forrest

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Some songs drift ephemeral like fireflies in dark-summer-skies before street lamps buzz and blend bioluminescence into brightness; others never fade, and when the stars are perfectly aligned and sound waves vibrate the eardrums just right: they last forever, crystallizing within the subconscious subjectives of day-to-day-life; these songs take on the properties of all five senses: the dim orange lighting accompanying the musky smell of a garage-turned-office; weak plush of a thin-hospital-blanket; or the taste of cheap Maruchan you had for dinner the last three nights. Without realizing it, these songs have crept their way into the deepest recesses of your psyche, composing the soundtrack of your life.

Mom always said it was Jackson 5’s ‘I Want You Back,’ playing in the living room in black and white on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when she was sixteen, waiting for her high school sweetheart to buzz the bell before their first date. The same song started serendipitously after sucking-down milkshakes at the diner, minutes before the first kiss near the Pontiac that facilitated the drive home; the die cast, the psychic etching ensured. Fifty-three years later and that diner’s derelict but the music is still as clear as 1969.

Musical Imprintation can’t be forced – it just happens – and the less you think about it, the more likely it is to happen; the music is part of you now, whether you like it or not.

Most recently, for me: it was Black Marble’s ‘Self Guided Tours’ off their 2016 album “It’s Immaterial”; a song twinkling with starry guitar bits over delicately oscillating synthesizers; all innocuous until sub-machine-gun-snares of the drum-machine-persuasion burst into the mix accompanied by a second stuttering guitar line resembling neuroscientists’ attempt at capturing the very same snapping-synapse-sensation of ‘creating psychic-song-etchings’ in a test tube; this is all complimented by a simple bass line with just enough bounce and groove to be catchy; the vocals, low disembodied incantations attempting to summon specters of 80s-past – “you’re the owner of a lonely heart” – float somewhere in the ether alongside quivering synths coloring the choruses. The lyrical content could be about anything, but for me it’s about driving to the Hot Dog Shack to get my wife and I something to eat less than 12-hours after the birth of my son, Arthur.

Video: Black Marble – Self Guided Tours

Merely 48-hours earlier, April 25th, 2023: I was sitting in my dimly lit garage-turned-office with a leaky-water-heater writing an essay on the classic tactical role-playing game “Tactics Ogre” for my virgin computer-games-website ‘oncomputer.games,’ listening to – among other things – “It’s Immaterial” by Black Marble. I was on week-one of six-week-paternity-leave from one of those cartoony-soul-crushing-sales-jobs; the paternity-leave started a week early because my wife was way-overdue and missed two due-dates already; Arthur clearly didn’t want to come out. The next day we had an appointment at the hospital to get my wife induced, or more accurately: our lives changed forever.

And that’s what we did. It was a nice hospital room in the maternity-wing with bright-white-lights that I immediately adjusted to the dimmest possible setting, big windows overlooking a courtyard with flowing curtains that I promptly drew to keep the light out, a wall-mounted and very-ancient-CRT receiving high-definition cable through a coaxial that I immediately tuned to whatever channel played the bass line from Seinfeld (the TV setup, as you can imagine, was true-low-def; the mismatched input-output-combo created terrible picture quality with fuzzy-lines-forever and malformed-aspect-ratios consisting of very-large-black-bars-baked-in). There was also a small blue couch with hard cushions and thin blankets that I slept on a few times before realizing that it folded out into a full-sized-bed.

Without delving into the biologicals-of-birthing (something I will likely never write about), the induction was a success; a beautiful screaming baby boy with a full head of red hair was born on April 27th, 2023 – my wife insists the hair gave her heartburn and after we cleaned him off, we promptly styled that heartburn-hair into a fauxhawk and gave him lots of kisses on the head. My wife held him close, skin-to-skin, and he was ours forevermore. That night, he slept by our side in a transparent bassinet; we woke every few hours to a nurse checking on us and piercing-newborn-cries quickly solved by warm bottles of formula.

We didn’t have a care in the world; working was irrelevant and mortgage payments were immaterial; nothing mattered except what was right there in that spacious hospital room.

We had to stay at the hospital for a few days, primarily so the doctors could test Arthur’s bilirubin-levels (or something) and make sure my wife was fit enough to go home. Naturally, a day after my son’s birth, both my wife and I wanted something-other-than-hospital-food so I decided to take a drive to the local Hot Dog Shack and pick something up; I ordered two large fries and a plain hotdog and she ordered some-sort-of-sausage-thing; so, I packed my things – wallet and keys – and left the hospital for the first time in two days; the double-doors opened for me with infrared sensors (or: Jedi Mind Tricks); the harsh sunlight burned my retinas and the moderate coastal heat felt like a sauna after the cold of the hospital, but I was hungry so I hopped into my Toyota and pressed the modern ignition button; the car revved up and the bluetooth connected my phone to the stereo system and the last song I was listening to in the garage-turned-office started playing.

It was ‘Self Guided Tours.’

I drove through the busy midday roads to that Hot Dog Shack with a back-and-forth bob to the smile on my face, singing loudly and privately along with the music. Happy. And that’s how it happened.

The psychic etching complete; and now, whenever I hear ‘Self Guided Tours’ or – literally – anything from “It’s Immaterial,” I am psychically transported back to that snapshot of late April, 2023. If I had known this etching would occur maybe I would have picked something with relevant lyrical content – something cliched like Will Smith’s version of ‘Just the Two of Us’ – but it just happened.

Before I knew it, Black Marble was part of the soundtrack to my life.

*view from the afternoon; April 28th, 2023.

Black Marble, in its current iteration, is just one guy: Chris Stewart, a once resident Brooklyn New Yorker and bygone fixture of the Brooklyn ‘darkwave’ scene where he – and former bandmate Ty Kube – made a name for themselves as ‘that band that sounds like Joy Division’ by playing at local New York clubs before releasing their first record, “A Different Arrangement,” on October 9, 2012. While it’s easy to point at the Joy Division influences, Black Marble sounds far more like early New Order with some “A Broken Frame”-era Depeche Mode thrown in for good measure. Stewart primarily dons a bass guitar in live shows, playing ultra-repetitive but memorable Peter Hook-styled bass lines, while Kube contributes synthesizers, laying down electronic drum loops and cascades of neon-hued bleeps-and-bloops, with a touch of shimmer and gloom. Stewart and Kube went their separate ways when Stewart left New York for Los Angeles, but – being Stewart’s baby – Black Marble never truly dissolved.

I sort of took the man-of-leisure approach to the city, and after living there for so long, you get to a point where you’re just like, “Well, I’ve been to every party, I’ve been offered crack cocaine by Natasha Lyonne like six times already, or whatever,” and you sort of reach an end … obviously, I’m not with my old bandmate [Ty Kube] anymore and people are like, “What’s up, dude? Is there a rift?” And I always made all of Black Marble’s music, so I was always going to find a friend wherever I was to help. If Ty felt like moving to Los Angeles just to be in my stupid band, he could, but he’s got more shit going on, hopefully, than that. I was just sick of New York, and there isn’t really a better answer than that. -Chris Stewart, 10/18/2026. CLRVYNT Interview.

Chris Stewart had written all the music for “It’s Immaterial” before his move to Los Angeles, and it was written with big-moves-in-mind. This results in an album that – while superficially dark on the surface – flickers effervescently with optimism’s flame; this dichotomy is on full display from the start of the record, with ‘Interdiction’ or: something not dissimilar to a Merzbow track that I would turn off immediately: noise, horror-ambiance, frivolity – a sine scream, electronic oscillations, robots powering-up-and-down-again, futuristic occultations, and more sine screams. ‘Interdiction’ is a ‘mood,’ as someone like Anthony Fantano might say; a horror-driven mood like hungry ghosts escaping from the machine. Black Marble wants you to think this is the ‘essence’ of the record, but that is very much not the case and serves only as an unpleasant waste of time – the opposite of what follows immediately afterwards.

‘Interdiction’ flows into ‘Iron Lung,’ which takes the Peter Hook bass lines and puts them on an Evo Firewire surfboard riding a gnarly wave while Stewart sings in baritone-echo-tones over sparsely-sparkling-synths; it’s obvious ‘single’ material, that one song on every album begging to be overplayed to the point of nausea, and will be. ‘It’s Conditional’ follows, setting the tone with the sound of a marble dropping on hard floor as a reminder that: ‘yes, you are listening to a band with the word ‘marble’ in their name’; and while this all seems very tacky on first read, ‘It’s Conditional’ is one of the most unique stand-out tracks on the album, with all the similar bassy-synths wrapped in moody pop packaging just in time for Halloween.

Video: Black Marble – It's Conditional

And that’s the crux of ‘It’s Immaterial’: not a cemetery at night like the first filler track tricks you into believing, but a moody pop record with hints of beautiful optimism sprinkled throughout that hits all the right nostalgic notes, getting the synapses spinning like a hard drive writing memories in real-time. From the poignant lament of ‘Missing Sibling,’ with its simple reflective chord progression driven by fuzzy bass tones, to the sea-saw synths of ‘Frisk,’ the rubber bands and minigun firing blips-and-bloops of ‘Golden Heart,’ and the starry-skied-and-hopeful electronics of the closing track ‘Collene.’ It’s all very popful; and if you replaced Chris Stewart’s ghostly baritone with Madonna’s mezzo-soprano, you’d have a Billboard Top 100 in no time.

The girl on the supremely iconic “It’s Immaterial” album cover is Halle Saxon Gaines of the Los Angeles-based band Automatic. She stands in front of upper-class suburban coastal homes with a cold, scornful glare into the camera, gesturing in Thelema, dressed in a white collar and black blazer. She is looking down on you, but it’s all a facade; just like your neighborhood crush in high school who, over summer break ‘04, discovered The Cure, dyed her hair black-black, and went full goth: underneath the dark Covergirl eyeliner, black Revlon Colorsilk, and all the doom and gloom, that bubbly girl you used to trade Pokémon cards, explore homes under-construction, and ding-dong-ditch with is still there, about to burst out at the seams.

#music #BlackMarble #Autobiographical

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Charles Manson: “I’m still ten-years-old in your world. In your world, I’m still a kid. I’m not gonna grow up. I’m not gonna go to college.”

Tom Snyder: “How old are you in your world?”

Charles Manson: “Uh … forever since breakfast.”

