Video: Cat Power- He War

I really like this video, the cut-up scenes of a relationship set against some beautiful looking settings. It's always stuck with me. I even used it for a presentation in a philosophy course of Aesthetics for some reason. I get the feeling the video is trying to say something by mostly keeping the guy's face hidden until the very end but it's beyond me. It's nice to see the whole thing from the other side, where a guy is the unattainable, aloof object desire. Remind me to wear jeans and black T-shirts more often, maybe I'll get a woman like Chan Marshall to chase after me...

Shuffling IV

On your marks.

Get set.

Shuffle!!

1) Freddie Freeloader by Miles Davis: Even though I really like jazz and I'm so far from an expert on the subject I don't have the credibility to say this, I'm going to say it anyway: if you own Kind Of Blue you already should understand everything that's enjoyable and interesting about jazz. It really is the quintessential jazz album, an album of incredible perfection but recorded mostly in single takes, giving every track a fresh, searching feel. 'Freddie Freeloader' is the most traditional track on it, a classy mid-tempo piece that's neither a fast scorcher nor a slow chill-out ballad. All the solos are focused and excellent and...well, if you like music enough to be reading this you probably already own this album. If not, you are an incomplete human being. I'm just going to sit here and enjoy the rest of the song because I have nothing else to say.

2) Saturday by Yo La Tengo: I think that the album this song comes from is one of the most perfect mood setting pieces you could hope for. 'Saturday' is a prime example of the calm, druggy tone And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out has, a late night "I can't sleep"/"we can't sleep" soundtrack for solitary insomnia or romantic insomnia. Plus I love the way Georgia and Ira's voices sound together.

3) Cicadas by Deerhunter: The dual release of Microcastle and Weird Era Continued was one of 2008's best moments, but the one thing I forget to mention about it is the excellent instrumentals they have. Deerhunter could make a completely instrumental release and it would be every bit as striking as their albums so far.

4) Baby Genius by Eels: This is my least favorite track on Electro-Shock Blues. I find the vocal samples irritating and it doesn't fit the mood/concept of the album, in my opinion.

5) Little Debbie by Fugazi: I need to do a Primer on Fugazi some day because I keep meaning to listen to their albums in order and finally get a grip on their discography. Every time a track like this pops up on my shuffle I have to look to see who it is and then I'm all like "oh, it's Fugazi...awesome!!" 'Little Debbie' is quite aggressive and angry. For a band known for their angular guitar playing and border-line reggae/funk bass and percussion work, they could be surprisingly loud and noisy when they wanted to be. Even their 'mature' final album The Argument has lots of thorns to it.

Album of the Week: Cat Power- The Covers Record

Is it possible that an artist's most vital, interesting work is an album of covers?? I could see this happening in the 50s and 60s, when original material was often a rarity. But not from an artist like Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, who's written and recorded a respectable body of work of her own. Yet there is some power and magic to this release that keeps me coming back again and again where I normally listen to her other albums maybe once or twice a year. Chan must think it was a great album, too, because her last album was another set of covers.

Yet 2008's Jukebox had a country/soul sound to it, the sort of earthy, 60s worshipping sound that she adopted on her last non-covers album, The Greatest. I'm no great fan of her more current music. I think once she cleaned up her act and got all "professional" she became far less of an artist and more of a pseudo-celebrity, admired more for her personality and stage presence than her music. Well, at least I've got The Covers Record to hold onto. This is the covers album as a minimalist, stripped down, transformative ideal. Chan's performance on this album is naked and shiver inducing. It is both totally vulnerable and totally in control, fragile like a wilting flower yet as powerful as a tidal wave. She accompanies herself on just a guitar or a piano, turning every one of these songs into sad, beautiful things.

