REVIEW: DEEP TIME - DEEP TIME

Deep Time - Deep Time
Hardly Art, 2012

A fun thought experiment: what would Stereolab sound like if you subtracted the krautrock, the lounge, and the bossa nova? The easy answer, of course, is nothing, really. But to keep this going a little further, what would replace those sounds? Assuming that this un-Stereolab band would play to the same strengths--a certain rigidity healthily coexisting with a kind of bounciness and a singer whose voice and style best suit a flattened sing-song--and without logical pairings for its exotica fetish, it's probably safe to assume that the new influences would hail from the dubbier sides of post-punk.

On their self-titled debut (actually the band's second album, after being forced to change their name from Yellow Fever), the duo Deep Time does a pretty good impression of what the band described by that thought experiment might sound like (and on "Gold Rush" they don't sound a million miles away from actual Stereolab). The bass lines are slightly more reggae than dub--closer to the Police, say, than to PiL (especially on "Clouds," with echoes to these ears of "Roxanne")--but the guitar clangs and crosshatches its way along just fine, eschewing chug for starkness and winding melodies (often following bass and voice) that gesture towards surf, while the touches of organ that creep up throughout suggest an American take on Clinic and Broadcast (perhaps most obviously on "Coleman"). Singer Jennifer Moore doesn't have Laetitia Sadier's Gallic charm, but her phrasing is remarkably similar to the Stereolab frontwoman's (a definite plus in my book), and the way she manages to pull lines apart into clipped syllables and yelps serves as an immediate hook over the tightly wound music.

One other band looms large here, though less because of a similarity in sound and more because of the lessons learned over the course of its career. Spoon has managed to turn simplicity and space into virtues, using negative space to amp up the power of their rock in a minimal take on early rock and roll and rhythm and blues filtered through a post-punk sensibility. Deep Time sound like they've learned many of these tricks already: for as focused as their songs are (there are no wasted seconds on this album), they're also rough and raw, letting space help them fill the room. There are a few moments in which this backfires--even at their most demo-like, Spoon's songs sound immaculate, the guitars pristine in their raggedness, whereas the guitar on "Homebody" sounds plastic and cheap, rather than wiry. Similarly, though the minimalist palette is refreshing, a few other textures, or at least some different deployments of the same textures, would go a long way toward making this record a little more immediate and its songs a little less homogeneous. The messy harmonics on closer "Horse"--almost "Hey Joni"-ish--are so striking precisely because they play on the ear in a way that nothing in the previous twenty seven minutes has.

However, these shortcomings don't detract much from what is an intriguing album. The way opener "Bermuda Triangle" shifts from stark chords to loping verse to lush chorus is a masterful bit of arranging and really sells Moore's vocal whoops. Her way with a melody is even more apparent on "Sgt. Sierra," on which her voice keeps sliding around where it would seem natural to head, saving what might otherwise be too straightforwardly sweet and schoolyard rhyme-ish with an injection of subtle tension that balances out the music's organ-led garage flourishes. And, despite my complaints about the guitar sound above, "Homebody" has one of the album's most emotionally powerful vocals, with the chorus sounding like an alternative-universe version of a Fiona Apple track. "Gilligan," on the other hand, is the most straightforwardly radio-friendly song on here (is that idea even still a thing in 2012?): a little too slick and anonymous compared to the rest of the album, it trades the idiosyncrasies that bring the others songs to life for a catchy, spiky indie song. By far the longest song, "Horses" gives the band some more room to stretch out in and is the better for it, suggesting that there are possibilities for the future in a slight unwinding that keeps focus on the duo's impressive interactivity. 

