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- The Retrographer, Issue 52 (April, 2 0 1 9)
The Retrographer, Issue 52 (April, 2 0 1 9)
Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, Victoria Monet, Maxo, Kevin Abstract, Weyes Blood, FKA twigs, Big Thief, Mdou Moctar, Craig Finn, Fennesz, Dirty Projectors
The Retrographer, Issue 52
“listen before i go”, Billie Eilish (Spotify / YouTube) – No pop album sounds like WHEN WE FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, and even its most conventional moment – this beautiful melody, a moonlit soliloquy – contains evocative verisimilitide, tastefully conjuring rain sounds, distorting reverb, and wobbling drops that read like thunderclaps.
“MONOPOLY”, Ariana Grande and Victoria Monet (Spotify / YouTube) – Somewhat underrated in “7 Rings”’ long shadow, Grande and Monet’s ode to friendship, independence, and self-love should be one of the lighter moments on your summer ‘19 playlist.
“Headphones”, Maxo (Spotify / YouTube) – Speaking of summer ‘19: the little big man himself finds sweet sadness and nostalgia in a getaway, a split to get away from the “drama drama drama…” but even he can’t quite get away. “Now I see that nothing good lasts forever.”
“Georgia”, Kevin Abstract (Spotify / YouTube) – Kevin’s gratitude and appreciation for his boyfriend steams off this song, but it's never without a sense of guilt. Here’s hoping Andre 3000 has Kevin Abstract on his radar, the artist making music as spiritually in tune with mid-period Outkast as anyone working today.
Weyes Blood, “Movies” (Spotify / YouTube) – Natalie Mering’s music often sounds and feels like something from the 1970s, like a darker Carpenters. But here she sounds like the future, out in distant space, begging for the chance to live her own life, to have fate sweep her up like the art form she sings of here.
“Cellophane”, FKA twigs (Spotify / YouTube) – A song full of blinding pain, contrasted with a video displaying incredible strength. No contradiction there. No contradiction when that incredible strength is dwarfed by a supernatural visitation. Our best efforts are folly before fate.
“Cattails”, Big Thief (Spotify / YouTube) – ”Still the question seems / like Saturn’s rings” Adrianne Lenker sings, as the country folk of this song thermals up on some low swell of sound. Through the close of the song, it breaks, like silverware caught up in a tornado, a rush of deliverance.
“Tumastin”, Mdou Moctar (Spotify / YouTube) – Awash in reverb, the Nigerien Tuareg guitarist seems to just float, like little clouds over a huge plain. Moctar’s many guitars – pulsing rhythm, streaking slide, scribbled riffing – all meld together in this radiating oneness.
“Something to Hope For”, Craig Finn (Spotify / YouTube) – That organ at the top made me think I was hearing “Crucifixion Cruise”; somehow I felt the Hold Steady immediately. Finn is just Finn, thank god. “I know that you’ve been passed around, you’ve been hurt so much you’re bored,” he empathizes, in that familiar voice.
“In My Room”, Fennesz (Spotify / YouTube) – Andy Cush interviewed Christian Fennesz and learned how far the planet-sized sounds he crafted for this album were mutated from their original homes in humble, earthly instruments. Music like this changes your environs just by being in its presence.
One Album for April, 2 0 1 9
The idea – or one of them – was to make an album with Black Flag’s Damaged as the book. But the game was to not listen to the source material – just get to writing. Like building a house with the blueprints, but no interest in the original materials. Listening to it has the feeling of walking through a place that feels familiar, even if you can’t quite say why.
Song names and lyrics stayed; beyond that, not much. Damaged is one of punk’s holy texts, the exemplar of an uncompromising intensity that splits fissures in the most mundane, prosaic corners of everyday life. Drinking too much beer; watching TV; getting chased around by the cops; feeling depressed. Its aesthetic palette is driving, flat, volatile. It had predecessors, because the phenomenon it fulminated against was global: On their eponymous first album, The Clash lamented the rote meaninglessness of life in the 70s with “I’m So Bored With the USA”, “Career Opportunities”, “London’s Burning” (“London’s burning with boredom now!”). But Damaged is distinctly American, rageful in the endless supermarket of Reaganite America; it hewed stultification to the size of a needle and stick-and-poked itself into the minds of restless domestic dissidents wherever their tapes could be found.