The album's essential strength is revealed right away when she delivers a plaintive version of the famous Rolling Stones single '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction' but omits the chorus. It is practically a different song, and the line about being on a losing streak takes on a new poignancy. Assuming you've seen V For Vendetta, you'll already be familiar with the most astonishing moment on The Covers Record, the cover of the Velvet Underground's 'I Found A Reason.' All covers are debatablely better than the originals, but like Jimi Hendrix's re-working of 'All Along The Watchtower', Cat Power's piano-and-vocals-only version feels like how 'I Found A Reason' was always meant to sound. I tend to overuse words like "haunting" and "powerful", but this one is haunting and powerful. A lot of the songs on this album give me chills when I hear them, but this one gives me, uhh, double chills. And in a perfect example of how pacing and tracklisting can make a great album even better, The Covers Record saves its most light and celebratory songs for the end, the three-track-combo of 'Paths of Victory', 'Salty Dog', and 'Sea Of Love' giving the listener a nice pick-me-up after often heavy and dirge-like music. In fact, this is one of three albums that I always end up listening to when I'm going through a period of depression. It starts out sympathizing with me but by the end it's starting to talk me out of the valley of sadness.

In answer to my original question, I do think a covers album can be the most interesting and vital work of an artist. It's rare, but The Covers Record proves it can happen. Must hear.

Video: Galaxie 500- Tugboat

Galaxie 500, folks. It's too bad this live version lacks the incredible reverb on the vocals that the studio version has. Hearing that track for the first time gave me chills. Every time I'm listening to it and he comes in and the reverb swirls around his words...well, I get the chills all over again.

I'll get around to reviewing an album of their's sometime. I think they're an incredibly underrated and under-discussed band.

Polvo- Exploded Drawing

While listening to Polvo for the first time, I began thinking about how most of the music we think of as post-rock is mostly descended from Tortoise and Mogwai and not the accepted Slint or Talk Talk starting points. However, there actually were a lot of bands who closely studied Spiderland, Slint's 1991 masterpiece, and went from there. Bands like June Of 44, The Shipping News, Rodan, and, yes, Polvo picked up on the experimental guitar based rock music of that album. But none of these bands has ever cracked into the mainstream or produced an album that is widely known or critically acclaimed. Why is this??

Well, before I get to that, I want to make an important distinction here. This may seem pointless since genre classifications are by nature fluid and meaningless, but we've got to have something we can use when talking about different styles. So: bands like Polvo fly closer to math rock than post rock. There's a lot of overlap between the two, but bands like those named above usually focus on extended instrumental passages using guitars, unique tunings, and non-traditional time signatures instead of the more overtly impressionistic music of post-rock, which normally has keyboard/electronic elements to it (often borrowing liberally from kraut rock, dub, ambient, and sometimes jazz in the process).

The problem with this--and with post-rock/math metal bands in general--is that none of them have recorded anything as good as Spiderland. This may seem like an unfair level to compare them to, but I would argue that almost all of the Tortoise/Mogwai inspired post-rock bands have matched or bested the best efforts of those two bands. See, the thing about math rock is that because of the frenetic playing and complexity it often comes off like prog rock but much more dissonant and experimental. And lacking memorable tunes. Spiderland is so brilliant and memorable because while Slint really got down into some distorted, angular guitar playing and flat out rocking moments they also wrote some affecting, powerful songs. I think I mentioned this in my review of Spiderland, but watching the band perform it live a few summers ago at the Pitchfork Music Festival, I could look around and see thousands of people who had, like me, memorized every deft movement.

This brings us to Exploded Drawing. It is a good album, indeed, often very good. The songs are perfectly competent and always interesting to listen to, but, well, nothing really sticks with you. It's the same thing I see happening with modern noise/indie/rock/experimental bands with mostly unprintable names like Holy F*ck, F*ck Buttons, HEALTH, et. al.: they have interesting sounds/textures and their songs are flat out cool and/or rocking, but none of it really sticks with you. Billy Corgan once dismissed Pavement by saying something like "no one wakes up humming Pavement songs", which is provably false, but it's the kind of thing I think about when I listen to those bands and Exploded Drawing. I enjoy it, I don't regret the money I spent on it, and I'll probably listen to it a few times a year for the rest of my life. But it'll never be the album I make copies of for people I know; it'll never be the album I put on 'best of' or 'my personal favorite' lists.

This review may seem like an indictment of math rock-leaning post rock in general and Exploded Drawing in particular, but it wasn't my original intention. In all fairness I would qualify this album as above average post-Slint indie rock and the "math rock-leaning post rock" bands mentioned above are all worth checking out for those interested. Assuming you like this kind of stuff, Exploded Drawing is highly recommended. However I caution anyone looking into these bands--Shipping News is the only one I can really vouch for, because I don't have any full lengths by June of 44 or the others--and hoping for some kind of underground, undiscovered masterpiece on the level of a Spiderland. I fear that Exploded Drawing is the sort of thing an over eager record store employee or *ahem* music critic might foist upon you with the best intentions. But there's a line between very good genre excursions and very good, lasting music. Polvo managed to make the former but not the latter. To put it simply, they don't transcend their genre.

