REVIEW: GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR - ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND!

Godspeed You! Black Emperor - ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND!
Constellation, 2012

In one sentence: ALLELUJAH! DON'T BEND! ASCEND! is both exactly what you think a new Godspeed You! Black Emperor album should sound like (particularly given that it's made up of "definitive" versions of two songs that were being performed before the group's hiatus) and a reminder of their music's ability to transcend expectations. Surprises: it's heavy as fuck, all squealing guitars and full band detonations. Reassurances: occasionally that exquisite brand of melancholy that is distinctly Godspeed will be teased, but the band never gives in to the temptation to rehash past glories--this is nervous, edgy music for a nervous, edgy time. Ultimately: if this is the end, it's on a higher note than Yanqui U.X.O., trimming some of that record's fat in its longer pieces and including some of the atmospheric dronescapes that made Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada and Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven such engrossing listens. Fuck yeah, I'm pumped, basically. I'll write a real review when I've stopped smiling. For now, listen here.

REVIEW: MARK HOLLIS - "ARB SECTION 1"

Via Fact, here's new music from Mark Hollis (formerly of Talk Talk). As their story points out, it's the first piece of music he's released since his 1998 self-titled solo album. Hollis casts a long shadow over the world of post-rock given his involvement with Talk Talk, obviously, and like Scott Walker (he of the forthcoming Bish Bosch), Kate Bush, and Michael Gira from Swans (apparently--I have to admit being deficient in my knowledge of that group), he's something of an avatar of the modernist auteur. 

After the announcement that the first chance one would have to hear Hollis' new work would be through the incidental music of a pay channel drama starring Kelsey Grammer, I admit that I didn't have high hopes. "ARB Section 1" does nothing to particularly raise my hopes, but it's at least a curiosity; it might even present a problem to be solved. After working through the strangeness of its first few seconds, the mix of weirdly tropical, Fantasia-esque strings and what sounds like the "voice" preset on a low quality keyboard (recalling the soundtrack to any number of JRPGs from the late 90s and early 00s) proves itself quite beguiling. There's a certain lushness to it that fits music from one of the primary architects of Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, but whereas those albums seem crystalline and unreal, emanations from a Platonic realm somehow beamed to a fallen world, "ARB Section 1" feels weirdly real. Its humid mystery (appropriate, given that the music was originally conceived of as the score for a 2010 film The Peacock) actually makes it feel of a piece with artists like Shlohmo, Lone, and Slugabed, which, considering how far off the beaten path Talk Talk's later releases seemed at the time, is promising. 

Despite all this, the piece feels neutered without context, and I have to believe that subsequent sections of "ARB"--should they exist and be released--or at least more music to surround this piece would improve "ARB Section 1" Certainly, this feels like only half a return without Hollis' heavenly voice, which acted a beacon of light during Talk Talk and his solo work's bleakest moments, a familiar hand to guide the listener through the strangest passages. The problem that I see this track posing is one of the author function: Hollis' solo album seemed so of a piece with the final Talk Talk releases, and the long silence following it has offered a certain closure. I hear--and I'm sure I'm not the only one--that album "finishing" Talk Talk's project. If the appearance of "ARB Section 1" heralds the release of new music from Hollis, then, is it taking up that project again, suggesting that it wasn't finished in the first place, or is this a new moment, with a new project? How will the linearity of Talk Talk and Hollis' progression as an artist--one that is so perfect that it seems scripted--be understood in the face of new music? Will an equally long silence follow? In a way, "ARB Section 1" (and what follows, if anything) might cause a change in how Hollis is understood as an artist, or it might reaffirm how he is understood now by denying his new music a place in his oeuvre. Either way, it should be fascinating to watch the debates should more new music by Hollis surface.

