REVIEW: ERIKA SPRING - ERIKA SPRING EP

Erika Spring - Erika Spring EP
Cascine, 2012

Let's talk about fashion for minute: as an awkward, bookish, young white male, my understanding and conception of fashion is, to be far too generous, limited. Nonetheless, I do understand--or at least I am able to project--a certain sense of the signifiers of fashion, like glamour. Glamour seems to me to reside somewhere in the 1980s, to be most at home in the postmodern metropolis of global capitalism. The hollowed out subject that exists within this evocation of wealth and leisure (perhaps best exemplified by Christian Bale's performance of the cypher Patrick Bateman in American Psycho--and isn't it Bateman more than any other of his roles that suggests the origins of Bruce Wayne/Batman in his current cinematic form?) looks out from the screens and mirrors of capitalism into yet more screens, reflections reflecting back to (and on) themselves, and glides through the cities whose buildings are a perfect match for their subjects. Thus, glamour becomes a way for consumer capital both to s(t)imulate desire and to enjoin enjoyment. Given this (a big if: as I said, my knowledge and understanding of fashion is beyond limited; this is seen through a glass very darkly, if at all), the endless return to the aesthetics of the 1980s in the current moment makes a great deal of sense: what is the iPhone and its attached oediPodal (to borrow a word from Mark Fisher) operator if not a kind of perfection of this sense of glamour?

Erika Spring's solo debut is nothing if not indebted to the aesthetics of the 1980s, with the drums of its slick pop (she namechecks Bateman-favourite Phil Collins twice in a recent interview), synths that split the difference between banging electro and gauzier, 4AD-style dream pop, and--especially on "Like a Fire" and the Eurythmics cover "When Tomorrow Comes"--some particularly retro touches with the basslines and vocals. All of that doesn't necessarily sink the EP, as Spring is undeniably talented at these kinds of breathy, dreamy songs, but the most overtly retro moments are the weakest. "When Tomorrow Comes" is a well-written pop song, but it's not particularly subtle, and its inclusion here pushes the wrong buttons in terms of authenticity. It might not be intended to act as citation--indeed, in her interview with The Fader, Spring claims that "when I heard 'When Tomorrow Comes' the words just got me. . . . and I just wanted to say them--I just wanted to say the words"--but it feels like it, causing the spectre of pastiche to loom around the edges of the project.

Of course, others have noticed this and see nothing wrong with it. In her review for Pitchfork, Lindsay Zolandz writes that:

Spring gets points for reappropriating 80s synth pop and Kaputt-style soft rock in a context that's utterly devoid of ironic scare quotes . . . [She] displays a genuine interest in replicating the texture and aesthetic of the music she grew up with. The elements of pastiche are woven smoothly into her sound, which dances gracefully on the edges of past and present, of waking life and dreams.

There is, Zolandz seems to be saying, an inherent value to non-ironic replication, and while this isn't incorrect, it feels like a pretty hollow victory (though postmodern irony is certainly beyond tiring at this point). The reference to the critically acclaimed Destroyer's recent album Kaputt is important here--rather than reappropriating sounds and tropes of 80s soft rock, Spring's music reappropriates a reappropriation of those sounds; in the procession of simulacra, we're pretty far down the line at this point.* It's also calculated, though, and speaks to a cultural phenomenon that Mark Richardson discusses in one of the best pieces of music writing I've read in the past year, "the subtle Tumblr-ization of indie; music-making as re-blog." Richardson summarises the appeal of Tumblr as a further step in the purposing of pop culture in the construction of identity, an "intesif[ication]" of the same impulse that lead former generations to draw on binder covers, but now:

allowing us to re-purpose richer media. Not to mention making the whole process so much easier. So instead of scrawling a constellation of bands onto a blank notebook, you can instead host the band's music, post their videos, and present their most compelling photos. You can actually become a broadcaster of the media, rather than just commenting on it, and you can do it all with just a couple clicks of a mouse. The person posting can say, "This is me" with a click or two, and the media itself becomes part of the person's identity, not just the association with it.

 This is why the reference to Kaputt rather than to the actual (or original) sources of those soft rock sounds--even if those earlier sources are the intended references by Spring--makes so much sense. Like a .gif of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air that is reblogged, the transaction that Richardson characterises as "Remember David Lynch? I do, too," the cultural analogue in which Spring's statement of musical identity makes sense is Kaputt and its rhetorical "Remember the 1980s? I do, too."**

That late capitalism no longer sells products but lifestyles (in a Tumblr'd and Pinterest'd age, it might be more effective and appropriate to say images) is not a new proposition, but the consumption of these images and the cultivation and purposing of media in the construction of an image via social networking seems part and parcel with the sense of glamour I tried to describe above. The continual "re-blogging" of 80s aesthetics across cultural formats feels like an obvious fit in this context. In his opening monologue in American Psycho, Bale's Bateman details his rigorous, fascistic regimen to control his image, and his constant readings of popular music like Phil Collins, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis and the News turns those objects into further screens and cyphers, marketing slogans and yuppie ideology acting as depth, as subjectivity, the cultural counterpart to his ruthlessly disciplined body. On Spring's EP, "Like a Fire" and "When Tomorrow Comes" are the songs Bateman might like, finding in them mirrors of his anomie, his murderous materialism, his amoral desire for exposure regardless of the absence of those sentiments in the music. Their musical signifiers are trappings of his ideology: the synth bass of "Like a Fire" combines with the glossy keyboards and plastic guitars to perfectly reblog the 1980s as an image as much as a sound (moreso even than her take on the Eurythmics' song), the triumphant upsurge of the song's chorus evoking music videos as much as music. 


Ultimately, what saves the EP are its first two songs and closer "6 More Weeks." Though these tracks work with a similar palette to the rest of the EP, they are more ambiguous, with inside and outside becoming confused. I can't help but be reminded by Kate Bush in some way. "Happy at Your Gate" is all cool glamour, but its seductive, breathy atmosphere is also charged with a nervous momentum, a tension carried over by the harsher keyboards of "Hidden," reminiscent of Broadcast's The Noise Made By People and the gloriously downer pop of "Come On Let's Go." Indeed, the repeating pulses throughout "Hidden" make clear that her mention of Terry Riley and Philip Glass in The Fader is not just attention-grabbing namedropping. If "6 More Weeks" isn't quite to the level of these two songs, it at least feels a more able synthesis of the avant cool chill of the likes of Broadcast and Stereolab and 80s synth rock than either "Like a Fire" and "When Tomorrow Comes." Or, put more simply, if the latter are pastiche, the former feels like a step away into a more personal vision of how to use these styles. Given this, it's doubtful that anyone will label Spring's EP revolutionary, but it is smart and endlessly catchy; on a warm summer night, it can be an ice cube on the back of the neck.

*As Baudrillard writes in that essay in reference to the recreation of the Lascaux caves, "It is possible that the memory of the original grottoes is itself stamped in the minds of future generations, but from now on there is no longer any difference: the duplication suffices to render both artificial."
**Though as something of a tastemaker given his status, isn't Dan Bejar's statement with Kaputt closer to "Remember the 1980s? I do, too, and they sounded like this"? Thus, musical "re-blogs" of that sound confirm Bejar's memory as the true memory of the 1980s, almost retrochronically creating the decade and its aesthetic in Eliotic fashion.

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.