Hidden Tracks?
I did not download/listen to the leak/NPR-preview of Bloom, I waited until it came out yesterday and I bought it with money, so I haven’t had the months that many folks have to let it sink into the back of my brain. So far I like it more with each play.
Something about “Irene” bothers me, though. Not the song itself, but the fact that the track is 17 minutes long and, lo and behold!, it contains another secret song at the end after a few minutes of silence. I’ve suddenly realized how ridiculous the idea of trying to put a “hidden track” at the end of an album is these days. You take one look at the song lengths in your iTunes library and you either say to yourself (somewhat stupidly) ‘wow, Beach House made an epic 15 minute song!’ or you know immediately that there are in fact eleven songs on this album, not ten, and the band feels that they are pulling a fast one on you. A hidden track can no longer be hidden; it’s an insurmountable limitation of the digital format. Between this and the curmudgeonly interviews they’ve been giving as of late, I think we’re starting to see Beach House’s stubborn side emerge, and even as their output remains consistently enjoyable and engaging, I wonder how close they are to getting existentially stuck at the bottom of their own well.
Animal Collective - “Honeycomb” b/w “Gotham”
Somewhere along the line I lost track of the idea of ‘weirdness’ in music. The further you step back from it, the harder it gets to pin down what ‘conventional’ music is supposed to be and how anything can be called ‘weird’ in opposition/as an alternative. I used to be able to use Animal Collective as my own mile marker for weirdness, partly because their music used to be a lot more abrasive and partly because I was at a point in my life where I found a lot of personal value in feeling like I was roaming the edges of popular music, discovering hidden gems that people in the middle didn’t want or know about. Now I ask myself if the appeal of Strawberry Jam or Here Comes the Indian or Sung Tongs (I will probably always love Sung Tongs) wasn’t actually founded in cultural caché—if I started liking the music only after being drawn to what it might be like to be a person who liked this music instead of just engaging the music itself—and I can’t come up with a satisfying answer. If you don’t have your arms folded too tightly, Animal Collective can be great at freaking you out: the screaming, bashing, and ululating electronics and all that can sound just wild enough to be inhuman. But as the disorientation wears off and you begin to recognize the patterns in what they do, you end up wondering if it was really all that strange in the first place. What, if anything, are you left with after that?
I think in its own way Merriweather Post Pavilion was a shot at answering that question. The AnCo dudes filled out the bass, shined up the keys, wrote big, open melodies, and ta-dah!: they found a much wider audience and took a turn as big indie pop stars. There’s a well-worn road for bands (invented by critics and rock scribes, I’m sure) that starts out on those ‘weird’ edges and makes its way toward the ‘conventional’ center. Experiments are the beginning, pop songs are the end, and Animal Collective got about as far down that road as they’ll probably ever get. Maybe that’s why these new songs sound like an irresolute shuffling of feet: no real hooks to speak of, but not much to throw off the ears or astound the senses either. You step back far enough and the line between ‘weird’ and ‘conventional’ disappears, so anyone who’s spent a lot of time studying, following, and playing with that line is going to find themselves at a sudden loss of direction.
"Why the Old-School Music Snob Is the Least Cool Kid on Twitter"
Oh boy. OK, here’s the thing. I tend to think of taste and notions about taste as a sort of developmental issue, the idea being that people develop/inherit tastes and some attendant modes of thinking long before they develop the capacity to consider them self-critically. Your ideas about what is good and bad taste—about where music’s value comes from, in other words—aren’t inherent, but they do tend to precede you or anyone else being able to articulate what they are. This mindset where obscurity is valuable unto itself is something a lot of us picked up when we were teenagers and, if you’ll allow me a moment of blind psychoanalysis, it probably has more to do with burying the insecurities of a person than it does engaging with art. I think maybe that’s what Alexandra Molotkow is getting at when she says, “I liked the idea that my favorite movies, books and music are for me and a select few others, because they’re special and they’re part of my life. To think that everyone in the world might love them just as much makes me feel like a salt molecule in a tub of brine.”
