Happy House

There are few ways to celebrate musically without looking completely stupid/cliché.
Siouxsie & The Banshees clearly had theirs. And it’s all about THE RIFF.

(And I really think this song is awesome remix material – will look into that)

Siouxsie & The Banshees – Happy House

The Beer you won’t digest

Just a quick note to say that my last post led me to re-check-out Kimya Dawnson’s myspace where one of her recent songs literally fell on me. And I feel on it (bad pun intended). The recording is shit, the lyrics hugely grim and there’s a sound in the background that is vaguely reminiscent of Cocorosie’s arrangements (which I’m not too keen on, but I know loads of people are). BUT the song’s been wired in my brain for the last two days.

Kimya Dawson – The Beer (no version available yet – check it on her page)

Short song, short post. More later.

Loose Lips

“I gotta be honest; I don’t much approve of dating in your condition, ’cause well… that’s kind of messed up.” 
Mac McGuff to his pregnant daughter in Juno.

There’s a genuine naivety about people bluntly speaking out their minds. May that be in movies or in real life. Particularly when the point they’re making is as awkward as the way they’re doing it. It might look overdone but this post is really about Juno. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen it. And I’ve already watched it a couple of time. And I know how risky it can be, writing about something around which there’s already been such a buzz.

But my point here is not to talk about the inner qualities of the direction, the ethical conundrum around teenage pregnancy and abortion, or even the underlying clash of classes in the movie. There are far more competent and involved people to discuss it out there. Really. But I do believe there’s something to be said about the words, or the way they’re told, the narration of/in the movie.
One the things I found most interesting and amusing, is the way that kid speaks out her mind. So bluntly, blatantly, that she’s always creating a sort of gap between what we’d expect her to say and what you hear in the end. She’s not talking in an hyper-articulated fashion like most of the kids in hollywood movies, making all-of-a-sudden loads of sense when they’ve been second-rate pooping a-holes characters for two hours before that. No really, Juno McGuff’s got some things to say. Even if she ends up being wrong, she’s almost too naturally outspoken. Stating whatever she sees and thinks, even if it’s shenanigan. She’s cool in a very un self-conscious way that builds all her charm.

In a very parallel fashion, the music that’s interwoven tightly with the rest of the movie is mainly made of a collection of anti-folk pearls. Displaying old-shool-but-good-school Moldy Peaches, insanely well-known-for-a-folk-singer Kimya Dawson and living-myth indie-star Cat Power (in her earlier-great work). This seemingly innocent choice sticks to Juno much better than the Stooges she listens to (whatever the incredible quality of the band in another context). All bands whose inner quality and beauty lies as much in the music they create (their actions) as in the words they use and buid up. Juno shares with those bands the same innocence and naive outspoken manner of expressing the world that sometimes seems to hit more acutely than any long articulate discourse, may that be solely about love or even politics.

And that’s the beauty in it. They keep it simple but they make it good.

The Moldy Peaches – Anyone Else But You (that’s about love)
Kimya Dawson – Loose Lips (that’s about politics)

Every fire burns out…

…and it’s hard to be on fire eternally. The planet is burning out of oil, forests keep on flaring up, and we ourselves can’t help but flare out after some time, forget our grudge or put an end to our best efforts, as ravaging as we may have been (tis all about you A.).

Let it be known, the beauty is in the fire, who cares if it has to end.
And Charlotte’s on fire and Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya understood it and put some oil on Cocosuma’s song (in the form of a hotter than thou remix). Let yourself be burnt by that fantastic beat, let yourself by soothed by those cuddly voices.

Cocosuma – Charlotte’s on Fire (Bitchee Bitchee Ya Ya Ya remix)

Fever

It’s sunny outside, I can almost smell summer coming in. And I don’t know why but such brightness makes me want more darkness. Call it contrast or bipolarity, I don’t care, with that weather I want darkness, I want the warm penetrating smell of sweat, the electrifying feeling of bodies, both close and yet not touching, both tense and paralysed.

