LCD Soundsystem: 45:33 (pt. 1)

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4533

Dear Matthew:

In my last post, I mentioned listening to music while exercising. You also pointed out that your last three assignments to me have been long compositions. With all that in mind, there’s no way your next assignment isn’t going to be LCD Soundsystem‘s 45:33.

As a person who generally follows music, there’s no way you haven’t heard of LCD Soundsystem. They were indie rock royalty in the mid to late 2000s, unquestioningly loved by all of the hip music publications and blogs that were rising to prominence at the time; they’re probably the first ever ‘buzz band’, in the sense that we might use that horrible term today (though its use does, thankfully, seem to be fading). The band was a project of James Murphy, cofounder of the New York indie dance label DFA Records, who was already in his early thirties when he started the band. This lead to a lot of hacky music writers calling him things like ‘indie rock’s elder statesman’ and ‘dance music’s resident old guy’. He made a jammy, dance-influenced style of indie rock with often contemplative and ironic lyrics that put him squarely in the camp of music universally loved by sad college kids of the early 21st century.

All of this, and the band only ever released three proper albums, over only seven years. After a series of singles, LCD Soundsystem released a self-titled debut LP in 2005, a widely lauded followup called Sound of Silver in 2007, and a final album called This Is Happening in 2010 before Murphy announced the end of the band in 2011.

I’m not sure what to call 45:33. It’s not usually lumped in with the band’s three studio albums, but it’s too long for me to be comfortable calling an EP. The title is ostensibly a reference to the two most common speeds of vinyl record playback*. It’s a one-off composition written and recorded by Murphy in 2006, commissioned by Nike for release under their Nike+ program as a piece of music made specifically for running. (This would have been at the same time he was working on Sound of Silver, and indeed a large instrumental chunk of 45:33 ended up on Sound of Silver with lyrics as the song ‘Someone Great’.) Marketing copy for the piece’s release talked about how it was designed to ‘reward and push’ at ideal points during a run, and how it had been refined by Murphy after numerous runs on a treadmill.

…except that this was all bullshit. A few years later — presumably after Nike’s exclusivity license was up and he was able to release the piece himself — Murphy admitted he had been lying through his teeth when he said the piece had been designed for running, and that he doesn’t even jog. He just wanted to make a longform disco record in the style of Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4, and given his own label’s hesitancy due to the format’s unmarketability, he figured this was the only way he’d be able to do it. The music press — who, you’ll recall, unfalteringly loved everything Murphy ever touched — had of course eaten the whole thing up, leading to some pretty hilarious reviews where music blog hacks lauded the mix’s peaks and valleys that coincided so perfectly with their workout. While his label’s trepidation was no doubt a factor, I like to think that, at least on some level, Murphy just wanted to fuck with people.

All of LCD Soundsystem’s stuff tends to the long and jammy side, but on 45:33, Murphy takes that aspect of his music to its logical conclusion. As often seems to be the case around here, this is not the band’s conventionally accepted magnum opus, but I see no reason why it won’t be a great introduction to the band for you — and you’ve told me you’ve been meaning to give the band a listen for ages. So, now’s your chance. Go for a run while you listen to this piece. Or don’t! By Murphy’s own admission, it won’t matter. Either way, I think you’ll like this album a lot.

— Matt

*If Murphy had made the piece about 30 seconds shorter, it would have been exactly 45 minutes and 33 seconds long. This frustrates me to no end.

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John Luther Adams: Become Ocean (pt. 2)

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Become Ocean

Dear Matthew:

I don’t think you’re going to like this post.

Become Ocean is fine. It’s pretty. It’s interesting enough to listen to it ebb and flow, to build from silence to full blast and back again. But in the end, I have the same reaction to this piece that I did with the only other classic drone record I’ve listened to — Sleep’s Dopesmoker* — and it’s a question we’ve both posed on this blog before: What is this music for?

One thing this blog has caused me to examine about myself is the ways I like to experience music — and how that might affect my tastes more broadly, in a way I hadn’t really considered before. I think there might be a medium-is-the-message sort of component here, and if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to try to unpack it.

Generally, I listen to new music in only a few specific settings: while commuting and/or exercising (these have been one and the same for a while now, since I bike to work and almost everywhere else); while doing primarily rote and/or visual tasks, like cleaning or organizing or photo editing; or while playing the popular computer game StarCraft II. I also like to listen to music while I drive, cook, and do certain computer-based tasks, but I don’t like these situations for brand new music because I can’t devote enough attention to it and/or there’s too much background sound.

