wow we are terrible at this

I thought that growing older made you grow wiser, more mature and more focused. If anything, I find myself even more afflicted by "ooh, something shiny!" syndrome, particularly when it comes to writing; I've never had the discipline to just sit down and crank out WORDS about something, even when I've been passionate about it, so on a certain fundamental level the very idea of me attempting to maintain a blog presence is laughable. Still, this is something I want to do; at one period in my life I got a lot of praise for how I put words together, so I tend to think I'm pretty good at it even if I hate doing it for extended periods of time.

I don't know what John's excuse is. Possibly the lack of sudden international superstardom based on discussing Sleepytime Gorilla Museum and Gay Witch Abortion has left him jaded.

That's probably more navel-gazing than the three people who ever stumble across this thing want to read, so instead let me talk for a second about We Love:



Their debut album just came out on BPitch Control, the same label responsible for Ellen Allien, Apparat and Modeselektor. This duo is from southern Italy, yet manages to ape the cool Scandanavian vibe of The Knife well enough to make me assume on first listen that they are cut wholesale from the same Scando-Germanic cloth. This entire album panders directly to me; it starts out controlled and warm and blossoms across 11 songs into a ever-growing slab of controlled dance floor awesome. Tracks like "No Train, No Plane" (linked above) and "Hide Me" aren't what I would typically consider to the type of banging choon that would make me lose my mind, but the entire package works. Where The Knife would take a harsher edged, less subtle turn in incorporating quirkiness into their music, We Love opts for smooth cool, perhaps betraying their romantic Italian roots in the process.



The entire album may be too monochromatic for some but I defy anyone to listen to all eleven songs in isolation and not find at least one really great track.

#40 Krallice - Krallice

Well for one thing, I appreciate it when a band decides to do the whole s/t thing because that is one less thing I need to remember when talking about them, and I have a lot on my mind between eating and what's on TV and if I left the windows in the bedroom open because there is a storm brewing. This is complicated work on display here, and the members of the band have significant avant-crazo pedigrees from their previous/other bands, but what I think people tend to kind of gloss over is that there's some interesting melodic work going on under the screams and madness. Yes, the techie side is well represented, and there is much flailing of pick-hands and gnashing of teeth, but the bones lie mostly in composition, not look at me attention whoring. Much has been made of the question of whether this is really uppercase serious face Black Metal, but I think the answer is two-fold, only one half of which is "Shut the fuck up." The really great old school Black Metal out there lives and dies on composition and structure, albeit sometimes structure that is hard to glean on the first shot. SO the people that decry this band because they are too technical are like the jerks that get mad when East Bay Ray plays a non power chord and makes the Dead Kennedys all arty and not punk. Or from the school that feels like any Black Metal recording needs to be made by one lonely dude in a closet with a Fisher Price "My First 4-Track" that offs himself right after pressing the pause button and then his buddy makes 3 copies, buries two, and sends the third one to Terrorizer with dead dudes pinky toe in a baggie.

Where was I again? Oh yeah, Krallice. It's good despite the use of a saxophone in the rock idiom (ok Ihsahn gets a pass on this one too). Warning for the short attention span types bouncing up and down in their desk chairs: it's long! There is repetition! Too bad for you!

Krallice - Energy Chasms

OH DEAR A BIT DUSTY IN HERE

Yeah so obviously we here at the fantastic Blogstravaganza lack a certain what shall we call it, oh yes, DRIVE. We pull you in just to disappear again into the ether, and you stand there blinking and wondering WHAT HAVE I DONE.

Well, probably plenty. But we forgive you. We are like that.

All being a way to get back around to the idea that since you have been so nice as of late, we feel like you deserve a second chance. DON'T SQUANDER IT. This boat is leaving and either you are on it or you are TRAPPED back on the shore, shuffling home with your mud-caked hand-me-down shoes, hands in your pockets, wondering WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN.

That'll show you.

As a reward, I will be giving you a GUIDED TOUR OF LUXURY, in the guise of a boring countdown of my top 40 albums of 2005-2009, as wholly unrepresented on internet pandemic hype site ILX. So there. There will be youtubes! You might enjoy some small amount of what is contained within. There will be snacks!

(there will not actually be snacks)

A quick review of Danny Gokey's "My Best Days Are Ahead Of Me"

Dear Danny Gokey,

On your song, "My Best Days Are Ahead Of Me", you waste three precious minutes of my time to whine empty platitudes at me about how awesome it is that you are getting older. Every line seems to thrill at the prospect of using your "American Idol" experience to insinuate your way into households that only a year ago did not even know you were alive. The breathless way in which you eagerly chatter about absolutely nothing in the brightest, most chipper manner possible while assaulting poor unsuspecting listeners with a barrage of banal guitar riffs too pedestrian for Don McLean and just enough pedal steel guitar to further tarnish the legacy of country music reinforces two overriding things in a tortured, unfortunate listener:

1. As someone who was a former youth minister, you have a penchant for delivering entirely content-free messages that should make any halfway thoughtful or introspective person worry tremendously about the spiritual well-being of the children who were under your charge.
2. While, as you so fondly tell us over and over, your best days may be in front of you, our best days are most certainly behind us, because they are all of the days of our lives that occurred before we heard your awful, awful song.

