REVIEW: NATHAN FAKE - STEAM DAYS

Nathan Fake - Steam Days
Border Community, 2012

As "The People's List" is unveiled over the next three days, there are a number of albums I'll be looking to see where they place because they seem to function as barometers or signifiers of certain strains of indie-dom. Of those albums, Kid A is the one that I'm most interested to find out about, and not just because it's one of my favourite albums--along with Kid A, there's a whole constellation of albums and artists that defined a certain aesthetic, a certain sensibility, a certain sound that was, for awhile, the sound of the present and the future. Warp Records and 1990s IDM played a big role in shaping that sound. When it came out, discussions of Kid A seemed almost inevitably to be discussions of influence, as if the only important thing was determining from where Radiohead drew those sounds. Once the genealogy was straight, these discussions suggested, everything else would slot itself into place. That the process of tracing this genealogy in reviews and promos for the album let in a whole new spectrum of sounds and ideas about music than were normally covered by reviewers dedicated to slackers with guitars and math-rock bands was a happy accident. So, Kid A--via the fact that it led people who didn't normally (read: ever) talk about these things to mention electronic music, to list Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, and others, and to open a whole new world to listeners of a certain age and background--is and was momentous.

As recently as 2009, Pitchfork officially held Kid A to be the best album of the 2000s. This list makes for interesting reading still, as it at once confirms a pretty conservative bent (all of the albums one would expect to make that list are accounted for, most in exactly the places one would expect) and offers a glimpse at some bands whose stock doesn't seem to be riding quite as high today (Sigur Ros, the Strokes, and Modest Mouse all in the top ten seems like a stretch for "The People's List," but I could be wrong). I believe there's a good chance that "The People's List" will be the final enshrinement of a certain canon of indie music, an entrenchment of an orthodoxy that just might be one of the last stabs at importance as a criterion for evaluation. What I'm not sure of is to what degree the orthodoxy that sprung up around Kid A (and there were certainly people into the things influencing Radiohead long before Kid A was released, but I do think that a band of Radiohead's size and of its position in the indie rock landscape so publicly displaying these musicians' influence on them had a crystallizing effect) will remain the orthodoxy. Back in 2005, Nitsuh Abebe wrote of a world in which "indie kids no longer bulk up their mix-tape credibility with some Autechre or Squarepusher on side two, and the new daydream alternative to rock attitude comes mostly from German electronics." That last clause now seems almost painfully of its time--I can't remember how long it's been since German electronics seemed the choice of indie kids, and given the post-everything maximalism and omnivorous listening habits of today's milieu, it might not even be possible to name any one thing that could be that choice today.

Nathan Fake's Steam Days is a pretty fascinating album to listen to in light of all this, as it seems to speak to a time when there was a specific choice for indie kids, a time that has largely passed. I first became interested in Fake's music when Jess Harvell described his work as "plastic techno My Bloody Valentine homages" in a review of the deluxe reissue of Seefeel's Quique. I've checked out a few of his releases since then, though nothing has really caught my ear in the way that that description caught my imagination. I'd be lying if I said that Steam Days was really much different: for all that Fact might describe the album as his "most dynamic album-length work to date," much of it feels same-y and undistinguished as the songs mostly do the same thing over and over again. What hurts most is the fact that Fake's music seems to be mining territory that others have already covered to such dazzling ends. Opener "Paean," for example, feels straight off the Richard D. James Album, its melody and structure somewhere between "Cornish Acid" and "Cornmouth." Unfortunately, while it's accomplished enough, the melody lacks staying power and the combination of playfulness and slight surreality that lifts James' best work. Regrettably, this same problem crops up over and over again; Fake is a gifted producer--nothing here sounds out of place--but nothing feels particularly necessary, either. By the time "Neketona" arrives, it's hard not to start wondering how many times you've already heard this track.