Post-punk derived bands are never in short supply, and, with Prinzhorn Dance School's very good second album Clay Class already mining similar territory this year, it's tempting to write off Deep Time as a solid album that, if you're inclined to enjoy this style, is worth a listen but otherwise isn't worth making a fuss about. What I find intriguing about this album, though, is its ability to fit into an unoccupied space in an otherwise crowded milieu. The borders of that space are easy to sketch out, somewhere within the rectangle defined by Stereolab and Spoon, Broadcast and Clinic, but knowing them doesn't render Deep Time's sound ineffective, nor does it mean that the duo is incapable of surprise. This is not cookie cutter post-punk revivalism that pretends it's still 1979, though that period is obviously an influence on the music. Like their Austin brethren Spoon, Deep Time are working by subtraction, stripping out of their music what's not propulsive, and making more interesting music because of it. They might not have a classic in them yet--and they might never develop to that point--but there's more than enough going on here to merit keeping an eye on Deep Time.

REVIEW: LIARS - WIXIW

Liars - WIXIW
Mute, 2012

To start with--and as all reviews have had to note, especially given this video--it's pronounced "Wish You."

I feel at a loss for how exactly to review this album. It's not because I don't know how I feel about it--I really like it--and it's not because I don't have things to say about the songs (I do!). I think it's because I'm just not sure of the place in which this record exists. In many ways, WIXIW is an album that's out of time--not timeless, but not readily identifiable with any particular time period. It could have emerged in any year since the turn of the century/millennium--there's little that marks it as a record released in 2012. Though this is the most "electronic" record that Liars have released, its electronics don't gesture towards UK Bass, or Dubstep, or House, or any of the permutations therein that are currently en vogue. If anything, the electronics here point toward 1990s Warp and 1970s Berlin, more than 2010s Hyperdub, say (or even 2000s Mute). Luke Turner's review of the album for The Quietus notes the album's resemblance to Radiohead, and that's a good starting point: my first thought when listening to the album was that it resembled nothing so much as an alternative Kid A/Amnesiac. Those are two fine albums, and they mean a lot to me for various personal reasons. I imagine that I wasn't the only suburban kid with dial-up internet who followed up references to Warp Records, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Autechre in reviews of those albums and began to get an education in an alternative to "alternative rock." In 2012, though, should a band whose reputation rests on its experimental nature get credit for recreating a sound that's at least a decade out of date, regardless of how good the album is? Or, to turn the question around onto the reviewer, if a band releases an album that mines sounds not from the present and produces a record that doesn't really sound like anything else out there right now, do I have any reason to complain?

While the overtly electronic elements are something new for the band, the sounds that point back further to Bowie/Eno collaborations like Low, "Heroes", and Lodger, to the post-punk of The Fall and Joy Division, and to the motorik pulse of Neu! aren't new. Indeed, they're something of a homecoming. After the notoriously poor reception of Liars' second album (my favourite), 2004's hallucinatory witch trial nightmare They Were Wrong, So We Drowned, the band decamped to Berlin and an East German radio station for 2006's Drum's Not Dead, which channeled the percussive, repetitive elements of They Were Wrong into tense art-rock, not a million miles removed from Sonic Youth's EVOL and Sister. Following the krauty proto-punk and noise-rock of 2007's Liars and 2010's Sisterworld, WIXIW feels like both a step forward for the band away from their most traditional work and something of a retreat. In a recent interview with Ian Cohen for Pitchfork, frontman Angus Andrew stressed how much isolation and insularity is a part of the band's creative process, as "when we're in the process of writing and making a record, it's a real, actual, physical effort to block everything out." The results speak for themselves to an extent: this is undeniably a Liars record, but it doesn't feel like it's in conversation with anything outside of itself, and that is its strength and its weakness.