After the release of 1986’s “Life’s Rich Pageant,” R.E.M. quickly recorded a seven-song EP titled “Forever Since Breakfast,” which flew under the radar without much radio play. Michael Stipe, the band’s frontman and singer, was smoking two packs a day throughout the recording sessions, which resulted in a phlegmy-hoarseness to the vocals that ended up sounding more like a Really Good Michael Stipe Impersonator than Michael Stipe himself; Peter Buck’s guitar playing, apart from the hyper-melodious Byrds-like arpeggios in ‘She Wants to Know,’ could best be described as ‘phoning it in’ but still good enough to complement the vocal-driven hooks (one might say the hooks themselves are guided-by-voices instead of traditional instrumentation); Mike Mills’ bass playing is just lost somewhere in the poor mixing, and Bill Berry’s drumming is unsurprisingly on-point, as usual, pulsing and keeping the beat as one does when banging something with a stick.

The title of the record, “Forever Since Breakfast,” comes from a 1981 interview between Tom Snyder, host of “The Tomorrow Show,” and Charles Manson; the latter of whom was locked up in California Medical Facility – male-only state prison – for seven counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit even more murders; and after three parole petitions were rejected: locked up, pretty much forever (since breakfast); a phrase that Charles Manson himself used in response to Snyder’s aggressive questioning of “How old are you in your world?” to Manson’s obvious psychobabble.

Video: Tom Snyder interviews Charles Manson.

Tom Snyder’s interview style, best described as going-to-the-principal’s-office-when-you’re-twelve (when you didn’t even throw the first punch), often elicited the most virulent responses from his guests, and his guest, in this case – being a total caligula-type – was the perfect ratings-booster (22.2 million viewers!). The ratings needed boosting so badly that “The Tomorrow Show” executive producer, Roger Ailes, paid $10,000 in ‘consultation fees’ to ‘free-lance journalist’ Nuel Emmon (actually just Manson’s prison buddy), who ‘made it happen’; all parties agreed that Emmon was pivotal to securing the interview with the Sorceror of Helter Skelter, thereby solidifying Mr. Snyder and his entire network as certified death-dealers.

Roger Ailes later became CEO of Fox News and was ‘totally not forced to resign’ after multiple sexual assault allegations against him; perhaps paying off friends-of-murderers to secure television interviews is a decent indicator of moral values – something for Fox News to consider next time during the interview process, provided they have moral values themselves (which they don’t).

The irony here is that while paying off a murderer’s friend to secure an interview with said murderer is probably real-bad, we wouldn’t have Guided By Voices’ “Forever Since Breakfast” if the interview had never taken place. Where would Guided By Voices be today without Charles Manson’s neuromythic rantings?

Probably the same place they are today (39-albums-in, as of 2023) just with a different title for their first record, now that I think about it.

*”Forever Since Breakfast” album insert, featuring a young Robert Pollard’s scribblings

Well, I suppose the jig is up; this article is not about an R.E.M. record, but – you guessed it – a Guided By Voices record. Robert Pollard, the 29-year-old ex-school-teacher from Dayton, Ohio and main character of Guided By Voices, was clearly obsessed with R.E.M. during the making of this record, imitating Michael Stipe’s inflection down to a tee and telling guitarist Paul Comstock to ‘sound as much like Peter Buck as possible or you’re fired’ and he was fired by the writing of the next album for – probably – ‘sounding too much like Peter Buck.’ Because, Guided By Voices won’t sound anything like this again for another decade; this being: cohesive, formulaic jangle-pop-rock with plainly-decipherable lyrics and semi-decent production that sounds a lot like R.E.M. And that’s a good thing, or a bad thing, or something – depends on who you ask.

And while there’s no ‘So. Central Rain’ or ‘Radio Free Europe’ here, “Forever Since Breakfast” is still a really good, consistent R.E.M. record, with songs that come very close to the splendor of early R.E.M. If you don’t believe me, just listen to ‘The Other Place,’ a track that sounds like it was inappropriately shelved during the recording of “Murmur”; complete with Stipe-mimicry, vaguely political lyrics – “change has got to come, and I’ll be the first to admit it” – melodious Buck-like arpeggios, and a chorus that kicks you in the head – “don’t you understand anything?!”

Video: Guided By Voices – The Other Place

Guided By Voices already has ‘rockathon’ on the mind because if there’s one thing “Forever Since Breakfast” does better than its inspiration, it’s rock ‘n’ roll. From the beginning, ‘Land of Danger’ bursts into your headspace with a blur of babbling weirdness that shifts suddenly into a chorus of shouts perfect for cross-generational-jumping-up-and-down (that means: music even your flower-power-parents can rock out to). ‘Sometimes I Cry,’ another rockathon, continues to showcase Robert Pollard’s knack for writing immediately accessible hooks right-out-the-gate, cramming so much melody into three minutes that it’s somehow impossible to appreciate on the first listen. Along with ‘Let’s Ride,’ ‘She Wants To Know,’ and ‘The Other Place’ (the latter being my most-repeated), we already have an album that is far more consistent than the next five Guided By Voices albums combined.

And why is that? On “Forever Since Breakfast,” Robert Pollard showcases his superb songwriting ability, with a knack for composing radio-friendly hits; crafting an excellent pop-rock record full of hooks and intricate melodies, a ‘proof of concept,’ but immediately drops this approach with the release of his next full album, “Devil Between My Toes.” Moving into a friend’s 8-track DYI-studio and creating far less accessible music with very dodgy production where the rock-pop only shines through between fuzz-and-drunk, dubbed affectionately by fans as ‘lo-fi.’ Almost like Robert Pollard wanted to prove himself, “look what I can do.” And then, once he did it, moved on to his true passion: Whatever The Fuck He Wanted.

“Oh yeah, we’ve always wanted to go into a big studio. Our first record, Forever Since Breakfast, was [made] in a big studio. We’ve always had no success whatsoever in a big studio. The four-track stuff we started doing in the late eighties or early Nineties sounded to me much better than the big studio stuff. We had more control of it and we did things more spontaneously. We’d go into a big studio and work with these unsympathetic engineers and it just didn’t work.” – Robert Pollard, Mo Ryan Interview. 1996

As always, the truth is simpler than the myth, or is it the other-way-round? “Forever Since Breakfast” wasn’t successful, and Dayton, Ohio’s Guided By Voices consistently faced derision in their local scene as an R.E.M. imposter band with little-to-no fanfare; the album didn’t sell well, putting Robert Pollard’s expectations in check, but he also didn’t have full control of his ambition. The big studio, rented by the hour, didn’t care about his vision or understand his work, and consequently, he couldn’t accomplish everything he wanted. Robert Pollard invested the effort-of-kings, crafting seven catchy pop-rock songs, yet wasn’t appreciated and grew jaded of the big studio experience, leading him to Stop Worrying and Just Do Whatever the Fuck He Wanted instead.

“Forever Since Breakfast” is an impressive 23-minute rockathon that might be a little too R.E.M.-inspired in some places, but it’s worth listening to if you’re interested in the history of the band or just pop music in general. “Forever Since Breakfast” is the ultimate ‘proof of concept’ album for a band in its formative years. Guided By Voices won’t sound this cohesive, focused, and rich until their 1994 hit “Bee Thousand,” with only bits and pieces of this shining through on their next six albums.

“Forever Since Breakfast” is the best R.E.M. record that’s not an R.E.M. record. And that’s fine.

#Music #GuidedByVoices

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Shakedown 2005. I’m real young. I’m a recluse. I’m a wreck. My parents split five years earlier; Mom remarried and moved to a Posh Island Community in Coastal Georgia; Dad remarried but stayed in Atlanta, my hometown. I was given the great honor of choosing which parent’s heart to rip out of their chest and, naturally, I picked Dad because Mom let me do whatever I wanted with no supervision. Years prior, in September 2001, Cowboy Bebop aired on Adult Swim’s programming block, three years after its Japanese airing on TV Tokyo; I watched the whole series in the dim light of way-past-bedtime with one hand on the TV-remote in case the parents wanted to check on me. Two years later, in October 2003, Final Fantasy XI, a massive multiplayer online game, was released on PC and I was on the bleeding edge, consuming it all in real-time; ‘island time,’ as the very-elderly-beach-bum-elite of the Posh Island Community would call it.

Blessed with a rich step-dad, a Dell Dimension 4550, and nowhere to go but down; I had all the bells and whistles a 2000s-kid could possibly want: computer games, big TVs, every modern game console, friends in fantasy worlds, an office to lose myself in, and two girlfriends who didn’t know about each other.

I also had three LiveJournal accounts, two of which were for my roleplaying-character-profiles. None of them exist anymore (I checked). I enjoyed writing; it’s the only artistic thing I’m remotely good at. So, of course, I spent a lot of time in Yahoo! Messenger chatrooms typing up ‘paragraph-style-roleplaying’ with random strangers online.

I was on Adderall (Amphetamines, pretty much ‘speed for children’) from the young age of ten, being diagnosed with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; the medication helped with the writing process. To help get me in the zone, I would listen to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack, specifically – “No Disc,” the third soundtrack released in 1998 by Yoko Kanno’s band SEATBELTS, which was initially created specifically to compose the music for Cowboy Bebop. I enjoyed the song ‘Elm.’ A track consisting of only gentle guitar ringing and a vocal melody of simple, melodious ‘la la la’s’ performed by Pierre Bensusan, French-Algerian acoustic guitarist. This song, best described as both deeply somber and beautifully transcendent, put me in a zen-like state of non-stop writing (and still does, evidenced by this article) and, of course, I would write garbage like:

Edge walks into the tavern with a mean look on his face. He swipes his long blue and red hair out of his eyes before casting a glance over to the bar. The tavern’s lantern light glints off the huge sword on his back. Edge surveyed the room for a moment before he walked to the bar and sat near the pretty girl at the far end. He signals to the bartender, who approaches quickly out of pure fear due to Edge’s coolly intimidating presence. Edge smirks at the girl then at the bartender, “one glass of milk, and another for the lady, on me.” Edge pauses, “actually, make that strawberry milk for the lady.”

Naturally, most of these role-playing sessions would lead to private messaging and in-character textual-love-making between myself and the random stranger, who was most likely much older than I assumed; but I never asked their age, I didn’t care: we were playing characters; It was artistic; It was cool; It was cyber-sexing in abstraction. And to the best of my – rather poor – memory: this was how I learned about the nuances of sex.

