilana simultaneously as the symbol of working class opression and as an icon of religious deliverance. This is an artist using music as a clarion call, asking for consciousness and passion from her listeners and pounding malice on anyone not listening. Even more importantly, the music and beats she raps over are mesmerizing and gorgeous in their own right and incorporate Middle-Eastern inflections and rocky guitars with equal grace. This is devoid of the boom-click bullshit taken up by every other hip hop artist trying to look like Nas. The learning curve for someone not already enthusiastic about the genre is enormous, but what’s there is a phenomenal expression of politics and intellect wrapped in an incredible sonic landscape.
Invincible – Sledgehammer
Deer Tick is alt-country in its rawest form, the product of 21-year old frontman John McCauley’s youth and what I can only presume to be a whole lot whiskey and disillusionment. Sounding (mercifully) much closer to Leonard Cohen than Garth Brooks, debut album War Elephant is the sound of naivety breaking to pieces. Kicking things off with the aptly named “Ashamed” where McCauley claims “I should have been an angel / but I’m too dumb to speak” sets the tone of wide-eyed wonder and terrible self-deprecation that marks the whole album. I love this man’s voice, a swooning growl that’s more Dylan than Waits, with a passion. The band masterfully cribs some of the most affecting tunes in pop music from the last thirty years and turns them to their own use, most notably transforming the melody and rhythm of Brown Eyed Girl into a love song lullaby on “Dirty Dishes” that is sincerely nowhere near as trite as that might sound. Other tracks crank up the distortion on the band’s simple three piece instrumentation for some down-low caterwauling, or lift McCauley’s alto growl into the clouds with the addition of heartfelt strings. This is all done with a delicious eye for the simple and dramatic, and without slathering the proceedings with cliches and pedal-steel like other supposedly alt-country acts. Closing track “What Kind of Fool Am I?” is one of the most beautiful and lyrically provocative laments I’ve heard in years, finishing an album rife with disappointment and loss with the hair-raisingly defiant, heart-broken proclamation “Why can’t I fall in love / till I don’t give a damn / and maybe then I’ll know / what kind of fool I am.” Going out on the gusts of a fiddle and three instruments aching to emulate big band is the most gorgeous counterpoint this yearning songwriter could hope for, and the result is magic.
Deer Tick – Ashamed
In Pursuit of Frivolity
Valve’s proprietary game-distribution platform Steam has forever changed the way I will acquire and play games. Being a child of the eighties, and someone to whom video games represent not only the apex of entertainment but a genuine cultural artifact at this point, this is a big deal.
In a nutshell, Steam is an elegant and densely populated market for purchasing games on ones computer. The process is streamlined that I swear I will never resort to brick and mortar money traps again where I have the option. It is that fast and easy – not unlike your mom.
Once purchased, Steam becomes something like an online inbox of all your games: you never have to remember keys or keep track of cd’s again, and the games are available everywhere you have an internet connection. That is incredible convenience, and it’s a godsend for gamers to be able to let go of the tedium and frustration of trucking all their unwieldy discs and papers around from place to place. I don’t have to worry about disc or serial loss equating to game loss anymore, and that’s a sound investment.
Anyway, yesterday this gorgeous platform delivered what I can say without hyperbole is the best thing ever. It is called Audiosurf.
Let’s get the most glaring contention out of the way: it’s sort of like Guitar Hero, insofar as you “play a song” by catching oncoming multi-coloured bricks which correspond to the rhythmic of the music being played. On the other hand, it is nothing like Guitar Hero past this superficial resemblance.
A more rousing description has been put forth by a friend of mine, positing that the experience is like “Guitar Hero meets Tron meets Tetris” to which I’d like to append the qualifier “on rollercoaster, in space.” The results are fantastic.
Down to brass tacks, Audiosurf essentially turns any mp3, m4a, ogg, flac, or music cd you have on hand into a psychedelic race track, something which can be exciting or soothing depending on the tone and tempo of the music. You control a little space ship car thing on said track and attempt to catch different coloured blocks in such a way that three or more of the same colour touch one another on your grid, giving you points. Quiet portions of songs make you crawl up hill while more exhilarating moments plunge you down, complete with power ups and intense special effects light shows and of course, the most difficult combinations of blocks yield the most points.
It sounds overwhelming and it is, the learning curve takes a few games to get a hold of and after about two dozens songs I’m still not cracking any high scores by a long shot. But it does make sense once one sits down with it, and the game’s three difficulty modes and fifteen “avatars” (space ship things granting different play styles and special abilities) ease the process of getting the hang of things.