REVISITING THE FOR CARNATION

I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of Pitchfork's "The People's List" when they start appearing on Wednesday. It'll be interesting to see what the balance is between "we know these are the important albums/great albums" (not the same thing, obviously, though often grouped together and even more often used as the guiding criteria for these kinds of lists) and genuine surprises, revelations, re-evaluations, etc. There's been a certain canon of indie that's crept up around Pitchfork over the fifteen years it's been around, and though that canon and the breadth of genres that contribute to it have expanded (in both good and bad ways), this seems like a moment of confirmation for that canon. In one sense, this list might actually rekindle a certain sense of "importance" that people feel is a diminishing aspect of music criticism and music writing. 

I won't start guessing at trends or trying to figure what those important albums might be, but one pleasant sign I've noticed from the lists I've seen so far is widespread love for the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I and one surprise has been the love for Sonic Nurse and Rather Ripped as the albums representative of Sonic Youth's second wind in the '00s. I went back and forth on whether to go with Sonic Nurse or Murray Street on my list, but "Karen Revisited/Karenology" carried the day. I was definitely not expecting to see Rather Ripped on as many lists as I have, nor was I expecting the total absence of The Eternal. One Sonic Youth related turn of events that I'd half-hoped would come to pass because of its potential for humour was a massive show of support for NYC Ghosts & Flowers that would see the recipient of one of the more damning reviews in Pitchfork's history suddenly held up as one of its readers' favourites. A missed opportunity, universe, but oh well (that was probably a little too far-fetched to hope for on my end, because aside from "Free City Rhymes" and the title track, nothing on that album is particularly great).

One album that compiling my list has made me go back and revisit--and which I'd been meaning to re-listen to anyway because bits of it have kept popping into my head recently--is the For Carnation's self-titled album from 2000. A pretty underrated and underacknowledged bit of American post-rock, it really is a gem, working the ground between folk, jazz, and rock largely by playing on the ideas about space and silence found in each genre. The songs often swing (not surprising given the help from Tortoise alumni), but gently, and for an album that relies as heavily on repetition as it does, it leans on the nagging rather than insistent side. It's also seriously quiet, to the point of almost non-existence at times--this is an album of dramatic pauses and calm-before-the-storm hushes that end up revealing themselves to be the storm. Most reviews talk quite rightly about the strong sense of dread and air of tension that permeates the release--and given the connections to Slint, that makes sense--but there's much more in common here with "For Dinner. . ." than "Good Morning, Captain." The album's not gothic in the way that Spiderland is, though it's very much a nighttime album--that the closer is called "Moonbeams" makes perfect sense, as do the intimate vocals. Most of this different sense of tension and dread comes from that focus on space and silence; where Spiderland is full of guitars, the For Carnation relies on the drums to carry the lead (quite literally on "Being Held") and various electronics to provide what colour there is. 

"Being Held"

For all that the album follows its own path, it's remarkably listenable: never slow despite the patience involved in the construction of the songs, and quite easy to fall under the spell of--there's mystery and suspense, which makes the whole thing seductive. In many ways, it's like Bark Psychosis' Hex in that you never really notice how strange or experimental the album as a whole might be because entering into its logic is so natural. On its own, "Being Held" is bizarre: a weird bell/siren, some dissonant keyboard washes, and a drum solo; taken in the context of the album, though, it feels every bit as natural and as songlike as "A Tribute To" and "Snoother," though both are more obviously "songs" in the traditional (which in this case, I guess, is taken to mean rockist) view. Indeed, "Snoother" is one of the highlights of the album, at once the most overtly jazzy and poppy song, a delicate waltz with some fantastic backing vocals by Rachel Haden shadowing Brian McMahon; when the pair sing "We are no less removed / than for that which she is known," my heart melts. The emptiness of its verses coupled with the sparseness of its instrumental section makes for one of the few moments during which the tension relaxes over the course of the album, but the droning organ (?) in the background throughout carries the dreaminess of the song into appropriately haunting and haunted territory.

"Snoother"

"Snoother" is followed by "Tales (Live From the Crypt)," the album's other highlight. Where "Snoother" was sparse, "Tales" is full, the busiest mix on the album, a weird amalgam of a pounding, almost post-punk intensity with science fiction synths (at times sounding right out of the Dr. Who theme) and a vocal performance that manages in its deadpan manner to go beyond Spiderland's darkest moments. Kim Deal's ghostly introduction to the song is a nice scene setter, especially with the way that the bassline seems to launch the song into the abyss after her final word. Everything that was bubbling under the surface of the album's first half comes to light here, though the dynamics feel very different from the standard rock explosion of tension. After this, "Moonbeams" is an aftermath, a ruin, and though the music threatens to become redemptive at times, the album trails off into sullen silence, anxiety looming large over everything.