Video: SEATBELTS – Elm

SEATBELTS, as Yoko Kanno’s band, is actually a collective of musicians. Yoko Kanno herself functions largely as a writer, producer, and conductor on most tracks, playing only piano and keyboard melodies on records that encompass far more than pianos and keyboards. Occasionally, she sings under the credited pseudonym of ‘Gabriela Robin.’ The collective’s name is derived from the ‘seatbelts the band members have to wear during their hardcore jam sessions.’ Their music transcends consistent labeling; jazz, world music, top-10-pops, metal, rock, lounge, and bluegrass; sometimes within the course of a single song. Often, it feels like a completely different band from track to track, and at times it might as well be due to the sheer number of musicians involved with creating the music. Yoko Kanno’s SEATBELTS are the very definition of eclectic.

*Yoko Kanno, her face very close to a piano.

Anyway, the girlfriends.

The two girlfriends. One was an artist named after a Bob Dylan song; she lived in my old hometown of Atlanta. We liked all the same stuff. She was sad when I moved; and I was too. The other was a girl named after a flower who lived in the Posh Island Community; she was more akin to a venus flytrap than a rose, and I was the fly. I would travel back and forth from Mom and Dad’s house every other month, visiting my Dad for a weekend or so before returning to Mom’s to live – what I felt was – My Real Life. It was multiversal; a quick one-hour plane ride to the other dimension. When I visited Dad, I would focus every ounce of my being on being around the Artist. We would go to a gigantic store called Media Play – which sold anime, manga, DVDs, games, CDs, everything – and just walk around shyly holding hands, barely talking to each other, like young teenagers do. Sometimes, if her parents were present, we would go to her house and watch TV in her roomy basement; usually anime, often Cowboy Bebop. We were inseparable and I was stupid.

Flower Girl was just there, on the Island. She was interested in me, largely because we both liked those terrible early-2000s hardcore bands – Underoath or Alexisonfire or Whatever – and when I would get bored of playing Final Fantasy XI, I would occasionally venture out to see her. My Mom gave me far too much freedom. I would go to her family’s apartment, alone, with no adults around except her incapacitated great aunt who had a gaping hole in her throat; “yes mom, an adult is here with us.” The house smelled of quintessence – cigarette smoke quintessence – which I didn’t recognize until many years later after I started smoking myself. I barely liked the Flower Girl, but with freedom, access to a bed, and utter boredom came fun. A lot of fun. And, of course, Teenagers Having Fun is Very Complicated, especially when you’re Seeing Other People.

I didn’t like the Flower Girl; she was just there. I was using her and hiding it from the person I really liked. I knew what I was doing was wrong; I was lying and I was stupid. So, I broke it off with the Flower Girl, and things got really weird, really fast.

Flower Girl was obsessed and upset. She called me on my Nokia cell phone late one night while I was partying in Final Fantasy XI; I was ‘puller,’ which meant I had to claim the monster and pull it back to camp for the party to kill; Cowboy Bebop was playing on Adult Swim in the background, the episode where the guy with the afro – Hakim – tries to kidnap Ein, the corgi data-dog, while ‘Want It All Back,’ an infectious pop song with bright horns and a ripping guitar melody plays loudly during the exciting mid-episode chase scene.

Video: Cowboy Bebop EP2 “Stray Dog Strut,” scene in which Spike chases Hakim while “Want It All Back” plays.

Then it happens.

Mid-pull, the Flower Girl tells me that she’s pregnant. She says that I should come to her house ‘right now so we can talk about this.’ I stop what I’m doing; the monster never makes it back to camp and attacks my character to death while I stare mindlessly at absolutely nothing.

I turn off the computer manually with the button.

I am fourteen years old.

There was a gaping pit in my belly and a million questions running through my head. What would my parents think? How am I going to take care of this kid? Will I have enough time to keep writing and playing computer games? Is my life ruined? Should I end it all? All I could think about was myself. The Nokia started beeping softly; someone was trying to come through on the other line. It was the Artist; the other girlfriend; we talked every night before bed. I didn’t know what to do. My mind was fried. The Flower Girl kept repeating ‘hello?’ while I was staring at a blank monitor in catatonia.

Quickly and out of pure selfishness, I bluff and tell Flower Girl, ‘I don’t believe you,’ and then hang up on her. Then I turn off my cell phone and lay down on the floor with my face in the carpet. I can hear Cowboy Bebop’s ending theme playing in the background, ‘The Real Folk Blues.’

I deserved this.

I eventually fell asleep and woke up the next day in something resembling a sober hangover. I turned my phone on and text messages started flowing in from both the Flower Girl and the Artist. I ignored them and turned my phone off again. I returned to my office, retrieved my Cowboy Bebop DVD box set, and began watching the series from the beginning while I logged into Yahoo! Messenger and started roleplaying as some new character or other, escaping into virtual insanity.

Cowboy Bebop became my mood and my life. I lived as a complete recluse, hiding from the world; constantly in a state of paranoia, believing that any call or SMS would bring terrible, life-shattering news. I feared that someone, particularly the Flower Girl’s parents, would contact mine about the pregnancy. I tiptoed around the house like a shadow in the corner of an eye, avoiding everyone and everything. I abused Adderall and rarely ate, passing out briefly one time as I swapped out a Cowboy Bebop DVD when Mom was in the room, she was concerned but I talked my way out of it – “I just didn’t eat much today, Mom, I’m fine.”

I convinced myself that if I simply ignored the problem, it would go away. If I wasn’t present to witness it, like a tree falling in the forest, it wouldn’t happen; the Flower Girl’s parents wouldn’t contact my family, and no one would show up at my house with any parental announcements whatsoever. My only comfort was speed, writing, computer games, and SEATBELTS; often all happening at once. It was Teenage Quantum Physics and Vices On Repeat.

*the cast of Cowboy Bebop

In another time, the defining moment of someone’s childhood might have been parents dying in a war, working in a coal mine, or facing some other cosmic horror; mine was pathetic and modern, ‘I got a girl pregnant.’

Or so I thought.

Months of ignoring the problem, attending school as if nothing was wrong – luckily, the Flower Girl went to a different school – and going through all the motions of being a privileged fourteen-year-old kid; eventually, I turned my phone back on and went through all the missed messages. That’s when I saw it, the final message from the Flower Girl.

“I’m sorry, I made it all up. I’m not pregnant.”

I stared at the little Nokia pixels that made up the letters for what must have been thirty-minutes. Speechless. Textless. All the mental anguish, the paranoia, the sneaking around – it was all pointless? She was never pregnant? She made it all up? A great weight had been lifted, but I was never truly the same. During this period of my life, I became reclusive, cynical, gaunt after having lost thirty pounds, and simply wrote and listened to music all day and night on child-approved-speed. And it was all because I turned my phone off and ignored the problem?

I deserved this.

About a week after the initial catatonia, I had been communicating with the Artist through AOL Instant Messenger weekly. I told her my phone was broken, and she believed it. However, after I resumed using my phone and learned ‘the truth,’ I confessed to her about what had happened. She was shattered but said, ‘I forgive you, and we’ll work through it; just promise me I’m the only one now.’ And I promised. I learned my lesson the hard way. It was over now.

Video: SEATBELTS – Cats on Mars

Months later, while listening to ‘Cats on Mars,’ a keyboard-driven piece of bubblegum pop sung in Japanese by ‘Gabriela Robin,’ I received a random message on AOL Instant Messenger from an unrecognizable username. The instant-message was simply a link to an image hosted on Imageshack (a popular image hosting site during the early 2000s, similar to Imgur now). I clicked the link, and it was a picture of a baby with the caption ‘lol.’

The fear, the pit, the paranoia; it all returned in an instant with one instant-message. My mind, fucked. Incensed, I called the Flower Girl, and she plainly told me that she had actually been pregnant but had ‘given the kid up for adoption,’ then scolded me for ignoring her for so long. I asked her why she had told me that she made up the pregnancy, and she said ‘it was easier that way.’ Finally I asked her, ‘then who sent the picture?’ and she said ‘oh, my friend, she got drunk and sent it, I told her not to.’

This wasn’t the truth either. Months later, she told me – again – that she was never pregnant, apologizing and telling me that ‘both my friend and I were drinking and thought it would be funny to send you a random baby picture we found online.’ She made everything up because ‘I wanted to get back at you for leaving me.’

Mindfucked and totally mental; I didn’t know what to believe. My teenage years, from fourteen to sixteen, were filled with this anxious dread, this paranoia of not knowing. Was she ever pregnant? If so, did she actually give the baby up for adoption? Did she really make it up, or did she say that to make me feel better? Was it all really a big prank to get back at me?

She got back at me, alright.

Much later, in my twenties, I spoke with Flower Girl again, and she strongly insisted that she made up the whole thing because she was angry that I dumped her. She claimed that the instances where it circled back, the ‘here’s a picture of your baby, lol,’ were just her ‘being cruel’ with her friends while on a bender – but was this just another lie?

For so long, I felt like Spike Spiegel falling from the church’s stained glass window after his serendipitous battle with Vicious – “You should see yourself. Do you have any idea what you look like right at this moment?” And instead of looking like a ravenous beast, I looked like a scared, lost child. The gorgeous ‘Green Bird,’ a piano driven hymn that sounds like cherubs taunting from on high, plays as I fall endlessly, wishing the ground would hurry up and catch up with me.

Video: Scene from Cowboy Bebop in which Spike and Vicious duel; the song “Green Bird” by SEATBELTS plays as Spike falls out of a stained-glass window.

I looked it up. I checked the family trees. I checked the local birth records. There’s nothing there. It never happened.

I laugh about it now but, at the time, it was terrible.

But it wasn’t all terrible. Surely, I would not be the same person I am now without the Flower Girl and the SEATBELTS. Yoko Kanno was there for me; comforting me in a darkness of my own making; my guide and my only friend. The eclecticism of the music found throughout Cowboy Bebop, a show that, without the SEATBELTS, would have been far worse than it lucked-out to be, eventually inspired me to explore jazz and other genres of music I never would have considered otherwise.

As of writing this, I am 30-something-years-old, married to the love of my life, and have two children. I’m doing well. But I will never forget the time when Yoko Kanno and her SEATBELTS were my everything.

#music #autobiographical #anime #SEATBELTS

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When seraphs sell out they do so on such high notes that their fanatics can’t help but cover their ears from the sheer splendor of it all. Enochian utterances, once the source of many an exploded head – only rarely translated through the scribbling of independent (and very hardy) prophets – are now replaced with Plain English Gospel on High Directly to the Masses. The very hardy prophets are now out of work, and the dedicated faithful, prideful of their sacred occult enjoyments, are now resentful that their cupids come to wider audiences – “are we not the chosen few, the special ones?” Thou hast cast them down into destruction. These newcomers – “those that pretend to believe” – are not worthy; ephemerals and fad-chasers, blasphemers and worth-nothings.