And when I want that, I want The Kills.

I want a band whose outrageously overdone look becomes credible in all the grandeur of the baroque cliché it embodies. I want a band who summons in my mind views of pitch black caves, where fucked-up kids frantically try to get the monster inside of them out with their guitars. I want a band that gives me the feeling my skin is pierced from inside by thousands of tiny needles, whose blatant rage make my nerves shiver in hot blooded excitation. I want a band who puts the bitter taste of sweat and metal on the tip of my tongue and make me wanna bite lips to keep my feelings alive. I want a band whose music sounds of deep blues and furious angst, low bass and twisted industrial guitars, deep paranoid heartbeat drums and sings with voices that cry thousands of after-hours cigarettes burning throats and lungs.

I want that band and I have The Kills.

That’s cool with me, since they’re putting out a new album, and it will never be coming soon enough but we still have that :

The Kills – U.R.A Fever
The Kills – Now Wow (MSTRKRFT Remix)

He Lost Control

They’re ain’t much to say here.

Just let yourself fall within the embracing darkness of the tune.
Be hypnotised by the deeply corrupted bass line, the (poorly mixed) aggressive guitar and the repetitive spray sound (made with real spray!).
Let Ian’s sombre voice and lyrics simmer, and take a sip of that bitter english tea.

Joy Division – She’s Lost Control

Catching Bullets

N’Djamena is now empty of its population.
People fleeing street fights between government forces and raging rebels.
They even said the president is dead (he isn’t).
I’m sure a lot of other people are dead (they are), for him and other stuff too.

I just hope those who stayed have Tunng on their side.
Cause they’re good at catching bullets in the most stylish fashion (the one that let’s you survive).

Tunng – Bullets

Chemicals

An act of sheer laziness from me, but right now my mind is a mess and my brain crushed by a violent headache. To which the pill (not to make any unauthorized use of a branded name) I took helped very little. Which brings me, in an interesting and surely completely involuntary turn of rhetoric, to think of this interesting article posted last December on the not-less-interesting Pitchfork, highlighting both a major issue of our contemporary occidental societies and four great songs by three great bands (I tell you, they’re good over there) :

Cloud Cult – Chemicals Collide
Cloud Cult – Take Your Medicine
Of Montreal - Heimdelsgate Like a Promethean Curse
Panda Bear – Take Pills

And by the same token I would like to highlight Bridging The Atlantic’s best of 2007 which seems to me like a very good post-it for those of us who’ve skipped over some records from last year and still like to rock themselves out on good music (plus they’ve mixed it all up and left the songs separately – they’re good too).

The Do and Don’ts of Pop Music

(Aka: A little thoughtful thinking for you A.)

Pop music is a subtle and uncertain art. Often declassified by hardcore music fans as “too easy”, for its incline on catchy tunes, light-hearted melodies and sweet-love lyrics, a closer look reveals how much of this is generally built on repetitive listening of average pop songs. Forgive my caricaturing but I’m trying to make a point here. See, the greatest pop songs may often fit in this description, but will almost as often reveal themselves unforgettable.

It appears that the greatest subtlety of (at least modern) pop music is to manage to reach out to the broadest audience using the catchiest tunes and still keep something to discover for the fewer, more exigent, often most critical part of the listeners. It requires some cunning and some stunts. I requires pulling off unseen tricks, surprising everybody will remaining very accessible. The Beatles managed it for years, so did the Beach Boys, and both of them are now more remembered for their riskiest albums (Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band or Pet Sounds) than for their debut recordings.