"Tales (Live From the Crypt)"

I'm not expecting the For Carnation to place highly on "The People's List." I would actually be surprised if it placed at all, though I hope it does. I found out about Slint when I was starting high school, and, for whatever reason, the first thing I checked out after Spiderland and Tweez was the then newly released self-titled album by the For Carnation. Where my passion for Spiderland has faded a little over time (and my Spiderland t-shirt was stolen by an ex-girlfriend), I've remained consistently enchanted by the For Carnation. I doubt I could make a case for its importance or greatness if measured by influence--I've never heard anything else that sounds like it, nor have I heard or seen a band mention the For Carnation in an interview. What I can say is that the album means a great deal to me and that certain parts--the harmonies in "Snoother," the strings in "Emp. Man's Blues," the opening of "Tales (Live From the Crypt)"--are burned into my brain, coming forth from time to time to serenade me. If nothing else, it remains an intriguing, quiet road that few bands seem interested in traveling down. I'm waiting, but I doubt that anything will ever top it at what it does.

REVIEW: EVIAN CHRIST - "DUGA-THREE"

"Do you think things are going to get better before they get worse?" 

"No way. Things are going to get worse and keep on getting worse. . ."

"What do you think this country's going to look like in 2003?" 

"You know, I'll tell you the truth. Nothing against you guys, but I don't want to answer that question because I haven't even got a mind that's that inhumane." 

"Are you ready for what's coming?" 

"Ready as I'll ever be."

I've only purchased one piece of vinyl in my life, Godspeed You Black Emperor!'s Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada EP, which remains--even thirteen years on (and ten years on since I picked it up)--a stunning release. It was an exciting thing to have, despite the inconvenience of not having my own record player and pretty much only getting to listen to it when I could convince my dad to put it on his record player (given that he favours mostly rock and roll from the 1950s and 1960s, this was never an easy proposition).* What made it a doubly exciting thing to have, though, was not just the sense of danger and strangeness--there was plenty of that, to be sure, given that its back artwork features a diagram of how to make a molotov cocktail, and its cover (see above) is a series of Hebrew letters from the Book of Jeremiah that seem ancient, terrible, and unknowable--but also the catalogue that came with it of recent and upcoming releases on Constellation Records, things like Fly Pan Am, Exhaust, A Silver Mt. Zion (before they became A Silver Mt. Zion etc. etc.), Hangedup, Re:, 1-Speed Bike that came with descriptions that made them sound like the music of dreams and the music of nightmares in equal proportion.** 

Those capsule descriptions were alluring because they both matched what I was hearing on Slow Riot--the simultaneously bleak and chiming music behind "Blaise Bailey Finnegan III" seemed to be, without having heard any of these other artists, what the writer meant by "electro-acoustic"--and hinted at worlds beyond that were darker, denser, more challenging, more violent. I remained (and to an extent remain) fascinated by the feel of this stuff as much as by the sound, the weird accruals of emotion that show up in the collision of drones, field recordings, noise, strings, and electronics that Constellation, Kranky, Alien8, and a bunch of other labels peddled in the mid-to-late 1990s and into the early 2000s. 