What I like about commuting/exercising, sorting/editing and StarCraft is that they don’t take a lot of processing power, or at least not all at once. (Not at my StarCraft skill level, anyway.) I find I can almost never listen to music while I ‘work’, because my work generally either involves writing and thus consumes essentially all of my available brainpower, or involves working with audio and thus precludes music listening altogether. I usually don’t even listen to music when I’m just surfing the internet, because I either won’t absorb what I’m reading or I won’t absorb the music, so I’ve realized at this point in my life that it’s a lost cause to try and do both. And even StarCraft isn’t perfect; if a skirmish gets particularly heated, I’ll completely lose the thread of whatever I’m listening to for a few minutes.

Now, what these situations all have in common is this: while listening to the brand new music, there is something else that is actively demanding at least partial attention from me. With the rote/visual tasks or the real-time strategy, I’m diverting at least some attention away from the music, and sometimes all of it for brief periods. Commuting/exercising is probably closer to ideal, particularly when public transit is involved, but while this avoids the problem of concentration lapses, you’re also competing with other sounds. Cars, people, wind noise if you’re on a bike — all of it makes it harder to pick up on details in the music.

The more I think about this, the less of a coincidence I think it is that my favourite music tends to be energetic, driving, loud, bizarre, cerebral, and other similar adjectives — my favourite music tends to be stuff that really commands attention. I think this may be due at least in part to the types of situations in which I generally consume music, combined with my obsessive personality. (I’m one of those people who keeps entire albums despite only really liking one song, and I almost always prefer to listen to entire albums versus songs on shuffle or in a playlist or whatever.) In other words, I think my taste is at least somewhat affected by the use I see the music as having for me. Simply put, I seem to generally want music I can bob my head to while doing other things.

So, with that in mind, let’s consider my original question about Become Ocean a bit differently: What can I use this music for? It’s not rhythmic enough for bike riding. It doesn’t work for StarCraft at all. It’s far too droney and atmospheric for the bus. What I ended up doing was listening to it at work where, as you know, I’m currently doing some glorified data entry, so it worked well enough for that. But really, I find that music like this is of only limited utility to me. There’s only so much data I have to enter, only so many photos to edit. And besides, rote tasks like that are great opportunities for music that is too cerebral — some lyrically dense rap, say — for more attention-demanding situations. For me, this music falls into the same category as bands like Mogwai or múm: bands I really like, but whose music I really only ever listen to in specific situations, like at three in the morning on a deadline and I need something besides the silence to keep me clinging to consciousness.

I don’t know, maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I’m not approaching the music on its own terms. I mean, this piece clearly isn’t meant to be a workout mix, or a video game soundtrack. I’m sure it’s spectacular live. And I realize that it’s incredibly selective and hypocritical of me, given that one of my favourite musicians recently released an EP of moody space music, and I love it. But even though it’s selfish, the reality is that this kind of music is of limited use to me just because of how, why, and where I tend to listen to music, and I think that might be why I find it hard to get especially excited about.

All of this is to say: it’s fine music. But I think I understand your response to the Micronauts a lot better now.

But hey, speaking of workout mixes and long compositions, I think you’ll really like your next assignment.

— Matt

*OK, I guess it’s kind of obvious what a record called Dopesmoker is for.

John Luther Adams: Become Ocean (pt. 1)

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Become Ocean

Dear Matt,

I’m still reeling from my unexpected reaction to the Offspring. I’m assigning you orchestral music to rebuild my sense of self.

In your response to my Brooklyn Rider assignment, you thanked me for starting you out with a quartet, since it lacks the flash of a soloist or the bombast of an orchestra. And, while I may chafe at those characterizations of venerable art music genres, you’re clearly right on both counts. I mean, the first ensembles that we could recognize as orchestras developed in the only place where they feasibly could have gathered the forces: 17th-century Central European royal courts. It doesn’t get more bombastic than that.

But at the same time, thank god that art is like that sometimes. Occasionally, when you put a creative genius at the helm of truly massive forces, great things happen. I don’t want to live in a world without Ben-Hur, or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, or BioShock Infinite or any of the other great decadent works that obviously had huge amounts of money poured into them. I think that the symphony orchestra is one of the best things that humans have ever invented. And, the fact that the logistics and finances of it dwarf those of a chamber group is part of the appeal.

