REVIEW: THE WEEKND - "ENEMY"

I've made my feelings on the Weeknd's music fairly clear: I loved the trilogy of albums released last year because of the stylish production, but I keep returning to them because of the bizarre psychological terrain that the albums cover. Ahead of the release of Trilogy--the major label backed, newly mixed and mastered versions of House of Balloons, Thursday, and Echoes of Silence--Abel Tesfaye and co. have released a new song, "Enemy." As Fact point out, the song sounds like it features a warped sample of the Smiths' "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want," which should do nothing to fend off the charges of the Weeknd's music being "PBR'n'b," but is another inspired production choice. 

"Enemy" itself is a wonderful track, taking the lush, sensuous pop of tracks like "Montreal" and "Outside" from Echoes of Silence and fusing it with the fragility of that album's closing title track to produce a coldly sensuous burner. The minimal piano backing feels like it exists in an ocean of space, while the hints of 80s guitar and the fairly minimal beat provide an accent and a foundation, respectively, for Tesfaye to do what he does best: unfurl a tale of depravity and seduction shot through with desperation, isolation, and manipulation. It's old ground for him in some ways, but few people are masters of an aesthetic the way Tesfaye is, and that aesthetic evolved a great deal more over the course of three albums last year than people gave him credit for. "Enemy" doesn't move that aesthetic into any radically new territory, but it does suggest that there doesn't seem to be a drop in quality on the horizon.

The best songs on his Trilogy were the ones that balanced this tension between the wild indulgences and psychological emptiness that seems to define his character--"The Zone's" admission of not being able to see or feel even as he has the sex he can't help but pursue being the archetypal example--but there was another strand to this, the one in which Tesfaye considers his own status and abilities as singer, celebrity, seducer and denounces all three as inevitably fleeting and ephemeral ("Rolling Stone" and "Next" come to mind). "Enemy" seems to balance somewhere between the two narrative threads, at once begging and yearning like Morrissey but in the same breath noting that "I'd rather be your enemy / than any friend you think I'd be" and admitting that he "forgot how it feels to regret my sins / I need the old thing back." Unlike "Rolling Stone" or "Next," though, in which Tesfaye worries that once he's told his story the females he surrounds himself with will leave him as old news, no longer mysterious and therefore no longer attractive, he flips the tables and explains to the female he addresses in "Enemy" that:

You remind me of a feeling that I used to have
So I don't know what to expect from you tonight
But I'm not trying to waste nobody's time
I'm just trying to find material, some inspiration
We can put it in a song, if you want.

It's another seductive dangling of the fame and fortune he promises on "Lonely Star," one predicated on his voice, though one in an interesting tension with the choruses desire to seduce her without a word, as if he doesn't want to have to resort to his status anymore. Tellingly, the old ambiguity returns in his desire to make her "numb without a word" and "leave without a word," the two things that Tesfaye himself seems to reveal about himself over and over again: he's always numb, and he's always leaving and being left.

REVIEW: ULTRAISTA - ULTRAISTA

Ultraista - Ultraista
Temporary Residence, 2012

I've written about good taste and records before. Generally, I'm of the opinion that good taste is largely a curse; the bands and artists whose work deliberately appeals to good taste are rarely satisfying listens. While albums and bands can, in hindsight, seem to devolve into good taste (Bark Psychosis being a prime example with Hex, an album so perfectly in line with what's now "good taste" its wonder must surely be imperiled for the first time listener), there's a certain something--Fredric Jameson might call it an old-fashioned, modernist, "unique" style--that elevates such music above its influences, confluences, references, and progeny. Ultraista's self-titled debut album comes carefully packaged in not just good, but excellent taste. The press blurb on Temporary Residence's website notes the band's fondness for "Afrobeat, electronic an dance music, visual art, and tequila," a set of influences that lead them to produce their album "of highly infectious, exquisitely crafted electronic kraut-pop." To make it even more appealing, of course, the album is available (for a limited time only! Act fast!) on coloured vinyl. Oh, and it's Nigel Godrich's (he of Radiohead-producing fame) band, along with session musician Joey Waronker (famous to me for his drum work on R.E.M.'s Up) and Laura Bettinson, so you know the kids will love it.

