Get Damned Or Get Out

I've stepped away from rock music for a little while. I was just getting tired of whatever I was hearing. Every time I'd listen to a 4-piece guitar/bass/drums/vocals rock band I'd think "Heard it already!" and let my attention wander. So I dipped into some jazz for a little while (which isn't generally my thing, but it was pretty palette-cleansing), then electronica (heavily trip-hop), and one of my other loves, heavy instrumental dub reggae.

It was the dub that was critical in leading me back to rock recently. My nominal introduction to quality dub music was Mikey Dread's remixes and productions for the Clash, whose dub works I went back and listened to. Specifically, I wore the grooves out on the second side of the original Black Market Clash EP, which has "Bankrobber/Robber Dub" (not the version that's on the CD version!) into "Armagideon Time" into "Justice Tonight/Kick It Over". There's a fantastic bootleg out there that collects all of the Clash's dub material called "This Is Dub Clash". I won't post it here, but if you're inclined, maybe google it to see what comes up, or you could compile it yourself.

Anyway, dipping back to the Clash, one of my first musical loves, lit the pilot light on my rock-based listening again. Rock music still sounded like tired garbage, except for the purest, most incisive rock music out there, so over the past few days, I've slowly been reloading my wiped iPod with pure rock or punk bands, the bands that have the energy and madness and hooks and drive that seduced me in the first place. While the Ramones are practically a prerequisite for any "Mike's Favorite Music" assessment, it's been the U.K. punk that's really turned me over. My first punk interests were almost exclusively British and late-'70s. What I've found is how my perspective has changed. It would take a miracle for my idealized opinion of the Clash to change, but where I once saw the Pistols as trailblazing heroes, I look at them now as a bunch of peacocking brats whose way of giving authority the finger is recording about two amazing albums of noisy classic rock. I still love them, but the pose becomes more evident to me with each passing year. The Buzzcocks are the band I would most likely be in if I were in that era - classicist, catchy, relationship-obsessed songs, and maybe a little vulgar but not really very offensive. The older I get though, the band that really surprises me over and over is the The Damned.

The Buzzcocks (or even the Undertones, if you want to get all Irish about it) are the band I would most likely be in, but the Damned are swiftly becoming the band I would most like to be in. Unconcerned with politics, always there to undermine the gravity of the situation with a well-placed pie in the face, they weren't afraid to experiment sonically with weird psychy touches and funny effects (although the second album illustrates this well, it sadly wasn't very good), and under all the "we're just here for the beer"/class-clown image, they were a lethally potent rock band.

Listen to "New Rose". Producer Nick Lowe made those drums sound like I want every drum I ever record to sound, the band is flailing with manic intensity and stumbling over itself, there's a little "rock history" nod with the whispered Shangri-Las intro, the hook is enormous, and it's all over in under 3 minutes. Oh, and the b-side of this, their first single, is a Beatles cover. Huh? Even though it's admittedly the best song on the first album, the whole album is great in almost exactly the same ways throughout.

Not only that, but once they moved away from the ramalama Stooge-punk that left with founding guitarist Brian James, their more experimental work is just as good in completely different ways. Machine Gun Etiquette is funny and rocking and silly and colorful, The Black Album pushes punk into gothy psychedelic power-pop, and Strawberries is a backstep into poppy punk, but it may even be the best yet. They got no respect, were constantly shit on by the punk rock elite and those that believed what they were told by said elite (even me - reprints of the Pistols' magazine articles and interviews from the era were taken as gospel by my friends and I in that pre-"everything's on the internet" era), but in hindsight, until their dramatic fizzle in the mid-'80s the Damned were cranking out great-to-better-than-average rock albums, and when they came back in the mid-'90s, they were back to being great. Now that's impressive. "Least likely to"... yeah, right.

Because We All Want More Lists...

