| August 30th, 2006 by Eric K (Permalink) Add Comments |
Regular readers (humour me and pretend you exist, please) will recall that, having been availed of my usual listening device by some wealth-redistributing ideologue (read: thieving toothless bastard), I have been forced to engage somewhat more than I generally like to with what others have described to me variously as ‘us here in the real world’ and ‘outside your precious ivory tower you pretentious, anti-social freak’. Gratefully, I can recount that it was not an altogether unpleasant experience which has got me a-thinking about the listening experience and just how we reviewers go about talking about it. We all listen to whatever gloop gets plopped on our laptops and wax lyrical about the noises within but are we ever talking about the same record? I don’t mean some sort of conspiratorial organisation distributing fake Radiohead cds (although remember all those “authentic” tracks that flooded the web pre-Kid A’s much-anticipated release). I mean that each one of us brings so much of our own personal experiences and attitudes when we crank the record up, that, in a sense, we’re actually reviewing a different product. And the most easily overlooked aspect of this is what’s going on outside while we’re listening and what we’re actually doing at the time. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but I don’t sit down in an echo chamber with a pair of headphones and listen attentively to a new record from track 1. More often than not, I’m just wandering about doing my business (Oh, grow up. Not that kind of business) with the music soundtracking. I listen to a couple of tracks on the way to work. A couple more while I have my lunch. Give the whole thing a spin on the bus home. The unforgiving Aberdonian climate doesn’t usually admit of frequent fresh-air venturing but as we’re currently enjoying what is generously referred to as the ‘Summer’ season, these listening experiences have, more often than not, involved a background scenery of the elemental variety rather than umbarella-clad spurts between various man-made fabrications and this has got to have a different effect on my experience of the music. Listening to Sisters of Mercy is a very different ride when you’re constantly assailed by little babies with ice-cream cones and sandbuckets.
Everyone knows that there’s a particular kind of record that does well this time of year: the Soundtrack-to-your-Summer record. It encapsulates the warm, fuzzy feeling we all have in these skin-cancer-spreading months: Beach-towel-clad, worry-free bundles of pop portraying the kind of over-excitable individuals that only really exist in Sunny D commercials with lyrics limited to the monosyllabic la-la, na-na variety rather than despairing odes to the inherent alienation of the human condition. We also know that this kind of music sucks harder than a 5-year old on a squishy binge so we all have to dig that bit deeper to unearth the hibernating sun-avoiders making the musical gems that make up the ‘Overlooked Collections’ in these days. This, then, is your Summer guide Indiecult-style.
Feu Therese - Feu Therese
I brace the elements, hands covering my light-deprived eyes, high-UV shades protecting my dilating pupils, accompanied first by the genre-dodging Feu Therese and their self-titled debut. Here’s a theory about why record sales for innovative, experimental, genre-defying music such as this enjoys the commercial prospects of an Andrew Lloyd Webber/Osama Bin Laden charity record for the BNP: In today’s oft-maligned MTV-generation, you can’t keep the kids attention for more longer than it takes to say “Buy this record” before they’re diverted by some other shiny trinket. It all depends on those 30 seconds chosen by the Sample Guy at Amazon (surely the most powerful man in music). And if you had to choose 30 seconds to sum up the output of Feu Therese what would you choose? Parts of this record sound like a free-wheeling fairground carousel careering down an Amsterdam red light strip and others like the plodding menace of some evil marching band. Tu n’Avais Qu’une Oreille is Joy Division’s Atmosphere sung in slo-motion by a drowning Chris Rea. In French. But in a world where you are eclectic if you own a Chili Peppers record, anyone can do weird. The trick is making the music you want and others want to listen to it again despite this. A trick Feu Therese seem to have nailed.
Sucioperro - Random Acts of Intimacy
As I round the corner I’m greeted by my buddy Duncan and his overbearing optimism in the face of such dangerous global-warming effects as we are currently experiencing. He’s keen-to-bursting to tell me a joke: ‘How many emo kids does it take to change a lightbulb?’ I reply that I don’t know and try to focus on whether my shoelaces are tied to indicate indifference towards an answer. ‘None.’ He wails, almost in tears with anticipation of the ensuing hilarity, ‘They just sit in the dark crying.’ At which point he collapses into some awful epileptic spasm and struggles to stay on his feet. Noticing, like the empathetic soul that I am, his disappointment that I am not also convulsing on the floor, I try to assure him I did find the joke amusing, but my sickness for any conversation involving the recollection of ‘emo’ is the kind of thing I am in need of a prescription for.
