REVIEW: MOGWAI - A WRENCHED VIRILE LORE

Mogwai - A Wrenched Virile Lore
Rock Action, 2012

It is, of course, no secret that I love Mogwai, but I have to admit that I was somewhat sceptical about the prospect of this remix album being any good. I don't love Kicking A Dead Pig (in fact, I can't really remember ever having the urge to actually listen to the thing, not even the Kevin Shields rework of "Mogwai Fear Satan"), and the list of contributors--Justin K. Broadrick and Tim Hecker aside, obviously--seemed pretty underwhelming. Nevertheless, as a fan of the band, I felt an obligation to at least give it a listen. After all, no remixer was foolhardy enough to tackle the best song on Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will ("You're Lionel Richie"), nor was anyone tackling the worst ("Death Rays")--at least not exclusively: "Death Rays" is a part of Robert Hampson's "La Mort Blanche" remix, but more on that later. Unfortunately, I have to say that, by and large, my initial impression--this will be underwhelming--was confirmed. All told, there are two absolutely essential remixes/recreations here, with the rest of the album's tracks slotting in anywhere from functional to boring to irritating.

Starting with the latter, the album's only serious misstep is the Klad Hest "Mogwai Is My Dick" remix of "Rano Pano." Refashioned into some kind of cartoon-jungle hybrid, the track winds up as seven interminable minutes of hyperactivity, an annoying child of a song that just won't seem to go away. If the track is meant as a joke, it's punchline is made clear early on without any kind of set up and it never manages to raise as much as a grin. Cylob's "EVP Mix" of "White Noise" is the closest to Klad Hest's in terms of missing the point, but nothing about it winds up as actively annoying. The vocodored vocals inserted over the top of the track are a curious choice, and with some worthwhile lyrics (and maybe a deviation or two from the main melody line) might have been interesting. The sort of surfeit of prettiness Cylob seems to be going for is ultimately delivered by Umberto's slightly too long remix of "Too Raging to Cheers" as a kind of mystical, cosmic disco track. As it is, Cylob's track just seems kind of pointless.

I hate to damn the contributions of (arguably) the main draws here pointless, but there's not much to be said about either Tim Hecker's reworking of "Rano Pano" or Justin K. Broadrick's "reshape" of "George Square Thatcher Death Party." The former is little more than the original track with some static over top and run through a tremolo and the occasional bit of detuning. In some ways, it feels like Hecker is trying to turn the track into something like his own brilliant "The Piano Drop," but no such luck. Compared to this year's brilliant "Suffocation Raga for John Cale," Hecker's version of "Rano Pano" just feels half-assed. Indeed, the Soft Moon's take on "San Pedro" actually does a better job of "Hecker-ising" its source track, coating the track truly thick and viscous fuzz. As for Broadrick, it's probably best to think of his reshape as a kind of alternative take on the song, one where the original's bouncing pop is replaced by a gothic, arid dream pop, a little like what appeared on Jesu's Silver EP minus the warmth. It's certainly worth a listen just to hear what else "George Square Thatcher Death Party" could be, but I can't see myself returning to it with any frequency, or ever really preferring it to the album version.

There are a few takes that, if not superior to the album versions, do offer an interesting cases for how to hear those album tracks as part of larger themes and sounds that would otherwise escape detection. While "Mexican Grand Prix" was perhaps the most obviously krautrock indebted track on Hardcore Will Never Die, its Neu!-isms are revealed to be in good company by Zombi's reworking of "Letters to the Metro" as an elegantly Kraftwerkian epic, one that in its icy snynths, rigidly sequenced lines, and stately, measured melody line deliberately evokes "Trans-Europe Express" (the better choice would've been that record's real highlight, "Europe Endless," but that's an argument for another time). I only wish that Zombi could've found a way to get some "Planet Rock"-style vocals into the mix. Xander Harris' take on "How To Be a Werewolf" is equally enamoured of early German electronics, but uses its gentle motorik pulse to simply draw attention to the original track's euphoric build and climax. Indeed, it winds up feeling more like a kin to "Hallogallo" than "Yes! I Am a Long Way From Home" by the end. Nothing flashy, nothing fancy, then, but both tracks manage to make "Mexican Grand Prix" seem less like an anomaly than it initially appeared on the album.

