forrest

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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

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In 2004, George W. Bush was re-elected President of the United States. BBC’s “Top of the Pops” stopped advertising Coca-Cola in an effort to be more health-conscious. “Half-Life 2,” one of the greatest computer games ever made, was released and revolutionized the first-person-shooter genre. The Strokes had already released two excellent records of raw New York garage pop-rock that would invigorate an entire generation of musicians, leaving countless copy-paste-bands in their wake. In short, 2004 was a great year for teenage-me, who didn’t give even-one-damn about politics and was addicted to nasty soda pop, computer games I would continue to discuss well into my thirties, rock music on repeat, and, most importantly, trying to appear as cool as possible to my peers by pretending to be something I wasn’t. Ah, the fog of youth.

Enter the Jarmans. Twins Gary and Ryan, along with their younger brother Ross, saw The Strokes’ youthfully-disheveled frontman, Julian Casablancas, perform “Last Nite” in feigned apathy, as if he wasn’t aware of trying to be the coolest guy in the room on November 6th, 2001, at Top of the Pops. The Jarman brothers immediately had to form their own copy-paste garage rock band, and The Cribs were born. We’ve seen this before; The Strokes were very much a re-run of the Sex Pistols performing at CBGB in the ’70s; nine-out-of-ten people in the audience went on to create their own band, but this time the audience was different: greasy-long-hairs addicted to Daria and Michael Moore documentaries, undesirables that McDonald’s wouldn’t even touch with a ten-foot pole.

“Before the Cribs I used to try and get jobs in McDonald’s but even they wouldn’t employ me, which was so weird. I still don’t know why they wouldn’t give me a job. I really wanted to do it. I would neaten myself up and tell them I could work whatever hours they wanted. I went for job interviews in McDonald’s three times but they never gave me a job. They never said why either.” — Ryan Jarman, The Cribs. The Guardian, Feb. 2013

There were countless “British Strokes” bands, but The Cribs were special. Their debut self-titled album was recorded in 7 days in an 8-track studio, with one song being produced by the famous Chicago-eccentric Bobby Conn (which I’m sure I will write about one day; his albums “The Golden Age” and “King for a Day” are masterpieces in their own right). Yet somehow, the young brothers struck gold despite flunking out of music school and failing to be McDonald’s material.

Ryan and Gary’s obviously British yet truly authentic dueling vocal warbling, Ryan’s amateur yet innovative guitar playing that sounds more like furiously attacking someone after one-too-many shots at the pub, and, most importantly, the brothers’ sharp ear for melody inadvertently created an extremely high bar for them to surpass with every future Cribs release.

The album starts with an odd number, “The Watch Trick,” which sounds like a silly-meme-song at first but quickly becomes something far more complex with its ending mini-chorus about a minute and thirty seconds into the track, shifting into dangerous hyper-melodic-territory; this flows into “You Were Always the One,” a sharp-powerpop number showcasing the Jarmans’ ability to conjure a hook out of nothing more than Gary’s straightforward basslines accompanying Ryan’s organized-chaos-guitar-work, and Ross just on drums (poor little bro never gets the spotlight).

Video: The Cribs – You Were Always the One

Songs like “Another Number” showcase Ryan Jarman’s bizarre yet brilliantly neurotic guitar-playing, which sounds like four-year-old-plays-guitar, but upon further listening, is actually a creatively-intricate melody that is infinitely-memorable and impossible to get out of your head for three-straight-weeks; featuring a nervously-picked guitar line formed by what has to be a malformed chord going into a “dududududududu” for the chorus, then back to the broken melody; a perfect microcosm of Ryan’s unique playing style which is truly idiot-savant-levels of “what the fuck?”

In an effort to remain objective, not everything is rainbows here; some tracks just miss the mark entirely. “Tir’elle,” the Bobby Conn produced track, is an instant skip, along with “Learning to Fight,” which is marred by repetitive, ugly verses.

Overall, The Cribs’ first album is fast-paced hook after hook after hook into utter exhaustion; it’s good sex. The first time I played this album, it was on a lark while I was working, to put something on in the background while fiddling with an Excel sheet; this was a mistake as ten minutes later I was replaying songs constantly and not getting anything done; an immediate sign that what I’m listening to is special, something I will be listening to for years to come.

My wife would often comment, after I emerged from my office exhausted and sweaty, “You’ve listened to the same song twelve times in a row, are you ok?” This is now a common occurrence whenever I start listening to The Cribs.

