The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are evolving into the jet plane age of American Smooth
I've never been that much into the triple Y.
Then I saw the video for Zero. Gladwrapped, Ramones groupie clad, shopping cart cruisin' (in 2009! Guts!) Karen O - the only true Madonna of the real screeching punky Riot Grrrly-girlish electroclash - delivering an album strong as this even after the genre itself has vanished and dried up being nothing but a new monotonous Ladytron album recycling the same cliches every once in a while.
The strength of this record lies, besides a kick-ass cover, in a less punky, more songwriting based approach and dancewise production. I already mentioned this year's strongest single, the epic feet mover Zero. Heads Will Roll is almost as tempting, with its sexy chorus, cricket menace synths, hungry sounding back beat of cannibal drums and a string arrangement loop reminiscent of Gary Numan's Me. Ha! Original? No. Hooky? Yes.
There's also a quirky appeal in that very Yeah Yeah Yeahs type of signature sinisterism of Shame and Fortune, which, let's face it, sounds nothing but a chocolate bar commercial. YYY are well aware that a lackluster song without a substance can be turned into a moment of musical suspense when you add enough danger into it. Alas, the ballads are a drag, lacking the aforementioned aspect. Loaded with strong emotion, but musically so very uninteresting. Runaway and Little Shadow are completely worthless, while Hysteric has a potential lost with the old fashioned production. Makes me think of present day U2 trying to play girl pop.
And oh yes, there's Dragon Queen (the tittle? Again, guts! Love you Karen). It's a fascinating attempt to duplicate the glam sexy Johnny Jewel type "Italo meets minimalism" dark disco, the result being something much more organic, retroish and original, sounding like something from a James Bond versus Saturday Night Fever double feature from the seventies.
All in all: It's Blitz! is not a perfect record, but a nostalgic trip back to the millennial times, where the new wave of indie wasn't something idiotic and a bunch of kids stopped dwelling in escathologic depression and traded their unwashed jeans for plastic and lipstick. Naturally all this sounds a bit dated today, but so does every record of artistic maturation. See, there's a difference between artistic growth and being artistically mature. The first is when you release your second album which is praised in unison, latter is when the critics think you're a relic but the actual audience has been growing with the artist and consider your release incredibly strong. It's like they've made their own Blood On The Tracks.
As a post scriptum I must add that I do like Ladytron, but for a band taking their tittle from a Roxy Music song they should pay more attention to artistic variety. It sounds like mockery. I bet I will soon hear it is mockery, irony, a tribute, what ever...
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz
(Interscope, 2009)
Record rating: 8.5/10
Bob Dylan: Blood On The Tracks
(Columbia 1974)
Record rating: 9.0/10
lauantai 23. toukokuuta 2009
tiistai 12. toukokuuta 2009
May contain artificial emotions and emetics
"Shit, still in Saigon"
Stumbled upon this while checking out what the Guild of Pretentious Hipsters from Brooklyn -media are into nowadays. It's not fair to judge a band by just one single track. Usually. But Quiet Little Voices just reveals We Were Promised Jetpacks to be so evidently crappy that I do not, I definitely NOT want to hear another song from the group ever again.
A good four minutes of mind melting pathos and angst. Remember Carlos the Jackal? Well he was an amateur compared to these professional assassins, experts in the field of suffocating the listener with their emotional overload which leaves absolutely no room for imagination or interpretation (let me try, umm, my interpretation is that these guys are sad, depressed... or maybe hungry?). No diversity, no ambiguity, just a crap load of overflowing expression of "pain". Fake as hell.
Why is it that we are living in a culture of exaggeration? Why is it that Nick Drake did the same thing with just a guitar, a capo, and a few sparse anxiousness lacking reciting whispers? Why is it that he made you feel empathy without moaning in pain? Why is it that he didn't throw that big cream puff of his ego straight at your face leaving your eyelids so sticky that you were unable to recognize who was it from the band being in such tremendous emotional misery that he had to comfort himself by humping you at backstage? Why is it that the actually sad guys kill themselves, not in Paris in a summer rain, but after purchasing a pack of cereals and listening an Iggy Pop record?