Alright, so here's the first go-round. I've been racking my brain for 5 months, and this is the best list I can come up with, although I'm sure I'll be obsessing over additions and corrections for most of the NEXT decade. Here's the "contenders" list for the "Best Albums Of The Decade". The list is made up of albums that were important to ME in some way, or reflected a particular aspect of the times to me in a specific way, or whatever. Not the "best collections of notes" or "most relevant to the most people", but all personal, and somewhere in between. If I do it right, what it SHOULD do is give a pretty clear idea of what new music I've been listening to over the past 10 years. However, it might be prudent to note the fact that my favorite musics include styles that peaked years ago, so this doesn't reflect the heavy listening to classic punk or garage rock or shoegazer or dub or any of those other styles that nobody is really making anymore.

The plan? To take this randomized list and divide it into two parts - the semifinals, baby. One side of the line will get a rose and move on, the others are going to have to go home, maybe a checkup at the free clinic, and then their own lists, VH1-style. Just kidding, I think. Although we'll see. Once we've whittled it in half, we're hoping to have a conference with Mister Brent over at Dogdoguwar, where we discuss the merits of our respective choices, now that all the turn-of-the-decade hullaballoo has died down, we can do it right. Without further ado... your contestants!

The Raveonettes - Chain Gang Of Love
The Strokes - Is This It?
The Big Pink - A Brief History Of Love
Dinosaur Jr - Beyond
A Place To Bury Strangers - s/t
Spiritualized - Songs In A&E
Joe Strummer - Global A Go-Go
Basement Jaxx - Rooty
Daft Punk - Discovery
M.I.A. - Kala
Malory - Not Here, Not Now
Luna - Romantica
The Postal Service - Give Up
Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere
Johnny Cash - American IV
Guided By Voices - Isolation Drills
Fountains Of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers
Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots
Asobi Seksu - Citrus
Madlib - Shades Of Blue
Danger Mouse - The Grey Album
Gorillaz - Demon Days
Queens Of The Stone Age - Songs For The Deaf
The Dirtbombs - Dangerous Magical Noise
The White Stripes - White Blood Cells
Modest Mouse - The Moon And Antarctica

Floating Away On Detritus Of Pop Music

Part of the charm of getting older is that you get to get bitter about what you view as the idiocy of youth... and specifically youth culture. As I spent my teen years as one of those weirdo cranky outsiders, it's actually quite nice to get less bitter as I get older, but it coincides with a downturn in the quality of popular music. If I were 27 in the early '90s, I could be an alt-rock type, in the late-90s, I could have been a Stereolab-loving aesthete, while still taking ironic pleasure in the harmless but vapid pop charts. Ten years out, there is very little mainstream pop music that's worth listening to.. and that's coming from a guy who's willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. To quote a writer named Huw Jones, from Slant Magazine:

"These days our stars are force-fed to us by Simon Cowell and reality television, our chart-topping singles merely cover versions of songs that were cutting edge decades ago, and the entire concept of "pop music" is relegated to fodder for our celebrity voyeurism: penned by the talented, performed by the beautiful."

Which is why I am thrilled to tell you that I love the new Gorillaz record.

Will it top my "best of 2010" list? Probably not. But I love the idea of a resigned pop star piecing together some entertainment through a motley group of outcasts and also-rans, making a record that sounds contemporary simply because it stands in such sharp relief to the prevailing trends of the day. Title allusions aside, this album reminds me of nothing so much as Wilson the beach ball from Tom Hanks' Cast Away - this is an album made to make oneself happy, to keep yourself active and happy, lest you become swallowed by the blackness of it all. It's got a touch of melancholy that things aren't as good as they could be, but it's still making an effort... and by continuing to hold on, it's the most hopeful record I've heard in years. Pretty strange stuff coming from a group of cartoons led by a former popstar.