The limited palette on display in the first half doesn't help matters. The vinegar-y backing to "Iceni Strings" feels like it might be intriguing at first, but it's not abrasive enough to really set off the track's melody (nor is it really that different from what's appeared on the first two tracks). The titular strings are nicely soaring, though I wish they had more to do besides repeat a pretty but otherwise nondescript part. Similarly, the hollow, brittle drums that underpin most of the album's songs feel stuck in some turn-of-the-millennium hinterland in which they're doomed to perpetual good taste: nothing really rages, and even syncopations are relaxed and obvious. It's disturbingly close to coffee shop soundtrack territory, in this regard. What urgency is present on the album is often the result of straight 4/4 hi-hats or snares that become tiresome long before they have the chance to become transcendent, as on "Harnser." 

In contrast, "Old Light" is one of the best things here, as a beat with a slyly funk hitch in its step is accompanied by a distant melody that strikes the right balance between melancholy and mawkish and in so doing manages to be evocative without being sentimental. There's a deftness in its construction that just underlines how much more I wish some of these songs did. The second half of the album seems to pick up on these qualities and is altogether more promising. "World of Spectrum" is intriguingly aggressive, not a million miles removed from the sounds and textures on display on Squarepusher's Ufabulum. Especially against the too-polite backdrop of the majority of the album, its slightly harsher approach is a welcome intrusion and a chance to get the blood pumping. "Rue" is another highlight: its droning chords are genuinely affecting as it pulls off a similar trick to CFCF's "Exercise 4 (Spirit)" or the backing to Radiohead's "Motion Picture Soundtrack." The primary-colour melody of "Sad Vember" isn't quite as striking as that of "Old Light," though it is quite nice, but its final minute of hissy, tuneless, pitch-damaged synths feels indulgent and unearned.

The album closes with its two longest tracks: "Glow Hole" and "Warble Epics." The former clocks in at just a shade under eight minutes and moves from ring modulated textures to more mid- to late-90s Warp nods before returning to those ring modulated sounds in its bridge. The melody creeps back in and the drums get a little heavier, but as a whole, the track isn't really dynamic enough to make use of its slightly lengthier run time--its valleys don't feel like valleys and its peaks are too choreographed and inevitable to be genuinely exciting. "Warble Epics" opens with some nicely mock-portentous synths in a much appreciated moment of levity before rigidly 4/4 hi-hats take over. The drums are very upfront and dominate the mix a little, which is a shame because they're not as interesting as some of Fake's other bits of programming. The melody has some intriguing twists to it, and when it finally comes more to the fore a little under halfway through the track it's a welcome development. There's nothing radically different or unique about "Warble Epics"--it sums up what Steam Days is about fairly well, and is one of the more solid tracks on the album. The coda to the track might be the best part, though, a bit of nicely suggestive music that hovers in the distance like heat over a hump in the road.    

I can imagine being impressed by this album if I'd discovered it at 14 when I was reading all about Kid A and its influences. What I can't imagine, though, is being captivated by it in a way that the classics of those Warp Superstars of old captivated me when I heard them for the first time. It's not that Fake is doing anything wrong--largely, he's doing everything right. The problem is that he's doing the right things because they're the obvious, established things to do. The album desperately needs a challenge, an angle to work that would elevate these tracks from filler to attention grabbers. As it is, too much of the album goes by without making an impression or offering a way to differentiate one track from another. What's most disappointing about the album, ultimately, is that its building blocks have already been cannibalised and assimilated by other other genres to fresher, more interesting ends. It feels timeless in the wrong sense: Steam Days doesn't transcend its moment and stand as an immortal work, but rather feels equally unmoored from the present and the past that inspires it, without a place to exist and in which one could interact with it.

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.

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).

TEN SONGS I'VE LOVED IN 2011

I'm still trying to figure out some kind of albums of the year list (though the number of contenders is slowly but surely dwindling to a manageable number). I imagine that when I figure it out I'll post maybe one a day for ten days or something like that. A countdown! It might add some excitement to this space. Before I get to that, though, I thought I'd highlight, in no particular order, some songs that are off albums, EPs, and other such things that definitely won't be on my albums of the year list (I'm stealing this idea from Nick Southall). Think of this as something of a "Singles of the Year" list, though not all of these were singles.

