Arthur Miller once said that an era can be said to have ended when its basic illusions are exhausted. I would like to posit two things- that the current era will end once people stop listening to bloodless Italo-disco electro-pop and start listening to bands as grandiose, reverential and human as WU LYF, the World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation. Their new video for ‘LYF’ is above and you can find my personal favorite song of their’s, ‘Heavy Pop’ Secondly, that Vanity Fair is writing articles like this:
It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.
Economists long ago tried to justify the vast inequalities that seemed so troubling in the mid-19th century—inequalities that are but a pale shadow of what we are seeing in America today. The justification they came up with was called “marginal-productivity theory.” In a nutshell, this theory associated higher incomes with higher productivity and a greater contribution to society. It is a theory that has always been cherished by the rich. Evidence for its validity, however, remains thin. The corporate executives who helped bring on the recession of the past three years—whose contribution to our society, and to their own companies, has been massively negative—went on to receive large bonuses. In some cases, companies were so embarrassed about calling such rewards “performance bonuses” that they felt compelled to change the name to “retention bonuses” (even if the only thing being retained was bad performance). Those who have contributed great positive innovations to our society, from the pioneers of genetic understanding to the pioneers of the Information Age, have received a pittance compared with those responsible for the financial innovations that brought our global economy to the brink of ruin.
It’s done: a comprehensive survey of the relevant musical recordings of the Jan 2010-Dec 2010 period so that future historians can look back and hear the sounds that had us all shaking our leg-warmers in the disco-clubs.
I didn’t go with a ‘cut’ (or is it ‘joint’? I can never tell. Rap is hard.) from Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. It was, as Pitchfork pointed out, a very good record, a career best, but I’m sure that anybody who would appreciate it has heard it already.
The track list is as follows:
Swans – You Fucking People Make Me Sick
Xasthur – Broken Glass Christening
High On Fire – Bastard Samurai
Earl Sweatshirt – Earl
Deerhunter – Desire Lines
The Body – Lathspell I Name You
WU LYF – Heavy Pop
Alcest – Percees de Lumiere
Tennis – Marathon
Zola Jesus – Run Me Out
Das Racist – Ek Shaneesh
Amanda Palmer – Idioteque
Wrnlrd – Death Drive
Gonjasufi – She Gone
Salem – Killer
Agalloch – To Drown
The last song is significant not only in allowing me to close the album with enough grandeur and majesty to reanimate Richard Wagner, but because Agalloch’s The Marrow of the Spirit is my Album of the Year. Yay.
With Marrow Portland Oregon’s Agalloch have pulled off the difficult feat of releasing the greatest album of their career fifteen years after the band formed. Try to envisage MGMT or Vampire Weekend’s magnum opus arriving in 2022 and you’ll see the magnitude of Don Anderson, John Haughm, Jason William Walton and Aesop Dekker’s achievement. It is fitting that a band who are so heavily influenced by nature would obey nature’s rhythms as opposed to those of the music industry. Like the songs on Marrow, the shortest of which is nine minutes and forty seconds if you don’t count the album’s intro, Agalloch have grown and evolved. This is not to say that their first real album, 1999′s Pale Folklore is by any means primitive- Agalloch are not Ulver, who started out as folk-influenced Black Metal and ended up in unclassifiable electronic weirdness by way of a two disc William Blake inspired concept album, or that they have mellowed with age- Into the Painted Grey from Marrow is closer to Black Metal than anything they have recorded previously. Their progression has been, appropriately, organic.
They aren’t just getting this accolade for releasing a career best album- Deerhunter’s Halcyon Digest is their finest recording to date, Malefic closed the books on his Xasthur project and said goodbye to metal with a record that will be hard to top no matter which genre he uses next. The Marrow of the Spirit would be the best album released this year if it was a debut by a previously unknown cadre of mountain-men who had just wandered down from the Cascades covered in mud and deer gibbets. As with any great piece of art its greatness is multi-dimensional, but I would like to venture something: part of what makes it great is that it is accessible. This term is almost prejorative when discussing music, one step away from ‘pandering’, and there is often an undertone of dissapointment when a beloved band release an album that could be described as ‘accessible’. Imagine if Radiohead’s next album was written primarily as a jumping-on point for teenagers who missed out on The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. Marrow will appeal to many people who wouldn’t normally listen to Black Metal, though I doubt your kid sister is going to make the jump from Ke$ha based on the mournful minor-key acoustic strumming in The Watcher’s Monolith.
There are people out there for whom The Marrow of the Spirit will be the first Black Metal album that they will hear. Looking through the rest of the Black Metal genre they will find genuine progress being made by a few outsiders and a deluge of Mayhem cover bands staffed by fascist lunkheads. The few of them who start bands will bring what they learned from Agalloch with them whether their musical is explicitly metal or another genre (indie-rock is in serious need of blackening). Music will get a little bit better for The Marrow of the Spirit being made.
Okay, a short story for you all today- this is part of the Big Important Novel that I noticed can work as a stand-alone piece, and it’ll teach you how to play the guitar part for a really great song.
“My God, that gives me such a boner.”
She meant my guitar, the EDS-1275. We were in my room, possibly cell, above the coffee house. We had, until this point, always stayed at Adele’s- my motivation being shame at my whole situation vis living. A young woman who often made it clear, even when it wasn’t appropriate, that her parents were millionaires and her childhood home was ‘a honest to God fuckin’ mansion’, deserved to be somewhere finer. Not, I should point out, in strictly bourgeois surroundings but in and amongst genuine aesthetic beauty, suitable to her idiom (for example, the Vatnajökull glacier).