To put it bluntly: Ultraista are not capable of transcending their good taste. Indeed, their good taste is so conspicuous, so all-encompassing, that the album becomes kind of interesting despite itself. Good taste in music like this often registers as pleasant anonymity--it sounds good because I know it sounds good, so it doesn't actually have to sound like anything--and Ultraista's debut is no exception. The concern to appear hip turns the album into a rigidly controlled screen, a surface that's impossible to get beyond. Studiously mixing the same three or four elements (essentially: metronomic, Teutonic funk drums; buzzing, swirling synths; icily detached vocals), the band's sound presents itself as a blank, a cipher. You can hear anything in this music: it's contemporary (parts of sound more like The King of Limbs than The King of Limbs did, others are vaguely in line with chillwave), it's retro (crucially, though, it draws from the 1990s rather than the 1980s, all mid-period Stereolab and early Broadcast), it's indie that has a shelf of European techno on vinyl to impress visitors with. For the most part, it's not even possible to distinguish the songs on the album by saying "that's the one with the . . ." or "it's the one that goes . . .," because its compositions are more of a piece than Music for Airports. In short, it's aggressively bland in its good taste, its pleasant anonymity.

This is where it gets interesting, though, because nothing can be so bland and anonymous without transforming into something else. One of the most overworked remarks on a piece of music is Brian Eno's description of My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" as the "vaguest music ever to have been a hit," but I honestly do feel that something similar is at play with this album. Just when it's on the point of dissolving, when it has reached a point of maximum blankness, it becomes bizarrely appealing. Temporary Residence credits the musicians with "masterful control over the pure anatomy of a pop song," and the description is not wrong, though for different reasons than the label would suspect, I think. This is pop music transformed into observed pop music--it knows very well how pop songs work, and it's able to demonstrate how they work to the listener without ever doing the things pop music does. This isn't music that inspires an emotional response in the way that a Top 40 hit will, but it offers a clinical deconstruction of how the Top 40 hit does this by turning the pop song into the unreachable world behind the screen of Ultraista's music.

Take opener "Bad Insect," which rewrites Radiohead's "Bloom" and suggests how pop music can be exhilarating without actually ever raising your pulse. Emotionally, this music is flat, devoid of affect, and more interesting for it. The minimalism in terms of sound design works to the song's advantage in focusing attention on the surface. This is taken to even greater extremes in the middle of the album, with "Our Song" and "Easier" anonymous enough to become almost offensive, to retain a certain grain of reality, a kind of productive irritation that suggests the songs are as much theorizing about the music they sound like as functioning as actual songs. Indeed, the album falters at its busiest, when the spell of its good taste, its vagueness, is broken. The songs that fall victim to this (hyper)activity become genuinely irritating, as on the grating "Smalltalk" or the chirpy "Static Light."

Perhaps the oddest song here is "Gold Dayzz," which ends up with a kind of sub-Trish Keenan vocal that sounds lazy in the wrong ways, a curse that also plagued the Godrich-helmed King of Limbs. Bettinson's detached vocals are put to quite good effect elsewhere, though, as on "Strange Formula"--which is practically sub-zero in its icy loops of voice and synth--or the brilliant closing troika of "Party Line" (the album highlight), "Wash It Over," and "You're Out." What makes "Party Line" immediately noticeable is its deviation from the rest of the album's tonal palette. Foregrounding a piano line that feels snatched out of an adult alternative song designed to soundtrack graduations, the song supports itself with buzzing synths and a gently insistent bass that work brilliantly to catch the ear. The final two tracks are content to drift along aimlessly, threatening to lose all semblance of form at any moment, to lose sight of the pop structures they so carefully work to ape and to dissolve into pure sound, and the better for it.

