REVIEW: NATHAN FAKE - STEAM DAYS

Nathan Fake - Steam Days
Border Community, 2012

As "The People's List" is unveiled over the next three days, there are a number of albums I'll be looking to see where they place because they seem to function as barometers or signifiers of certain strains of indie-dom. Of those albums, Kid A is the one that I'm most interested to find out about, and not just because it's one of my favourite albums--along with Kid A, there's a whole constellation of albums and artists that defined a certain aesthetic, a certain sensibility, a certain sound that was, for awhile, the sound of the present and the future. Warp Records and 1990s IDM played a big role in shaping that sound. When it came out, discussions of Kid A seemed almost inevitably to be discussions of influence, as if the only important thing was determining from where Radiohead drew those sounds. Once the genealogy was straight, these discussions suggested, everything else would slot itself into place. That the process of tracing this genealogy in reviews and promos for the album let in a whole new spectrum of sounds and ideas about music than were normally covered by reviewers dedicated to slackers with guitars and math-rock bands was a happy accident. So, Kid A--via the fact that it led people who didn't normally (read: ever) talk about these things to mention electronic music, to list Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, and others, and to open a whole new world to listeners of a certain age and background--is and was momentous.

As recently as 2009, Pitchfork officially held Kid A to be the best album of the 2000s. This list makes for interesting reading still, as it at once confirms a pretty conservative bent (all of the albums one would expect to make that list are accounted for, most in exactly the places one would expect) and offers a glimpse at some bands whose stock doesn't seem to be riding quite as high today (Sigur Ros, the Strokes, and Modest Mouse all in the top ten seems like a stretch for "The People's List," but I could be wrong). I believe there's a good chance that "The People's List" will be the final enshrinement of a certain canon of indie music, an entrenchment of an orthodoxy that just might be one of the last stabs at importance as a criterion for evaluation. What I'm not sure of is to what degree the orthodoxy that sprung up around Kid A (and there were certainly people into the things influencing Radiohead long before Kid A was released, but I do think that a band of Radiohead's size and of its position in the indie rock landscape so publicly displaying these musicians' influence on them had a crystallizing effect) will remain the orthodoxy. Back in 2005, Nitsuh Abebe wrote of a world in which "indie kids no longer bulk up their mix-tape credibility with some Autechre or Squarepusher on side two, and the new daydream alternative to rock attitude comes mostly from German electronics." That last clause now seems almost painfully of its time--I can't remember how long it's been since German electronics seemed the choice of indie kids, and given the post-everything maximalism and omnivorous listening habits of today's milieu, it might not even be possible to name any one thing that could be that choice today.

Nathan Fake's Steam Days is a pretty fascinating album to listen to in light of all this, as it seems to speak to a time when there was a specific choice for indie kids, a time that has largely passed. I first became interested in Fake's music when Jess Harvell described his work as "plastic techno My Bloody Valentine homages" in a review of the deluxe reissue of Seefeel's Quique. I've checked out a few of his releases since then, though nothing has really caught my ear in the way that that description caught my imagination. I'd be lying if I said that Steam Days was really much different: for all that Fact might describe the album as his "most dynamic album-length work to date," much of it feels same-y and undistinguished as the songs mostly do the same thing over and over again. What hurts most is the fact that Fake's music seems to be mining territory that others have already covered to such dazzling ends. Opener "Paean," for example, feels straight off the Richard D. James Album, its melody and structure somewhere between "Cornish Acid" and "Cornmouth." Unfortunately, while it's accomplished enough, the melody lacks staying power and the combination of playfulness and slight surreality that lifts James' best work. Regrettably, this same problem crops up over and over again; Fake is a gifted producer--nothing here sounds out of place--but nothing feels particularly necessary, either. By the time "Neketona" arrives, it's hard not to start wondering how many times you've already heard this track.

The limited palette on display in the first half doesn't help matters. The vinegar-y backing to "Iceni Strings" feels like it might be intriguing at first, but it's not abrasive enough to really set off the track's melody (nor is it really that different from what's appeared on the first two tracks). The titular strings are nicely soaring, though I wish they had more to do besides repeat a pretty but otherwise nondescript part. Similarly, the hollow, brittle drums that underpin most of the album's songs feel stuck in some turn-of-the-millennium hinterland in which they're doomed to perpetual good taste: nothing really rages, and even syncopations are relaxed and obvious. It's disturbingly close to coffee shop soundtrack territory, in this regard. What urgency is present on the album is often the result of straight 4/4 hi-hats or snares that become tiresome long before they have the chance to become transcendent, as on "Harnser." 