To wit, here is the greatest contemporary argument for why orchestras are still a good idea: John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean.

Adams has been the composer of the moment since he won the Pulitzer for Become Ocean last year. He’s lived in interior Alaska since 1978, and all of his music is written as a response to that landscape. This is a guy who used real-time data taken from the position of the sun in the sky, the fullness of the moon, the presence of minor seismic events, and the strength of the Aurora Borealis to produce a computer-driven audio installation at the University of Alaska.

But, as conceptual as Adams’ music can get, it never veers into territory that makes it unappealing to listen to. It’s powerful, cerebral stuff — but never obscurantist. Adams cites some frightening figures as influences: the player piano innovator Conlon Nancarrow, stochastic musician Iannis Xenakis, and that arch-avantgardist John Cage.

But possibly his most important influence was Morton Feldman, who practiced a sort of alternative minimalism that focusses on creating spare, spacious music rather than the driving rhythms of Steve Reich and Terry Riley. For my money, his Rothko Chapel is one of the most gorgeous pieces of the 20th century. And Adams’ music sounds a lot more like Rothko Chapel than anything by Cage or Xenakis.

(Around this point, it’s traditional to explain that there are two well-known American post-minimalist composers named John Adams. John Luther Adams is not the guy who wrote the hit opera Nixon in China. That’s John Coolidge Adams. He got famous first, so he doesn’t need to use his middle name in his credits.)

Become Ocean is Adams’ reflection on the rising sea levels caused by climate change. As Adams put it himself, in one of the more succinct program notes you’re ever likely to read: ‘Life on this earth first emerged from the sea. As the polar ice melts and sea level rises, we humans find ourselves facing the prospect that once again we may quite literally become ocean.’

Clearly, instrumental music is a strange medium by which to approach such specific themes. But, Adams isn’t being didactic in this piece. He’s doing what modern composers do best: expressing vague notions, sensations and anxieties by way of sound.

The work is a single, 42-minute composition (I know, I know, I know) for large orchestra. It is purely textural music — I believe that when I first discussed this album with you, I described it as ‘drone music for full orchestra.’ I basically stand by that. But as with the inventor of drone music, Richard Wagner (not trolling, listen to this), Adams employs a wealth of textural effects that intermingle to bring the music to crashing peaks and tense troughs — brought to life beautifully in this premiere recording by the Seattle Symphony and their brilliant musical director Ludovic Morlot.

Certainly, Adams would never deign to incorporate anything so vulgar as a melody. But I think that the side of your taste persona that’s into droney electronic music (a taste attribute that we share) will also appreciate this different sort of droney music — a drone made more vibrant for being played on acoustic instruments and orchestrated by a master. Feel free to zone out during this music. It’s approachable on a number of different levels of attention.

One of these days, I’ll assign you some proper core orchestra rep. But as much as I love Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky and Brahms, they’re not coextensive with what is erroneously called ‘classical music.’ John Luther Adams is, to me, just as central to that tradition. I hope you enjoy this.

— Matthew

P.S. This New Yorker profile of Adams by Alex Ross is one of my favourite pieces of music journalism. Just, as an aside.

The Offspring: Americana (pt. 2)

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Previously, on Two Matts:

Matthew has complicated feelings about punk. He doesn’t like it in principle, but when confronted with the actual music, he has to admit that there’s more to it than he usually tends to think. Matthew’s complicated feelings got even more complicated when he found that he absolutely adores NoMeansNo’s Wrong, the second album Matt assigned him. Matthew was forced to admit that there’s a tremendous chasm between the Platonic ideal of punk rock he has in his head and the reality of a genre that has evolved and fragmented over the course of decades. Now, Matt has assigned Matthew a successful late-90s pop-punk album, and Matthew’s complicated feelings are being dredged up again…

americana

Dear Matt,

Well, shit. I like this one too.

I’ve got to admit, I wanted to despise this album. In general, on this blog, I’ve tried to keep an open mind. I’ve written before about how I generally think that when I don’t like something it’s my own fault, so I always approach new music hoping to like it. But when you assigned the Offspring, my first thought was ‘Ah, here’s my opportunity to really tear into something.’