Why should anyone feel unspecial because of the music they like? I say this because it takes one to know one, but what a horrible, flimsy thing to tie your identity to! Culture is always in flux, so even if you feel secure in relentlessly favoring the obscure no matter what it happens to sound like, you can’t rely on obscurity itself retaining any value over time. That’s part of Molotkow’s point, I think, but I would go a step further and say that the value of obscurity is/was a house of cards that everyone who subscribes to it builds for themselves. When did modern culture ever collectively agree that knowing about underground stuff was the paragon of cool? Or has that always been the province of a certain kind of person (myself so very much included) who made the mistake of piling their eggs in the music + coolness = self-worth basket?
My point in all this is that Molotkow doesn’t (or shouldn’t claim to) speak for everyone who listens to music in 2012, just herself and maybe some of us who’ve had to carefully confront our own backwards thinking. Recognizing and refining (with fire if necessary!) your own ideas about taste is a developmental stage that hopefully every music fan goes through at one point or another. Some people just get to do it in public via the New York Times, is all.
Against Reverb
As part of my never-ending quest to catch up on what the rest of the internet was listening to a month ago, I’ve spent the last couple days trying out the new albums from Grimes and Julia Holter. In both cases I find the biggest obstacle to my enjoyment, the thing that most prevents me from getting excited about them1, is the particular way they’re colored by reverb. On Grimes’ Visions, there’s some really wonderful-sounding synth pop to be had. Ear-grabbing textures, itchy-enough beats, all of it nodding to but not in awe of its influences (I hear bits of krautrock, R&B, new wave, rave/techno, 80s bubblegum, etc.). But Claire Boucher’s deference to deep-space reverb routinely smears her already-affected voice into an indistinct mewl and blocks her from delivering melodies or (Heaven forbid!) lyrical phrases that stick. This shoehorned tension between living, breathing instrumentals-in-motion and dead-eyed, indie-chic psych is, to my ears, unnecessary. I realize as a project Grimes has its roots in psychedelia and this is the clearest and most pop she’s ever been, but the better the music sounds the more glaring the lack of a commanding (though not necessarily un-interesting) vocal becomes, a problem largely traceable to the way heavy reverb distances and cloaks a sound.
Julia Holter’s Ekstasis has, in many ways, the opposite problem. Not that her voice is especially brazen or authoritative—she has the same gauzy mid-range hoot as a lot of indie musicians—but it’s placed up front in the mix with all kinds of extra harmonies and criss-crossing lines. There’s a crisper, sculpted reverb on it—her voice doesn’t fizzle into the ether so much as it fills up some imaginary cathedral—which makes the comparisons to Julianna Barwick’s monastic choirs apt. There is just as great a disconnect, however, between the way Holter’s voice is projected to the back of the room and the cheap, thin, flimsy GarageBand sound of her beats and synths. Where Grimes’ instrumentals take on their own life to the point of superseding her voice, Holter’s fail to live up to the grandiosity her voice aims for. The songs on Ekstasis I find myself enjoying most are the ones where she forgoes the plodding kick-snare-kick-snare thump and lets her centerpiece speak for itself (or indulges in some vintage vocoder, which in 2012 sounds way fresher than any reverb). I’m sure lots of people find a certain comfort in the homemade qualities of the album, but I have more and more trouble latching onto such charms with each bedroom pop album I hear. It’s a personal hang-up exacerbated by the way that disconnect between voice and instruments hints at a fuller and more sonically engaging album than is actually presented here.
Now, these are two albums out of the hundreds that make their way into the world every year and everyone’s cross-section of experience is going to be different, but I don’t think I’m alone in sensing that heavily reverbed voices have been common to the point of hegemony in the world of indie pop/rock the last few years, or that it can be a crutch and anathema to a sound’s personality. That’s why distinguishing between ‘atmosphere’ as an artistic tool and ‘hiding behind/brandishing echo as a flaccid cultural signpost’ is harder in 2012 than it’s ever been. Ostensibly, in most cases, the intended effect is psychedelic—stretching out a sound so its borders soften and it swirls and ripples in colorful ways. There are often heavy connotations of memory and nostalgia, too (think Real Estate, Fleet Foxes, or Panda Bear, who we might rightly blame for making this A Thing), but I would argue that it’s all really a function of space.
