Reviewing Albums

The first tape I ever owned was a Beach Boys greatest-hits, the first CD I ever owned was the soundtrack to the Big Chill—thanks Mom—and the first vinyl record I bought was a hardcore punk 7” EP. Were I to enter the new technological age, and purchase a digital download, it almost certainly would be a single mp3—the new Rihanna song, let’s say—in any case, as with my initial forays into all other music formats, it would not be an entire album. Ah, yes, the album—that doomed and anachronistic medium (we are told)—at every turn of my music-buying life has been diverted, chopped up, abbreviated, made irrelevant, and at the same time (we need look only to hip-hop as a genre) bloated, crammed with filler, expanded to the full 80 minutes allowed by the CD.

One need hardly point out that the “maximizing” of the album (compare Metallica’s Black Album (1991) at sixty minutes to Slayer’s Reign in Blood at twenty-nine minutes (1986) for an index of the CD’s tendency to promote, uh, “epic” ambitions in music) and the album’s increasing irrelevance are two sides of the same coin—the longer and only inconsistently-rewarding $18 album begs to be summarized, stolen, and cherry-picked from. So it is both a relief and an aggravation to remark upon Pitchfork Media’s continued dedication to the album as the only serious work of musical art (while Lil’ Wayne’s mixtapes are treated as charming “deconstructions” of the album’s untroubled supremacy).

In what does Pitchfork’s allegiance to albums consist? Alas, this can only be answered as a tautology (though it is the tautology of their aesthetic, and not mine). Pitchfork’s reviews treat albums as deep and meta-critical meditations upon…the album form itself. It is as though every album (in indie rock) were a minor recreation of Fellini’s masterpiece 8 ½, with its mise-en-abyme of the director’s making a movie about making a movie (or several?) about...artistic dilemmas. Applying this ready-at-hand formula to reviewing occasionally tedious and usually unprofound contemporary rock music does, as one might expect, yield some tedious and unprofound results.

You don’t need me to tell you that the most-acclaimed and innovative art is often a meditation on the medium itself: from Velasquez’s Las Meninas to Don Quixote, until Godard’s Contempt, this is a reliable way to produce one’s masterpiece.

It’s worth doing what in grad school they call “close reading”—let’s take the opening of a Pitchfork review of some Death Cab for Cutie album:

Love isn't watching someone die, contrary to what Ben Gibbard memorably sang on Death Cab for Cutie's major-label debut. No, love is watching someone grow and change and still staying with them-- whether we're talking about family, friends, romantic interests, or a little college-town indie rock band from about an hour-and-a-half outside Seattle. Death is just the dénouement. In the three years since their platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated Plans, Gibbard and Death Cab producer/guitarist Chris Walla have both entered their thirties, coming off a wave of successes that included 2003's Transatlanticism going gold and the debut by Gibbard side project the Postal Service becoming Sub Pop's best-selling disc since Nirvana. That's a whole lotta love.

Narrow Stairs, Death Cab's second album for Atlantic and sixth proper LP overall, is one of the darkest and most muscular in the band's discography, but they're still aiming for the same place: your heart. It's an album about growing and changing and becoming resigned to the fact that you'll never be truly content.

In brief, the album is about the band’s process of realizing that this was the album they needed to make. Hmm. As if that weren’t circular enough, this point is introduced by a quote from the band’s previous album!...in which I am assured that “love” and “death” are just metaphors for the vicissitudes of the music industry and creative process. That might be true, but what profit—when this produces platitudes like “You’ll never be truly content” or nonsense like “death is just the denouement.” Oops: Pitchfork insists upon the Francophile diacritical mark—dénouement.

But let’s play nice. This isn’t about pretentious spelling or Death Cab. Let me give you a sampling of other such moments from Pitchfork’s recent history, where the album’s lyrics are taken as a commentary on the art of making an album.