In contrast, "Old Light" is one of the best things here, as a beat with a slyly funk hitch in its step is accompanied by a distant melody that strikes the right balance between melancholy and mawkish and in so doing manages to be evocative without being sentimental. There's a deftness in its construction that just underlines how much more I wish some of these songs did. The second half of the album seems to pick up on these qualities and is altogether more promising. "World of Spectrum" is intriguingly aggressive, not a million miles removed from the sounds and textures on display on Squarepusher's Ufabulum. Especially against the too-polite backdrop of the majority of the album, its slightly harsher approach is a welcome intrusion and a chance to get the blood pumping. "Rue" is another highlight: its droning chords are genuinely affecting as it pulls off a similar trick to CFCF's "Exercise 4 (Spirit)" or the backing to Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack." The primary-colour melody of "Sad Vember" isn't quite as striking as that of "Old Light," though it is quite nice, but its final minute of hissy, tuneless, pitch-damaged synths feels indulgent and unearned.

The album closes with its two longest tracks: "Glow Hole" and "Warble Epics." The former clocks in at just a shade under eight minutes and moves from ring modulated textures to more mid- to late-90s Warp nods before returning to those ring modulated sounds in its bridge. The melody creeps back in and the drums get a little heavier, but as a whole, the track isn't really dynamic enough to make use of its slightly lengthier run time--its valleys don't feel like valleys and its peaks are too choreographed and inevitable to be genuinely exciting. "Warble Epics" opens with some nicely mock-portentous synths in a much appreciated moment of levity before rigidly 4/4 hi-hats take over. The drums are very upfront and dominate the mix a little, which is a shame because they're not as interesting as some of Fake's other bits of programming. The melody has some intriguing twists to it, and when it finally comes more to the fore a little under halfway through the track it's a welcome development. There's nothing radically different or unique about "Warble Epics"--it sums up what Steam Days is about fairly well, and is one of the more solid tracks on the album. The coda to the track might be the best part, though, a bit of nicely suggestive music that hovers in the distance like heat over a hump in the road.    

I can imagine being impressed by this album if I'd discovered it at 14 when I was reading all about Kid A and its influences. What I can't imagine, though, is being captivated by it in a way that the classics of those Warp Superstars of old captivated me when I heard them for the first time. It's not that Fake is doing anything wrong--largely, he's doing everything right. The problem is that he's doing the right things because they're the obvious, established things to do. The album desperately needs a challenge, an angle to work that would elevate these tracks from filler to attention grabbers. As it is, too much of the album goes by without making an impression or offering a way to differentiate one track from another. What's most disappointing about the album, ultimately, is that its building blocks have already been cannibalised and assimilated by other other genres to fresher, more interesting ends. It feels timeless in the wrong sense: Steam Days doesn't transcend its moment and stand as an immortal work, but rather feels equally unmoored from the present and the past that inspires it, without a place to exist and in which one could interact with it.

REVIEW: SQUAREPUSHER - UFABULUM

Squarepusher - Ufabulum
Warp, 2012

I was quite excited by the prospect of the new Squarepusher album when the trailer clip for the album--a few seconds of "Dark Steering"--appeared online earlier in the year. There was something nicely punishing in it that, if it could hardly be called cutting edge, at least promised some gleefully disorienting listening. Throughout the highlights of his catalogue, Squarepusher's music has received a charge from the tension between Tom Jenkinson's virtuosic bass playing and his dizzying layers of programming. On Hard Normal Daddy and Music Is Rotted One Note, Jenkinson balanced sturdy melodicism and a surprising inclination toward jazz-fusion with strafing snares and deranged kicks, time stretching and stuttering the whole mess into oblivion at times. If that sounds like fun, it is. At his best, Jenkinson's music as Squarepusher is exhilarating. There hasn't really been a Squarepusher release that I would call exhilarating in quite some time, though. There were occasional flashes on Just a Souvenir from 2008, but Ultravisitor (2004) is probably his last top shelf release, and even that is patchy. For an artist who's been accused in the past of being willfully (some might say perversely) difficult and who maintains that his refusal to sit still as an artist comes from a desire to further his craft by avoiding repetition (see his recent Spin interview with Philip Sherburne), Ufabulum's guiding principle--the use of no live instruments and an emphasis on programming--hearkens back to 2001's Go Plastic, arguably his last "classic." Is this a case of Jenkinson reaffirming some core principles and getting the whole project back on track?