I was cautious. Albums this loaded with name guest-stars are usually a red flag to me (see Massive Attack's "Heligoland"), but when Snoop Dogg's voice comes wafting out of the speakers, it triggers a strange familiarity. Here's an artist who hasn't been crucial in almost 20 years, but his voice is so comfortable, it gives you a way into the moaning keyboards and lurching beats. Every review I've read of the album makes note of the "weirdo grandfather" vibe that Lou Reed's appearance gives off, and the doomsday declamations of the Fall's Mark E. Smith... but these are just signifiers for nerd-types like myself. In a project this conceptual, the creators are banking on your familiarity with these voices - they want you to listen to this thing pre-loaded, so that you can appreciate the cast of characters. It really does help if you know past work and history by the likes of Reed, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, and De La Soul. It's like casting them all in a play, but typecasting every one of them. When your brain flips through a rolodex of larger-than-life characters, it's concpetual shorthand. They're not just bringing a performance to the table, they're bringing everything they've done. But by playing to type, pop listeners with no interest in the Velvet Underground will still get the "vibe" of the dry declamations by Ol' Lou.

Of course, none of this would work if the music didn't hold up. And as many have noted, the melange of modern styles that Gorillaz have combined since their first record in 2001 has become less state-of-the-art and more State Of The Union. Combining hip-hop and pop and electronic and indie rock in a highly-concpetual [i.e. cartoon] fashion is no longer as confusing and surprising as it once was, so instead of dwelling on the squelching hooks, we can focus on the emotion behind it. Musical leader Damon Albarn (you like how I didn't mention him until this far in?) long ago made his reputation as a pop writer, and on the last two or three Blur albums (depending on how you look at them) gave us his gift for setting moods through textures. And if the haunted machines of the first two Gorillaz albums didn't clue you in, his under-heard work with The Good, The Bad, And The Queen showed us that he could craft deep nests for throbbing bass grooves (courtesy of The Clash's Paul Simonon, who appears here, along with his Clash bandmate, Mick Jones). This album is nowhere near as fresh as the first one, but its depth isn't even discovered on the third or fourth listen. The pop is poppier, the murk is murkier, and by cobbling together something that stands as its own pop island, floating further and further away from Simon Cowell's mainland, waving goodbye, and ready to cobble together something from whatever it has left, one has to wonder why more people aren't building their own islands out of the scraps that nobody else seems to want anymore. Again... not bad for a bunch of cartoons.

Like A Virgin (?)

"When I was a weird, lonely teenager, The Modern Lovers painted a perfect picture of an imperfect young adult world. I could see exactly what he was talking about and it resonated with my teenage sensibility. Now that I've moved to Boston, and soaked up the vibe of the city (so important to Richman's senisbility), it cast those songs in a re-lit (not new) light... bringing the two together strenghtened the magic (like the rocks in 'Temple Of Doom') that the album makes in my head, refreshing it, but it's so good because it still sounds exactly the same, in exactly the same way. Now that I'm in Boston, I hear it the same way I used to, but just like before I had all this baggage. So it has the weird effect of making me walk around in the exact same mood I would get in when I was fifteen. Weird."

Trip hop has gotten a bad rap. I was there when it became the blandest fodder for the tasteful elite, becoming background music for dinner parties and art openings. Most of its finest practitioners have not only denounced the name (which fits the style perfectly, but more on that later), but have moved on to other styles, attempting to distance themselves from the loping haze of the style they themselves pioneered. Massive Attack's Heligoland was an overguested step in the right direction after the stuttering glitch of 100th Window, Tricky has gone off the rails into critical respectablilty and tasteful irrelevance, Portishead disappeared for a decade before returning with a great album that they have yet to follow up, and Nightmares On Wax have been hit-or-miss, with solid moments next to missteps like 2002's vocals-heavy Mind Elevation. While I agree that market saturation might have instigated a holdoff, what happened to turn this into a musical whipping boy?