"Mexican Grand Prix" itself is the subject of one of two tracks that make the entire album worthwhile. RM Hubbert transforms the song from driving krautrock into a hushed, moonlit bit of menace. Amping up the air of frustrated lust that ran through the original, Hubbert's acoustic guitar plays off the electronic voices retained from the original to brilliant effect. It's so good that I can only hope Mogwai themselves are taking notes. Hubbert's reworking is dwarfed (literally and figuratively) by Robert Hampson's mammoth closer "La Mort Blanche." Working through both "White Noise" and "Death Rays," the track is a full-immersion bath of bliss that, like Floating Points' remix of Four Tet's "Sing," radically expands the scope of the original source material in order to push into ever higher levels of light and colour. Hampson takes full advantage of his fourteen minutes, not rushing a single note and allowing a softly burbling ambient wash (it sounds a bit like an email alert heard through a running faucet, and I mean that in a good way) connect his take on "White Noise" to "Death Rays." The latter half of the track is even more impressive to me than the former, turning what I thought was Mogwai's most by-the-numbers track into a subtly life-affirming hymn, all soft-focus spangle without a sharp edge in sight before the original's furious climax appears in the guise of a gentle flame out.

Ultimately, I can't say that A Wrenched Virile Lore is going to get much play on my stereo. Outside of the RM Hubbert and Robert Hampson, there's not enough to really recommend it over its source material. I'm not sure that there ever has been with a remix album (I can't even say that I would take No Protection over Protection, to be honest). Without ten transcendent talents who are all firing on the day, the remix album seems destined to be a grab bag. Thinking of these as sort of b- (or c- or d-) sides that never were, though, makes a little more sense, though not in 2012. Instead, I'll treat A Wrenched Virile Lore as a postcard from an alternative 1998. In the meantime, though, I'll wait for Mogwai's soundtrack to Les Revenants.

BECK AND RETROMANIA

I was listening to Pink Moon the other day--a late discovery for me, something I'd heard of but never really listened to until I got to grad school, and even then didn't really take to until the second year of my M.A.--and thought that for as good an album as it is (great songs, interesting arrangements, possibly the most perfect overdub in history [the piano line in "Pink Moon"]), it's an even better guitar album. Besides the fact that John Wood's production is a textbook example of how to record an acoustic guitar (it really is a joy just to hear that tone), Nick Drake is in brilliant form as a guitarist: not quite as freewheeling as some of his earlier work (like "Man in a Shed," for example, or much of Bryter Layter), but in full command of his talents, liquid runs mixed in with great chord work and lines that split the difference between chiming and droning ("Road," one of my favourite pieces of guitar music, being the best example of that). In fact, for all its simplicity--a guitar and an equally resonant male voice--Pink Moon achieves much of its singular power because of the inventive guitar playing. The circular chord progression underneath "Parasite" is an absolute necessity for its emotional content to hit at the right level and in the right places, a point that's often overlooked in attempts to ape Drake's sound and aesthetic.

Of course, there have been some successful copies of his work. I say copy rather than extension or development, because the song I have in mind--"Round the Bend" by Beck--is essentially a photocopy of "River Man," probably Drake's signature tune (interestingly, that's not Beck's only "borrowing" on the album: "Already Dead's" verses indulge in a bit of plagiarism at the expense of the Foo Fighter's superior--and wonderfully shouty--"I'll Stick Around"). The deliberate evocation of Drake's most recognisable song (prior to Volkswagen introducing a whole generation, myself very much included, to "Pink Moon") is a key part of the retromania-fest that is Sea Change. As an album, it feels mannered to the point of suffocation: a "serious," "mature," "artistic" work, Sea Change is very conservative in its template of sad man plus slow acoustic guitar songs. The best tracks are the ones that steer furthest away from this--"Round the Bend," obviously, but also "Paper Tiger" (the only track with a real semblance of life), "End of the Day" (with its gestures to some kind of casiotone country), and "Sunday Sun" (in its distorted climax)--but even they are indebted to specific strains of the past. That's not a problem in an of itself, but when that debt is figured as some kind of guarantor of authenticity--either in the sense that the music of the past was somehow "real" music in a way that today's music falls short of (e.g. rockism and calls for the return of rock), or that the emotions that the artist wishes to convey can be presented in their "realest" form in a style of the past (e.g. yearning and 1950s ballads)--the retromaniacal impulse becomes one of tail-chasing stagnation, curatorial consumption rather than creation. 