The opening pair of songs, "The Exact Colour of Doubt" and "Octagon," set out much of the territory that WIXIW covers. The former, a gloriously dreamy ballad that floats on glacial synths, some chattering drums straight out of a classic IDM cut, and a few strands of chiming guitar, is as unashamedly pretty as the band has let themselves be, like something from Slowdive's Pygmalion (which I'm convinced is the ur-text for Kid A, but that's a post for another day). Andrew's voice is at once tender and distant, like a lover's voice on the other end of a phone. "Octagon" is "Doubt's" more malevolent sibling, its drums skittering around a punishing kick and a swooping melody framing Andrew's slurred chants. For the rest of the album, this swing between tenderness and intensity defines the songs. First single "No. 1 Against the Rush," a reference to the San Francisco 49ers, splits the difference, suggesting the bleak beauty of Joy Division, though shorn of the kind of vocal histrionics that usually mar such efforts and augmented by a burbling percussion loop that, with its metallic tang, recalls Autoditacker-era Mouse on Mars. "A Ring On Every Finger" swings back toward "Octagon's" intensity and is WIXIW's first reminder that Liars actually started as a dance-punk band, the drums and squiggly synths working up a stiff, nervous robofunk before a strange, largely a capella close. "Ill Valley Prodigies" marries mechanical sounding percussion to a Tom Waits-ian ballad with disconcerting squeaks and squeals hovering around the edges as the first half of the album comes to a close.

The centrepiece, both literally and figuratively, is the title track. Something of a starting point for the album--guitarist/synth player Aaron Hemphill states that the process of coming up with the title, "one that was visually appealing and nonsensical . . . seemed to be good luck. And the song 'WIXIW' came out of it," helped spur the songwriting--it embodies the album's contradictory nature, and the five songs either side of it seem to be in orbit around it: at once recognizably Liars and representative of the new developments stemming from the band's experiments with electronics, "WIXIW" is reminiscent of songs and artists without really sounding like anything else. Initially, its arpeggios call to mind Portishead's "The Rip," but a little over a quarter of the way in the track turns itself inside-out and rides a weirdly droning and insistent backing through at times bizarre instrumental breaks to one of the album's biggest emotional payoffs.

After "WIXIW," the album's second half tails off a little bit, feeling slighter than the strong run of songs in the first half and containing the only real misstep. It opens promisingly with the sly, slinky "His and Mine Sensations," home to one of the record's biggest hooks in its chorus, moving the tenderness of "The Exact Colour of Doubt" into steamier territory (and never failing to call to mind Midnite Vultures for some reason).  From there, WIXIW settles into moodier, more meditative terrain. The brooding "Flood to Flood" calls back to They Were Wrong, though it never quite reaches the wonderfully deranged heights of that album (no chants of "Blood! Blood!" unfortunately), and its tension is kept at a high pitch by "Who Is the Hunter," with its creeping bass and drums and waves of synths. "Brats," though, casts another eye toward the dance floor and its energy is misplaced, breaking up the mood and lacking the nervous energy of "A Ring On Every Finger" to redeem it. The distorted vocals don't work for me--they sound too much like rap-rock knuckleheadedness--and the track serves as more of an annoyance than anything else. Thankfully, "Annual Moon Words" floats out as gorgeously as "The Exact Colour of Doubt" floated in, once again riding some wonderfully simple guitar work to the album's close, a little like "I Can See It (But I Can't Feel It)."

Like the 2012 album it most resembles (in execution if not necessarily in style)--Lotus Plaza's Spooky Action at a Distance--WIXIW offers forty five minutes (minus "Brats") of strong songwriting and interesting music. It feels churlish to complain that it doesn't revolutionize anything, that it isn't an event, no matter how much music in 2012 feels like it needs one. I like this record a great deal; at this point, were the year ending tomorrow, it would almost certainly feature in my top five albums of the year. Nevertheless, I can't help wishing that WIXIW was a little less insular, a little less disconnected from everything outside of Liars. A trendhopping record that aped electronic music's current moves without subtlety would've been a disaster, obviously, but were it able to speak beyond itself, outside of itself, this album might have been a masterpiece. It sums up in a rather neat way a certain strain of indie rock's last decade. If it could make the next step and suggest what lies beyond that sound--what happens when krautrock and Eno/Bowie and post-punk and IDM are no longer the vanguard of what rock music can be--it could be as decade-defining as those reference points were to their own times (and several after). That it isn't, as unfair as it might be to try and hold it to that standard, feels just a little like a let down, especially given how talented Liars are.