I WISH I LIKED THE COCTEAU TWINS

I've said this a number of times, but I really wish I could love the Cocteau Twins. They are one of my favourite bands to read about because, when a decent writer discusses their music, it usually turns into a description of everything I love about music. Unfortunately, when I listen to the Cocteau Twins, I don't have the same experience. Part of it is the production--everything sounds impossibly dated and awkward (this is probably aided by reading guitar magazines as a teenager, which tended to demonize any and all uses of the chorus effect after its abuse in the 1980s)--but part of it is something I just can't nail down. I love Elizabeth Fraser's voice in other settings (Massive Attack's "Teardrop" or This Mortal Coil's version of "Song to the Siren," for example), but I often feel vaguely embarrassed when listening to her within the context of the Cocteau Twins. Similarly, I recognize how gorgeously detailed and layered Robin Guthrie's guitar sound is, but in action it often leaves me cold (or worse, bored). Thus, despite the fact that the Cocteau Twins helped invent/refine the kind of music that I love, I've pretty much shied away from listening to them. This is all the more surprising to me in light of the fact that I do really love a lot of things that sound like/bear an obvious debt to the Cocteau Twins, like Seefeel's Quique.

This is not to say that I hate the Cocteau Twins or actively dislike them. If anything, I'm ambivalent toward their music. I'll enjoy the odd song when I come across it, but the only album I own is Heaven or Las Vegas. Inspired to give that album another spin after writing about The Weeknd, who sample "Cherry-Coloured Funk" for "The Knowing" and have their own song titled "Heaven or Las Vegas," I was reminded how much I love the title track. Fraser's voice in the chorus is just perfect, lightly tripping through the syllables, and Guthrie's guitar is as neon and sparkly as the titular locales would suggest. Really, it's just a wonderful piece of pop that's sweet as the sugariest treat. I've always felt that the colour My Bloody Valentine used for the cover of Loveless is the perfect colour for that music (my own weak experience of synaesthesia). Similarly, the combination of Fraser's voice and Guthrie's guitar in "Heaven or Las Vegas" suggests the exact shape depicted on the cover of the album.

Browsing for the video for "Heaven or Las Vegas," I came across a band that, like the Cocteau Twins, I tend not to enjoy, despite their similarity to many other bands I do enjoy: Lush (whose album Spooky was produced by none other than Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins and who were also on 4AD). My brother is a Lush fan, and I remember him playing their albums while I was on the computer and he played video games, or vice versa.* One song I don't remember him ever playing, but that I've come to really like, is "Undertow" from their album Split (I think my brother stuck to things like "Desire Lines" and "Never-Never," though he didn't like The Cure, surprisingly). It's not hard to figure out what I love about "Undertow:" the opening drumbeat, so metallic and mysterious, the industrial-strength bass, and the swirling, sensual music (which owes not a little to Guthrie) that threatens to overwhelm the vocals until the lovely a cappella end. This is as heavily sexual as My Bloody Valentine, but unlike the fairly ambiguous/androgynous Loveless--and here is as good a place as any to acknowledge one of my favourite lines in any album review is Heather Phares' description of Loveless as "suggesting druggy sex or sexy drugs;" that's just so apt--the sexuality here is fiercely feminine, something like "Loomer" or "Blown a Wish," but deeper and darker somehow.

*There were three bands I can remember him playing in this situation: Lush, Buffalo Daughter, and Portishead. Clearly, only one of those three took. Actually, I think that Beth Gibbons and Elizabeth Fraser are not a million miles removed from each other in terms of technique, approach, subject matter, etc. This just makes my ambivalence toward the Cocteau Twins more confusing.

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #2 BLUE DAISY THE SUNDAY GIFT

Albums of the Year 2011: #2

Blue Daisy - The Sunday Gift

Few albums I heard this year were heavier than The Sunday Gift (maybe only Earth's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, really). The obvious points of comparison--Massive Attack c.Mezzanine, Tricky c.Maxinquaye and Pre-Millennium Tension--are there, but combined with the softer, rain-soaked greyscale of Burial's Untrue.* The bright colours on the cover feel like something of a red herring; the music on this album is almost relentlessly cast in shadow or harshly illuminated by uncovered 100W bulbs. There's a very real sense of anger on this album that, devoid of someone like Tricky's playing with sexuality and gender, makes for a brutal listen, but one that resonates in the wake of the London riots this summer. If the post-political is the most political, this album soundtracks what that politics entails: fear, doubt, paranoia, and anger, the dystopic world of Children of Men brought one step closer to reality. In this sense, the album pairs well with Black Sun and Pinch & Shackleton, but whereas those albums felt extraterrestrial somehow (or at least temporally distant), The Sunday Gift is shockingly of the present moment. The defiant undercurrent of "it doesn't have to be this way" that is so prevalent in hauntological music from the UK is supplanted here by anger and mourning that it is this way. Menace is the starting point here, with "Distance (Once Upon a Time)" pacing nervously, stalked by its echoing strings, setting up the long march to "The End." Anneka's vocals on "Firewall" are definitely not "Safe From Harm"--she sounds as if she's keening in the wake of a massive armed force's march through a city, the spectre of total policing that is increasingly becoming a reality in the UK and its aftermath.  Heidi Vogel's wailing vocals on "Fallin'" sound so often as if they're saying "no," the denial echoing round and round, lost, empty, and almost defeated. There are no real track breaks here, so everything tumbles together and feeds off what came before. After a few songs, it starts to add up to a bleak picture.

