Music Banter

This is just a repost of something found on Pitchfork, but it’s a reason to be cheerful, anyway. Stereolab were one of the most unusual and often impenetrable bands of the mid-nineties- if you put some of their music on for a friend, you’d either get a reaction of total bafflement or utter love. motoric Krautrock beats, weird analogue keyboards making the kind of thing robots would do if you told them to make lounge music (as opposed to Daft Punk, which is what robots would do if you told them to make disco music), and serene gallic-toned harmonies with lyrics which contained such gems as ‘originally the institutions were set up to serve society, now society serves the institutions.’ On the quiet, they were like the Manics, chucking provocative Marxist rhetoric into (sort of) pop music, and rendering it indecipherable as they did so. They were awesome.

They’ve been ploughing their own particular furrow for what seems like forever now, and announced recently that enough was enough, at least for the time being (although frontwoman Letitia Sadler will be putting out more solo stuff soon).

Luckily, however, there is still some new music to look forward to. with a new album called ‘Not Music’ coming out on Drag City records on the 16th of November.

Fantastic. I’m imagining it’ll be as charming, quirky and impenetrable as the band I’ve come to know and love over the years. I also hope it’s not the end for them- it’s harder and harder for bands to sustain themselves, and some bands really shouldn’t. Stereolab have managed to settle into that comfortable territory between ‘groundbreaking/unique’ and ‘instantly themselves no matter what record of theirs you put on’ that, say, Sonic Youth have also managed. It’s hard to know when diminishing returns set in, and I’m hoping that maybe this will just be a fallow period which allows them to return refreshed and invigorated.

In the mean time, here’s a reminder of exactly what got us interested in them in the first place:

http://www.myspace.com/burntisland

I never went to BurntIsland when I was young. I lived near it, though, in Aberdour, a tiny little village just along the Scots coastline from the place. I was aware of it. In my mind, Burnt Island was a romantic name, a strange place just out of the orbit of my child’s world. I imagined it, rather predictably, as a scorched place, an abandoned island scarred by volcanoes, or some kind of disaster. I dreamed of fields full of charred ash, survivors of a nuclear holocaust clambering from the basements of ruined houses, of lava and firestorms. It was a mysterious, and distant place.

What’s that? Why yes, I was an unusual child.

What’s my point? Well, my point is that Burnt Island is a fantastic name. That’s what initially caught my attention with this Glasgow-based five-piece. What a fantastic name, I thought. Someone has really caught the potential in that idea.

Of course, that’s not really enough to keep my attention. After all, I’m not sitting writing a review of Doctor Colossus and the Fifty-Foot Spider Monkeys, am I?

No, what’s keeping me pressing repeat on this band’s tracks are the wonderful, weary worlds of sadness that singer songwriter Rodge Glass conjures up in his songs. Just when I’d started to get sick of maudlin Scottish guitar-based singers with maybe a female vocalist and some violin for that folky tinge, here’s another one coming along to remind me of why I liked that kind of thing in the first place.

Glass sings songs which seem to speak of long struggles with sadness, difficult journeys through life which kept on going wrong. ‘A supposedly fun Thing’ starts with the line ‘that’s it I’m leaving home.’ It’s about the end of something, a time spent with someone which started well but didn’t live up to its promise. ‘yeah we did some things/yeah we went some places’ he recalls, but then goes on to detail that crushing sense of disappointment when you get to the end of a relationship- and yes, it’s obviously a relationship- which just petered out. It’s lovely, searing, and unflinchingly true.

‘Music and Maths,’ their album’s title track, is another slow-burner, starting from quiet piano chords and building to a stirring chorus. ‘I watch my children grow up and I wonder,’ he sings and you feel the weight of adulthood. ‘reach out for the easy life’ he sings, with a chorus singing along, but then the song refuses to boil over, won’t cop out with some kind of loud, redemptive chorus. Instead, it just gently subsides into a question ‘He sees the future that I have planned and he crumbles/says dad will I even notice it when it arrives?’ It sounds like Glass is struggling mightily with the notion of being a parent, and doesn’t know if he’ll be able to provide any kind of future for a child. Not exactly rousing stuff, but it’s saved from what could be overbearing, with the starkness of the images he raises. It’s not really self-pitying music, this; Glass’ songwriting voice is a lot calmer than that.

In ‘Man on Fire’ Glass is talking about life and a listless sense of feeling lost. ‘the same dreams/the same regrets… I call it home/It doesn’t have a floor for me to sleep on/the mountains do not stir up feeling in my chest/the roads do not lead anywhere I want to be’ speak of a quiet desparation, but somehow the beauty of the music is enough to render this soft confusion into a kind of quiet dignity.