“I liked Cocteau Twins before it was cool.”

The pretension revealed: one might assume that spreading the joy is of utmost importance, yet these situations strip away the persona, revealing the pure vanity underneath – the vanity of fandom. This is the story of Cocteau Twins’ seventh studio album, 1993’s “Four-Calendar Café”; a stripped-back record that sounds more like The Sundays than Cocteau Twins; an album where the seraphical Elizabeth Fraser’s previously unintelligible babblings are replaced with plain English and guitar wizard Robin Guthrie has layered only two guitar tracks on each song, as opposed to a whopping six hundred. The result is pure pop brilliance that cleaved a rift down the middle of the Cocteau Twins fanbase. Adding fuel to the fire, the Twins jumped ship from their old label, 4AD, to a major record label; Capitol Records in the US and Mercury Records in the UK – a move that ardent fans saw as akin to sleeping with the enemy.

“Four-Calendar Cafés” is named after an autobiographical book by William Least Heat-Moon, “Blue Highways,” in which the author – having recently divorced and lost his job – traveled America on old beaten highways, ranking cafés by the number of calendars hanging on their walls. This, of course, assumes that Cocteau Twins’ seventh album is only four calendars worth of quality, which, depending on your perspective of time and/or ranking systems, is either middling or maximum quality.

(Many critics, including the late, great Roger Ebert, use a star system where “four stars” represent the maximum; this is arbitrary. Summing up the quality of a work via numerical values (stars or gross profits or otherwise) is insufficient and devalues the effort and essence of the work in question; this is why I largely consider ‘music/film/book/(art) critique’ silly and try to stay within the subjective lines of ‘well, I liked it and maybe you will to!’ or the opposite, and will never provide a score for any artistic work ever; of course, after this dual consciousness completes, I will immediately contradict myself, as one often does.)

“Four-Calendar Café” is easily four calendars’ worth of quality. The Twins have crafted a stripped-back, subdued record that still swirls in both effervescent and lugubrious dreamstuff, rivaling the mood-mapping of all their previous work and then some. This becomes quickly apparent from the first half of the album, where ‘Know Who You Are At Every Age’ sets the mood with a lazy late afternoon drum fill that morphs into even lazier bongo beats, backed by the silken strumming of a virginal guitar and a second guitar deflowered only by the languid echoing onomatopoeia of waves slowly swashing sandcastles on the beach in chilly Autumn. Years prior, this song would have been overwrought with guitar overdubbing and vociferous effects-laden tones in an attempt to force the mood out of the instruments, but here, Robin Guthrie manages to capture the ambiance without the exaggeration.

Video: Cocteau Twins – Know Who You Are At Every Age

“I’ve consciously been stripping things back. In the past, I’ve always wanted one more overdub, one more melody, because I’m terrible for thinking that my music isn’t good enough. So if I put in a few more frilly overdubs, then it’ll be alright. These ones are more substantial. The ideas are more focused.” –Robin Guthrie on “Four-Calendar Café,” Cocteau Twins Fansite

This practice of ‘stripping things back’ is evident throughout the entire record, showcasing a laser focus in sharp contrast to the chaotic album art by Walter Wick of “I Spy” fame. Songs like ‘Oil of Angels’ feature only keyboards, calming backbeats, and melodious guitar plucking that serves simply to highlight Elizabeth Fraser’s angelic choruses; her soprano remains as indescribable as ever, even when the lyrics are in English, often trailing off into the chirruping of exotic birds, creating a relaxing trance of a song that could only be crafted by the occult alchemy of Cocteau Twins.

*Elizabeth Fraser on 9/11/1993 issue of Melody Maker for the release of “Four-Calendar Café”

Tracks like ‘Evangeline’ and ‘Theft, Wandering Around Lost’ stand out as two of Elizabeth Fraser’s most emotional pieces on an already incredibly soulful album that is, essentially, a breakup record at its core. Fraser and Robin Guthrie, once self-described ‘soulmates,’ were in the middle of a breakup, or had already broken up; the minutiae of their private lives are hazy (as they should be), but Fraser, through her vulnerable lyrics, is uncharacteristically transparent about the ‘why’ of their separation. Fraser, intimately linked with Robin for the entirety of Cocteau Twins’ existence (14 years at this point) and mother of his child, sings incredibly potent lines such as “Sorrow – for letting someone else define you know who you are at every age” on ‘Evangeline’ and “Are you the right man for me? Are you safe? Are you my friend?” on ‘Bluebeard,’ two very alien yet poppy singles that charted higher than anything the Twins had released thus far. The tension during the recording of these songs, nay: the entire album – the subject matter of which should have been obvious to Guthrie – must have been palpable; however, this tension never negatively impacted the music. Instead, this tumultuous breakup, the raw emotion of the whole thing, resulted in the most focused and, absolutely, the most human of Cocteau Twins’ otherworldly discography.

Video: Cocteau Twins – Evangeline

From the moment Evangeline’s chorus kicks in, we are consumed and ‘there is no going back.’ We are fully part of it. Quite possibly the Cocteau Twins’ greatest song, alongside ‘Heaven or Las Vegas,’ ‘Cherry-Colored Funk,’ and ‘Lorelei.’ The pure pop of ‘Bluebeard,’ which sounds very similar to their contemporaries The Sundays (who were themselves largely influenced by Cocteau Twins) and ‘Squeeze-Wax’ with its beautifully bouncy guitar riff complementing Fraser’s fluttering vocals and seamless middle eight section that feels like it was Simply Meant To Be, serve to raise the album from languishing in pure lovelost with a reminder that you are, essentially, listening to a pop record – a pop record that may or may not have been recorded on an alien planet or in the otherworldly realm of the religion of your choosing. By the time ‘Pur’ comes along – the final song on the album, an ode to Fraser’s daughter that erupts mid-song into a lush haze reminiscent of Cocteau Twins’ earlier work – you have already replayed every song on the record at least five times, artificially extending the 41-minute runtime to 205.

Upon its 1993 release, “Four-Calendar Café” stood as Cocteau Twins’ most accessible album, boasting two largely successful singles and a performance of ‘Bluebeard’ on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.” The Twins had finally achieved commercial success. By this time, however, they had already inadvertently spawned entire subgenres of rock music, including dreampop and shoegaze, and a direct line can be drawn from Cocteau Twins to the success of bands such as Lush, My Bloody Valentine, and Slowdive. The point is that Cocteau Twins were simply themselves and nothing more; they didn’t consciously ‘sell out’; they had been progressing in this direction since their previous album, “Heaven or Las Vegas,” and “Four-Calendar Café” was a natural continuation into more stripped-back, accessible pop music. Fans eventually warmed up to this album, but initially railed on it for departing from their noisy goth roots – but who cares? The music is Beyond Good. Fandoms, as a hivemind, often make the mistake of assuming that widespread popularity dilutes the artistry or that ‘accessibility’ equates to a ‘dumbing down’ of the craft; these are mere correlations, not causations, and these assumptions frequently lead to missing out on Some Really Good Stuff.

With that being said, if “Four-Calendar Café” is what happens when seraphs sell out, then count me among the faithful who can only be so lucky as to bask in the ethereal splendor that arises when celestials leave their multidimensional plane to explore the complexities of our three-dimensional mortal sorrows, joys, and everything-elses.

#music #CocteauTwins

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My Bloody Valentine was formed in 1987 after Bilinda Butcher picked up a guitar and started singing ethereal death melodies about sex into a microphone.

Actually, that’s not true; My Bloody Valentine was founded much earlier by friends Kevin Shields and Colm Ó Cíosóig, who met at a karate tournament as teenagers in Dublin, Ireland, circa 1979. Kevin was an exceptional guitarist influenced by the Ramones, Johnny Marr’s melody-making in The Smiths, and the forsaken spider-web noir of Siouxsie’s Banshees, and Colm was a hard-hitting punk drummer of similar tastes; the two got along instantly and later formed My Bloody Valentine along with singer David Conway, the former of whom would later leave the band to pursue a career in writing, leaving Kevin Shields as the sole creative force behind the band’s music.

(All members now insist that they weren’t aware that the name “My Bloody Valentine” was the title of a slasher film from 1981; likely a “we thought of it first” saving-of-face because of how edgy the band name sounds (that’s what I’d do). To this day, whenever I talk to people about My Bloody Valentine, they think I’m referring to some mid-2000s screamo band, so now I just don’t talk about them at all unless I know the person is on my “musical wavelength.” Of course, anyone who knows My Bloody Valentine knows that they claimed the name as their own, and it’s now almost exclusively associated with them, their excellence defining the words themselves.)

My Bloody Valentine went through numerous lineup changes and released a handful of EPs of middling quality before recruiting Bilinda Butcher in 1987. Bilinda wasn’t anything special; well, she was, but not when it came to playing the guitar, of which she would be playing rhythm, and her singing was amateur at best. However, there was a haunting innocence in her tenor that complemented the band’s playful, feedback-ridden doom and gloom. My Bloody Valentine had The Smiths’ melodies but was missing the Aztec human sacrifice of Siouxsie and the Banshees. In short, they were missing a crucial piece of the puzzle, and Bilinda was that missing puzzle piece; she fit perfectly, and with her inclusion: My Bloody Valentine became what we know them as today.

*Ecstasy and Wine insert, left to right: Colm Ó Cíosóig (drums), Bilinda Butcher (guitar/vocals), Debbie Googe (bass), and Kevin Shields (guitar/vocals)

To understand My Bloody Valentine’s early sound, one has to grasp what was happening in the Scottish music scene during the early ‘80s. Well, not really; one just has to listen to the increasingly hard-to-find early recordings of My Bloody Valentine, but context never hurts. There were two very important bands in Scotland during this era. One is well-known: The Jesus and Mary Chain, two brothers (William and Jim Reid) with a drum machine who made feedback-riddled bedroom pop influenced by surf rock, specifically the Beach Boys. The other was the lesser-known but very influential band The Pastels, led by Stephen McRobbie.