Presumably this tepid offering is a harbinger of an album full of similarly vapid nonsense evoking lazy images of comfort and home with all of the originality of the Transformers movie, the passion of a wet paper bag and the musical introspection of a raucous rendition of "The Farmer in the Dell". Before inflicting this upon a public that, despite its flaws, never did anything to deserve this (aside, possibly, from slavery), I feel it is my duty as someone who has watched your transformation from the approachable blue-eyed soul singer at the original "AI" auditions into a self-important, abrasive charisma sponge to give you some long-overdue feedback:

Just stop.

Go home to your family, who loves you no matter what, and perform your wholly anonymous, embarrassing songs for them. They will give you the positive reinforcement you so desperately crave. The rest of us don't like you enough not to hurt your feelings.

Sincerely, someone about to gouge out his ears with blunt sticks.

MASSIVE ATTACK - Heligoland

Oh hey, it's 2010 and I have a music blog. I suppose I should write on it for those three stalwarts out there who follow it...




I picked up Heligoland last week with some amount of trepidation. I'd heard the song "Splitting the Atom" several months ago and thought it was nice enough, but even more on the anonymous side than what I expected; nothing about it struck me as particularly distinctive or attention-grabbing, no mean feat when one of your vocalists is the always-idiosyncratic Horace Andy. I filed it away in my mind under "pleasantly forgettable" and promptly forgot about it, moving back to having my mind blown by Owen Pallet (née Final Fantasy) and The Knife (I may have mentioned them once or twice around here...?).

I am very, very glad my completist impulses made me get this album. The opening groove, "Pray For Rain," does an excellent job of setting the tone for the album; this is a band taking the elements of past efforts that made them successful (the hip-hop sensibility of Blue Lines, the emotional heft of Protection, the paranoia-tinged sonic palette of Mezzanine and the cool stasis of 100th Window) and merging them together into a piece of work more than capable of standing with their previous efforts. From the first line sung by TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, I was hooked. The song's tone alternates between discontent and hope, a tightrope-walk of emotions that permeates the album and keeps it from becoming too much of a sad-sack affair. The album picks up steam as it progresses; "Girl I Love You" is an obvious high point that, on first listen, obscures the momentum kicked off by "Paradise Circus" (buoyed brilliantly by Hope Sandoval's fragile vocals) and carried through the end of the album. I am not going to try to convince anyone that this is an immediately-arresting album; it isn't. It is one that will sneak up on you and smack you over the head at around the 6th listen with how uniformly excellent and awesome it is.

Okay I do actually have a new favorite band...

... and that band is called The Knife.

As chronicled right here on this very blog, I never paid any attention to The Knife until people started going nuts over Fever Ray. In particular, the song "If I Had A Heart" wormed its way under my skin, its analog synth warbles smoothing out the razor edges of the vocal processing and undulating serenely over the pulsating bass drum. I know a lot of people find terror and sinister overtones in the song, largely I think because of the creepy shamanistic imagery incorporated into the video, but that is not what the song says to me. Instead, I get wistfulness, longing, and an overarching sense of remote warmth and immediate pain, almost like an overweight, awkward aunt who loves you very much and shows you by smothering your face in her bosom as she gives you painful, crushing hugs. The rest of the album, particularly on standout tracks "Dry and Dusty" and "Concrete Walls", follows a similar emotional template.

The almost Pavlovian "WANT" reaction Fever Ray gave me made me reassess the one Knife song I'd heard, which was "We Share Our Mother's Health". At the time, and again I believe my disconnect was caused by the accompanying video, I thought it was interesting-sounding but not particularly compelling. Listening to it again via Last FM after becoming a Fever Ray head transformed it into a delirious swirl of awesome; the pounding beats gave me the aggression I was missing from the Fever Ray material (even if I didn't know it at the time) and the overlapping vocals hit every music nerd "oh hey, the person who wrote this is totally into fugues and canons" button in my body. It was a quick decision to grab Silent Shout; my only regret is that I wasn't all over this album when it came out. Not only does it have "We Share Our Mother's Health" on it, but it also contains the claustrophobic title track, all-out boogie stomper "Like A Pen", the ethereal, dreamlike "The Captain", and possibly the greatest melody Karin has ever sung in the form of "Marble House", a sweeping, majestic march of sensuality that floors me every time I hear it. I have played this album upwards of 50 times this year and I have yet to get sick of it; it's one of my favorite albums of all time and I really thought it would encapsulate everything about The Knife that appeals to me.

This perception lasted up until I heard about "Tomorrow, in a year". This production, co-sponsored with Hotel Pro Forma, is billed as an electro-opera about Charles Darwin. As a semi-pro opera chorister obsessed with electronic music who seriously considered doing a double-major in computer science and music so that he could write software that would generate art songs in the form of club music, everything about this project is designed to make me go "SQUEEE!" and the Youtube clips I've tracked down have turned the soundtrack to this project into my most anticipated release of 2010. If I thought the budget for it could be raised, I'd suggest an Opera Boston/BMOP collaboration to bring it to the Boston area, but unfortunately I think the orchestration might be a dealbreaker. Still, I expect it to be incredible and, if it comes anywhere within 200 miles of me, I plan to go see it.

