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- The Retrographer, Issue Nine (September, 2015)
The Retrographer, Issue Nine (September, 2015)
September, 2015
The Retrographer, Issue Nine
Bulletins
Gabe and I spoke to CMJ about Cymbal’s upcoming showcase. It features PORCHES, Le1f, Empress Of, Deradoorian (see below), and more, and it’s free! It’ll probably be a hot ticket, so if you want to enter to win guaranteed entry, enter here.
Need to kill a few hours? Watch PBS’ “Blank on Blank” series on YouTube. These animated shorts have introduced me to the unheard tape of so many interviews with amazing artists. Of particular note: Tupac; Coltrane; Kurt Cobain.
I saw A$AP Rocky, Tyler, the Creator, Vince Staples, and Danny Brown at the Theater at Madison Square Garden and wrote about it for NPR. If you forgot the joy of A$AP, here you go.
Cymbal is beginning to feature college radio stations, which I think is very cool. Historically, college radio has been ground zero for emerging and alternative music, but has struggled to find a consistent listenership. We’re hoping to make those voices an important part of the community, and get them the attention they deserve.
Ten Songs for September, 2015
Justin Bieber, “What Do You Mean” (Spotify / YouTube) - Look, man. I’m not going to sit here and tell you to like Justin Bieber. Like Kanye, it seemed like after a while hating the guy turned into a safe pose for extremely basic 14-year-old Redditors. I don’t care. This song intertwines odd reclaimed sounds (pan flutes, clock ticks) with smooth and beautiful vocals.Petite Noir, "Chess" (Spotify / YouTube) - Throughout La Vie Est Belle / Life is Beautiful, Yannick Ilunga chases the ghosts of Heroes-era David Bowie and The Queen Is Dead-era Morrissey. It's only on the closing track that he brings himself into the picture, growing this beautiful slow burner over six minutes. "This is the real shit right here, man," he marvels aside.
Travi$ Scott, “Flying High” (Spotify / YouTube) - Another controversial figure, maligned by self-righteous crusaders for some convenient old-school morality that likely never existed, assuming it was ever valid in the first place. Scott is an amalgam of easily identifiable influences (see: MBDTF-era Kanye) and doesn’t add up to more than their sum, I’ll give you that, but here he blends a suite of bygone jiggy rap with Chaz Bundick’s dreamy chillwave in fluid movements.
Deradoorian, “Violet Minded” (Spotify / YouTube) - Six years ago, when the Land of Indie first discovered hocketing from Angel Deradoorian’s former group, they used it to prove the power of her voice, and fight some common criticisms. Indie rock didn’t have to feel accidental, they argued. They overlooked, however, that she’s more than a human synthesizer, but a real live songwriter, working in the vein of UMO and Queen.
Drake & Future, “Jumpman” (Spotify / YouTube) - Two artists, unconcerned by reality in unique ways. Drake, who refuses to be qualified by his upbringing, and Future, who refuses to be encumbered by consonants. What a time to be alive, indeed. Is there a bird caw in this beat?
Kurt Vile, “Wild Imagination” (Spotify / YouTube) - This album, in all of its dreamy droning, is more consumed by perception than reality. Song to song, KV's dissociative perspective turns our focus onto the strangeness of life. He's looking at you; No, at a picture of you; No, at a picture of you on a screen. No, Monday, No Tuesday...
Young Thug, “Power” (Spotify / YouTube) - Like Drake, Young Thug observes his ascendance smoulderingly, his rage against the scores of haters who could never touch him burning cooly on a cruising London On Da Track beat. Rage at their rejection; Rage at their lack of belief; Rage at how they came around after you’d already succeeded. He enjoys his winnings spitefully, spoiling his girl, eating chicken with his ice cream.
Alex G, “Kicker” (Spotify / YouTube) - Like so many great indie rock songs (“Blue Buzz” by EZTV; "Zurich is Stained" by Pavement; "Rose Parade" by Elliott Smith), “Kicker” states its own oddness without explaining too much. A weirdly voiced riff, part-“Adam’s Song”, frames muttered lyrics and gives way to an outro that grooves like a better-groomed song.
Diet Cig, “Harvard” (Spotify / YouTube) - For what it's worth, many of those Harvard kids have a healthy anticipatory shame about your assumed judgment. Still, it bites to feel like your ex's next was picked to fix your shortcomings. "I bet she's not as loud", with as much defiance as shame.
