Such was the light speed of hip hop back in 1989, that I strongly suspect EPMD were way well on an irresistible arc to irrelevance by the time this album came out. I was only vaguely aware of them at the time, but the sunhats on the cover date them firmly in the Eighties.
"Please Listen To My Demo" is the back-in-the-day reverie. "Jane II" is the sexy story of the horny woman getting them home. There's a party tune too: "It's Time 2 Party" stitches together various samples, end-to-end, like a party mixtape. It may've sounded more of a departure back in the day, but it sounds very laidback and minimal now. "Who's Booty" has a bit of a Tribe Called Quest feel and predates them by a few months, still a bit James Brown reliant and spliced with Funkadelic.
There's something not quite on the money about the flow either, a few words a bit hurried, perhaps not much punch. My qualifications are beneath reproach, of course. The production leans on the same stacks of auld R&B wax, whereas Public Enemy and Dre and De La Soul were already pulling much large back catalogues in greater, more exciting directions. "Snappin' necks and cashing cheques": perhaps but digging crates? Not so much. "Knick Knack Patty Wack" goes over the same Joe Cocker loop that Dre would use later for "California Love".
"You Had Too Much to Drink" has a strange Eighties rock keytar feel to it, a nightclub version of an extra Highlander movie. The lyrics are pretty lumpen too. And there's way too much role play chatting on it. It's too much of a public information film - and no-one even hits a bag of tomatoes with a cricket bat. Weeaakkk!
Starts with a keyboard wash. I don't know if that's the correct term, but my heart sinks into the Zeitgeist. I don't think I need to sound this sound for a while, even with faint Balearic clapping going on. The song is entitled "The Exact Colour of Doubt" and that helps with the pain.
They're a furtive bunch, Liars - all rangy punk funk one minute; then you turn your back, and they come up with some brooding juggernaut of electronic distemper to strap themselves to the front of like "Octagon", which is not based on the Eighties Bangor nightclub of the same name, I'll wager. A touch of Eastern tones and slightly ecstatic mumbling vocals. They're always making music about magic, those treacherous guys.
Skulking in the corners of a deathly disco, "No. 1 Against the Rush" mixes up some narcotic-numbed longing with a dissipated want to kick away and dance against the pricks. Skipping rope bass and mumbles about "I want you". More claustrophobic shuffling on "A Ring on Every Finger", crippled beats and glitching words about being "still broken". I like it. (But you knew that, didn't you?) Monumental bird noises on "Ill Valley Prodigies" are way clearer than the vocals, which shows a healthy mistrust of human chauvinism. The title track has a Thom Yorke resemblance at the beginning until it flowers up more complicatedly into vibrating shards of dense keyboard noises and lyrics that hover in and out about separation and the like.
"I wanna shake temptation," he sings on "His and Mine Sensations" over rubbery, bubbly noises. At least, I think he does. Sounds a bit Beta Band or whatever people compared them to when they arrived: I forget what that was. "Teach me how to be a person." More kettles of pressurised rock steam
and leak their messy juices underneath. "Who Is The Hunter" features
some crooning, relatively speaking. It gets a bit more gellid and machinedisco during "Brats", swollen with a funky enormity supported with some falsetto reaching and other appropriate bells and whistles.
This deserves more listens than it's going to get this year, but I've labelled it up for 2013. The party will get really started rounds about then. In the meantime, I'm going to take away a little suitcase of good impressions, stuffed with words about magic and weirdly danceable tunes and excellent electronic noises.
Been waiting for this one for a while, finally latching onto a stream that's available here. The last album was deeply ace, so I'm hoping for similar top notchery this time around as well.
"Beautiful Son" dubs encouragingly while jittering, whistling noises wheel about. Family unit as they are, I wonder if this is a tune about their child. (I actually wondered that! Penetrating insight, non?) "Dreams are sweet when they turn real," she croon as if in a lullaby. "Live Loves" peps up the pace but roams around the same perimeter. Household dub.