Partially, though not as much as I would like or expect. Ufabulum as a whole does not live up to the promise of its trailer and I doubt it will go down as the jewel of Jenkinson's oeuvre. It offers some brilliant moments, songs that are genuinely the most fun I've had while listening to Squarepusher in quite some time, but large sections leave me cold. At times, it feels just a fraction of something away from soundtracking your next latte at Starbucks, which is almost always a bad sign with music like this. In advance of the album, Jenkinson offered extensive notes on the nature of the project at Warp's website, and while his commentary can be fascinating--he describes his conceptualization of the album and its accompanying visuals as an attempt at "allowing visual aspects to feed back to the music that I make and vice versa, in order to bind them as closely together as I can," and it's entertaining to try and see how a song resembles "a tidal wave or polyphony smashing over [a] submarine edifice" or "a continually dissolving and reforming Greek ampitheatre" (sic)--the conceptual underpinnings don't seem to have made for a particularly cohesive listen. Talk of letting visuals guide the composition process and working entirely in "greyscale" are all well and good, but it doesn't get around the fact that there are two competing aesthetics at work on the album. If the tension between these aesthetics was somehow mined within pieces (or even across the album), then Ufabulum might have been a fascinating study in finding a hitherto un(der)explored middle ground between two extremes. Unfortunately, though, Ufabulum does nothing to reconcile its rampaging, distorted rave ups and its new age synth workouts, and an opportunity is missed.

After the rollicking opener "4001," one of the album's best tracks, Ufabulum drops into the buzzy, distorted melody line (possibly the worst moment on the album--it sounds like it was played on a telephone) of "Unreal Square." As much of a shame as it is to waste the album's best song title on a mediocre song, Jenkinson's "industrial sea-shanty" goes nowhere. After its irritating opening, the track briefly flowers into something quite fascinating, feeling like a continually aborting and re-starting house track with massive basslines smashing through everything, before returning to its shanty and some rather frantic (and pointless--the less charitable might even say masturbatory) drum explosions. It's like an early Prodigy track with none of the hooks and humour. From there, the album takes a detour into the kind of prog rock that begat many an RPG soundtrack and that serves usually as the punchline to a "[fill in the blank] on ice" gag. It's tempting to try and salvage this stretch--"Stadium Ice" has some lovely, lush synth tones, "Energy Wizard" plays with time in its middle in a clever way, and "Red In Blue" is nicely unearthly--but it's the effort one has to make to do so that ultimately sinks the middle of the album.

The second half is more promising, venturing into darker (and faster) territory and coming across like the Richard D. James Album's older brother who's having a bad night and plans to see what your organs look like under the streetlight. "The Metallurgist" reprises the trick at work in the good part of "Unreal Square," the middle section when it sounds like it's trying to go in two different directions at once, to great effect. Better still is "Drax 2," a drill n base workout that stretches out across seven minutes and at least as many discrete sections, slowing down for a gloriously foreboding percussion-less stretch before seizing up entirely in a symphony of glitches. "Dark Steering" follows suit, twisting "Drax 2's" approach into a darkly funky song that might be the album's catchiest track. The melody that starts up just under two minutes in is one of the few moments in which the album attempts to work the middle ground between its competing aesthetics (and a reminder of just how gifted Jenkinson is at writing a melody, when he feels like it). As it accelerates in its second half, sounding like a fleet of racing lightcycles, some of the glee of earlier Squarepusher returns.