Solange Knowles - "Left Side Drive"

Okay, yes, it's just Solange singing on top of the old Boards of Canada song of the same name (off the Trans Canada Highway EP), but she really manages to work well with the music. You could almost think (until the coda--although, this version is different than the one I've been listening to, and the vocals are a much better fit) that BoC had written the song for her. The chorus is particularly well done (dig that descending vocal line to kick it off), and I wouldn't be upset at all by a full album that sounded like this. 

Braids - "Lemonade" off Native Speaker

After hearing this song, I was really excited to hear the rest of the album. Unfortunately, it doesn't really live up to the promise of the single, but it's not bad for what it is. I'll be excited to hear their next album, at any rate. The sudden outburst of "Have you fucked / all the stray kids yet?" is a genuine surprise, but the real star is that gently burbling melody line that runs throughout the song.

Dum Dum Girls - "He Gets Me High" off He Gets Me High EP

This is basically just a classic girl group song sped up and with a little scuzz added to it (the start of the song always makes me think of something off Goo, but I can't think of what--"Kool Thing" I guess, but not quite), but damn if it isn't tight and well-written. Really, it's almost like some kind of platonic form--this genre distilled to its essence somehow. The explosion of the chorus is wonderful, and the long, stretched out "Be" at the end of the song  makes me dizzy with glee. Incidentally, I'd never seen this video until right now; I really like it out of sheer nostalgia--it looks like it was made in about 1992 (seriously, I swear there's an Eric's Trip video that looks exactly like this).

  

Efrim Manuel Menuck - "Our Lady of Parc Extension and Her Munificent Sorrows" off Plays "High Gospel"

The name alone conjures up ghosts of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Thee Silver Mt. Zion etc., etc. (seriously, I could never keep track of all the things they added to that name), but this doesn't really fit either camp. It's obviously closer to SMZ, given that Efrim is in something like "rock" mode here and singing (quite well, too, though Katie Moore's vocals really steal the show), but the mood is different--less dire, more hopeful, almost triumphant at times. Disappointingly, nothing else of the album really reaches its power, though "I Am No Longer a Motherless Child" comes close.

Thundercat - "Daylight" off The Golden Age of Apocalypse 

Let me start by saying that I do love this album and I might yet convince myself to include it in my albums of the year list. There are a few dud tracks (the ones that sound a little too close to anonymous FlyLo demos/B-sides), but Thundercat's voice and playing are wonderful (I can see why Simon Reynolds included him as part of what he calls the rise of maximalism). This song isn't about chops (or is at least only incidentally about chops); when those sighing vocals come in with the trilling electric piano and tinkling bells, it feels exactly like daylight. Whereas a lot of the better songs sound very much like 1970s fusion, this wouldn't feel tremendously out of place on Cosmogramma, and it's stronger for that.

Tycho - "A Walk" off Dive

Put this and "Daylight" back to back in a playlist--they work really well together, with "Daylight's" synths trailing off into that gently distorted, echoing opening to "A Walk." There is a very obvious debt to Boards of Canada (especially c.The Campfire Headphase, cf. "Dayvan Cowboy," which puts it in a similar sonic environment to the Solange Knowles song above--possible collaboration? I'd listen to it) throughout Dive, but it's well-played and well-produced. If the songs aren't always quite there yet--Pitchfork's review is correct in pointing out that some dynamic shifts would be helpful, because your attention does want to wander--"A Walk" doesn't suffer from that problem. For five minutes while listening to "A Walk," everything about the world seems magical, and sometimes that's more than enough.

Radiohead - "Separator" off The King of Limbs

The highlight of a frustratingly uneven record, "Separator" wouldn't have sounded that out of place for the band sometime just after The Bends was released, if it weren't so relaxed and spacious. One of the advantages (though it can also lead to some deathly dull songs and albums) about bands having played together for a long time is that they play together well. If nothing else, "Separator" is the sound of a band who know how to play to each other's strengths doing just that. Thankfully, it is so much more: one of Thom Yorke's best vocals on the album; a nice, slightly funky, rhythm section; and those heavenly guitars that come in about halfway through. Why couldn't the whole album have sounded like this?!