The Jesus and Mary Chain released their debut album “Psychocandy” in 1985 and, with that, pioneered a genre later dubbed “noise pop,” which would eventually spin off into the vacuum cleaner sound of “shoegaze.“ Noise pop was just that — very noisy guitar pop full of feedback and distortion, heavily influenced by the Beach Boys, The Byrds, and other guitar pop bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Video: The Jesus and Mary Chain – My Little Underground

The Pastels formed in 1981 and spearheaded the “anorak pop” movement in Glasgow, Scotland a genre named after the brand of jacket, ‘anorak,’ a form of parka often worn by perceived simple ‘low-class’ children and teenagers at the time. This style of music, adjacent to noise pop, can be best described as hook-driven primitive pop music, ‘purposely’ of an untrained poor quality – something a child might produce in their bedroom on play instruments; a willful naivete, escapism with lyrics about young love, playing kickball, and doing chores – or whatever kids did back then. Not so much a movement as a transparent deflection of criticism at the musician’s perceived (and often very real) lack of talent (“we’re not supposed to sound good – we’re anorak pop!”). This genre eventually branched off into “twee,” which is so saccharine that it is indistinguishable from sickening; and while it may seem like I have a disdain for this genre of music, The Pastels are a clear exception as they produced some incredibly catchy music that featured both a male and female vocalist sharing singing duties, often within the same song as a form of “singing back and forth to each other,” as heard on one of the greatest pop songs ever written — ‘Nothing to be Done.’

Video: The Pastels – Nothing to be Done

(I was obsessed with both The Pastels and twee pop for a brief period in 2008, where I actually formed a band called “The Crayons,” influenced by The Pastels. We eventually changed our name to “Golly Gee,” but the band disbanded due to competition for the only girl in the band’s affection between myself and the guitarist, who is one of my only ‘real’ friends to this day. Like The Pastels in the early ’80s, their influence reached out into the 2000s and affected even myself.)

While My Bloody Valentine was based in Ireland, the Scottish influence of both The Pastels and Jesus and Mary Chain sailed over the Irish Sea and can be heard throughout My Bloody Valentine’s early recordings, surfacing with full power in their 1987 EP, “Sunny Sundae Smile,” in which a still malformed version of the band, led by vocalist David Conway, played fuzzy guitars over childlike pop songs that were secretly about necrophilia (‘Paint a Rainbow’) – “Earthen trail of slimy goo; I smear it on your cheeks like rouge” – and incest (‘Sunny Sundae Smile’) – “Close your eyes and let’s pretend we’re little children once again!” (The Crayons covered this song). This cemented My Bloody Valentine’s intention to subvert listeners’ expectations: they sounded grandma-sweet but were actually singing about Doing It With Dead People; their music was simple verse-chorus-verse-chorus jangle pop at its core but it was washed in layers of nasty guitar feedback.

“(we wanted to play) the most beautiful songs with the most extremeness of physicality and sound” – Kevin Shields, The Guardian, 2021

Later in 1987, David Conway left the band to pursue writing, and Bilinda Butcher was recruited. My Bloody Valentine then released their greatest material to that point: two EPs, one titled “Strawberry Wine” and another called “Ecstasy.” Both of these are combined on the 1989 compilation album “Ecstasy and Wine,” which happens to be the topic of this long-winded essay. Kevin Shields now has full reign over the band’s direction, and as a result, there is a mastery of what came before: the wistful twee pop melodies have been perfected and the guitar feedback sounds less forced and more a natural extension of the music.

The album starts with the track ‘Strawberry Wine,’ taking full advantage of Bilinda Butcher’s vocals to add a ghostly choral harmony over the entire song. This use of vocals is reminiscent of how Kevin Shields would layer multiple guitar tracks to create unique walls of sound on future albums, particularly on “Loveless.” Following up from this is the monumental 2-minute pop epic ‘Never Say Goodbye,’ in which Kevin and Bilinda play the role of lovers singing back and forth to each other in alternating verse, similar to The Pastels’ ‘Nothing to be Done,’ only released a year earlier – possibly a case of the influenced influencing the influencers.

Video: My Bloody Valentine – Never Say Goodbye

“Ecstasy and Wine” functions as both its own complete album, full of well-crafted infinitely repeatable pop songs, but also a precursor to everything My Bloody Valentine becomes known for later on. Tracks like ‘(Please) Lose Yourself In Me,’ ‘Can I Touch You,’ and ‘Clair’ with their deep basslines and lazy sludge-like progression hint at many of the songs on their first official LP, 1988’s “Isn’t Anything,” specifically tracks such as ‘Soft As Snow (But Warm Inside)’ and ‘Cupid Come,’ all of which are about sex in one form or another (an ongoing theme throughout all their music). Every song is laced with a layer of fuzzy proto-shoegaze noise hovering over shimmering guitar melodies.

The near perfect pop found on “Ecstasy and Wine” is never this crystal clear again with My Bloody Valentine; progressively washed away in noise with each additional release. Tracks such as the Bilinda Butcher-led ‘She Loves You No Less’ (my favorite cut on the album), ‘I Don’t Need You,’ and ‘You’ve Got Nothing’ are some of the most hook-laden guitar pop you’ll find outside of The Smiths’ ‘This Charming Man.’ My Bloody Valentine’s future work on “Loveless” and other EPs, including tracks such as ‘Thorn,’ ‘Honey Power,’ ‘Off Your Face,’ and ‘When You Sleep,’ borrows from these pop elements generously but never quite reaches the same level of joyful bounciness found on “Ecstasy and Wine,” an album that showcases a band on the verge of revolutionizing rock music but also just a really solid four-piece with an excellent grasp of melody.

My Bloody Valentine may have gone on to change rock music forever, but before that, they were making some of the best jangle pop (secretly) about sex that you will ever hear in your life.

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(This entire album is on YouTube; but YouTube is awful and I wouldn’t advocate supporting them. Outside of purchasing the album directly from the band, which you can’t even do anymore, you can find it on Archive.org or simply send me a private message and I’ll send you a zipped copy. Trust me, it’s worth it. My first experience with My Bloody Valentine was Loveless, after hearing Billy Corgan mention it in an interview when I was really young; a timeless classic (actually for real), but hard to get into. To this day, I find myself more in the mood for Ecstasy and Wine over Loveless, and, considering the classic deserted island hypothetical, would likely pick Ecstasy and Wine over Loveless 9 times out of 10.)

#music #MyBloodyValentine

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The now defunct British music newspaper Record Mirror asked Mark Hollis, principal singer-songwriter of the band Talk Talk, in 1982 what his greatest ambition was; Mark’s response was “owning a car.” When asked about his greatest heroes, he said “mum and dad.” His top musical influence was “Burt Bacharach,” and his favorite film was “A Clockwork Orange.” His ideal holiday was “New York,” and his favorite drink was “Gin.”

When asked about his first love, Mark Hollis gave the nickname of his childhood sweetheart: “Flick.” He would go on to marry and have two children with Flick, living with her for the rest of his life.

Reading the 1982 Record Mirror profile of Mark Hollis, one gets the impression that he was an everyman; someone who never intended to be a pop star, someone with the humility (or wisdom) to stay out of the spotlight. He longed for a peaceful life, a slow fade into a pastoral backdrop, with down-to-Earth hopes and dreams; so it’s not surprising that when asked about his ‘ultimate dream,’ Mark Hollis replied, “drinking gin in my Aston Martin DB6 around New York,” or: a criminally good time.

Mark Hollis’ father had a different dream, a failed dream, that of becoming a famous musician; some fathers’ failures are so potent they simply cannot fade into the pastoral backdrop; they must be inherited by the children; the dream must live on for as long as it takes to manifest in the physical plane.

This was reality for young Mark Hollis: his father, an unsuccessful musician, insisted that both Mark and his older brother, Ed, pursue music above all else. Influenced by his father, Mark learned to play both piano and guitar at a young age but never felt confident in his musical ability and despite his father’s dreams, in 1975, Mark chose to pursue Child Psychology at the University of Sussex.

The love of music instilled by his father never faded, and confidence can be a tricky beast; often, an outward appearance of confidence, regardless of the trembling-inside, can be enough to trick others into believing you’re the real deal; this is the case for charlatans and businessmen, which are (more often than not) synonymous; however, this confidence trick is much harder for artists, as perfectionism runs deep in the artistic mind and you can’t fake a beautiful painting or a hit song; fortunately, confidence can come from the most unsuspecting of places, and in Mark Hollis’ case: morons who couldn’t play instruments and sang about anarchy while being signed to a major record label – the Sex Pistols.

The classic motivation of, “if those idiots can do it, then so can I.”

By punk, I am convinced that musical technique is of minor importance. My feeling is that the strength, the zest in music is much more important. In fact the most important. That’s why I felt attracted to punk. –Mark Hollis, Oor Interview, April 1986

Inspired by the Pistols, Mark Hollis formed his own band, The Reaction, and collaborated with his older brother Ed Hollis to write and record a short two-minute song titled ‘Talk Talk Talk Talk.’ A song about the double-speak of officials and the chess-like courtship rituals of Words Don’t Mean What You Think They Mean. In his signature trembling voice, Mark Hollis explodes, “All you do to me is talk, talk!” Embodying the spirit of the everyman who desires only to return to a simpler time; a core tennant of minimalism found throughout all of Mark Hollis’ work.

Mark’s brother and early collaborator, Ed Hollis, was already a manager of a semi-well-known pub-rock band, and had connections within the local London music scene, allowing him to put Mark in contact with Lee Harris, Paul Webb, and Simon Brenner, responsible for drums, bass, and keyboards, respectively. ‘Talk Talk Talk Talk’ underwent a synth-inspired reworking for the post-punk era, losing two ‘talks’ in the process and metamorphosing into ‘Talk Talk.’ After another hook-up from Mark’s brother, a demo was recorded in Island Records studios and eventually the song was sent to EMI, leading to Talk Talk’s signing for a record deal in 1981.

Thus, Talk Talk was born and Father Hollis’ dream was closer to becoming reality.

*Talk Talk 1982; ”The Party’s Over” record insert: Simon Brenner, Lee Harris, Paul Webb, Mark Hollis (respectively)

From the very beginning, Mark Hollis wanted Talk Talk to be something different from his radio-friendly contemporaries, specifically Duran Duran and other ‘New Romantic’ bands of the early ‘80s. But this wish was self-sabotaged by being on the same label as Duran Duran (EMI), having their first record produced by Colin Thurston (the same producer for Duran Duran), a band name of a word repeated, and going on tour as Duran Duran’s opening band in 1982 for exposure; possibly cementing the public’s view of Talk Talk as another Duran Duran, but one look at the band members and, most importantly, one listen to Talk Talk’s music says otherwise.