All of this is really lead-up to what I actually want to write about, though: Deep Cuts. I just got this album last week, mostly because a lot of the people I talk music with could not stop raving about the song "Heartbeats". Granted, this is the song that really made people start paying attention to The Knife in the first place but for some reason I wasn't paying attention when it exploded and, being familiar with The Knife's later work, it didn't strike me nearly as revelatory or amazing as its ardent supports proclaim it to be. The thing about it, though, is that it displays on its sleeve the romantic warmth that is the common thread through all of the Knife-related material. There is no obfuscation via costumes or vocal processing here; this song is a full-on nostalgia blast wrapped up in gorgeous synth patches and an easy rocking beat that can't help but make you smile. It is a full-on blast of joy to listen to; in today's market of regurgitated formula in practically every genre imaginable, it's startling to encounter something so naively fresh and charming. This sense of heart-on-sleeve abandonment permeates most of the songs on this album; no matter the mood, every song sounds like it not only BELIEVES whatever emotion it is selling, but also that no one else has ever felt that emotion as deeply or fully before. From the sinister assault of "Girls' Night Out" to the brightly manic "Listen Now" to the almost-literally breathless "You Take My Breath Away", the songs display artifice crafted so cunningly that you can't help but believe it. This makes the weird songs even weirder; aggro-freakout "The Cop" and the drug-addled sleaze of "Hangin' Out" seem like they have no place in the earnest company created by much of the rest of the album and the sparse chirpiness of "You Make Me Like Charity" initially comes across as a complete joke, but eventually even these worm their way under your skin and make you believe in them.

For those who can't be bothered with all of this and skipped to the bottom to see if I had a point, I do: The Knife cannot be fucked with. BOW DOWN.

ITS ALL FLUFFERNUTTERS AND RAINBOWS UP IN THIS BLOG

So ok, I am sure that by now I have probably painted myself into a corner with our legions of loyal blog viewers with all my gross and unkempt metal dudes rocking hard and noisy bleep blop chugga chugga nonsense. I know that I've been a simple minded lout, all geetars and rarrglebargle, but I have a sensitive side too. I like stuff that is pretty, cuddly, full of "oh you left me whoo whoo" heartstring yanking verses.

I can pop it up with the best of you sons of bitches.

So with that in mind, tonight is all about the pop. It is a music that people like that aren't angry jerks, and maybe don't have spikes all over them and stuff. So lets get into it shall we?

I can't take full credit for the first two of these. I live in a spooky self-fulfilling vacuum of total dorky indulgence, so unless I am drunkenly stumbling on stuff courtesy of cutting edge channel MTV HITS (give us money), I normally need some guidance here. I wish I could say that radio supplies me with this avenue, but sadly A) commercial radio in our second tier town is craaap B) I drive the sort of car that is avoided by upstanding citizens, the cultural elite, and the majority of radio transmissions.

Anyway, the first one is courtesy of my special lady friend (oh hey you come up with a term for this in this modern age), who recently traveled to Chicago for a gala concert event by this (oh shit here it comes stop smirking) artist. There were acrobats! Wirework extravaganzas! Led Zeppelin covers! A shit hot band (this claim has been verified, also the POWERHOUSE MOTHERFUCKER Jessy Greene - yeah that one with the Geraldine Fibbers and that other less important obscure military radio designation band - is involved)!

Anyway, Pink is a badass.



The second one comes from my primary black metal adoring, show going, tough as nails never say die brother (note: not actually my brother, but as close as I am going to get). Also he openly loves girly pop. When we aren't debating the merits of shakiras werewolf chicken dance or other ladies in terrifying danger of falling out of their video costumes, we watch videos. One of them is this. Now I have not done the appropriate wikipedia research (IT NEVER LIES) to determine if they are clones or twins or sisters or whatever, but as far as such stuff goes, at least they aren't faking it like T.A.T.U. or boring the fuck out of me like good old mush-mouthed Canadians Tegan and Sara.

They also don't like embedded videos, which has brought my adventures in said technology to a screeching halt, but they are called The Veronicas, apparently.

Ok, but this last one is all me. To be fair, it is a instant "holy shit i like this why do i like this but hey goddamn I LIKE THIS YAAAAAAAHHH!" moment so two days from now I might not really care about it at all, but tonight it is the coolest shit ever. I know nothing about this person, but she dances with a huge chair and doesn't sound like Lily Tomlin, so the cognitive dissonace is quite satisfying. Thanks fabulous basic cable station MTV HITS (no but seriously you guys should probably give us some money). Her name is Priscilla Renea, and that name is impossible to spell correctly twice in a row, so don't try.



Ok then. More horrifying screechy nonsense in days (maybe minutes, who knows)?