| July 7th, 2006 by Eric K (Permalink) Add Comments |
Overlooked Collection #2
The Gentleman Losers - The Gentleman Losers
I might as well get to the meat of what you, the reader, want to know. Screw objectivity, this is the best thing I’ve heard all 2006. Hear this: I condone this album. A couple of Australians have crafted here a record of inconceivable emotive power that will add quality to your life or I promise to eat the corks off my outback hat (apologies for inappropriate cultural referance - race relations ed). Enter voice of grumpy old man: “Modern music has too many notes.” For once, our elders have a point: Take one idea - a simple motif, bare guitar line - and let it speak for itself. Most of those extraneous notes (or in Keane’s case all) could quite easily be thrown into the deep caverns of audio-Hell (which is where, incidentally, the aforementioned indie-weepers reside most of the Summer) with a vast improvement in output. Each track on the Gentleman Loser’s self-titled debut demonstrates an accute awareness of the deceivingly tardis-like possibility of this premise. Here, the most humble of restrained melodies imparts more information in the 97 seconds of opener An Empire of Coins than any bloated 20-minute, prog-rock “epic” (I’m looking at you Wakeman!). Put bluntly, if this record asked me to jump off a cliff you would find me approaching the ground below seconds later weeping tears of joy that these musical poets had deigned fit to address me. The ‘Losers say, through their music, more about our human condition than an entire library of psycho-analysis and philosophy.
Anoice - Remmings
Another example of a group of artists for whom their various instruments are not mere physical objects existing in the world but the additional limbs of some further evolution of homo-sapien whose sole function is the communication and articulation of the deepest abyss of human nature. Unfortunately the ears of most incarnations of our current species do not seem advanced enough to detect such subtle frequencies (well, if sales figures are any indication) but when the Earth is destroyed in 2012 by the Lizard King’s thirst for petroleum-based satiety and a new species is born from the nuclear aftermath, Anoice will be rightly given their due status as Lords of All Beauty and Soul. Rarely has the sound of horsehair on steel sounded so natural and prescient.
Minamo - Shining
Granted this was released 2005 but art is timeless, right? And anyway, you’ll forgive my lax attitude towards chronology once you’ve sampled the aural delights herein. My defence is that Shining only arrived in K-land, during the merry month of May so it’s going in. We are all slowly decaying - it’s a fact of the corporeal world we inhabit and no amount of botox injections and cucumber face masks is going to stop this. But that doesn’t mean we should all give up and a few spins round Shining’s brittle electronica gives new hope of development within degredation. Minamo don’t fight evolution but live within it and absorb it into art. If all this sounds pretentious it’s not the fault of the music which seems resolutely unassuming in creating their harrowing audio mise en scene. Each track-title provides a fairly adequate sense of the music within - crumbling, serene, stay still - but music such as this is barely articulable in words. The only resort for the journalist is to say “Here, play this. It’s good.”
Hisato Higuchi - She
If Hisato Higuchi told me my mother was conceived by dogs after they were released from coolies quarantine but did it playing acoustic over the fragile clicks and whirrs of She I probably wouldn’t put up much of a defence. 18-second opener Breath is a suitable introduction into the EP consisting of a single tone and inhalation. Girl Sister sets the mood for what follows (harrowingly bare melodies over scratchy, electronic manipulations). By the time he gets to stand-out Ghost Ghosts one wonders if his instruments haven’t in fact been lost to the Land of Nod and what we’re actually hearing is the faint whisper and scamperings of some furry little creature nextdoor. And that’s the rub: music like this is like watching a doormouse steal your edam: even if it’s not exactly what you asked for it’s so inobtrusive and the looks so meek and innocent as it peers up at you that it’s difficult to get worked up about, and double-hard to be objectively critical about. What sets Higuchi apart from being just another acoustic balladeer with a copy of ProTools, however, is when things take a turn for the experimental towards the end of the record. Here, sounds become noticeably harsher but always displaying a real attentiveness to dynamics finding gradual resolution in the lonely string-plucking of earlier.
7 Year Rabbit Cycle - Ache Horn
The more observant among you may have noticed a distinctly melancholic tinge to this month’s selections. This is due to your correspondant with the Music World being subjected to that most unnecessary interruption of student life that is the Summer Exam session and, as such, being in need first of something incidental to soundtrack his intense (ha!) work ethic and laterly to provide sounds of solace post-mortem. Deerhoof have put out more releases than Charles Clarke’s Home Office over the last few years (check their website now for a free EP download “for fun”) so this is another side-project to redress this collection’s ambient balance. Now, Deerhoof and their related projects don’t so much split opinion as take a giant rainbow-coloured candy cane to Opinion’s face and leave two raving street-preachers debating the merits of marmite-based snacks. With this in mind, if you have experienced the ‘Hoof’s yelping-squeals-over-attentively-challenged-percussion style and been thankful for the invention of the off button then this isn’t the record that’s going to change your mind. Even more primal and stripped down than previous outings, 7 Year Rabbit Cycle continue to explore just how creepy nursery rhymes can be when set to Rob Fisk’s pots-and-pans crashing with Kelly Goode’s Goldilocks-on-[insert own illegal stimulant here to avoid journalistic cliche]. Their third studio release, Ache Horn is a more contemplative, less excitable (by Fisk and his cohorts usual standards, that is) excursion down the noise-rock path and all the more intriguing an addition for it.
3hostwomexicansandatinofspanners - Pegasus Bridge
Every couple of weeks some hack proclaim’s punk is dead. Well it may have been backed into a corner - the Big 3 of the music industry continuing to be, err… unsympathetic to punk’s independent ethic - but it’s still snarling back with teeth bared last year through the punctuation-evading and commendably googleable (given you likewise avoid the spacebar - otherwise the Other Side of w3 may be revealed to you) 3hostwomexicansandatinofspanners. From the kick-off Pegasus Bridge packs more venomous spite than on hundred Jello Biafra’s stuck in a lift on the way to a job interview with The Man. With Mclusky recently confined to posterity and Emo threatening to take over the planet by swaddling it in a big, Dashboard Confessional-shaped comfort blanket, records like this appear like the logos of messiahs. So to the OC with the naysayers, the day punk rock dies is the day you’ll find me shooting pucks at beelzebub (because hell has frozen over - come on, keep up at the back!). All the corporate leviathan’s efforts serve to do is incite bands like this to fight back angrier than ever. So, in the traditional spirit of journalistic laziness under the pretense that they put it better than I can I’ll leave the rest of this review to the boys themselves: “What is music for? It’s not about selling fucking records, or promoting your image, or getting into magazines, or getting famous, or being cool, or hard, or getting girls, or getting fucked in some bog with some cunt… It’s for making a statement, and confronting core beliefs and standards, and creating an emotion, a feeling, without exclusion, and fucking off corporate wank.”
True that, and here’s to the overlooked gems that June will bring.
Purchase or search for related items:
