tape

okay, so i'm making a mixtape for the car, one side sorta stoner music, one side sorta rocky, so who knows how that will turn out. anyway, i'll talk about it a bit while i'm taping it.

i kick off side one with do the whirlwind by Architecture in Helsinki, one of the best, if not the best, current Australian band. i don't know how you would describe their music. quirky pop, a gangshow on acid, kitchensink-included melange. all of that and great tunes. do the whirlwind is reminiscent of the tom tom club, which older viewers may remember was a Talking Heads spinoff that made leftfield, mildly funky pop. boppy is the best word for it.

more strictly stoner music is the beta band, who sound like i feel after three or four pipefuls. i know is particularly bonged out. like many beta tracks, a fragile melody staggers along and some guy or other mutters without sounding too interested. gotta love that when you're fucked up.

more ecstatic, and my current favourite song, is hyper-ballad by Bjork. if you don't know it (and if you don't, why the fuck not? this is a masterpiece of one of our day's great talents. please, do yourself a huge favour and get into her. she has a truly special voice and is a pioneer in IDM; either aspect would make her worth getting to know -- both puts her in a league of her own), it starts gently, with a hint of a melody, and grows to become a belting dance number. if the world was not stuffed full of fuckwits, this would have been number one for a hundred weeks.

Broken Social Scene is a Canadian supergroup. yeah, i know, that's like being the ski-ing champion of Nigeria, but as it happens, Canada is very much in the forefront of rock at the moment. Arcade Fire lead the sales, but Godspeed! You Black Emperor are the artistic pinnacle for me. some members of GYBE are involved in Broken Social Scene, but Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning are very much the creative force. anthems for a seventeen-year-old girl is the track i chose, and it's one of the standouts on the brilliant you forgot in people. and i mean brilliant. if you have any love for pop at all, you should own this album. it is that good. you just will not hear better songs than lover's spit or cause=time, i guarantee it.

you cannot think dope music without thinking Caribou. Dan Snaith's andorra is the most trippy album made since 1969. if you didn't know better, you'd think it was made in '69 (but with more, erm, synthesisers and shit). his earlier work was what you might call folkatronica -- the brand of IDM that has a folk element, usually more in its general feel than in any reliance on folk song structures, although i think you could consider Tunng to be folkatronica if you pushed it. Four Tet would be very much the kind of thing we're thinking of here: it's not folk, but you it has the organic, rootsy feel of it. anyway, irene is a great track. at first, you think you are going to get bouncy electropop, but then the drugs kick in and you get a psychedelic masterpiece, which spins and whirls its way into a static wash.

when i've been smoking, i like intricate, difficult to follow music, because having something to unravel makes good use of the better focus you can have when you're stoned. but also i like simple, raw emotion (like hyper-ballad, for instance). severance by Dead Can Dance brings the huge power of Brendan Perry's voice into full effect. it's the kind of gloomy, marvellous bullshit that I loved when I was a late teen, and frankly still love. it really helps that it has a wonderful melody too.

after the gloom, and given that atmosphere is yet to come, i thought something bouncy might be fun. so it's Feist's 1234. this is being used here for ipod ads, so you hear it a lot on tv, but it just doesn't get tired. there isn't much to say about it (and i already blogged a review of her album, the reminder (i hesitate to link that because i've changed my view on volta somewhat--repeated listens to great songs like wanderlust have allowed the intricate melodies that were hidden on first listen to be revealed): it's just topnotch bouncy pop.