Thank Rao, then, for Ayr’s Sucioperro: very much the emo-antidote. Erstwhile collaborators and tour-buddies of Biffy Clyro, Hell Is For Heroes, Aereogramme and other post-grunge Scots, they harness the menacing spirit of Kurt Cobain if he’d been brought up listening to King Crimson rather than Half Japanese. Although they lack the intricate prog-cleverness of da Biffy, they do possess their ability to seamlessly segue bone-crushing, lyrically-ferocious, RATM speaker-destroyers (The Crushing of the Little People) and sweetly emotive lullabies; often within the same song (Random Acts of Intimacy). Post-hardcore, emocore, metalcore: there’s so many cores around these days I could start an orchard. But however you try to pigeonhole these boys, make sure you keep a tag on their wings to track their next directions.
The Caretaker - Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia:
Now, feeling as out of my depth as a Nigerian Olympic swimmer, I come to one of the most staggeringly powerful pieces of music I’ve heard for some time. All that I’ve said about environment affecting experience seems redundant as listening to the Caretaker’s music appears to render invisible to me everything but the music itself. Surely the most effective conversation-stopping record since Come On Die Young. As the almost unbelievably self-aware and omniscient human being that I am, I recognise that I am somewhat prone to hyperbole from time to time so I’ll try and reign myself in but… Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia will be the single most compelling and demanding record you will hear in 2006. If you feel like you’ve been trapped in a sensory-deprivation chamber with a blue whale after listening to this then I empathise. Trying to relate the noise harnessed within is probably an impossible task but it’s my job so I’ll do my best. As I round the corner for home onto the desolate side-street where my flat resides, I am accompanied by a cavernous wailing from within some deep barrier reef, slowly swelling like the tides above, creating an ominous sense that the whole creaking structure is about to collapse in on itself. As recognisable man-made music is gradually leaked into the cave, it’s the ghostly presence of some ballroom dance-band swinging into action, slowed by its submersion as it sinks into the deep ocean ready to be added to the sedimentary non-Rock formed on the seabed. It’s a wonder how the Caretaker is able to hold your attention for the entire length of the record when change is so gradual and reluctant.
Fat Worm Of Error - Pregnant Babies Pregnant With Pregnant Babies
I turn the keys and begin to climb the steps of our terraced abode. You can probably gauge whether or not to keep reading this review now when I tell you that here we have another release from the Load Records stable. What’s more this is probably the weirdest thing the aforementioned none-more-weird label have put out. What that doesn’t tell you is anything about what kind of music this is but it will weed out those of us unsympathetic to the fine line between mind-bending innovation and a bunch of art-school drop-outs clattering about in their mum’s kitchen. Pregnant Babies… falls into the former. Just. If it counts for anything, Fat Worm will provoke a reaction. This album will split a room like marmite sandwiches at a ‘Jaffa Cakes: Cake or Biscuit?’ conference, and in a world where most of the music-makers out there couldn’t provoke a reaction between sulphuric acid and a voodoo doll of Ben Elton’s face (it’s not hard, believe me) we should be thankful. It’s a familiar oeuvre of cut-and-paste field recordings, the aforementioned utensil-bashing, squeel-little-piggy vocals, the new-weird’s oh-so-post-modern in-jokes and archly affected antics. Accompanied energetically by the unintelligible sqwaking of a frenzied (possibly sectionable) siren, Fat Worm do set themselves apart by infusing their music with a humourous and richly-developed multiverse that you have to really give yourself to if you want to get any enjoyment. Suspend your cynical disbelief for a second and pretend this is the first time you’ve heard a Load band creating a racket like this and become absorbed in Fat Worm’s disturbed and disturbing parallel world. Once you do this (admittedly an easier prospect if witnessing one of their manic, bizarrely-costumed live ‘performances’) then the freaky fun takes over. Try and analyse it; try and evaluate it; put it in a ‘social context’ of post-pop faux-art and, sure, it looks like Cirque de Soleil rejects masquerading as knowing savants, but pretend it’s the first time you ever heard anyone do this and it’s a hella-fun show. There’s a line (albeit a somewhat squiggly-drawn one) running through American Rock of weirdo noise-niks reaching back into Beefheartian territory through the Residents and their modern disciples. Most of it is, as its moping detractors are so eager to point out, silly nonsense. But as this record is finally brought to a halt spasming (like myself as I finally make it home) on the floor like a swarm of electrocuted wasps I spy my university lecturer out the window gloomily exiting the department office and I realise you take this kind of joyousness where you can get it.
That’s your lot. Now stop browsing the web and enjoy the sun while it’s here, dammit.
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