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- The Retrographer, Issue 27 (March, 2 0 1 7)
The Retrographer, Issue 27 (March, 2 0 1 7)
Lorde, Jay Som, Beach Fossils, The Drums, Your Old Droog, Danny Brown, Feist, Perfume Genius, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Calvin Harris, Young Thug, Ariana Grande, Pharrell
The Retrographer 27 (March, 2 0 1 7)
Bulletins
I just realized I listed last month’s issue as #27… when it was #26. Yoinks. Might be time to get an editor
So. You haven't seen Cam'ron's new video. Let's fix that.
10 Songs for March, 2 0 1 7
“Green Light”, Lorde (Spotify / YouTube) – Remember, “Royals” came out when Ella Yelich-O’Connor was sixteen years old. Here’s hoping she knows that when you’ve got a song this good, though, it can’t matter how you follow up a hit like that. “Brand new sounds in my mind” indeed!
“Everybody Works”, Jay Som (Spotify / YouTube) – This album is sort of a buffet of indie rock in 2017: You’ve got your Mac DeMarco “Baybee”, your Haim-ish “Remain”. This song is the album’s most singular, with scintillating prechorus, soaring chorus, and intimated bridge.
“This Year”, Beach Fossils (Spotify / YouTube) – Driving through Zion National Park, and this song came on. “You know, there’s a lot of very good dreamy pop out there”, Emma said, peering at its vertiginous rock, sprayed vermilion and ochre, like the sunset had finally dyed a match.
“Blood Under My Belt”, The Drums (Spotify / YouTube) – This is how The Drums sound: Peppy, unencumbered, driving, free. With its “Human Nature” verse melody, doo-wop guitar, and skipping rhythm line, the band smuggles in a simple melancholy: “It’s true I hurt you, but I still love you.”
“Grandma Hips”, Your Old Droog and Danny Brown (Spotify / YouTube) – Droog is the rare rapper who really seems to enjoy rapping. It seems like his idea of a good time in the same way Rocky does on Hot 97. With Danny Brown, rap’s Animaniac, this song skips along blithely, stopping only as a courtesy.
“Pleasure”, Feist (Spotify / YouTube) – Leslie Feist has been silent since 2011’s Metals; She arrives here silently, too, but not for long. Armed with an electric guitar (not exactly “1-2-3-4”), she ponders the circle of life and its onanism from alpha to omega.
“Slip Away”, Perfume Genius (Spotify / YouTube) – Perfume Genius is an anthem factory. “Queen” captures the power of Queen with less reassuring bravado. This song, with its drumline percussion and bunker-busting chorus, is a fight song with blood in its mouth.
“Do Not Disturb”, Drake (Spotify) – Bloated, mopey, and overlong, More Life falls in with VIEWS to form Drake’s Use Your Illusion period. Thankfully it ends with this palette cleanser – neither tenebrific nor pandering – with an opening beat to snap you out of it.
“HUMBLE.”, Kendrick Lamar (Spotify / YouTube) – To Pimp a Butterfly led with the contemplative “The Blacker the Berry”, then banger “King Kunta”. After “The Heart Pt. IV”, “HUMBLE.” similarly varies Kendrick’s cavalcade of opening singles with a certain tasteful coincidence of mob mentality and moral certitude that Kendrick cohabitates better than anyone.
“Heatstroke”, Calvin Harris, Young Thug, Ariana Grande, and Pharrell (Spotify) – They say taste can’t be taught, which makes one wonder whether this is a different Calvin Harris than we knew. Thugger’s goofy intro and Ariana’s heavenly “And you set me free”: It’s all new and lightened, ready for a summer as hot as the title implies. My mom posted it on Cymbal!
One Album for March, 2 0 1 7
There was a famous psychology subject named Louis Wain. As he descended into schizophrenia, he drew pictures of a cat, documenting and characterizing the effects his change in art. Each image is a distillation of what he was experiencing it in each moment of distortion.
The results are striking. Each portrait evokes an essential quality: Some are subdued and unfocused; others are manic and overstimulating. Some are hard to pick out as even feline, and others are so feline they’re almost divine. But they all change, faithful to Wain’s changes.
Wire’s first album cover, for 1977’s Pink Flag, is a quiet, almost dadaist depiction of a flagpole, with the described flag positioned atop it. It is a literal depiction, but a landscape simple enough to seem symbolic, rather than photorealistic.
Their second, 1978’s Chairs Missing, is similarly literal, but the literalization is surreal, divorced from reality: A tabletop hovers over the ground in a curtained room. The title borrows from an English colloquialism for the mentally disturbed.
1979’s 154, the third, makes neither literal depiction, nor any sort of obvious message. Its fully abstract cover, all bolded shapes and white space, simply stands on its own – Open, cold, unanswerable.
These three covers report three of rock music’s fastest experimental trajectories: A sequential perceptual realignment, undertaken at breakneck pace. With Pink Flag, Wire created one of punk’s most essential albums, while suggesting its dissolution. It is the sound of the genre exploding upon creation: Its opening track, donned in punk’s new, yet unmistakeable robes of fuzzy guitar and cockney howl, is odd in how it slows down to examine itself, telling a distending story of horror in front of the news camera.
Chairs Missing, released with virtually no interval from its predecessor, stepped through the wreckage to create post-punk: The same desperate intensity, but abstracted into synthesizers, spoken word, contorted lyrical ideas, a view of the conflagration so zoomed in to only find the texture within. Where Pink Flag‘s songs “Surgeon’s Girl”, “Mr. Suit”, or “Ex-Lion Tamer” couched Wire’s thunderhead of weirdness in identifiable punk, Chairs Missing opted to take an exit off the highway right into the storm. Only “Outdoor Miner”, the band’s only identifiable “hit”, deviates from its adventures. And even that song, taken in context of the album’s menagerie of aberration, seems an unusual entry to the singles chart.
Then, on 154, another end. The sounds the band used just 21 months earlier on Pink Flag are here just references: Occasional appearances from distorted guitars, driving beats, merely accent songs that are more like acts in a work of abstract theater. Singer Colin Newman, now joined by bassist Graham Lewis on vocals, puts on voices like set pieces; Forms are maintained in songs for only so long as it is necessary to be noticed and recognized; The soaring melodies rife in Wire’s work emerge, glinting, and then recede into shapeshifting instrumentation, sometimes tidal, other times hammering. As Wain said, “When one is drawing a cat, one’s attention is necessarily fixed more on the paper than the animal, and hence one gets the habit of forming ideas.”
After 154, Wire exploded. It wasn’t for decades before they’d reassemble and resume their work, but by then the idea of the band had transformed music and broken punk rock: Pure annihilation could no longer be seen as the natural conclusion of rock music. The Cure, Sonic Youth, R.E.M. all of new wave and punk music going forward would be made in Wire’s image.
Transformation is the state of art; Great musicians follow a predictable yet irreplicable process. The Beatles, Radiohead, Kanye West, Joni Mitchell, Talk Talk, Miles Davis, and yes, Wire, walk the same path. Each began as a master of the dominant mode of their musical style, and then evolved beyond it, taking some idea from their genre to its logical extreme. But none did so as quickly as Wire, whose explosive two short years truly exploded: Music changed, and the band dissolved, claiming they were out of ideas. Perhaps they’d just completed a thought, from the known to the new, from the identifiable to the foreign. Perhaps the trip was complete.
Best-Of Playlists
Though these playlists are all on Spotify, not every song (including many of my favorites) is available to stream.
To see what tracks are missing, go to "Preferences", scroll down to "Display Options," and then switch on "Show unavailable tracks in playlists."