I’m not quite sure why I had it in for Americana. I certainly didn’t feel the same when approaching Wrong. Maybe it’s because, now that we’ve established that I can’t attack punk at its ideological roots and have it be anything other than a totally facile critique, I feel more comfortable lashing out at a band that’s signed to a major label and scoring massive radio play. But that doesn’t make any sense, because the whole notion of ‘selling out’ doesn’t actually upset me. Plus, I don’t even have any sympathy for the SoCal skatepunk DIY values that the Offspring were probably betraying, here.

All the same, for whatever reason, I came to this album expecting some blend of annoyance and outrage that could only be mitigated by writing something angry and indignant about it. But around three songs in, I was unable to deny that I was enjoying myself. No matter how hard I tried not to.

You pitched Americana to me as a disc of summer jamz, and it is that. I listened to it on a bus, on a sunny day, after work. When the album was over and I found that I was early getting to my destination, I immediately listened to ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?’ three more times. Then ‘She’s Got Issues’ twice. Then ‘Pay the Man’ again.

So basically, I’ve once again been confronted with the difference between the way I think about punk and the way that punk actually works, and I come out looking like an ass.

I want to try out an idea, here. You’ll know by now that I spend an awful lot of time thinking about prog rock. To me, one of the watershed moments in the history of that music was a point somewhere in the 80s when a wave of ‘neo-prog’ bands emerged, playing music that was explicitly modelled after the prog of the prior decade. This, as opposed to working in the original spirit of progressive rock, which dealt with genre fusion and independent experimentation. There was never a prog ‘sound’ in the 70s. In the 80s, with bands like Marillion and IQ cribbing the aesthetic trappings of a few key bands, there suddenly was.

We could define this as the point where prog calcified into a ‘genre’ in the strictest sense — a category of music with a defined set of traits — rather than a ‘movement,’ or perhaps a ‘scene.’ The result, initially, was a lot of pretty formulaic music: quite the opposite of what King Crimson and Magma were trying to do. But more recently, bands like Opeth and the Mars Volta have found a way to use what they’ve learned from classic prog bands to create music that sounds distinctly different.

All of which is a self-indulgent aside leading up to this relevant insight: clearly, something similar has happened to punk. Punk was a scene or movement prior to becoming a proper genre, and the aesthetics of that genre (as opposed to the ethics of the movement that produced it) have been stripped for parts and used for various purposes with varying degrees of relation to the original source.

One of those purposes turns out to be writing pop songs. And I do love me some pop songs.

So, you’re batting two for two in terms of punk assignments that worked out. However, I suspect that I remain one of the least punk rock people that either of us know. And that is unlikely to change…?

To be continued.

— Matthew

The Offspring: Americana (pt. 1)

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americana

Dear Matthew:

It’s summertime, and for me, few albums encapsulate the feeling of summertime than The Offspring’s Americana.

Americana is not the Offspring’s fan-agreed magnum opus; that would be 1994’s Smash, an album that is still the top-selling independent record of all time.* Coming hot on the heels of the complete and utter musical paradigm shift that was Nirvana’s Nevermind, the Offspring’s third full-length album — their second on the legendary Epitaph Records — catapulted them to stardom on the backs of two very angsty, 90sy singles, ‘Come Out and Play‘ and ‘Self Esteem‘. You can almost smell the righteous youthful rage coming out of the speakers, cutting through the tinny drums and poorly-recorded guitars. It’s a dynamite record.

But you’re not listening to Smash. Instead, you’re joining the band four years later. The Offspring are now huge, and Americana is their second major-label album (Columbia signed them almost immediately after Smash blew up). 1997’s Ixnay on the Hombre was almost a sort of second ‘difficult sophomore album’ for them as they learned the ropes of an entire new way of making music, but by 1998, they’ve got it down. Frontman Dexter Holland has changed his signature hairstyle, and the band is riding high on the rise of a comparatively new trend: pop-punk. Bands like blink-182, Sum 41 and other combinations of single syllables and several numerals take the fast, frenetic aesthetic of California hardcore and skate punk, and then sing pop songs — generally about things other pop songs are about, like girls and how uncool your parents are. (In hindsight, it’s actually a totally weird moment in music history. But I guess it’s not the first time the mainstream has made a mint co-opting and sanitizing music it finds scary.)