I mean, that’s what reverb is, right? The sound of sound filling up a space, vibrating against the walls and giving you an auditory picture of it. Reverb happens when noise traverses physical distance before it gets to your ears, so applying it to a multi-track recording allows an artist to design the impossible architecture her piece inhabits. (Artificially or otherwise doesn’t matter, but the fact that you can modulate it for individual voices does.) Most listeners never think of it in these terms—you don’t need to unless you’re on some kind of cranky mission like me—but even in more abstract senses like the way that reverb can suggest faded memory, it grows out of the implication of sound moving a great distance to reach you. It’s one of those things we’re all so used to hearing in music that it doesn’t strike us as nearly so odd as it should. There is a reason, in other words, that writers often describe heavily reverbed sounds as “drowned”: they can reach a point where they sound too far away to ever come back.
Reverb as a philosophy—and for many a blog-buzz band, it certainly is a philosophy—gets really thorny. It puts severe limits on the way an artist can engage the ears with sound. Ever stand on a long subway platform and hear someone busking down at the other end? The natural reverb of a concrete tunnel makes the music turn to indistinct mush. You’ll hear the echo a long way off—maybe even a vague idea of a tone—but you won’t hear much nuance unless you get close. It can be useful and even beautiful, but smeared, hazy sound as an end in itself is probably a dead end. I tend to believe (hope?) that people will only tolerate a certain amount of being faux-ignored by an artist on the proverbial other end of the subway platform before they’ll give her what she appears to be asking for and start ignoring her right back. Reverb plays a big part in insulating the internal sound-womb of white earbuds we’re all doing most of our listening in. It allows a sound to emanate from behind or within you rather than from in front of you2. The question is not whether it’s effective on its own terms, but whether it’s an ethos that should continue unchecked or, at the very least, unconsidered. As comforting as deep, solipsistic sounds can be, there’s no replacing the magnetism of confidence, of music that’s not afraid to look you in the eye. I’m finding I value that directness a lot more these days.
Net Beef: Abebe vs. ‘Adult Contemporary’
The other day, Nitsuh Abebe wrote a piece for New York magazine in which he pondered the idea of a certain crop of ostensibly “indie” acts taking the modern place of “adult contemporary” music: singer-songwritery, pop-rocky, Americana-y type stuff. Most people who have even a passing interest in contemporary music probably already have the set of ideas and images in their heads that Abebe invokes—CDs sold next to the register at Starbucks, artists given extensive coverage on National Public Radio, widespread accusations of dullness. You know the type, even if that type isn’t as neatly pin-pointable as we might like to think. The new albums by Feist and Wilco (quite rightly) serve as his two biggest examples.
Then, in a not-ironic turn of events, some noted proponents of such artists took offense and decided to speak up. First and strangest was the NPR interview with Abebe that carried a markedly passive-aggressive tone throughout, as if the radio folks had read his little “NPR Muzak” jibe and decided to call him up, all indignant with raised eyebrows, and say, “Would you care to explain yourself?” See, while they make an effort to feature an eclectic range of styles, the artistic values (and critical voice) espoused by NPR tend to be pretty consistent. They like ostensibly mature, thoughtful, reasonable, literary, hazily leftist music. And that’s fine! Those are perfectly nice things to like, which Abebe acknowledges both in his original piece and in the subsequent interview. But regardless of any eclecticism, NPR-ish music does seem to share a certain aroma, doesn’t it? Their approach to journalism / criticism has a kind of flattening effect on whatever they’re covering, so they rarely surprise you. That’s why I think using the organization as a signpost for the commonalities between Feist, Wilco, Neko Case, et al, isn’t all that shortsighted. It may be less of an insult and more of a plain, useful descriptor, y’know?