Trip hop, the term, has been much derided, but I have to agree with Simon Reynolds' assertion that not only is it a handy shorthand, but it's a highly descriptive term. The hallucinatory spatial disorientation caused by the presentation of mutiple samples with multiple ambiences is grounded by a steady, loping breakbeat, taken from the funky grooves of hip hop's history, then rubberized, tenderized, and left to gather dust. It's psychedelic and resolutely urban - sure it sounds good in the 'burbs, but this is human music for concrete jungles. The edgy darkness of some of the best records make you wonder what's around the corner in the alley, and the soulful samples and oft-present "haunted diva" provide some human reassurance. It's groovy, it's not in a hurry, and it's been known to tickle one's brain and alter their mood. When I find myself listening to Mezzanine on repeat in the grey, rainy late autumn, I know I've got to pull myself out a funk.

What happened? There's always the theory that if it was cool ten years ago, it's lame now, sure. We're in the midst of a DayGlo Revolution, and things have been pretty grim. The economy's in the toilet, the housing market dropped out, unemployment is spiking, nothing is getting done cause everyone's stubborn - this is not the time for a grim 'n' gritty soundtrack. People need to dance their troubles away to popclash or whatever today's irono-disco-new-wave hybrid is. If Maxinquaye were a "major label new release" album today, it would inspire mass suicides, cause that is DARK, man. But for whatever reason it's out of vogue right now, mark my words that some variation of it will be back in a BIG way in a few years.

What Time Is Love?

Forget part two... I don't even remember what I was going to write about anyway.

For those of you that have been following us here at the Central Target Research and Sound Laboratory, you'll realize that while this is a music blog, it's not really about music. Music is merely the frame with which to hang a given topic on, providing an ostensible topic for the moment, but usually elaborating on whatever I've been thinking about in the real world. Incidentally, I realize fully that it's poor writing to explicitly lay your literary devices on the table within the same work you're using them. However, while to you this blog might be entertainment, but to me it's a project of "personal journalism", so let's not quibble.

The thing is, I've been very taken with certain types of electronic dance music lately, specifically the Detroit school of early techno music and the minimalist work of Richie Hawtin's Plastikman project that I have, as of late, found difficulty finding a respective perspective to latch on to.

In high school, I finally began to investigate electronic music, after years as a punk. As a media-saturated child of my age, techno and dance music seemed like a wild, colorful adult world, and based on the imagery of 1980s dance club culture, it was very, very adult. Conversely, as a boy, I spent a few years living in Vienna, Austria (with my family - I wasn't just a globe-trotting preteen). It was 1989-1992, and acid techno and house were exploding all over Europe. It was absolutely omnipresent, and there was still enough E-influenced, Day-Glo good-naturedness to it that a part of me has always believed that it really was the dawning of a new era in culture. The early 90s were a culturally cool time anyway, with the coked-out decade of greed winding down and an explosion of multiculturalism. Although I didn't understand the social framework at the time, it felt like everyone was walking around with their eyes open and embracing vibrancy for a while. I loved the squelching soundtrack of acid house music, and ever since have always had a soft spot for it. By the time I hit high school 5 years later, my tastes were a lot more elitist, preferring the jittery, brainy end of electronica (Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Warp Records) to the ass-shaking end of things.

As I've mellowed my position with age, I've noticed that there's a ton of intellect in the better dance music, and the late-80s/early-90s Detroit scene is a perfect example of this Zen minimalism. The "Belleville Three" have all made wonderful records, both dancefloor-ready, and cerebral enough to stand up to armchair listening. However, it's Plastikman (one of the several aliases of producer Richie Hawtin) that's been eating up a lot of my listening time. Minimal to the point of being subliminal, the tiniest change in the music can warp the beat into another rhythm, building brilliance out of only the barest essentials. His second album, Musik, is a masterpiece.

On the other side of the spectrum is my love of dubbed-out ambient house. The Orb, in this writer's opinion, stands above the pack as a favorite. The rubbery, intergalactic psychedelia of their first few albums is the soundtrack of an outer-space journey in your own head. Tinkling atmospherics and soft, cotton-wrapped beats eventually gave way to ambient noodling in their later years, but everything they did up to (and sort-of including) Orbvs Terrarvm is worth checking out. In fact, see if you can track down the full 39-minute version of "Blue Room", the longest single ever to top the UK charts, with a memorable TV appearance featuring the band members in space suits, playing chess in front of footage of dolphins. Trippy.