when i was a kid at school, i had a friend called h. he was a decent musician, which i've never been, and more importantly, he was into alternative music in a big way. one day in school, i saw him drawing notation on paper. not musical notation, more like a graphical representation of music, much like you'd see in cubase or a sequencer of that type. it was atmosphere, and it made me curious to know what it sounded like. so i bought the record and bang, i fell in love. that love, unlike so many others, has not diminished, not when the band, Joy Division, became New Order, not even when New Order made a duff record (which i have now forced myself to love). and what did i think about atmosphere when i got to hear it? it made me weak at the knees. there is something about Joy Division, an ability to reach inside you, touch something deep in your core, ring a note that resounds in the darkest, trembling part of you. i'll tell you a secret. i've always liked nice people. i like bubbly, outgoing people, if i feel they're genuine. if i feel they're bunging it on, not so much. mrs zen was a nice person, sweet and gentle. our relationship broke down when she had kids and stopped being nice. but in music nice is nearly always faked. and uninteresting, mostly. nice you can feel warm about, but let's face it, you need dark to become deeply engaged. and atmosphere has a glacial beauty that nice, however good it can get, cannot hope to produce.

after the depth of atmosphere, you really bounce. no, you do. so it's MIA's Bollywood cover, jimmy. it's just good clean fun with a dash of garam masala. you know you like the sound of that, sucka.

so let's see. we've had folkatronica, and we've had icelandic. so let's have icelandic folkatronica. that's mum, more so on their latest album than on the previous three. the IDM stylings of their earlier work have largely give way to a more organic pop sound. it hasn't been universally well received, but the latest album come on feel the poison ivy, or whatever the fuck it's called (please no letters to the editor. if i really cared what it's called, i'd read the front cover of the cd.) is pretty decent. the eerieness has been toned down and the sound is much more strumalong. i think that you end up with a tradeoff. they are never going to hit the heights of the best stuff on earlier albums (green grass of tunnel or don't be afraid... come to mind) but the new album is not chockers with dreary "experimental" filler. we smoked frogs til they exploded is bouncy and fun, with a bit more than the average pop song going on. i don't think it has any claim to greatness, but i'm not kicking it to the kerb either.


we can argue all night about who is good, who is great, but what we will not dispute is the best rock band of the past twenty years. not just the band who revived the flat-out dead genre of rock, but a great live rocknroll band -- the best i've seen by so far it's not funny, a band who went off, becoming incandescent, furious, psychotic. the pixies obv. i remember buying surfer rosa without ever having heard a note of them, on the strength of a review in the nme by someone whose taste i knew i shared. he said, must buy, so i must bought. omfg. for this tape, i chose hey, a stripped-back blues that allows black francis to throw out that incredible energy that made him a rock god. i think it's close to his finest three minutes. i've never analysed the song or tried to work out what it means, or anything like that. it's one of those works you just let be.

i wrapped it up with ace of babylon by shitmat. killababylonkutz, the album, sees shitmat take a quote from babylon bwoy, a bogstandard ragga joint, and bend it, warp it, mince it alongside different mashups. one features the mastermind theme music; another the Jacksons. the leadoff track, in which Babylon Bwoy meets Ace of Bass, is pure class. although you don't half get weird looks when you break out in a "Babylon Bwoooooy" in the fruit section at Coles.

so for the other side of the tape, i went for rock of one type or another. i think the Arctic Monkeys need a better internal editor, because both albums have featured great songs amid some very ordinary dross (i feel the hot reviews have been reactions to the really good stuff, and have glossed over the filler). a certain romance is a feature on the first album, a hymn to the chavs, of sorts. this is the sort of thing that can only be english: we would all recognise what he is singing about. here, people would not get the nuance. chavs are not bogans, the aussie equivalent, and this is why. someone like me, a working-class boy with materially very little, is there but for the grace of god a chav. they are people like me who lacked whatever and took another path. but a bogan is someone you just would never be. aussies feel that bogans are different from them. but although the english working class looks down on chavs, it also knows that they are themselves a few failed exams from chavitude.

steve albini is these days better known as a producer than a musician. you will have heard his production, even if you didn't know it was him. among others, surfer rosa and in utero.

unfortunately at this point i became so stoned that i couldn't write any more. just in case anyone is in the slightest interested, the rest of the tape was:

colombian necktie
bleeding heart
lloyd, i'm ready to be heartbroken
a hundred years
pace is the trick
sunspots
ceremony
On a plain
saeglothur

and yeah, it's fucking good but i'm bored of writing about it.

posted by Dr Zen @ 8:13 pm