All so apparently peaceful and straightforward. I just imagine myself sat round the kitchen table drinking a cup of some herbal tea, "Cosmic Tides" lapping around my feet. It's the danger of dub again, its resistance to my critical faculties. Such as they are. It gets a bit more mechanical around "Midnight (In the Valley of Shadows)"; a touch more disco on "LO HI". But the flow is pretty much the same. It fits in with the chill pop dream wave but gives it an extra bit of low end sinew. I can't get a handle on the words, but they feel secondary to the rhythms as well. There are also baby giggles and squeals.
Listening to "He's in the rhythm of my heart" on the penultimate song "Dream Beat", I start to wonder whether the whole album is a tribute to their little one. Whether he is their "Morning Star", the Lucifer of the title? The music on the closing song is less driven forward by dub, more a short collection of tinkling piano sounds. Then it's over. I can't think of an album happier to hang around at home.
In 1989 I began reading Melody Maker (and to a lesser extent, NME) and in the Best of 1989 section this doomladen band of Swiss industrialists bobbed up time and again. I thought to myself in my 17-year-old tones, I must hear this band; they sound interesting. Twenty-three short years later and hear we are...
In all honestly, I've probably heard tracks here and there. David Lynch has used more than one tune here or there, especially in his Lost Highway/Mulholland Drive period. But here is my first effort to harness the possibility the world of the Interweb has presented to me to bring about the Young Gods's "L'Eau Rouge".
The first track isn't quite what I was expecting. It starts with a soft, classical loop of woodwind, subtle brass while a ragged-throated man sings in a cabaret style with what I take to be a Swiss French accent. About half way through, the strings become ravenous birds fluttering around with Hitchcockian intent. The vocals are a bit too theatrical to warm to immediately. (Why should I expect I'd be warming to them? Jeez! What kind of fuzzy-minded cockbarrel am I exactly?) Maybe it's the Verfremdungseffekte? (I knew that A-Level German would work out one day...)
"Rue de Tempetes" is more what I'd been imagining, guitars amplified and distorted to a divine and apocalyptic scale. It sounds so big and clean. The title track features more razor-gargling French. I'm reminded a bit of The Residents show I saw in 2010. The 2010 that I thought was last year, but has been carried away much further by the tide than I would like to admit. Scary noises that seem to be recorded so close (especially by today's dream pop/chill wave standards) that I fear for my personal safety.
"Charlotte" is on an altogether narrower scale: cabaret-sized but with a town square feel of boules and pipe organs. This cabaret angle is interesting, as it runs against the grain of the industrial rock developments from Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and the like. A European direction, which must have been influential at the time as well. Were I able to manipulate the ideas better, I'd look into the way that tension is used in "Longue Route" as opposed to "Head Like A Hole". It's less based on the Blues again, I guess.
Was music a bit more grown up in the Eighties? I mean, the alternative to the pop stars and poodle metal acts. This sounds so tough and adult in a way that makes everything I can think of nowadays sound so whistful and adolescent. "Les Enfants" has shudders of music rearing up from sample banks, sounding huge. Everything I think of is about scale; but perhaps that how I'd imagined them all those years ago. Giants. "L'Amourir" has the metronomic drum machine and bass pulse I'd expect to lead armies out to undreamt continents in conquest. Bad armies in big, bad machines.
There seem so many albums made at the moment that could be shelved in a creaking electronic dream pop category. This must have been like what the mid-Seventies prog reservoir was like, only on a much larger post-punk, anyone-can-do-it scale. A bit like people blogging about new albums. Another disease that has flared up big time.
I've read avant pop as a label, but I'm not sure. "Years" sounds like Bjork, but without the vocal acrobatics. Then the acrobatics are what gives Bjork's music the ecstatic drive that pop requires. So is this rock, according to my nascent taxonomy of what is what? Is there tension building? Is there propulsion enough for it to tick my techno box? I don't think so. So avant something then... It's too soon to have to re-think my categories again.
"Joy" should be a case in point. It percolates and pulsates in a scary fashion until everything slows and cools down into the sound of a motherboard breathing to itself. Maybe the sound of joy taking it easy. "MK Ultra" sounds even more like a less operatic version of Bjork, as though the musical impulses are the same but the resources and temperament are quite different, more muted and DIY. "Wow" is a massed bank of baby sighs and 10cc tributes, stacked up against the fire exit.