The Do seemed to have gotten it right, at first. Their first single hit the target perfectly. Beginning with weird – yet unaggressive – guitar feedbacks, meshed with an upbeat tempo on the drum/bass and a melodic singing voice building into a steady full-bodied verse with the song unfolding an almost too obvious fashion from there on, On My Shoulders seemed to cry out the name of a soon-to-remember, soon-to-be innovative, band. Instead, their album appears to be slightly less-good than the debut single. If not disappointing.
I mean, everything is here: The slightly lo-fi sound (yet perfectly mixed), the somewhat folkish use of the guitars, up to the small imperfections sprinkled from here to there. BUT, something is definitely lacking. In every features of the album, everything is “expected”, and they’re not missing out, BUT, the case is: it’s not really surprising. After a few song even the mellow charm of singer’s Olivia B.Merilahti’s voice wears out, the rythms, the feedbacks, it all seems a bit overdone and you start to ponder whether you’re gonna listen to the rest of it or skip directly to the next song.

That is not good. Definitely not good.

Not unbearable yet, but when one, accidentally falls into Panda Bear’s (the escaped beast from Animal Collective) last E.P Person Pitch, one starts to wonder whether there wasn’t something wrong with The Do all along. As for me, the comparison is harsh, the later don’t stand a chance against the former. That is the magic of good Pop music, suddenly it appears crystal clear that one of the bands is trying too hard, attempting to sound like Pop whereas the other one is making Pop music the way it’s supposed to be felt: In a fun way.
Panda Bear is actually quite unsettling. It’s really not something you would expect, even from a member of Animal Collective. Basically, it’s a guy, alone, sampling songs, beats and chords in a dazzling maze of sounds, joy & fury (yes I added joy, cause this is definitely furiously joyful), and chanting – not singing, chanting – over it. All that in a weird, dancy, Brian Wilson-esque fashion that’s both uncanny and seducive. It’s almost as hard to describe as it is to understand, and it’s as hard to classify as it is to skip.

To sum it up, it needs to be discovered.

Because somewhere, Noah Lennox’s got it. He found the underlying idea of great pop, that it should be both fun and innovative, totally listen-able and unheard. And I’m pretty sure, even if he doesn’t keep on with this side project he’ll have had some influence on the next pop recordings to come up, at least for the rest of this decade. Because he has now joined the official brotherhood of Pop smart-asses kids. Praise be to the Bro’s!

Panda Bear – Bro’s

Dilating

“Time dilation is the phenomenon whereby an observer finds that another’s clock which is physically identical to their own is ticking at a slower rate as measured by their own clock.”
Wikipedia

If mathematics rules the world then I contend that music rules mathematics.

Music, in most of its forms is based on rhythms, as to say, successions of silences and sounds following a certain pattern and regularity. It could lead to think that music is a pure expression of mathematical rules. But the musicality and the rhythmic quality of a song don’t stop at the rigorousness of its structure. Rather, a successful piece, one that has a groove is often (if not always) built on the slight differences of rhythms between or inside instruments in the same musical sentence. That small dilation of time (and seemingly space) between each instruments, that ever so small balancing that makes your body wanna move, that is the groove my friend. It is a mathematical regular/irregularity that appeals to our inherent ability to sense and perceive life in anything that surrounds us.

The ancient Greek had a far broader understanding of rhythm. If you’d listened to Plato (or rather Socrate) when he was dispensing his teachings to pubescent pupils (note the etymological root) you would have heard him declare that the rhuthmos is the underlying framework that structures all living activity. The rhythm is behind every move we make or observe because it is an organizing force of nature. I’m not a specialist of Plato so I will stop here on his philosophy, but the way I see it, if rhythm is behind everything we live then the small glitches, then those ever so slight dilations in rhythm between each of our actions may be what creates movement in our lives.

Americano-French duo Berg Sans Nipple seem to have understood this. The song posted today is all about dilation, from the deep, unstoppable, almost organic bass line that makes its backbone to the small piano key-strokes sprinkled from here and there, the controlled outbreaks of drumming and the outer-worldly softness of the voice, every parts of the underlying rhythmic structure of the song seem to distort, dilate and change its texture to that of waves of dark velvet. Waves cradling the listener in a weird place where – like every good piece of music – it seems to invade our world and start distorting, dilating it, changing the view we have on it, the way we live in it.

So listen and dilate my friend, listen and dilate in rhythm.

Berg Sans Nipple – Dilate in Rhythm