For an album that threatens to slip into broken and defeated territory, though, there remain slivers of hope and uplift. Hey!Zeus's massive turn on "Psyche Inquiry" suggests the anger that fueled the summer's riots finding a voice to struggle and fight on with, a way to demand changes and to hold people to account. The final two songs proper, discounting "The End," cover some of the same ground as Burial's "Raver"--particularly the second half of "Only For You," with its arpeggios and piano/vocals emerging from the hiss and crackle, and the club-ready, almost ecstatic beat of "Spinning Channels"--softly glowing in the darkness and offering a possible way in out of the horror of the rest of the album. Of course, aside from all this context, the music sounds phenomenal. When the beat drops in "Shadow Assassins" it is an upsurge in intensity that is breathtaking at high volumes. "Raindance," with its squalls of noise and arresting chants, might be the closest the album comes to the psychedelic colours of its cover.** And for an album whose world is so resolutely overcast, this is a surprisingly varied listen that is never a chore. Much of the credit for this is due to the vocals: in place of the chopped, looped, and pitch-shifted syllables favoured in so much electronic music right now, The Sunday Gift, like SBTRKT's self-titled album, demonstrates the power of full vocal tracks. Beyond Hey!Zeus's appearance on "Psyche Inquiry," Anneka's two turns on the mic, "Firewall" and "Spinning Channels" are both wonders. The latter is possibly my favourite on the album: the wordless elegies of the album's first half re-cast as a spectral rave diva. Back in 2009, SBTRKT called Blue Daisy as an artist to watch based on the strength of "Raindance." Clearly, this was a man who knew of what he spoke. Few albums released this year feel as timely as The Sunday Gift and almost none do a better job of presenting a massive talent coming into his own. It's a harrowing journey through the darkness of this album back to the light, but well worth your time and energy.


*Another, perhaps surprising, point of reference for me is Radiohead's Amnesiac (cf. this and this), an album whose themes and lyrics (much more so than the techno-dread of Kid A) seem to become more relevant with each passing year.
**Another surprising connection? I can't help but be reminded of The Fifth Element's soundtrack during "Psyche Inquiry" and "Raindance" (criminally underrated movie, by the way).

SOMETHING LIKE A BLOG POST ON "SHUFFLE"

A few random thoughts on the eve of the start of a new semester.

Two song titles that make me chuckle every time I see them:
"Stupid Prick Gets Chased by the Police and Loses His Slut Girlfriend" by Mogwai and "Eat My Dust You Insensitive Fuck" by Catherine Wheel. Of course, it helps that both are actually great songs beyond having punchlines for titles: the Mogwai song is, fitting its origin, really quite tense and filmic and the Catherine Wheel song, thanks to Tim Friese-Greene's always stellar production work, features the same amazing harmonica sound found on those later Talk Talk albums.

Speaking of said harmonica sound: "The Rainbow" by Talk Talk. The way that note just builds and then explodes from 7:04-7:16 is just wonderful. I'd say it sounds like a rainbow, but it's a little too violent and unhinged (not that I'm complaining). Also, wow, the guitar that comes in at the start. He must be hitting the strings really hard because it sounds way out, but it works so well with the piano. It really is astounding that the same band that wrote this (which is also a great song) made Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock (twenty years old this year!). Both albums have a pretty sterling critical reputation these days, but they deserve more actual listening than I'm sure they get. I know I'm guilty of letting them sit for criminally long times without a spin. As albums they're so intense, though, that it's difficult to do anything else but let them wash over you--there's no fading into the background, especially not with Mark Hollis' voice coming out of the speakers at you.

I'd been hearing a bit about The Weeknd when they released their first album, but I wasn't really in the mood to check out an R&B band from Toronto. With the release of their second album of the year, Thursday, this past Thursday, though, I figured it couldn't hurt to see what they're about. After listening to Thursday, I have to say that I'm impressed: it sounds great, sort of halfway between Brainfeeder and mainstream pop. It reminds me of Massive Attack (pre-Mezzanine, maybe during the Protection era) and early Tricky (circa Maxinquaye) in a lot of ways. I didn't pay enough attention to the lyrics to pick up on the tales of debauchery that supposedly make up all the lyrics, but I can see this being just sort of noirish and outre enough to score a more "sophisticated" night out for a lot of people (kind of like Portishead when Dummy came out--actually, "Cowboys" from Portishead isn't a terrible touchstone for The Weeknd's sound, to a certain extent). The way that the voice is used isn't quite as arresting as Gonjasufi, but the vocals really do grab your attention. I'm interested to see what album #3 in this trilogy will sound like.

A great companion to The Weeknd that came out on Brainfeeder recently is Shlohmo's Bad Vibes. It's less indebted to IDM and jazz than Flying Lotus, so it's able to feel much more like a kind of malfunctioning, robotic R&B, but it retains the kind of glassy, airy tones that made Teebs' album Ardour so great and that Four Tet regularly transforms into moments of great beauty. There are some Burial-style disembodied voices that creep up and moan like ghosts in the background, but they're handled well and aren't really much of a distraction. It would be nice to hear what Shlohmo could do with some real vocals, though. Actually, lately I've been really wishing that Bjork would hook up with the Brainfeeder roster. Just the thought makes me sort of dizzy. Or maybe if Laura Darlington could guest on a few of Shlohmo's tracks the results might be as impressive as her turns at the mic on Flying Lotus' last two albums.