EMA - "Breakfast" off Past Lives Martyred Saints

The "Fuck California / You made me boring" opening to "California" may have received much of the attention, but it's the uncomfortable "Marked" that has the album's most devastating line: "I wish that every time he touched me left a mark." Mark Richardson wrote an absolutely fabulous piece on "Marked" that, like most of the pieces he writes, says a lot more than I could ever hope to. My favourite song on Past Lives Martyred Saints, though, is "Breakfast" (sorry for the live version; there's no studio version on Youtube). It's relatively peaceful compared to the rest of the album, but as quietly heart-wrenching as anything else. It also reminds me of Deconstruction's self-titled album (especially some of the quieter songs on it, like "Son"), which remains an underappreciated moment in "alternative rock." And she sounds a good deal like Kim Gordon, though in singing mode, rather than grunting mode.

Fennesz - "Liminal" off Seven Stars EP

This is Fennesz in "Endless Summer" mode, unfurling gorgeous melodies wrapped in static. I can't say that it pushes his sound in any new directions, but it sounds great. Fennesz has mastered his own sound, one that's distinct enough to turn his name into an adjective, and this whole EP sounds like him playing with nothing to prove. Even the drums on "Seven Stars" just literalize Fennesz's deconstruction of early rock and roll, which he's been doing since Endless Summer (he does this better than more literal callbacks--like Deerhunter's recent stuff--manage to do, in my opinion). Anyway, "Liminal" (and the rest of the EP) sounds like a breather after the masterful, but quite dense, Black Sea, and it's a joy to hear.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - "Senator" off Mirror Traffic

Speaking of songs that don't push an artist's sound forward. . . There's nothing about "Senator" that Malkmus wasn't doing with Pavement in the 1990s, and part of the pleasure is hearing Malkmus write a song as good as something he would've written in Pavement. The stop-start structure gives "Senator" a lot of momentum, and it sounds like Malkmus and the Jicks are having fun. The latter point has usually been a warning light when it comes to SM + the Jicks' releases (has a talented band jamming ever sounded so interminable?), but here the listener can have fun, too. 

REMEMBERING FIRST LISTENS

Well, I'd hoped to do a post a day during this break, but I didn't quite manage that. Oh well, nothing to do but press onward.

It's pretty rare now because of the way I listen to and consume music, but the first moment of listening to something new used to be quite the experience. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I start to consider what might be on an end of year list for me music-wise. I've heard so much this year (I can see arguments against both of them, but for me, 2010 and 2011 have been great years for music), but I can't specifically remember hearing it all for the first time. When I was in high school we'd just got the internet, and I spent hours on Allmusic, Pitchfork, and other websites reading, researching, and imagining what things sounded like (I even spent some time in music chat rooms on Yahoo!--speaking of which, I'm very intrigued about what relationship could be drawn between chat rooms and social networking as it exists in 2011). Pre-YouTube and high speed internet, it was still really difficult to hear any of the music that I was finding out about (krautrock, post-rock, IDM, basically all the references someone with "good" taste should get), and I had to make guesses as to what something could sound like when based on reviews and descriptions. After all the reading and guessing, then, to hear the actual music was an enlightening moment. Was I ever disappointed? Oh yes, all the time. Most of the time, though, I was able to come to love what I heard, even if it was only years later. Sometimes, I'll come across a song or band now that sounds like what I expected some of those genres to sound like before I'd ever heard them. For example, Mouse on Mars' "Tamagnocchi" sounds like what I expected Neu! to sound like, and what I've always kind of resented Neu! for not sounding like.

Anyway, there are a couple first listens that I can remember with particular intensity. I first heard Loveless, for example, late in the afternoon on a weekend (I have a feeling it was a Sunday, but that could be a projection based on other things). I remember the colour of the light and the way that even though it was right about the time on a weekend afternoon when I tend to get the kind of ennui that Douglas Adams' called the long, dark tea-time of the soul, Loveless was strange enough, different enough, new enough to cut through all of that. It's hard not to pay attention after the first five seconds of "Only Shallow."

