Can it Sing a Melody?

It's too easy to smack the indie kids around, their meaningless exaggerated praise, the way their supersaturated online presence can make the world feel like one giant Adult Contemporary radio station.  But when it's good, it's good; as we reach the year's midpoint three of the stickier records so far take a lovely, fractured approach to pop.

Apologies for the well-travelled tracks, and I'm sure I won't have anything illuminating to add to the discussion, but redundancy is where it's at now, right?  I'll spread them out over three entries, try to pair each with something complementary.

Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move (mp3)(buy)

For years David Longstreth's Dirty Projectors (myspace) project looked like it was doomed to go nowhere better than guerilla avant-garde showcases (not that there's anything wrong with those).  I could only take them in small doses.  Longstreth's holistic pointillism demanded a maximum amount of concentration from his performers and his listeners to bind his work together.  You could be impressed by the level of skill and the extent to which he tried to communicate his perspective, but it was very difficult to remain both convinced and involved.  It was like being at a bad séance, someone relaxes their grip, whoops, no ghost.

Things clicked better on Rise Above, a 2007 reimagining - gimmick, experiment, excuse, whatever - of Black Flag's Damaged that was less a covers project than the sound of light catching dust blown off an old untouched album jacket.  But the source's blunt assertions often proved too potent when delivered with non-cathartic intricacy.  Maybe like being at a great séance:  Aaaah!  Ghost!  Everyone loses grip, turns away.

So here's the new one, Bitte Orca (Longstreth seems to specialize in unfortunate acronyms), and it's something I can not only stand all the way through, it's something I can keep on repeat.  It's something I can sing along to!  It's something I can hold hands with.

(It has nudged Rokia Traoré's record from the top of my shortlist, though it will soon have to deal with a new Shiina Ringo that sounds infinitely better on its 30th listen than its first.)

A couple important things changed, and a couple important things did not.

This record is a relative lark.  Whatever the lyrics may be, it feels - especially after the last album - optimistic.  When the first words on the record are "Look around at everyone, everyone looks alive and waiting" it's completely possible to ignore that they're part of a song called "Cannibal Resource."  Optimism works for this band's sound, Longstreth's falsetto can sound pubescent and naïve, his bandmates' voices ply sugar that ranges from powdered confectioner's to syrup.  When singers settle into asking questions, it's easy to think they are asking them hopefully.  "Stillness is the Move" can contemplate identity and existence without ever feeling lost.

Bitte Orca is just a collection of songs.  It isn't forced to suffer the stress of an overriding concept or the contrived encouragement of a false experiment, and that provides an airy relief against the seriousness of its construction.  And when you have a strong enough point of view - even if it's a holistic one, especially if it's a holistic one - a collection of otherwise unrelated songs are united through identity.

These songs are now held together by more than willpower and definition.  It seems insulting to say that, oooh, there are melodies and riffs on this record, but the ear needs something to hang on while Longstreth twists musical phrases and creates polyrhythms by staggering entrances and dictating interruptions.  A more expressive love of R&B -not new, you can hear it on "Not Having Found" from The Getty Address, in the bridge from "Spray Paint (The Walls)" and the backing vocals on the title track from Rise Above - both gives your hips something to do and allows Longstreth to better utilize his female bandmates' vocals:  Along with esoteric harmonies and drawing-room airs they're allowed to dip into standard doo-wop derived back-up roles or can be encouraged, as Angel Deradoorian does in this track, to go Mariah Carey all over the place.  (It might have helped Longstreth that his band's line-up has solidified, somewhat; he knows what tools are in his box.  He shares control, too; "Stillness" was co-written by co-Projector Amber Coffman.)

Longstreth's own vocals have gotten stronger; his all-inclusive approach to sound hunting is as resolute and better utilized.  Whatever consolations he's had to make to achieve listenability, he has not had to sacrifice interestingness.  There's a winning balance achieved when, say, the frantic kora-like lines in "No Intention" are laid over laid-back populist (electronic?) handclaps.  And while people love to point out his West African guitar influences, there's a nice chunk of Jimmy Page on this record.  Steve Howe, too, I think, how uncool and great is that?  Sometimes it's a distraction - it's killing me that I've heard "Fluorescent Half-Dome's" melody somewhere else and can't figure out where - but mostly Longstreth's constantly shifting set of ideas and influences are wholly shaped by his concern, whirl around in something that sounds like nothing but the Dirty Projectors.