The sound is huge, but the song is a simple ode to being needed, about the pleasure in caring for something, whether a child or family pet… In other words, it's about accepting responsibility and most of all about growing up, which is something Animal Collective seem to be doing brilliantly, with their creativity and adventurous spirit intact.

"This loneliness ain't pretty no more," she sings on [El Perro Del Mar’s] "This Loneliness", acknowledging the melancholic draw of pop music in general and her music specifically.

On "Mushaboom", the signature track from her 2004 breakthrough album Let It Die, Leslie Feist [of Feist] claimed, "It may be years until the day my dreams will match up with my pay." Now, after countless sold-out shows across the world, close to half of a million records sold, and placement in a commercial for British bed manufacturers Silentnight, it seems safe to say this NPR darling's "pay" should be satisfactory.

Whether the implications of the line are intentional or not is difficult to say, but when, on "Paper Cup Exit", [Sonic Youth’s] Lee Ranaldo sings, "It's later than it seems," the band seem to be keenly aware of their age and relevance. That self-awareness, both of an appreciably long canon and the four lives it has traversed, makes Sonic Nurse all the more remarkable.

Is there a problem with reviewing records this way? Frankly, yes. For one, it privileges English-language pop music over other genres: the Pitchfork model is always about lyrics. For instrumental music, or music with other things on its mind than its own importance, there is precious little to say for this style of review. Further, the model is extremely well-suited to the masterpiece: 8 ½, Don Quixote, Sunset Boulevard, Remembrance of Things Past—works with something interesting to say. The “meta” remark contained in snippets of contemporary indie rock have, well, let’s say they have somewhat less insight to offer. Pop music is melancholy; we have to grow up; achieving one’s dreams is not always so great; getting old sucks: these are all cheap insights.

As English majors in college, Pitchfork’s reviewers surely know the instant reward of showing that something called “form” is reflected in something else called “content,” and vice versa. If this tawdry hermeneutics is the only way to appreciate full-length albums in 2008, perhaps it is a kind of devil’s bargain. Still, it is worth remembering that on one hand this lyric-based method is akin to reviewing a film based on a print-out of its script, and secondly that no less an artist than Bob Dylan is (famously) singularly resistant to this kind of biographical/self-referential reading; with the exception of his disastrous “Christian period.” Should a method of aesthetic appreciation not be as well suited to evaluating successes (as those of Dylan’s classic but most sphinx-like period) as to indulging the pretentiousness of failures?

"Generic Pop Music"

Poptimist column from Pitchfork

There is some wrong-headedness in the above link, and also some false statements.

On the wrong-headed side, the idea of "pop music" trotted out here is totally unhistorical. Pop music is actually a really terrible vehicle for the "generic." In the obvious sense, yes, 90% of pop music at a given moment in time is very much identical to itself, and trends dominate over individual voices. But, what should be equally obvious is that, decade-to-decade, pop music is being constantly revolutionized. (Pitchfork's idea that "electro-dance" is a permanent feature of our lives is ideological in the highest degree.) And when things are outdated--constantly--they really do fall outside of their generic bounds.

Also, pop history has a distorting effect. "Innovations" (things initially falling outside of the genre) are incorporated so quickly and so lastingly that they cannot always be grasped as such from the present day. This is all very "duh," but then you read this:

a happier idea of the generic: a core of musical ideas or values, which, executed well, satisfy the fans of a genre just as much as music that moves beyond those.

1) No. This "core" is not stable or self-sustaining or core-like. In pop music, music that "moves beyond" a genre is then constantly re-absorbed within the genre as its new center.

2) The idea of musical ideas being "executed well" here is completely question-begging.

