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: 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.

BUTTERFLIES ON CORKBOARD: SUPERHYBRIDS, ATEMPORALITY, HAUNTOLOGY

Simon Reynolds' latest (and last) guest blog over at Bruce Sterling's Beyond the Beyond on the atemporality of the omnivorous listening generation's music (an omnivorousness that is a product of not only the increased access/availability of more music on the internet, but the consequent decrease in any sense of limitation/closed horizons to a musician's output) is a good one. One of Reynold's big points--via a piece by Justin Davidson in NY Mag--is that "with the musical past's archives splayed open, there is a constant temptation to regress;" he goes on to note that the music of a band like Battles comes across as closer in spirit (and in sound) to jazz-fusion or 70s prog rock than any kind of futuristic, forward-thinking, new millennium music, or, as he puts it: "both their aesthetics and their ethos echoed progressive rock and jazz fusion."

The problem with this echoing is the sense of atemporality that inevitably seems to accompany it. In the words of Reynolds: "The other thing worth saying about these nu-fusion or 'superhybrid' styles/scenes is that their very rhetoric and philosophical repertoire has a pronounced 'retro' air. These ideas and ideals have been around for what feels like forever." Whereas the jazz fusion or prog rock bands of the 70s were exploring and incorporating contemporary influences, "What gradually developed, with the passage of time, was the onset of atemporality: more and more elements in a new band's make-up cease to relate to the present genrescape and instead involve rummaging through the archives." So instead of prog rock picking up on folk or classical or contemporary black music, as Reynolds points out, or jazz fusion's engagement "with that moment in the 70s when soul music got looser and smoother and more electronic, and electric jazz started taming the wildness of improvisation with the slickness and structure of the pop song," as Jess Harvell mentions in re: Thundercat's new album, we have bands in 2011 engaging with moments in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, etc. and producing music that is not, in an distinguishable way, beyond that earlier era (Reynolds has written about this extensively [and I gather Retromania, his new book, explores this idea in some depth], and Mark Fisher has also discussed this on his blog).* This seems different than hauntological music, obviously, because whereas that features, according to Fisher, "cultural objects that return to a wounded or distorted version of the past in flight from a waning sense of the present," and whose purpose is to "preserv[e] . . . demands [for the radically new] in conditions where--for the moment at least--they cannot be met,"** this atemporal, omnivorous music is purely archival or curatorial: it highlights a dead style without advancing it, or by simply adding it alongside other dead styles, without the production of any kind of real cultural affect--it's the musical equivalent of the Ark of the Arts in Children of Men. In contrast with the superhybrid, the hauntological foregrounds the unanswered questions, the unexplored possibilities; it captures what is still alive in the "dead" genre but has been repressed, the ghost of the past-future and its potentially utopic energies.

The inevitable product of these "superhybrids," though, can only ever be pastiche, in Jameson's sense:

the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs. . .

Those blind eyeballs are unable to see unresolved questions or contradictions in the genres that are hybridized. What's more, they don't want to see them, don't want to have speak with a live tongue, because of the work and effort that goes into actually having and sustaining the necessary "ulterior motives," convictions, or beliefs. Nigel's answer to Theo's questioning of the purpose of the Ark of the Arts in a dying world--"I just don't think about it"--is the answer of the pastiche maker: there is nothing behind the mask of the art, no belief it can reference, so no viewers are even necessary. In this environment, the cleverest recombinations or resurrections of past genres wins. And those that are deemed cleverest are those whose chosen genres have been archived, or curated, for the present audience by the most prestigious curators/archivers (cf. Soul Jazz's Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound compilation, or the Ethiopiques series, or the granddaddy of the them all in some senses, Nuggets--and this is not to denigrate the music found on those compilations: most of the songs on Tropicalia are fantastic, and I own and enjoy several volumes from Ethiopiques).*** Who revives these genres becomes more important than why the particular genre is revived, or its resonance with the current cultural moment. Consequently, the wrong advocate, the wrong curator, can sink a genre's chance for successful revivification (in the sense of restoring to activity, but not to life or vigour--this is rarely revitalization).

For Reynolds, this "looks a lot like the way fashion operates. Or indeed how high finance operates. Where no value is immune from being abruptly and utterly devalued." The consequences, he notes, are rather dire:

the principles and practices of 'flux and mutability' have long ago shed their former subversive and utopian charge. Worse than that: they have become inverted, to the point where if anything they suggest the static and dystopian. Because in some fundamental and profoundly perturbing way, 'flux' and 'mutability' are actually isomorphic with the economy, characterized as it is by precariousness and the imposition of 'flexible' work patterns. 

This music works as an ideal soundtrack for the ascendance of non-places and non-time in the modern working world, or what Fisher calls "Itime, a distributed or unpunctuated temporality," which has been characterized by a "reflexive impotence in the face of a neoliberal ideological program which sought to subordinate all of culture to the imperatives of business." The reissue and compilation cycle work in tandem with the atemporal, omniverous musician: he or she creates a "superhybrid," and in explaining its roots in [insert various genres/locales/time periods here], sets in motion (if the musician is successful) the machine that gives us back those genres, locales, and time periods, like so many butterflies on a corkboard. New superhybrids arrive, along with their new butterflies to display, etc., etc. Isn't this just the music of the Last Man who lives at the mythical End of History? The man for whom everything is a museum piece?