Since I've spent so much time between headphones, though, I find myself without anything to say about the music, as there is little vocabulary in the rock dictionary to capture the essence of some of this intensely introspective music. I've always looked at electronic music (dance-derived, rather than the electronic experimentation of early artists like Stockhausen) as running on a similar but parallel universe to the rock sphere since about 1977 - just as rock has developed sub-genres and stylistic diversions, so has this electronic music spawned acid house, techno, trip-hop, trance, drum 'n' bass, gabber, microhouse, and on and on and on. There's so much to dive into that with this introspection phase, I've just been cruising around in my own head for a few weeks. How do I hang my hat on that?

Realizing today that I've been neglecting my writing duties, I've decided not to change my listening from a techno and dub diet, but to dig deeper, to push further, to peel back the layers and really find something to say about this music. Maybe an album review of AFX's Analogue Bubblebath 3 (one of the greatest acid techno records ever), maybe a reflection on the co-opting of psychedelia from guitar-based rock to the mindspace of bedroom beatniks, or maybe just me blathering on and on about just how good 808 State is. We'll have to see.

Part 1: Clearing The Field

Sometimes it's easy to get complacent as a fan of anything. When you're immersed in something, it's easy to forget the boundaries, and easy to forget that there are very few innovators in any given field. I listen to a lot of music, so sometimes, it takes something extreme, something that I rarely listen to, to shake me out of my jaded state and really make me perk up. Quality is not the issue, as it's easy to hear and appreciate a great record that still fits within the boundaries of "normal" music.

I put on some James Chance & The Contortions today and it was like I'd never heard anything so aggressive in my life. Now, the funniest thing is that yesterday, I was listening to The Birthday Party (R.I.P. Rowland S. Howard), and felt the same way. I often forget that sometimes I need a brain cleansing. So many "confrontational" bands or musicians are simply "confrontation signifiers", throwing out all the established imagery, conjuring up an image of danger or confrontation without actually being so. And there's really nothing wrong with that. Art is art, it is not life. Art is a representation of aspects of life. However, when (specifically) music is authentically confrontational, there is a certain "magic ingredient" that is almost palpable, but hidden in the spaces between the notes - it can't be quantified, but it's obvious when it's present.

It's easy to get wrapped up in this world of signifiers, but it makes it incredibly powerful when dosed with the real deal. And No New York, the compilation of No Wave heavy hitters, sounds like the real deal. So does the Birthday Party's Prayers On Fire, but it's Chance and his ilk that I'm listening to right now, and it's so disconcerting that I'm having trouble keeping my thoughts straight enough to type. It's not the knowledge that early shows often ended in actual physical confrontations, sparked by Chance himself, in an attempt to shake the jaded NYC audiences out of their complacency - it's that this music often sounds dangerously close to coming apart at the seams. "Dish It Out" is the sound of frantic, sweating fear.

On Thanksgiving, my mom makes a cranberry walnut salad that I love. It's tasty, but so tart that it completely cleanses the palate... something that this raw nerve, live-wire music can do. After hearing something this harrowing, it's easy to lean back and just enjoy the nuances of something that's not so intense.

And while I'm listening to these records now 30 years out, this is not the only era to generate bands like this. However, it is a rare occurrence. If you ever spot one live (and it will most likely be live, since bands this electrifying aren't usually around long enough to properly document), take heed. Both in the cycle of rock music and one's listening habits, palate-cleansing, cranberry salad moments like this are like forest fires... clearing the debris for something new and fresh to grow. Which is why it's serendipitous when the universe draws me to music like this at the same time it presents me with the sonic alternative, which we'll be discussing next time on Central Target, in Part Two...