3) There is no possibility for a "deconstruction" here. The spatial metaphor laid out in this article does not consider that a great deal of innovation occurs *not only* "within" these boundaries--that is really just the spinning-off of variation--but that creativity does interesting things to the logic of boundaries: parody, pastiche, transplantation, etc. If you know anything about English poetry, you will know that meter is a similar thing. There is not "correct iambic pentameter" and "moving beyond iambic pentameter." What makes good iambic pentameter is the counter-rhythms and liberties one can take with the form. (Again, I stress this is different from just variation, which is the monkeys-on-typewriters production of permutations within a given limit.)

Now for the false statements.

I got this feeling listening to the new Kylie Minogue album, Aphrodite: Not one track stood out, but I never stopped enjoying the record. As an experience it felt rather like good customer service: seamless, efficient, friendly, and inobtrusive.

This is clever writing, even though "enjoying the record" is very question-begging. But the second sentence must give us pause: has anyone ever ENJOYED good customer service?

The generic is something one sees only at a distance in time or in taste.

Technically true--in an Aristotelian sense, one has to aggregate the essence of a genre from outside of the particular--the implication here is false.

Let's say that I want to get into some new style of music, say, folk music made with an African thumb-piano. It would be virtually impossible to get a view at the "center" of this genre "from a distance." In one sense, yes, the first 30 songs I heard would "sound alike" to me, and this would be a kind of generic similarity. But I totally refute this. Because I would be constructing this genre out of ignorance and pure phenomenality: the fact that something "showed up" on this quest would automatically incorporate it into my idea of this genre.

This happened when I was getting into the very rule-bound genre of hardcore punk. I wanted fast, fast, fast music. But a lot of things that came my way were FAST, sure (Zeke, Capitalist Casualties, Dillinger Escape Plan) but really have to be placed outside the genre as I was looking for it and as I now know it. What I *wanted* was Jerry's Kids and Mob 47, but this "generic center" was not at all discernible from outside, i.e. from the "distance" that Pitchfork writes about.

Not to be too philosophical here, but the "distance" here is not an objective one, like a fine or a coarse adjustment on a microscope (as the metaphor intends). It is really a subjective one; the phenomenon of "African thumb piano music" really exists only in my head UNTIL I have really educated myself. Once so educated, much that will seem generic on first glance will perhaps disappear (into a more correct classification) and an appreciation of nuances will show that was seemed very "usual" was in fact innovation of the highest order, etc. In short, "closing the distance" between oneself and a phenomenon that exists already in one's mind, is entirely an appreciation that the phenomenon in fact DID NOT exist in one's mind, and had to be appropriated anew in its heterogeneity.

This last paragraph is also a good description of falling in love.

Recent Swedish Hardcore

Martyrdöd- Sekt LP

Let's begin phenomenologically. It is impossible to say from a first listen whether a record is "good" or not. However, it is entirely possible to say whether I enjoy something or not. I contend, though, that these are the same thing. We all know what it is like to LOVE a song: it catches your attention, you play it a bunch of times in a row, you send the video to your friends, you have it stuck in your head.

When you hear some music and this ("I love this!") does NOT happen, there is not some other thing happening: it's not as good. Does this mean that my Ornette Coleman records are not as "good" as Black Sabbath, because I do all sorts of ridiculous things in my room when I am listening to one and not the other? I enjoy them less, even over a span of years. Life is too short to worry about the difference.

The d-beat, as we know, is a beat, a rhythm. Any band playing this style has to face up, immediately, to the fact that this beat can become deadly boring. The best bands, Discharge, Disclose, Totalitär, make it their own. They take precedence over the beat. The worst bands succumb to it, and their music disappears into X minutes of sheer material.

Martyrdöd were a band I was very excited about in 2003-2005, but have not thought a great deal about since then. They were more mysterious and more metal-influenced than the bands who were going around at that time, although this appeal was subsequently undermined by rawer (and far superior) bands like Framtid and Lebenden Toten.

