Monday, September 13, 2010

Interpol is Arrested.

If this review is accurate...

Interpol's best work sounds enormous, making any room or car in which it's played instantly feel incapable of holding it. Interpol boasts "Barricades," an awe-inspiring song full of sweeping grandeur. It has palpable weight and size. Album closer "The Undoing" gives a sense of panorama, and both "Summer Well" and "Safe Without" succeed to a lesser extent, but Interpol doesn't threaten to blow the roof off.
The size has always worked off the razor-sharp edges of the music, with Daniel Kessler's guitar leading the way. Interpol restores some of the shine, but the music still feels softer somehow, the cuts not as precise.
 ...then Interpol is all but done. The eponymous reboot is oftentimes a band's last shot at a sustained career; if you hose it, or don't immediately build on it, then you're toast. So Andrew Earles may have been right, again:

Interpol updated ’90s indie rock by brilliantly revisiting first-wave post-punk and the Church. 2003 was a heady time for the New York City foursome, when the world stayed oblivious to the fact that this was a one-and-a-half-album band. That reality slapped Capitol across the face four years later when Interpol delivered major-label debut Our Love To Admire, a small-scale Waterworld for modern rock circa now.
But if some of the songs are as enjoyable, they may yet have a new lease. Don't make us wait, boys, sling that post-punk out fast!

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Paglia on Gaga on Madonna

Camille Paglia does not overhear herself.

I disagree with Anne Althouse, who sees nothing in Paglia's takedown of Lady GaGa but an old fart telling the damn kids to get off her lawn. In point of fact, I see a lot of blunt truth:

Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.
One doesn't need to spend a lot of time with adolescents to see this. Technology has empowered the self-absorption/self protection cycle of adolescence to the point of mindlessness. We will one day reach the point when people will wonder why dining tables and fireplaces even exist; when families will be nothing more than genetic flash mobs. The machine is in the ghost.

However, Paglia, like Marx, does not see the logic of her own argument. She does not see that every criticism directed at GaGa redounds to Madonna as well. The names themselves mirror each other; had they been switched, none could tell the difference. So when Paglia says:

For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over… 
I can only say, "did she miss the 1980's?" That sounds like every act my elementary-school psyche came to grips with on MTV: jaded, soulless hawkers of plastic decadence. I cannot understand why she believes that GaGa differs from Def Leppard differs from 2 Live Crew differs from Madonna. And when she says:


There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.
I have to say "Woman, please." As though Madonna was an indie act, bursting forth armed from the head of Avant-Garde, rather than a relentless self-promoter who cannily released her disco-pop from Sire Records, who by 1982 had, like everyone else in the music industry, ran not walked away from everything risky. Madonna's entire shtick has been an epater les bourgeois riff punctuated by exploding dollar signs from the beginning. It's actually kind of sad watching Paglia continue to play defense for a woman who has become as big an institution as Elvis ever was:

However, the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir.
That  laughing sound you hear is me trying to figure out whatever it was the young Madonna did that could ever be considered "fiery." Was it the Go-Gos Lite of "Lucky Star"? The syrupy tedium of "Papa Don't Preach"? The lipstick-smeared, second-rate Vivienne Westwood fashion sense? Whatever the hell was going on in "Express Yourself" (truly a sentiment America had never encountered before)? What?

I suppose if I grew up in the 1950's and came of age in the 1960's, I might have considered Mdme Ciccone's disco-cancan act vital and novel. As it stands, I find the Ga of Ga's way less offensive than Madonna, who will not rest until she's acknowledged as the Queen of All Culture. Both are, at root, making a mint being drag queens with girl parts. The newer one, at least, has no notion of being anything more.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

Rating My CD's: Love of the Loveless

19. Eels -- Shootenanny!

I first encountered Mark Oliver Everett, aka E, the man behind the Eels, whilst digging through my wife's iTunes collection, and enjoying "Novocaine for the Soul." I read somewhere that E was a bluesier, more introspective version of Beck, so in the first flush months of having my own iTunes, I downloaded Electro-Shock Blues, which has never been an easy listen. Given the subject matter it drew from (the suicide of E's sister and cancer diagnosis of his mother), it hardly should be, and it's leaden melancholy still makes for better listening than The Soft Bulletin, which I bought around the same time.

In all honesty, I'd really first encountered him in a Spin review of Shootenanny!, the content of which I thankfully do not recall. I liked the name (perhaps confusing them with proto-punk geniuses the Electric Eels), and liked the album title, and liked the none-more-black cover. So when I heard "Novocaine," I decided to delve more deeply, and thought an album called Electro-Shock Blues would be a good set of immersion songs. But Shootenanny! was always the goal purchase.

Rating My CD's: This Isn't Supposed to Be Here.

18. The Black Keys -- Brothers

It's September. I'm in the damn E's.

Back in January, when I conceived this,  I hoped that I would have knocked out the first part of this plan by the end of the year. I should be elbow deep in the Rolling Stones by now, not struggling to come up with things to say about Echo and the Bunnymen. I shouldn't be promising reviews to my three readers. I should be delivering them.

Remember my one-word review of Back in Black? Good times.

So the last thing I need at this point, with my momentum flagging, is to double back into the B's just because I happen to have bought another Black Keys disc. Hell, I shouldn't be buying another Black Keys disc until I've finished cataloguing all the stuff I already have, sitting patiently, alphabetically by genre, waiting for me to tell all of you whether I like it or Like It like it.

A Lament for "Forced Consumption"

Album-a-Week laments the fall of music magazines, as represented by the end of Paste:

Let's say you bought an entire album just because you liked one song. After listening to that one song on repeat for days, you ventured into the rest of the album. After listening to the entire album, you ran across the best song of your life. Well, that would never have happened if you hadn't bought the album, now would it? If you just bought the single, you would not have learned about any other tracks on the album. Forced consumption in the magazine format is the same. It leads you through a maze of possible favorites; whereas, online only leads you through what you already know.
He's not wrong.  But the mags need a better tag line than "Forced Consumption: Because We Know Better, Sheeple!" Maybe ConsumptionPlus?

INCOMING!

My plan is to have not one, but two, new reviews up by tonight.

Until then, savor the awesomeness of this:

Jazz is the new black, y'all.