Deafheaven, “Brought to the Water” (Spotify / YouTube) - More controversy, it seems. This metal band invited torrents of criticism from its community for the same reason it was embraced by the wider world: By melding singer George Clarke, well, deafening screeching eminent doom with Kerry McCoy’s, well, heavenly post-rock guitar. These are dark epics, but expansive.
One Album for September, 2015
Post-rock seems, at first, like a confusing term: What makes it not rock? It clearly is related to rock – otherwise it wouldn’t preserve its lineage in it’s name – and yet it’s name connotes it’s something else altogether.
One answer is that every genre originates someplace: With jazz it was showtunes; with rap it was dance parties; with rock, it was the blues. As a genre grows, the way it uses it’s originating material becomes more important than the originating material itself, and ultimately comes to define it as something distinct. It becomes its own genre when it is validated by it’s own rules, not by the standards of the place it came from.
The first actors in a genre are attempting to adhere to it’s originating material, but differ in a conspicuous way that makes their genre distinct. The second actors in a genre work with the ideas that made the first actors differ, making those ideas the focal point of their work; Challenging formalism becomes modus operandi. The third actors in a genre experience the form in a way that is potentially fully-divorced from its origin material.
Laughing Stock, Talk Talk’s final album, is fascinating in part because it caps the evolution of a group thathad completely subsumed the second and third stages in a genre’s development in a way that has happened extremely rarely in musical history. The Beatles, Miles Davis, and Radiohead are on the short list; Talk Talk is mentioned less often.
If you’re over the age of 30, you likely know Talk Talk from their string of chart-topping New Wave hits in the 80s, led by “It’s My Life”; If you’re under 30, you probably know No Doubt’s cover, and not much else.
This is because over the course of Talk Talk’s five-album oeuvre, the group shrank from the mass commercialism that had them signed with EMI and compared, at one time, to bands like Duran Duran. By the time 1991’s Laughing Stock was quietly released on the jazz label Verve, the band had entirely abandoned its pop aspirations, and that album made a fraction of it’s recording cost. Talk Talk shrank in members, too; the group’s principal songwriter, Mark Hollis, was the only remaining member of the group by the time the album was created, save contributions from longtime producer Tim Friese-Greene and drummer Lee Harris.
Some erstwhile chart-toppers fail to achieve continued commercial viability by refusing to evolve; Talk Talk did so by evolving beyond recognition. Laughing Stock is composed of six fluid, unconventionally structured songs. There are no choruses or verses; The lyricism is highly abstract and opaque, and delivered in Hollis’ indecipherable, albeit beautiful, murmurs; All the instrumentation is the product of hours of live playing by session musicians improvising over set chord changes, then meticulously cut and then edited back together. There were reportedly hundreds of hours of playing put to tape that was never used. Crediting musicians on Laughing Stock is a lost cause.
The album, above all, sounds like nothing before. It codes as rock only in its instrumentation: bass, guitar, drums, strings, horns, reeds, keys. It feels somewhat more akin to composed jazz, or modern classical, but that’s not right either. Part of that is because the music, as performed, was never heard before by the musicians on the album. Hollis demanded hours of improvisation because he thought that an idea, expressed musically, was at it’s truest when performed for the first time. Every repeat performance, he believed, was an attempt to recapture that expression, rather than an actual repeat of the expression itself.
If you buy into that, then Laughing Stock shimmers with revelation. “Runeii”’s extended guitar intro comes out of time, awash in natural reverb, bleeding overtones and string sounds, and “Myhrrman”’s opening chord feels like a new idea striking you, no matter how many times you hear it.
That revelation is matched in the lyrics, too. Look at the tracklist: Half of the songs seem to reference the Bible, especially the End Times (“Ascension Day”; “After The Flood”; “New Grass”), and the other half refer to the Second Coming within talismanic nonsense phrases (“Myrrhman”; “Taphead”; “Runeii”). Even the cover, a New Age-y work that references its similarly-abstract, if marginally-less singular predecessor The Spirit of Eden with a globular tree filled of birds forming the shape of the continents, seems to suggest the flighty impermanence of our time on Earth. It is, more than any other music ever made, surreally naturalistic.
Talk Talk quietly dispersed following this album. Hollis produced one solo album seven years later, an album as quiet and sacrosanct as a whispered proverb, but beyond that, has disappeared from music. It was as if he had not just left the genre, but also the world, for the wind.
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."