Americana is a fascinating album. It’s got what are arguably the Offspring’s two biggest, poppiest hits, ‘Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)‘ and ‘Why Don’t You Get a Job?‘, but it also starts with a fantastic one-two punch of very old-school SoCal angst punk jams. Like most Offspring material, the album is dripping with irony and disaffection, the title track an angry tirade against everything twisted and wrong with modern America. Even the aforementioned poppy singles are sarcasm-laced takedowns of hateable characters and the trends they embody. The album closer is a jammy psychedelic number that was actually recorded for Ixnay, but shelved because the label thought it was too jammy and psychedelic. Like all of the Offspring’s best albums, it’s an album — it’s a cohesive package, not just a collection of songs. (Solidifying this notion are the various interstitial soundbites of automation and technology — only 90s kids will remember having a landline answering machine!) It’s even got that staple of CDs in the 90s, the hidden-track-after-several-minutes-of-silence. Sure, Smash may be their best record, but Americana is their most interesting.

I brought up Nevermind earlier for a good reason: in addition to its fundamental reshaping of the entire landscape of popular music, it’s generally heralded as a sort of cultural signpost of the 90s, a musical encapsulation of the malaise, alienation and nihilism of an entire generation. (Has anyone from Grantland written a really good essay about this to link to? Or Chuck Klosterman, maybe?) I put it to you that what Nevermind is to the early 90s (or perhaps more to the point, the post-80s), Americana is to the late 90s. It’s a musical time capsule in the same way, but instead of chronicling the start of a movement, it chronicles its effects. If Nevermind created Generation X, then Americana is the result of the theory put into practice for the better part of a decade.

I dunno, maybe I’m being a little grandiose. I mean, it’s just a pop-punk album. But either way, for my money, Americana is as close as you can get to reliving the 1990s until they invent an actual time machine.

— Matt

* This record will probably never be broken, because people don’t buy music anymore.

Charles Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (pt. 2)

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black-saint-sinner-lady

Dear Matthew:

We’ve been pussyfooting around this conversation for a long time, but I don’t think we can avoid it any longer. Since you brought it up, I think we have to talk about the race politics of the last century of American popular music.

The history of the music industry is fascinating, and there’s a constant theme that has run through it since the days of Tin Pan Alley: the exploitation of black people by white people. The American music industry is, essentially, a cycle of black people inventing something new and interesting — and uniquely black — which is then discovered by white people, who proceed to sanitize it, whitewash it, and sell it to the (predominantly white) masses — often with little or no compensation to or real acknowledgement of the creators. It happened with roots music (gospel, etc.) after the Civil War; it happened with rock and roll after the Second World War; it’s happening right now with hip hop; and of course, it happened with jazz.

This is, I assume, what you’re hinting at when you talk about the ‘gentrification’ of jazz: you’re talking about white people taking a distinctly black art form and, over the last few decades, turning it into an institution of whiteness that, at this point, is rivaled maybe only by golf in terms of sheer albedo. (The 1970 Walt Disney film The Aristocats is a very good example of this process at work.) This once vibrant, provocative, iconoclastic art form now oozes cloyingly from the speakers in elevators, and sits conveniently packaged on compact disc for you to impulse-buy at Starbucks so you can feel more cultured.

In fact, that last bit — the weird inexplicable obligation white people feel to be into jazz, and the resulting guilt over not being into jazz even a little bit — is the giveaway that jazz is part of the institution, now. It’s the same way you’re supposed to feel about other middlebrow art forms, like Shakespeare, or Romantic poetry, or the Classical music canon (sorry). What did it take, 50 years? Probably less, even.

But we, as a society, have very short collective cultural memories for this sort of thing. Teenagers are the primary target of the American pop music machine, and I’m willing to bet the average teenager these days (what is that, Generation Z? do they have a horrible buzzword yet?) has little to no context for the history of the music they are being assaulted with on a daily basis. For them, Iggy Azealia isn’t the latest incarnation of the endless parade of white people fetishizing the art of cool black people — she’s just a pop star with a very large ass. Like Elvis before her, the (white) kids love her, the (white) parents are afraid of her, and it’s only the (predominantly white) armchair academics who notice the cycle repeating, who recognize her role in the project of hegemonic American whiteness. In 30 years, those elevator speakers will be pumping A Tribe Called Quest, and the Starbucks compact discs will have titles like The Golden Era of New York Hip Hop and Classic Dirty South, Vol. III. Time is a flat circle.

Is that sort of what you’re getting at when you talk about the gentrification of jazz?