It seems to me that, in some ways, the worst offender in this whole phenomenon has been krautrock and its champions. While Can, Neu!, Faust, Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Cluster, Popul Vuh, Amon Duul, Ash Ra Tempel et al. could be incredibly forward-thinking (they could also be stultifying in being totally of their moment), the idea in certain circles seems to have become that German music of the 1970s is the endpoint for experimental leanings and tendencies. How do we know that a band is getting more "serious" and making more "challenging" music? They play a rigid 4/4 beat and say the word "motorik" a lot in interviews. What are recycled analog synth washes and occasional bits of string or flute in the hands of such bands? Attempts at channeling the same "kosmische" music that poured out of Germany three and four decades ago. The annoyance I felt at the sort of reflexive praise automatically heaped on any band with even a whiff of krautrock coming off their music (and again, I'm not blind to my hypocrisy here: there's a footnote praising Stereolab in this very post!) came to a head for me following Portishead's album Third. I should note that I'm a huge fan of Third: it's a great record, and it might be the record I've listened to most over the past three years. Indeed, going by the metric Nick Southall suggested recently for determining a favourite album--"how often you've listened to a record through choice"--you'd have to call Third one of my favourite albums (interestingly, if I sat down to write a list, I'm fairly certain Third would struggle to make the top ten, and maybe even the top twenty).

Perhaps, then, it's just a matter of overexposure, but when Portishead debuted "Chase the Tear," with an accompanying video that could've been made at any time since the 1970s it looked like, I'd had enough. This was good music by most reasonable standards--it sounds good, it's got a catchy melody, it's well-played and produced, you can even dance to it if you want--but it's not "new" in any sense other than the song was written in 2009. It's not likely to lead to "new" music, either. "Chase the Tear" is pointed firmly backwards, but it exists now--it is the mask, the dead language, that characterizes pastiche. Nevertheless, a lot of the language in reviews of the track suggested that this is music that is going forward. And I just couldn't be excited by it. I still can't. This is the same band who largely abandoned the samples that made up its first album (or sampled instrumentals played by the members) by the time they got to album number two for fear of repeating themselves. Now, it's not hard to say that a lot of Portishead's aesthetic was always looking backward, but it was never felt to me as much of an open plagiarism of the past, a copy and paste job of dead genres and styles, as it does on "Chase the Tear" (even when they were literally copying and pasting bits of the past to make new music!).

The problem, in a nutshell:

What is different about music now is that open-minded, curious musicians are responding to and fusing with influences from all across music history and across the globe. This ought to provide them with a palette of infinite possibilities. And for those who are very creatively strong, who have a filter, having such a superfluity of launching pads and diving boards works out well.
But most artists aren't strong enough to withstand such an influx.

Obviously there's nothing wrong with musicians having a set of influences from the past (it would be hard to say that the Thundercat album I just gave a fairly positive review of doesn't have a few influences from the 1970s and 1980s, say), but there is something "wrong"--and I think Reynolds does a great job identifying just what that is--with the automatic assumption that omnivorous listening habits and infinitely extendable spheres of influence automatically lead to new music. The facts seem to be pointing to the conclusion that they don't, or at least that they don't often enough. What we're left with the rest of the time is pastiche, a poorly reproduced simulacrum of the past that won't leave us alone, and which denies even the possibility of nostalgia for that past or an investigation of the promised-futures trapped within it, the desires that capitalism (and neoliberalism in particular) "captur[ed] . . . [but] which it could not satisfy." To close with Fisher's words--a few sentences that underscore, I think, the continued importance in considering the hauntological, even if its internet vogue might be long gone--"A genuinely new Left must be shaped by those desires, and not lulled, once again, by the logics of failed revolts." If there's to be any kind of post-capitalist society, it seems to me, its art won't sound (and look) like it's ensconced in the accompanying lulling cultural logic, either.


*I should say that technology also seems to be an interesting factor here: not that technology has stopped expanding and developing w/r/t music and production, but wrestling with technology and its possibilities doesn't seem as public and exciting as it has in the past, probably because outside of autotune--which very people are actually "experimenting" with in any meaningful way, to say nothing of its age: it's hardly contemporary technology, given the speed of technological advancement these days--there is little public grappling with technology when it comes to music. The technology that dominated in the 1970s and 1980s, synthesizers (particularly analog ones), are not quaint retro touches, the domain of middle aged men able to drop ridiculous amounts of money on Moogs and ARPs and Oberheims, etc., etc. It is, as Adrian Utley from Portishead agreed in an interview a few years back, a hobby like owning a caravan (or a set of golf clubs). Circuit-bending and software that allows user-written programs might be the closest thing to this, but they hardly seem like public interactions of music and technology (was Radiohead's "Go to Sleep," featuring Greenwood's guitar solo passed through Cycling74's Max/MSP the most public example of this? That was back in 2003. . .).  But then again, is it really that different than his guitar solo on "Paranoid Android?" And that was running through even older technology. . .
**That post I've linked to on Fisher's blog, thanks to the series of abstracts it contains, is one of the easiest and best summaries of hauntology and capitalist realism available on the web. A great resource, there.
***I'm also not necessarily denigrating bands who do this: Stereolab are one of my favourite bands ever, and they essentially functioned as highly selective and successful curators for a large part of their career. Ditto Portishead (but I'll talk about them more in the body of this). And of course there is a difference between genealogical exploration of a genrescape (I love that term!) and an investigation of its constituent parts and simple curatorial presentation; two very different kinds of critical apparatus are involved in these acts.