The first listen that I remember above all others, though, is my first encounter with Verve's (pre-The) A Storm in Heaven. I'd read about it for weeks (months?): "the group's 1993 full-length debut, A Storm in Heaven, was based on buoyant, extended psychedelic passages. Looking back today, it was an interesting and original musical direction, since at the time, angst-ridden Seattle bands (and their many copycats) were all the rage." That was the sum total of my knowledge prior to hearing the music. I knew "Bittersweet Symphony" and "Lucky Man" obviously, but those were, I was told by the review, a different animal altogether from A Storm in Heaven and the early singles. And those singles! Oh, the mythology that was built up in my mind around them based on their reviews was immense:

"One Way to Go" and "Man Called Sun," however, show off their tendency to groove, building moody songs out of repetitive phrases that are the perfect backdrop for Richard Ashcroft's acid-tinged lyrics. With its minimalistic, echo-laden guitar, droning bass and heavy backbeat, "Man Called Sun" is the first Verve classic."

The band truly comes into its own -- Richard Aschcroft sings like a man possessed and Nick McCabe's guitar is positively oceanic, producing tidal waves of drone which crash and break over the hypnotically liquid rhythms of SImon Jones and Peter Salisbury. . . . [A] dreamlike beauty, tapping into an energy just outisde the realm of consciousness -- it's music which transcends space and time, with a purity unmatched by anything else in the Verve catalog.

"Gravity Grave" finds Verve augmenting their echo-drenched, fuzzed-out guitars with harmonica and flute. Underpinned by a pulsing bassline and heavy backbeat, the end result is euphoric, mind-blowing psychedelia.

It didn't hurt that the covers of their singles and albums--designed by Brian Cannon and Microdot--were amazing pieces of work. They had just the right mixture of surreality and menace to appeal to a teenage me. There's an NME feature with cannon talking about many of these images alongside his other work with Oasis, Suede, et al. Reading through his descriptions of the Oasis sleeves, you really get a sense of how they were the nostalgia mode. Everything is based on rehashing a rock and roll myth that had already become cliche. That one of their members was named "Bonehead" and suggested many of the ideas seems only too fitting.

A Storm In Heaven, front, back, and interior

"She's a Superstar"

"Gravity Grave"

"Slide Away"

Incidentally, it took many years--until YouTube appeared--for me to actually hear the full version of "Gravity Grave," despite the fact that for a number of years, if pushed, I would've said it was my favourite song (Now? Who knows? My stock answer for was Bark Psychosis' "Eyes and Smiles," but I don't know if I'd still say that). Knowing there was more to it that I hadn't heard actually helped its cause, really. The fadeout made me want more, made me need to know what was missing, and preserved the mystery of something that I already found inscrutable--what does "To me you're like a setting sun / You rise and you're gone" mean? I listened to "Gravity Grave" for the first time in a few years the other day and was taken away again. It was glorious. If there's one thing that I really long for from music it's transcendence, and early Verve delivers that in spades for me.

Anyway, this is supposed to be about my first encounter with A Storm in Heaven, so I guess I should talk about that. Sitting on the floor, staring at my stereo and flipping through the booklet (Ashcroft looking not quite of this world in his photo--you can really see how he sort of got away with his faux-messianic thing to start with; shame it all went to shit), as "Star Sail" begins. That first chord, like "Only Shallow," is immediately captivating.* But rather than the violence that follows "Only Shallow," a fade back out, an opening of immense spaces, and finally "Hello, it's me..." That guitar solo (it's like some god's vacuum cleaner in the best possible sense). The feeling that you really are hearing a transmission from somewhere out in space. I was changed. I've been looking for anything that sounds feels like "Star Sail" since that moment, and never really found it ("Gravity Grave," in my opinion, is even more captivating, but not in the way that "Star Sail" is). There are other high points: "Already There" and its alarm clock feedback in the chorus, "The Sun The Sea" and its wonderful horns (courtesy of the Kick Horns, whose contributions to Radiohead's "The National Anthem" had already blown my mind), "Butterfly" and its barely-keeping-it-together vibe. The real gem of the album, though, after "Star Sail" is "Virtual World." Again, that sense of unending space, of Ashcroft coming to you from somewhere else, and a return to the flutes that helped out "Gravity Grave."

