Holy Shards

Micachu - Curly Teeth (mp3)(buy)

Dave Longstreth spins pop like a gossamer sleeve surrounding his melodies, Annie Clark compartmentalizes and smothers hers.  Mica Levi (myspace) takes a pile of scrap and a mallet and bangs hers into shape.

Not that it's crude, though some of it's meant to sound that way.  Like the best sculpture, you recognize both the subject and the materials.  The best tracks on Jewellery are solid pop songs -- "Golden Phone" would work well as underadorned blippy indiepop (and that video, yikes, aims for cutesy-cutesy) -- but the craft is in their texture.  When there are stringed instruments, you will hear the strings and you will hear the fingers hitting them.  There are dents, glitches, w00ts, sarcastic kisses.  A vacuum cleaner!  "You know when you put a record on when you have to Hoover your floor? It's about that," she said.  Which is pretty awesome.  It would have been awesomer if Shiina Ringo hadn't done that back in 2003 with "Yattsuke Shigoto" (and surely someone did it before that), but still, pretty awesome.

Sometimes all Micachu's sounds don't stick to the songs, and sometimes Jewellery feels more like a sketchbook than finished product.  Which is fine!  "Curly Teeth" is my favorite track.  She uses the chorus, which isn't much more than a clarification of the riff under the verses, to hold the whole thing together, make you feel silly for thinking it might come apart.  Frees you up to follow the yip!s and electric Windex-on-pane squeals as you wish.

Of course I'm a sucker for almost anything that successfully reconfigures real life noise into music, Foley for Foley's sake.  It's one of the reasons I like listening to great tap dancing.  Not the stuff that comes off as severely clever or choreographed.  But, like, here:

(Well, up to the four minute mark.  After that it's pussyfooting.)

So much of the routine is Hines going, "This is what the floor sounds like here, and this is what the floor sounds like here, and here's what I can do with this sound and that sound."  There's a scene from the movie called Tap that always stuck with me, where Hines showed a class how to pull material from the street:

(You can skip the first two minutes.  The movie loses confidence in the idea too soon, but there you go.  I do still love the moment where Hines first hears the construction site.)

Róisín Murphy - Ramalama (Bang Bang)(mp3)(buy)

Which is all just a way to mention Matthew Herbert, who served as Levi's co-producer, whose Accidental Records label first picked up her CD.  Herbert is famous for having configured foody crunches and whatnot as percussion, could probably squeeze sounds from the moon.  His next project, The Pig, "...will be made up entirely of sounds made during the life cycle of a pig. I will be there at its birth, during its life, present at its death, and during the butchery process.  Its body will then be given to chefs new and old, there will be a feast, it will all be recorded and then turned in to music."

And he's the reason why Róisín Murphy's first solo record, Ruby Blue, turned weirdo electro-soul into a headphone experience.  The CD booklet doesn't, thankfully, have a list of stunt samples, and the tympanic "Ramalama" isn't meant to be a combination making breakfast/singing song track.  But for a big spare obvious bing bong ding dong song it's filled with odd sounds, some used to confirm the song's center, some used to distract.  And it's a hoot.

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Yes, Dead Michael Jackson will probably be this year's most popular Halloween costume.  But coming in second?  Half-and-half combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell server.

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I really wanted to like The Dead Weather (myspace), Jack White and Alison Mosshart's new band.  And I'll try to give the record (streaming here, this week) another couple listens.  But I get so bored halfway through every single song.  I start to get excited halfway through the best Stripes and Kills songs.

A lot of "Treat Me Like Your Mother" sounds like someone rapping over "Tom Sawyer."

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Only what it says it is.  (via)  Don't forget to click the Gibson!  I can only hope that Roy Peckham is a Fat Worm of Error fan.

tags: micachu  roisin murphy  matthew herbert  

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