One of these was Dave Longstreth, who forgot about the album until a decade and a half after he’d first heard it at age nine. He had then since started making his own music, as Dirty Projectors, in college. By the middle of the 2000s, he’d expanded it to become a group. By the time his bandmates joined, Dirty Projectors was four albums deep into thorny, searching, uncompromising solo recordings. Bending those to sound like ensemble music was a tall order that the group exceeded.
Rise Above opens is a bit hard to digest at the outset. Its opener, "What I See", moves through five dramatic movements: A first, hulking, joyous groove, then a quieter, a capella section, which explodes, shattering into slammed ride cymbals and feedback, then giving way to a creeping, sprechstimme interlude, and then back to the opening feel again. In a short time, it’s ambitious, unstable, and a little unfriendly, not unlike Damaged. Yet its plume of multicolored feathers reflect a cultural outlook far removed from the stultification Damaged raged against.
Dirty Projectors were only one of several bands who helped to elevate music like this – that wanted to cross, say, punk with 20th-century classical music, or highlife with bedroom indie rock, or all of the above – to the center of its left-of-center place in music. This period valorized artists who could approach popular taste in an odd way: Dirty Projectors walked alongside Animal Collective, who were celebrated for their Reichian loops, and who both were lauded for achieving something like the viscerality of pop music without what was seen as its cheapness.
Why did this matter? Despite listeners’ increased reliance on the internet, “mainstream” music still held powerful cultural currency. Music made by independent labels, even given their distribution limits, had become an increasingly-significant cultural counterweight to the pop that dominated radio and TV. Despite the grievous wounds piracy and digitization left on the music business, Spotify wasn’t founded until the next year, 2008, and listening hadn’t yet fractured into an infinity of Discover Weekly playlists. It wasn’t insane to sing, as Arcade Fire’s Win Butler did three years later, “MTV, what have you done to me?”, feeling that something intrinsic was still being corrupted by the big business of making big music. Many listeners felt that pop was hegemonic enough to define everything in opposition to.
But something seems to have happened in the decade since Rise Above came out. Avoidant music has less power. Broadly, the industry continued its collapse until around 2015, and has only begun to stage its recovery. The "mainstream" bogeyman hollowed out as its prizes dwindled. As the barriers to creating and releasing work to an effectively unlimited swath of listeners dropped to the cost of a DAW like Logic or Ableton and an internet connection to Bandcamp or SoundCloud, the inherent differentiation of “lo-fi” and “independent” music attenuated. Further, the diversification of discovery tools – take YouTube’s immensely influential “related videos” recommendations, for one – made it hard to tell what threat tyrannical “mainstream” music really posed any more. So then what did it mean to be alternative, or independent?
This change means that some the glint Rise Above shone in 2007 requires a somewhat distant recollection today. One part of its brilliance is indeed the Dirty Projectors’ inventive approaches to the record’s source material; Longstreth is a singular guitarist, whose protean playing elicited comparisons to avant garde players and jùjú guitarists alike. The band’s adoption – first heard here on “Gimme Gimme Gimme” – of the the ars antiqua vocal technique of hocketing, wherein backup singers Amber Coffman and Susanna Waiche (later followed by Angel Deradoorian) would form harmonic horizontalizations by alternating chordal notes in dizzying rhythm, became one of the band’s many, many stunning idiosyncrasies. Idiosyncrasies were important to the differentiation of alternative music.
But another part of the brilliance of Rise Above was the way it made its listeners feel set apart from broader movements in music, even as the band waxed in popularity and found collaborations with Kanye West, Diplo, and many of the moment’s best-known artists. That impact diffused as the distinctions of alternative music blurred and ultimately disappeared. Longstreth never completely abandoned his unique ear, but the oppositional throughline he found with Black Flag smudged as the next decade wore on, eventually yielding two albums, Dirty Projectors and Lamp Lit Prose, that didn’t seem to know what they were endeavoring to rise above at all.
To that point: In its time, Rise Above did rise above. It was challenging and confrontational while somehow succeeding in engaging its listeners. It was indirect and satisfying, which was its power. Or, as he sang in “Spray Paint (The Walls)”,
“It feels good to say what I want
To knock things down
It feels good to see the disgust in their eyes”
MONTHLY
#52 April, 2019 | Dirty Projectors, “Rise Above”
#29 May, 2017 | Steely Dan, “Aja”
#27 March, 2017 | Wire, “154”
#16 April, 2016 | RIP PRINCE
#15 March, 2016 | Prince, “Prince”
ANNUAL