While it's easy to see now how the space for such music is limited and how it could easily become over-saturated with bands, projects, and solo musicians all working off the same template, that didn't always seem the case. Nevertheless, the whole "Montreal scene" around Godspeed felt exhausting to consider long before Red Sparrowes started releasing stuff that seemed like a parody of Set Fire to Flames (who might have benefited from being parodied, to be honest) or Valley of the Giants put out a concept album about Westworld (though that album is frequently quite beautiful). I've remained fascinated by this style of music--one of the innumerable branches of post-rock--partly because it never quite felt exhausted so much as stagnant, full of good ideas that no one quite knew how to marshal into the next step forward. Those interstitial moments on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven--like the infamous "Welcome to Arco AM/PM Mini-Market" recording (one of the great joys of my life while I was living in Oregon was to finally go to an Arco AM/PM, though I never got to hear any PA broadcasts while I was there, unfortunately)--were so good at carrying emotion and conceptual meaning, at making the connections between the politics of the band and the album's liner notes, the grainy films behind the band's performances, and the music, but nothing ever really got beyond them (and by Yanqui UXO the band had abandoned them). 

This strand of post-rock was already (perhaps always already), in a certain sense, a pretty hauntological genre, but I've often thought that it would be thrilling to hear a band or musician revisit those generic elements and to take that next step with them. In his essay "Progress versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future?,"*** Fredric Jameson discusses the function of science fiction as a genre via its narrative structures and their complex temporal work. Under late capitalism, Jameson claims that the problem facing "historical fictions" is not only that the genre is dated, but also:

It is the relationship to the past which is at issue, and the feeling that any other moment of the past [than that depicted in the particular work] would have done just as well. The sense that this determinate moment of history is, of organic necessity, precursor to the present has vanished into the pluralism of the Imaginary Museum, the wealth and endless variety of culturally or temporally distinct forms, all of which are now rigorously equivalent. . . . In its (post-) contemporary form, this replacement of the historical by the nostalgic, this volatilization of what was once a national past, in the moment of emergence of the nation-states and of nationalism itself is of course at one with the disappearance of historicity from consumer society today, with its rapid media exhaustion of yesterday's events and of the day-before-yesterday's star players (who was Hitler anyway? who was Kennedy? who, finally, was Nixon?).

In contrast to historical fictions, then, Jameson argues that SF works according to a different temporal relationship that restores historicity to a certain extent. As a genre it does not, he suggests, relate to the future(s) it depicts in the sense of acclimating its readers (and society at large) to potential "future shocks" as its:

visions are themselves now historical and dated--streamlined cities of the future on peeling murals--while our lived experience of our greatest metropolises is one of urban decay and blight. That particular Utopian future has in other words turned out to have been merely the future of one moment of what is now our own past.

Given the distance between these dated visions of the future (often now set in our present) and our own lives, and given the impossibility of living to see the realisation of the distant futures predicted, Jameson locates the function of SF not in "images of the future," but in an experience of the present. These narratives "defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present, and . . . do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization." This is a valuable function, and works to restore an experience of historicity to daily life, because:

the present--in this society, and in the physical and psychic dissociation of the human subjects who inhabit it--is inaccessible directly, is numb, habituated, empty of affect. Elaborate strategies of indirection are therefore necessary if we are somehow to break through our monadic insulation and to "experience," for some first and real time, this "present," which is after all all we have.

For me, post-rock served a similar function (and given the steady diet of SF I consumed growing up, maybe the two were cross-pollinating), its "shock of the new" shocking precisely because it seemed so richly and intensely of the present moment. I do not think it is (or that it is not only), then, a retromaniacal impulse that leads me to dream and wish for a resurgence of this music that seems like it could so precisely and effectively locate me and society in our present.

As a politicized aesthetic statement, the possibilities seem vast, especially the way it might enable a reimagining of the elements of daily life under late capitalism, a transformation of the sonic detritus that surrounds us, into critique, into vision, into a different world. In terms of lost or misplaced futures, the one in which post-rock didn't exhaust itself and its listeners by hardening into a set of rigid dynamics and instrumental tics is the one I feel the absence of most personally. I wasn't old enough, nor was I born in the right country, to experience rave and jungle, to enjoy that shock of the new with its cultural and political vibrancy. For me, post-rock was my avant-garde, "I've never heard anything like this" moment growing up. I'd caught it past its peak, to an extent, and within a few years of discovering it, it was gone (or at least its key players were either on hiatus or lacking in vitality), but post-rock, even in its much derided genre name, seemed to point to something, to a future that was beyond the limits of the present (and at the same time, to highlight and outline just what the limits of that present were). It may not have been as apocalyptic as the vision quoted above, but there was a sense of something coming, some fundamental change driven by monumental forces. Pre-millennial tension and post-millennial anxiety and good, old-fashioned conspiracy theories and complaints about the government combining in various forms of despair, discontent, outrage, and, underneath it all, hope. That future, the one post-rock offered, never came, obviously, and I'm left with old Constellation catalogues and under-listened to pieces of vinyl (now I have mp3s of Slow Riot I can listen to whenever I please) and my memories of what I thought could be.