So, why does this band sound so familiar? Artificial feelings and overdramatization so that your audience won't miss a thing, since they've paid 30 bucks for that Vegas show ticket, right? Yeah! I restate, We Were Promised Jetpacks are not assassins, they are nothing but errand boys, delivering a message. From Celine Dion. In the manner of not shooting the messenger I might as well give them another chance one fine day.
We Were Promised Jetpacks: Quiet Little Voices
(Fatcat, 2009)
Track rating: 2.0/10
Possible forthcoming record rating: I'd like to have a t-shirt instead, it's more convenient and, chance is, enough ironic someday to be worn in company of hipsters with t-shirts slightly over the top being enough ironic. Man, It's a one delicate issue. Ain't that a drag?
Stumbled upon this while checking out what the Guild of Pretentious Hipsters from Brooklyn -media are into nowadays. It's not fair to judge a band by just one single track. Usually. But Quiet Little Voices just reveals We Were Promised Jetpacks to be so evidently crappy that I do not, I definitely NOT want to hear another song from the group ever again.
A good four minutes of mind melting pathos and angst. Remember Carlos the Jackal? Well he was an amateur compared to these professional assassins, experts in the field of suffocating the listener with their emotional overload which leaves absolutely no room for imagination or interpretation (let me try, umm, my interpretation is that these guys are sad, depressed... or maybe hungry?). No diversity, no ambiguity, just a crap load of overflowing expression of "pain". Fake as hell.
Why is it that we are living in a culture of exaggeration? Why is it that Nick Drake did the same thing with just a guitar, a capo, and a few sparse anxiousness lacking reciting whispers? Why is it that he made you feel empathy without moaning in pain? Why is it that he didn't throw that big cream puff of his ego straight at your face leaving your eyelids so sticky that you were unable to recognize who was it from the band being in such tremendous emotional misery that he had to comfort himself by humping you at backstage? Why is it that the actually sad guys kill themselves, not in Paris in a summer rain, but after purchasing a pack of cereals and listening an Iggy Pop record?
So, why does this band sound so familiar? Artificial feelings and overdramatization so that your audience won't miss a thing, since they've paid 30 bucks for that Vegas show ticket, right? Yeah! I restate, We Were Promised Jetpacks are not assassins, they are nothing but errand boys, delivering a message. From Celine Dion. In the manner of not shooting the messenger I might as well give them another chance one fine day.
We Were Promised Jetpacks: Quiet Little Voices
(Fatcat, 2009)
Track rating: 2.0/10
Possible forthcoming record rating: I'd like to have a t-shirt instead, it's more convenient and, chance is, enough ironic someday to be worn in company of hipsters with t-shirts slightly over the top being enough ironic. Man, It's a one delicate issue. Ain't that a drag?
maanantai 11. toukokuuta 2009
No sleep 'till celestial object
Sleepy Sun may have created the soundtrack for Summer 2009
When I grow up I'm going to put up a band. And we will do so much drugs! Our album covers will be symbolism filled and esoteric, and our song titles pseudo-artistic and cryptic just like the tittle of this blog article above. And our clothes will be ugly and dirty. Oh, did I tell you we are about to do so much drugs? We'll do thumbprints of acid and mescaline and shitidrine and it will be like visiting all the museums in Paris in one day. And our music sounds just about the same as everything done before us, but it doesn't matter since it's not about how the music sounds, it's about how the music tastes like.
Sleepy Sun is a genre band, one might even say generic. Droning guitars, religious themes, drugged up vocals and a good deal of echo. Besides the obvious influences from the sixties there are echoes of Black Mountain, The Oscillation, Spiritualized and even Kula Shaker. Most of the tracks work fine for me... With two exceptions, the hang-the-lyricist-mood agitatingly titled Snow Goddess, which propably tries to imitate Kid A era Radiohead, and then, the vocals in Duet With The Northern Sky simply sound disgusting.
The most satisfying track must be the downcast, subtle, still somehow entheogenic whirlwind of gentle fire, Golden Artifact, a tornado of flammable liquid moving in slow motion, more kissing than consuming. The strange atmosphere makes me think of the mellowness of Grateful Dead's Dark Star every time I hear it. I would like to taste more of this stuff.