“Our songs are about tragedy… human tragedy; like the title track, The Party’s Over, that’s about someone who’s past their prime and won’t actually acknowledge the fact. They’re striving for what they used to be and looking ridiculous. It’s just the conflict between trying to attain something more than you are, which is a good thing, and the parody of actually doing it. It’s just an observation. Tragedy’s what I feel most at home with.” – Mark Hollis, Record Mirror, 5/8/1982

Talk Talk in 1982 is Duran Duran without the makeup, hair dye, lust for attention, silly headbands, fraudulent air of nobility, and pretty much everything else that makes Duran, well, Duran; and while “The Party’s Over” may start with a shimmering synth line reminiscent of something from Duran Duran’s 1981 album “Rio,” once Mark Hollis starts singing, it immediately becomes apparent that we’re in for a darker and far less superficial experience.

‘Talk Talk’ starts with a pounding drum fill, basslines that sound like plucking rubberbands stretched between two fingers with as much slack as possible, and two layers of synthesizers: a lead synth resembling the melody of a twisted children’s carousel and a second computer game bounce that Sega likely borrowed for their 1988 Megadrive soundchip, all dominating the mix before Mark Hollis’ distinct vocals take charge. Here, Hollis sounds angrier than he will for the remainder of the album, with his voice trembling and seemingly on the verge of bursting into a fit of rage before calming down a bit in the subsequent track ‘It’s so Serious’ — very much a sister-song of swirling synths and cynical yet vulnerable subject matter.

Some tracks are driven solely by Paul Webb’s rubberband basslines and Lee Harris’ energetic industrial drumming while Mark’s vocals haunt the mix before bursting with synthesizer splendor only during the chorus, as evidenced in the standout ‘Today,’ the album’s strongest single, partially propelled by a chanting of the title and Hollis’ ghostly vocals naturally echoing through the valleys of his own emotional caterwauling. This organically leads into ‘The Party’s Over,’ which drops subtle hints as to the direction of Talk Talk’s later work with its minimal soundscapes driven by simple yet subdued synths and a lazily-captivating bassline that builds to a moody tsunami of a chorus before returning to calmer yet now forever rippling waters.

Video: Talk Talk – Candy

‘Candy’ serves as the thematic and literal finale to both the album and its titular track; a successor song incorporating Father Hollis’ and Burt Bacharach’s influences by layering a minimal-piano-pop nocturne in lockstep with the odd drum timings and that ghostly-wail of a vocal line, something later Talk Talk albums expand upon considerably. On both ‘Candy’ and ‘The Party’s Over,’ easily the album’s strongest tracks, Mark Hollis’ haunting vocals are used to full effect, showcasing his impressively loud range; constantly quavering on the verge of tears, of either sorrow or joy quizzically, echoing upon itself into a spectral wall of sound that effortlessly blends into the surrounding doomed landscapes; this effect draws some similarities to Talk Talk’s distant contemporaries, the Cocteau Twins, where Elizabeth Fraser’s vocals serve less to communicate lyrical content and more as an additional instrument within the arrangement.

While unique and full of promise, Talk Talk’s “The Party’s Over” is a mixed bag: very much a synthpop record with simple song structures, with the first-half’s blatant pop bleeding into the second-half’s moody atmospherics that are just accessible enough not to be entirely off-putting to an audience clearly intended to be Duran Duran fans. Singles such as the self-referential ‘Talk Talk’ became brief dance-club favorites, and the music video played on MTV in its infancy; the latter being a practice Mark Hollis would go on to protest in his iconic music video for ‘It’s My Life,’ rebelliously composed of only stock animal footage and brief shots of the singer with a censorship bar over his mouth. Based on Mark Hollis’ later work, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that “The Party’s Over” was not a natural extension of himself, but rather a product of the time and, more specifically, EMI’s commercial sensibilities, with only sparse pieces of Mark Hollis’ true-self inserted whenever he could get away with it.

In Mark Hollis’ own words, “It’s just the conflict between trying to attain something more than you are, which is a good thing, and the parody of actually doing it.”

“The Party’s Over” is the parody of actually doing it; a time capsule of a band in it’s formative years. An album easily surpassed by their next album, which, in turn, was easily surpassed by the album after that, and again after that, forming a cyclical epic leading to the eventual creation of two genre-defining albums: “Spirit of Eden” and “Laughing Stock,” which led to a wave of imitators that could never quite reach Mark Hollis’ level of genuine, down-to-Earth brilliance – but that’s a story for another four articles.

What matters here is that Father Hollis’ dream had come true: his boy had made it, and the party had just started.

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(Provided my attention span holds (it won’t), this is likely the first in a series of articles about each Talk Talk album with a focus on telling the story of Talk Talk and Mark Hollis. I like Talk Talk a lot, so of course, it’s all biased all the way down. And it will likely be awhile before I write another entry, as it took far more research than my more simple opinion pieces; the bits about Mark Hollis’ father are shaky at best as they’re solely based on information in one article. Conclusion: I’m sure I got something wrong somewhere. The gist of the story, however, is correct, and like all history: the game of telephone facilitates the creation of legends. Special thanks to Snow in Berlin, an excellent Talk Talk fansite that cataloged seemingly every Talk Talk interview ever, from which all the quotes and historical stories are pulled from.)

#music #TalkTalk

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Three vodka tonics deep into the hotel bar and you really should be getting back to your room before something stupid happens. There’s a deal-closing sales presentation you have to speak to tomorrow morning, but a low whisper that sounds miles away yet oh-so-close destroys your common-senses; following the voice through a trail of smoke that twists and turns through hallways decorated with once elegant, white wallpaper now jaundiced with tobacco stains; you enter a dimly-lit backroom where everything coalesces: the whisper was actually the smooth-talking-baritone of the enigmatic frontman of the hotel’s four-piece house band, Arctic Monkeys; a thin young man with slicked-back chocolate hair accented by a thin goatee-mustache-combo, yellow-tinted glasses, and a cheap white sports jacket draped last-minute over a black t-shirt and some blue-jeans. The frontman leans forward into the microphone above an ancient Steinway piano, a moody melody drifts through smoky fog before starting on his signature seductive croon, “I’m a big name in deep space, ask your mates.”

You glance at your watch: it’s 23:31:47 – Moon time. Then suddenly, you remember where you are: that once all-important sales presentation now melting away into the red polymeric foam that you melted into just moments ago. With a flick of the wrist, you order another vodka tonic and slide a pack of cheap cigarettes out of the left pocket of your black khakis; the match takes three strikes before you add some smoke of your own into the room. The music pauses, giving you a chance to flirt a glance at the massive blue marble looking down at you through the nearby window, interrupted by the groove of a lone bassline as the scrappy frontman tosses his white jacket onto the piano behind him, steps up to the standing microphone, and says, “This next one’s called Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino.”

Alex Turner, frontman and principal songwriter of Arctic Monkeys, pictured during the 2018 Maida Vale BBC sessions

This is “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.” A loose concept album following the house band of a luxury four-out-of-five-star resort on the Moon, a hotel-casino erected and named after the location of Apollo 11’s 1969 Moon landing; Neil Armstrong proclaimed, at 20:17:58 – Moon time, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

The Eagle has, indeed, landed.

“Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” is Ziggy Stardust sung by the millennial equivalent of Bryan Ferry, which amounts to Arctic Monkeys’ crowning achievement: their masterwork. Entirely written by Alex Turner, frontman and principal songwriter, on a gifted Steinway Vertegrand piano after feeling stuck with guitar music following the overwhelming success of their previous album, “AM”; the result is a saturnine jazzy-mood-piece driven by piano melodies supported by subdued but incredibly funky basslines and a light seasoning of electric guitar that manages to capture all the contradictions: introspective and arrogant, modern and retro, lounge and rock ‘n’ roll, very stupid and incredibly intelligent.

Like every great album, “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” transports you to a location in time and space; this place happens to be the science-fiction in Alex Turner’s head: a scenic space resort with a seedy underbelly – and we will be covering a sampling of what this resort has to offer.

“I liked the idea of naming the album after a place, because to me records that I’ve been in love with and continue to be in love with feel like they’re places that you can go for a while.” –Alex Turner, Billboard, 2018

Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino is a resort you’ll want to stay checked into for a long while.

‘Star Treatment’ starts the record with the strike of a single piano key and a big-band drum roll, signifying something different is going on with the Monkeys. Moony synths and forlorn “oohs” and “aahs” sprinkled throughout, and not a single rhythm guitar in earshot before Alex Turner’s baritone comes in at the forefront of the mix, as if he’s singing only to you in an empty bar. “I just wanted to be one of The Strokes,” he sings, kicking off the self-deprecation hiding underneath the glossy science-fiction surface that also serves as an introduction to the fading frontman of the Tranquility Base house band; this fading frontman could easily be Alex Turner twenty years after the writing of this record, a washed-up version of himself that might say something like, “What do you mean you’ve never seen Blade Runner?” — a movie older than Turner himself.

In what might be the second-funkiest bassline on any Arctic Monkeys’ record to date, ‘One Point Perspective’ serves as the drunken aftermath following a night of lounge singing, as our faded frontman retires to his penthouse suite in a stupor, singing to only himself in the mirror and … “Bear with me, man, I lost my train of thought,” he sing-says before a perfectly timed pause, gathering his thought-train into another drunken karaoke; “Dancing in my underpants, I’m going to run for government,” crooning his take on Earth’s politics before hinting at the planet’s fate with mentions of “shining cities on the fritz” and a man-made apocalypse that “finally gets prioritized.” The frontman — at this point impossible to distinguish the real one from the fake one — then shifts into an impressive nostalgic falsetto, reminiscing about listening to the soundtrack of his favorite documentary while driving on Earth’s motorways before ultimately questioning if it was all just in his imagination.

Both ‘Star Treatment’ and ‘One Point Perspective’ combine into the title track ‘Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino,’ an epic poem told through the narration of the hotel’s receptionist, Mark, who details the unique and oftentimes very strange guests he has to deal with, from hot tub lounge lizards who think they’re Jesus Christ, to wannabe-folk-hero Moms late to their protest songs after getting expensive salon treatments, and finally the lowlife mafioso trying to cop a feel of every young woman in the casino: “Pull me in close on a crisp eve, baby; kiss me underneath the Moon’s side boob.”