So, this new Martyrdöd album: what's it like? For one thing, it is startlingly cliché-free. They seem like they are working within a musical idiom rather than within a bag of tricks. Somehow they convince me that d-beat can be profoundly melodic, without resorting to the "sweet" lead-lines of early 2000's stadium crust. It does not grab your attention, necessarily, but if you put time into this record, it pays back. The best d-beat ("Fight Back") grabs your attention, despite its being incredibly predictable. Martyrdöd are more thunderously monotonous, but I am convinced they crafted these songs to be immersive. It's a good record, but I suppose I am saying it is not a punk record. The Ramones are not "immersive," y'know? It's a good METAL record, in that sense (and in that sense only).

Disfear- Live the Storm LP

I guess this band never "made it," although this album was (favorably) reviewed on indie rock website Pitchfork. Strictly speaking, this has very little in common with Discharge anymore. I mean, there is a d-beat, it is redundant as hell, the singer is still the singer from Skitsystem (and At the Gates)... but it is basically emo. I don't mean of course that it is *really* emo, that emo music will come out of your speakers if you play this... but all the embellishments, the chord progressions, the long choruses, the expressive and bummed-out vocals--none of this has to do with Discharge. It is more like Coliseum.

The whole point of Discharge was not to "rock." Discharge were a very abstract, cool-looking, almost inconceivably arty, monotone, and minimalist outfit. They weren't into tattoos or brass knuckles or sad/tough fonts. Discharge invented a timeless form of hardcore at a single stroke, by detaching melody, narrative, musicality, emotion, attitude, etc. FROM punk, reducing it to Stooges-levels of dumbed-down-high-concept. Discharge are an anthem, a protest--anything but a haphazard assemblage of rock cliches. In truth, Discharge are much more in the tradition of the Stooges, the Ramones, and Motorhead, than most any of the bands subsequent to them (although it remains a task to interpret this essence correctly).

In any case, Disfear has nothing to do with any of this. Undoubtedly that makes Disfear catchier, more "rockin," than a legitimate group could ever be, but on the other hand this is just circus music for upset teenagers (à la Cradle of Filth).

Wolfbrigade- Comalive LP

This was heralded as something of a "return to form" of this venerable band. In my opinion they haven't been good since Jonsson left (i.e. since after their second LP). Nothing here is even close to A New Dawn Fades or Lycanthro Punk, which were truly depraved slices of life from a crazy person. I'd like to see these clean-cut lads make a song called "Land Shark" or "Roll the Dice" totally convincing, which was the specialty of Wolfpack in their prime. Wolfpack certainly were not the greatest band of all time, but you definitely were afraid that they would STAB YOU. In this sense, they were in a league with Negative Approach and Poison Idea; simply scary people.

Nowadays Wolfbrigade resort more to fonts than to visceral thrills, although the production here is certainly a step above what I heard from their last album, Prey to the World. They have totally ditched the Tragedy rip-offs which informed their album on Feral Ward, and so this is entirely straight-ahead. I couldn't tell you if it is better or worse than any of their 2000s records, though. But it's impossible to imagine wanting to hear these songs again. More damningly, if someone came over to your house and played you these riffs without a huge production and a full band, i.e. just on their little practice amp, I don't think they would sound better than anything else just made up on the spot. Totally by-the-numbers.

Warcollapse- Defy LP

I don't want to make any grand claims for this, but it is by far the best of the bunch. Why? For one thing, in their own way, Warcollapse have made a "party record," a bouncy, catchy, drug-addled good time. To the uninitiated, sure, this will sound like death metal, or at least be indistinguishable from the other albums here... but this is a lesson IN small differences. Or, as I have it on my other blog, "paying attention to" Swedish hardcore. Every second of this album is enjoyable, not to say riveting. What can I say? It grabs your attention. By any other measure, it is a ridiculous album. Like the first Star Wars movie, the criticisms are as obvious as they are redundant: (in this analogy) badly acted, derivative, only for teenage boys, a climax that has little to do with the preceding small-scale plot, etc. And these odes to the crust lifestyle and heavy drug use will probably not change any minds, either.