“You wanted to see it… so… there.”
“How old is it?”
“Forty-one years. Some parts, like the tone control knobs, have been replaced but the body’s still solid mahogany.”
“Forty-one years… This is American history. It is a manifestation of our collective will.”
“It’s really just an instrument- I know to a lot of people it’s important, or ‘iconic’ or whatever, but it’s a tool to accomplish a certain task.”
“Then you should play it.”
“It’s late and if I play it through the amp I’ll wake Mr. Rosenberg-”
“It’s a tool to accomplish a certain task, und that task is making girls go all wet und quivery over othervise boring guys like you.”
“It’s not meant to be played acoustic-”
Adele held me around the waist and whispered “One song and you can fuck me wherever you want.”
“Is that anatomy or geography?”
She held up four fingers in front of my face.
“Okay, you want to play hardball, fine: there are four parts of me which can make you have an orgasm. For every second that goes by where you aren’t playing a song your access to one of them gets revoked. One, tw-”
I played. It was an intro in the chord C. I knew that she knew the song. It was important to us both.
“Two, one, two, three, four.”
I’m going to skip ahead to the next day with the two of us and my guitar and her drums in her apartment, mic-stands carrying Shure SM-58s in front of us and a formation of amplifiers behind.
Adele’s drums came in on the ‘four’ and I played the intro over after tap-dancing over the switches on a DS-1 and Bigmuff, then in G.
Adele, standing upright at her drumkit, leans into her mic. I’ve written out the chords above the lyrics and the strumming pattern should be pretty easy to pick up if you listen to the original. Continue reading
I’m not going to talk about Cocorosie’s album Grey Oceans. That I don’t want to talk about it shouldn’t be taken to mean that is beneath my contempt or unspeakably awful- I don’t talk about the vast majority of music that I listen to. I have no strong feelings about Cocorosie. I can imagine hearing them at a polite but not formal dinner or an ethnic-organic cafe. To me they’re the musical accompaniment to Hummus.
What I want to talk about is the article on Stereogum that has caused me to write three blog posts about Cocorosie in almost as many days and spend more time with their music than I have with anything that I am genuinely excited by. Continue reading
Over at The Millions there’s a comprehensive profile of indie-darlings and current cause celebre Cocorosie. I’ve been listening to Grey Oceans and I can’t say that I’m impressed or that I can see what all the fuss is about. Is Joanna Newsom half-rapping over Xiu-Xiu when he’s run out of all ideas really worth the digital ink spilled over this band? They’re profoundly average at their best and not bad enough to be interesting in a Shaggs type way at their worst. They haven’t been cruelly cast aside by the white male phallogocentricocracy, just absent-mindedly left out of the Garden State soundtrack.
Here’s the most interesting thing they’ll ever do (drop the n-bomb in a song):
Here’s something new: Brandon Stousuy of venerable MP3 blog Stereogum doesn’t believe that CocoRosie have been given a fair shrift. Fair enough, there’s bands we all would like to see get more of that sweet “considered dialogue” that would send a million or so clueless scenesters straight to the iTunes store. Bands like GWAR. Unfortunately many of us aren’t authentic enough to mobilize the independent rock nomeklatura to show “that the reception of CocoRosie in the US reflects the denial of a greater feminist issue, an ecological issue, a racial issue, a spiritual issue (sic)” Yoko Ono’s there, but Bjork is notable by her absence. You can always get Bjork for this kind of stuff.
I’m going to spend some more time with Grey Oceans before I can decide whether or not all bad things in the world are caused by our collective ambivalence towards Ms. Bianca and Sierra Casady. An extended post will be forthcoming.
In the mean time, I’d like to judge them purely by their album art: the cover for Grey Oceans is seemingly copy and pasted from the Facebook gallery that remains after a rich kid’s ‘Dress Totally Random!!!!1!’ party, captioned with lettering that Gary Gygax would reject from the design of the 2nd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide for being too lame, and it is the most aggressively stupid thing I have ever seen.
Over at Sign & Sight Ueli Bernays has a smart little article on the changing meaning of the Falsetto over time- derided by classical musicians for being ‘false’ and unnatural, and more than anything unmanly, then appropriated by the musical genres that would make lacking traditional masculinity into a virtue: Soul musicians turning sensitivity into a virtue instead of a liability and treating your lady right into the apogee of male sexual achievement; Heavy Metallers who finally got that memo about stereotypical masculinity being, and I quote, ‘gayer than eight guys blowing nine guys’ (G.W.F Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, 1807). Today, Bernays suggests in his last paragraph, auto-tune has made the falsetto false again. Have a read.Continue reading
Terror and Fabulous are two words that sound unreasonably good when put together, so there's no reason that they should be monopolised by an acclaimed 90s Dancehall DJ and can't be used as the title of a blog by Gareth Watkins of near to London, England.
There's no theme.
Okay, there's a theme: Things Are Not Okay, but this site will ignore the way things are and promote the work of artists and intellectuals who show us hints of how things could be.
I post MP3s. I do this to promote awareness of certain artists and to encourage critical engagement with their music. If you are an artist whose work I have featured or the owner of any copyrighted material that appears on this site then your first step should be to consider how I've advertised your product for free and how sending me further .mp3s to feature would be good business sense, or to send an email to terror.fabulous(at)gmail.com requesting the removal of specific songs from the site, which I will respond to as quickly as I am able.