But all of this is secondary to the question of what the term “adult contemporary” means and how it should / shouldn’t be applied to the aforementioned acts. The day after the NPR interview, Stephen Deusner wrote a piece for Salon in response to Abebe, taking him to task for supposedly misunderstanding both the notion of adult contemporary and the bands he summarily lumped in with it. Deusner’s right when he points out that modern audiences are fractured and difficult to pin down, which makes the idea of blander music specifically targeted at older fans seem outdated. But I’m not sure that was necessarily Abebe’s point. I have little doubt that a greater number of older, less “indie”-aware people are listening to Wilco and Feist, but the connection I see Abebe drawing has much more to do with how this music is built and how it behaves. There are subtle innovations, yes, and a lot of smart, skilled craftsmanship at work on Metals and The Whole Love, but they’re largely buried inside the facade of pleasantly scruffy pop-rock. For all the lip service to krautrock or the earthy grime of group-shouted choruses, these songs feel safe, familiar, and resolved. They participate directly in the traditions of classic singer-songwriter rock. If you’re wired a certain way, as Abebe says, or if you’re just in the market for something more immediately exciting, your reaction to it will probably be a big fat yawn.
Personally, I realized I’d lost interest in Wilco after the McCartney-loving snore-fest of Sky Blue Sky and, while I did come around to liking The Reminder after a bit, I found Metals generally weak and unengaging. Leslie Feist seems unable to commit to any note or musical phrase on the whole thing—perhaps for fear of accidentally making another hit (how awful that would be!)—instead relegating herself to a muffled half-yawp that grates against the inner ear. So as I weigh in on this debate, I think it’s important to remember that I’ve kinda already decided not to like these records. Abebe’s invocation of traditionally “boring” music becomes a really convenient opportunity to chime in and say “See? I told you they sucked!”, which would be a very childish thing to do indeed. But just as I’ve stooped to admitting my own prejudices when it comes to Feist and Wilco, I detect a hint of vision-clouding fandom in Deusner’s incredulity. “Wilco, adult contemporary? Really?” Well yeah, dude, they fit the bill pretty damn squarely. In the last few years it’s become abundantly clear that they won’t be embarking on another overhauling YHF-type experiment and they seem rather content to paddle around in the lukewarm waters of roots rock and folk pop into their graying years.
The problem with this debate goes back to the outdated connotations of the adult contemporary label. Take away the ‘insult’ part of it and it becomes another plain, useful descriptor for what we’re hearing: subtle, carefully considered music that plays on highly generic forms and tends to appeal to modern grown-ups. But modernity has yet to fully deconstruct the way we ingest such terms, so the word “indie” gets used almost like a shield against the unbearable scorn of being called “adult contemporary.” (Just a reminder: Metals was released by UMG subsidiaries and The Whole Love marks the first time in over a decade that Wilco haven’t put out a record on a Warner-owned label, so let’s not retain any illusions about taking the word “indie” literally either.) To me it starts to look like Abebe may have jumped the gun by taking liberties with such a traditionally loaded term, hence the politely vitriolic reactions. But that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about it.
How I Spent My Spring Vacation
Hello, I’m back (sort of). Here’s an excerpt from a very long and self-pitying thing I wrote during my hiatus that explains more of what’s been going through my head:
This doesn’t seem like one of those bicycle things. I’ve taken a few weeks off from writing and in the interim I’ve been in turmoil, reexamining in my mind the value and purpose of everything I’ve been working on and finding it hard to come up with a satisfactory answer. My writing has been centered on a topic—music and culture—that has looked deader and deader every day. It’s not the music itself or even the ways people talk about and live with it. It’s me. Something in me has been sustained by having this purpose, this Thing That I Do That Makes Me Special, and I can’t tell if removing myself from it is causing my distress or if it was only ever distracting me and covering up existential distress that’s been there all along. I quite literally don’t know what to do with myself; not in the sense of simply being bored (though I have had a hard time filling the hours), but at a loss for something I can do that will give me any small peace.