Upon deciding to write this article, I thought, “I haven’t listened to this album in a while; hopefully, I didn’t wear it out, and it’s as good as I remember.” My worries were misplaced as I ended up a broken record repeating history, looping insanely catchy tracks like “You and I,” “The Lights Went Out,” and “What About Me” while typing away about how much I love this album and occasionally looking back at my work computer to ensure no one sent me a furious email.

It’s easy to come to the conclusion that the Jarman brothers were trying to be The Strokes. The Cribs, like teenage-me, wanted to be something they’re not. That’s the easy take, the lazy take. The more nuanced-take is that The Cribs, while inspired heavily by The Strokes, could never sound like their inspiration because of their unequivocal-essence; instead of being Just-Another-Number, their natural talent and gift for crafting catchy pop music shines through, exploding with youthful vigor into what can only be called one of the best records of 2004.

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#music #TheCribs

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On Guided By Voices’ previous album “Mag Earwhig,” prolific songwriter Robert Pollard crooned about becoming “produced.” Then, for their 11th album, 1999’s Do the Collapse, he hitched a ride in Ric Ocasek’s Mustang and rode straight into a full-blown studio complete with a hundred-track recording setup, poppy-warbling synths, and amplifiers that actually worked.

The joke is that Ric Ocasek was – is – the frontman for the hit 80s band, The Cars. He produced this album. And he, maybe, would drive a Ford Mustang? That last part is an assumption on my part.

The result is Guided By Voices’ most polished record to this point; but, not everyone was pleased. A certain subset of fans is only happy if the music sounds like it was recorded through a 1980s tape recorder in a basement with two defective washing machines on spin-cycle and a vacuum running in the background. “It’s just like, not ‘it,’ dude – where’s the lo-fi, man?” Of course, those fans are here for all the wrong reasons. Guided By Voices, lo-fi darlings they may be, never intended to sound like a cat-fight in the backyard. The music was a product of circumstance and surroundings. What matters most are the songs, not the production. Discounting one or the other solely based on one or the other would be folly.

And, contrary to what someone on Allmusic might tell you, the songs on Do the Collapse are some of the most consistent and strongest Guided By Voices have recorded since their 1995 cult-classic LP “Alien Lanes.” If one can’t get over the fact that you can actually hear all the instruments clearly, then consider taking a step back and analyzing why you like anything at all; is it because you put the band patch on your nasty leather jacket used solely for picking up cute alt-goth girls at the shows, and you’re thirty-five now with over forty-thousand in student loan debt for a useless degree, or is it because the music makes you want to sing-real-loud when no one is around? If the answer is the former, I can’t help you – that’s a personal problem.

Ric Ocasek’s professional nail polish is appreciated here because the songs themselves are spectacular, and the production only helps to highlight this fact. Every ounce of musical flair is clearly defined and aurally shimmering, like the coyly glistening Smiths-like guitar licks and accompanying strings in “Wrecking Now,” or the beautiful ringing of the picking in “Wormhole,” the former being an instantly arresting “stop what you’re doing, this is amazing” track. All of this detail would be lost or simply not included on previous Guided By Voices records because the production wasn’t there to make it happen, and it all exists within the classic wall of Guided-By-Noise.

“Do the Collapse” is more focused than previous records, including only 16 carefully selected tracks instead of the normal 25+ one would find on earlier records. The trade-off here is that the majority of these tracks are two minutes or longer, which is an oddity considering the band we’re dealing with, known for including – sometimes – 20-second long tracks throughout their albums. The longer the track, the more responsibility it carries: responsibility to actually be worth listening to, and, thankfully, every track rocks or pops or does something worthy of your time.

If you want the chaotic noise of past records, it’s here with tracks like “Zoo Pie.” If you’re looking for the bubblegum-poprock-mastery of “Game of Pricks” or “Gold Star for Robot Boy,” well, you’re in luck because this album contains the strongest pure-pop Guided By Voices ever released, starting with the very first track “Teenage FBI,” a somewhat off-putting radio-friendly track that is just too catchy to hate, followed by “Things I Will Keep” and “Surgical Focus,” which are immediately melodious to the point the Greek God Apollo is jealous of how simple Guided By Voices makes crafting a hook look.

This album gets mixed reception for all the wrong reasons. If you want ultra-catchy-sing-along-songs that mask the darkness swirling underneath the lives we all live, this is the Guided By Voices album for you.

Don’t believe the anti-hype.