***

In the past month and a half, the release that I've listened to most frequently is probably Evian Christ's mix for Dummy, "Duga-Three."**** While he's coming from a different place than those post-rock musicians I loved growing up, in sound and execution, to say nothing of inspiration, "Duga-Three" feels like it should have come out on Constellation or Kranky in about 1999. The drones, the field recordings, the disembodied voices from television and radio broadcasts, it's all there. Joshua Leary (who produces music under his nom de plume [nom d'ordinateur?], Evian Christ) mentions early Tim Hecker as an influence--and that influence is pretty obvious here, especially in the way the melody works in the first section--but the extreme pitch-damaged tones, and the air of half-remembered dreams also calls to mind Boards of Canada, Ghost Box Records, and all the hauntological all-stars of the past decade.***** Given those sounds, it's fitting that Leary offers the following inspiration for the release:

Duga-three is a four-part piece of music I wrote after reading about a Soviet signal transmitter of the same name. It was characterised by the repetitive tapping sound it broadcast, which was sufficiently powerful enough to intercept transitions [sic--I think he means "transmissions"] across the world. After 28 years of transmission, the Duga-3 array was abandoned as mysteriously and unexpectedly as it had appeared. 

*** 

I have weird little pockets of mainly useless knowledge about random things and for a little while I was reading about over-the-horizon radar systems, which were used by governments in the mid-late 20th century to detect targets at really long ranges. Because the Duga-3 array was unclaimed during its period of use there was a lot of speculation about what it was actually there to do, and together with the sheer scale of the construction...I dunno I can imagine it really intimidating and I guess I just found that interesting. Visually it is just incredible, there are some amazing photographs of it on the internet. Just kind of gets your imagination going a bit.

Based on the above, you'd be forgiven for assuming this is just another exercise in ostalgie, nothing but Cold War daydreams and Soviet kitsch. It's really quite a remarkable listen, though, and if it doesn't quite do what I hoped some post-rock band would do in 2003, it doesn't feel a million miles away from that. Over the nineteen and a half minutes of "Duga-Three" you are transported: it creates an atmosphere, a coldness and a ghostliness, a haunt(ing), and takes over the space in which you listen to it. I find it endlessly entrancing and fascinating, especially the tapping (it almost sounds like a motor softly turning over) that runs throughout the second half, the most overt nod to Duga-3. 

I also find "Duga-Three" curiously dated and quaint--not just as a result of its inspiration and subject matter--but in the way that it really does feel out of time, like a lost release from another era. This isn't exactly the kind of thing you hear so much of these days--for whatever reason--though ten or fifteen years ago I imagine people would be all about it, as it taps into the same kind of emotional space and resonance as something like William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops or The Conet Project. I was happy to read Leary's answer to the question of how he sees this release fitting into his more rap/bass music oriented work; for Leary the only distinction is the lack of drums. Maybe there's a spark of what caught my eye and fired my imagination (long before it ever caught my ear) about post-rock rumbling in the increasingly polyglot world of bass music, ready to re-emerge and transform itself. If not, though, there's still "Duga-Three," a perfectly elegiac reminder of one of the lost futures of my youth and all its promises.

________________________

*I will always be thankful for my parents letting me put things like Loveless and Spiderland and Ege Bamyasi and all sorts of stuff that I was finding out about from the internet on during car rides (mostly) without complaint.