Video: Arctic Monkeys – Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino

Mark sees it all and tells us all about it to the backdrop of the funkiest bassline on the record and a shimmering piano melody before reaching the sinister bridge that mirrors the dark underworld of the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino; a place where the rich gather, literally floating above it all, and pretend to be tuned into the suffer-frequencies of those still on Earth all the while participating in the never-ending sexual deviance that humanity can’t seem to shake, regardless of how resplendent the venue happens to be.

The last song we’ll cover is ‘Four Out Of Five,’ the first single released for the record. ‘Four Out Of Five’ functions as the marketing pitch for both the literal and fictional “Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino.” In the literal sense, it is an accessible pop song with a catchy sing-along chorus and elements reminiscent of the older Arctic Monkeys style filtered through a Post-Bowie-Glam-Rock amplifier; a bright light of pop music meant to draw in the figurative moths. In the fictional sense, it serves as an advertisement of the Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino directly from the mouth of its creator, who acts as the narrator for this five-minute science fiction marketing pitch for the resort he toiled so tirelessly to create.

“Take it easy for a little while; come and stay with us, it's such an easy flight; cute new places keep on popping up; since the exodus, it's all getting gentrified; I put a taqueria on the roof, it was well reviewed: four stars out of five, and that's unheard of.” –Arctic Monkeys. “Four Out of Five.” Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino. 2018.

‘Four Out Of Five’ paints a vivid picture of the fictional Moon world that we, in the real world, can only visit for 40 minutes at a time; a microcosm of the album’s overall setting. It introduces one of its core themes: distractions, particularly technological distractions. This theme borders on full-blown technophobia, referencing social media and virtual realities that disconnect us from real-human-contact and lead to real-human-sadness.

Taking the digital criticism even further, ‘Four Out Of Five’ draws from Neil Postman’s concept of the ‘information-action ratio’ both by name-dropping it as a location ‘around Clavius’ (one of the largest craters on the Moon) and conceptually; this concept examines the actions people take upon receiving information and how we have been oversaturated with trivialized, contradictory, and sometimes pointless information to the point where we now partake in stupid-action-at-a-distance; in this way, the world of Tranquility Base is a lot like our own, more akin to “Brave New World” than “1984.” It’s a world where stupid-information-overload makes us forget about all the Bad Stuff going on and focus only on all the Stupid Stuff going on instead; ignoring the impending ‘meteor strike’ mentioned only in passing by Tranquility Base’s marketing director as a perk of visiting the Moon resort: “Look, you could meet someone you like during the meteor strike, it is that easy.”

After all, why should we care about a meteor strike on Earth if we’re in a hot tub on the Moon?

“Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino” warns of the dangers of technological distractions but also functions as one of those very same distractions; because nothing really matters when Bryan Ferry for the millennial age sings the 40-minute long sequel to David Bowie’s ‘Five Years’ directly into my ear while it’s late at night and I’m all alone surrounded by twelve screens of blinding blue light.

#music #ArcticMonkeys

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What happens when seashell resonance is run through Trent Reznor’s spookiest effects unit, guitar tremolo is passed through blown speakers, bass buzz and kick drum burst your eardrums, and grandpa tries-real-hard to relive The Glory Days but also strongly insists that he’s not? You get a track called “R.I.D.E” by the band Ride that features a woman occasionally whispering the word “ride” meaning we are three levels of “ride” deep into an incantation meant to summon something that died in the mid ‘90s, and what we got instead was Ride’s 2019 album “This Is Not a Safe Place” and a bolt to the brain.

Ride, sometimes stylized as RIDE, or as seen on the album art as “RIDE ///” (the slashes representing the historical hobo graffiti meme used to indicate an “unsafe place,” reinforcing that this album Is, in fact, Not a Safe Place), is composed of five parts return-to-form and seven parts annoying-and-repetitive, which is unwittingly acknowledged by the band on their electronically-tinged Devo-like “Repetition,” in which the title is chanted in a fraternity-hazing interrupted only by verses analyzing how “repetition is a form of change,” a line spoken by the ambient pioneer Brian Eno which is either Too Smart or Too Stupid for this writer’s small brain. One can’t help but think this track, with references to Jean-Michel Basquiat (‘80s neo-expressionist graffiti artist), is a callback to the hobo-graffiti trope but also a statement on the band’s experimentation with new styles across the album.

Unfortunately for Ride, there is no causal link between “new styles” and “worth listening to,” and the whole package is an immature reminder of that one time I did mushrooms in college with my friend and he insisted that he urinated himself but his pants were completely dry, much like the majority of this record.

I’m probably being too harsh, but that’s only because “This Is Not a Safe Place” is a frustrating experience. On one hand, it contains at least two of Ride’s Best Tracks Ever. On the other hand, it’s a collection of sterile potions brewed using a mixture of Nine Inch Nails’ 1994 “Downward Spiral,” Sonic Youth’s 1987 “Sister,” and grape cough syrup (the really gross non-children-kind that doesn’t even get you drunk).

But let’s try to stay positive.

From a single opening strum that invokes Yes’ genius minimalist build-up before the gut-punch “Roundabout,” Ride’s “Future Love” shows that they are still a force to be reckoned with. The jangling, dream essence which produced 1991’s “Vapour Trail” is still there and emerges with renewed vigor in one of the most infectious lead guitar lines to ever grace the world of shoegaze, all backed with a dreamy fuzz that makes it sound like Really Fast Birds zipping through Dark Storm Clouds leaving only Sunlight in their wake. You could strip the entire track down to only the lead guitar and still have a song that, according to Last.fm, I have listened to 43 times within the last week.

Video: Ride – Future Love

“Future Love” is Ride throwing their dedicated fans a bone that perfectly captures what made Ride a standout band among the litter of ’90s shoegaze copy-cats: the ability to successfully run hyper-melodic jangle pop through a vacuum cleaner. If you take anything away from this article, hopefully, it’s the immediate urge to listen to “Future Love” and discover a sliver of lost Arcadia in music.

“Clouds of Saint Marie” and “Jump Jet” are close spiritual successors, channeling that same floaty “Nowhere” energy but favoring prettiness and repetition (there’s that word again) over hooks. All three “shoegaze-revival” tracks must have been challenging for Ride to produce, as the often forced need to change the formula is present throughout the album, and all three songs very much “don’t fuck with the formula,” as famed Beach Boy Mike Love once said to a very mentally-ill Brian Wilson. One could describe these tracks as cash grabs capitalizing on ‘90s nostalgia, and that may or may not be the case, but Ride manages to relive their Glory Days better than most, and the result is some of their best music ever.

Andy Bell sings “you can’t go back in time” on the Sonic-Youthian “Fifteen Minutes,” which is ironic considering Ride has already shown us that they can time-travel, at least sonically, and do it very well.

Yet, “Fifteen Minutes” covers completely new ground with an oddly tuned, sharp chord progression that accentuates vocals exuding an apathy-so-cool that makes you want to be the one behind the microphone. “Fifteen Minutes” is easily the most aurally interesting track on the record, mixing classic fuzz in the chorus over lyrics that read and sound like Dad telling you that you’ve done “something totally fucked” and “you’ve got to live with it,” making you wonder what Andy Bell is even talking about; what happened?

“Fifteen Minutes” is one of two Golden Greats, a hook line and sinker leaving you wanting more, which we do get with the precursor track “Kill Switch,” sung in the same apathetic cadence but not as melodically powerful and more (again) repetitive, with a chorus that repeats the line “hit the kill switch” and makes me want to, literally, hit the kill switch.

“This Is Not A Safe Place” ends with the somber “In This Room,” one of the floatier, ambient tracks on the album that manages to reign in the noise just enough to sound heavy and soft simultaneously. “In This Room” is a highlight that not only highlights the depressing reality that this album only contains five songs worth listening to but also Ride’s ability to weave catchy pop melodies into this depressing reality where the landscapes often favors texture over Real Song Stuff.

Imagine that you hate the rain. Now, imagine that you live in Sequim, Washington, where there are 143 rainy days a year. The rain keeps you inside, which Is Not a Safe Place, leaving you alone with your thoughts and all the doomed fiction that goes along with that. This is a place where there’s so much rain that the sunny days feel like Heaven on Earth.

That’s “This Is Not a Safe Place,” stingy like the weather in Sequim, but when the sun shines, damn, it’s bright.

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#Music #Ride

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Spotify has its share of detractors and obvious problems around artist compensation, but I’ve come to realize that its “Autoplay similar content” feature is responsible for introducing me to massive musical multitudes within the last ten years. It was about a year ago when The Beth’s excellent 2022 album “Expert in a Dying Field” trailed off into Slow Pulp’s equally-excellent yet infinitely-understated depression ballad “Falling Apart,” a soft acoustic number sung in breathy tones, colored by a violin section that sounds like watching a sunset after climbing an apple tree at grandpa’s horse farm in South Georgia and your girlfriend just dumped you via text message. “Why don’t you go back to falling apart? You were so good at that,” Slow Pulp’s instant-crush Emily Massey sings in what I first believed was bitter condemnation of a past lover but slowly realized after repeated listening that it was actually a cutting criticism of herself.

“Falling Apart,” however, is almost nothing like The Beth’s “Expert in a Dying Field,” outside of the self-deprecating lyrical content and female vocalists. The Beth’s is largely distorted, fuzzy powerpop with obvious hooks, whereas Slow Pulp’s “Falling Apart” is a subdued, grows-on-you folk affair that, once grown, never ever goes away. That’s why it was curious to me why “Falling Apart” would autoplay here at all. I had to find out, so I listened to more of Slow Pulp’s discography and came to realize the eclecticism at play within the band’s music.

Slow Pulp’s signature sound is a cacophony of contradicting musical genres, including shoegaze, country, folk, and manufactured pop. You need only to browse Slow Pulp’s hand-selected Spotify playlist titled “movies” to get an idea of what to expect: Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon,” The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” some Cat Stevens, and – uhh – Hillary Duff’s “Why Not” from the classic Disney Channel hit movie “The Lizzie McGuire Movie.” This combination of influences is a concoction of distortion pedals, acoustic lamentations, sugar, spice, and everything introspective; or, the formula for the Powerpuff Girls if the Powerpuff Girls were only Buttercup.

Full disclosure, I had only heard “Falling Apart,” a few tracks from their 2019 “Big Day” EP, and the single “Cramps” before the full release of “Yard.” Having an inclination for messy distorted powerpop, “Cramps,” with its fully-fuzzed-out wall of noise and dueling vocal harmonies, grabbed me immediately and had me hooked for weeks. The crunchiness of “Cramps” is some of the most crunchy I’ve heard since the 2007 release of “Dead Sound” by The Raveonettes, which, unsurprisingly, Slow Pulp occasionally sounds like except less The Jesus and Mary Chain carbon copy.