I've not followed Beck's career all that closely since Sea Change--in fact, I gave the album to an ex-girlfriend and never bothered to get it back--but what has popped up on my radar has fallen into this same kind of retromania. His record club project, while great fun for its participants I'm sure, (the recording sessions certainly seem like they were a blast) is perhaps the most damning example of this: track for track covers of "classic" albums (something that the Flaming Lips have also gotten into as they've settled down into increasingly less interesting work), without even the wink and nudge of the Moog Cookbook or Camper Van Beethoven's version of Tusk. Was this retromaniacal turn an inevitability for Beck? Hidden in his gleeful appropriation of junk culture and slacker attitude, was it a time bomb waiting to appear?

Certainly, by Mutations (named after Os Mutantes), Beck's urge to cite, to curate and to copy, had already begun to overwhelm him, parody clearly slipping into pastiche (a transformation completed in toto on Midnight Vultures). "Nobody's Fault But My Own" is the best of Beck's sad sack mopey ballads, but its sitars and Orientalisms are already as caught up in some period piece vision of the late 1960s as anything Oasis ever did. The real turn on Mutations is one toward "craft," and specifically songcraft as understood to mean very conventional and traditional notions of guitar driven music. Odelay's collage may have been a dead end, but it was also a force that managed to counterbalance the guitars and the reliance on folk, blues, and country throughout. For all its craft, Odelay is a different kind of self-conscious from Mutations, one that is equally exhausting and stifling in the end, but that also feels comfortably of its time (even if that means it sounds surprisingly dated in some ways today) in a way that its follow up abandons. Or rather, doesn't abandon, but rather reveals to be irrelevant: Mutations' influences--tropicalia, bossa nova, 1970s singer-songwriter music--is as up to the moment current for 1998 as are Odelay's influences for 1996. The difference is that Mutations is about its influences. Not doing anything with them, not transmuting them, but instead making them very apparent. They are the surface and the content, the purpose of these songs. Mutations, despite its title, changes nothing. It has the good taste to cite accurately and completely.

Looking back at his career arc, the later Beck's subsumption in overt retromania seems inevitable. One Foot in the Grave, his lo-fi folk album from 1994 (the phase of his career most obviously referenced by Sea Change), is designed to separate out a certain strain of his music and present it in its "authentic" form, "bolster[ing] his neo-folkie credibility the way the nearly simultaneously released Stereopathic Soul Manure accentuated his underground noise prankster credentials," as Stephen Thomas Erlewine puts it. As a poster child for a certain form of indie rock's postmodern 1990s, an artist who was considered both cutting edge/hip and commercially viable, Beck seems like a useful signpost for investigating what happened to so forcefully propagate retromaniacal culture in the 2000s. The various phases of his career, for example, are an obviously different kind to that of Madonna (another postmodern artist who straddled the cutting edge/hip and commercially viable realms) or David Bowie (certainly a modernist [at most, a "limit-modernist," to use Brian McHale's term], whose "characters" explore an idea of persona that no early twentieth-century modernist would be uncomfortable with). It seems to me that a more careful and patient reading of Beck's oeuvre might reveal some points toward the definition of a retromaniacal artistic temperament, which might be a useful tool for analysis and criticism going forward.

RETROMANIA IN ACTION? FAVOURITE MOVIES, GREATEST MOVIES

A week on and people are still stopping me when they see me to say they enjoyed my talk. I guess it must have gone well.