**Thinking about my own relationship with my copy of Slow Riot, I understand the cult of vinyl that exists (and I certainly loved the physical object of the CD--artwork and liner notes at once a great fixation and a source of disappointment by never revealing enough and, at the same time, never deepening the mystery enough). Perhaps if I had more time, money, and space, I would become a collector of vinyl (there's a pretty big second-hand record shop down the street from where I live), have a high-fi, and throw record listening parties.
***A shockingly prescient essay, given that it appeared in 1982.

****That Evian Christ releases music on Tri-Angle makes a lot of sense--while I don't love everything the label puts out, I definitely find their catalogue and aesthetic intriguing, just as I did with Constellation et al. when I was younger.

*****One artist he doesn't mention as an influence but whose work I've found pairs quite well with "Duga-Three" is Fever Ray, whose album remains one of my favourite releases of the past five years.

REVIEW: RADERE - I'LL MAKE YOU QUIET

Radere - I'll Make You Quiet
Future Sequence, 2012

Back at the start of the year, Big Shot put out an article on "75 Dance/Electronic Music Albums to Look For in 2012." One of the releases highlighted on that list that caught my eye was Radere's I'll Make You Quiet. Described as an album constructed out of "found sounds and processed guitar and electronics" that was "captured on single takes, a rarity in this cut-and-paste digital age," I marked the album down as a definite "must-hear." That description called to mind Tim Hecker, whose work I love, and I wondered if I'll Make You Quiet might be this year's Ravedeath, 1972. In many ways, Hecker is not a bad comparison for the music Carl Ritger makes as Radere. The physicality of his music, the weight and presence it seems to have in the room as it plays, certainly calls to mind some of the best attributes of Hecker's work, but the tension between silence and noise, the co-mingling of beauty and violence within both of those dynamics, also calls to mind the work of Laughing Stock-era Talk Talk or Bark Psychosis c.Hex. Another recent touchstone might the Sight Below, whose It All Falls Apart used a similar tonal palette, though to more melodic (and ultimately more rewarding) ends.

While Radere calls to mind all of these artists, I'll Make You Quiet is not quite at their level. Most of the tracks here work not in terms of linear development or narrative, but through stasis and repetition. This can be quite an effective technique, but I'll Make You Quiet often suffers from a fatiguing insistence on its static qualities. Given the power and force of his sounds--even at its sunniest and lightest, nothing here could be called gossamer or be said to shimmer; this is solid music throughout--Ritger is often able to construct his tracks in a topographic fashion, using layers of sounds to construct worlds with a great deal of variance from top to bottom. The cover image, which is absolutely gorgeous and probably my front-runner for album cover of the year right now, describes the movement of sound on the album well: while there are often peaks and valleys, huge banks of cloud (in the form of drone, hiss, or hum) shift throughout, now obscuring those peaks and valleys, now revealing them. When this approach clicks, as it does on the album-opening title track--whose structure of a slow build to a monstrous wash of noise (aided by the grainy, lo-fi texture of the recording) that gives way to a brighter, almost angelic bit of melody reminds me a great deal of "Hex"--and the closer, "Stay Away," which uses dynamic shifts, feedback squall, and the arrhythmic propulsion provided by what sounds alternately like keys jangling or bits of broken metal and glass being dragged across a floor to great effect, Radere's music achieves a beauty and power that can breathtaking.

Those two tracks, at twenty two minutes combined, make up just under half the album's forty six minute running time. Unfortunately, the other twenty four minutes are not similarly thrilling. "Sometimes, I Can't Make Full Sentences" is the best of the rest, calling to mind the more interstitial moments of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven (I half-expected a female voice to tell me about Arco AM/PM Mini-Markets), but there is a frustrating lack of development. An entire world is being constructed, one that sounds like what Arthur C. Clarke imagines might be beneath Jupiter's clouds in 2010: Odyssey Two, but nothing happens beyond that construction. That Ritger is able to create such vivid and detailed tracks in one take is impressive, but I can't help feeling that multiple takes might allow him to do more in the way of development. The remaining two tracks, ". . . So I Left" and "Good Evening, Ghosts (Version),"* suffer from the same fate. While ". . . So I Left" introduces a new colour to the album with its mock-organ guitar and chattering denouement (the most alien sounding moment on the album), "Good Evening, Ghosts" is nine minutes of static repetition, a swooning, swooping loop (a very pretty loop, to be fair) repeated while being swathed in noise and sonic debris. The materials are there, but Ritger seems content to put them together without asking them to do anything.