As I write this down I’m encountering one of those strange quirks of language, whereby a writer’s thoughts don’t seem real until he types them out and reads them back to himself. I know deep down that I lack the semantic skills to articulate what’s going on inside of me, but jotting out a feeble and slanted attempt crystallizes it somehow. Maybe that’s the cruel joke of being a writer: you get yourself to this point where your half-expressed thoughts only sort of sound like things you think and feel, but at least they’re there (“spelled out,” if you will) and it gives you a platform from which to try once again to leap up and grab at straws even further out of your reach. According to Einstein’s famous koan—that “insanity” is doing something over and over again expecting different results—writing is one of the craziest things we can do.
When I decided to step back from Popcorn Noises, my mom texted me about how writers often describe the compulsion as a curse. They’re haunted by the notion that they will stop being themselves or become invisible and irrelevant if they don’t share their thoughts through written word. At the time I was still enjoying the break from my self-imposed schedule and still feeling a residual jealousy of all my friends who can go home at night and not have this thing hanging over them. I wanted some serenity or freedom and mom encouraged me to just “be” for a while, but now I wonder if what she said about writers was true. The connection is only just occurring to me: the fear of disappearing is the fear of death, and in the face of this death, my mind has become strangely sensitive. I’ve thought about oblivion a lot and spent a lot of time trying to distract myself from intense bouts of anxiety. I’ve felt inexplicably as though the delicate scaffolding of my life could come crashing down at any minute and the whole world would smite my ruin. I know it sounds dramatic and unreasonable, but that’s where my head’s been lately.
In light of all this, I have a hard time knowing how to go forward. The regularity of my work and the diminishing marginal returns I saw from it was a big part of what prompted me to take this break, so returning to that pressure only seems like an assurance that this will happen again. I created a schedule for myself because in the past I’d struggled to get into a habit of writing (and thereby make good on the notion that this was what I wanted to do), but now it seems I struggle with the opposite, with having expectations of myself about how and what I produced every day. Is my writing a good habit to be continually enforced or a destructive habit to be tamped down firmly so it only flares up on occasion? Is there something better in the middle?
Another source of exhaustion was having to keep up with the pace of music and the internet. There are so many people and so many opinions and so, so much music out there that I felt like I had to have the widest possible cross-section of knowledge and experience in order to validate my own significance. That and, of course, I wanted respect and attention (who doesn’t?), which caused me to recurrently believe that I wasn’t doing enough. If I just did more and worked harder, I’d somehow get the satisfaction I was after, right? If I read more and listened more, I’d come out the victor in the music world’s unspoken contest to Be Right All The Time without Looking Like You’re Trying. I know now in my head that it simply can’t be done. I probably knew it all along, but was too seduced by the idea of being a famous and respected blog writer to really believe it. I feel like I have to learn how to stop caring about who or how many people read my stuff, but it’s a lot easier said than done.
And, of course, the concern remains with me that I’ve ruined music for myself. Sitting down and writing about my inner struggles after weeks of abstinence feels really good, but I’m still not compelled to actually listen to much. I’ve agreed to DJ a handful of weddings this spring and now I cringe at the very thought of it. I worry that I’ve lost the ability to experience music as something visceral and unique after spending so many years convincing myself that it was better to be well-read and topical. So much writing about music—even very good writing—is really about other music. Everything descends from something else, everything is part of some movement, and everything must be given a catchy name that has to either be mocked or apologized for. I have a sense that at one time in my life (maybe in my late teens?), I was capable of getting deep into a record without having to either mock, apologize for, or venerate it, but now it’s like my ears have been disconnected. Listening to music feels like watching nothing but commercials on TV. It’s not that the commercials (or the music) are “bad” and would be better if they were more like things I liked when I was young, it’s that there’s this blaring deluge of information, contradictory messages, and fleeting temporality that wears me down something fierce. I forget how to distinguish between the thing I’m actually interested in and the thing that’s just there because someone else is talking about it.
Dire, yes? I can’t deny that it was written partly as a therapeutic exercise, but on the whole I think it’s still a good summary. The real point of all this, though, is to say I’m trying to figure some stuff out, so don’t expect PN to be the same as it was (I say this for myself as much as anyone reading it). I probably won’t stick to a schedule or even write every day. I still plan to eventually find time to listen to the new tUnE-yArDs album, but it might not be until after everyone stops caring about it. Same goes for the new Panda Bear and the new TV on the Radio. Other musics will be taken as they come.