It's no so much that I'm nostalgic for that kind of experience (or rather, I am, but it's not only that), but I do think something is lost in sitting in front of my computer, browsing online while an album plays. Much of this is on me, obviously, and I recognize that fact. Nevertheless, how can I remember the first time? How can I change my listening habits and adapt to this new mode of listening? How can the current listen have meaning without a memory of the first listen, even if that memory is a myth? Perhaps it needs to be a myth,  a personalized fiction of listening, in order to develop personal significance, personal resonance? This seems, somehow, related to music and atemporality. I need to think about this some more.


*This is something of an anachronistic reflection. When I heard "Star Sail," hearing "Only Shallow" was still a year, if not two years, away. They're two of the most striking album-opening chords I'm aware of though, so I tend to group them together.

RADIOHEAD ON COLBERT: "CAPITAL . . . THE GREAT IRONIST"

I've got a long post on Facebook that should be up by the end of the weekend, but I thought I'd take a minute to comment on Radiohead's appearance on The Colbert Report. In the lead up to the event, Colbert had said "I look forward to meeting the Radioheads and leveraging their anti-corporate indie cred to raise brand awareness for my sponsors," which is in many ways a more interesting statement than it initially appears. Stripped of the perfunctory and surface-level irony that it relies on as a gag*--famously anti-corporate rock band appears on TV show put on and supported by corporations--this statement seems to me to be a particularly good example of anti-capitalism as one of the primary guises of contemporary capitalism. In his take on WALL-E, Mark Fisher points out that:

[T]he ideology of capitalism is now "anti-capitalist." . . . Initially, it might seem subversive and ironic that a film made by a massive corporation should have such an anti-consumerist and anti-corporate message . . . Yet it is capital which is the great ironist, easily able to metabolise anti-corporate rhetoric by selling it back to an audience as entertainment. 

Colbert's statement is essentially a reformulation of this point, making explicit how capital-as-ironist functions with regard to anti-capitalism. His interview with the band goes a step further and continually puts this concept in tension with the band's statements regarding their anti-corporate stance--there is a delicious and palpable dissonance at play because, in a lot of ways, Colbert "wins" the debate: capital succeeds as an ironist (and the band appears to be as humourless as their detractors would have them be).

While some of Colbert's persona's more exaggerated characteristics are starting to wear thin--in much the same way that Jon Stewart's attempts to maintain both his "objectivity" and his status as "just a guy on a comedy show" can make his commentary infuriatingly impotent and toothless--the interviews, especially the one with just Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien, are most interesting when that persona allows him to be punishingly blunt. Until the joke about clean coal, the end of that second interview is almost unbearably pointed. If policies from the left--and political statements made by artists--are to move beyond comfy neoliberalism and the easily consumed anti-capitalism that goes with it, take downs of easy positions like those mocked by Colbert in these two interviews need to continue.


*A gag that was already boring when it featured in every review of Rage Against the Machine in the 90s and is now beyond tired.

R.E.M.: A BRIEF STORY ABOUT BEING AND NOT BEING A FAN

Taking a break from grading for a moment--why do I always leave myself with the majority of papers to finish grading the day before I've said I'd give them back?--I thought I'd offer this short comment on R.E.M.'s breakup. I was at one point, from grade six through grade nine, a more intense fan of R.E.M. than of any other cultural force/object. I still have a poster of Michael Stipe in my bedroom back home. The "Daysleeper" single was the first CD I ever bought--I still think the version of "Sad Professor" on there trumps the version on Up.* Obviously, given the past tense above, I am no longer such a fan. I can trace the decline in my fanhood to two things, basically.

1. The internet: we got the internet at my house in grade eight. While this was initially a boon to my obsession--I could find out more information about the band, albeit on a painfully slow dial-up connection--it also made it possible for me to find out about all sorts of new and exciting music (although again, thanks to said dial-up connection, I could often only read about this music, not hear it). In grade nine, I had Napster, and I started listening to all sorts of stuff that made R.E.M. seem kind of tame and pedestrian.