I'll Make You Quiet, then, is ultimately a missed opportunity. Its opening and closing tracks show just how strong and interesting Radere can be, but the middle of the album suffers from being neither ambient enough to serve as aural wallpaper (music this weighty and physical commands attention) nor active enough to repay close listening. At its best, the album suggests that Ritger has a voice distinctive enough to contribute to the kind of power ambient music that Tim Hecker has been the master of for the past ten years, which is high praise. That the longest tracks on I'll Make You Quiet are the strongest bodes well for Ritger's ability to make this kind of music appealing on a large scale, but for now, too much stasis and repetition and not enough development compromise his vision over the album as a whole.


*You have no idea how much I wanted to like a track called "Good Evening, Ghosts."

ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2011: #8 MOGWAI HARDCORE WILL NEVER DIE, BUT YOU WILL

Albums of the Year 2011: #8

Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will

Mogwai have been (and probably always will be) a favourite of mine: five normal guys with terrific senses of humour playing intense (in terms of both sonics and emotions) music. They also hold the distinction of being the band whose album I have paid the most for ($40+tax for an import copy of Young Team), but I won't hold that against them here. Based on what I know about Scotland, it must just ooze melancholy--and I have to admit, as thrilling as "Like Herod," "My Father My King," "Glasgow Mega Snake," and "Batcat" are, it's Mogwai's melancholy that I've found to be their most appealing quality (cf. "Tracy," Come on Die Young, "Stanley Kubrick," "I Chose Horses," and "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead"*). If you're like me, Hardcore delivers in spades, with the excellent "Letters to the Metro" and "Too Raging to Cheers" (in a discography littered with great song titles, this is truly one of the best). It also offers "Death Rays," which is melancholic and the most Mogwai-sounding song here, and, in its very adherence to Mogwai's traditional strengths, points out why the rest of the album (barring "White Noise," a passable but largely anonymous number) is so superior to it: Hardcore is Mogwai poking around in largely forgotten or un(der)explored areas of their sound.

I've written a great deal about Mogwai, my relationship to their music, and my reaction to this album, but it bears repeating: this is the album I needed Mogwai to make without even realizing I wanted it. The Hawk Is Howling has its moments, but I was kind of bored of Mogwai instrumental epics. Hardcore is, starting with "Mexican Grand Prix," a genuine surprise, and a largely pleasant one at that. Even the seeming throwaway "George Square Thatcher Death Party" is more enjoyable than the last album's stab at a radical departure, "The Sun Smells too Loud." Part of the joy is that through the first half of the album, the band offers something like their version of Mogwai-Pop (what is "San Pedro" but "Glasgow Mega Snake" or "Batcat" with the distortion dialed back and the hooks dialed way up?) and it works brilliantly (this is also what makes "Death Rays" such a misstep, in my opinion). Not to be outdone, the back half reminds listeners that very few bands do "sad" quite as prettily as Mogwai do, and then, to continue the embarrassment of riches, outdoes all of those epics on The Hawk Is Howling with their best straight guitar songs since Come on Die Young. "How to be a Werewolf" is everything I fell in love with the first time I heard Mogwai with a truly ecstatic guitar solo as its climax, and "You're Lionel Richie" makes a split EP with Earth (who released a pretty decent album this year, too) seem like the best idea on the planet.** It's unlikely that Hardcore will change anyone's mind about Mogwai, and I can understand why some people would offer rather tepid reviews and write the album off as more of the same, but for me, Hardcore was a minor revelation.

*That comma splice kills me. I love the title and hate it all at the same time (and I am really not a grammar pedant--as a quick read through of this blog will probably make clear).

**"You're Lionel Richie" also offers a pretty great use of movie (?) dialogue, which is a cliche with this kind of music, but that feels earned and that works here.