Crystal Antlers- Untitled EP

Between bands like Deerhunter, No Age, Liars, Animal Collective, Deerhoof, and Comets On Fire, it's been a pretty diverse and excellent decade for noise rock/pop. And I'm not even that much of an expert to know some of the newer and/or more underground bands that have emerged in the past few years who fit into that group, too. But I think that Crystal Antlers are the first band who take a direct influence from that group while also still maintaining their own sound and inspiring a listener to want to follow their career. And all they've got to their name so far beyond live shows is an EP and a MySpace page.

Listening to this untitled EP for the first time, I very quickly thought they were some kind of Comets On Fire rip off. Specifically Field Recordings From The Sun and earlier era Comets On Fire, when they hadn't quite let their classic rock influences bleed through: noisy, wandering guitars; swirling noise and distortion all over the place; rock solid but loose and rocking drums and bass; an unhinged singer who either shouts or screams everything. But on subsequent listens, this EP starts to take on its own identity and character. Crystal Antlers aren't as jammy as Comets On Fire, for starters. And while they maintain a stupefying level of noise and distortion they sometimes let in moments of psychedelic relief, always showing a keen ability for knowing when to ease up the attack and when to press it home. I don't know how else to explain it, but this music is the sort of stuff you think you'll only want to listen to a couple times before filing it away but then quickly becomes a daily staple. It goes from headache inducer to fist pumper. It helps that, like the aforementioned Comets On Fire, they never forget proper songwriting and rocking amidst all the chaos.

The first two tracks of this EP burn by without a look back until we get to the magnificent 'A Thousand Eyes', which is the Rosetta's Stone to getting this band and why they're good. It starts with some spacey guitar noise and a minimalist melody with tinkling percussion before the full throttle assault hits again, underpinned by an electric organ. Then there's that great moment where the chorus comes out of nowhere and the singer's voice strains to hit the high notes. A brief pause and we're off again, repeating the cycle before we slow things down at the 2:00 mark and let the noise quiet a bit. A psychedelic rock interlude ensues, complete with organ and guitar overlapping each other while the bass and drums pound out a slow motion wallop. Then some "hoo hoo hoo" wordless vocals sweeten the deal a bit, the mix growing denser until we break right back into the chorus. This song reveals all the elements at work in the band's sound: noise, psychedelia, pop songwriting, and flattening rock. On a similar note, the EP closing and appropriately titled 'Parting Song For The Torn Sky' is seven minutes of the best stuff Comets On Fire never recorded, the paint peeling howls enough to stop hearts and awaken the dead. The whole EP package brings to mind old stand-by adjectives like 'incendiary', 'pulverising', and 'powerful' while also demonstrating that sometimes it's not just hyperbole when these terms are used about music.

It's tempting to play a guessing game for how Crystal Antlers's debut album will sound--less noise, more noise, more pop, less pop, more psychedelic, less psychedelic??--but I suppose it's enough for now to enjoy this 6 song sampler platter and appreciate how the band has managed to combine those elements already. This may not be the kind of "out of the blue, fully formed, shot across the bow" that TV On The Radio's debut EP was, but it's still damn good.

The Videogame Solipsist: Video Games Or Video...Something Else??

With the release of Flower and Noby Noby Boy, and my recent purchase of a 360, I feel like I'm more immersed in the videogame arena again. Enough so that I'm musing on the distinction between things that are definitively "videogames" as we've always know them and new "kind of a videogame, but kind of not" things like the aforementioned two titles.