And because it has so many facets, it can work in different ways at different times.  I found out this past weekend that it sounds great blaring out of speakers out of doors on a sunny day.

Volcano! - Slow Jam(mp3)(buy)

I don't think Longstreth is without a sense of humor, though in the past I've pictured him as a sad sketchbook Orpheus, dolefully dragging his lyre behind him.  (I've only seen his band live once, when they opened for Jarvis Cocker a couple years back, and they were all business.)  One thing missing from his carefully arranged musicspheres is the room to laugh.

Enter (again) Volcano! (myspace). More obvious, less exact, absolutely unafraid to go over the top.  Longstreth will let his bass and/or drums drop out of songs for stretches; the bass line in "Stillness" sounds more like a coffee percolator.  The Projectors coo their crazy, crazy dream.  Volcano!'s a trio, far more reliant on their rhythm section to carve out space and create fits.  When they ply R&B to their post-punk-derived math-rock it's five minutes of the sound of someone stumbling over his own feet.  Embarrassing, convincing.  "Slow Jam" is the World's Worst Seduction, all elbows and course corrections.  "I just want to freak you, didn't mean to freak you out!"  "Got me hiding the cookies!"  Who writes a pick-up line and includes O. Henry and Bob Dole?!  Who wouldn't go home with this guy?

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Emmy and her The Great have rerecorded a quartet of Internet-weary nuggets for a digital/vinyl "Old Songs" EP that will henceforth be included with copies of First Love.  Included are something I've never <strike>stolen</strike> heard of before called "A Bowl Full of Blood" and personal fave "Edward is Dedward" (currently streaming at her/their myspace).  Details on all that here.

Still haven't heard about a proper stateside release for First Love, though at some point Amazon-US started selling the mp3s for cheap and import copies of the CD for not-cheap.  Neither of those have the xtra tracks, though.

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I receive a disheartening amount of PR e-mail every day, read pretty much none of it.  I understand.  New Bands are the We Will Clean Your Gutters! for the 21st century, it makes me hate everything about music, but I understand.

However.  Over the past few days there've been multiple attempts to get my attention by shoving Michael Jackson's name in the subject header.  "X Band Reacts to MJ's Death!"  "X Label's Bands Share Michael Jackson Memories!"  This isn't enterprising, it is disgusting, and my default reaction to all such communicae has gone from "Mark as Read" to "Report Spam."

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‘"1901" sounded so small and peculiar in the context of FM radio, it was as if the song were turning its back to me, turning its back on the listener. Or that it was embarrassed to be there, like Phoenix were sharing a bill with Kenny Chesney, propped up in front of an unreceptive audience. Initially I felt bad, because they can't possibly lift the intellectual siege FM radio is under and are doomed to flop in that space. That hopeless resolve, of a band undefeated but unaccepted, was somehow audible as the song wound down.'

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This series continues to be quality stuff.

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I have both a new laptop and a pledge to use it less than the old one.  Wish me luck.

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"Transformers: ROTF is so long you'll need to wear adult diapers to it. But the movie's pure celebration of the primal urge, and unfiltered living, will make you rejoice in your adult diapers. You'll relieve yourself in your seat with a savage joy, your barbaric yawp blending in with the crowd's screams of excitement... You have a movie that tries to reassure men that they can actually be masters of their reality - but then turns around and says that actually, reality is not real. There's no such thing as the "real world," and the only thing that's left for men to dominate is a nebulous domain of blurred shapes, which occasionally blurt nonsensical swear-words and slang from ethnic groups that have never existed. If you're drowning in an Olympic swimming pool full of hot chewing gum fondue, do you still care if Megan Fox likes you?"

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Michael Bay's keyboard.

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"To quote Bordwell on Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, "ROTF teases us to try to fit its parts into a coherent whole, yet at the same time it provides several indications that such a constructed unity is impossible.... At first it seems possible to piece events together in a chronological fashion.  Only gradually do we realize that the task is hopeless....Transformers 2 breaks with conventional expectations by suggesting, perhaps for the first time in film history, that a narrative film could base itself entirely on a gamelike structure of causal, spatial, and temporal ambiguity, refusing to specify explicit meanings and teasing the viewer with hints about elusive implicit meanings. Critics have too often tried to find a thematic key to the film while ignoring this formal dynamic. Much of ROTF's fascination for the spectator rests in the process of discovering its ambiguity."

tags: dirty projectors  volcano  emmy the great  

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