So, in the end, it’s like life. Flawed, imperfect, but what did you expect? This isn’t happy music. But it is beautiful nonetheless.

Burnt Island’s album ‘Music and Maths’ is currently on sale through www.chaffinchrecords.com. Go buy it. Just don’t listen to it at 3am.

Pitchfork seem to think this piece of news makes perfect sense, but I really can’t let this one pass. Liam Gallagher is the producer on a film about the Beatles. Excuse me, what?

LIAM GALLAGHER is a film producer now. This Liam Gallagher:

What the hell?

Ok, the Beatles thing, makes sense, I get it, but seriously, Liam Gallagher, in charge of money. Liam Gallagher, hiring actors and setting budgets, running production meetings and being the behind-the-scenes genius behind a film. Liam Gallagher? Monobrow caveman frontman of Oasis, the most famously thuggish band of rockstars in the last twenty years?

Fucking hell. Times have changed.

Surely this can’t be true. The man’s a cartoon neanderthal. A lumbering, monosyllabic chimp of a man. Can you imagine being in a production meeting with him? I can’t imagine that there’d be much talking being done. Just menacing stares and demands that people ‘fooking get on with it, yeah?’

I guess if you’re incredibly rich and a bit intimidating, then you get to indulge in vanity projects like this. Plus, since Oasis split there isn’t really much else he can do. He’s already spent the best part of two decades creating a pale image of the Beatles, why not carry on in a different medium?

I suppose if Adam Sandler and cuddly alcoholic Jew-hater Mel Gibson can be producers, then it’s only fair to let Liam have a go. After all, maybe I’m being harsh and snobbish, looking down on a working class lad made good, incapable of believing a football fan could be intelligent and talented.

Bollocks to that. I know plenty of laddish football fans. I have no problem with believing that they are intelligent and talented. I do have a problem with believing that Liam Gallagher is intellgent and talented. After all, if even Peter Kay notices that you’re a bit of a knobhead, well, there’s something really wrong:

Plus, let’s be fair, I might be getting the wrong end of the stick here. Consider the fact this film is supposed to be based on Richard Dilello’s Beatles 1972 biopic ‘The Longest Cocktail Party.’ Are we really sure Liam Gallagher has read a book?

I don’t know why he’s doing this. Presumably to prove he’s got more to him than we, the sneering masses, understand. Screw that. You’ve just reached Ozzy Osbourne ‘I’m doing a musical about Rasputin’ territory. It’s embarrasing. Go home, Gallagher. Go get yourself a house, a very big house in the country and just bugger off.

School of Seven Bells, who I’ve previously discussed on here, back when this blog had no pictures or nothin’ have a new record in the can, so it seems. It’s going to be called ‘Disconnect From Desire’ and it’ll be out in July. They’ve given Stereogum an exclusive on one of the new tracks, Babelonia.

Like some kind of musical blog-parasite, here I am reposting that link. From that page there’s a widget where you can download it, if you’re happy to give them your email address. I would, if I were you- the more spam I get sent about these guys, the better.

In a lot of ways, the track is more of the same- the same sort of blissful grooving guitar, pristine female vocals and sense of inexorable, gliding momentum. It makes me think of looking out of train windows, and watching the countryside spin past, which is exactly what this kind of music should do.

The obvious touchstones you expect from this band are there- the guitars still sound blessed by the hand of Kevin Shields, but there are other bits and bobs thrown into the mix- the ‘chorus’ melody sounds quite like the sort of thing Stereolab would have done, only it’s behind a few strange layers of effects. It’s all very nice. There’s also a few bleeps and such at the start of the track that are a nice opening touch.

Overall, then, School of Seven Bells haven’t done much here to progress, or take their overall sound much further out there- they’ve simply plowed their furrow, and made a piece of music that’s a little slicker than something on ‘Alpinism.’ Nothing that remarkable about it, but it’s well-done and a good sign of more pleasant, blissful listening times to come, when their album comes out in July.

So there’s been a lot of controversy recently regarding singer MIA (right) and the bloody, graphic video for her new single, ‘Born Free.’

Placed onto Youtube then removed a day later, it’s a ten-minute, Hurt Locker style hi-def depiction of a group of American soldiers rounding up young ginger people, driving them away in armoured vehicles to the desert, and forcing them to run across a minefield at gunpoint. It’s pretty gruesome- a small child is shot in full-facial close-up, and there is absolutely nothing left to the imagination when the inevitable explosions start happening.

It’s still up Here, and it’s compelling viewing.