The album winds down with a little less energy and excitement than the start of the second half would suggest. "303 Scopem Hard" doesn't offer much that the preceding three tracks haven't already covered (its metallic, streaking sounds feel like a repeat of those in "Dark Steering," in fact), but it's a fairly solid workout with some more time-stretching and stuttering at its close (it's almost enough to make one ask if Jenkinson knows of another way to end a track). The final song on the album, "Ecstatic Shock" opens with the most upfront drums on Ufabulum, but doesn't really get going until about a minute in. The arpeggiation and lush synths voicing the melody call back to the dullest stretches of the album, while its fairly busy drums keep it in line with the dominant aesthetic of the second half. It's not the most interesting track here--and like much of the album, it's the effort of having to find what actually is interesting about it, rather than that becoming apparent simply by listening, which sinks the track--but it's another solid (though unremarkable) exercise in various parts of the Squarepusher sound.

Ultimately, the biggest problem with the album is its sequencing and length. It might sound harsh, but I'm not convinced that there's enough strong material on Ufabulum to really justify a full album. There is, though, enough to make a taut, exciting EP or mini album. Keep "4001" in place as the starter, follow it with "The Metallurgist" though "Dark Steering," and close with "Ecstatic Shock" and Ufabulum offers twenty nine minutes of hard, intense electronic music. Of course, while this trimming would help put some more life into the album, it doesn't do much to dispel the nagging sensation of repetition, of having heard this all before. Clearly, Squarepusher is revisiting old territory here, even if he claims not to be. And while it's fruitful territory--the comparison I made to the Richard D. James Album is not for nothing: the album's best tracks really do remind me of that Aphex Twin classic as much as they remind of Squarepusher's own earlier work--I find it a little disappointing that Jenkinson hasn't returned from the wilderness of Solo Electric Bass 1 and Shobaleader One: d'Demonstrator with something a little more forward looking (for him, if for nothing/no one else). Perhaps the light and visual show that he promises in his live performances for this tour will help fight off the faint hint of dust that's present here (the videos on YouTube are impressive), and, given his legendary propensity for shifting directions at the drop of a hat, perhaps this is a necessary clearing out exercise, a revisiting of old pathways to find new ones. I hope so, because it's starting to feel like an awfully long time since Squarepusher shocked and, in shocking, delighted.

ON PERFECT SONGS

Mark Richardson's latest Resonant Frequency column is his usual mix of self-reflection and cultural insight. His description of "Flim,"* which I have to agree is a pretty fantastic song, is particularly nice:

[E]ach little pause, hesitation, and stutter is so perfectly placed, and . . . the drums plant ideas in my head about innocence, awkwardness, burgeoning confidence, and growth. . . . I picture myself sitting across from Richard James in his bedroom as he works over this material on his computer. It's an illusion, of course, but I like to imagine that I'm hearing what James was hearing at that moment, that the glass between us is completely transparent.

Part of what makes Richardson's columns such pleasures, though, is his talent as a writer for scenes that are so evocative of his subject matter--the relationship between memory, perception, music, and everyday life (his invisible music project is a really fascinating attempt to put those themes into practice). He has a doozy of a line to finish the second section of his most recent column: "All of these feelings are carried to me through the bass, so strong it's uncanny, like how the smell of a certain shampoo can instantly bring to mind a face you'd completely forgotten." The evanescent face that a smell conjures, the fleeting emotions that that note (right or wrong) calls forth, Richardson's one of the best at writing about those moments.

During his discussion of "Flim," Richardson linked to an earlier Resonant Frequency column in which he talked about "perfect songs." I'd thought about this idea for a long time, even before I read that column, how some songs that aren't my favourite songs are what I would consider to be perfect: nothing can be done to improve on these songs/performances of these songs. As Richardson puts it, "They cannot be improved; each has fulfilled its destiny and become everything it could hope to be." He lists a dozen such songs in his article, and I agree with several of them--"I Want You Back," "Crimson and Clover," "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough"--though I'm not sure if I'd put "Flim" down as my choice of a perfect song from the Aphex Twin. Reading these columns this morning (re)inspired me to surf through some videos on YouTube and poke around my music collection to consider what some of my perfect songs might be.