Ultraista is, ultimately, an odd release. It seems too studied and mannered to have had its most appealing qualities (vague formlessness, anonymity) in mind. Nevertheless, the songs here tend to work as a kind of new twenty-first century ambient art-pop, plundering the cool bits of the past and reassembling them into the precise shapes that are now able to be only just heard and distinguished from the general background noise of life--a YouTube video playing in the background of your cubicle while you do work, the sound turned down so as not to disturb coworkers. Ten years ago it would have been a hit, and ten years from now it might be again (or it might sound like nothing at all, its good taste silencing it), but at this moment Ultraista's debut is weirdly adrift. As I listen to it, I think about Neil Kulkarni's "A New Nineties" series at The Quietus. Whereas his columns reclaim an alternative decade to the Alternative decade, Ultraista are like a band of Rip Van Winkles who fell asleep when bands like Eleven were making albums like avantgardedog and that dog. were making Retreat from the Sun and awoke in 2012. Whether there is any place for them (or any point to them) remains the question, though; where Rip eventually settles into a blissful senescence, free to be the idle raconteur he always wished to be, I think Ultraista will never quite find another time they fit into.

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.

REVIEW: FOUR TET - PINK

Four Tet - Pink
Text, 2012

I figured I might as well join in the outpouring of love for Four Tet's new album, Pink (for examples, see the reviews here, here, and here, and the comments here). I don't know if I can call myself a long-time fan of Four Tet, but I've been pretty solidly on board since I first heard 2008's Ringer EP. "Ribbons" caught me in its spell--mysterious and alluring and weirdly beautiful; retrofuturistic in a strange way, like dusty chrome furniture in a space station. From there, I went backwards and caught up on what I'd missed. By the time 2010's There Is Love In You rolled around, it was fair to say that I was a fan. Over the past year and a half or so, it's been a pleasant surprise to have a steady trickle of music from Kieran Hebden, from collaborations with Burial to one-offs and pairs of tracks of new Four Tet songs. Those Four Tet songs are collected here, and it's a credit to the strength of Hebden's voice as a producer that Pink is a fairly unified set, exploring an area that, if not rigidly defined, at least has some pretty solid borders. If Pink doesn't quite match the heights of There Is Love In You, it's not for a lack of stunning moments, as throughout Hebden continues to demonstrate his ability to take what might seem affected in others' hands and turn out effortless, weightless music. The more overt turn for the dancefloor signaled by Ringer and followed through on his last album is front and centre, but there's also a nod towards his earlier work, with the sinuous, ever-shifting rhythms and cosmic outlook of free jazz, the gently psychedelic strains of 1960s folk and early 1970s singer-songwriter music, and the loose-limbed bop-and-knock of hip-hop shot through the floor-filling potential of the material here. Six albums into his career as Four Tet, Hebden's managed with Pink to sum up where he's been and hint at where else he might go. That both parts of that equation are thrilling suggests what a special talent Hebden is.

Pink is a lengthy album--it clocks in at just over an hour--but its length is put to good use: aside from a mid-album stretch of shorter tracks, extended run times provide Hebden with the room both to continually mutate the shape of tracks and to spotlight a track's parts. Thus, opener "Locked" allows its swinging percussion almost two full minutes to do all the lifting before it turns into infinitely refracted psychedelia, all shards of hallucinatory melody that subtly disorient even as they enchant. Similarly, closer "Pinnacles" pushes and pulls on its underwater, Caribou-esque techno centre, letting jauntily dissonant piano crash through the mix again and again, not to disrupt the groove but to highlight how swinging it is. Hebden is still able to pull back and isolate elements on the shorter tracks, though, as the drop into near-silence during the weirdly percolating break of "Jupiters" bridges its pretty overture with the jazzy and relentless groove that dominates its second half. Indeed, if there's a common denominator to the album, it's the importance of the drums to these tracks. Thrillingly alive--even when they clearly aren't live--they make the best argument for the evolution of Four Tet over the past decade, turning what's been an eclectic discography into a surprisingly linear trajectory. It's as if the collaborations with Steve Reid, the folktronica, the detours through house and techno had all been planned by Hebden, rather than happy accidents along the way as he developed. Regardless, it's all there in the drums, which, aside from the beatless epic "Peace For Earth" (probably the closest thing here to the material on There Is Love In You), cover the album like a web in much the same way those shimmering, Reich-ian pings and chimes covered the last album.