An interesting moment today in class: while discussing evaluative criteria and the difference between personal and more universal criteria, I had my students list their favourite movies and why they liked them. Then, I asked them to come up with candidates for the greatest movie of all time. Looking at the list, I was amazed at the time period it covered. For all you could tell from my students' lists, movies came into being somewhere around 1994. One student offered Back to the Future (1985) as his favourite movie, but that was the only movie older than Happy Gilmore (1996) and Pulp Fiction (1994) on either list until I put on my own favourite movie, The Shining (1980), and suggested that we consider some movies from before the 1990s on our greatest movie of all time list. We eventually added Star Wars (1977) and Rocky (1976), both franchises that had installments come out in the 1990s or 2000s, with Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Rocky Balboa (2006) respectively. With some prompting, I managed to get someone to suggest The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Godfather (1972). Thinking back, I'm fairly certain the same thing happened last year when I did this activity--one student finally spoke up and said something about greatest movie of all time meaning "classics" like The Sound of Music, etc.

I'm tempted to chalk this up simply to their age--if my students turned 18 this year, they were born in 1993 (!!!). However, it seems like my peer group in school had a much broader sense of the past than this group. What they do seem to know--movies like Star Wars, Pulp Fiction, and Rocky, for example--are among the most frequent subjects of pastiche/parody in the culture (although a straight pastiche of any of those films would seem pretty dated at this point). Is that what makes them known for my students, I wonder? There is no embarrassment in discovering bits of culture this way--long before I'd ever seen Citizen Kane, I'd picked up the basics from the numerous parodies, homages, and appropriations of that film that showed up in the first few seasons of The Simpsons.

What strikes me as really odd, though, is the hard cut off somewhere in the 1980s for pop culture references that students make and/or appreciate in my experience (even the 1980s are pushing it--the number of students who have never seen Jurassic Park [1993] is mindblowing). Generally, my students seem to react to bits of culture that come from before the 1980s as being separate somehow, belonging to a group of cultural objects they neither consume nor judge, that have no impact on them at all, really (actually, anything from before their birth seems to flummox them--they are baffled by clips from early seasons of The Simpsons, in my experience). I'm not certain, but I'd bet that most of my students reject the idea of the greatest movie of all time coming from any period other than their own lifetime (some of their suggestions: Titanic [1997], Remember the Titans [2000], and Avatar [2009]). I wonder if it's just the result of living through a much more baby boomer saturated culture and a wave of 1970s revivalism that gives me that sense, though.

Is this some kind of response to postmodernism? Are my students--who have no knowledge of anything other than a postmodern culture (I'm not sure that I do, to be honest. I was born during high postmodernism and grew up with irony as the only appropriate response to any event)--unable to process cultural materials that are not themselves clearly postmodern? Do they require cultural materials that are not obviously postmodern to be (re)presented in pastiche in order to acknowledge them and to pass judgement on them?

These questions are probably just the result of extrapolating wildly from a very tiny dataset, but it would make sense in some ways. The endless return to the 1980s (and even the Back to the Future answer feels very "now" more than a recognition of the quality of a cultural object from the past--the kind of retro-future chic of that movie is a prominent [if not dominant] cultural discourse these days) doesn't appear to be slowing down even as the 1990s revivals ramp up to full speed. The time between emergence and revival of cultural materials is shrinking. Already my students seem to regard the time before widespread internet access (and high speed internet access, at that) as something of a fairy tale. How soon before they start to ignore it entirely?

This is not a plea for cultural conservatism or the preservation of the past or anything like that. I'm just curious about how my students actually perceive and experience the cultural landscape. If anything, I would be interested in my students focusing even more on the future and even less on the past--ideally, it would be the yet-to-come that grabs and fires their imagination. Maybe in such a situation, the past will become more available and the immediate past will become more forgettable. A new futuremania (futurama?) to cure retromania, and a futuremania free of irony, kitsch, and ultimately retro underpinnings. My students have a chance to write about just this topic for their next essay, so I will be anxiously awaiting their responses.