Anyway, Mingus. The main reason I bring up the whole whitewashing-of-jazz thing is because my first coherent thought after the first few minutes of Black Saint was: ‘This isn’t what jazz is supposed to sound like.’ With all of these decades of context in mind, what an absurd thought to have! To a relative jazz novice / young white guy like myself, jazz is a bunch of guys soloing one after the other, Benny Goodman- or Glenn Miller-style. My experience with instrumental jazz is largely limited to the greatest hits collections my parents would listen to when I was a kid. So this unified, sprawling, almost orchestral style of New Orleans-inspired jazz is a total eyeopener. The ebb and flow of the arrangement, combined with the callbacks and leitmotifs, make this feel almost symphonic. There are, as you suggest, still entire worlds of jazz untouched by that gentrification.

In a morbid sort of way, I’m very curious to see what happens to hip hop as the cycle of white appropriation continues. What will the gentrification of rap music look like? Which elements will the white institution canonize, and which will it leave by the wayside? Fifty years from now, who will the modern Mingus equivalents have turned out to be?

Jazz!

You’re right — it’s a pretty great word to look at.

— Matt

Charles Mingus: The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (pt. 1)

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black-saint-sinner-lady

Dear Matt:

Jazz!

Isn’t that word just fun to look at? Especially with an exclamation mark. Here, let’s see it again:

Jazz!

Nice. Anyway, I’ve given you ten assignments in the course of this project, and none of them has had anything much to do with jazz. There’s a good reason for that: I really don’t listen to that much jazz, these days. People tend to assume that I enjoy jazz more than I do, because I’m a classical listener who listens to things other than classical. And when classical people like ‘things other than classical,’ people tend to assume we mean jazz.

Actually, my jazz fandom reached a peak in high school, and I haven’t continued my exploration of it that doggedly since then. But, I still like to revisit some old favourites from those days. So, here’s one that has more staying power than just about any other jazz album, for me.

Jazz as an idiom was never more interesting or vital as it was in the early 60s, around the time this album was released. It had long since matured to the point where people were making self-conscious artistic statements with it, but it hadn’t yet ascended to the bland legitimacy that has characterized so much of it for the past few decades. (Jazz might be the only music to which the word ‘gentrification’ meaningfully applies.)

In 1963, bassist Charles Mingus was perfectly situated to make the album that summed up jazz thus far. He’d played with Louis Armstrong’s touring swing band. He was briefly a member of Duke Ellington’s orchestra, who boasted the most complex and elegant jazz arrangements of anybody before or since. And he’d played in bebop combos with Charlie Parker, who redefined jazz harmony and set new standards for speed and complexity in solos. Throw all of those influences together with a big dollop of gospel and some conceptual notions inspired by Mingus’s psychoanalysis sessions, and you get The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.

(It’s worth checking out the back half of the album’s liner notes, which were actually written by Mingus’s therapist. The first half was written by Mingus himself and is almost entirely inscrutable.)

The album consists of a single sprawling composition (hmm, this seems to be a theme, lately) written for a ten-piece band with occasional interjections by Jay Berliner on classical guitar. That format is the source of a lot of Black Saint’s appeal. For all of Mingus’s effusive rhapsodizing about how wonderful Charlie Parker was, he remained loyal to the elaborate structures and complex timbral effects of the Ellington band. I think that has a lot to do with why this is a jazz album that I still love, even having largely dropped out of jazz: it doesn’t conform to the standard jazz format of one solo after another.

Long before this album, Mingus appeared as a member of ‘The Quintet:’ a sort of jazz supergroup assembled for a single concert at Massey Hall, which also included Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and Max Roach. Frankly, Mingus was the weak link at that gig. But that’s because he isn’t the kind of jazz musician where the joy lies in listening to him play his instrument. He’s a bandleader. He’s kind of like Miles Davis that way, except one suspects he was at least marginally more fun to be around. (He published a pamphlet on how to toilet train cats. Tell me you don’t want to hang out with this guy.)

There are plenty of solos on Black Saint, and they’re good solos. But, for me, the appeal lies more in the arrangements, which are enormously complex but manage to still feel intuitive. Jazz solos are best appreciated with a bit of insider knowledge — knowledge that I mostly lack. On the other hand, anybody can appreciate a band making a big, soulful sound. This band makes a huge sound, and I imagine they’ve done a pretty good job here of emulating what it was like inside Charles Mingus’s fascinating mind. What more can you ask for?

— Matthew

P.S. Since we’re giving bonus tracks now, you might like to check out Mingus’s most famous cut, which brings his gospel influences front and centre — and is probably the catchiest instrumental jazz tune ever recorded.

