#musicdiary2012 for Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
- Four Tet - Jupiters/Ocoras 12" (2012)
- Lazer Sword - "Sounds Sane," "Missed a Spot," "Let's Work" from Memory (2012)
- Melody's Echo Chamber - "Crystallized" (2012)
I listened to these this morning on my laptop as I did my daily internet rounds. The Four Tet 12" is coming out on Text, his label, and it's quite good. "Jupiters" in particular is a great track, managing to bridge two pretty distinct halves. The Lazer Sword tracks I was not impressed with, though I can see how they might go over well in a club. I wanted to like them, and each one had at least one interesting thing happening in it, but in they end they weren't for me. I wrote about "Crystallized" yesterday, so I'll say no more about it for now.
- Four Tet - There Is Love in You (2010)
I listened to this on my iPod as I took a walk to a used bookstore. I placed it at number two on my 2010 year end list, and it remains a fantastic listen. The way that the tracks evolve and develop is a wonder to behold, and Four Tet has a quite a way with melody. The songs are at once intricate like the innards of a watch, fragile and shiny like coloured glass, and inspirations to movement. Perfect walking music.
- Unidentified indie folk
While I browsed in the bookstore the owner had some anodyne indie folk playing on the stereo. It was pleasant enough and largely inoffensive, but after the first few seconds I didn't really notice it. I'm guessing the band may have been local. Book shopping was wonderful: I picked up copies of Octavia Butler's Kindred, Christopher Priest's The Inverted World, and Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Liebowitz to go along with a like-new copy of Marc Auge's Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity.
I listened to these on my walk home from the bookstore. The POLARBEAR tracks (Eric Avery's band after Jane's Addiction and Deconstruction) are the two best on the EP, and still sound surprisingly contemporary. Reading the history of POLARBEAR is a lot like reading about any doomed venture: you have to laugh so you don't cry. The band just never seemed to get any momentum going and for whatever reason capitalizing on Avery's past in Jane's Addiction didn't ever seem like a possibility for them. The one album they released, Why Something Instead of Nothing?, is even better than this EP, and features a lot of great songs. In many ways their sound was ahead of its time, and if they released their music today, they'd fit right in. As for the other thing I listened to on my return trip, I'm a big fan of Real Estate and of Days in particular. There are a handful of songs on the album I'd kill to have written. But, as I've written about this album before, I'll point you toward that for right now.
- Mister Lies feat. Jessica Blanchet - "I Walk" (2012)
- Mister Lies - Hidden Neighbours EP (2012)
Inspired by the "Rising" feature on Mister Lies up at Pitchfork, I made my way over to his Bandcamp page to check him out as I browsed the internet before dinner. I can't say I'm a huge fan, though. It's pleasant enough, but, like the unidentified indie folk in the bookstore, within a few seconds the music stops registering with me and fades into the background. Maybe he deserves another, closer listen, but I don't really feel motivated to do so at this point.
- Bark Psychosis - Hex (1994)
- Menomena - Under an Hour (2005)
- Insides - Euphoria (1993)
- Mogwai - "My Father My King" from My Father My King EP (2001)
After dinner I spent most of the evening reading The Inverted World (excellent so far--I'm about two-thirds of the way through it), so these were all playing in the background. Hex is amazing, and in addition to being one of the albums in the running for the position of being my favourite album of all time, it also has a song that is in the running for the analogous position. If you haven't heard it, you need to do so as soon as possible. Nitsuh Abebe called it "the sort of avant-garde the whole family can enjoy" and "a little like dub reggae might have sounded if it had developed in the English countryside," and neither of those claims is inaccurate. The Menomena album is one that, like the Lokai album I listened to yesterday, doesn't get talked about anywhere near enough. It lives up to the promise of its title by being under an hour (actually around fifty three minutes) of wonderful instrumental music that's great for doing work or reading to, but that also rewards close listening with inventive arrangements and clever playing. I highly recommend it. Insides make more sense along with Bark Psychosis as they were another one of the bands that Simon Reynolds dubbed "post rock" in his genre defining piece. Euphoria is a great album (as is the album that the pre-Insides band Earwig made, Under My Skin I Am Laughing) that doesn't really sound like much else--a more melodic Disco Inferno? A more rhythmic Slowdive? After all that, "My Father My King" was a little more of a forceful note to end on. A titanic slab of rock, it's probably Mogwai's best epic (yes, even better than "Like Herod" or "Mogwai Fear Satan") and one of Steve Albini's best engineering jobs.
I'm off to bed, so once again, until tomorrow!
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