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roadrunnertwiceAfter a long-ish dry spell, I've been getting a bunch of new music lately, and a fair chunk of it has been making demands of me. Biggest offenders: The Devil, You + Me by The Notwist, and Interbabe Concern by The Loud Family.
I got The Devil, You + Me about three weeks ago, and I think I like it. As I said a while ago, The Notwist's Neon Golden was very nearly a perfect album, and the idea of a new disc from them worried me to an extent I'm embarrassed to cop to. And I guess I was sort of right, because this album is not Neon Golden II; it's a different thing with different goals, and it doesn't speak to me with anything approaching NG's immediacy.
But still... it's good. Maybe really good.
I think what I'm saying here is that I wouldn't have had to work so hard to "get" the album if NG hadn't already become part of the foundation of my brain. But nevertheless, I am slowly getting it. And it does replicate one of my favorite things about Neon Golden: the way it doesn't give up all its treasures on first listen. For the first month I owned NG, I listened to it every day and heard something new each time, and I can already start to see the pattern resolving here.
I think the album it most reminds me of is Broken Social Scene—it's a somewhat inscrutable sequel to an immediately mindblowing predecessor, and I'm seeing myself being slow to warm to it in the same sort of way. Hopefully this presages a similar amount of love a few months down the line; we'll see. In the meantime... I like it.
I think it's an album about a space station. Just saying.
Interbabe Concern, on the other hand, is just one weird-ass record. It came out between Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things and Days For Days, and while both of those albums are full of extremely tight pop songs (and strange interstitial bits, and grotesquely distorted samples from Miller's previous band), Interbabe goes entirely elsewhere. At first listen, it seems to slide in and out of musical competence with no readily apparent structure; the pop hooks are there, but they're buried under several inches of rubble. And it's not just the weird samples and random backwards parts between songs; in an individual track, the guitar, vocal, and rhythm parts all go wonky independent of each other, and the time signatures are perverse and impossible to dance or rock out to.
It's all deliberate, of course, the exception being that Scott Miller's voice is simply an idiosyncratic instrument to start with. But I'm still trying to figure out what cumulative effect the artifice is meant to have. One thing I'm noticing is that there's an unusual satisfaction in knowing exactly when the chorus is going to hit, which definitely takes repeated listenings, and likewise in being ready when one thing becomes another, unrelated thing. Also, the increased out-of-phase sloppiness of the parts seems to increase the drama of some of the tracks: for example, I'm not convinced that "I'm Not Really a Spring" would be nearly as gripping in a more exact performance, as having the vocals sliding around free of the guitar and drums is what makes it feel so out of control and breathless.
But like I said, weird album.
Also, speaking of Scott Miller, I managed to find a torrent with pretty much all of Game Theory's catalogue! This is super exciting, as the original CDs (or cassettes, or whatever) are basically unobtainable, and cost in the range of $70 when they actually show up on eBay. I consider this pretty much the ideal use-case for wholesale piracy, so I snagged it and have been acquainting myself with an album at a time. It is, indeed, worth hunting down. Or at least a lot of it is.
And in other news, I seem to be learning to like metal. This is new!
I got The Devil, You + Me about three weeks ago, and I think I like it. As I said a while ago, The Notwist's Neon Golden was very nearly a perfect album, and the idea of a new disc from them worried me to an extent I'm embarrassed to cop to. And I guess I was sort of right, because this album is not Neon Golden II; it's a different thing with different goals, and it doesn't speak to me with anything approaching NG's immediacy.
But still... it's good. Maybe really good.
I think what I'm saying here is that I wouldn't have had to work so hard to "get" the album if NG hadn't already become part of the foundation of my brain. But nevertheless, I am slowly getting it. And it does replicate one of my favorite things about Neon Golden: the way it doesn't give up all its treasures on first listen. For the first month I owned NG, I listened to it every day and heard something new each time, and I can already start to see the pattern resolving here.
I think the album it most reminds me of is Broken Social Scene—it's a somewhat inscrutable sequel to an immediately mindblowing predecessor, and I'm seeing myself being slow to warm to it in the same sort of way. Hopefully this presages a similar amount of love a few months down the line; we'll see. In the meantime... I like it.
I think it's an album about a space station. Just saying.
Interbabe Concern, on the other hand, is just one weird-ass record. It came out between Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things and Days For Days, and while both of those albums are full of extremely tight pop songs (and strange interstitial bits, and grotesquely distorted samples from Miller's previous band), Interbabe goes entirely elsewhere. At first listen, it seems to slide in and out of musical competence with no readily apparent structure; the pop hooks are there, but they're buried under several inches of rubble. And it's not just the weird samples and random backwards parts between songs; in an individual track, the guitar, vocal, and rhythm parts all go wonky independent of each other, and the time signatures are perverse and impossible to dance or rock out to.
It's all deliberate, of course, the exception being that Scott Miller's voice is simply an idiosyncratic instrument to start with. But I'm still trying to figure out what cumulative effect the artifice is meant to have. One thing I'm noticing is that there's an unusual satisfaction in knowing exactly when the chorus is going to hit, which definitely takes repeated listenings, and likewise in being ready when one thing becomes another, unrelated thing. Also, the increased out-of-phase sloppiness of the parts seems to increase the drama of some of the tracks: for example, I'm not convinced that "I'm Not Really a Spring" would be nearly as gripping in a more exact performance, as having the vocals sliding around free of the guitar and drums is what makes it feel so out of control and breathless.
But like I said, weird album.
Also, speaking of Scott Miller, I managed to find a torrent with pretty much all of Game Theory's catalogue! This is super exciting, as the original CDs (or cassettes, or whatever) are basically unobtainable, and cost in the range of $70 when they actually show up on eBay. I consider this pretty much the ideal use-case for wholesale piracy, so I snagged it and have been acquainting myself with an album at a time. It is, indeed, worth hunting down. Or at least a lot of it is.
And in other news, I seem to be learning to like metal. This is new!
no subject
Date: 2008-07-22 05:57 am (UTC)