“Cramps” showcases Slow Pulp’s ability to lift elements from their influences without becoming cheap imitation.

In “Gone 2,” the first track of Slow Pulp’s 2023 album “Yard,” the band seems to be fully aware of my sole problem with the record, singing: “I know that you are impatient.” See, the problem with releasing an excellent single like “Cramps” and being a band that explores multiple styles is that I expected more “Cramps” and was annoyed when that was not the case. Instead, “Yard” is a challenging collection of 10 songs that resemble “Falling Apart.” It would be easy to say that they’re riding the coattails of their previous output.

But, like Emily sings: I am impatient.

So, I played “Yard” on repeat while building Gunpla models (a pairing I recommend, as it seems to naturally pan the musical gold from the figurative dirt), and something clicked: “Yard” isn’t a ride on the coattails; it’s a masterful weaving of those coattails. “Yard” furthers Slow Pulp’s craft of impeccable shoegaze-country genre weaving (hereby dubbed “countrygaze”) into a tapestry so layered that impatient-me couldn’t grasp it on the first go-around.

This countrygaze fusion is obvious from the first half of the record. “Gone 2” is a track driven by acoustic guitar that swells in countryside splendor from the very first bar, layered fingerpicking hiding behind a wall of sentimental strumming and hushed backing vocal hymns that are barely audible. Emily Massey sounds like an apostle of Liz Phair with far more emotive range, and that range is on full display here with impressively held “oohs” and “aahs” that give the track a forlorn sense of longing for a lost lover. The second track, “Doubt,” changes pace into something resembling the two Liz’s: the best bits of Liz Phair’s “Whip-Smart” and the bubblegum hooks of Lizzie McGuire’s “Hey You,” with a chorus of repeating the “do” in “doubt” that surpasses any so-called “hook” Disney channel ever produced. And then, of course, there’s “Cramps,” the crunch before the somber chugging and feedback loops found in “Slugs,” where Emily sings “you’re a summer hit,” a statement that would apply to this album if it were released 30 days earlier.

The first half closes out with the eponymous title track “Yard,” a piano ballad touching on suburban nostalgia that is a little too barren to be considered a complete song, the only true low-point on the record, which is unfortunate considering the vulnerable-relatability of its subject matter.

The second half of the album starts strong with “Carina Phone 1000,” a song about old friends calling out of the blue; a reminder that people hundreds of miles away may still be thinking about you. “Carina Phone 1000” exudes nostalgia not only for lost childhood companionship but for the ’90s in general, with its acoustic progression resembling the first few bars of Goo Goo Doll’s 1995 hit single “Name” or its spiritual successor, 1998’s “Iris.” Contrasting this somber nostalgia, “Worm” attempts to be side 2’s “Cramps,” a fuzzbox that fails to reach the heavenly levels of harmonious crunch of its predecessor.

Video: Slow Pulp – Mud

“MUD” is the understated absolute-classic-masterpiece of the album; Slow Pulp’s magnum opus, creating the “countrygaze” genre all by itself with its southern state tapestry of slow acoustic strumming and backing electric guitar that picks all the right notes to create an ambiance of watching the flickering night sky before launching into outer space in a chorus exploding with crunchy fuzzy power. “MUD” takes off like the “astronaut that wants to get out of here,” the same astronaut Emily sings about in the verses leading up to the climactic chorus in which she accuses her lover of “not being where you’ve said you’ve been” but later admits that she has been doing the same thing.

“MUD” is pure, undistilled Slow Pulp and if you don’t like it then you won’t like the rest of the album.

“Broadview” is a turning point for our heroine, who can choose to stay inside or, instead, take a plunge into the unknown, mirroring a lazy afternoon in which two or three unseen emotional crises can’t help but bubble up within the idle mind. Emily Massey adopts a country-western twang to her voice during the quizzical chorus, like Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley but with the added sincerity of a heartattack. “Broadview” is a sequel to “Falling Apart” in tone and structure, furthering the country-stylings by adding harmonica and steel guitar into the mix, much the same way “Falling Apart” utilized violin to create a feeling of soberly roaming the countryside.

The album closes by extracting the sugar from the water with “Fishes,” a stripped down track driven only by acoustic fingerpicking and the occasional tapping of a piano key. This is the comedown after a hard night of partying, trying to process everything that happened. After all, sometimes it makes sense to take a step back and consider what the hell you’re doing with your life, and other times it makes sense to forget about it all and just sing-real-loud when no one’s around – Slow Pulp’s “Yard” lets you do both.

#music #SlowPulp

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David Sylvian has gone through many changes, from a dangerous perfect-haired glam rock sex symbol in the mid-70s incarnation of his band, Japan, to perfect-haired made-up auteur bishonen in the early-80s, and then pivoting to perfect-haired (and possibly) Maoist-intellectual in geek-chic glasses during the “Tin Drum” era of Japan; and finally, around the time of his 1987 solo record “Secrets of the Beehive,” a down-to-earth reclusive bishonen who no longer wears makeup but still has perfect hair forever.

Being a “solo artist,” putting – only – your name on the cover of albums, is an interesting phenomenon. It’s unlikely that one person is the sole creator of an album’s worth of material composed of varied instruments (unless you’re Prince), and in David Sylvian’s case, he’s certainly not playing all the instruments himself, as indicated by the lengthy personnel credits within the liner notes, including Ryuichi Sakamoto on strings and synths, a renowned Japanese avant-garde musician, actor, general savant, and Sylvian’s close friend; a starcrossed kinship reflecting the eccentricity of both men.

The truth is that being recognized as a “solo artist” with a full backing band is a privilege earned through perseverance, unique vision, and, sometimes, just being – that – cool. If I sound flippant, that’s the opposite of my intention because David Sylvian actually deserves it. This is the man who wrote “Ghosts,” a lamentation so relatable in its capture of regret that it propelled itself into the number 5 spot on the UK Singles Chart, despite being a slowly hushed whisper antithetical to anything labeled “pop” at the time; coupled with the fact that Sylvian was the inspiration for the mid-80s “New Romantic” aesthetic, and bands like Duran Duran shamelessly imitated his entire style (which itself was inspired by a hodgepodge of David Bowie characters). Is it any wonder that when David Sylvian says, “I want you to play on my solo record,” you drop everything and play on his solo record?

The point is: David Sylvian is cool in a way others can only hope to capture in fleeting moments of pale imitation. David Sylvian is entirely himself. But that’s enough attention-deficient-detouring, let’s talk about the music.

“Secrets of the Beehive” is about mood, particularly a pensive, somber mood, like watching leaves fall and wither in autumnal real time. That last line tries-real-hard to invoke David Sylvian’s beautiful lyricism but fails in spectacular fashion, and that’s because throughout Beehive, Sylvian plays the role of narrator for ten grand stories written humbly to craft Byzantine emotional landscapes for the often-unfortunate protagonists to travel through in each story; sometimes, the protagonist is David Sylvian himself.

“September” sets the climate and, clearly, the month in which these stories take place. September is the guillotine of summer, the symbolic end of the carefree, childlike wonder. It’s only appropriate that “September” is a sparse piano hymn that invokes a whispered sense of longing for a time that only just recently slipped away. “Sipping Coke and playing games,” he reminisces while the summer fades, with strings softly creeping into the mix as if they were there all along. Ironically, while September is the end of a season, it’s the beginning of the record.

With the realization that summer’s fading comes “The Boy With The Gun,” a fantasy of violence in which the protagonist dreams of killing those whom he perceives as having wronged him. Autumn’s leaves wither in our protagonist’s mind as he “carves out the victims’ names in the wooden butt of the gun.” Yet, as we round the bend to the end of this short story, Sylvian, in a rare moment of vulnerability, sings “my name’s on the gun.” This track, like many others on Beehive, draws on the theory of minimalism, a motif found throughout the record, driven by a plucky double bass line and subdued guitar licks that add sinister fringe to the whole affair.

David Sylvian sings, “I harbor all the same worries as most, the temptations to leave or to give up the ghost,” as he struggles to find inspiration and hope in his dreams. “Standing firm on this stony ground, the wind blows hard, pulls these clothes around,” he sings, effortlessly coloring the mood on “Orpheus,” an epic poem reaching out to Homer’s pantheon for inspiration, swirling with subtle chords, swelling horns, and sleepy synths resembling, perhaps, the onomatopoeia of dreams bubbling up right before deep sleep. “Orpheus,” in many ways, is David Sylvian’s Iliad, epitomizing the album it finds itself on, fusing elements from each story while borrowing pop song structures on loan from the Greek bard of divine musical inspiration.

Video: David Sylvian Performs Orpheus Live

Breaking the mold, “When Poets Dreamed of Angels” uses classical Latin-tinged guitar tones to create an infectious opening too beautiful for the subject matter. “The bruises inflicted in moments of fury … next time I’ll break every bone in your body.” An elegy of violence serenaded in such melodious iambic pentameter that the listener can’t help but rewind and listen to it again before trailing off into jazzy improvisation.

In many ways, “Secrets of the Beehive” is a direct sequel to Japan’s “Ghosts,” covering similar themes and expanding on the musical concepts, particularly jazz and minimalism, that David Sylvian would continue to pioneer in later work. Like the ghosts of the past, “Secrets of the Beehive” is a haunting; tracks such as “Maria” and “The Devil’s Own” invoke a sense of disquieting unease, perfect for exercising the wraiths after two glasses of red wine, while “Let The Happiness In” tries to recoup with its doomed grasp at hope before finally succumbing to the rain in “Waterfront,” a song that sounds like the younger brother of “Ghosts,” with its use of empty space creating a void of anticipation before a great wave of emotion. Japanese pressings of the album include a final track, “Promise (The Cult of Eurydice),” a soft ballad made up of only Sylvian’s light guitar strumming and baritone and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s sparse keyboards, invoking the ancient story of Orpheus’s attempt to save his true love’s soul, only to spiral into despair after losing it all in a game with the god of the underworld.

If you’ve read this far and truly want to know if “Secrets of the Beehive” is worth your time, consider the following hypothetical: if you can smell the autumnal aroma drifting through September skies and recognize the beauty in its ephemeral existence, then “Secrets of the Beehive” is well worth every moment.

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#Music #DavidSylvian