I love it. Punching up a favourite song of mine and careening around its spectacularly rendered curves and drops is mind-bending, and I can’t stop thinking of more tracks that would make incredible… tracks! (har har har) Audiosurf makes all comparable music and rhythm games look cheap and it only costs $9.99 to buy and about sixty seconds to download and install via steam.
Take a chance on the free Demo, sans Steam, here; it only allows you to play 5 songs but that’s enough to get a taste of it. If you’ll excuse me, I have twelve thousand or so levels to complete.
Your Ears Only
This is a late breaking musical update, thanks to an unanticipated slew of problems here in the old office. The things you just have to hear this week are as follows. Links to real music to come as soon as I have a moment!
M83 released their fifth proper studio album a couple of months ago, and it’s brilliant. The sort-of-electronica outfit made up solely of one Anthony Gonzalez has toyed with a sound and style strikingly reminiscent of 1980’s shoegaze since the eponymous debut some seven years ago. The results never really clicked, at least to my ear. I thought, here is an artist with an incredible palette of sound and an imagination to take it places, but without any compelling songs. Its My Bloody Valentine without the guitars, or at least it meant to be. Gonzalez always reached for the kind of reverb-drenched shoegaze lightning that made Loveless the cultural monolith it is, but the results always settled into electronica meanderings with some unusual flair and punch. Saturdays = Youth has finally hit the mark. By fully embracing the kind of 80’s production aesthetic he’s always idolized, and bumping up piano and guitar in the mix so that the songs have actual, y’know, hooks, Gonzalez has produced an absolutely riveting opus. The man clearly spends as much time at the mixing board as he does behind any instrument, and the results are crystal clear pop songs that never outstay their welcome. Every single sound has been crafted to perfection, creating the kind of glorious sonic gems that linger in ones mind for days.
M83 – Skin of the Night
Crystal Castles hail from Toronto, and their self-titled first album has generated an ungodly amount of buzz over the past six month, something which makes me nervous. Not because it reflects one way or another on the band, but because I’m liable to have half a dozen hipsters leap through my sternum before I can finish uttering their name. The crux of the band’s appeal is this: they’re remix and electronica artists extraordinaire and their medium of choice is a seemingly limitless cascade of vintage Atari bleeps and boops. The songs are never complex, rarely deviating from a quick one-two punch of “this is our awesome verse, this is our awesome refrain, etc.” but the sound is creative as hell. Singer Alice Glass adds an incredibly raw element to about half the songs on the album, and the juxtaposition of such a forcefully sensual element (more than a little like Karen O) against such a thrillingly artificial background is mesmerizing. These artists may be disposable, but they’re far from forgettable.
Crystal Castles – Black Panther (editor’s note: weird video to be ignored)
Parts & Labor’s last full length, Mapmaker, came out in 2007, and I loved it. For about fifteen minutes. The band’s gorgeously raucous music was overshadowed by the strangely more accessible Battles, and I forgot about them for some time. I’m glad I gave them a second try. The three-piece play rock music with an eye for soaring, crunchy choruses and fantastic melodies underscored by metal’s intensity, a style that’s thrilling without succumbing to wall-of-noise syndrome (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Singer Dan Friel has a remarkable voice that cuts chasms of melody across the riot of sound that roils below him in the mix, not unlike Isaac Brock without the warble. The choruses this man belts out are long and deep, I love them. The real special ingredient in this group is the expert manipulation of keyboards and feedback into an unusual and compelling accompaniment to guitars and simple drums. While the very notion of such a knob-turning wizardry is enough to turn away the unwary, the product is the most natural fit of noise in rock I’ve ever heard. Combined with a truly uncommon knack for elegant song structure and restraint, this may be the best rock out there right now. And that should be something rare enough to get your attention.
Parts & Labor – The Gold We’re Digging
Subtle Six
For those of you who’ve never heard of, much less seen Mister Adam “Doseone” Drucker in action, I hope this makes even half of the impression the man once made on me. He’s crazy as a madhouse rat, as you can see, and awesome as hell to watch. Also, I’m experimenting with embedding video, for its own sake.
This is taken from a 2003 show put on by Themselves, progenitors of Subtle, and it’s heart-breaking for a fan such as myself to see band member and all-around nice guy Dax Pierson (the fellow on the right) resplendent on stage. Dax was paralyzed from the chest down in a van accident while Subtle toured in 2005, and though he’s recovered well and contributes much to the band’s current output, I wish the man could return to doing what he loves unimpeded. Dax’s hands in this video are unbelievable.
BIT PART 