One would make a mistake calling Embrace a record of great originality. It would be unfair to call it mediocre as well. Thumbs up because of Golden Artifact and the guilty pleasure soothing thought that after the summer I'll check into a rehab and throw away this piece of easygoing "music to take dope in the park by".
Sleepy Sun: Embrace
(ATP, 2009)
Record rating: 8.5/10
When I grow up I'm going to put up a band. And we will do so much drugs! Our album covers will be symbolism filled and esoteric, and our song titles pseudo-artistic and cryptic just like the tittle of this blog article above. And our clothes will be ugly and dirty. Oh, did I tell you we are about to do so much drugs? We'll do thumbprints of acid and mescaline and shitidrine and it will be like visiting all the museums in Paris in one day. And our music sounds just about the same as everything done before us, but it doesn't matter since it's not about how the music sounds, it's about how the music tastes like.
Sleepy Sun is a genre band, one might even say generic. Droning guitars, religious themes, drugged up vocals and a good deal of echo. Besides the obvious influences from the sixties there are echoes of Black Mountain, The Oscillation, Spiritualized and even Kula Shaker. Most of the tracks work fine for me... With two exceptions, the hang-the-lyricist-mood agitatingly titled Snow Goddess, which propably tries to imitate Kid A era Radiohead, and then, the vocals in Duet With The Northern Sky simply sound disgusting.
The most satisfying track must be the downcast, subtle, still somehow entheogenic whirlwind of gentle fire, Golden Artifact, a tornado of flammable liquid moving in slow motion, more kissing than consuming. The strange atmosphere makes me think of the mellowness of Grateful Dead's Dark Star every time I hear it. I would like to taste more of this stuff.
One would make a mistake calling Embrace a record of great originality. It would be unfair to call it mediocre as well. Thumbs up because of Golden Artifact and the guilty pleasure soothing thought that after the summer I'll check into a rehab and throw away this piece of easygoing "music to take dope in the park by".
Sleepy Sun: Embrace
(ATP, 2009)
Record rating: 8.5/10
lauantai 9. toukokuuta 2009
Classic Revaluated; The Monks - Black Monk Time
or the record better known as the one from the band of the mayor of Turtle River, Minnesota
I guess at least part of you know the story so far: 20 years after a devastating blitzkriegish war that almost burned down the whole world, five American soldiers stationed in BDR form a band. You can see them playing in German television under a moniker of "The Monks", wearing black robes, nooses around their necks, and their heads tenure-shaven. The vision is apocalyptic, the music is ugly. Ugly and demented. Reminiscent of an SA marching band playing the Horst-Wessel-Lied with electric guitars (and one electric banjo) and Pink Floydish organ that cries out like an overdriven Jericho trumpet from hell. And the fact is that the German teenagers are dancing to this. It's 1965 and it's anglo-saxon pop music, so of course they are crazy for it. The scene is very decadent and disturbing. The first impression is that The Monks are Pure Evil.
One must point out that the historical importance of this album is questionable. Released only in Germany without any remarkable success, there's no doubt that the likes of Velvet Underground and The Fugs were actually superstars at the time compared to these guys. Hardly anyone heard the record in 1966 so it won't really make a difference if they invented the use of guitar feedback (as it is claimed) or if they pioneered punk (or postpunk, or maybe industrial, EBM or death metal for God's sake!).
But the lack of a historical substance is nothing compared to the fact that the record is awesome. I already mentioned the EBM context; The Monks are actually something like Nitzer Ebb thrown into the sixties. Philistine as a beer hall full of nazis. The music is mechanical, set over the most roaring, almost tribal drumming and violent tambourine clashing, making it look so evident that rock music is nothing but a form of a primitive religious ritual.
If the music is a combination of strict militarian monotony and the all collapsing chaos of war, the lyrics are nothing more than psychotic rantling of bigotry, ranging from torsos of protest songs to nihilistic battle cries, sometimes near existentialism in their minimalism (Drunken Maria). Gary Burger's vocals are aggressive army marching chants of call and response ("People kill, People die for you!" of the horrifying Complication). At times it's all just wild shell shocked stream of consciousness - the opening track Monk Time being the best example of Burger's hysteric rhubarb ("My brother died in Vietnam! James Bond who is he? Pussy Galore is coming to town! Stop it, it's too loud for my ears!") the band beating the shit out of their instruments in the background.