If the drums make the album, though, the stunning moments that I mentioned earlier come courtesy of the textures that interact with those drums. The chunky synths that close out "Locked" like a sunset. The kalimba/mbira that wends its way through the final three minutes of "Lion" and pushes the track's funkiness through the roof. The repetitive, old-school vocal sample that drives "128 Harps," and the heart-stopping pauses throughout the track, that inject some tension into what could otherwise be a bit of pretty filler. The chasing-its-tail vocal in "Pyramid" that allows the track to do "Love Cry" in reverse and offer the hardest, purest dance track of Hebden's career. These and other moments provide sumptuous highlights that move the body and fire the senses, suggesting that the music on Pink might best be called "gourmet techno." I've damned other albums for suffering from the dulling effects of great taste, but this is an example of undeniably great taste used to help the music rather than render it tame and predictable.

Despite the superlatives littering this and other reviews, it seems like it would be relatively easy to underrate Pink. Hebden's been so good for so long at this point that a new Four Tet album that does everything he's always done well and expands (or at least deepens) the project's aesthetic doesn't feel like a revelation. I doubt this album is going to be the starting point of any kind of revolution, and it's unlikely that Pink will be spoken of in the same hushed, reverential tones as his pal Burial's Untrue, say. What that doesn't and can't cover, though, is that this is well-written, well-produced music that hits all its targets in a relaxed, assured manner. Sometimes it pays to have a steady hand at the wheel, and it's difficult to imagine a steadier hand than Hebden's here.

On a deeper level there is one thing that Pink has going for it that suggests if it's not an "important" album, it's at least an interesting one: the tracks that make up Pink offer a model of how omnivorous music can avoid the over-caffeinated maximalism that tends to plague "post-everything" music, like Rustie's Glass Swords. At this point, Four Tet denotes an aesthetic sensibility that really does seem comfortable grabbing from just about anywhere, even if it mostly remains within certain genres and idioms. The pastoralism that first brought Four Tet notice is still present--if in limited supply on Pink; one of its wonders is how urban it feels--and the various elements at work in his sound are so integrated, so naturalised, that it's difficult to call anything he does a dalliance anymore. In this sense, Pink feels very timely: you could spend hours following its sounds and strands through YouTube, though that wouldn't necessarily make your experience of the album any richer. Knowledge of UK garage, 2-step, dubstep, house, and techno aren't required for entry--beauty and meaning are communicated on the surface as well as in the depths. In his study of literary modernism The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner compares the densely allusive poetry of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot before concluding:

[N]o knowledge about Coriolanus will lock Eliot's lines neatly together as the information that Paquin was a Paris dressmaker will lock Pound's. Pound omits, omits, but knows what he is omitting and can restore on demand; but behind Eliot's resonance there is frequently nothing to restore (how centrifugal are the Notes to The Waste Land!). (133)

In place of omitting, we might say that Hebden synthesizes or integrates, but, like Pound, he can restore what he's integrated, allowing worlds to continually bloom behind his music. Here an allusion, a citation, and the (seemingly) infinite archive of the internet that supports and supplements the experience of listening to Four Tet offers a connection to a broader cultural matrix without ever feeling like it threatens to overwhelm the music in the present moment. That might not seem like it's much, but I'm finding that an increasingly scarce experience when listening to music these days. If musicians can learn any trick from Four Tet's Pink, I hope it's to do the same.