Sounds turn a bit darker on "Carcass", as you might expect and her vocal becomes wrapped in a suffocating plastic bag; the kind you should keep away from children. The album title gives me a little shiver as well, the tingly threat of contagion. As though the confusion at the heart or on the borders of this music could be infectious. Or that the love or excitement glimpsed at (like the snatches of "Just wanna be with you" on "Holoday") needs to be sealed away.
Space drift comes into the frame for "Nerve", which is possibly the least nervy track on the album. A bit of a HAL feel. Then "Light + Space" is the closest thing to a pop song on the album; not that it's important to categorise, of course. Of course, it isn't. No, no. Not at all. "Words are just words/That you soon forget", she sings.
More of that complexity, drifting past on the internet.
Heard bad things about this already. And I don't have time to listen to much of it twice, so the pressure is on Alexis and Joe and the boys.
I used to very much love Hot Chip - and at their very best, they will always be in my pantheon of great bands. "The Warning" is an amazing, complicated, mournful, melodic slab of invention and emotion that chartered in retrospect moments in my life that had already happened: tiny fissures of heartbreak and hormonal lurches at the apex of personal crisis. But now I, and many many others, get the sense they've lost interest and direction.
"Motion Sickness" is a good start, pining vocals and bristling banks of poignant chords. There's a four-to-the-floor cheek on "How Do You Do?"; positive upward musical lines and a nice, bouncy bass. "A church is not for praying/It's for celebrating the light that bleeds through the pain."There's more Eighties positivism on the following track as well, "Don't Deny Your Heart". Is this a deliberate attempt to heal Broken Britain through the medium of tumbling house music? With added steel pans?
"Night And Day" has the same bounce that the 2 Bears album has from earlier this year. Even the same lower-octave effect on the vocal. Synth noises scatter around in pleasing showers. Rubber basslines chew the walls. It's good. "Flutes" follows, building up from a nice chanting rhythm. I've read that the negative reviews pick this out as a standout track. It's certainly a bit more complicated than the others. And we all like complexity, eh?
I'm enjoying this album much more than I was expecting. I had Mark Anthony ideas of coming to bury them, but I'm lending them my ears easily. "Ends of the Earth" has the same wheeling, foolhardy attitudes to chords and musical progressions that I like to think belong to Hot Chip. The other Hot Chip characteristic is declarations of love and the last two tracks are full of them too - "Let Me Be Him" and "Always Been Your Love". Slower paced and the latter with a weirdly Seventies breathy womanly voice muttering about something or other.
So Hot Chip continue to fight another year or two in my good books. They must be delighted.
Only know the single, "We Are Young", which is everywhere and sounds like some hipster anthem about trying to pick women in bars and celebrating being "young", ie rich. So I assume there is large money involved. And how shit is the "straight/Empire State" rhyme? Very shit. My last attempt to be brief didn't work at all. Must try harder.
The intro is touched by the gloved hand of Freddie Mercury, touched quite hard. The title track picks up that multi-tracked vocal baton and runs harder yet with it like an Olympic sponsorship deal hung in the air ahead of them. The spirit of musical theatre is alive and well and has bought itself AutoTune. "Carry On" is also about hanging about in bars, talking about their parents. "It Gets Better" is about someone being "bored": "It's hard to weigh a golden egg with everyone around." Privilege drips from it again. Rich kids in pop: we need rid.
Just when I think the self-mythology built on everything arriving exactly where they need it, "Why Am I The One" comes along and ratchets up my irritation. "My life's become as vapid as a night out in Los Angeles": I can believe that. The music limps along in the finest pop tradition. "All Alright" is sung from the perspective of a jaded party-boy who chickens have come home to roost and are shitting all over his buzz. More than a couple of tracks have applause on them, which suggests they have real approval issues.
"I'm standing in Brooklyn just waiting for something to happen/I can't help but think that everyone doesn't get it."
There are some really farty musical pieces that escaped from some mid-Eighties sports show to embed themselves in some Williamsburg loft appartment. "Stars" is another song about going out and missing his Mom. There's a child choir as well, which is the last refuge of the scoundrel - especially when AutoTune is involved. AutoTune histrionics even lesserer so.