But is it offensive?

To some, yes, absolutely. That kind of violence is shocking and terrifying, and yes, it is happening in the world today- there’s some suggestion that with these ginger people in there, MIA’s making reference to the Tamil Tigers, who she’s previously caught flack for supporting. It’s a fairly clear message, too- pretty much, it’s ‘Racism is bad, m’kay?’ It can’t help but make you think about the fact that things like this are well within the human capability for violence and hatred.

That’s all well and good, but I have a problem with the opening of the video- there’s a bunch of other shocking images in there, seemingly at random- the old man smoking crack, the overweight couple having sex. It’s unclear why they’re there, apart from the fact that, well, it’s unsettling and unpleasant. And that’s kind of a shame. We don’t need to be beaten over the head with outrage, surely? It’s almost as if they’re just throwing as much at the camera as they can, to see how far they can push it.

It’s odd, too, that to me the music itself is really only a secondary consideration in this. It’s not the main event, it’s the soundtrack. That’s reinforced by the way that the track fades in and out where the narrative of the video deems it appropriate. Now, that might be interesting, but isn’t Mia supposed to be a recording artist, not a film-maker?

And if I’m going to be brutal about the track, it’s not that good. It’s atmospheric, and angry, but it’s not really as good as the song it samples, or indeed strong enough to stand up as a good song on its own. I may be a little bit of a luddite about this, but it’s about the music.

In this instance, I can’t help but think that music is a bit of a distant second priority.

Seriously, this is batshit crazy.

We’ve all heard religious music, I think. I’m not talking about the really good choral stuff, I’m talking about what one could quite easily call Chaplaincy Rock. One earnest singer with an acoustic guitar, banging out some happy-clappy song about being ‘safe in the arms of Jesus’ or something. I knew a guy like that at my university (Richard Craine, Swansea’s answer to John Denver!), and I even drummed on a few biblical epics he recorded, because he was an absolutely lovely bloke.

Still, musically, you know the drill. It’s fairly standard stuff, yer christian folkster. If you were to see this image, you’d have a fairly clear picture of what to expect:

Just another happy-clappy acoustic guitar singalong, right? Maybe a few quotes from the bible, toe-curlingly bad adaptations of ancient psalms, something like that?

Well, not exactly. Have a listen, and see what you think.

I can’t help but find this utterly unique. This is two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine, and more echo than the Edge in a cathedral. It’s strangely eerie, and actually just a little bit beautiful.

‘Fire’ itself is a sort of minimalist evocation of the joys of celibacy. Not sure I see the appeal, myself, but it’s led to this strange wonder, so fair enough. The rest follows in the same vein, and is, well, quite lovely actually.

I love this kind of thing-music which is strange, and naive, and breaks the rules, because the people making it didn’t really know much about what the rules were in the first place. In its own way, Sister Irene O’Connor is almost as innovative as people like the Durritti Column, or any number of bizarre post-punk acts that cropped up in the aftermath of new wave, in that bold time when the rulebook had not so much been torn up as gobbed on, used to wipe blood off the floor, set on fire and then torn up.

That’s right. Two Australian nuns with a guitar and a drum machine. Punk as fuck.

Gather any number of music business professionals in a room and ask, “What makes a song memorable?” It is possible that you will get as many answers as you have people. If you think of one of your favorite songs, it might be hard to pin down exactly what makes it so.

Lyrics

Two kinds of lyrics can give a song staying power. Those that generate powerful emotions, laughter or are just fun to sing (Henry the VIII, anyone?) will keep a song on your lifelong play list. The other may have some of the aspects of the first, but it has its own appeal. A great chorus can wrap the most cerebral or obscure lyrics in a “chart-able” song package. A strong chorus should have a somewhat predictable melody line and lyrics that are easy to sing well.

Melody

Some genres, such as American Country, aim for predictable patterns and progressions. Most country listeners like the comfort of knowing what to expect from the music. Those, whose tastes run more artistic, like to be teased or challenged by a melody. The charm of being taken to a poignant minor note, when you were expecting a major is entertaining. If the change coincides with a compatible emotion, the result is a memorable melody. In either case, the melody contributes to the staying power of the song.

Talent

Have you ever tried to listen to your favorite song played by a bad band or sung by a terrible singer? It’s painful! While great musicians singing and playing a terrible song can make it palatable, this alone will not make it a hit. So, whether the song requires a symphony orchestra or a single acoustic guitar, good musicians will make a good song great, but not a bad song good.

Songwriters, producers and record company executives spend their careers trying to nail down the right configuration of these ingredients to generate hits. All you have to do is listen.