I would also like to acknowledge that I haven’t totally ceased writing during the hiatus. The things I have started and will in all likelihood never finish include: a Steve Martin + John Candy-ish comedic script, an outline for a graphic novel (the first scene has vomiting!), a handful of bloggish things about food, and my best man speech for my roommate’s immanent wedding (I actually do have to finish that one).Furthermore, I would like to acknowledge a handful of people who said very kind and encouraging things to me in the last month: Wayne Robins, Casey “Crumbler” Newton, Nick Stamas, Danny Anderson, Josh Doody, Adam Peterson, Nate Lopez, Josh Owen, Steve & Darby Musha, and anyone else who still has any faith in me. Thank you.
And so, my friends, it is with caution and trepidation that I declare: Onwards and Upwards!
Cold Pizza Friday LVII
Imaginary SXSW (or, if you wish, ‘FOMO’)
I scrimped and saved for the plane tickets. I took night jobs. I barely made the cut-off date to register for press credentials. I got x-rayed at the airport (twice!), my flights were delayed, and the portly gentleman seated next to me had a snoring problem like I’ve never heard before. The shoulder strap on my duffel bag broke, but I am here, coming to you live from the Austin, Texas of my imagination! You see, dear friends, every spring this city is home to the biggest and most important annual confluence of music, film, interactive design, and business cards in the entire world ever! South! By! South! West!
I do have business cards, by the way. They’re really cool. I designed them myself because I really think I have a good eye for graphic design stuff and I don’t wanna just hand out something that people will go throw away as soon as I leave their eye line, y’know? Unfortunately, handing them out to people I meet here in Austin is my one and only strategy for ‘getting my name out there.’ See, I have this blog where I write about music. No, wait! Come back! Just hear me out! Okay. So. Like, I know that every hipster schmuck this side of Williamsburg has a music blog these days, but I swear mine is different. I like to think of myself more as a budding ‘critic’ than, like, some kind of Gorilla vs. Bear thing where I’m supposed to know about all the coolest new bands. I’m not into that stuff, y’know? I’m more about the music itself, like how it works and what it means and stuff. Like, I use Tumblr but not like everybody else uses Tumblr, y’know? I just like how many cool, genuine people who love music are on there. The internet’s really the future of all this stuff anyway, right?
So the thing you have to keep in mind about my imaginary SXSW is that it’s a giant freaking mess. Bands come from all over the country—even if they weren’t invited!—to find places to play this week just so they can say they ‘made a huge splash at this year’s SXSW.’ I’m not kidding. There are dudes with guitars (or, if you’re lucky, tambourines and 808s) on every street corner downtown singing their damn hearts out through portable PA systems. If you know someone here with a house, there are six bands playing there right now. If you know of a killer taco stand, they are having the best week of their lives. If you know where to get cheap beer and a seat in an air-conditioned room, you are everybody’s best friend. I mean, Austin during SXSW is this music industry, y’know? The next Animal Collective could be jamming out at the dive bar around the corner. You wouldn’t want to miss out on that, would you?
Oh wait, I think that dude walking down the sidewalk with the sunglasses is in The Strokes. Hang on, I’m gonna go try to talk to him. …Okay I guess he’s not, but he really does look like the bass player, doesn’t he? I mean I totally loved their first two albums even if the newer ones aren’t as good, y’know? Anyway, like I was saying, the bands that we’ll all be talking about a month from now are all here right now, playing to a crowd of twenty people. I mean, what if I’m just chilling at some random show and Bradford Cox or Ryan Schreiber happens to walk in? We could totally just hang out and talk music over some cheap beers. Careers are made that way, y’know? I’m not saying all I wanna do is schmooze with influential people while I’m out here in the Austin of my imagination, but how cool would it be to hang out with someone like that? Just to be there and be part of the action, y’know? I dunno, man, in my mind it was worth all the trouble.