The Monks' idea of a love song is degenerated as well. The bluesy rumbling I Hate You, with Burger crying out the "(unintelligible line) -- I Hate You with a passion baby! -- I hate you because you make me hate you!" opening, must have been a truly shocking moment in 1964 or 1965, when the audiences were almost completely nurtured with lyrics fitting to the boy meets girl canon of popular music. But I guess not that many actually got shocked. Some did, but the German teenagers, maybe a mite challenged with the English language, seemed to be happy raving while the band were playing numbers like Shut Up, where the protagonist, with an intonation of a Germanic warrior, yells his counterpart to shut up and stop her crying.
One should remember that the Monks were five GI Joes in a foreign country, frustrated by cultural isolation and pissed off with the army. Music like this couldn't have come out in New York, neither in Frisco. Somehow it makes sense, that in these stranded conditions they were forced to create the most barbarian, primitive, menacing album of the sixties.
The Monks: Black Monk Time
(Polydor, 1966)
Record rating: 9.5/10
I guess at least part of you know the story so far: 20 years after a devastating blitzkriegish war that almost burned down the whole world, five American soldiers stationed in BDR form a band. You can see them playing in German television under a moniker of "The Monks", wearing black robes, nooses around their necks, and their heads tenure-shaven. The vision is apocalyptic, the music is ugly. Ugly and demented. Reminiscent of an SA marching band playing the Horst-Wessel-Lied with electric guitars (and one electric banjo) and Pink Floydish organ that cries out like an overdriven Jericho trumpet from hell. And the fact is that the German teenagers are dancing to this. It's 1965 and it's anglo-saxon pop music, so of course they are crazy for it. The scene is very decadent and disturbing. The first impression is that The Monks are Pure Evil.
One must point out that the historical importance of this album is questionable. Released only in Germany without any remarkable success, there's no doubt that the likes of Velvet Underground and The Fugs were actually superstars at the time compared to these guys. Hardly anyone heard the record in 1966 so it won't really make a difference if they invented the use of guitar feedback (as it is claimed) or if they pioneered punk (or postpunk, or maybe industrial, EBM or death metal for God's sake!).
But the lack of a historical substance is nothing compared to the fact that the record is awesome. I already mentioned the EBM context; The Monks are actually something like Nitzer Ebb thrown into the sixties. Philistine as a beer hall full of nazis. The music is mechanical, set over the most roaring, almost tribal drumming and violent tambourine clashing, making it look so evident that rock music is nothing but a form of a primitive religious ritual.
If the music is a combination of strict militarian monotony and the all collapsing chaos of war, the lyrics are nothing more than psychotic rantling of bigotry, ranging from torsos of protest songs to nihilistic battle cries, sometimes near existentialism in their minimalism (Drunken Maria). Gary Burger's vocals are aggressive army marching chants of call and response ("People kill, People die for you!" of the horrifying Complication). At times it's all just wild shell shocked stream of consciousness - the opening track Monk Time being the best example of Burger's hysteric rhubarb ("My brother died in Vietnam! James Bond who is he? Pussy Galore is coming to town! Stop it, it's too loud for my ears!") the band beating the shit out of their instruments in the background.
The Monks' idea of a love song is degenerated as well. The bluesy rumbling I Hate You, with Burger crying out the "(unintelligible line) -- I Hate You with a passion baby! -- I hate you because you make me hate you!" opening, must have been a truly shocking moment in 1964 or 1965, when the audiences were almost completely nurtured with lyrics fitting to the boy meets girl canon of popular music. But I guess not that many actually got shocked. Some did, but the German teenagers, maybe a mite challenged with the English language, seemed to be happy raving while the band were playing numbers like Shut Up, where the protagonist, with an intonation of a Germanic warrior, yells his counterpart to shut up and stop her crying.
One should remember that the Monks were five GI Joes in a foreign country, frustrated by cultural isolation and pissed off with the army. Music like this couldn't have come out in New York, neither in Frisco. Somehow it makes sense, that in these stranded conditions they were forced to create the most barbarian, primitive, menacing album of the sixties.
The Monks: Black Monk Time
(Polydor, 1966)
Record rating: 9.5/10
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