2.  Reveal: I've often found that discovering a band in the midst of the down time between albums can be trying--especially if it's a long wait until the next album. If it's an established band, by the time I've gone through the back catalogue, I have pretty set opinions about the band's sound. The new album can often be something of a let down, and this was especially devastating when I was young and had an astonishing amount of libidinal energy invested in bands. R.E.M. is the prototypical example. As Up was the second album I bought on CD (after Weezer's Blue Album, which, shockingly, was cheaper than the "Daysleeper" single), and as I considered it my favourite album and R.E.M.'s best, I was stunned to discover that I didn't particularly like Reveal. In the wake of some of the music I'd started listening to thanks to the internet (especially sites like Pitchfork and Allmusic), Reveal was boring. Its electronics were nowhere near as exciting as Kid A's, for example (say what you will about that album, but it was genuinely revolutionary for a kid in the suburbs whose only experience of electronic music was "Firestarter," Fatboy Slim's You've Come A Long Way, Baby, and the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole).

It's been years since I've actually paid attention to R.E.M.--basically since the release of Reveal--and even the kind of "return to form" reviews that surrounded Accelerate and Collapse Into Now couldn't lure me back into the fold. For one thing, R.E.M.'s form, in my eyes, was shaped by the manner in which I experienced them. Reckoning and New Adventures in Hi-Fi, Murmur and Monster, everything they'd done existed simultaneously for me. No single album they released could possibly recapture my sense of their sound and scope.

I'm not horrifically upset by the band's breakup. I'm not even really upset. I am a little wistful, though, as I sit here and think back to the hours I spent flipping through the CD booklets and listening to the music, trying to piece together what the songs were about. The early albums especially, Murmur through Fables of the Reconstruction, were as culturally alien to me as anything I'd ever heard--I knew nothing of the lore of the South, and I shared no cultural common ground with what Stipe mumbled about. I have no grand conclusion to draw from R.E.M.'s breakup, but it has given me a chance to go back and re-listen to some fantastic music. So, here are some of my favourites.

"Leave"

"Country Feedback"

"You"

*Another source for my fascination with representations of academics? Perhaps. I didn't think of that until right this minute.

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.

THE KING OF LIMBS, REDUX

I wrote about Radiohead's latest album The King of Limbs when it first came out. I was rather underwhelmed on initial plays of the album, and I said then "I think [the album] wants to be a grower (at least I hope it does), but I’m not finding a lot to go back to on my first few listens. I’ll stick it out and keep trying, but for right now I’m filing this one under 'mild disappointment.'" Watching the band perform the songs on Nigel Godrich's From the Basement series has done nothing to alter that impression. In fact, if anything, their performance has made me firmer in my criticisms of The King of Limbs. The band rarely seem to be playing together and interacting. Certainly, their performances feel less intense than those of the webcasts they offered along with In Rainbows. More than that, though, the songs themselves just don't stick compared to those on their previous album, and the sooner Thom Yorke gets over whatever inspired his vocal on "Feral" the better. I will say that, to be fair, the performances didn't always seem to work to the benefit of the songs: "Little by Little," which I like very much on the album, never achieved the playfully deranged rhythm that it does on the album, and "Bloom" and "Lotus Flower" seemed even more underwhelming than they do on record. One pleasant surprise was that "Morning Mr. Magpie" proved to be a fantastic live number and grew in stature from a somewhat reserved take on the album.

The very clear exceptions to all of this, though--on the album and during the show--are "Give Up the Ghost" and "Separator," both of which stand, in my mind, as two of Radiohead's finest songs to date. The former offers Thom Yorke's best vocal turn on the album (which counterbalances the fact that it's basically a solo performance here) and the latter is just a beautiful song, particular during the final 2:30 of this performance when the guitars come in. Perhaps not so surprisingly, neither would feel nor sound out of place on In Rainbows, an album whose gains Radiohead seem to have turned their back on, to a certain extent (this in spite of its so obviously pointing a way forward for the band. It's clear The King of Limbs couldn't have happened without In Rainbows, but Radiohead seem to have decided not to embrace the best aspects of that album for some reason). I don't think The King of Limbs is going to end up near the top of my "Albums of the Year list (frontrunners right now: Mogwai, The Caretaker, Cults, Tim Hecker, and Low), which is honestly the first time I can say that of an album by Radiohead. Anyway, enjoy the performances of "Give Up the Ghost" and "Separator" if you're so inclined.

"Give Up the Ghost:"

"Separator:"