Major Lazer: Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do (pt. 2)

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majorlazer

Dear Matt,

If this seems like a poorly thought out response, fair enough. It’s been a week.

This album is exactly the sort of thing I was hoping for from this project, like A Walking Fire was for you. It strikes me as something that’s as central to your sensibility as a music fan as Brooklyn Rider is to mine — which means that Guns Don’t Kill People was always going to be a tough sell for me. I have some problems with this album, but I’m intrigued.

I’m definitely not the right person to attempt to parse the probably somewhat problematic cultural appropriation on this album. (I fully acknowledge my cowardice.) But I can certainly understand your preference for this over an album full of ‘bass drops and white people.’ That sounds terrible. Whereas Guns Don’t Kill People is the complete opposite of that sort of lazy blandness. Its entire appeal comes from how totally bonkers it is (those videos!), and the fact that it takes inspiration from sounds that come from outside of Diplo and Switch’s narrow cultural sphere.

Now comes the part where I say denigrating things for several paragraphs, in spite of my general admiration for the album. I know it’s becoming a habit, but I can’t help being perverse.

To me, Kala absolutely towers over this. The reason for that is, for all of its eclecticism, Kala still has one foot in pop songwriting. And the fact that my favourite track on that album is still ‘Paper Planes’ probably indicates that I value that characteristic. Hell, even Thick as a Brick is structured around (deeply unconventional) pop songwriting. I tend to like my pop songs clothed in somewhat flamboyant garb — be it prog rock bombast or a Diplo beat — but that doesn’t change the underlying value.

(The fact that your next assignment will have absolutely nothing to do with the craft of songwriting ought to indicate just how inconsistent my musical value system is. I am not at all sorry for this.)

Basically, my issue with Guns Don’t Kill People is that there’s no figure equivalent to M.I.A. on it — nobody to provide the raw goods for Diplo and Switch to dress up in mad, eclectic sonic outfits. (Though I did love that B-side with her on it.) Instead, we get a cavalcade of guests who each seem somewhat incidental to Diplo and Switch’s central concept. Aside from the Paul Simon-esque colonialist implications of that, which we’ve agreed to blithely ignore, this presents an aesthetic problem for me: for all of its internal cohesion and its high-concept grandstanding, Guns still feels like it lacks a core. It feels like a very attractive coat that nobody’s wearing.

And as for the guest artists — who occasionally wander by the coat, but never really consider putting it on — they’re a bit hit-and-miss, aren’t they? M.I.A.’s politics may piss a bunch of people off, but they make for more interesting listening than ‘Mary Jane.’ Granted, that’s an easy target and I’m a humourless d-bag. ‘What U Like,’ then.

So clearly, I didn’t love this. I liked it, basically. But I’d stick it at the lower end of my positive responses on this blog — above the Micronauts, certainly. But significantly lower than, say, Belle and Sebastian.

Okay, then. On to your next assignment, which I hope will be as challenging for you as this was for me.

— Matthew

Major Lazer: Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do (pt. 1)

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majorlazer

Dear Matthew:

As alluded to previously, I’ve been wanting to give you this album for a while now, and your last assignment was chosen at least in part as a setup for it. This week, you’ll be listening to Major Lazer‘s debut album, Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do.

Major Lazer is a laser-armed Jamaican commando from the future who rides around on a rocket skateboard fighting the undead. Behind the scenes, though, it’s a musical project originally started by Diplo and Switch — two producers who you may recall having produced most of your last assignment, M.I.A.’s Kala. Major Lazer is their take on the music of Jamaica — mostly dancehall and reggae, with a bit of good old-fashioned pop and electronic bullshit thrown in for good measure. They work extensively with Jamaican artists and Guns Don’t Kill People was recorded at Tuff Gong, a legendary recording studio in Kingston that’s been used by Bob Marley, among many others. Major Lazer is sparse and futuristic and wonky and disorienting in all the best ways.

…or at least, that’s what Major Lazer used to be. A short time after the release of Guns Don’t Kill People, Switch left the band due to ‘creative differences’, and while he did work on a few songs on the band’s second album, Major Lazer is now essentially just a Diplo solo project. It’s been kind of heartbreaking to watch such a unique and interesting band go from the astonishing nugget of weirdness and awesomeness that is Guns Don’t Kill People to what it is now — especially since it’s made them a huge international success. Their third album came out a few weeks ago, and while it’s got some decent tunes, it mostly just makes me sad. It’s full of trap and bass drops and white people, and the production is very noisy and in-your-face, but not in a good way. It’s not an album, it’s just a bunch of tracks meant for DJs to play in clubs. Sigh.