Flower, as seen above, is a "game" in which you exist inside the 'dream' of flowers inside someone's apartment, dreams in which you control a 'train' of flower petals that fly about fields setting off chains of color and sound by hitting other flowers and so forth. It's not a "videogame" in the traditional sense that we think of, though. I haven't played it but my impression has been it's more akin to interactive art. Perhaps it's better to say non-videogame interactive electronic entertainment. This is a fine distinction to make, I admit, and most of my thinking on the subject has to do with the problematic definition of what a "videogame" is, not to mention the even tougher definition of what a "game" is.
So I'm going to just come out and roughly define a game as something you can win or lose. There's some sort of 'goal' you're trying to obtain. In a fighting game, it's to beat your opponent or win the tournament. In a strategy game, it's to complete your mission objectives or conquer the world. In an arcade style game, it's to get as many points as possible before you run out of lives. These are all simplistic examples but they're what I mean when I say 'win' or 'lose.' Can you 'lose' at Flower?? Noby Noby Boy might be a better point of debate, as it seems to be just a "stretching, eating, and pooping simulator", to paraphrase a friend. There is gameplay to it, but it's the kind of game that sits on the border between "videogame" and "tech demo" or "videogame" and "interactive art"/" non-videogame interactive electronic entertainment." You can't really win or lose the game, though there is apparently some overarching thing about combining what you eat and how far you stretch with players across the world to get the titular character and an accomplice to other planets. Or something.

Flower and Noby Noby Boy exist somewhere in the space between the different types of videogames. There's simplistic videogames like, say, Pac Man in which the goal is to survive as long as possible/get a high score and there is no 'story' to speak of; actiony affair like Gears Of War which has some story and a bit more gameplay complexity; games like BioShock or Half-Life which primarily tell story through the gameplay and the game world; games like Metal Gear Solid 4, which are tell most of their story through long, involved, movie-like cutscenes. Of coure I'm leaving out co-operative or competitive multiplayer games, which have narratives of their own. Anyway, while there are many more examples and types of games that sit in between these, I feel like Noby Noby Boy and Flower take the medium to a different place in which there is very little "gameplay" and no standard "goal", no true "winning", and the story is either all up to the player to fill in or done in a minimalist, impressionistic way. For the sake of argument, Peggle has very little gameplay (you choose where a ball goes, to reduce it to its basic elements) yet I still think it's a videogame. SimCity has no standard "goal", there's no true "winning" to it and you only truly "lose" if you give up, yet I consider it a videogame. Finally, Shadow Of The Colossus tells its story in a minimalist, impressionistic way yet I absolutely would call it a videogame.
On the other hand, there's something like AudioSurf, which lets you use songs on your computer to make levels for a 'game.' This sort of concept was done earlier with Vib Ribbon, which never saw release in the U.S. And anyway, AudioSurf is more of a 'game' in the traditional sense. It's controlled like a racing game but the gameplay is more akin to a puzzle game in which you drive through colored blocks and try to match them together in the grid below your car. You can't really lose no matter how badly you do but there is some skill to it and you have a goal in mind--get the highest score possible on a certain song at a certain difficulty level. True, you can just use it as a semi-interactive visualizer in which you inhabit music and experience it visually as much as aurally--something that was also done before in a different way by Rez. I would certainly say AudioSurf is more of a game than the two PS3 games discussed above, but I don't think of it on the same level as, say, Fallout 3 or Killzone 2. Again, it's somewhere in the gray area between the different types of videogames.

I could make all sorts of mealy mouthed comments about how Flower, Noby Noby Boy, and AudioSurf are art games whereas Gears Of War isn't remotely an 'art' game, but this doesn't help define what they are. They're all technically "videogames" in the same way that Die Hard and Eraserhead are "movies." But movies are just something you watch even if the experience is different. There's more to "do" in Gears Of War, more "gameplay" so to speak. But should this be our basis for saying what is and what isn't a "videogame"?? Is the level of interactivity what determines it??

I'm not really sure. And I'm not sure my definition of a game as something that has a goal which can or can't be achieved helps us, either. This is one of those tricky things where lots of gray areas come into play and nothing can be easily divided into groups. Still, I wanted to point out how different Flower and Noby Noby Boy are and to compare/contrast them to other, more traditional "videogames." I would argue they're as much tech demos and interactive art installations as they are videogames. It's good to see the art form expanding in this way, growing more 'artistic' in one direction while other branches like Wii Sports and Rock Band bring the medium to people who never thought of themselves as "gamers." Maybe what we need isn't a new label for these type of games so much as a different way of approaching them from both a consumer and a critical standpoint: what they make you feel and think is more important that if you had fun or what you 'did.'