so, my first run through the year-end lists was at pitchfork, where i pulled out the following as worth mentioning (sometimes due to name recognition, or legacy artist status), and the rest as not worth mentioning, and am now scratching out the ones that should be considered dismissed, despite being mentioned, if you can't tell which reviews are critical and which are positive, which i admit is a possibility:
floating points. B.
holly herndon. C.
1000 gecs. C. thom yorke. D. kim gordon. C. fennesz. C.
fka twigs. C.
my second run through was at brooklyn vegan, where i added the following:
blanck mass. B-/C+.
vanishing twin. C. the comet is coming. D.
kelsey lu. C.
control top. B-/C+. sleater-kinney. F. lingua ignota. F. tool. F.
that means we've got the following, so far, for my own list, as constructed from the list of others:
tier 1 (As):
nothing yet.
tier 2 (Bs):
floating points. B.
blanck mass. B-/C+.
control top. B-/C+.
tier 3 (Cs - passes):
1000 gecs. C.
fka twigs. C.
holly herndon. C.
kelsey lu. C.
vanishing twin. C.
tier 4: (Cs - Fails) fennesz. C. kim gordon. C.
tier 5 (Ds): the comet is coming. D. thom yorke. D.
tier 6 (Fs): lingua ignota. F. sleater-kinney. F. tool. F.
i need to begin by saying that i'm actually not much of a sleater-kinney fan. i'm actually more of a fan of st. vincent's work (excluding her most recent record, which i think was terrible). you want some irony? i've just always found sleater-kinney to be kind of generic frat boy rawk, actually. it's not like their discography isn't void of moments, but i'd actually argue they're one of the most overrated rock bands of the post-nirvana era.
so, the premise of bringing annie in to slap some sense into them is actually a good one, from my perspective.
i'm not really hearing her fingerprints, though. there's some kind of, like, pedestrian sequencer work, but there's not any intense orchestral programming, or any wacky guitar work. maybe even that's too much for some people, but it's really not much. to me, that is the disappointment.
i know a lot of fans are a little irked that the record is more "radio-friendly", but i never really interpreted them as some kind of an anti-commercial noise rock band or something in the first place - i'd argue they were always fairly radio-friendly, and that's the reason i could never really get into them in the first place. that's stasis, not a change.
so, i'm going to agree with the people that aren't liking this much, but for the opposite reason; if they do this again, i'd like to hear more input from annie clark.
somebody tell them to book a show at the trumbullplex...
actually, i'm wrong.
titus andronicus opened with a local snore-punk band called partner (who are terrible.) and ted leo skipped detroit altogether.
so, i didn't miss it...
...but i would have.
would i have gone to see control top and left before ted leo or titus andronicus?
i would have finished my beer, first.
i think i may have missed this not once but twice this year, and it's a good reminder of why i spend so much time sorting through show listings.
it's a shame i missed them, but the bands they were opening for - ted leo, titus andronicus - are both well known acts that i wouldn't even think about going to see, and i consequently didn't bother researching the opening bands. if they had played at a smaller venue, i would have certainly caught this. but, i need to keep a closer eye out....
the record is a little generic at points, but this is one of two or three types of music where i don't spend much time worrying about that - it just needs to actually be good and this does that.
they could turn the vocals down a hair. my ideologically rigorous, enlightenment-era approach to anarchism sort of clashes with her post-nihilist anti-intellectualism, but whatever; that's academic, mostly.
that means that i won't grade this too high, but it also means i'd enjoy seeing it more than most of the stuff in the list.
this carries on with the theme i pointed out a while back of mixing classical music with technology, which i will repeat is the idea underlying the music of the post rock music era that we're living through, but, as was the case with the fka twigs disc, and the holly herndon disc, and to a lesser extent the floating points disc, this is fundamentally still bad pop music that is perpetuating bad mainstream cultural ideas.
i like the fact that we're seeing a new generation of artists that is less afraid of exploring actual musicianship than the last one was. this is, in some ways, a movement in the right direction. but, i've still heard these songs before - it's still not getting over the basic problems of sameness and conformity within pop culture, which is what i really want to get away from.
and, the lyrics are terrible.
maybe 2019 is shaping up to be a crossover year, where there's not much worthwhile in and of itself but the ideas have been put in place for something more substantive in the years to come.
in terms of pure pop, these records i'm drawing attention to are substantively better than the pop of the last roughly twenty years, but this movement that's afoot does not appear to be ripe, yet. let's hope it gets there.
i'd like to hear some blaring, horn-driven contemporary electronic jazz, but this is way, way too simplistic too hold my attention.
i've tried to steer clear of the retro - both 60//70s and 80s/90s - that is dominating these lists this year in order to focus on forward-thinking and contemporary artists, so it may seem like i'm breaking down in reviewing this record, which comes off as pretty retro on first listen. but, that's actually a kind of a trick, as this isn't really retro in substance.
rather, i actually want to describe this as post-rock in the original sense, and suggest it's kind of futuristic sounding, and not in this goofy "we're the jetsons" retro-futuristic kind of way. i don't think that anybody projecting the end of live instrumentation is thinking clearly, as it kind of misses the plot around music being something that people enjoy doing to express themselves. we'd be kind of defaulting on our humanity. i don't expect that to happen...
it may be technically true that you can trace the synthesizer work on the record to wendy carlos or delia derbyshire or morton subotnick or something, but nobody actually made music that sounded like that in the 60s or 70s because the gear was kind of hard to gain access to. you couldn't just walk into a store and buy a synthesizer until something like 1985. check the dates on those classic analog synths, they didn't exist in the 60s or 70s. those earliest junos were from 1983, i think. people forget that. what people actually had access to were moogs and mellotrons in the recording spaces, unless they were rich arts school grads like tony banks or richard wright and could buy one from the studios or manufacturers directly. there were something like 20 mellotrons in existence in the entire world in 1970.
so, you might imagine that something like this existed at the time, but it actually couldn't exist until the 90s when the technology became accessible to normal people, and the closest thing i'm aware of to it existing at the time was stuff like the experimental reaches of sonic youth (and the other things that jim o'rourke did). you might have heard it in a movie, where the producers had access to expensive gear. you wouldn't have seen it in a club.
so, i think it's actually rather forward thinking to project the idea of organic and electronic instrumentation interacting in a small club or cabaret style space as a means of jazzy expression; it hasn't happened yet, even if you think it has. i think it's entirely plausible that you could walk into a watering hole in 2073 and see some musicians playing something that sounds vaguely like this, in a way that is contemporary to 2073 and culturally relevant to the people alive at the time. that's more plausible than walking into the same space to come face to face with robots performing music via ai, certainly.
there's not a lot of spaces left to try and carve out a novel sound in this genre, but this does actually manage to do it, even if you don't actually realize it, and i'm taking note of it on that level - this is contemporary electronic music with a bit of a 60s shtick to it, it's not retro or regurgitated music from a bygone era. it makes sense for me to draw attention to the effects work, then, as it's the central part of the record. this would not be worth taking note of, otherwise.
and, i would be excited to hear more forward-looking music that attempts to combine electronic sound effects and organic percussion.