They used to be so much better, man. You know, before they sold out. *takes drag on clove cigarette*

But I digress. Seeing what happens to a band when you take half of it away is interesting from an academic standpoint, if nothing else. Diplo (who produced your standout Kala track ‘Paper Planes’) is very much a DJ at heart. He’s a straightforward guy who makes straightforward music. His reputation as an oddball producer is really only because he’s ahead of the curve in knowing who to work with and what sounds are on the bleeding edge of what’s ‘in’. (There’s a discussion about white appropriation of black culture to be had somewhere in regard to this album, and Diplo is probably at the centre of it.)

Switch, on the other hand, is much more of a producer. (He produced — well, he produced most of the rest of Kala, actually. And a lot of Matangi, which is why I love it so much.) In comparing old Major Lazer to new Major Lazer, he is very obviously the source of the weirdness and sparseness of the first album. He brings a level of restraint to to the studio that Diplo just can’t muster. I think that’s why the first album works so well — Switch is able to rein in Diplo’s madness and bring a level of focus to the project that it now seems to utterly lack. Switch is the reason Guns is a cohesive album rather than just a bunch of songs like the newer albums. (This is probably also why he works so well with M.I.A.)

Anyway, this is turning into more of rant about why I don’t like a band’s new music than actually saying anything useful about the record at hand, so I should probably wrap it up and hand it over to you. I’m not sure how familiar you are with Jamaican music, but if not, it’s time for a crash course in patois. This album is all over the place, but if you liked Kala, there’s definitely something here for you somewhere. It’s controlled chaos. It’s lightning in a jar. It’s Major Lazer. Booyaka.

— Matt

PS: There’s also a Major Lazer cartoon. It’s essentially a sendup of bad 80s action cartoons like G.I. Joe, and it’s about as insane as you’d expect. Also, J.K. Simmons plays the president of future Jamaica. Yeah.

PPS: Bonus M.I.A.-featuring B-side.

Bryce Dessner & Sō Percussion: Music for Wood and Strings (pt. 2)

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Dessner

Dear Matthew:

You’re right — this is pretty good.

I have to admit, though, that it wasn’t quite what I expected from a group that describes themselves as a percussion ensemble. I mean, I get that a dulcimer or dulcimer-like instrument is technically percussion in that you play it by hitting it, but there aren’t really any drums to speak of on this record. Which was a bit disappointing, because I love me some drums.

I don’t really know or care that much about the National. I think I listened to their album Boxer in undergrad once when it was the hot new thing that all of my indie rock friends were into, but I don’t remember it doing much for me. So, I can’t really say if this is ‘in keeping’ with Dessner’s earlier work or anything. But what makes good indie rock and good minimalist percussion ensemble music seem to be pretty different worlds. I guess I could give the National another go? I mean, a lot of people like them, so they have to have some redeeming qualities, presumably.

I do definitely see the minimalism you’re talking about. This isn’t a concerto or a suite or anything — this is definitely one 35-minute-long song. It’s always fun to hear a leitmotif come around again, to hear a familiar sound being recontextualized again and again. (In fact, a lot of the reasons I enjoyed this pieces are reasons why I like Bleep to Bleep so much. I’m not sure how you’ll feel about me saying that.) And whatever mode the piece uses (you’ll have to tell me this part, it’s been literally more than a decade since I did any music theory) is very dynamic and epic-sounding.

Aurally, this piece reminds me a lot of an Icelandic band called múm, if you’re familiar with them at all. I can’t really say why, because now that I listen to them side by side they’re actually quite different. But they have similar characters, if that makes sense? I don’t know. They’re both the kind of music I like putting on at three in morning when I’m up late working on something in my dimly lit room and the rest of the world is asleep.

The main other type of music I go for in that situation? Post-rock. Are you into post-rock at all? Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky, that sort of thing? In fact, I put it to you that Music for Wood and Strings is, itself, a post-rock song. I put it to you that this is the kind of music Mogwai would make if you gave them Dessner’s chord sticks. I think I know what your next assignment is.

Well, your next next assignment. Confession: while I do definitely love M.I.A. and did want to assign her, Kala also doubles as a setup for your next assignment. I hope you’re ready for some soothing island rhythms…

— Matt