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#music #GuidedByVoices

Letter From the Editor – OCGM#2

The electric question – “Why?” – has been snapping around the synapses of my brain like lightning bolts lately. I can hear the question not only in my mind’s voice, but in the little squeaks and squibbles you hear up there in your head when everything is real quiet. It’s vexing, to say the least. Why do I do this? Why do I write so much? Why do I make this magazine? Why do I hide away from my friends and family to do all this despite making no money and having very few fans? Why do the articles masquerade as “video game journalism” when they are only tangentially related to the games themselves, focusing instead on vaguely-related fiction, personal stories, and half-baked critiques of modern society? Why does it seem like I have a particular disdain for video-game culture yet still participate in that same culture? Why does it seem like this publication hates itself? It’s clear that I want to write literature to be taken seriously, but if my goal is to write literature, then why am I writing it to an audience of people who are (largely) more concerned with how many pixels can fit on a screen rather than ever reading a single word in print or otherwise? Am I trying to impart some grand wisdom on the reader? Am I trying to convince someone of something? Am I writing this for others – or myself?

“Nothing sounds as good as, ‘I remember that.’ Like a bolt out from the blue, did you feel it too?” – Prefab Sprout. “I Remember That.” From Langley Park to Memphis. 1988.

I’ve told myself before that I publish so much material because I want to be remembered. My daughter is eleven years old now; as of writing this, she mostly cares about makeup and doing her hair and video chatting with her friends until way past her bedtime. But maybe one day she will ask, “What was my father really like underneath that parenting facade that I used to take so seriously?” The same goes for my son, who is only a single year old at the time of writing this. Maybe one day they will both ask, “What were the contents of our father’s soul?” And when those questions start snapping around the synapses of their brains like bolts of lightning, they will be able to pick up this issue of On Computer Games Monthly and start to piece together the puzzle that is their father’s soul: “So this is what father was doing all the time in that little office shed?” Maybe they will find that they think a lot like their old man, or maybe they will think the opposite: that I was a hopeless fool who wasted years of his life typing pretentious drivel to an audience of literally no one and that everything I wrote failed to make a goddamn difference to anyone at all – but it will make a difference to them. They will remember me by the words that I have written. (Among other things too, one would hope.)

But is this the only reason why I write?

“Everywhere that you go, I'm with you now.” – Guided By Voices. “Unspirited.” Isolation Drills. 2001.

But that is not the full story. There is a part of me that wants to be loved. There is a part of me that wants a cult of personality. I want to be told that I’m a good writer. I want to be told that I make very good points, that I am really-really smart, and that I am also super cool and know so much about the totally-important world of pop culture, literature, music, and computer games. I want to be adored. Even the “I want my children to know and remember me” excuse comes from an egocentric place of wanting to be adored. I want to be adored by my family; I want to be adored by literary critics; I want to be adored by random people online; I want to be adored by your mom and dad, and your aunt and uncle too; I even want to be adored by the people who would much sooner hate me than read anything I’ve written. I tell myself that this is a natural desire. I tell myself that any artist who puts themselves out there is doing it – at least partially – from a place of vanity. There is a certain hubris to the act of creation, with the baked-in assumption that anything you create is worth being considered by anyone at all. Some artists say they do it for fun or for self-improvement – and there may be some of that mixed into my work as well. And some say they do it to make some sort of political message, but this implies that you believe your political message is righteous and worth considering, and this implies hubris. I am guilty of all of these things, and I freely admit to it, and I use this willingness-to-admit as a badge of honor to deflect criticism – but here I am, still doing it. I tell myself that everyone is like this and that most just won’t admit to it; those people are not true to themselves, I say. I tell myself that everyone just wants to be loved; and this makes me feel a little better.

Is this the true reason why I write? There must be something more.

“I am human and I need to be loved – just like everybody else does.” – The Smiths. “How Soon Is Now?” Hatful of Hollow. 1984.

I am a bundle of contradictions, so, of course: I undermine my own desires. I am standoffish, quiet, and cold when clearly people would like me more if I was the opposite of those things. I believe my work should speak for itself and if you don’t like it then you just don’t get it. I'm too proud to boast, and I see self-promotion as a low-key form of boasting; so my capacity for self-promotion is close to none. I will post the link to this magazine on a few online forums, but anything beyond that makes my stomach turn. Despite my vanity, copious self-promotion feels just a little bit too forward, a little too confident, a little too capitalistic, a little too revealing of one’s intent. You may think this contradicts my claim that I am vain – “If you’re vain, then certainly you would advertise your stuff to everyone everywhere in an effort to amass that cult of personality you so desire!” – but I assure you, dear reader, that this anti-desire to self-promote also comes from a place of vanity; because I don’t want people to know how vain I am.

“But surely by admitting how vain you are, it proves that you don't care if people know how vain you are!”

Wrong again – because I’m banking on no one reading this to begin with.

And we are no closer to answering the electric why…

#computergames #autobiographical