Aphex Twin - "Avril 14th," from Drukqs (2001)

It's simple and direct (sort of), without any of the flashy drum programming of "Flim," but Richard D. James found one of those magic chord progressions that makes your chest ache and that's more than enough in his hands. The final section is pure joy, the high notes leaping out and shining. The little details are what really make this special, though: the way the melody line in the first section gets doubled an octave higher, the surprisingly tricky syncopations in the middle that manage to avoid disturbing the elegance and grace of piece. I played it at a wedding once during the ceremony (long story) and it went over surprisingly well.

Bark Psychosis - "Eyes & Smiles," from Hex (1994)

The peak of one of the few albums I'm tempted to call perfect. Graham Sutton and co. absolutely nail the feel of three in the morning throughout the album (that one song opens with the line "It's 3 am..." can't be a coincidence), and there are several stretches that I just can't imagine anyone equaling, ever.  In eight and a half minutes, "Eyes & Smiles" piles all of the conflicting emotions of being awake and alone when surrounded by people on top of each other and shepherds them to a point of ecstatic desolation.

Boards of Canada - "Kid for Today," from the In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country EP (2000)

I remember finding the percussion on this song absolutely mystifying when I first heard it. What was the source of that click? Now that I know it's a slide projector--what could be more in line with their ethic, really?--some of the mystery is gone, but that only allows me to appreciate the combination of joy, innocence, melancholy, and menace all the more. Complex psychological portraits of childhood are tough--how can you avoid idealizing or overdetermining any aspect?--and I think that's why Boards of Canada's music is so enthralling: they get it all in their music, the good and the bad, somehow. 

Four Tet - "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth," from Rounds (2003)

Kieran Hebden has a knack for making beautiful music. He also has a striking ability to match sound with title (cf. "Circling" and "This Unfolds" from There is Love in You and "Ribbons" from the Ringer EP for more examples), as here the music does feel like it's gently rocking you back and forth. What's more, he's wise enough to get out of his own way when he has a good thing going, as he does here, letting the prettiest melody he's ever written spool and unspool itself for five minutes with minimal accompaniment. Some dusty percussion to give the track a little forward momentum and an unobtrusive background wash for added colour are all he needs to make something that could go on for years and ends at just the right time.

Kevin Shields - "Are You Awake?," from the Lost in Translation soundtrack (2003)

As rudimentary as the beat is on this piece, it works quite well as a kind of driving background that the bouncing, echo-drenched melody can play off of. Richardson actually reviewed this soundtrack for Pitchfork and faulted "Are You Awake?" for its brevity: "it's painfully short at a minute and a half. I get the sense that Shields is on the verge of tapping into something deeper here . . . but 'Are You Awake?' doesn't give much to go on." I think it's the perfect length; "Are You Awake?" gains much of its charm from seeming like a sketch that turned out to be the finished product. Shields has produced at least one other masterpiece post-Loveless (his "MBV Arkestra" remix of Primal Scream's "If They Move, Kill 'Em"), but "Are You Awake?" is what gives me hope that he really can top Loveless someday.

Stereolab - "Three Women," from Chemical Chords (2008)

I'm not unconvinced that this song won't make the sun spontaneously appear, and I would put it on this list even if it were just the horn chart. The added bonus of one of Laetitia Sadier's typically bouncing, playful melodies and a rhythm section that drives harder on this than on almost anything else they've recorded makes it almost unbearably great. I have had to forcibly stop myself from dancing down the street if this comes on my iPod while I'm walking somewhere on more than one occasion.

Tim Hecker - "Harmony in Blue III," from Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006)

Really, I could put the whole "Harmony in Blue" suite here, but there's something about those gentle clusters of notes that just cuts right through me (Fripp and Eno's The Equatorial Stars tried to do much the same thing on songs like "Meissa," I think, though they didn't accomplish it anywhere near as well). Like much of Hecker's music, this piece is profoundly ambiguous, it's emotional content straddling so many borders that you can't help but be drawn back in. I think even the least synaesthetic person when it comes to music can hear the blue in this.

So, those are seven of my perfect songs. What are some of yours?

*The disadvantage of YouTube videos (and I guess music videos generally, though that's a conversation for another day...): with the admittedly quite pretty and bucolic scenes that are included there, something of the grace and beauty of "Flim" is cheapened. The images are too direct and obvious, grasping at the feelings that emerge so naturally from the music (just like all the videos of Boards of Canada songs cut to footage from Planet Earth).